Foundations of Biogeography: Classic Papers with Commentaries

Edited by:
  • Mark V. Lomolino,
  • Dov F. Sax &
  • James H. Brown
University of Chicago Press: 2004. 1,291 pp. $135, £94.50 (hbk); $45, £31.50 (pbk) 0198528558 | ISBN: 0-198-52855-8

Collections of papers are useful both to undergraduates and their lecturers. Here is a set of 72 pieces on biogeography, 30 of which are excerpts from books. They were chosen and edited by a committee of 19 biologists, 13 of whom have contributed to the commentaries that precede the eight sections. Except for the first section, on early (mostly nineteenth century) classics, these are arranged by topic, which is helpful. In much the same way that a camel is a horse designed by a committee, the selection of topics has some strange bumps and depressions, but the resulting animal is nevertheless useful in the appropriate circumstances.

The editors suggest that biogeography is a recent discipline and that nine of the authors would not have called themselves biogeographers. But biogeography is a nineteenth-century term. Darwin wrote of the geographical distribution of organic beings, and Alfred Russel Wallace wrote of geographical zoology. And in the twentieth century, Robert MacArthur and Edward O. Wilson are in print saying “we both call ourselves biogeographers” and are “unable to see any real distinction between biogeography and ecology”.

Biogeography might appear to be an interdisciplinary subject between biology and geography. It is certainly taught in both sets of departments, which once caused me a little difficulty as an external examiner because students had been taught essentially the same course twice. But biogeography is a branch of biology, of population and community ecology, and covers genetical and evolutionary topics as well as pure ecological ones. It is certainly an important branch, although the editors exaggerate its importance to Darwin and Wallace in discovering natural selection. It is nevertheless a branch with unusually fuzzy edges, differing from the related bits of biology largely by an emphasis on maps and geology.

With so many editors involved, the standards of the commentaries and the editing are both a bit variable, though it is mildly amusing to be told about “Louis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass” (two errors there) or that the muskrat “was introduced in 1905 into what was then Czechoslovakia”. More seriously, in my view, the editorial board (who are all biologists) would have been well advised to seek the opinions of historians of science on the works from before 1950. Using facsimiles that have been standardized to a fixed page size means that some of the text is hard to read and some half-tones would have been better omitted. The cross-referencing is a bit weak, too. Some of the commentaries are excellent.

If your class reading list calls for something on Linnaeus, Buffon, de Candolle, von Humboldt and Hooker at one end of the time span, along with MacArthur and Wilson's theory and developments in the 1970s, this 2-kg set will be very useful.