Joe McCormick

speaker

4,706 appearances 10 recordings 1 series first heard Sep 2026 last heard today

Joe McCormick’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 10 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 10.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Stuff To Blow Your Mind · From the Vault: The Wallace Line, Part 2 · 22 Sep 2026 podcast

Um uh also uh we talked about the concept of biogeography, the study of what lives where and why. voice-verified

Wallace is considered a very important founding figure in biogeography, with one of his most enduring observations being what is now called in his honor the Wallace Line, an invisible boundary passing in the ocean between the islands of uh originally Borneo and Sulawesi, and voice-verified

Even more astonishingly, in the tiny narrow strait between Bali and Lombok, which marks the westernmost boundary of a lot of characteristic Australasian fauna, marsupials, cockatoos, and things like that. voice-verified

So we are back today to talk more about Wallace and the Wallace line. voice-verified

Now, one thing I think we've got to do before we move on any further is just a bit of cleanup because as I mentioned in the last episode, our model of the Wallace line has undergone some major revisions since Wallace first proposed it in the mid-19th century. voice-verified

Uh, I'm not gonna do a whole detailed play-by-play of the shifting history of the line, but for a brief summary of developments. voice-verified

I was just looking at uh the abstract of a paper called Wallace's Line, Wallacea, and Associated Divides and Areas: History of a Tortuous Tangle of Ideas and Labels. voice-verified

This is by Ali and Heaney, published in the journal Biological Reviews in 2021. voice-verified

So the authors go through the concept, which we discussed in the last episode: the idea of a faunal boundary being basically a place where you voice-verified

Find uh animals mainly of one sort on one side of the line, and animals mainly of a different sort on the other side of the line, and this raises questions: how did it end up like that? voice-verified

Um, the authors write that the earliest dividing lines in this region were considered quite sharp, especially the line Wallace drew in 1863. voice-verified

And this was based on looking at the distribution of land mammals and voice-verified

And some birds. voice-verified

This is the line we've been talking about so far, passing between Bali and Lombok, with Asian animals found west uh from the west coast of uh or from the eastern coast of Bali and Australasian animals running east from Lombok. voice-verified

This particular theoretical boundary proved very influential and it got, you know, reproduced in a lot of texts. voice-verified

It was baked into maps and plates and stuff all over. voice-verified

So, like it had a big cultural footprint and within the discipline of biogeography. voice-verified

It came to be seen as something of a fixed marker in nature, maybe like the tree line on a mountain. voice-verified

But over time, it also became obvious to experts in the field that there were a lot of exceptions to the Wallace line, especially a lot of Asian fauna found east of the so-called line. voice-verified

And this would not have been very surprising to Wallace himself, I think, who argued that biogeographic boundaries were all to some extent permeable. voice-verified

Showing 341–360 of 4,706 · page 18 of 236