Joe McCormick

speaker

4,384 appearances 9 recordings 1 series first heard Sep 2026 last heard yesterday

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

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 9 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 9.

Appearances

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

I mean, obviously ideas get updated, but some of the confusion is also because we're trying to figure out what exactly is being proposed here. voice-verified

And so, like, you have gotten away from the idea of a simple boundary line on a map that you know where you have one thing on one side and one on another, and more into say the idea of a transition zone. voice-verified

And it is absolutely still safe to say that there is something very interesting. voice-verified

interesting with reference to biogeography that's happening in the islands between Borneo and Bali to the west and Papua New Guinea to the east, let's say. voice-verified

And uh this this boundary line or transition zone can tell us a lot about the history of life on the surrounding continents and the history of the earth itself. voice-verified

That's right. voice-verified

And so that brings us to the question of what causes the boundary. voice-verified

Uh we raised this in the last episode, but didn't really have time to answer it. voice-verified

What causes the faunal boundary between the islands of say Bali and Lombok? voice-verified

Why do you get mostly one set of animals on Lombok and a fairly different set on Bali, even though the strait between these two islands is just a few dozen kilometers wide? voice-verified

It's like it's barely any ocean at all. voice-verified

Uh and also the environment on the two isle islands is very similar, so it seems like you would expect that the animals you find on one to be the same as the ones you'd find on the other. voice-verified

Right, right. voice-verified

So to summarize sort of the the original mainstream explanation, and there will be some additions to this as we move on in this episode. voice-verified

Wallace understood the cause of the apparent faunal boundary between Bali and Lombach to be a result of geological history. voice-verified

This is a core insight of biogeography. voice-verified

Studying where animals live can tell us not only about the animals, but also about the land. voice-verified

And there are actually really awesome examples of this. voice-verified

Uh if you get into the the the way paleontology has helped interact with uh with the geohistory of Earth, like um fossil organisms from hundreds of millions of years ago that appeared to live only in Africa and South America. voice-verified

Huh? voice-verified

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