The Song of the Dodo

I'm taking a break from the quite lengthy but interesting John Adams book, and am now reading "The Song of the Dodo". The book is by David Quammen and is about, as it is subtitled: "Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions". Biogeography is perhaps not as complex as it sounds. It basically looks at how animal species are distributed, and how that's important. In 1855 Alfred Wallace came up with an idea so simple and profound, it almost seems obvious:

Every Species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a pre-existing closely allied species.

Essentially: new species come from old species, and tend to live close them. It was groundbreaking at the time, because it argued against the previously accepted idea of "special creation". Namely, God designed species to specifically suit each geography location. Islands are a focus because they are simple. Species can't easily come and go from them, so they are essentially closed systems.
Of course, what Wallace didn't know at the time of his idea was how new species formed. He would later, nearly simultaneously with Darwin, come up with the mechanism of natural selection (the history is mixed as to who really deserves credit for publishing the idea first).
What I find amazing is the creative inspiration that allowed these brilliant men to come up with their theoretical leaps. They both (Darwin and Wallace) collected and observed animal species. But it took a leap in the brain to come up with the theory to explain how the species were evolving. Science, contrary to what you may think, does involve creativity. You have to come up with ways to interpret evidence, and use those interpretations to figure out what to do next. It's perhaps one of the most difficult and rewarding elements of science. Anyone can blindly run statistical tests, or, can dig their way through difficult classes. It takes something else to put those ideas to discover something new, or to figure out which tests to run, or how to interpret those tests. It's a skill that I certainly need to improve in my own work.
For now, I've got another page to read...