Meeting 1235 Minutes

The 1235th meeting of the Cambridge Entomological Club was called to order by President Sarah Dendy at 7:44pm on Tuesday, October 8, 2024. 26 members and guests attended with additional attendees on Zoom.

New business: Two new nominations

Old business: None

Our speaker was Andrew Berry, Lecturer on Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard.

His talk was entitled “Alfred Russel Wallace: Insects and the Discovery of Evolution”

In 1908, at an event to mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of the theory of evolution by natural selection by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, Wallace addressed a simple question: why did it fall to him and Darwin, who had died in 1882, to make the discovery? As T.H. Huxley put it, “How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!” Wallace’s answer was beetles.  Both he and Darwin started their careers as naturalists as avid beetle collectors. Earlier in his life, Wallace made a living as a collector for natural history collections, travelling to Brazil with Henry Bates and later on his own to the Malay Archipelago. As Wallace put it in 1908, “Now there is certainly no other group of organisms that so impresses the collector by the almost infinite number of its specific forms, the endless modifications of structure, shape, color and surface-markings that distinguish them from each other, and their innumerable adaptations to diverse environments…” Dr. Berry argued that in fact studies of beetles — and other groups of insects — did indeed provide the scientific foundation of the Darwin-Wallace theory. 

The meeting was adjourned at 9:02

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Respectfully submitted,

Andrea Golden, CEC Secretary