I think I can rightly claim that the basic findings were all in this early paper of mine which was published in 1941, except I didn’t express it in mathematical form which was done by McArthur and Wilson. The interesting or amusing thing is that when one really applies these formulae, these mathematical formulae of… of Wilson’s, you get to results that are very often contradicted by the facts. This was particularly true for the Hawaiian islands where the studies of Olson and… others shown that there was a large fauna that was… bird fauna… that was exterminated by the Polynesians when they occupied the Hawaiian islands, and this is not predicted at all by Wilson’s formulae, and the result was that… Storrs Olson published a paper in which he said that these findings completely refute the theory of island biogeography. Well, I don’t agree with that. It just refutes the mathematical formulae of McArthur and Wilson, while the purely descriptive aspect of this island biogeography of my 1930… 1941 paper – the turnover, the mixture of very old and ever more recent elements, the relation between island size and… and number of species, the relation between island size and percentage of endemics – all these basic facts are not refuted by the findings of Storrs Olson on the fossil birds of Hawaii, only the mathematical aspects of the McArthur and Wilson thing. Now, there was one other case, yes. There’s the famous island of Krakatoa which in 1883, so to speak, exploded as a volcano and exterminated the entire fauna and flora of the islands, that there were only ash piles left. And this island has, since 1883, now more than a hundred years, been re-occupied again… re-colonized first by plants and eventually by various animals, and finally by birds, and a final steady state size of the number of species on Krakatoa has now been established. McArthur and Wilson, on the basis of their mathematics, calculated what this ultimate size would be, and I calculated it on the basis of looking at other islands and… and various… without any… using any mathematics, how many species one would expect on an island of that size. And the final sum found by… by the latest reviewer found that my prediction is almost precisely correct, while the prediction based on mathematical formulae was way off.
