The Island of the Colorblind

by Oliver Sacks

balsam

a great deal of intermarriage between blood relatives, many of them (in subsequent generations) now carriers of the gene. A marriage between two such carriers of a recessive gene will be likely to produce some children with manifest disease, in a Mendelian ratio.

scorcheth

spicules

militate

day-blindness (hemeralopia)

“Cannibalism,” wrote Stevenson, “is traced from end to end of the Pacific, from the Marquesas to New Guinea, from New Zealand to Hawaii.… All Melanesia appears tainted … [but] in Micronesia, in the Marshalls, with which my acquaintance is no more than that of a tourist … I could find no trace at all.”

one of Pingelap’s sister atolls, Pakin (which he calls Wellington Island):

the natives of Wellington Island were cannibals;

furrows.

Pitcairn, and the idea that this remote island was populated by only seventy people, all descendants of the Bounty mutineers.

three survivors who had been cast ashore from Tahiti, seven hundred miles away. They had set out in a party of twenty, expecting to make a brief journey from Tahiti to Raiatéa, a few miles away, but had been blown off course. Similar unintentional voyages, he thought, might explain “how the South Seas, may have been peopled;

numinous.

Virgil, a man virtually blind from birth

When it was suggested that Virgil’s sight might be restored by surgery, he could not help being intrigued and excited by the prospect of seeing. But after the operation, which was seen, medically, as “successful,” the reality, for Virgil, was bewildering. He had built up his world entirely from nonvisual information, and the sudden introduction of visual stimuli threw him into a state of shock and confusion. He was overwhelmed by new sensations, visual sensations, but he could make no sense of them, he could not give them any order or meaning. The “gift” of sight disturbed him profoundly, disturbed a mode of being, habits and strategies he had had for fifty years; and, increasingly, he would shut his eyes, or sit in the darkness, to shut out this frightening perceptual assault, and regain the equilibrium which had been taken from him with the surgery.

the Hawaiian Islands, on Molokai, which Jack London wrote about in “The Sheriff of Kona” and “Koolau the Leper.”

Our Western diseases have had a disastrous effect on the native populations of the Pacific—scarcely less disastrous than those of military conquest, commercial exploitation, and religion.

E. O. Wilson calls “biophilia.” He defines this as an “inborn affinity human beings have for other forms of life”—an affinity which can extend itself to an ecological feeling, a feeling for habitat.

Howard Gardner, well known for his theory of multiple intelligences (mathematico-logical, visuo-spatial, kinaesthetic, social, etc.) is now inclined to recognize such a “biological” intelligence as a distinctive one.

avocations:

connaturality,

One has to wonder whether it may not have—as linguistic competence and musical intelligence have—a clear neurological basis, which may be more richly developed by experience and education, but is none the less innate.

All of these were covered by a thirty-foot blanket of hot ash, so that “not a plant, not a blade of grass, not a fly, survived,”

Three years later, ferns were the first plants to recolonize the island. These were followed by casuarinas,

There are also diseases endemic to islands, diseases which have emerged or persisted because of their isolation, and are thus analogous to an island’s endemic flora and fauna.

the great German epidemiologist Hirsch.

J. B. S. Haldane once proposed a way of quantifying the rate of change of any variable—

ammonite’s

w...

suggesting that a change of one percent per million years be...

Evolution generally proceeded, he thought, in “millidarwins.” But we are now finding that evolution can oc...

This is especially so on newly colonized oceanic islands, which, as they become hospitable to life, offer new ecological niches with a relative absence of predators and competitors. And the process may be further accel...

Lake Victoria, only 12,000 years old, already harbors more than three hundred species of cichlid fish. While Darwin’s finches evolved perhaps twenty different species over four million years, the cichlids of Lake Victoria have a speciation rate 5,000 times greater.

Particularly favorable or particularly challenging environments may also be provided artificially. Resnick et al reported on a group of guppies which were removed from a predator-rich waterfall pool to a virtually predator-free pool upstream. Within four years the guppy population had undergone a huge transformation, with an evolution rate millions of times faster than that seen in more “normal” circumstances.

Forsters, the botanical father and son who accompanied Cook on his second voyage,

ichthyosis, or “fish” skin.

cinchona

Lathyrism is a form of paralysis long endemic in parts of India, where it is associated with eating the chickling or grass pea, Lathyrus sativus; a little lathyrus does no harm, but sometimes it is the only food available—and then the hideous choice is to be paralyzed or starve.

“jake paralysis” which paralyzed tens of thousands of Americans during Prohibition.

extract of Jamaica ginger (or “jake”), not knowing it contained large quantities of a poison (later found to be a toxic organophosphorus c...

Gajdusek regards post-encephalitic syndromes not as active disease processes but as hypersensitivity reactions.)

a spirit of curiosity and wonder, no less than conquest, as animating all the explorations. Certainly this was true of Antonio Pigafetta, a gentleman-volunteer who joined Magellan, “desirous of seeing the wonderful things of the ocean,” and wrote the best history of the voyage.

Magellan’s reputation

His discovery of Guam, especially, took place under very adverse circumstances.

skiff

This arrogance seems to have been wholly absent from the admirable Pigafetta, who (though himself wounded at the time of Magellan’s death) described the entire voyage—its natural wonders, the peoples they visited, the desperation of the crew, and Magellan’s own character, with its heroism, its candor, its mystical depths, its fatal flaws—with the sympathy of a naturalist, a psychologist, and a historian.

aquifer

Kuru,

Gajdusek found, by the ritual practice of eating the brains of the dead. The disease agent was a newly discovered form of virus, a so-called slow virus which could remain latent in the tissues for years before giving rise to actual symptoms.

cretinism,