From 1896 to 1898 three Anglo-Australian expeditions were made to the Pacific atoll of Funafuti to test competing theories of coral reef formation, one published by Charles Darwin more than fifty years earlier and the other proposed by John Murray as a consequence of his research on the 1872-1876 voyage of H.M.S. Challenger. Darwin himself had died in 1882, but advocates of both theories favored a crucial test that he had suggested. The idea was to drill as deeply as possible into an atoll in an effort to determine, by bringing up cores, whether these formations were built up by shallow water corals that had accumulated atop a subsiding basement foundation of volcanic rock (as Darwin argued) or if atolls were formed by growth of corals atop accumulating banks of sediment. But the expeditions were framed as something bigger, as tests of Darwin’s broader geological perspective as it bore on his theory of evolution. As “crucial experiments” the expeditions were failures: no consensus emerged that the boring had settled the theoretical dispute(s) in question. In this paper, I examine the premise that boring a single atoll could conceivably resolve an interdisciplinary theoretical dispute, and argue that the “failure” of the Funafuti expeditions lay in incompatible ideas of parsimony between zoologists and geologists in the face of an absence of evidence to contradict Darwin’s reef theory.
