Darwin, The Galapagos and Evolution
When Charles Darwin began his five-year voyage around the world on the Beagle in 1831, he was little more than an enthusiastic amateur naturalist set on a career in the clergy. His formative years had been somewhat directionless and lacking the stimulation that his mind craved. He attended Edinburgh University as a medical student, but found the lectures stultifying. Prompted by his father, he turned to a career in the Church, one of the few respectable options left open to him, and went to Cambridge to study divinity. By his own admission, he spent most of his time there shooting partridge and following country pursuits, and only just scraped through without honours. It was here, however, that he encountered John Henslow, the Professor of Botany, who recognized in the 22-year-old a talented mind with a flair for the science. He was so impressed that he immediately recommended him to Captain FitzRoy, who was seeking a naturalist on a hydrographical expedition to chart the coast of South America, returning across the Pacific. Small reservations from FitzRoy - about the shape of Darwin's nose, which FitzRoy held to indicate a weakness of character - and Darwin's father, were soon overcome, and they set sail on board HMS Beagle in December 1831. Darwin, however, suffered from terrible seasickness and complained bitterly in letters to his family: "I loathe, I abhor the sea and all ships which sail on it". Wherever he could, he stayed on land, and in the entire five-year voyage got away with spending only eighteen months at sea. On September 15, 1835, the Beagle arrived at the Galapagos and the desolate landscape startled him. "Nothing could be less inviting", he wrote, "the country is comparable to what one might imagine the cultivated parts of the Infernal regions to be". In the five weeks spent in the archipelago, he set about collecting samples and was taken aback by the "tameness" of the islands' creatures. Darwin's own observations were searingly acute, and he noticed countless things that had passed previous visitors by, but it's clear that his experiences there only planted the seeds of ideas in his mind that were to blossom on his return. Indeed, already exhausted from four years of hard travel, Darwin's normally fastidious sampling was somewhat slapdash in the Galapagos. He failed to label the source islands of his bird collections ("it never occurred to me that, the productions of islands only a few miles apart, and placed under the same physical conditions, would be dissimilar"), and even misidentified the now celebrated Darwin's finches (so named in 1936). It wasn't until his return to London, after the taxonomist, John Gould, had examined Darwin's samples and told him about the thirteen closely related species of finch, that the penny dropped. Yet, while he gave acclaimed lectures to London's scientific societies about his geological discoveries, and published the Journal and Remarks 1832-1836 in 1839 (and then a few weeks later with the unwieldy title Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the Various Countries visited by HMS Beagle ), better known now as Voyage of the Beagle , he only hinted at the big ideas that were troubling him, for example, about the finches and their beaks, he writes "there is not space in this work, to enter on this curious subject". Instead, he set about working over his ideas in near secret in his famous Transmutation Notebooks , the first of which begins: "Had been greatly struck? on character of South American fossils and species on Galapagos Archipelago. These facts origin (especially latter) of all my views". He saw that the volcanic islands were relatively new and that the life on the islands bore resemblance to species in South America, but were different in crucial ways: he also came to realize that life had come to the barren islands by air or sea and had adapted to the harsh environment through a process he termed " natural selection ". In this, at a given time certain members of a species are more suited to their surroundings than others, and are therefore more likely to survive in it, so passing on their advantageous characteristics to their offspring. Over the course of time, an entire population would come to develop those special features, eventually to such a degree that it will have become a new species, what Darwin called "descent with modification", rather than "evolution", which implied progressive movement towards the highest point of development. In his groundbreaking model, change was without direction and could result in a number of new species coming from a single ancestor. Darwin knew the implications of his theory would upset the public, the establishment and draw bitter criticism from the Church. A religious man, it was a source of pain to him that his theories came into direct conflict with the creationist dogma of the time, and he grew sick with the stress of it all (though some commentators have since attributed his illness to Chagas' disease, a chronic and withering parasitic infection he may have caught in the tropics). He sat on his theory for nearly twenty years, quietly amassing the information to back it up. It took a letter from Alfred Russel Wallace , who had arrived at the idea of natural selection independently of Darwin - though without the latter's intellectual rigour - to jerk him into action. In 1858, they offered a joint paper on their findings to the Linnean Society in London. Darwin wrote up all his material and in November 1859 published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life . It sold out in a single day. Sure enough, Origin of the Species sent shockwaves throughout the Western world and opened up to science areas that had previously been the province only of philosophers and theologians. Intense debate followed, and by the time of Darwin's death in 1882, the idea of evolution was well established and Darwin was a legend. He was buried in honour at Westminster Abbey next to Sir Isaac Newton. The most important, original and far-seeing part of his theory - the mechanism of natural selection - however, was still highly controversial, and it was only in the 1930s that it received the full recognition it deserved, so forming the basis of modern biology and forever changing humanity's view of itself.
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