Darwin and the Galapagos

Abstract

Charles Darwin's historic visit to the Galapagos Islands in 1835 represents a landmark in the annals of science. But contrary to the legend long surrounding Darwin's famous Galapagos visit, he continued to believe that species were immutable for nearly a year and a half after leaving these islands. This delay in Darwin's evolutionary appreciation of the Galapagos evidence is largely owing to numerous misconceptions that he entertained about the islands, and their unique organic inhabitants, during the Beagle voyage. For example, Darwin mistakenly thought that the Galapagos tortoise–adult specimens of which he did not collect for scientific purposes–was not native to these islands. Hence he apparently interpreted reports of island-to-island differences among the tortoises as analogous to changes that are commonly undergone by species removed from their natural habitats. As for Darwin's finches, Darwin initially failed to recognize the closely related nature of the group, mistaking certain species for the forms that they appear, through adaptive radiation, to mimic. Moreover, what locality information he later published for his Galapagos finch specimens was derived almost entirely from the collections of three other Beagle shipmates, following his return to England. Even after he became an evolutionist, in March of 1837 (when he discussed his Galapagos birds with the eminent ornithologist John Gould), Darwin's theoretical understanding of evolution in the Galapagos continued to undergo significant developments for almost as many years as it took him to publish the Origin of Species (1859). The Darwin-Galapagos legend, with its romantic portrait of Darwin's ‘eureka-like’ insight into the Galapagos as a microcosmic ‘laboratory of evolution’, masks the complex nature of scientific discovery, and, thereby, the real nature of Darwin's genius.