This month's World Heritage Site

Galapagos Islands

The islands' isolated animals give Charles Darwin his key to the origin of species 

Islands exert powerful pulls on the tides of human imagination. The quick collapse of Minoan civilization after the massive eruption of Thera in the eastern Mediterranean around 1,400 B.C. led to the legend of Atlantis. The Spanish novelist Montalvo, in his romance Las Serges de Esplandian, wrote of a paradisiacal island called California, somewhere in the New World, a vision that inspired the conquistadors.

In modern times, Tahiti inspired Gauguin (whose paintings in turn inspired a still powerful ideal of the South Pacific as an edenic place), Bikini atoll in the South Pacific gave its name to an article of clothing that bespoke great changes in Western attitudes towards women’s bodies and sex, and the takeover of Cuba by Communist revolutionaries almost set off a nuclear war.

Many more names come to mind: Manhattan, Elba, Bali, Sicily, Honshu, Ireland, Krakatoa. But in the long list of islands that have figured so importantly in human affairs, it may turn out that one group of distant islands, dominated by wild animals, has had the greatest effect on human self-perception: the Galapagos group 600 miles west of the coast of Ecuador.

For it was in the Galapagos in 1835 that the young British naturalist, Charles Darwin, sailing on the research ship HMS Beagle, gained the insight that would lead 24 years later to the publication of his revolutionary book, On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.

Until Darwin’s tome, evolution was an accepted theory among many scientists. Having learned how old the earth was, and seeing the fossilized remains of many fantastic animals that no longer existed, scientists wondered how contemporary creatures had come to be. Rejecting the idea that God had endlessly recreated life through the ages, they wondered what mechanism he might have set in motion that would govern the rise of one species from another.

In the Galapagos, Darwin observed how the beaks of finches varied in size over the generations, depending on the food available to them. The finches were drab, unassuming birds, and Darwin didn’t devote a lot of his time or writing to them. But the variations among them planted an idea that took root and reached fruition in 1859. Might it not be possible that nature itself “selected” which animals would survive by how they were equipped to function in their environment? And wouldn’t relentless “selection” in one direction eventually create an entirely new species as new traits came to crowd out or dominate other traits that had previously distinguished a species?

Darwin’s mechanism, natural selection, not only seemed to present an entirely logical and self-contained answer to the question of how evolution worked, it also eliminated any consideration of intelligent design as having had a hand in evolution. If the origin of species did not require a designer, then the concept of God as the source of life’s origin came into question.

Such a revolutionary concept – the possible non-existence or irrelevance of God – revolutionized the intellectual life of the West and turned its science toward a materialist bent that it retains to this day.

So the Galapagos Islands loom large in importance, not only as inspirations for Darwin’s grand conjectures, but also as an example of how an untouched environment, freed from the influence of man or his modifying behaviors, could give science an unvarnished look into nature.

The islands that Darwin saw in 1835 were sparsely settled by humans. Their population of giant tortoises, iguanas, flightless birds and other species that were analogous to mainland species, but frozen at a different point in evolution, were largely untouched and uncowed by man. The 13-island archipelago of volcanic rocks had not invited or accommodated the wholesale ecological destruction that had befallen Easter Island, 2,000 miles to the south. It was as though nature had conspired to produce two ocean-bound paradises, one dominated by man and the other one not, and had then proceeded to demonstrate how natural selection worked in both cases.

The islands still work their magic. Thanks to their designation in 1978 as a World Heritage Site, they should work it for many years to come. Ecuador, which governs them, wisely has set aside 97% of their area as a national park. The few people who live there permanently make their living fishing and functioning as provisioners and tour escorts, aware that their livelihoods depend on the health of the animals that draw 60,000 visitors per year.

Ecotourism here treads as lightly as possible. Visitors may not go ashore on any of the islands without a certified guide, and they are not allowed to stray from designated paths. There’s a little more freedom underwater, where the Galapagos feature some of the most spectacular scuba diving in the world. Still, even the measures taken to mitigate human visitations to the island group may not be enough. There is serious talk of drastically limiting the number of people who come each year – a possibility that will make the islands even more attractive. - By Patrick Totty