The Galapagos Islands “effected the greatest of all revolutions in human thought as Darwin made the first step out of the fairy tale of creationism into the coherent and comprehensible world of modern biology” – Julian Huxley, a famous English biologist, echoed his thoughts a century after Darwin’s visit.
Eleven years after his return from the Galapagos Islands Darwin wrote in an 1842 sketch on evolution: “So if islands formed new continent, let it be ever so different, that continent would supply inhabitants, and new species (like the old) would be allied with that continent.”
Under creationism, in contrast a good Creator should fashion new species to fit their locals without any alliance to ill-suited nearby types. Darwin emphasised this point in a private essay two years later: “Even the different islands of one such group are inhabited by species, distinct, though intimately related to one another and to those of the nearest continent.” This he noted, “is so wonderfully the case with the different islands of the Galapagos Archipelago.”
Darwin pulled together the available information on Galapagos species. In his private essay in 1844 he wrote: “Here almost every bird, its mammifer (mammal), its reptiles, land and sea shells, and even fish, are almost all peculiar and distinct species, yet they belong to the American type.
Under creationism, in contrast a good Creator should fashion new species to fit their locals without any alliance to ill-suited nearby types. Darwin emphasised this point in a private essay two years later: “Even the different islands of one such group are inhabited by species, distinct, though intimately related to one another and to those of the nearest continent.” This he noted, “is so wonderfully the case with the different islands of the Galapagos Archipelago.”
Darwin pulled together the available information on Galapagos species. In his private essay in 1844 he wrote: “Here almost every bird, its mammifer (mammal), its reptiles, land and sea shells, and even fish, are almost all peculiar and distinct species, yet they belong to the American type.
All the Archipelago’s islands are of similar composition and exposed to the same climate; most of them are in sight of each other; and yet several of the islands are inhabited, each by peculiar species of some of the genera characterising the archipelago.”
You can see how Darwin’s reasoning was working out. In the privacy of his mind and personal writings, Darwin had made his case for organic evolution. Then he thought of
his imagined opponents – The Creationists: “The creationist can only say that it so pleased the Creator … that the inhabitants of the Galapagos Archipelago should be related to those of Chile ….
He argued to himself – “but it is absolutely opposed to every analogy, drawn from the laws imposed by the creator on inorganic matter.” Darwin has made his case for organic evolution.
Darwin, at that time did not have any idea how it all happens – how individuals change in response to their environment and thus evolve into new species over time. This question hounded him for years. He then came upon a generation-old Lamarck’s theory that individuals change in response to their environment and thus evolve new species over time, which was ridiculed by the scientific community at that time.
His inspiration, however, came from reading Thomas Malthus’s – An Essay on the Principle of Population (1838). Malthus asserted that humans have a natural tendency to reproduce at an unsustainably rapid rate. Competition among people check the excess through famine, epidemic, war and the like, tending to leave the fittest to survive and reproduce their kind.
Darwin’s moment of insights came when he caught at the idea “that ones who died would be the weakest and the ones who lived the strongest – or best adapted. Death, so to speak, could be a creative entity.”
Darwin would call the elimination of the weak “natural selection” – struggle for survival, an inevitable consequence of chance and change rather than divine design.
Darwin was gradually getting recognition in the very conservative Victorian era as a scientist while he kept his thoughts to himself. In 1839, he gained election to the Royal Society of London and married his pious and proper first cousin, Emma Wedgwood – daughter of a very rich father.
In the 1845 edition of his “Journal”, Darwin greatly expanded his discussion of Galapagos finches, adding a sketch of their differing bills and concluding with blast, “Seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one small, intimately related group of birds, one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends.”.
He also noted novelty and diversity among Galapagos reptiles, insects, fish and shells, including a new reference to David Porter’s 1813 observation of island-specific differences among Galapagos Tortoises.
In this edition he conceded, God could have created unique species for the Galapagos Islands, but “why were they created on American type of organisation?”
Despite his growing scientific status and financial security, he dared not publish his grand theory (of evolution) until 1858, while searching for evidence supporting evolution from his Galapagos plant specimens.
About this time, Herman Melville, an American who visited Galapagos briefly in1841, six years after Darwin, opposed everything in Darwin’s theory. He wrote a book “The Encantadas” or enchanted isles (not wanting to use Galapagos) in which he described “these reptiles as purgatorial incarnations of wicked sea officers. Until science saw in nature something beyond human utility or divine design; the archipelago would arouse little scientific interest.”
Then, Darwin finally published his epic book “The Origin of Species” in 1859, and everything changed. Each use of Galapagos evidence reinforced the book’s central thesis.
Darwin wrote, “for, as already explained, species occasionally arriving after long intervals in a new and isolated district, and having to compete with new associates, will be eminently liable to modification, and will often produce groups of modified descendents.” Second, isolated places sometimes lack an entire type of plant or animal, with its place filled by another. For instance, “in Galapagos Islands reptiles … take the place of mammals.”
Darwin asked, “Why should the species which are supposed to have been created in the Galapagos Archipelago, and nowhere else, bear so plain a stamp of affinity to those created in America? I believe this grand fact can receive no sort of explanation on the ordinary view of independent creation; whereas on the view here maintained, it is obvious that the Galapagos Islands would be likely to receive colonists, whether by occasional means of transport or by formerly continuous land from America.”
Darwin hammered ‘natural theology’. “God did not providentially create species ideally suited for the archipelago; instead, chance arrivals evolved to fit there. Nor did the islands easily fall within Paley’s “happy world.” (Vide annotation). They were places of fierce competition among individuals and species where only the fittest survive. The old argument of ‘designs in nature’, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, hails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered.”
Darwin concluded: “There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows. Everything is the result of fixed laws.”
Darwin wrote: “When I visited during the voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, the Galapagos Archipelago, I fancied myself brought near to the very act of creation. I often asked myself how these many peculiar animals and plants had been produced: the simplest answer seemed to be that the inhabitants of the several islands had descended from each other, undergoing modification during their descent; and that all the inhabitants of the archipelago were descended from those of the nearest land, namely America. Others would want to see this for themselves.”
ANNOTATION
William Paley in 1802 wrote ‘Argument from Design’ or teleological argument, in his book Natural Theology. He compares the complexity of living things to the inferior complexity of a watch that is designed by an intelligent being. Paley argued that just as a watch could not exist without a watchmaker, living things could not exist without an intelligent designer.
This view was severely undermined by Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection in 1859 – explaining how living things can become so well-adapted to the environments that they appear to be intelligently designed even when they are not.
Darwin’s visit to the Galapagos Islands changed how scientifically informed people view how life and human beings on Earth evolved from nature. His evolutionary theory has weakened the intellectual foundation of a ‘biological argument to design’.
