Evolution's Workshop: God And Science On The Galapagos Islands - Hardcover

Larson, Edward J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0465038107 ISBN 13: 9780465038107

Publisher: Basic Books, 2001

Synopsis

More than any other place on Earth, the Galapagos Islands are the workshop of evolution. Isolated and desolate, they were largely overlooked by early explorers until Charles Darwin arrived there in the 1830s. It was Darwin who recognized that Galapagos' isolation and desolation were advantages: the paucity of species and lack of outside influences made the workings of natural selection crystal clear. Since then, every important advance and controversy in evolutionary thinking has had its reflection on the Galapagos. In every sense-intellectually, institutionally, and culturally-the history of science on these islands is a history of the way evolutionary science was done for the past 150 years. Evolution's Workshop tells the story of Darwin's explorations there; the fabulous Gilded Age expeditions, run from rich men's gigantic yachts, that featured rough-and-ready science during the day and black-tie dinners every night; the struggle for control of research on the Galapagos; the current efforts by "creation scientists" to use the Galapagos to undercut evolutionary teaching; and many other compelling stories.

About this title

About the Author

Edward J. Larson is a Professor with a joint appointment in History and Law at the University of Georgia. He is the author of Trial and Error: The American Controversy over Creation and Evolution, Sex, Race and Science: Eugenics in the Deep South, and Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate over Science and Religion. He lives in Athens, Georgia.

Reviews

The isolated Gal pagos Islands, lying on the equator 500 miles off the coast of Ecuador, have played a continuing roleone that Larson beautifully evokes herein studies of evolution ever since Charles Darwin spent his celebrated five weeks there in 1835. Larson, who received the Pulitzer Prize in history for Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate over Science and Religion, relates the islands' fascinating history since their discovery by a Spanish bishop in 1535. They soon became a sometime base for pirates, and, during the South Seas whaling boom of the late 1700s, English and American vessels fished the surrounding waters. English naturalists called attention to their unique plants and animals, which led to Darwin's visit on the Beagle. The young Herman Melville visited them six years later; he was much less favorably impressed. In the late 1800s, San Francisco-based scientific institutions like the newly founded Stanford University sent expeditions to bring back plants and animals, dead or alive (mostly dead). The American army dynamited an airstrip out of the volcanic rock to protect the Panama Canal during WWII. After the war, UNESCO took steps to protect the wildlife, which had been decimated over the centuries. In recent years tourism and the attendant influx of Ecuadorians have proved a dubious blessing for the islands' unique ecosystem, which still attracts scientists who travel there to study evolution at work, as well as creation scientists who hope to disprove it. The book contains two extensive photo galleries and is larded with drawings from old accounts of the islands, but it would have benefited immensely from a modern topographic map and photographs of the terrain. Nevertheless, Larson's first-rate history not only will entertain and engage lay readers but also is required reading for those seriously interested in Darwin, evolution or these remarkable islands.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

A few hundred years ago the bleak, inhospitable oceanic islands known as the Galápagos archipelago were visited only by buccaneers and, later, by whalers and sealers who fed their crews on its giant tortoises. By the mid-19th century, however, these volcanic cones--located 600 miles west of Ecuador on the equator--began to attract such distinguished visitors as Herman Melville, Charles Darwin and Louis Agassiz. Now historian Edward J. Larson, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Summer for the Gods (an account of the Scopes trial), invites us to witness the entertaining parade of Galápagos pirates, adventurers, eccentrics, naturalists and other scientists who changed this extraordinary place and were changed by it. For novelist Melville, who sailed there during the 1840s, the Galápagos appeared to be "evilly enchanted ground," a Dantean purgatory populated by vile, hissing reptiles. Young Darwin, on the other hand, landing in 1835, thought the islands looked primeval rather than hellish: "We seem to be brought somewhat near to ... that mystery of mysteries-the first appearance of new beings on this earth." As Larson reminds us, it was only later, back in London, that Darwin nurtured his heretical conclusion that the distribution of Galápagos creatures and their possible relationship to mainland ancestors "would undermine the stability of species." Harvard zoologist Louis Agassiz, an opponent of evolution, had still another take on the Galápagos. Perceiving no "struggle for existence" when he and his wife visited there in 1872, Agassiz found the island creatures wonderfully fearless, exhibiting a "delight in living" wrought by a beneficent Creator. After millennia with no large ground predators, the animals were indeed naive, but Darwin predicted that they would soon become afraid of humans. (I've always wondered why they have not. After centuries of predation by people, where are all the shy, timid whales, tortoises, birds and seals that selection ought to have produced? Or has there simply not been enough time?) Major museums launched expeditions to the archipelago, and Larson introduces us to the rapacious world of collectors, along with body counts of the island wildlife they prized. Seven scientific expeditions, all from the San Francisco Bay Area, invaded the Galápagos between 1897 and 1906. The last of them took 75,000 specimens, including 264 tortoises from 10 different islands. I find it remarkable, after reading Larson's account, that any Galápagos wildlife at all managed to survive the attentions of the scientific community. By the 1960s, with the establishment of the Charles Darwin Research Station and the conferral of national park status by Ecuador, the Galápagos entered its present phase of conservation and observation. Ornithologists Peter and Rosemary Grant have spent 30 years watching and measuring Darwin's finches on several tiny islands.Where various species mixed together on the same islands, the Grants found that they ate different foods--evidence for selection by competitive exclusion. They were even able to watch the finches' beaks evolve. After heavy rains, succulent seeds were everywhere, whereas during droughts only tough, hard seeds remained. The Grants proved that half a millimeter of beak could mean the difference between survival and starvation. Unconvinced that this was a demonstration of evolution in action, creationists conceded that the finches might have developed bigger or smaller beaks within a few generations but pointed out that none turned into vultures or ducks! As for the future, there is good news and bad news. First, the good news: lots of scientists and conservationists are devoting themselves to caring for the Galápagos and learning from it, and more than 2,500 giant tortoises have already been bred and released onto the islands from which they had been plundered. Now the bad news: illegal commercial fishing on a large scale in park waters, a swollen, growing and disgruntled immigrant population of 17,000 from the mainland, and occasional oil spills produce continual crises for the ecosystem. I am privileged to count among my friends Sarah Darwin, a botanical artist who is also the great-great-granddaughter of Charles. When she visited the Galápagos with her family for the first time in 1996, I asked her to write a postcard to the old boy for the London Natural History Museum's First Annual Galápagos Day. "I sit here in a café on the Avenue de Charles Darwin," she wrote, "watching tourists buy tee-shirts and mugs with your picture on them.... I am sorry to relate, though, that many problems here would sadden you ... and all are caused by human greed or thoughtlessness. It will take a tough, caring international effort to ensure that this place of marvels is not destroyed, but will remain to delight and instruct my own great-great-grandchildren." Amen, Sarah.

Richard Milner is the author of The Encylopedia of Evolution: Humanity's Search for Its Origins and Charles Darwin: Evolution of a Naturalist.

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Larson (Univ. of Georgia; Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate over Science and Religion, LJ 9/15/97) compellingly reveals the importance of the Gal pagos Islands to scientific exploration and evolutionary biology from the 19th century to the present. The Gal pagos hold a special place in the history of science, having inspired Charles Darwin to conceive the theory of evolution by natural selection. Before Darwin, explorers declared the islands wretched and without worth, but after Darwin, their scientific value was recognized and many expeditions sought to gather specimens to prove various theories of evolution or to satisfy a passion for scientific collection. Unfortunately, well-meaning explorers and collectors depleted populations of some native species until the mid-20th century, when the focus shifted to environmentalism and conservation. Today, the islands have achieved mythic status, having come to represent the ideal laboratory and the ultimate place of "tensions between paradise and purgatory." Highly recommended to lovers of biology for its scholarship and grand storytelling. Joyce L. Ogburn, Univ. of Washington, Seattle
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Placing Darwin's famous 1835 landfall in the Galapagos amid the welter of expeditions to the place, Larson's new book is a worthy one. The most salient characteristic of the archipelago's animal life--the island-to-island speciation of similar animal types (finches, tortoises, iguanas, etc.)--was noted as a curiosity by such pre-Darwinian visitors as David Porter, a U.S. Navy officer during the War of 1812. Larson surveys the proffered explanations, such as periodic creation, for the variety of the Galapagos' animal forms, until Darwin's Origin of Species set off the stampede to see what he saw. Herman Melville, in the course of his whaling voyages, thought the place a cinder-strewn wasteland; Louis Agassiz went there to refute evolution; and the natural history museums established at the turn of the century dispatched a slew of characters on collecting expeditions. Inevitably, the ever-increasing crowd stressed the environment and extinguished some species, which provides a worrisome closing tone to Larson's fine history of the islands named for the giant tortoises. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0465038107
• ISBN 13: 9780465038107
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336