Exploring the Reality and Perception of These Enchanted Isles

“Evolution’s Workshop” might well have been called “The Galapagos Islands in Fact and Fancy.” In the often entertaining and illuminating contemporary fashion that examines a place, an idea or a cultural symbol by looking at people’s perceptions of it, Edward J. Larson presents the Galapagos Islands both as they are and as they have been perceived.

The early Spanish explorers who encountered these islands, located in the Pacific on the equator, dismissed them as barren chunks of rock of no use to man. The Spaniards were looking at them through the eyes of their times, which saw no value in anything not made, as their religion held, for man’s benefit. Three hundred years later, Herman Melville stopped by and found them to be no better: “The special curse of the Encantadas [the Enchanted isles, as he called them] is that to them change never comes.”

Melville, alas for his scientific if not literary reputation, had visited the islands six years after young Charles Darwin arrived there in 1835 on the scientific voyage of the HMS Beagle. In later years, mulling over what he saw in the creatures on the Galapagos, Darwin came to the opposite conclusion: that in the world of living things, as on the Galapagos, change always comes. Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection turned on its head man’s understanding of the natural world in which he lived. Most scientists accepted it quickly on the evidence, but many people to this day struggle against it, being unwilling to acknowledge the fact that humans like all other living things have evolved in a process described by the philosopher of science David Hull as “rife with happenstance, contingency, incredible waste, death, pain and horror.”

Larson dealt with modern American aspects of Darwin’s legacy in his book “Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion.” “Evolution’s Workshop” is more leisurely, an engaging mixture of strenuous scientific ideas and the quirks and foibles of some of their human advocates. Larson, for instance, introduces the Swiss-born Louis Agassiz, who became famous as one of the principal discoverers of the fact and consequences of the Ice Age. Transferring to Harvard, he founded its Museum of Comparative Zoology, visited the Galapagos, but went to his death in 1873 fiercely, and futilely, disputing Darwin’s theories.

There is a charming sketch of Walter Rothschild who, as an amateur naturalist, amassed a giant collection of specimens, including 87 huge tortoises, from the Galapagos at his English estate, Tring Park. He was followed by the rapid emergence of the Californians in Galapagos studies, led by the new California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco and UC Berkeley, and joined by Stanford University under the marine zoologist David Starr Jordan. “Californians,” Larson writes, “possessed a heady sense of destiny that accepted science as a means for progress and the Pacific as their domain.”

The California Academy of Sciences expedition to the islands in 1905 was, Larson says, “the single most comprehensive natural history survey of the Galapagos ever conducted.” Eight collectors working full time for more than a year at 29 locations on 23 different islands in the archipelago brought back more than 75,000 specimens, including 264 tortoises. Larson carefully describes the work of later, pioneering scientists, notably the English ornithologist David Lack who, Larson writes, “saw something on the Galapagos that no one had ever seen before--natural selection at work among its finches through interspecies competition.” Larson details, too, the celebrated work on Galapagos finches by Peter and Rosemary Grant.

The scientific endeavors on the Galapagos go on, even as Ecuador, which owns them, struggles at once to preserve them and to promote them as a lucrative attraction for eco-tourists. It isn’t easy. At times tourists threaten to overwhelm, and to change, these strange-looking volcanic islands off the west coast of South America. But Larson notes that the islands have been resilient. And he sings the praises of their special place in man’s imagination of himself and nature. As long as they inspire such images, the Galapagos, he writes, “will remain classic ground in human experience.”