When Europeans first explored the Galapagos Islands, a rugged archipelago 650 miles off the coast of Ecuador, they were astounded by the forbidding landscape and the odd behavior of the animals and plants they found there. "The place is like a new creation," wrote ship captain George Anson, a nephew of the poet Lord Byron. "The birds and beasts do not get out of our way; the pelicans and sea-lions look in our faces as if we had no right to intrude on their solitude; the small birds are so tame that they hop upon our feet; and all this amidst volcanoes which are burning around us on either hand." Others who followed, like the onetime sailor and writer Herman Melville, took a dimmer view, calling the place "evilly enchanted ground." Whatever the sentiment, the Galapagos attracted generations of scientists, who, following the example of Charles Darwin, traveled there to test theories of speciation, adaptation, migration, and selection. Their work in the field helped overturn the prevailing orthodoxies of special creation, writes Edward J. Larson in his vigorous history of the islands and their role in the development of modern biological science. Their work also changed the face of the islands themselves, as hundreds and thousands of plants and animals were killed or removed for collections far afield, with a single expedition taking more than 10,000 birds and skins.
Today, the islands face other threats, as tens of thousands of ecotourists travel there each year, disturbing sensitive environments, and as alien plant and animal species are introduced. Still, Larson notes at the close of his fine book, "the archipelago's ecosystem has proved surprisingly resilient in the past," and conservation measures may yet be found to preserve the islands' "age-old solitude." --Gregory McNamee
From Library Journal
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.
From Scientific American
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.
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
Review
". . . Larson nicely summarizes the history of evolutionary biology and some of the current scientific debates." -- --BusinessWeek [5/14/01]
". . . if you are going tqo the islands, by jet or by armchair . . . read Larson's book first." -- --Washington Post Book World [5/4/01]
". . .a fascinating examination of the historical importance of the Galapagos Islands (to Darwin and others), as well as current threats. . . -- --Seattle Post Intelligencer [4/20/01]
"Highly recommended to lovers of biology for its scholarship and grand storytelling." -- -- Library Journal [6/1/01]
"Splendid new book . . . an impeccable job . . . This book is diligently organized, written with great panache and dotted with memorable portraits." -- -- The Seattle Times [5/11/01]
"This delightfully written book is sure to become a classic." -- Janet Browne, author of Charles Darwin: A Biography
"Thoughtfully conceived and expertly written, this is a good companion for travelers to the islands and students..." -- --Kirkus Reviews [3/2/01]
"Very highly recommended!" -- Michael Ruse, author of Can Darwin Be a Christian?
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.
