The stories of Charles Darwin and the Galápagos Islands are impossible to separate from one another. Each has shaped the destiny of the other, and both have rested well-within the global limelight for the last century-and-a-half as a result of their interaction.
Charles Darwin did not go to the Galápagos with evolution on his mind. When he set sail in 1831 aboard the HMS Beagle, he was a little-known naturalist. He was a guest of Captain Robert FitzRoy, who was sailing to South America to map its coastlines and return three captured indigenous residents of Tierra del Fuego. The voyage did not reach the Galápagos Islands until 1835, by which time Darwin had made a number of ecological and geological observations.
Darwin and FitzRoy spent just five weeks in the Galápagos, from September 15th to October 20th 1835. Darwin himself disembarked to explore San Cristobál Island, Floreana Island, Santiago Island and Isabela Island, and he sailed past nearly every other major island in the archipelago. Other members of the expedition made landings at other sites and returned with scientific specimens and samples of species.
One of the first things that struck Darwin about the islands was the diversity of the species. The mockingbirds that he studied were similar to the species he had found on the South American mainland, but they were clearly different species. In fact, the species varied from one island to the next. He was not the first person to have noticed this phenomenon; the resident governor on the Galápagos told Darwin that with a quick glance, he could determine which island a particular giant tortoise had come from.
Since Darwin, the islands have been closely associated with the idea of evolution....
Darwin returned from his trip a year later and set to work on his memoir of the experience. Still, of all of his observations from the trip, his notes from the Galápagos bothered him the most. The contemporary theory held that all species had been created at the same time and had not changed over time. However, as he learned that the finches he had collected on different islands all bore a strong resemblance to the finches of South America, but were slightly different, he developed a new theory. Darwin came to believe in transmutation, which is the idea that species changed over time.
Darwin put these theories to work in On the Origin of Species, which was released in 1859. The book, which expanded on the ideas Darwin developed around the finches, detailed the theory of evolution and natural selection. It formed the basis for all subsequent research into evolutionary biology, and it made both Darwin and the Galapagos Islands famous.
Ever since Darwin, the islands have been closely associated with the idea of evolution. Researchers and tourists have poured into the islands to see and study the same biodiversity that sparked Darwin's creativity. A permanent scientific research station was established on Puerto Ayora, which is located on Santa Cruz Island, and it was named after Charles Darwin. When Kurt Vonnegut wrote a novel about evolution, he set it in the Galápagos Islands.
