ANDRZEJ KRAUZE“As I was walking along I met two large tortoises, each of which must have weighed at least two hundred pounds: one was eating a piece of cactus, and as I approached, it stared at me and slowly stalked away; the other gave a deep hiss, and drew in its head. These huge reptiles, surrounded by the black lava, the leafless shrubs, and large cacti, seemed to my fancy like some antediluvian animals.” Thus Charles Darwin described the September 1835 scene that greeted him on Chatham Island (now San Cristóbal), the first of the Galápagos archipelago he visited.
As this issue of The Scientist is rolling off the printing press, I will be in the Galápagos, excited that I might be walking in some of Darwin’s footsteps, hoping to witness something close to what he saw. Most fittingly, Beagle is the name of the small boat on which I will tour the islands.
Darwin’s visit to the different volcanic cones that form the Galápagos Islands was pivotal to the development of his theory of evolution by natural selection. Yet he cogitated for more than 20 years before publishing On the Origin of Species in 1859. His HMS Beagle research journals came out the following year. And it took another 12 years before he released The Descent of Man, his thoughts on the subject ...
