Plenty of romance has been heaped on Charles Darwin though. Like Abe Lincoln with stovepipe hat in Springfield, IL, Darwin's visage with his big white beard are all over the island town of Puerto Ayora, the biggest settlement on the archipelago with 12,000 inhabitants, most of whom depend directly or indirectly on tourism -- or research. My favorite is the slick, minimalist logo for the Iguana Factory where Darwin has been equipped with a Che beret, "the evolution revolution." I don't know what the Iguana Factory fabricates, probably T-shirts, maybe they do iguana sausage, but I doubt it has anything to do with science. Anyhow, after a smattering of British pirates, Darwin was one of the first tourists to visit the Galápagos. Here he was supposed to have been inspired by the variety of finches on the island in developing his theory of evolution. Like the apple bonking Newton on the head, it's a neat myth -- but no more than that.
To start with, it wasn't Darwin's theory at all, but one that had been kicked about for years before Darwin even boarded the HMS Beagle in 1831. In 1809, a French fellow named Lamarck was the first to put out a working scheme for evolution, which he called "transmutation," a term Darwin and his contemporaries used as well to explain how species may be related. It was fifty later that he rocked the world with Origin of Species... or On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection if you're not into the whole brevity thing. In "one long argument" (as he describes the book) Darwin lays out the blueprint for how things change, the mechanisms for evolution, for adaptation, variation -- namely selection in its various forms. True, the main idea struck him shortly after he returned to England, but he'd mulled over his ideas on his "thinking path," batted it around with his contemporaries, and agonized over its potential impact on western society for a long, long time.
But first, he had to go to the Galápagos. At age 26, four years into his famous voyage on the Beagle, he set foot on the islands. As an amateur naturalist and hired "gentleman companion" of Captain FitzRoy, he didn't know what he was looking at when he collected what are now known as "Darwin's Finches." He was too enthralled by the other creatures he saw, like the monstrous-looking marine iguanas and huge land turtles. According to his own journals, Darwin throws an iguana into the sea over and over, only to have it swim right back to him. In his book the Beak of the Finch, Jonathan Weiner writes: "Contrary to legend, as [science historian] Sulloway has shown, Darwin did not think the finches were very important. He did not even think they were all finches."
Some of the finches had fat beaks, some of the finches had sharp beaks, some of them had thin, needly beaks like warblers -- that part is well-known -- each had a specific tool for a specific niche, but Darwin thought they were different unrelated species of "warblers" and "gross-beaks." After shooting a bunch of them on various islands and stuffing them, Darwin had chucked them all into the same bag, without labeling the home island of the individual birds! -- the key information that he needed to unlock the idea of Natural Selection, his first true stroke of genius. It wasn't until he got back to England that he even realized his finches might be different types, but variatons on a theme. After donating his already famous specimen collections to the London Zoological Society, however, they were examined tout de suite by an ornithologist named John Gould (Darwin even took an apartment in London so he could closely follow the developments). Gould quickly pronounced the finches 12 separate species of finch -- all relations -- which totally knocked Darwin's socks off. And for the next 25 years, the original Chuck D. worked on and agonized over his ideas, much to the detriment of his health. It is said that he was rarely well.
Much of Origin is speculation with little to nothing in the way of direct observable evidence. Sure, he had fossil records and specimens he picked up in Chile while aboard the Beagle. He also became quite the hand at breeding fancy English pigeons. He had as many as fifteen breeds, which he showed off to the geologist Charles Lyell and used specifically as an analogy for Natural Selection in Origin. But it's really Peter and Rosemary Grant, a couple of British evolutionary biologists by way of Princeton, who have proved that the "one long argument" is more than mere speculation. The Grants have been studying the finches of Daphne Major since 1971 -- all of them. Each and every finch birth, mating, and death; each beak has been measured, and each bird has been weighed and recorded for over four decades. The Grants, with Darwin lurking in the foreground, are the subject of Weiner's Pulitzer Prize winning book (The Beak of the Finch). Since we're sometimes short on reading material here, I read it. And despite myself (and my taste for bad westerns and pulp fiction), I was enthralled.
The finches -- or chiques as they're called by locals -- have filled every niche in the Galápagos that other birds haven't, including the pesky English Sparrow. So in Puerto Ayora, you can't go to an open air restaurant with out finches working for food everywhere you look. I watched one snag a piece of fruit out of a guy's bowl when he went to the bathroom. At a local beach, you can see them scavenging for crackers. The finches around Puerto Ayora are not going hungry.
But less than two hours away by bus and boat, the finches on Daphne Major are struggling for existence. One of the things the Grants and their team have shown is that pressures force and expedite change. On Daphne Major, in a drought year when the three species of finches who live there have exhausted all of the easy-to-find seeds, they resort to their specialized beaks to crack open the tougher seeds. All the while, their cousins back on Santa Cruz are scavenging Ritz crackers for easy meals and happily hybridizing.
Our meals were relatively easy to get as well. When Darwin and the crew of the Beagle showed up on the islands after four years of sailing, they were psyched to find fresh food, in the form of birds and tortoises, which can live up to a year without food or water. Instead, we wandered down to the fish market in town and bought Wahoo and Mero (? which we're pretty sure is a grouper), while the fishermen cleaning fish shoed away the sea-lions and pelicans with homemade sea-lion swatters, a plastic bag fixed to the end of a stick. We bought bread, wine, and fresh vegetables at a supermarket, went to our rented home, and cooked delicious meals on a gas stove.
Life now on the island of Santa Cruz bustles, and Academy Bay is full of cruise ships, luxury yachts, and water taxis. Of all of the places we've been in Ecuador, this place was by far the most chi-chi. It's easy to spend a lot of money in Puerto Ayora, but it's also got a local, down to earth side. The farther you walk from the waterfront, the cheaper prices get. As well, the locals-to-tourists ratio climbs exponentially by the block. If you leave the supermarket and walk uphill, you can find fruit and vegetable stalls where you can haggle over the price of a pineapple or a chicken.
But because a lot of things are shipped to Santa Cruz, it's two, three, or four times more expensive than on the mainland. 97% of the islands are National Park, and if you are land-based tourists as we were, you need a professional, certified Galápagos guide to take you around. The entrance fee to the park is 100 bucks for extranjeros, five for Ecuadorians, paid at the airport upon successful completion of your paperwork. From town you can island hop to different authorized sites, though many places are off-limits even to scientists. And the finches are everywhere. It's said that "only God and Peter Grant can recognize Darwin's finches," so I was wary from the start. We may have seen more than two species (Cactus and Medium Ground-finch), but I won't speculate. Still, of the 27 species we saw on the three of the islands, nine of them were endemic -- priceless.
The two tours we took were 90 bucks a piece. One day I saw the Galápagos Hawk and the Galápagos Pigeon. You could look at it as 45 dollars an endemic specie, but there was so much more than that. Vonnegut's point about value -- thanks to big human brains -- was about perception. Since Darwin and subsequent evolutionary biologists changed the way we view ourselves and our habitat, the Galápagos has gained value for all of us. Unfortunately, the cost of human existence goes up from year to year, and not just in dollars of course. I wonder whether ecotourism is an oxymoron, but Santa Cruz was the most eco-minded place we've been so far -- they have to be. When Darwin first arrived in the Galápagos the tortoise and finch were potential food sources; now they're bread and butter in Puerto Ayora.
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