A Review of Evolution's Workshop by Edward J. Larson
Michael J. Chapman
Metanexus:Views 2002.01.10 2312 words

"Evolutionists and clergymen are fallible; they perceive their data or their God as through a glass darkly; yet their pronouncements can change history.
The Galapagos Islands have occupied a central position in history of evolutionary thought, but how were these uninhabited islands perceived by
the first Christians to visit them? Devout adherents to natural theology, 16th and 17th century Pacific explorers dithered over the presence of
bizarre giant tortoises, marine iguanas and other animals on the Galapagos Islands...the animals must have traveled there from Noah's ark, but then how
to explain their total absence in the Old World? Perhaps the Galapagos were an accursed place, or a purgatory for sinners. But when Charles Darwin
visited the islands, he saw nature at work."

And that view of the Galapagos, as expressed by today's columnist, Michael Chapman, PhD, led to a theory that some may say changed the world and most
would say revolutionized and revitalized biology. For this reason, the Galapagos and those famous finches and tortoises have achieved an almost
iconological status in common parlance. If "Athens" symbolizes and evokes thoughts of philosophy, and "Jerusalem" and "Mecca" symbolize and embody
religions, then "Galapagos" evokes and embodies not merely natural selection and evolution, but also the exotic and the rare.

In today's column, Michael Chapman reviews Edward J. Larson's 2001 book on those enchanted isles: namely, Evolution's Workshop: God and Science on the
Galapagos Islands (Basic Books, ISBN 0-465-03810-7). For those who are interested in sampling Prof. Larson's work itself, you are invited to read
his Templeton Lecture "God and the Galapagos" which appeared on Metanexus this past August (2001.08.27).

Today's author, Michael Chapman, is an academic evolutionist who has worked with students at all levels, from 6th grade through graduate school. His
research interests include non-Darwinian evolution, non-Mendelian inheritance, and the evolution of human moral systems. Dr. Chapman teaches
in the Biology Department at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA.

--Stacey E. Ake

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Subject: A Review of Evolution's Workshop by Edward J. Larson
From: Michael J. Chapman
Email: <mchapman@holycross.edu>

Evolutionists and clergymen are fallible; they perceive their data or their
God as through a glass darkly; yet their pronouncements can change history.
The Galapagos Islands have occupied a central position in history of
evolutionary thought, but how were these uninhabited islands perceived by
the first Christians to visit them? Devout adherents to natural theology,
16th and 17th century Pacific explorers dithered over the presence of
bizarre giant tortoises, marine iguanas and other animals on the Galapagos
Islands...the animals must have traveled there from Noah's ark, but then how
to explain their total absence in the Old World? Perhaps the Galapagos were
an accursed place, or a purgatory for sinners. But when Charles Darwin
visited the islands, he saw nature at work. Based largely on observations
during his 1835 Beagle voyage, Darwin formulated his theory of evolution by
natural selection - and sparked a conceptual revolution like no other, a
revolution which shook the foundations of Christianity. And now, as no
other historian has done, Edward Larson has delineated the history of the
world-famous archipelago in both scientific and religious contexts.

Larson, who currently chairs the history department at the University of
Georgia, is the 1998 recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in history. His oeuvre
includes three other works on the American creation-evolution controversy.
Evolution's Workshop is his first work with a geographical focus outside the
continental United States. It is a thoroughly enjoyable read, filled with
vivid descriptions of the Galapagos. These truly oceanic islands are
volcanic outcroppings several hundred miles off the Ecuadoran coast,
inhabited by outlandish creatures such as the famed giant tortoises
(Galapagos is Spanish for "tortoises"), marine and land iguanas, and of
course Darwin's finches.

The Galapagos tortoises, so far isolated from the mainland yet clearly
unable to swim, were difficult to fit into classical European concepts of
natural history. Even in sailing ships, the islands were quite difficult to
reach: rocky and forbidding, and surrounded by unpredictable currents.
Those who did manage the feat reported a thoroughly inhospitable landfall:
Larson gives accounts of 16th century Spanish explorers Fernando d'Acosta
and Fray Tomas de Berlanga, who describe the islands as "cursed by God;"
Herman Melville, who was familiar with the Galapagos through his experience
with the New England whaling industry, detested the islands and parodied
Darwin's published work on them with an annotated census of Galapagos
"ant-eaters, man-haters, salamanders and devils." Melville portrayed the
tortoises as reincarnations of evil sea captains, cursed to spend a 200- to
300-year lifespan expiating their sins in the most miserable existence
imaginable.

An early Spanish name for the Galapagos, "las Encantadas" or the Enchanted
Isles, derives from the sheer difficulty, owing to vagaries of local ocean
currents, of getting near them in a sailing boat. Jagged volcanic rocks
made landfall impossible in most places, and cut sailors' feet once ashore;
scarcity of arable land or fresh water and swarms of mosquitoes did not help
to endear the islands to Europeans prior to Darwin's time. Nor did they fit
easily into prevalent European concepts of nature: William Paley's natural
theology, the dominant paradigm of 19th century European science, described
all species as immutable creations of a munificent God, intended for
beautification of the Earth and for exploitation by man. Certainly the
Galapagos, whose only edible fauna consisted of blue-footed boobies and the
plug-ugly tortoises, were an embarrassment to God, or perhaps, as Melville
portrayed them, a penal colony for fallen souls.

In the chapter entitled, "What Darwin Saw," Larson elegantly lays out the
central questions posed by the Galapagos and how they led Darwin to his
theory of evolution by natural selection. Some such questions are as
follows: If all species are immutable, intended for the service of mankind,
why should God bother to put multiple varieties of finch, iguana etc on
uninhabited islands isolated hundreds of miles out to sea? Why should the
many species of Galapagos finch, for example, bear clear anatomical
relationships to mainland species, yet occur in a much wider variety of
forms than on the mainland? And if Genesis is correct about the Noachian
flood, how did the giant tortoises, helpless nonswimmers, ever arrive there?
It turns out that the patterns of speciation on the Galapagos are repeated
again and again on oceanic islands all over the world; ever since Darwin
considerable study has been devoted to the phenomenon of adaptive radiation
in populations of plants and animals isolated on such islands.

In short, Darwin recognized that species are neither immutable nor
particularly intended for anything other than propagation of their own
offspring; and that islands like the Galapagos are ideal places for the
evolution of new species from isolated founder populations. On the
mainland, there are many genera of birds filling all available niches:
woodpeckers, thrushes, snail darters and other birds compete with finches
for food resources and nesting sites. But when an early founder population
of finches arrived on the Galapagos, perhaps blown there by a storm, they
found an absence of competition from other birds. Hence the finches were
free to evolve large nutcracking beaks, small ant-catching beaks, sharp
fruit-piercing beaks, tree-, shrub- and ground-nesting habits, and the
ensuing adaptive radiation led to the remarkable diversity noted by Darwin.
Small wonder that on his return, he waited 20 years to publish the dangerous
implications of his findings.

The world has never recovered from what Daniel Dennett called "Darwin's
Dangerous Idea;" and understandably enough, Darwin's association with the
Galapagos has eclipsed all others in the popular imagination. Yet Darwin's
work inevitably drew others to the archipelago - David Porter of the United
States Navy; Louis Agassiz, premier American naturalist of the 19th century
and founder of the Harvard Museum of Natural History; bizarre English
plutocrat Lord Walter Rothschild and multiple expeditions from the
California Academy of Sciences (CAS) visited the Galapagos between the
mid-19th and early 20th centuries. Larson deftly introduces us to each
character in his turn. We learn that Agassiz, an adherent of natural
theology, was obsessed with the islands as evidence against Darwin's theory
of evolution and returned there on multiple expeditions, undeterred by
failing health and mishaps including loss of all his specimens at sea.
Rothschild and the CAS competed for the largest, most impressive collection
of giant tortoises - the former brought an even gross of them to his estate
at Tring Park, and ordered more and more expeditions to fill in "gaps" in
his collection on learning of new acquisitions in California. The overall
impression one is left with after reading these chapters is one of plunder -
the philosophy of manifest destiny inspired the Californians to "stake their
claim" in the Galapagos, and like Rothschild, they were determined to "save
species for Science" even if it meant driving them to extinction in their
native habitats. Accompanying photos document the backbreaking labor it
took to move some of the last giant tortoises, many of which weighed a
quarter ton, from their inland refuges down to the boats.

Predictably enough, the early 20th century did not bring with it a respite
from plunder of the Galapagos fauna. Theodore Roosevelt inspired a
generation of young men to adventurism and "taming of the wilderness;" some
of these were tycoons such as Vincent Astor, Marshall Field and Harrison
Williams, who built a financial empire in the 1920s on the electrical power
boom. Millionaires' yachts were converted to scientific collection vessels
such as the Noma, which carried explorer William Beebe on a much-publicized
expedition to the Galapagos in 1923. Somewhat lacking in scientific
credentials but personally charismatic and enormously popular, Beebe would
leave the ship for collecting expeditions at breakfast but return by ten AM;
black-tie dinners and chamber music performed by the on-board quartet took
place every evening. The Noma was equipped with specially heated tanks to
house live specimens for the return trip; Beebe's collection went to the New
York Zoological Society.

The turning point in human attitude towards the Galapagos seems to have come
with World War II. The United States established an airbase there, and
bored GIs conducted iguana races and taunted the native goats; of even
greater ecological impact were the mainland introduced species such as mice,
which overran the island of Baltra. The presence of the military base, with
its 1,000 personnel, stimulated the economy of the local Ecuadoran colony
and swelled the islands' human population; despite the wartime stimulus,
however, the desperately poor settlers often needed to slaughter tortoises
and other native fauna for food. The burgeoning science of ecology came to
the rescue: following the war, ecologists such as Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt
and Robert Bowman visited the archipelago and publicly condemned the
extinction of native species from Baltra and other islands.

The prominent British evolutionist Julian Huxley soon became involved in
efforts to establish a permanent scientific research station on the
Galapagos. His efforts within UNESCO (United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization) soon accomplished that goal, and the
Charles Darwin Foundation for Galapagos Research was created in 1959, in
time for the centennial of the publication of the Origin of Species.
Ecuadoran officials had realized the archipelago's value as a tourist
commodity, and underwrote conservation efforts through the establishment of
strict environmental laws in the resident human colony. The latter half of
the 20th century, thankfully, has seen some recovery in populations of
endangered species on the larger islands: giant tortoises, for example,
still reside in the highlands of Indefatigable, and one can see marine
iguanas in the remote bays. Larson traces in detail scientific debates of
this more recent period, such as the one between Bowman and ornithologist
David Lack on the evolutionary basis for adaptive radiation in Darwin's
finches: Lack held that interspecies competition had contributed to
speciation, while Bowman stressed differences in food as the only necessary
selective force. Canadian finch researchers Rosemary and Peter Grant later
published results indicating somewhat of a middle ground between the Lack
and Bowman positions: all finch populations exhibited selection for and
against specific food types; however, the non-random occurrence of
particular combinations of species on certain islands strongly suggested
interspecies competition.

Grant quoted geneticist J.B.S. Haldane during a 1977 lecture as follows:
"There are still a number of people who do not believe in the theory of
evolution. Scientists believe in it, not because it is an attractive
theory, but because it enables them to make predictions which come true."
Of course creationists still see things differently, even on the Galapagos:
Larson quotes a contributor to the Creation Research Society Quarterly as
follows: "The birds are all still finches, and there is no evidence of
change of the magnitude which macroevolution would require." Christian
evolutionists such as David Lack and Alister Hardy labored to reconcile
nonscientific believers with their discipline; for them, as Larson quotes
Stephen Jay Gould, God and science were "non-overlapping magisteria."
Darwin himself is quoted on God: "I feel most deeply that the whole subject
is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on
the mind of Newton. Let each man hope and believe what he can." While the
creation-evolution debate continues into the 21st century, both sides
clearly value the archipelago for their own ends. Conservation efforts have
been aided immeasurably by Ecuadoran national park status and publicity
including visits by journalists Annie Dillard and Richard Atcheson. The
present volume itself has helped to raise consciousness about the Galapagos,
and preserve their flora and fauna for study by future generations.

In sum, Larson's book is a thorough, meticulously annotated history of what
Loren Eiseley has called "actually the most famous islands in the world."
On its face a useful academic resource on the Galapagos, this book will also
engage the casual reader, particularly those interested in the
science-religion dialogue on human origins. This evolutionist accords
Evolution's Workshop his highest recommendation.

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