Using a needle, he pried something unexpected from inside them-minute barnacles, roughly a tenth of an inch long. That night, back on the Beagle, Darwin studied the holes under his microscope. It was coconut-sized and had a baffling feature: hundreds of millimeter-sized holes, as if somebody had blasted it with tiny buckshot. On the beach Darwin found a strange shell. Wild potatoes grew near the shore, and otters splashed in the water, hunting crabs. He found a lush green canopy covering silky sand, with snow-peaked mountains visible in the distance. In January 1835, three years into the voyage, the Beagle anchored off the coast of Chile, and Darwin-who’d been seasick much of the trip-scrambled ashore to walk the beach. But the biggest influence on Darwin was a lowly, much-despised marine pest-the barnacle. What animals shaped his theory of evolution, then? Pigeons played a part, as did worms. So while pop culture usually associates evolution with the Galápagos, Darwin left the islands in the same state he’d arrived-a creationist. Darwin didn’t even specifically mention Galápagos finches in his monumental On the Origin of Species. Worse, he forgot to record the island of origin for most of the finches, making them useless for evolutionary study. He actually misidentified the birds, calling them grosbeaks, and had to be corrected by an expert back in England. He collected some during his famous voyage on the Beagle but proceeded to make a complete hash of them. If asked to pick an animal that influenced Charles Darwin, most of us would select the same one: the iconic Galápagos finches with their precisely crafted beaks, each tuned to a different ecological niche.īut the truth is, Darwin didn’t really care about finches.
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