Today, Dr. Edward J. Larson, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his book __Summer for the Gods__ (1997) brings to us an essay on that Mecca of natural history, organismal biology, and evolutionary theory--namely, the Galapagos Islands. The pivotal historical role played by the Galapagos in the creation of Darwin's own thinking is well known. However, the islands continued to be the center of scientific debate well into the late 20th century, attracting the attentions of such figures as Louis Agassiz, Richard Owen, David Starr Jordan, Henry Fairfield Osborn, David Lack, Ernst Mayr and Julian Huxley.

""What kind of God can one infer from the sort of phenomena epitomized by the species on Darwin's Galapagos Islands?" philosopher of science David Hull asked in a 1991 essay in the journal Nature. "The evolutionary process is rife with happenstance, contingency, incredible waste, death, pain and horror," he noted. Citing the findings of Galapagos finches researchers Peter and Rosemary Grant as prime evidence against any but a sado-masochist's natural theology, Hull protested. "The God of the Galapagos is careless, wasteful, indifferent, almost diabolical." Using the archipelago as a metaphor for neo-Darwinism generally, he asked, "Could anyone believe in God and the Galapagos?""

And this is precisely the question Prof. Larson sets out to explore. He not only addresses it in today's column, which is taken from his Templeton Lecture on "God and the Galapagos" given this past July at the 56th annual American Scientific Affiliation meeting at Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas, he also addresses it in his 2001 book __Evolution's Workshop: God and Science on the Galapagos Islands__ (Basic Books, ISBN 0-465-03810-7).

Edward J. Larson is the Richard B. Russell Professor of History and Law at the University of Georgia and recipient of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize in History. The author of four books and over fifty published articles, Larson writes mostly about issues of science, medicine and law from an historical perspective. His books are Evolution's Workshop: God and Science in the Galapagos Islands (2001), Sex, Race, and Science: Eugenics in the Deep South (1995), Trial and Error: The American Controversy Over Creation and Evolution (1985 and 1989 expanded edition) and the Pulitzer Prize winning Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion (1997). His articles have appeared in such varied journals as Nature, Scientific American, The Nation, Oxford American, Wall Street Journal, Virginia Law Review, Journal of the History of Medicine and British Journal for the History of Science. He is the co-author or co-editor of four additional books. The Fulbright Program named Larson to the John Adams Chair in American Studies for 2001 and he received the 2000 George Sarton Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

And, last but by no means least, a small editor's note: in referring to David Lack's embracing of orthodox Christianity, the author means a church of the Anglican, not Byzantine, variety.

For more information concerning David Lack, go tohttp://www.ucl.ac.uk/sts/cain/pubs/bio-lack.htm

==Stacey E. Ake

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Subject: God and the Galapagos? From: Edward J. Larson Email: <ejlarsson@hotmail.com>

"What kind of God can one infer from the sort of phenomena epitomized by the species on Darwin's Galapagos Islands?" philosopher of science David Hull asked in a 1991 essay in the journal Nature. "The evolutionary process is rife with happenstance, contingency, incredible waste, death, pain and horror," he noted. Citing the findings of Galapagos finches researchers Peter and Rosemary Grant as prime evidence against any but a sado-masochist's natural theology, Hull protested. "The God of the Galapagos is careless, wasteful, indifferent, almost diabolical." Using the archipelago as a metaphor for neo-Darwinism generally, he asked, "Could anyone believe in God and the Galapagos?"

In asking this question, Hull unwittingly came full circle to similar queries posed by Europeans who visited the Galapagos before Darwin enlivened natural history with his theory of evolution. God did not make these islands for human habitation, their Spanish discoverer reported to his king in 1535: indeed, he wrote, "It seems as though some time God had showed stones." Succeeding reports of a strangely desolate equatorial archipelago guarded by treacherous currents, ravaged by fiery volcanoes, and populated by gargantuan reptiles and stupidly fearless birds perpetuated the legend of evilly enchanted isles. "Apples of Sodom, after touch," Herman Melville called them following his visit there in 1841, "No voice, no low, no howl is heard; the chief sound of life here is a hiss."

To either a theist or a deist of that day, who believed in a reasonably well designed universe testifying to its creator's sound character, the Galapagos made little sense. "It is a happy world after all," William Paley had maintained in the most famous work of early-nineteenth-century natural theology. "In a spring noon, or a summer evening, on whatever side I turn my eyes, myriads of happy beings crowd upon my view." Any other view of nature - particularly a Malthusian one - would undermine natural theology much as the larger problem of evil erodes belief in God more generally. What then of the Galapagos, where a distinct spring never comes and summer simply means drought? "When the dews fail in the summer season, thousands of these creatures perish," British Captain James Colnett wrote about Galapagos finches in 1798. American explorer David Porter blamed such deaths on the volcanic soil. "These thirsty mountains, like a sponge, soak from the clouds the moisture," he explained, "but they permit none of its to escape in springs or streams of water, for the support of animal life." Arid and lava-encrusted, the Galapagos hissed their rebuke of natural theology's happy world. It was partly such continuing reports of its biological and geological oddities that placed the archipelago on the itinerary of Darwin's voyage aboard the British survey-ship Beagle in 1835. Due to these reports, Darwin went to the Galapagos with his eyes wide open. What he saw changed the course of science.

Before Europeans came with their tall ship, few plants and land animals could reach this oceanic island chain, which erupted from the sea over the past ten million years, and fewer still could endure its arid climate and volcanic terrain. Those that did typically came from South or Central America on the winds or currents. To survive in the Galapagos, they adapted to local conditions and diversified to fill niches not open to them on the mainland. Variations evolved in short order: marine iguanas, woodpecker finches and cactus trees, to name just three. Half the native plant and animal species are found no where else, yet most are distinctly American. "The Galapagos seems a perennial source of new things," Darwin privately mused long before he ever published those thoughts. Its species made no sense under older notions of special creation, but Darwin concluded that they made perfect sense if those species had evolved from a few chance American immigrants to fit the harsh Galapagos environment. Here, he wrote in his travel journal, on this "little world within itself, or rather, a satellite attached to America, whence it has derived a few stray colonists . . . we seem to be brought somewhat near to the great fact - the mystery of mysteries - the first appearance of new beings on this earth."

The central role played by the Galapagos in Darwin's grand idea made it a place of continuing interest to biologists. They called it "Darwin's Eden," and "Evolution's Workshop." During the late 1800s and early 1900s, a series of major scientific expeditions visited the archipelago from the U.S. and Britain, trying to resolve outstanding question in evolution theory, or to disprove it all together.

The doubters went first. Darwin's two leading scientific opponents were Louis Agassiz, founder of Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, and British Museum (Natural History) Superintendent Richard Owen, both of whom rejected Biblical revelation as a fount for science but clung to the idea that somehow nature separately created each species over time. Agassiz went himself in 1872 - his last overseas expedition and one for the first such ventures funded wholly by the U.S. government. Owen sent agents. Both men saw Galapagos species as living proof against Darwin's theory. On the one hand, they argued, take its giant reptiles, supposedly unchanged since an earlier geologic age. If these great beasts had not evolved over time, then how could evolution be a law of nature? On the other hand, look at its varied finches. If they had evolved fast enough to create new species on those obviously new islands, then how could field naturalists have failed to detect the evolutionary process in progress somewhere? Agassiz urged his own students to study Galapagos species more closely, through field research if possible, to find out the truth about life's origins.

Agassiz's wife Elizabeth, the founding president of Radcliffe College, accompanied her elderly husband on his Galapagos voyage, and joined him in denouncing Darwinism. "On a lovely day in June, we were approaching Charles Island in the Galapagos group," began her report of the trip for the Atlantic Monthly. "A marvelous school of porpoises . . . formed our escort. They seemed to be having a great jubilee. One must be very familiar with the ocean to recognize the fact that there is as gay, as tumultuous, as enjoyable a life for animals in the sea as on land." This was not a casual remark, but a calculated opening salvo against a Darwinian view of life drawn from the soul of the Agassiz's near-pantheistic natural theology. She went on to relate "the mere delight in living" of whales, fishes, sea anemones starfish - even corals. "They have an excellent time in their way," she affirmed. Of course she saw similar joy among the archipelago's docile land animals. "The 'happy family,' so often represented in menageries, was to be seen here in nature" she declared. Such observations, which run through Louis's private notes as well, challenged Darwin's view of a Malthusian struggle for survival driving organic evolution. The Agassiz's saw a happy creation even in the stark Galapagos. True romantics, they could not see nature any other way. Yet the idea of evolution took root in a younger generation of biologists, some of whom sought to understand its workings though comparative study of Galapagos specimens. What better species to study, they reasoned, than those that inspired Darwin. Closer historical analysis would have revealed that while the geographic distribution of Galapagos land birds and reptiles set Darwin to thinking about evolution, those seemingly peaceable animals did not help him to identify natural selection as a driving force in the process. Thus he employed the image of an entangled European bank rather than a thread-bare Galapagos landscape to represent his vision of the evolutionary process in The Origin of Species. And, Agassiz's objections notwithstanding, the post-Darwinian debates over origins centered on how, rather than if, evolution occurred.

At least in America, however, Agassiz's legacy played a central role in these debates. He had trained a generation of the nation's leading naturalists, and even though most of them came to accept evolution, they often did so with a distinct bias against Darwinian mechanisms. At a technical level, Agassiz had raised questions about how evolution could operate with sufficient speed and direction to generate the diversity of life found on the Galapagos and elsewhere. Some of his students sought answers in neo-Lamarckian mechanisms that saw organisms adapting changes in the environment, and passing those acquired characteristics to their descendants. Others favored a role for either an external God or internal vital forces in directing orderly organic development: the former position became known as theistic evolution and the later as orthogenesis. Thus there were at least three scientific alternatives to neo-Darwinism among evolutionists.

At a philosophical level, Agassiz challenged the very notion that life could result from purely material forces. He saw design and purpose in nature, and so did many of his students. Neo-Lamarckism, theistic evolution and orthogenesis could infuse evolution with design, or at least purpose. Many of these scientists never forgot their teacher's admonition that the Galapagos held clues to the puzzle of evolution. One of the greatest of them, David Starr Jordan, eventually rose to such eminence, as founding president of Stanford University and seven-term president of the California Academy of Sciences, that he could implement Agassiz's call to send naturalists for extended stays on the Galapagos. Indeed, in 1898, the former institution sent its first overseas expedition there and the later followed seven years later with the largest single expedition ever conducted in the archipelago.

Jordan's interest in the Galapagos went deeper than a mere sentimental attachment to the place that had inspired Darwin. At a philosophical level, Jordan - a devout pacifist and leader of the international peace movement -
could not accept a "Malthusian struggle for existence" as the source of life's novelty and variety. And like Agassiz, Jordan never separated his science from his philosophy. Indeed, although both eschewed traditional Christianity, each was profoundly and individualistically religious. Agassiz saw an immanent god in nature successively creating species while, for Jordan, nature itself drove the evolutionary process - but never in a purely materialistic way. As befit the leader of a dynamic scientific and cultural community isolated in the still-remote American West, Jordan turned to isolation as a causal factor in evolution, making its examination his major theoretical contribution to biology. Simply isolate a population by geographical or other barriers, he all but declared, and a new species will naturally evolve. As a natural laboratory for studying the effects of isolation on species formation, the Galapagos could possess profound beauty for someone like Jordan, just it had for the Agassizes. There he could all but touch his god.

Consequently, around the turn of the last century, Jordan participated in sending dozens of Bay Area scientific collectors to the place; and dozens more scientific researchers at Sanford and the Cal Academy joined in studying their collections. Struggling to keep pace, first the English Lord Rothschild, acting on his own account and with the British Museum, and later Henry Fairfield Osborn, as leader of both New York's American Museum of Natural History and Bronx Zoo, launched multiple expedition to Galapagos. As a result of these efforts, by 1930, Western scientific institutions possessed more comprehensive collections from the Galapagos than from nearly any other place in the Pacific - but they failed to resolve key questions regarding the cause of evolution. "If we are not able now to solve some of these problems," Rothschild wrote about his Galapagos collections, "no accumulation of zoological specimens will every help to answer our questions."

Although most of the collectors and researchers initially working with these specimens accepted evolution as the source of new Galapagos species, none of their published papers or available private notes posit a purely Darwinian process as the cause. Some followed Rothschild and Osborn in favoring Lamarckism; others join Jordan in hailing isolation; many simply gave up. "How came the grasshopper of the Galapagos to be differentiated as species?"
one Stanford entomologist asked in his field notes: Not isolation because the separate species do not neatly segregate onto different islands; not the environment because the entire archipelago is the same; and certainly not natural selection. He offered no other options.

The archipelago's finches posed the greatest puzzle. After a series of ornithologists failed to make any sense of the Cal Academy's collection, the task fell to Harry Swarth. A devout splitter when naming birds, Swarth divided Galapagos finches into forty distinct species and subspecies, arrayed among five genera within one new family. Their beaks caused the most trouble. He measured thousands of specimens, first at the Academy and then at Stanford and in England. "Such remarkable extremes of variation in bill structure as are seen," Swarth wrote, "lie outside my experience with any North American mainland bird."

A century earlier, seeing such diversity among Galapagos finches had inspired Darwin's thoughts about evolution - but when he could not trace his specimens to separate islands, he turned to Galapagos mockingbirds (which more neatly divide into island-specific types) as better evidence for his theory. Later expeditions deepened the mystery: everyone reported finding different types of finches living together, yet natural selection suggested that only the fittest of these species should survive. The enormous Cal Academy collection seemed to confirm earlier reports. "In other words, natural selection was eliminated as a factor in the production of the observed variations," Swarth emphatically declared. He could not resolve what caused the evolution of so many species from one ancestral type because neither the environment nor isolation seemed to operate as factors: perhaps it was simply extreme variability in the family or rampant hybridization unchecked by natural selection. "The Galapagos Islands offer an unrivaled opportunity for further field work" on this problem, he concluded.

Based on his reading of Swarth's monograph and his own work with collections in England, British Museum ornithologist Percy Lowe seconded Swarth's call that these finches be studied in their native habitat. "There is no group of birds in the whole world which has more right to occupy the attention of zoologists at the present moment," he asserted, and urged that "properly qualified investigators be sent to the Galapagos with the sole object of studying [them] on the spot." Julian Huxley, then secretary of the Zoological Society of London and already a leading advocate of neo-Darwinian natural selection as the driving force of evolution, knew just the person for this job - David Lack.

A twenty-five-year-old English schoolteacher and amateur bird watcher at the time, Lack had come to Huxley's attention as a gifted observer of bird behavior. Huxley arranged for the Zoological Society to pay Lack's expenses for a bare-bones expedition to observe finch behavior on the Galapagos over the course of one entire breeding season. Departing in 1938, Lack traveled by commercial steamers and stayed with local settlers. "The Galapagos are interesting, but scarcely a residential paradise," he noted. "The biological peculiarities are offset by an enervating climate, monotonous scenery, dense thorn scrub, cactus spines, loose sharp lava, food deficiencies, water shortage, black rats, fleas, jiggers, ants, mosquitoes, scorpions, Ecuadorean Indians of doubtful honesty, and dejected, disillusioned European settlers." Money was tight and food insufficient. One of Lack's travel companions almost died of dysentery. Despite his personal discomforts (or perhaps due of them), Lack did see something on the Galapagos that no one had seen before - natural selection at work among its finches through inter-species competition.

This observation took time. He saw nothing but co-mingled finches during his four-month stay on the Galapagos, but he did establish that they constituted only 13 distinct species that did not readily crossbreed. Then he spent more months studying the Cal Academy specimens in San Francisco and then those owned by the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where Lack roomed with the collector's curator, the neo-Darwinist Ernst Mayr. The beaks of these finches obsessed Lack. Eventually he resolved that each type of beak must confer some competitive advantage. Since three species of ground-finches live together on some islands, Lack asserted, "There must be some factor which prevents these species from effectively competing." Although he had not recognized it when he visited the archipelago during the breeding season, when rain falls and food abounds, Lack decided that the distinguishing beaks of these ground-finches must adapt them for eating different seeds (at least during the dry season). He applied similar analysis to other overlapping finch species.

A complete picture of finch evolution emerged in Lack's classic book, Darwin's Finches, which forever stamped a new family name on these birds. "That Darwin's finches are so highly differentiated suggests that they colonized the Galapagos considerably ahead of the other land birds," Lack wrote. "The absence of other land birds . . . allowed them to evolve in directions which otherwise would have been closed to them." Some island finches remained ground feeders, others took to the trees for food, and yet others adopted the feeding habits of warblers or woodpeckers. Geographic isolation created island variations among these basic types, just as it had for the mockingbirds and tortoises. But unlike those two better-understood groups, these finches did not remain isolated on separate islands. They spread into each other's territory. Here Lack broke new ground in his interpretation. "When two related bird species meet in the same region, they tend to compete, and both can persist there only if they are isolated ecologically either by habitat or food," he postulated. Such encounters further pushed the evolutionary development of competing species until they diverge into non-competing ones, such as by fine tuning their beaks for different foods. "The evolutionary picture presented by Darwin's finches is unusual in some of its details, but fundamentally it is typical of that which I believe to have taken place in other birds," Lack wrote, "so that with these birds, as Darwin wrote, we are brought somewhat nearer than usual 'to that great fact - that mystery of mysteries - the first appearance of new life on this earth'."

Lack's account of Darwin's finches became the classic case of evolution in action by the 1950s, and prime evidence for Huxley and Mayr's Modern Synthesis. Featured in countless textbook and popular science books, Darwin's finches became practically synonymous with modern Darwinism even though Darwin himself never mentioned them in The Origin of Species. So with the neo-Darwinian Lack do we finally find someone who answers in the negative Hull's question, "Could anyone believe in God and the Galapagos?"
Hardly, because in the same year that Lack published his landmark book on Darwin's finches, he converted from agnosticism to orthodox Christianity.

"Various writers, some Christian and others agnostic, have been troubled about natural selection," Lack once wrote, "because it is so unpleasant. Natural selection works because in each kind of animal most individuals die before they have produced any offspring, while most of the rest die before they have borne as many offspring as they might." More than any ornithologist before him, Lack documented the staggering death rate of birds and used it to explain their evolution. Such findings obliterate Paley's natural theology, Lack conceded, but need not reveal anything about God. "Although on theological grounds the ordering of the animal creation may to some persons seem surprising, man is surely unqualified to judge whether this ordering is in any way evil, or contrary to divine plan," he offered. Science deals with nature, religion with the human soul, and each should remain in its separate sphere. Just as "science has not accounted for morality, truth, beauty, individual responsibility or self-awareness," Lack maintained, "it is also not necessary and undesirable to postulate that animal evolution has been helped by supernatural interferences with natural law." God and science, as Stephen Jay Gould would later describe it, were "non-overlapping magisteria." "Christians have not infrequently become atheists and atheists Christians," Lack concluded. "Either view involves unexplained gaps and contradictions."

Even as Lack underwent his private religious conversion, his mentor, Julian Huxley, was undergoing a much more public transformation from academic biologist to high priest of global evolutionary humanism, which he called a "religion without revelation." Humans, he preached, with their developed brains and culture, could take hold of the evolutionary process and guide it toward universal progress. This was our mission and the Galapagos our Mecca. During the 1950s, as the first director-general of UNESCO and co-founder of WWF, Huxley championed the founding of a research station on the Galapagos and the development of the desolate archipelago as a pilgrimage site for a new breed of ecologically-conscious traveler.

It all came to pass much as Huxley envisioned it. The Galapagos evolved during the 1960s from an isolated outpost to Ecuador's first national park, one of the UN's initial World Heritage Sites, and a dream destination for eco-tourists. Of course Huxley could not control the inspiration drawn from the place. A case in point was American essayist Annie Dillard, who visited there in 1974, shortly after publication of her classic, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. That book, a Walden-like journal about wildlife in rural Virginia, contrasted scenes of sublime grace and beauty with horrid waste and death. The former reaffirmed Dillard's conviction that a Creator exists; the latter led her to describe creation as "the brainchild of a deranged manic-depressive with limitless capital." But Dillard, who remained a Christian pilgrim at heart, never fully accepted this view of God, and found one more to her liking on the Galapagos.

In a prize-winning article about her trip, Dillard focused on the same two features of the archipelago that still attract most tourists. "You come for the animals," she began. "You walk among clattering four-foot marine iguanas heaped on the shore lava, and on each other like slag. You swim with penguins; you watch flightless cormorants dance beside you." Here was nature's peaceable kingdom, not Darwin's entangled bank. Evolution in action was the archipelago's other feature attraction, but again with a non-Darwinian twist. "It all began on the Galapagos, with those finches," Dillard stressed. "The finches evolved in isolation. So did everything else. With the finches, you can see how it happened," she explained without ever mentioning the role of competition in that process. In the Galapagos, further, she openly sided with the "many," as she counted them, who question the "sheer plausibility" of the modern neo-Darwinian synthesis that reigns in Western science, and longingly suggested that "appending a very modified neo-Lamarckism to Darwinism would solve many problems."

Other visiting journalists, eco-tourists and scientists see their vision of God and nature in the Galapagos as well, as do the some 20,000-odd Ecuadorian settlers drawn there to service the ever-expanding tourist industry. The neo-Darwinian ornithologists Peter and Rosemary Grant, whose work inspired Hull's question, "Could anyone believe in God and the Galapagos?" continue to document a fierce struggle for survival among Darwin's finches, for example, while most Ecuadorians cling to the creationist concepts of traditional Christianity. The new Catholic church that now towers over the islands' capital city depicts a magnificent fregit-bird descending from above as Jesus blesses assembled giant tortoises. Its parishioners would just as surely answer Hull's question in the affirmative as Hull himself would say no. Dillard, Huxley, Lack, Osborn, Rothschild, Jordan, the Agassizs, Darwin and Melville would each have nuanced responses. Observers bring their concepts of God to the Galapagos and of the Galapagos to their God, and our science is the richer for it.

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Published   2001.08.27