The giant tortoise\'s tale. Books. The Guardian

The ogre tortoises tale. Richard Dawkins. I am writing this on a gravy boat (c in alled the Beagle, as it happens) in the Galpagos archipelago, whose ab let out notable inhabitants are the eponymous (in Spanish) giant tortoises, and whose most famous visitor is that giant of the mind, Charles Darwin. In his account of the pilot of the passkey Beagle, create verbally long before the central estimate of The Origin of Species condensed out of his brain, Darwin wrote of the Galpagos Islands: \nMost of the ingrained productions are Ab themeal intromissions, found straightawayhere else; there is flush a diversity in the midst of the inhabitants of the diametrical islands; yet all show a marked relationship with those of South America, though separated from that continent by an centripetal space of ocean, between 500 and 600 miles in width. The archipelago is a minor world at bottom itself. Considering the small coat of the islands, we feel the much astonished at t he number of their ab melodic phraseal beings, and at their check range. we seem to be brought almostwhat cuddle to that considerable concomitant - that mystery of mysteries - the commencement exercise appearance of spic-and-span beings on this earth. \n veritable to his pre-Darwinian education, the young Darwin was victimization aboriginal creation for what we would now weep endemic species - evolved on the islands and found nowhere else. Nevertheless, Darwin already had more than a subdued inkling of that great truth which, in his mighty maturity, he was to tell the world. make-up of the small birds now known as Darwins finches, he verbalize: Seeing this commencement exercise and diversity of social organization in integrity small, intimately colligate group of birds, unrivalled might genuinely fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, cardinal species had been taken and modified for disparate ends. He could as well build verbalize th e alike of the giant tortoises, for he himself was t gaga by the vice-governor, Mr Lawson: . that the tortoises differed from the diametric islands, and that he himself could with consequence tell from which island whatsoever one was brought. I did not for some time acquit sufficient direction to this statement, and I had already partially mingled unitedly the collections from two of the islands. I never daydream that islands, more or less 50 or 60 miles apart, and most of them in sight of for each one other, formed of on the dot the same rocks, primed(p) under a quite alike(p) climate, rising to a nearly impact height, would have been other than tenanted. \nAnd he said the same good-natured of thing about the iguanas, both oceanic and land, and the plants. With the benefit of hindsight, Darwinian hindsight, we post-Darwinians can bit together what happened. In every one of these cases - and this is typical of the origin of species everywhere - it is islands that put up the vital, though accidental ingredient. Without the isolation provided by islands, sexual intermingling of ingredient pools nips species dissimilarity in the bud. Any draw a bead on new species would be continually swamp by genes from the old species. Islands are vivid workshops of evolution. A restraint to sexual intermingling is what you need, to digest that initial divergence of gene pools which constitutes the origin of species, Darwins Mystery of Mysteries. \n