Galapagos Islands

1. International Site of Evolution (constellations)
2. A Monument to the Secular Worldview (differences)
3. Controversies in Scientific Paradise (significance)
4. Further reading
5. Citation
6. Image credits
7. Notes

International Site of Evolution (constellations)

In the last 150 years, the Galápagos Islands have become a symbolic site for the development of the evolutionary explanation of life and thus for competing religious and secular worldviews. The significance ascribed to the Islands reached its first climax in the twentieth century. Marking the centennial of the publication of the British naturalist Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species”¹, the Ecuadorian government declared the Galápagos Islands a national park in 1959. The government justified its decision with the uniqueness of the animal and plant species. This is what had spurred Darwin to formulate his considerations on evolution after his visit to the Islands in 1835, and what lastingly shaped the interests of international scientists.² The intention was to enduringly inscribe the commemoration of Darwin, his decisive contribution to the theory of evolution, and its significance for Western natural science into the Galápagos Islands as a “living museum of evolution”.

The enhanced significance ascribed to the Galápagos Islands at the end of the 1950s marks a decisive shift in their history. For the archipelago, which lies about one thousand kilometers west of the coast of Ecuador, had long been considered insignificant after its official discovery (1535). Its remoteness, cragged volcano landscape, overwhelmingly reptilian fauna, and chronic lack of potable water seemed to indicate a God-forsaken region. Into the nineteenth century it was visited only sporadically by buccaneers and whalers, and later by a few counterculture types. Even the Ecuadorian government, which took possession of the Galápagos in 1832, initially considered the islands a mere strategic outpost. This view changed only in the course of the twentieth century. The islands’ international importance grew as more and more scientists, especially from Europe and North America, went on pilgrimages to this “Mecca” of evolutionary biology, thus buttressing the Galápagos’s significance in the history of science.

A Monument to the Secular Worldview (differences)

By offering a purely biological explanation for the emergence and diversity of life, Charles Darwin provided fuel for an ideological debate between secular and religious interpretations of the origins and development of humankind. Examples of the kinds of tensions that arose between scientific and religious paradigms for understanding the world can be found in the “Darwin Year”, 1959. Julian Sorrel Huxley, a leading British biologist who promoted evolutionary synthesis and was the grandson of one of the most prominent defenders of Darwin’s theory of evolution, gave a lecture on November 26th, 1959, during a Darwin festival organized by the University of Chicago. From the pulpit of the Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, Huxley predicted: “Future historians will perhaps take this Centennial week as epitomizing an important critical period in the history of this earth of ours – the period when the process of evolution, in the person of inquiring man, began to be truly conscious of itself”³.

According to commentary from the press⁴, Huxley affronted many of his listeners with his “Evolutionary Vision”, adding: “In the evolutionary pattern of thought there is no longer either need or room for the supernatural. The earth was not created; it evolved. So did all the animals and plants that inhabit it, including our human selves, mind and soul as well as brain and body. So did religion.”⁵ In this biological and secular vision, religion was a part of human evolution that – following Darwin’s conception of a natural selection in the struggle for survival – would be displaced and ultimately replaced by new patterns of thought and worldviews. Thus scientific debate as a form of dealing with religio-secular differences, in this case regarding the question of the genesis and evolution of life, reached its culmination. A worldview informed by evolutionary science publicly triumphed against a religious interpretation of the world.

The Galápagos Islands were important for Julian Huxley’s thinking. In his defense of the theory of evolution, he had been fighting alongside other scientists for the preservation of the Islands since the 1930s. He believed that the place where Darwin stepped from the “fairyland of creationism into the coherent and comprehensible world of modern biology”⁶ should be preserved as a natural open air laboratory for science and thus illustrate the progress of evolution for humanity. With the endowment in 1959 of the Charles Darwin Foundation for the Galápagos Islands, of which Huxley was the first honorary president, and with the establishment of the Galápagos National Park, the foundation was laid for the lasting conservation of the Islands for science.

Controversies in Scientific Paradise (significance)

In 2009, on the 150th anniversary of “On the Origin of Species”, the tightly interwoven connection between the Galápagos Islands and Charles Darwin’s legacy was once again highlighted. In addition to fifty years of nature conservation on the Galápagos, a “human and scientific success story”⁷ was celebrated. Due to their significance for evolutionary biology, the Islands had been named the first UNESCO World Heritage Site twenty years earlier. To the same degree that the Galápagos Islands secured space and facticity for evolutionary worldviews over time and marked the growing influence of the scientific mentality in the 20th century, they also represented a kind of new “holy land” that seemed to offer scientists, and later tourists and investors, ostensibly heavenly conditions. The contradictory nature of these diverse desires for use, preservation, and development became clear after only a few years. Growing numbers of settlers and tourists, environmental problems, national development programs, and international economic markets like fishing and tourism put increasing pressure on the Galápagos Islands, continuously presenting Darwin’s monument and the living test site of evolutionary theory with new challenges.

(translated by Patrick Baker)

Further reading

Christophe Grenier, Conservation contre nature, Les îles Galápagos, Paris 2000. URL: \http://horizon.documentation.ird.fr/exl-doc/pleins_textes/divers09-03/010022562.pdf (01.04.2016).

Edward Larson, Evolution’s Workshop, God and Science on the Galapagos Islands, New York 2001.

Pablo Ospina; Cecilia Falconí, Galápagos, Migraciones, economía, cultura, conflictos y acuerdos, Quito 2007.

Glenda Sluga, UNESCO and the (One) World of Julian Huxley, in: Journal of World History 21 (2010), pp. 393–418.

Betty Vassiliki Smokovitis, The 1959 Darwin Centennial Celebration in America, in: Pnina G. Abir-Am et al. (eds.), Commemorative Practices in Science: Historical Perspectives on the Politics of Collective Memory, Chicago 1999, pp. 274–323.

Diego Quiroga; Ana Sevilla, Darwin, Darwinism and Conservation in the Galapagos Islands, The Legacy of Darwin and its New Applications, Basel/Cham 2017.

Citation

Elke Ackermann, Galápagos Islands / Islas Galápagos, in: On site, in time. Negotiating differences in Europe, ed. for the Leibniz Institute of European History (IEG) by Joachim Berger, Irene Dingel and Johannes Paulmann, Mainz 2016. URL: https://en.ieg-differences.eu/on-site-in-time/elke-ackermann-galapagos-islands , URN: urn:nbn:de:0159-20161103141.

This text is licensed under: CC by-nc-nd 4.0 international – Attribution, NonCommercial, NoDerivative Works.

Image credits

Photo: Elke Ackermann

Notes