9781422277607

Chapter A Theory that Changed the World 1 In September 1835, H.M.S. Beagle , a tiny survey brig of the Royal Navy, dropped anchor off one of the volcanic islands of the Galápagos group, on the northwestern seaboard of South America. On board was a young naturalist named Charles Darwin, twenty-six years old and already in the fourth year of a long voyage—one that had so far taken him around South America, and would shortly carry him around the world and back to his home in England. Darwin’s naval shipmates were not impressed with the hot, dusty Galápagos Islands; their job was to make a map of them, and this they did during the next month. But for Darwin himself it was a month of fabulous interest. The islands were like a zoo, with new and different groups of plants and animals—cactuses, shrubs, tortoises, lizards, birds, and insects—waiting for him whenever he went ashore. What he learned on the Galápagos Islands changed the course of his life, for there he discovered the source of a biological theory about the origins of plants and animals that would bring him fame in his own lifetime, and world renown long after his death. Charles Darwin died in 1882. For the last twenty years or more of his life, he had lived quietly at his home in Kent, England, by then a shy, bewhiskered invalid who pottered in his garden, studying and writing books about earthworms and orchids. He had a loving family, but few

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