A remote volcanic archipelago on the equator in the Pacific, about a thousand kilometers west of Ecuador, whose giant tortoises, marine iguanas, and island-by-island birds gave the young Charles Darwin evidence that, years later, helped him build the theory of evolution by natural selection. The islands' isolation bred a wealth of species found nowhere else, made them a living laboratory and a place of scientific pilgrimage, and turned them into a flagship of conservation now threatened by tourism, introduced species, and a growing human population.
These are the islands that changed how life explains itself. The Galápagos are a scatter of raw volcanic rock on the equator, far out in the Pacific, where giant tortoises haul across black lava and lizards dive into the sea to graze on algae. Many of the islands’ signature creatures, including marine iguanas and Galápagos tortoises, are found nowhere else on Earth. In 1835 a young English naturalist named Charles Darwin spent five weeks here aboard a survey ship and collected birds and reptiles without quite knowing what he had. There was no sudden flash of insight on the beach. The famous finches were sorted into separate species back in London, by an expert who was not Darwin, and the larger idea took shape years afterward. But the evidence these islands held, the small differences from one island to the next, would help remake biology. A remote archipelago became a shrine to the science of life.