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When Charles Darwin set sail from England aboard the HMS Beagle in June 1831, he was just a wide-eyed 22-year old volunteer surveyor with undeveloped career aspirations and a misunderstood interest in geology and beetle collection. After four years of surveying South American coastal ecosystems, Darwin reached the Galápagos island of San Cristóbal , having developed himself as a seasoned observer of nature. Although he spent only five weeks touring the four islands of San Cristóbal, Santiago, Floreana, and Isabela, Darwin gathered extremely detailed and perceptive descriptions of island features, noting similarities—and marked differences—between plants and animals on the mainland and on the various islands.
Contrary to popular belief, Charles Darwin did not depart from the Galápagos having come to a sudden epiphany about the evolutionary implications of his observations. Even though Darwin had been introduced to the idea that organisms change, or evolve, over geological time—a theory termed tranformism that had been developed over three decades previously by naturalist Jean Baptiste de Lamarck—he remained a resolute creationist. When he returned to England , he published a series of scientific papers and books, including The Voyage of the Beagle , which summarized the results of his surveying expedition. Meanwhile, Darwin continued to ponder the heretical notion—supported by his findings in the Galápagos—that species were not, in fact, fixed but could migrate and, over subsequent generations, became modified to their own ends. Over the next twenty-five years, Darwin devoted himself to establishing the process of evolution more convincingly than his counterparts through an explanation of its mechanism for operation.
Darwin 's incomparable contribution to science was this determination of the how and why evolution occurred, a biological force called natural selection. In two papers presented concurrently to the Linnaean Society in 1858, Darwin and Alfred Wallace theorized that individuals in a competitive, dynamic environment that are best suited to new factors will be more likely to survive and produce offspring carrying their superior inheritance, a process colloquially referred to as the “survival of the fittest.” These preliminary papers received very little attention, but Darwin 's book The Origin of the Species , published one year later, created a sensation among a traditional society still trying to understand man's position in the natural hierarchy of life. The debate over creation versus evolution has continued to present day and has brought world-wide fame to the Galápagos as a natural laboratory of evolution.
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