Just over 174 years ago, on September 17, 1835, the HMS Beagle landed on San Cristóbal Island in the Galápagos. After over a month of surveying the islands, looking especially for fossils, volcanic activity, and geological features, Charles Darwin left most notably with a collection of birds. He first noticed that mockingbirds of the various islands exhibited considerable variation. But of all the bizarrely tame birds, he wrote in The Voyage of the Beagle that the finches “form a most singular group … related to each other in the structure of their beaks, short tails, form of body and plumage.” The variation in Darwin’s finches was to be significant for his concept of natural selection.
Now, just to the west of where the Beagle first landed, descendents of Darwin’s finches find a food source in the dump of Puerto Ayora, a quickly growing town of about 10,000. The New York Times reports an ecological crisis on the archipelago, as the tourism-driven economy supports a population explosion coming largely from migrant Ecuadoreans. In the last year the government sent over 1,000 people back to Ecuador, no doubt because of pressure from preservationists who worry about the boobies and tortoises.
For evolutionary psychology, this story marks an odd union between the biological and the social. Literally trampling on the roots of a theory of evolution is an introduced population of pigs, running at times from hungry migrants who moved from their homeland for a chance at a decent life. Today in the Galápagos, evolution in the form Darwin observed is being crowded by the social world—a reminder, perhaps, that humans are not exempt from change.
