They Just Taste Different
This essay is meant to accompany the episode Galápagos. We re-released last week to kick off the summer season.
After a long, uncomfortable trip, a very grumpy Charles Darwin came off the ship on one of the Galápagos’ volcanic islands and found everything just ghastly. It was too hot. The landscape looked “infernal.” The plants smelled “unpleasant.” Iguanas were “hideous” and looked “stupid” when they moved.
He spent five weeks in the Galápagos. At first he obsessed over the craters. Then he was intrigued by the birds and decided to collect them. Later, conversations with the archipelago’s Vice-Governor Nicholas Lawson would pique his curiosity.
Lawson told him about the tortoises that gave their name to the islands (“galápago” is one Spanish word for tortoise). Their population had been depleted, sometimes extinguished, by passing sailors. It’s not just that tortoises can survive a long time without food and water, making them the perfect meal for pirates at sea. It’s also that tortoises are in fact quite delicious, tastier than they have any right to be. Scrumptious protein with a long shelf life.
Lawson told Darwin he could tell which island the tortoises came from just by looking at their shells. And — this may be apocryphal — by how they tasted. Darwin must’ve nodded politely, but the importance of this information didn’t hit him until later. He was too busy writing cantankerous letters and eating tortoises with the crew of HMS Beagle (his writs suggest he ate iguanas, too — and pumas, armadillos, even a bird he was trying to add to his specimen collection). He saved none of the shells.
He left the Galápagos, still content with the notion that species don’t change over time. Only 18 months later did he have his epiphany. His specimen collection was a mess and he’d been focused on the wrong birds, but he got there. The idea of speciation — the process by which animals in isolation develop unique characteristics to adapt to their surroundings — began to form in his mind. The result is the book written 22 years later that revolutionized our knowledge of the forms Life takes: On the Origin of Species.