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Daniel S. MiloGood Enough - The Tolerance for Mediocrity in Nature and Societyp. 75 |
The Galápagos archipelago is unique
The finch, it turns out, is a good model for the study of natural selection, but this does not mean that the evolution of its beak followed a typical, much less unbiquitous pathway.
The same is true of the archipelago itself. While the islands offer a fascinating natural laboratory for the study of natural selection, they cannot be said to represent earth as a whole. The Galápagos sparked Darwin’s imagination, and righly so. But preserving that spark meant ignoring the unusual character of the islands - their climate, topography, and isolation - as well as conflicting evidence from the islands and other terrains he visited. Darwin wore his blinders so tightly that with the help of the domestication analogy, he was able to see in the ecology of the Galápagos confirmation that nature everywhere breeds the best. That myth persists to this day, though its result is somehwat unusual. Whereas myth typically emphasizes the extraordinary, in the case of the Galápagos, it does the opposite: it deprives the islands of their uniqueness. The myth renders the Galápagos ordinary, so that the ramarkable works of nature occurring there seem common to the whole planet.