mutation claim; and the mystery of change, 
with such marked and characteristic differ- 
ences between existing species, is only in- 
creased, and brought to level with that of 
creation. If they are autochthones, from 
what germs did they start into existence? I 
think that careful observers, in view of these 
facts, will have to acknowledge that our 
science is not yet ripe for a fair discussion of 
the origin of organized beings. 
The quotation is long, but it is, so far 
as I know, exclusive. Its most remark- 
able aspect is an extreme weakness, 
almost speciousness, of argument. Agas- 
siz makes but a single point: many ani- 
mals of the Galapagos live nowhere else. 
Yet the islands are so young that a slow 
process of evolution could not have 
transformed them from related ances- 
tors in the time available. Thus, they 
were created where we find them (the 
obvious bottom line, despite Agassiz’s 
final disclaimer that we know too little 
to reach any firm conclusion). 
Two problems: First, although the 
Galapagos are young (two to five million 
years for the oldest islands by current 
reckoning), they are not so pristine as 
Agassiz indicates. In the letter, Agassiz 
describes lava flows of the past hundred 
years or so, and these are virtually de- 
void of vegetation and so fresh that one 
can almost see the flow and feel the 
heat. But Agassiz surely knew that sev- 
eral of the islands (including some on his 
itinerary) are more densely vegetated 
and, although not ancient, were surely 
not formed in a geological yesterday. 
Second, Agassiz leaves out the most 
important aspect of Darwin’s argument. 
The point is not that so many species of 
the Galapagos are unique but rather 
that their nearest relatives are invari- 
ably found on the adjacent South Amer- 
ican mainland. If God created the Gala- 
pagos species where we find them, why 
did he imbue them with signs of South 
American affinity (especially since the 
temperate climates and lava habitats of 
the Galapagos are so different from the 
tropical environments of the ancestral 
forms). What sense can such a pattern 
make unless the Galapagian species are 
modified descendants of South Ameri- 
can forms that managed to cross the 
oceanic barrier? Darwin wrote in the 
Voyage of the Beagle : 
Why, on these small points of land, which 
within a late geological period must have 
been covered by the ocean, which are 
formed by basaltic lava, and therefore dif- 
fer in geological character from the Ameri- 
can continent, and which are placed under a 
peculiar climate, — why were their aborigi- 
nal inhabitats . . . created on American 
types of organization. 
And the famous, poetic statement ear- 
lier in the chapter: “We seem to be 
brought somewhat near to the great 
fact — that mystery of mysteries — the 
first appearance of new beings on this 
earth.” 
Agassiz could not have misunder- 
stood, for, like Darwin, he was a profes- 
sional biogeographer who, unlike Dar- 
win, had used arguments of geograph- 
ical distribution as his primary defense 
for creationism. Why did he skirt Dar- 
win’s principal argument? Why did he 
say so little about the Galapagos and 
argue so poorly? 
I think that we must consider two 
possibilities as resolutions to the conun- 
drum of Agassiz’s silence (or failure to 
consider the critical points in his one 
private statement). Perhaps he knew 
that his argument to Peirce was hokey 
and inadequate. Perhaps the Galapagos, 
and the entire Hassler voyage, had pro- 
duced the same change of heart that 
Darwin had experienced in similar cir- 
cumstances and Agassiz simply couldn’t 
muster the courage to admit it. 
I cannot accept such a resolution. As 
I said earlier, we see abundant signs of 
psychological distress and deep sadness 
in Agassiz’s last defenses of creationism. 
No one enjoys being an intellectual out- 
cast, especially when cast in the role of 
superannuated fuddy-duddy (the part of 
ignored but prophetic seer at least elicits 
moral courage). Yet, however weak his 
arguments (and they deteriorated as the 
evidence for evolution accumulated), I 
sense no failure of Agassiz’s resolve. The 
letter to Peirce seems to represent still 
another of Agassiz’s flawed, but per- 
fectly sincere, defenses of an increas- 
ingly indefensible, yet steadfastly main- 
tained, view of life. (Agassiz’s last arti- 
cle, posthumously published in the At- 
lantic Monthly in 1874, was a ringing 
apologia for creationism entitled: “Evo- 
lution and Permanence of Type.”) 
I think that we must accept the sec- 
ond resolution: Agassiz said so little 
about the Galapagos because his visit 
made preciously little impact upon him. 
The message is familiar but profound 
nonetheless. Scientific discovery is not a 
one-way transfer of information from 
unambiguous nature to minds that are 
always open. It is a reciprocal interac- 
tion between a multifarious and confus- 
ing nature and a mind sufficiently re- 
ceptive (as many are not) to extract a 
weak but sensible pattern from the pre- 
vailing noise. There are no signs on the 
Galapagos that proclaim: Evolution at 
work. Open your eyes and ye shall see it. 
Evolution is an inescapable inference, 
not a raw datum. Darwin, young, rest- 
less, and searching, was receptive to the 
signal. Agassiz, committed and defen- 
sive, was not. Had he not already an- 
nounced in the first letter to Peirce that 
he knew what he must find? I do not 
think he was free to reach Darwin’s 
conclusions, and the Galapagos Islands, 
therefore, carried no important message 
for him. Science is a balanced interac- 
tion of mind and nature. 
Agassiz lived for little more than a 
year after the Hassler docked. James 
Russell Lowell, traveling abroad, 
learned of his friend’s death from a 
newspaper and wrote in poetic tribute 
(quoted from E. Lurie’s fine biography 
of Agassiz, Louis Agassiz: A Life in 
Science , University of Chicago Press, 
1960): 
. . . with vague, mechanic eyes, 
I scanned the festering news we half despise 
When suddenly. 
As happens if the brain, from overweight 
Of blood, infect the eye, 
Three tiny words grew lurid as I read, 
And reeled commingling: Agassiz is dead! 
I do not know. Perhaps a bit of his 
incorporeal self went up to a higher 
realm, as some religions assert. Perhaps 
he saw there old Adam Sedgwick, the 
great British geologist (and reverend), 
who at age 87 wrote to Agassiz a year 
before the Hassler sailed: 
It will never be my happiness to see your 
face again in this world. But let me, as a 
Christian man, hope that we may meet 
hereafter in heaven, and see such visions of 
God’s glory in the moral and material uni- 
verse, as shall reduce to a mere germ every- 
thing which has been elaborated by the skill 
of man. 
Be that as it may, Agassiz’s ideas had 
suffered an intellectual death before he 
ever reached the Galapagos. Life is a 
series of trades. We have lost the com- 
fort of Agassiz’s belief that a superior 
intelligence directly regulates every step 
of life’s history according to a plan that 
places us above all other creatures. (“If 
it had been otherwise,” Agassiz wrote to 
Pedro II in June 1873, “there would be 
nothing but despair.”) We have found a 
message in the animals and plants of the 
Galapagos, and all other places, that 
enables us to appreciate them, not as 
disconnected bits of wonder, but as inte- 
grated products of a satisfactory and 
general theory of life’s history. That, to 
me at least, is a good trade. 
Stephen Jay Gould teaches biology, ge- 
ology, and the history of science at 
Harvard University. 
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