In Galápagos, as elsewhere, things of the mind, including intellectual ramifications from evolutionary theory, and things of the spirit, like the feeling one gets from a Queen Anne’s lace of stars in the moonless Galapagos sky, struggle toward accommodation with an elementary desire for material comfort…because so many regard this archipelago as preeminently a terrain of the mind and spirit, a locus of biological thought and psychological rejuvenation. The sheer strength of Darwin’s insight into the development of biological life gently urges a visitor to be more than usually observant here- to notice, say, that while the thirteen Galapagos finches are all roughly the same hue, it is possible to separate them according to marked differences in the shapes of their bills and feeding habits.

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