The finches — Charles Darwin

Context

This is the drawing that served as a springboard for one of the greatest biological discoveries we know. While crossing the Galápagos Islands aboard the Beagle in the 1830s, Charles Darwin noticed that within the same archipelago, birds of the same species displayed different characteristics, depending on whether they inhabited one island or another. This observation was the inspiration for his book The Origin of Species and his famous theory of evolution, which sent shockwaves through the philosophical, religious and scientific paradigms of the time.            

An exploration drawn out

This drawing is the materialisation of an intuition. It was made in England, probably by the illustrator Elisabeth Gould, on the basis of specimens brought back by the expedition. Charles Darwin is said to have asked her to represent the subtle differences between birds on a single sheet of paper. To appreciate the significance of this intuition, let’s stop for a moment. Imagine walking around an island and realising that all the finches’ beaks are slightly different from all the finches’ beaks on the neighbouring island. Of course, the purpose of Darwin’s expedition to the Galápagos was to collect samples, but it still took a prodigious talent for observation to perceive these variations.