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This week, I learned that Charles Darwin didn’t exactly come up with the theory of evolution by cataloging the finches of the Galápagos Islands. Contrary to the simplified version I’d grown up believing, Darwin spent only a few weeks in the islands that he mentioned in his world-changing book, On the Origin of Species, and he wasn’t labeling his specimens with enough precision to really prove that they exhibited subtle differences based on which island they came from. I found out the complicated truth about Darwin’s journey aboard the H.M.S. Beagle by reading Helen Lewis’s dispatch from the archipelago, recently published in The Atlantic as the latest entry in our series “The Writer’s Way.”

After some reflection, I’m not surprised that the research that brought evolution to light in the 19th century wasn’t as straightforward as I’d thought it was. It reminds me of the first time I realized how the famous Scopes “monkey trial” came to pass in Dayton, Tennessee. While growing up in the state, I’d assumed that the 1925 showdown between the firebrand lawyer Clarence Darrow and the pious William Jennings Bryan had resulted from some government raid on the classroom of the unsuspecting teacher John T. Scopes. In reality, Scopes had volunteered to be a test case after the American Civil Liberties Union made clear its intent to challenge Tennessee’s ban on teaching evolution in state-funded schools. What set me straight in that instance was Brenda Wineapple’s 2024 book, Keeping the Faith.

Darwin, the man who set the stage for the scientific revolution that would lead to the Scopes trial, was no less deliberate in his work than Darrow was. A serious thinker and, as Lewis writes, “above all an empiricist,” he didn’t just stumble into a eureka moment—any more than Isaac Newton simply got hit in the head by an apple. And like the vainglorious Darrow, he was an imperfect messenger. By 21st-century standards, he was a strange specimen of naturalist. His logs from his voyage on the Beagle “amount to an animal-murder manual,” Lewis writes, although they have ironically “inspired subsequent generations to keep as many animals alive as they can.” Lewis saw the incredibly diverse fauna and flora of the Galápagos in a totally different way than Darwin did. The scientist “lived in a world where, whatever you did, more animals would be along in a minute,” she adds. In 2026, with global biodiversity in mortal danger, the Galápagos aren’t just a cradle of incredible variation. They’re a symbol of how much we’ve discovered, and how much we’ve destroyed, in the span of hardly more than a century.

Anyone with even a passing interest in Earth’s beauty might feel jealous of Lewis’s sojourn with plentiful tortoises, iguanas, sea lions, and birds, and possibly even more jealous of Darwin’s trip. That’s part of the article’s charm, but Lewis’s real feat is correcting oversimplifications—of how the theory of evolution was shared with the world, of how Darwin traveled to the islands, and what he did there. Like the work of the empiricist who inspired Lewis’s trip, this contemporary story leads us to a more complex and more honest understanding of the past.

Paradise Revisited

By Helen Lewis

What Darwin saw in the Galápagos

Read the full article.

What to Read

Small Town Girl, by LaVyrle Spencer

While researching the country-music career of her main character, Spencer interviewed Reba McEntire to understand the life of an industry star, and the parts of this 1997 novel set in Nashville feel like a behind-the-curtain peek at Music Row. But when Tess—known as “Mac” to colleagues and fans, if not to her family—is forced to take time off from recording her latest album to care for her mother after surgery, she struggles to fit into the role of the novel’s title. At home, she falls back into childhood dynamics with her mother and sisters. Adding to her disorientation is Kenny, the nerdy boy next door who’s now a single father and beloved member of the community. When Tess takes on the role of mentoring Kenny’s daughter, a talented country singer in her own right, the two get reacquainted. As in any good romance novel, their talking turns to flirting, which turns to kissing, which leads to tense conversations about how to merge their very different lives, which ends in—well, you know the rest.  — Karen Ostergren

From our list: Eight romance novels for romance skeptics

Out Next Week

📚 Sex on Murder Island, by Jo Firestone

Your Weekend Read

The Truth About Steven Spielberg’s Alien Obsession

By Shirley Li

The director seems to rely on extraplanetary visitors as catalysts for particularly heady stories, positioning them as intellectual superiors and at times moral compasses. Whereas Spielberg’s other blockbusters involving impressive creatures—the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, the great white of Jaws—contend with the question of how to control them, his alien stories consider what humanity can learn from them.

Read the full article.

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