The Next Species: The Future of Evolution in the Aftermath of Man by Michael Tennesen Read Free Book Online Page B

indeed.
    When Darwin returned to England, he gave all his bird skins and other trophies to the Zoological Society of London, and the ornithologist John Gould took a fresh look at them. At the next meeting of the society, Gould professed his excitement over Darwin’s findings of a new group of “ground finches.” The Daily Herald the next day reported on the meeting, noting the fourteen species of ground finches, “of which eleven were new forms none being previously known in this country.” This finding heralded an important moment in the evolution of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species , though it would be twenty-three more years before the book was published.
    The fossils Darwin collected in South America were unique as well. Among them were a giant llama, a giant armadillo, and a rodent as big as a rhinoceros. Wherever one followed the trail of life, across the land or back through time, “species gradually become modified,” wrote Darwin. He was beginning to realize how new species might evolve, but he had no idea at the time what a large role continental drift had played in the process.
    On the voyage of HMS Beagle , Darwin brought Principles of Geology by Charles Lyell along for reading. Though his Cambridge professors had warned him to take the book with a grain of salt, he enthusiastically accepted Lyell’s view of the earth changing restlessly beneath man. Darwin had witnessed this change in his journeys through South America. Still, both thought the movement of the continents was upward and downward, and that nothing moved laterally.
    Darwin had no idea yet how important both the vertical and horizontal movement of the continents on the surface of the earth was to evolution.
GEOLOGY LED THE WAY
    The mid-1800s were a time of upheaval in biological as well as geological thought. The British Empire was in full bloom and the most famous of the early geological surveys date from this era. The IndustrialRevolution had arrived earlier with an insatiable hunger for iron, coal, oil, and other deposits, and thus geologists became the celebrities of the day. They earned their keep by uncovering industrial resources, and in accordance with the spirit of discovery that ruled then, these geologists weren’t afraid to address more theoretical issues, like how these resources came to be.
    BrothersWilliam and Henry Blanford, members of the Royal School of Mines in London, were offered posts with India’s newly hatched geological survey and were sent to investigate the Talcher Coalfield in the state of Orissa in that country. The Blanfords started digging and in 1856 found that below this enormous bed of coal was yet another formation of large boulders embedded in fine mudstone, and there was telltale evidence of a glacier. The boulders all had the markings of glacial scour—the abrasions, scratches, and polish of glacial ice against rock. Furthermore, some of the boulders had been moved large distances, another telltale sign of glacial action.
    This showed that before Talcher had become one of India’s largest coal deposits, formed by steaming tropical swamps, it had been part of an enormous ice field. The Blanfords returned to Calcutta and reported to their boss that ice sheets had once covered India. But this raised important questions in the geological community. How could glaciers form in the tropics? Had India once been much closer to the poles? Did continents move?
    Further evidence for the shift of landmasses was uncovered in 1912 whenBritain’s Captain Robert Scott led a harrowing expedition to the South Pole, having to cope with blizzards and temperatures as low as minus 23 degrees. Though he and his men made it, they did so thirty-three days after a Norwegian team. Captain Roald Amundsen, its leader, left a Norwegian black marker flag and a note to the British at the pole. Losing the race for his country was enormously disconcerting for Scott, who wrote in his diary: “The POLE. Yes, but under very different