On Tuesday, January 7, 2003, at 05:08 AM, Brian Kendig wrote:
This is somewhat incorrect. Galapagos is not a single island, but a collection of small islands, I guess nearly ten (but I'm afraid I'm wrong. I couldn't get a quick answer by googling). And each island is off-contact from the other. For each island, one or two species of finches evolved through their interaction with environment. This process is called "speciation". Darwin was intrigued, or rather encouranged, by this phenomenon.
A major point of Darwin's work was that many different species can all coexist in the same place together and in fact depend on each other for survival. Take those finches and put them on an island all by themselves with no other animals around (no insects to pollinate the flowers, no predators to keep their population down and weed out the less-capable), and they'll eventually die out.
Another fact, or observation, that seemed intrigued Darwin is apparently low selectional pressure in the islands, and he attributed this to the fact that no real predetor-type species have invaded there thanks to their isolation from the outer world, which is historically accidental.
Cheers,
Kow
-------------------------------------------------------
This SF.NET email is sponsored by:
SourceForge Enterprise Edition + IBM + LinuxWorld = Something 2 See!
http://www.vasoftware.com
_______________________________________________
Fink-devel mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fink-devel
