On Darwin’s Trouble with the Finches

Andrew Berry

• Evolution’s Workshop: God and Science on the Galapagos Islands by Edward Larson
  Penguin, 320 pp, £8.99, February 2002, ISBN 0 14 100503 3

Scientific discovery, as any PhD student halfway through their project will tell you, is hard work: progress is step-wise, and the steps are small. Not surprisingly, however, the popular view of science overlooks the daily grind and focuses instead on the occasional flashes of inspiration that have punctuated its history. In this view, science progresses in a series of great leaps forward, and the scientists involved are mythic heroes grappling singlehandedly with the great problems of their time. The mythology also requires that these visionary moments acquire their own icons – Newton had his apple, Watt his kettle – and intellectual history is thus handily reduced to a series of mnemonics.