Richard Dawkins - The Magic of Reality

An important difference between species and languages is that languages can pick up ‘loan words’ from other languages. Long after it developed as a separate language from Romance, Germanic and Celtic sources, for example, English picked up ‘shampoo’ from Hindi, ‘iceberg’ from Norwegian, ‘bungalow’ from Bengali and ‘anorak’ from Inuit. Animal species, by contrast, never (or almost never) exchange DNA ever again, once they have drifted far enough apart to have stopped breeding together. Bacteria are another story: they do exchange genes, but there isn’t enough space in this book to go into that. In the rest of this chapter, assume that we are talking about animals.

So the DNA of species, like the words of languages, drifts apart when separated. Why might this happen? What might start the separation? An obvious possibility is the sea. Populations on separate islands don’t meet each other – not often, anyway – so their two sets of genes have the opportunity to drift away from one another. This makes islands extremely important in the origins of new species. But we can think of an island as more than just a piece of land surrounded by water. To a frog, an oasis is an ‘island’ where it can live, surrounded by a desert where it can’t. To a fish, a lake is an island. Islands matter, both for species and for languages, because the population of an island is cut off from contact with other populations (preventing gene flow in the case of species, just as it prevents language drift) and so is free to begin to evolve in its own direction.

The next important point is that the population of an island need not be totally isolated for ever: genes can occasionally cross the barrier surrounding it, whether this be water or uninhabitable land.

On 4 October 1995 a mat of logs and uprooted trees was blown onto a beach on the Caribbean island of Anguilla. On the mat were 15 green iguanas, alive after what must have been a perilous journey from another island, probably Guadeloupe, 160 miles away. Two hurricanes, called Luis and Marilyn, had roared through the Caribbean during the previous month, uprooting trees and flinging them into the sea. It seems that one of these hurricanes must have torn down the trees in which the iguanas were climbing (they love sitting up in trees, as I have seen in Panama) and blown them out to sea. Eventually reaching Anguilla, the iguanas crawled off their unorthodox means of transport onto the beach and began a new life, feeding and reproducing and passing on their DNA, on a brand new island home.

We know this happened because the iguanas were seen arriving on Anguilla by local fishermen. Centuries earlier, although nobody was there to witness it, something similar is almost certainly what brought the iguanas’ ancestors to Guadeloupe in the first place. And something like the same story almost certainly accounts for the presence of iguanas on the Galapagos islands, which is where we turn for the next step in our story.

The Galapagos islands are historically important because they probably inspired Charles Darwin’s first thoughts on evolution when, as a member of the expedition on HMS Beagle , he visited them in 1835. They are a collection of volcanic islands in the Pacific Ocean near the equator, about 600 miles west of South America. They are all young (just a few million years old), formed by volcanoes punching up from the bottom of the sea. This means that all the species of animals and plants on the islands must have arrived from elsewhere – presumably the mainland of South America – and recently, by evolutionary standards. Once arrived, species could make the shorter crossings from island to island, sufficiently often to reach all the islands (maybe once or twice every century or so) but sufficiently seldom that they were able to evolve separately – ‘drift apart’ as we have been saying in this chapter – during the intervals between the rare crossings.

Nobody knows when the first iguanas arrived in the Galapagos. They probably rafted across from the mainland just like the ones that arrived in Anguilla in 1995. Nowadays the nearest island to the mainland is San Cristobal (Darwin knew it by the English name of Chatham), but millions of years ago there were other islands too, which have now sunk beneath the sea. The iguanas could have arrived first on one of the now sunken islands, and then crossed to other islands, including those still above water today.

Once there, they had the opportunity to flourish in a new place, just like the ones that arrived in Anguilla in 1995. The first iguanas on Galapagos would have evolved to become different from their cousins on the mainland, partly by just ‘drifting’ (like languages) and partly because natural selection would have favoured new survival skills: a relatively barren volcanic island is a very different place from the South American mainland.

The distances between the different islands are much smaller than the distance from any of them to the mainland. So accidental sea crossings between islands would be relatively common: perhaps once per century rather than once per millennium. And iguanas would have started turning up on most or all of the islands eventually. Island-hoppings would have been rare enough to allow some evolutionary drifting apart on the different islands, between ‘contaminations’ of the genes by subsequent island-hoppings: rare enough to allow the different groups of iguanas to evolve so much that when they eventually met again they could no longer breed together. The result is that there are now three distinct species of land iguana on Galapagos, which are no longer capable of cross-breeding. Conolophus pallidus is found only on the island of Santa Fe. Conolophus subcristatus lives on several islands including Fernandina, Isabela and Santa Cruz (each island population possibly on its way to becoming a separate species). Conolophus marthae is confined to the northernmost of the chain of five volcanoes on the big island of Isabela.

That raises another interesting point, by the way. You remember we said that a lake or an oasis could count as an island, even though neither consists of land surrounded by water? Well, the same goes for each of the five volcanoes on Isabela. Each volcano in the chain is surrounded by a zone of rich vegetation, which is a kind of oasis, separated from the next volcano by a desert. Most of the Galapagos islands have only a single large volcano, but Isabela has five. If the sea level rises (perhaps because of global warming) Isabela could become five islands separated by sea. As it is, you can think of each volcano as a kind of island within an island. That’s how it would seem to an animal like a land iguana (or a giant tortoise), which needs to feed on the vegetation found only on the slopes around the volcanoes.

Any kind of isolation by a geographical barrier which can be crossed sometimes but not too often leads to evolutionary branching. (Actually, it doesn’t have to be a geographical barrier. There are other possibilities, especially in insects, but for simplicity’s sake I won’t go into them here.) And once the divided populations have drifted far enough apart that they can no longer breed together, the geographical barrier is no longer necessary. The two species can go their separate evolutionary ways without contaminating each other’s DNA ever again. It is mainly separations of this kind that were originally responsible for all the new species that have ever arisen on this planet: even, as we shall see, the original separation of the ancestors of, say, snails from the ancestors of all vertebrates including us.

At some point in the history of iguanas on Galapagos, a branching occurred which was to lead to a very peculiar new species. On one of the islands – we don’t know which – a local population of land iguanas completely changed their way of life. Instead of eating land plants on the slopes of volcanoes, they went to the shore and took to feeding on seaweed. Natural selection then favoured those individuals that became skilled swimmers, until nowadays their descendants habitually dive to graze on underwater seaweeds. They are called marine iguanas and, unlike land iguanas, they are found nowhere but Galapagos.