During Charles Darwin's studies on the Galápagos Islands, Darwin observed 13 species of finches that are closely related and differ most markedly in the shape of their beaks.

Charles Darwin | Darwin's illustrations of beak variation in the Darwin's finches | finches of the Galápagos Islands, which hold 13 closely related species that differ most markedly in the shape of their beaks.

Though the finches were less important for Darwin, more recent research has shown the birds now known as Darwin's finches to be a classic case of adaptive evolutionary radiation.

Darwin's finches are different closely related species which Darwin discovered on the Galapagos Islands.

Red-footed boobies, noddy terns, lava gulls, tropic birds, doves, storm petrels and Darwin finches are also in sight.

At the skirts and calderas of the volcanoes of Isabela, land iguanas and Galápagos tortoises can be observed, as well as Darwin finches, Galápagos hawks, Galápagos doves and very interesting lowland vegetation.

The name Fink is German for finch and is a reference to the name of the Mac OS X core, Darwin ; Charles Darwin's study of diversity among finches led him eventually to the concept of evolution.

) Darwin notes the gradations in size of the beaks of species of finches, suspects that species " are confined to different islands ", " But there is not space in this work, to enter into this curious subject.

Adaptive radiation, as observed by Charles Darwin in Galapagos finches, is a consequence of allopatric speciation among island populations.

He set aside his paying work and at the next meeting on 10 January reported that birds from the Galápagos Islands which Darwin had thought were blackbirds, " gross-bills " and finches were in fact " a series of ground Finches which are so peculiar " as to form " an entirely new group, containing 12 species.

Darwin had not bothered to label his finches by island, but others on the expedition had taken more care.

Whereas Darwin spent just five weeks in the Galápagos, and David Lack spent three months, Peter and Rosemary Grant and their colleagues have made research trips to the Galápagos for about thirty years, particularly studying Darwin's finches.

This claim is contradicted by Alan D. Gishlick and Dave Wisker, who state that Darwin was in fact heavily influenced by the finches as early as 1837, with Wisker stating that " Wells seems to be the one doing the speculating ".

He startlingly revealed at the next meeting on 10 January that what Darwin had taken to be wrens, blackbirds and slightly differing finches were " a series of ground finches which are so peculiar " as to form " an entirely new group " of 11 species.

The story of what we now call " Darwin's finches " was covered by the daily newspapers, though Darwin was in Cambridge and did not get details at this stage.

* 1835 –, with Charles Darwin aboard, reaches the Galápagos Islands.

The Galápagos islands are particularly famous for their influence on Charles Darwin.

Darwin refers specifically to the distribution of the species rheas, and to that of the Galápagos tortoises and mockingbirds.

The species are so distinct that when Charles Darwin collected them in the islands he thought they were completely different birds, and it was only when he was back in London in 1837 that the ornithologist John Gould revealed that they were closely allied, reinforcing Darwin's growing view that “ species are not immutable .” The adaptations of their numerous species, in three genera, show diverging evolution to exploit several ecological niches in the rugged and dry Galápagos Islands.

The Charles Darwin Research Station and the headquarters of the Galápagos National Park Service are located here.

Beebe was eager to undertake an expedition to the Galápagos Islands, with the intention of obtaining more detailed data in support of evolution than Charles Darwin had been able to collect in his earlier visit.

Beebe also discovered a previously unknown bay on Tower Island in the Galápagos, which he named Darwin Bay, and documented the diversity of animal life that inhabited it.

* ( 2003 ): Darwin and the mockingbirds of Galápagos.

When the survey voyage of HMS Beagle visited the Galápagos Islands in September to October 1835, the naturalist Charles Darwin noticed that the mockingbirds Mimus thenca differed from island to island, and were closely allied in appearance to mockingbirds on the South American mainland.

Silurians also feature in the Big Finish Productions audio play Bloodtide ( 2001 ), in which the Sixth Doctor intervenes when Charles Darwin and the HMS Beagle expedition encounter a rogue Silurian group in the Galápagos Islands.

In the first edition, Darwin remarks in regard to the similarity of Galápagos wildlife to that on the South American continent, " The circumstance would be explained, according to the views of some authors, by saying that the creative power had acted according to the same law over a wide area ".

One of the first projects of WWF was assisting in the creation of the Charles Darwin Research Foundation which aided in the protection of diverse range of unique species existing on the Galápagos ’ Islands, Ecuador.

In March, Darwin met Gould again, learning that his Galápagos " wren " was another species of finch and the mockingbirds he had labelled by island were separate species rather than just varieties, with relatives on the South American mainland.

When organising his notes on the last stage of the Beagle expedition, Darwin wrote of his growing suspicions that the differences between the various Galápagos Islands mockingbirds and tortoises, as well as the possible dissimilarity of West Falkland and East Falkland Islands Wolf, were but variants that differed depending on which island they came from:

In particular, when first arriving at the Galápagos Islands Darwin noted " I certainly recognize S America in Ornithology, would a botanist?

The Galápagos Islands have for centuries captured the interest of people from all over the globe because of its unique biodiversity that was made famous by Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution.

Yet disgust can often be a learned or cultural issue too ; as Darwin pointed out, seeing a stripe of soup in a man's beard is disgusting even though neither soup nor beards are themselves disgusting.

The original inhabitants of the greater Darwin area are the Larrakia people.

The Darwin Awards are a tongue-in-cheek honor, originating in Usenet newsgroup discussions circa 1985.

The Darwin Awards site does try to verify all submitted stories, but many similar sites, and the vast number of circulating " Darwin awards " emails, are largely fictional.

Most such stories on Northcutt's Darwin Awards site are filed in the Personal Accounts section.

While the Darwin Awards are named after Charles Darwin, due to his theory of natural selection, there is no evidence that the stories depicted actually represent the removal of " judgement impairment genes " from the gene pool.

While there is no scientific basis in Darwinism for the Darwin Awards, the stories are nevertheless entertaining, and can be thought of as an example of schadenfreude – deriving entertainment value out of the misfortune of others.

They are noted for their association with Charles Darwin, whose observation of animals here during the voyage of the Beagle led to his formation of the theory of natural selection as a means of evolution.

El Niño episodes are associated with negative values of the SOI, meaning that the pressure difference between Tahiti and Darwin is relatively small.

The Argentine dead are buried in the Argentine Military Cemetery west of the Darwin Settlement.

Using uniformitarianism, which states that one cannot make an appeal to any force or phenomenon which cannot presently be observed ( see catastrophism ), Darwin theorized that the evolutionary process must occur gradually, not in saltations, since saltations are not presently observed, and extreme deviations from the usual phenotypic variation would be more likely to be selected against.

Despite this uncertainty, fourteen individuals have been identified as having verifiably attended Lunar Society meetings regularly over a long period during its most productive eras: these are Matthew Boulton, Erasmus Darwin, Thomas Day, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Samuel Galton, Jr., James Keir, Joseph Priestley, William Small, Jonathan Stokes, James Watt, Josiah Wedgwood, John Whitehurst and William Withering.

Factors which affect reproductive success are also important, an issue which Charles Darwin developed in his ideas on sexual selection.

The term was introduced by Darwin in his groundbreaking 1859 book On the Origin of Species, in which natural selection was described by analogy to artificial selection, a process by which animals and plants with traits considered desirable by human breeders are systematically favored for reproduction.

Factors that affect reproductive success are also important, an issue that Charles Darwin developed in his ideas on sexual selection, for example.

The term was introduced by Darwin in his influential 1859 book On the Origin of Species, in which natural selection was described as analogous to artificial selection, a process by which animals and plants with traits considered desirable by human breeders are systematically favored for reproduction.

Darwin himself had noted that " the existence of free gemmules is a gratuitous assumption "; by some accounts in modern interpretation, gemmules may be considered a prescient mix of DNA, RNA, proteins, prions, and other mobile elements that are heritable in a non-Mendelian manner at the molecular level.

, others are held at the Fitzwilliam Museum ( this is the copy sent by Wedgwood to Erasmus Darwin which his descendants loaned to the Museum in 1963 and later sold to them ); the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the Department of Prehistory and Europe at the British Museum.

However, Darwin wrote, " I can by no means agree ... that immigration and isolation are necessary elements ....

), which Darwin described as " weapons ", while traits selected by mate ( usually female ) choice are called " ornaments ".

Charles Darwin conjectured that the male beard, as well as the relative hairlessness of humans compared to nearly all other mammals, are results of sexual selection.