Darwin and His Bears: How Darwin Bear and His Galápagos Islands Friends Inspired a Scientific Revolution

Review\nDarwin Bear may often be stuffed with blueberries, but he is never stuffy in talking about his colleague Charles Darwin and the science behind species and environment. This is the ultimate guide to take on a voyage of your own Beagle. — Amy Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club and The Bonesetter’s Daughter\nThis work, coming from Frank Sulloway, is highly original, and it deserves wide attention. I wish him and the bears, and the ghost of Darwin, wide success. — Edward O. Wilson, two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning author, evolutionary biologist, and conservationist\nFrom so simple a beginning, this most beautiful and wonderful book on evolution reveals the grandeur in this view of life, while also filling a vital educational niche. — Michael Shermer, Publisher Skeptic magazine, Scientific American columnist, and author of Why Darwin Matters and In Darwin’s Shadow\nFrank Sulloway’s revisionist description, in absolutely charming text and drawings, will set you thinking and will bring a persistent smile to your face as you read this wonderful book. — Roald Hoffmann, poet, playwright, and Nobel Prize–winning chemist\nLet Frank Sulloway’s delightful fantasy of talking bears lead you through the story of Charles Darwin’s visit to the Galápagos Islands and the development of his evolutionary theory. These sixteen bears know everything there is to know! — Janet Browne, past president of the History of Science Society, and author of award-winning Charles Darwin: A Biography
Darwin and His Bears is delicious! It is funny, sarcastic at times, includes good science, describes how to do science, and is appropriately argumentative in places. Where else can you read about island geography, the evolution of species, survival of the fattest, psicko-analysis, and tortoise racing in the same book? Extraordinarily clever. — Louis A. Sherman, Fellow of the American Society of Microbiology and of AAAS; Professor, Purdue University Department of Biological Sciences\nWhen Charles Darwin first stepped off the HMS Beagle and into the harsh and formidable world of the Galápagos islands with their sun-baked lava, spiny cactus, and tangled brushwood, he encountered many birds and animals new to him. He marveled at the remarkable tameness of the birds and the striking dominance of reptiles in these islands, which made the archipelago seem like a journey back in time. On the shoreline were swarms of “hideous-looking” marine iguanas — the world’s only oceangoing lizards. On land, Darwin and the Beagle crew encountered large land iguanas, closely allied to their marine cousin; several smaller lizards and snakes; and giant land tortoises, after which the islands are named.
How, Darwin asked himself, had life first come to these islands? Most of the life forms, he noted, were aboriginal creations, found nowhere else. Of all the creatures he encountered, none were as surprising and important to his studies as the Galápagos bears.
In Darwin and His Bears, scientist and Darwin scholar Frank J. Sulloway reveals a crucial — yet little known — link that led to Darwin’s development of the theory of evolution: sixteen brilliant bears residing on the sixteen archipelago islands. Charles Darwin had an undeniable knack for asking the right questions, and these remarkable blueberry-loving bears had all the answers he needed. With their invaluable assistance, Darwin was able to reassess his imperfect evidence, ultimately culminating in what we now celebrate as the Darwinian revolution.
Delightful and deeply informative, Darwin and His Bears recounts the fabled adventure of Darwin’s groundbreaking visit to “a shore fit for Pandemonium,” as Beagle Captain Robert FitzRoy described the Galápagos on their arrival in 1835. As Sulloway recounts this fascinating story, he also reveals the critical conceptual steps by which Darwin reached his theory of evolution by natural selection — and provides, according to philosopher Philip Kitcher, “a brilliant summar