Darwin, Gay, and the Utility of Chile

Abstract

Darwin left Chile in July 1835. By the time he left, many of the pivotal experiences for his intellectual development had passed: he had been shaken out of trusting the solid ground; he had met nomadic gatherer-hunters; and had seen a petrified forest at the top of the Andes. The Beagle arrived in England on October 2, 1836 and from that time, until his death, Darwin spent his life in southern England, mostly with his family at their home in Downe, Kent. There Darwin could reflect on his five years of travel—five years that provided him with much of the data and inspiration to overturn previous understandings of the nature of nature and humanity’s place in the natural order. He had also matured as a person and a naturalist, and Chile had been essential to this development; through his Chilean experiences he became convinced that relatively small geological changes, like the uplift he witnessed in Concepción, could explain the earth’s geology. Browne argues that, although Lyell’s work made this argument, “this notion was given physical reality by Darwin’s geological researches in Chile and became the hub of all his later biological thinking.”¹ His son Leonard went so far as to assert, “It was in Chile that the first notion of organic evolution began to enter my father’s mind, and therefore, historically, we may connect his journeys in Chile with the inauguration of the idea of organic evolution as far as it depended on him .”²