Who found the Galapagos Islands?

Darwin's great work, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, based mainly on his observations in the Galapagos Islands and Darwin Finches, was heavily attacked because it did not support the depiction of creation given in the Bible. Darwin argumented that natural selection - the engine of evolution - worked automatically, leaving little or no room for the teachings of the Bible. All species, he reasoned, produce far too many offspring for all of them to survive and therefore, those with favorable variations - owing to chance - are selected.

At Charles Darwin's hands, evolution grew into a well-developed scientific theory, which has been a constant target of religious or anti-scientific attacks. However, Darwin himself did not at first explicitly apply the evolutionary theory to human beings. He knew that his challenge to the Biblical teachings would cause stress to his friends and family, among them, his religious wife.

However, T.H. Huxley, another scientist who believed strongly in Darwin’s evolution theory, published in his Man's Place in Nature (1863) an application of the theory. Darwin followed him in The Descent Of Man, and Selection In Relation To Gender (1871) and Expression Of Emotions In Man And Animals (1872), which showed the similarities between animals and man in the expression of emotions and was the start of the science of ethnology. Darwin's voyage with the Royal Navy's H.M.S. Beagle was the foundation for many of his theories and is recorded in the Journal Of Researches (1836), a blend of scientific reporting and travel writing.