Darwin's Arch collapses: A testimony to the laws of science

For Charles Darwin, the laws of evolution that he discovered were in a sense immutable - even God couldn't change them. Now, a structure named after him and his theories, located on the same archipelago where he discovered them, has collapsed, succumbing to another law of nature that was already written into his theory of evolution - that change is permanent.

In the natural world, change is simply a way of life. Organisms adapt to their natural environment and the other life forms in many ways, changing their behaviour and metabolism to accommodate a variety of factors in the world around them, such as the weather and climate, the chemical composition of soil and threats from predators and pollutants. Similarly, on a geological timescale, the rocks and soil around them also change - they are eroded by forces of nature like wind, water, heat, ice and the roots of plants, while also being subject to tectonic shifts below the earth’s crust.

Informamos que hoy 17 de mayo, se reportó el colapso del Arco de Darwin, el atractivo puente natural ubicado a menos de un kilómetro de la isla principal Darwin, la más norte del archipiélago de #Galápagos. Este suceso sería consecuencia de la erosión natural.

📷Héctor Barrera pic.twitter.com/lBZJWNbgHg

— Ministerio del Ambiente y Agua de Ecuador (@Ambiente_Ec) May 17, 2021

This was illustrated dramatically on May 17, 2021, when an arch-shaped rock formation in Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands collapsed into the sea, leaving behind a pile of drenched rubble and only two freestanding rock pillars. The arch was popular with divers, but its larger significance was that the surrounding area had played an important role in scientific history.

After all, the anatomical differences in various finches of the Galapagos Islands had inspired Darwin’s theory of evolution, which states that living organisms naturally and continuously evolve through natural selection of those traits that help them to survive in their specific habitat. For this reason, the monolith had been named Darwin's Arch, and a nearby island bears the moniker Darwin's Island. Ecuador’s Ministry of Environment and Water announced the collapse in a tweet in Spanish, saying that it was a consequence of natural erosion. 

Both evolution and erosion are concepts that, at the fundamental level, point to inevitable and constant change in nature. This is an idea that dates as far back as the Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus, who in Plato's rendition was supposed to have said that "No man can ever step in the same river twice," because both the person and the river have undergone some change or the other in the interval. Thus, Heraclitus' idea would suggest that the arch as it existed until earlier this week was as fundamentally different from the arch that Darwin saw on his visits to the Galapagos in the 1830s, as it is from the two freestanding pillars that exist today.

The fall of Darwin's Arch was indeed unexpected for those who live around it. CBS News quoted Washington Tapia, the director of the Galapagos Conservancy, who said that, "Obviously all the people from the Galapagos felt nostalgic because it's something we're familiar with since childhood, and to know that it has changed was a bit of a shock."

The Conservancy itself released a statement on Facebook that read, "The beauty of nature lies not in its permanence, but in its constant transformation. Galapagos, more than any other place on Earth, is a symbol of evolution and change, so although we are saddened to lose this iconic structure due to natural erosion, it is a reminder of the power of nature's architecture and the need to preserve wild places while we still can."

This change and impermanence is a fundamental aspect of nature, but it also comes with an inevitable sense of nostalgia for what existed but has now been lost. Tapia's expression of shock over the loss of what was a mainstay of many Galapagos Islanders' lives is understandable to anyone who has ever seen familiar places and natural beauty being eroded by time and human action. With the world facing a climate crisis as a result of destructive human actions, it is likely that such nostalgia and loss will become more common. While nature's laws are constant and unchangeable, they can also be punishing, as places and lives are lost as a result of nature's response to human actions.

Image credits: By refractor - Flickr, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1102609