By RICHARD DAWKINS
Added: Thu, 05 Mar 2009 00:00:00 UTC

UPDATE: 3-23-09

Several people have expressed regret that they cannot come to Lalla’s exhibition in London and bid for her fabric pictures and ceramic paintings, in aid of the Gerald Durrell Fund for Galapagos conservation.

I am therefore offering to place bids on behalf of anybody in the world who wants to buy any of Lalla’s pictures.

The system is a silent auction. People who visit the gallery are invited to place written bids, on paper, in a box. Each bid includes the bidder’s name and address, the name of the picture they want to buy, and the price they are prepared to pay, in pounds sterling. The bid must be in pounds, for comparability with other bids, but when it comes to payment we can accept the dollar equivalent.

For the benefit of those who cannot visit the gallery, I have set up a special email address for the sole purpose of receiving bids. On this site, if you click on a picture, an email to me is automatically generated. Please send me your bid and your name and address, and I'll drop it in the box for you.

The auction closes on Saturday 28th March at 5.30 pm GMT. When the auction closes, the bids for each picture will be examined, and the highest one accepted, provided it reaches the (undisclosed) reserve price set for that picture. No guide prices have been given, but I can say that the Gerald Durrell Foundation are hoping to make £30,000 (and the frame alone costs an average of £100 per picture, which I have paid as my personal contribution). Go figure, as they say!

Richard

Click here to view and bid on items in the FABRIC PICTURES gallery

Click here to view and bid on items in the CERAMIC PAINTINGS gallery

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Click here to see a set of 40 postcards (PDF)


The myth-tormented imagination of the poet Yeats soared over the western horizon to a dream world of blissful islands, the Islands of the Blest, the Country of the Young. For Darwin and his heirs, the Galapagos Islands, 600 miles over the western horizon from South America, are the Islands of the Blest. It’s controversial whether Darwin’s visit to that remarkable archipelago really was the seminal experience of his life, but it should have been. If you were to set aside a few million years to design the ideal natural experiment to give the game away about evolution and spark the idea in the mind of a travelling naturalist, Galapagos is exactly what you would dream up. Imagination could not outperform this reality.

The key to the Galapagos islands is that they are young. All are volcanic, and none has ever been in contact with the mainland, so every endemic animal and plant has evolved there in extremely recent times. On the evolutionary timescale, Galapagos is the Country of the Young. Even the oldest of the islands (Espanola near the eastern end of the archipelago) is only just over three million years old, while the youngest (Fernandina, in the west) is probably less than half a million. It is no accident that the islands get younger as you move from south east to north west. The (also very young) theory of Plate Tectonics makes all clear. The Nazca Plate is moving, with a somewhat jerky and erratic course, in a south easterly direction towards South America, where it is slowly being subducted under the continental shelf. As it moves, it passes over a volcanic ‘hot spot’, which periodically punches through to raise a new volcano: in some cases a new island. Some of the islands have but a single large volcano. Isabela, the largest island, is a chain of five. Old islands are those that have been carried furthest away from the hot spot. Young ones, such as Fernandina and Isabela, are closest to the hot spot today: indeed, Fernandina is right above it. On the oldest island, Espanola, the single volcano is the last survivor of a previously larger island. There were even older islands that have now sunk out of sight altogether, as the plate inches its way under South America. The Nazca plate, with its volcanic hot spot underneath, serves as a conveyor belt for the manufacture and subsequent destruction of islands.

As I said, we know that every single animal and plant in the archipelago arrived recently (by geological standards, not by human standards, of course). You cannot say the same of Madagascar or New Zealand, which are fragments of the ancient continent of Gondwana. The faunas and floras of these primeval islands are a complicated mixture of Gondwanan originals together with the descendants of immigrants, which have had many tens of millions of years to go their separate evolutionary ways. Galapagos evolutions are not all as young as might be suggested by the approximately 3 million years of the oldest extant islands. This is because their evolutionary radiation could have begun on the now sunk older islands. But the maximum time available for the unique Galapagos fauna to have evolved is still very short. Continents and older islands like Madagascar have become palimpsests of history, the clarity of the story ravaged and distorted by time and repeated invasions of immigrants. But in Galapagos, we are privileged to see evolution in its burgeoning youth.

A young archipelago like Galapagos[1] is a natural laboratory of evolution, a bustling workshop for the manufacture of new species, again as if on a conveyor belt. Speciation is the name we give to the divergence of one ancestral species into two: Darwin’s ‘origin of species’ . For speciation to occur, there must be some initial separation – otherwise sexual cross-breeding will continually mix the gene pool of the original species with that of the budding new species, and prevent them from diverging. Sometimes the barrier is imposed from without, as when an earthquake, say, changes the course of a river so that it bisects the range of a previously united species. At other times the barrier is already there, wide enough to be difficult to cross but not totally impossible. This means that crossings occur just often enough to initiate speciation, but not so often as to allow enough sexual mixing (‘gene flow’) to stop the species diverging. Archipelagoes are speciation factories, and Galapagos is the pick of the bunch.

Speciation requires an optimal spacing of islands, not too far and not too close. The actual magnitude of the optimal distance will depend on the mobility of the animals concerned. To a wide ranging bird like a tropicbird, the whole archipelago might as well be a single continent. To a Galapagos finch, the 600 mile distance to the mainland constitutes a major barrier, which was bridged perhaps only once. The distances between individual islands – of the order of tens of miles rather than hundreds – are just small enough to allow occasional island-hops, but too large to allow gene swamping. These are ideal conditions for speciation. Galapagos might have been designed for the origin of species.

Darwin, in The Voyage of the Beagle, enunciated the principle in a dawning of recognition:

Seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one small, intimately related group of birds, one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends.

Darwin was here speaking of the finches that now bear his name, but he was first alerted to the principle by the Floreana mockingbird. He had already noticed, on San Cristobal, that the local mockingbirds resembled those on the mainland but were nevertheless different. The next island the Beagle visited was Floreana, and that was where Darwin’s penny dropped. The Floreana mockingbird was different again. And then other islands turned out to have their own species of mockingbird. The same is true of the giant tortoises, of the lava lizards, and of many of the plant species.

But the Floreana mockingbird was Darwin’s epiphany. It is of great significance in the history of ideas, and it is one of the most endangered species in the world. The extinction of any species is a tragedy. The plight of the Floreana mockingbird – inspiration of Darwin’s youth – moved Lalla Ward to accede to the Durrell Foundation’s suggestion that she should prepare a special exhibition on the theme of – and in aid of – Galapagos wildlife.

Lalla’s talents are extraordinarily versatile. Although best-known as an actress (companion to the definitive Doctor Who, Tom Baker; Ophelia to Derek Jacobi’s Hamlet in the BBC television production, and many other roles in the theatre, cinema and television) she has always been an artist at the same time, and here too her versatility seems boundless. She drew the cartoons for a series of popular books by the celebrated vet, Bruce Fogel. She has illustrated books of comic verse (by Lance Percival) and written her own comic verse to enhance her own books of knitting designs. She secured the contract to produce the Shell Calendar of seabirds in 1985, and chose to do it in a peculiarly difficult and labour-intensive style: embroidery. This prestigious commission won her another one the following year, to produce a calendar for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, again using embroidery: a delightful series of twelve bird pictures, seasonally evocative of the months of the year. While working on these commissions, she found books on embroidery so far from lucid that she was moved to write her own instruction manual. This she published as Lalla Ward’s Countryside Embroidery Book, illustrated with her own delightful pictures from the RSPB Calendar.

Since I have known her, she has branched out into mosaics, silk painting (I shall be wearing my Galapagos tie for the Private View on March 26th), and ceramic paintings, which form a part of this exhibition. When I first got to know Lalla, all these talents impressed me hugely. But I was drawn even more to her enormously wide reading, even in my own subject of evolutionary biology. How many actresses or artists can say that they read The Origin of Species at the age of 15, and then went on to read a large modern literature on evolutionary biology because of a fascinated desire to find out whether Darwin was still taken seriously (he is)? Almost all her art nowadays is centred on animals, and her knowledge of them and their evolution shines through.

Most recently, and perhaps most excitingly, she has taken up freehand drawing with the needle of a sewing machine, and painting with a palette of fabrics. It is these remarkable pictures, a juxtaposition of fine drawings with thread on abstract mosaics of cloth, that dominate the Durrell Galapagos exhibition. I think these fabric pictures are her most exciting work to date. They have been produced in a frenzy of artistic energy. For me, they capture the spirit of Galapagos in a unique way that does justice to the archipelago’s own distinctive strangeness. Although she refreshed her memory with photographs, she has seen all these animals at first hand, on two trips that we made to the islands together, including an especially memorable one as the guest of Victoria Getty on a small boat called The Beagle. These fabric pictures place the animals and plants of Galapagos, exquisitely drawn with a fine needle, in abstract landscapes created using the textures and colours of her fabrics, in a way that is uniquely evocative of these enchanted islands.

Also see:
http://richarddawkins.net/article,3666,Evolving-glory-of-the-Galapagos,The-Independent

The Gerald Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust is mounting an exhibition of art by

Lalla Ward

Inspired by the wildlife of Galapagos.

Chris Beetles Gallery, 8-10 Ryder Street, London SW1Y 6QB

The Exhibition will be open from 21-28 March
10.00 to 17.30 Monday to Saturday

Pictures will be sold in aid of the Durrell Conservation Trust

1. Or Hawaii, although that archipelago has been ruined by human introductions.

Photographs by Nicholas Kettlewell

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TAGGED: RICHARD DAWKINS

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