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The Beagle, off the Galápagos, October 1835. I had not yet understood what I was seeing. The finches were collected, labelled imprecisely, and almost lost. It was not until I returned to London and showed them to John Gould that I began to see the pattern. The great insight came not from the islands, but from a taxonomist's workbench in London, eighteen months later.

Science is not a moment of revelation. It is a long argument with the evidence.