FRANK J. SULLOWAY, PhD, is an adjunct professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also a member of the Institute of Personality and Social Research. His PhD is in the history of science from Harvard University (1978) and he is a MacArthur Fellow (1984). Dr. Sulloway has published extensively on the life and theories of Charles Darwin. His research has taken him to the Galápagos Islands eighteen times, and he has published numerous studies on the behavior and evolution of Darwin’s iconic Galápagos finches. Dr. Sulloway is the author of the New York Times Notable Book of the Year Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives (1996). His pioneering research has been featured on a variety of national television shows, including Nightline, The Today Show, Dateline NBC, Charlie Rose, and The Colbert Report. He is also the author of Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend (1979), which received the Pfizer Award of the History of Science Society.
Additional biographical information about the author is available here.
Below: Photographs taken while doing Galápagos research.
The author doing fieldwork documenting ecological changes on Volcan Alcedo, Isabela Island, using the method of repeat photography (a project conducted from 1968 to the present).
Crossing Volcan Alcedo’s cauldera floor (Isabela Island). This volcano is home to about 8,000 giant Galápagos tortoises. In the background are several active fumaroles.
Collecting specimens of an invasive wasp species (Polistes versicolor) on the summit of Volcan Alcedo, Isabela Island. These wasps were first discovered in the islands in the late 1980s, and they have since spread to every island in the Galápagos group, where their numbers are now in the millions. Polistes wasps prey on small caterpillars, thereby competing with Darwin’s finches and other small birds in the Galápagos, which feed caterpillars to their nestlings.
A lava tube in the highlands on Santa Cruz Island. Lava tubes like this one are formed when a lava flow cools on its outer surfaces but still retains heat in the flow’s center. When the lava finally ceases flowing, it exits the hardened tube and leaves a tunnel. Owls in the Galápagos use lava tubes as roosting sites, accumulating centuries of deposits of regurgitated pellets underneath these roosting places. Paleontologist David Steadman used such roosting sites to unearth numerous Galápagos subfossils, discovering in the process various now-extinct forms of birds, mammals, and reptiles that once inhabited the Galapagos Islands, including a giant rat as big as a cat (Megaoryzomys curiosi). For further information see Darwin and His Bears, p. 153; and David W. Steadman and Clayton E. Ray (1982) ; and David W. Steadman (1986).
A Galapagos land snail. This particular species (Bulimulus darwini) was collected by Darwin in the Santiago highlands in October 1835. Confined to Santiago, this land snail is one of nearly 80 species that have evolved in the Galápagos (Parent & Crespi, 2007), dwarfing the number of species that have undergone adaptive radiation in other Galápagos taxa, including Darwin’s finches (17 species), giant land tortoises (between 13 and 16 species), giant tree Opuntia (6), and Scalesia (15). This last taxon is a remarkable genus of plants that originally evolved from an ancestor in the daisy family and that now includes arboreal forms reaching a height of 20 meters. 
Camping at the top of a three-mile lava field after descending from the Santiago highlands. This part of the lava field on western Santiago has numerous young Opuntias, but the lower part is dominated by Jasminocereus (candelabra) cacti. After three days of trekking through the highlands of this island, my pants were repeatedly torn by cat’s claw (Zanthoxylum fagara). It was necessary for me to use the black tape, seen in the photograph, along with lots of superglue, to hold my pants together. For further information about the challenges of doing field work in the Galapagos, see Sulloway (2006).
Measuring beak size and shape in Darwin’s finches, at the California Academy of Sciences. For one study, I measured more than four hundred of these specimens, including their nares (nostril openings), which were collected by the Academy in 1905-1906. The purpose of this study was to ascertain whether there was deformation in the nares. Such deformations are currently present in all of the 17 species of Darwin’s finches owing to the damage caused by an ectoparasite (Philornis downsi), which consumes the keratinous tissues of the inner parts of the beak and nares when birds are in the nestling stage, and which also causes high levels of mortality. Based on evidence that deformities were not present in historical specimens, Sonia Kleindorfer and I reached the conclusion that this parasite was not originally native to the Galápagos and must have been introduced sometime in the early 1960s, probably in produce carried to the Galápagos aboard a cargo ship (Kleindorfer & Sulloway, 2016).
My first trip to the Galápagos Islands, in 1968, was aboard this World War II PBY seaplane. During the flight, I thought to myself that if we were forced to make an emergency landing on the ocean, this plane would be a relatively safe way to do it. I then discovered that there were numerous holes in the floor of the plane’s fuselage, through which one could see the ocean below. The Galápagos are now serviced by about six jets each day, which annually bring more than 250,000 tourists to the islands–a far cry from the fewer than 500 visitors that came during my first visit back in 1968. Three of the eight members of the Harvard-Darwin expedition, which I organized that year to make a film about Darwin’s travels around the South American continent as ship’s naturalist aboard H.M.S Beagle, can be seen on the right in the photo (Stevens, The New York Times, 11 February 1969).
(Photos 1-3, 5-6 above: Eric Rohrer).