Here you may submit any ideas you have for how to substantiate, or to refute, the claim that bears really inhabit the Galápagos Islands. (Ideas that are submitted will only be used on this website.) This part of the website is meant to be a fun exercise in the principles of hypothesis testing, as discussed in Appendix 5 of Darwin and His Bears (“Are There Really Any Bears in the Galápagos Islands?,” pp. 147-154.) As a guide, this appendix proposes the use of camera traps as well as searching for “environmental DNA” belonging to members of the Ursidae (bear family). Perhaps you can think of some other good ways of shedding light on this question.
In accordance with the various theoretical scenarios on this question that have been provided in Darwin and His Bears by Edward O. Wilson, Stephen Jay Gould, and Ernst Mayr (pp. 93-97), you may also propose here any hypotheses you might have for (1) how blueberries first arrived in the Galápagos Islands (at least the bears keep insisting that blueberries were once prevalent in these islands, before their extinction in 1835), as well as (2) why blueberries are blue.
A particularly challenging version of this intellectual exercise would be to suggest a hypothesis that is closely linked with the novel theoretical contributions of a past or a living scientist, to illustrate how such a scientist, given that scientist’s theoretical proclivities, might have dealt with either of these two questions.
For example, one might consider formulating a hypothesis that is consistent with the theoretical approaches of such historical figures as
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- Robert Chambers (who anonymously published a theory evolution in his notorious Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation in 1844);
- Alfred Russel Wallace (who formulated a theory of natural selection independently of Darwin, but came to differ from Darwin on some other theoretical issues such as sexual selection);
- Richard Owen (one of Darwin’s severest critics who nevertheless endorsed an alternative theory of evolution);
- Ernst Haeckel (famous for the “biogenetic law”–that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” discussed in Chapter 7 of Darwin and His Bears);
- Gregor Mendel (who discovered the laws of heredity);
- Hugo de Vries (who believed in large mutations leading to sudden evolution);
- Richard Goldschmidt (famous for his “hopeful monster” theory of macromutations);
- G. Ledyard Stebbins (who helped to elucidate the puzzling phenomenon of evolution by polyploidy in plants).