On January 16, 2001, the tanker Jessica ran aground off San Cristobal Island in the Galápagos Archipelago and began to discharge 750,000 gallons of diesel and bunker oil into the wildlife-rich waters. Oil intended for fishing boats and cruise ships fouled the shores. It was the latest turn in the complex story of how people perceive the remote islands that Charles Darwin helped bring to world attention.

In his engaging and rigorously researched new book, University of Georgia historian Edward Larson recounts the history of exploration and exploitation of the Galápagos and the prominent role the archipelago has played in shaping modern scientific thinking. Larson won the Pulitzer Prize for his previous book, Summer for the Gods, an account of the Scopes trial. He pursues similar themes surrounding science and religion in Evolution's Workshop to portray our complicated relationship with the eastern Pacific's largest islands. "Ever since Bishop Berlanga discovered it in 1535," he writes, "the archipelago has influenced how people impose meaning on nature and draw both scientific and spiritual insight from the world around them - and it has grown more influential over time."

Not everyone had a favorable first impression of the remote islands. Herman Melville considered them to be "evilly enchanted," haunted by the "demonic din" of seabirds and tortoises, whose faces evinced "sorrow and penal hopelessness" as they eked out an existence amid "arrested torrents of tormented lava." The author of Moby-Dick failed to appreciate that the absence of people had permitted a unique variety of species of birds and reptiles - from finches, boobies, and flightless cormorants to iguanas and giant tortoises - to colonize and evolve on the islands of the archipelago.

Anyone who believes that the human story of the Galápagos begins with Darwin will revel in the book’s early chapters. British buccaneer William Dampier sailed on the pirate ship Batchelor's Delight in the 1680s and wrote a popular book that blended swashbuckling with natural history. In 1709, Woodes Rogers pondered the islands' volcanic origin and the source of their placid reptiles, planting the seed for further scientific scrutiny.

The first people to take much notice of the archipelago's abundant life were whalers. Navy commander David Porter, sent to the Galápagos to protect American whalers during the War of 1812, wrote an important travel journal that would open readers' eyes to the peculiar fauna. Porter noted, for instance, that the tortoises on different islands possessed carapaces with distinctive shapes. Nonetheless, he summed up the place as dreary and desolate.

Then came Darwin. After Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus established a system for naming flora and fauna, naturalists began collecting and classifying every life form everywhere. That would be part of the mission of the HMS Beagle under the command of Robert Fitzroy during a survey of the southern coast of South America. Darwin wasn't the first choice of Cambridge scientists to serve as the captain's gentleman companion, but, writes Larson, "the others all declined and the lot passed to young Darwin, who had nothing better to do anyway." Plus the 22-year-old was passionate about natural history.

During five years aboard the Beagle, Darwin spent only five weeks in the Galápagos, in 1835, and set foot on four of its islands. At first attracted more by the islands’ geology, Darwin turned his attention to wildlife only because of a fortuitous lack of active volcanoes. He made detailed notes on the tortoises and noticed how these and the mockingbirds differed among the islands. He neglected to notice the uniqueness of the finches now most commonly associated with his name. In fact, Darwin's specimen labels do not specify on which island he collected the birds.

It took ornithologist John Gould back in England to sort through the collection and realize that the finches comprised several species, each with a distinctive bill adapted to a particular diet. Gould's conclusions catalyzed Darwin's thinking about the mechanism by which species originate. Darwin wrote that as each island apparently possessed certain unique forms of life, "we seem to be brought somewhat near to the great fact - the mystery of mysteries - the first appearance of new beings on this earth." Even so, his seminal On the Origin of Species contained a mere half-dozen mentions of the Galápagos.

Larson relates how the islands became a theoretical battleground for evolutionists and their foes. Harvard's eminent zoologist Louis Agassiz appreciated extreme environmental changes - he deduced the existence of ice ages - but he nevertheless denied that life changed over time. Determined to defeat Darwinism, Agassiz went to the Galápagos in 1871 while recovering from a stroke. Stopping in San Francisco on his way home, Agassiz donated his specimens from the islands to the fledgling California Academy of Sciences. Agassiz also spurred San Francisco's merchants and magnates to support scientific research as the path to intellectual and economic progress.

As the twentieth century dawned, California took an active role in Galápagos studies. In 1905 and 1906, a major academy expedition spent 17 months visiting 23 islands. The 75,000 natural history specimens, still one of the world's premier Galápagos collections, became the basis for a new museum after the 1906 earthquake and fire destroyed the academy's original collections from the voyage.

Galápagos tourism grew in the wake of the efforts of zoologist William Beebe and a 1923 New York Zoological Society expedition. Beebe earned a reputation as a consummate communicator of science (and like Carl Sagan was denied membership in the National Academy of Sciences). His romanticized magazine articles and the book Galápagos: World's End launched an era of private yachts embarking for the islands and even inspired an aborted colonization effort by Norwegians.

Beebe downplayed the struggle for island life to survive and promoted a benign view of nature. But the darker reality emerged through watershed work by David Lack, an English schoolteacher and amateur birder who set out in 1938 to make a shoestring study of finches. His painstaking efforts to document interspecific competition driving natural selection earned him a position at Oxford and international fame. Scientists continue to watch the finches closely - most notably Princeton biologist Peter Grant, the subject of Jonathan Weiner's book The Beak of the Finch.

Biologists continue to debate details of how new finch species arise and what light this microcosm sheds on the process of evolution, but they stand a chance of finding some answers in the place where evolution has been laid bare. More than 50,000 people arrive at the isolated islands each year seeking something: evidence, answers, or simply solitude. The Galápagos will remain a critical crossroads of cultural thought if we manage to protect the creatures that might tell us what we long to know.