The World Is on a Collision Course With Itself
The internet is designed to harbor isolated, extremist ideologies. What happens when they meet?
Almost 200 years ago, in 1831, Charles Darwin embarked on his now famous journey aboard the S.S. Beagle. This was the journey on which he visited the Galapágos Islands and formalized his theory of evolution via natural selection. (The idea of natural selection was actually hypothesized earlier by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck.)
Everything about the fauna on the islands, Darwin noticed, was simultaneously familiar and exotic. Animals typically diminutive in mainland environments were much larger on islands, and animals typically massive in mainland environments, much smaller. This made Darwin wonder if there were something about islands that gave way to the unique physical traits of the species he was observing, like the Galapágos’ famed giant tortoises.
Evolutionary biologists have since theorized that islands’ status as inversions of mainland ecosystems can be explained by their comparative lack of resources. Megafauna like elephants can’t grow as large on islands because they don’t have access to the same nutrient sources offered by mainland ecosystems. Similarly, small mainland species — rodents, for instance, or tortoises — grow much larger on islands because…
