Inside Darwin’s Mind | National Geographic

on this Patagonian Plateau
Darwin stumbles across one of his key
discoveries Darwin and his companions
sit down to a typical Gaucho dinner a
small Rhea
as heat the naturalist notices that the
bird seems different than the others he
seen he salvages the wings the head and
much of the skin in time these remains
will be identified as a separate species
Darwin’s Riya the naturalist can’t
understand why there would be a second
species that’s so similar to the first
he’s also perplexed by something else he
learns about the giant Birds
where exactly do you find the big Nandu
versus the small Nandu so del Norte de
Patagonia
in the north of Patagonia there are the
big Reyes and in the South the smaller
or lesser ones Darwin learns that the
common rearranges north of the Rio Negro
while the smaller one extends to the
south the closely allied species seem to
replace one another across the region
it’s a remarkably clear but inexplicable
pattern Darwin also can account for a
feature the flightless reassures with
some of the other birds he sees nearby
we find in South America three birds
which use their wings for other purposes
besides flight the penguin has fins the
steamer is paddles and the ostrich
assails perhaps Strange’s is the steamer
though they look like most other ducks
steamers can’t fly instead they use
their wings to paddle across the surface
of the waves it’s unclear to Darwin why
an all-powerful creator would design
such unusual creatures the radically
different uses for their wings might
suggest that the birds had changed
if this was possible they could have
lost their ability to fly darwin is
intrigued but he remains committed to
the more established idea that species
don’t transform one reason is the fact
that living things seem to have remained
constant through recorded time but
Darwin is only beginning to discover the
difference between the scope of human
experience and the history of life on
Earth