Charles Darwin

person · earth

English naturalist, 1809-1882. His first published book-length scientific monograph was not about evolution but about coral: The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs, 1842, written from observations made during the Beagle voyage, chiefly in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. In it he proposed that fringing reefs, barrier reefs and atolls are not three kinds of reef but three stages of one process, with a subsiding volcanic foundation and upward coral growth as the mechanism. The argument is a model of inference from distribution: Darwin had no way to see beneath a reef, and reasoned from the geometry of reefs at different stages instead. It was contested for over a century and confirmed by drilling in 1952. He belongs in this Journey because reef geography is not an accident of where corals happen to be — it is the signature of a process, and he identified the process before there was any means of testing it.

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