“We have the image of Darwin as that bearded, gray-haired gentleman, who represents a lot of wisdom. But Darwin, at that time, was only around 22 years old, he was a young man who was open to getting to know the world and that’s what he did.”
The sentence above speaks of the inspiration that the British biologist and naturalist Charles Darwin (1809-1892), who would revolutionize human history with his theory of evolution through the natural selection of species, gave for a trip and, with it, a book, which Márcio Pimenta wrote and has just released. In it, Darwin is not a character, but the guiding thread of a journey that took him not to the places where the British would consolidate his theory, but to those that first led him to question what until then was believed unquestionable: that the human being did not come ready-made from the factory. It, like all animals on the face of the Earth, was the result of many millennia of adaptation to the different biomes and geological and meteorological phenomena on the planet.
“The central role of my story”, points out Pimenta, “is time”.
Pimenta’s book, “Finding Darwin – An Expedition to the Ends of the World”, narrates the author’s journey to and through the Patagonia region, aboard a jeep. The former economist who abandoned his career to dedicate himself to photography and exploration follows the places where Darwin passed on his first voyage aboard the British Royal Navy ship HMS Beagle, between 1831 and 1836.
The captain of the Beagle was none other than Robert FitzRoy, who today gives his name to one of the most beautiful peaks in the region. Darwin, then, was almost what we know today as an intern, an apprentice who took his first steps in biological research. And, based on mammal fossils found along the way, and the observation of different species of emus that inhabited different geographic spaces separated, sometimes only by a river, he began to think about the ability of these species to adapt to each environment.
The author remembers, as he develops his journey in complete solitude along roads swept by brutal winds and dangerous curves, that FitzRoy himself, a fervent and conservative Christian, would become one of the most virulent critics of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, after having led fierce discussions about slavery, defended by the former and abhorred by the latter. The divine origin of the human being was not to be questioned, nor was the primacy of the “civilized” white being over inferiors. With a view like this, one can imagine what FitzRoy would think of human kinship with apes.
On his own journey, Pimenta comes to the conclusion that, if species evolve through “descent with modification”, human beings add an extra spice, “of constant adjustment and adaptation”. And from the experience he concludes that the greatest difficulty in traveling alone through this inhospitable and imposing territory is dealing with “the accumulation of information about how we relate to the environment and how it transforms us”.
“There are two very difficult issues during an expedition like this,” says Pimenta. “Silence, initially, becomes absence. And as we continue, it becomes presence.” He adds that solitude in this type of travel “is sometimes uncomfortable, because we are very used to distractions and, if you are alone, it is just you with your experiences, with your relationship with the world at that moment.”
At a certain point during the journey, Pimenta says he had to get out of the car “to feel the ground, feel the landscape, so that the gaze could be as distant as possible, to be part of that place”.
Finding Darwin – An Expedition to the Ends of the World
- Author Márcio Pimenta
- Publisher Solisluna, 288 p.
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