The Rest Is History - 283: Ecuador: Darwin's Adventure to the Galapagos

Episode Date: December 15, 2022

Ecuador: Darwin's Adventure to the Galapagos Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss Charles Darwin's time in Ecuador, where his observation of Finches, Mockingbirds, Iguanas, and many other animals native to the Galapagos, sowed the seed of his theory of evolution... Join The Rest Is History Club (www.restishistorypod.com) for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishist always start these podcasts exactly the same way i say that we're in the middle of the world cup marathon because we are and there's no other way but dominic the thing is we don't actually know if we get in the middle do we because we haven't yet worked out the schedule what we do know tom is that this is a podcast about Ecuador. Now, Ecuador's participation in the World Cup, it has been hanging by a thread for quite a while, hasn't it? Because there was some talk of them being kicked out,

which you were gutted by because you really wanted to do this podcast. Well, you're an absolute, you have a passion. And you've talked to me about this from the beginning of The Rest is History. You have a passion for Ecuadorian history. And you said you would. Dominic, Dominic, I've been up front throughout this that Latin American history is not my strength. Oh, Tom, don't say that.

So Ecuador, basically, I know two things about Ecuador. The first is it was the name of the 1990s club classic by Sash. You familiar with that? No, I'm not. You weren't strutting your stuff to it? I've learned something, Tom. I've learned something on this podcast. I've educated myself, which is lovely.

Down at Love Muscle every Saturday night, dancing to this. Right. Ecuador. You know? You don't remember that at all? I hope they cut this, Tom. I really do. Maybe you'd remember it if you heard it.

I don't know. But the other thing I know about Ecuador, and this is a bit of a cheat, is that a chunk of it was visited by Charles Darwin, namely the Galapagos Islands. Okay. And I know that doing an episode on Ecuador and focusing on Charles Darwin is a bit of a cheat, but that's what I'm doing.

So all that talk about you doing the foundation of Quito. I don't know anything about it. In the vice royalty of Nueva Granada. No. Or Dempsey had the Quito, all that stuff. That was a lie. You're not going to do that at all. I'm not going to do that at all, no.

But actually, and this is a sequel to, after Christmas last time, we did the 12 Days of Christmas, didn't we? We did a kind of series of episodes focused on anniversaries. And one of the episodes was the day that Darwin left Plymouth on the Beagle, 27th of December, 1831. And we talked about the backdrop to this famous voyage that he did, which Darwin described as by far the most important event in my life. The Beagle was a survey ship. It was being sent out to basically map the geography of South America. It was planned

to be a two-year voyage. It ended up being a five-year voyage, complete circumnavigation. And Darwin went on it as a naturalist and geologist, he was preeminently a geologist at this point. That was his main interest. He was less interested in natural history. Although, I mean, he loved it too. He was very keen on beetles. He loved a beetle. Okay.

He was very interested in marine life and he was very good at shooting. So you remember in the Loch Ness episode, we talked about Peter Scott who became a kind of leading conservationist founder of the World Wildlife Fund but he'd begun as a his great pursuit was um was shooting duck and he then became a leading ornithologist and slightly the same thing with Darwin. Coach turned gamekeeper Tom. That he was very good at shooting stuff at uh skinning it at stuffing it all that kind stuff. And so basically he gets signed up. He's

22 years old. He's a gentleman. He's very much an amateur and he's going on board the survey ship. The plan is that he will be looking at the various, you know, the wildlife, all that kind of stuff. But he's also going as a kind of gentleman companion for the captain of the ship, who's a man named Jamesames fitzroy who is also a young man he's about 26 i think when they when they leave and one of the reasons why that is important is that um fitzroy is quite depressive so he's actually the nephew of lord castlereagh the foreign secretary who kills himself oh yeah yes and a former captain of the beagle had also killed himself because i think it's quite isolating, quite lonely being captain of a ship.

So essentially their relationship is like Aubrey and Maturin in Master and Commander. So Darwin is basically Paul Bettany in the film. That's his role. And in fact, I guess that that is why in the film they end up going to the galapagos islands which is where we will be going with fitzroy and darwin okay darwin is a wig he's very progressive uh he's not in favor of slavery uh he's a supporter of the reform act which is uh bubbling away in the background as the beagle sets off fitzroy is an absolute diehard

tory he um he's all in favor of slavery um so there's a huge scope for political arguments but actually they get on pretty well they know that they've got to get on well yeah and so they set off um they uh they head to south america and darwin basically, he is in clover because there is just so much wildlife for him to get into. Right from the beginning, he invents this kind of net that he trawls and he just picks up all this kind of amazing sea animals that he can inspect. He gets to Brazil, there's the rainforest. He describes going into the rainforest and seeing the kind of incredible luxuriance of life. And it leaves him in an excess of delight, he says. Patagonia, he comes across kind of incredible fossils, fossils of ancient mammals, packs them all up. But he also, he gets

involved in kind of political things. So again, we talked about, or maybe we haven't yet talked about Uruguay, and he gets involved in a brief kind of war there there's an attempt to retake a fort on the river plate he visits the Falkland Islands they go around the Midgellan Straits and he's led quite a sheltered life as a gentleman. He's a man from Shrewsbury he's a shop show lad like me. Yeah gone to Cambridge hasn't seen much of the world but he he's kind of brought up short against the way that humans are naturally predacious on each other so he in patagonia he talks to gauchos who who who boast about basically exterminating the indians of the pampas and also he that they they've brought some uh three people Tierra del Fuego at the very bottom of Latin America.

And they've taken them back to England and kind of educated them according to English lights. And now they're taking them back to Tierra del Fuego. And they run off and they don't want to live as English people. They want to go back and live among their people. And Darwin, again, this provokes him to all kinds of thoughts about the different orders of mankind as he sees it. So all kinds of things are ticking away in his mind. And among the things that he is aware of is that when he's away from the land and he's still using his kind of plankton net to draw up all this marine life. What intrigues him is the fact that it's so rich, it's so beautiful. He wonders, what's it there for? Because most people,

most humans can't see it. So if life has been created to be admired by humans, what are all these creatures doing out in the sea? So he says, many of these creatures, so low in the scale of nature, are most exquisite in their forms and rich colors. It creates a feeling of wonder that so much beauty should be apparently created for such little purpose. So again, he's starting to wonder, why do different organisms exist? How have they come into existence? That's a very anthropocentric view of the world, isn't it? That nature only exists to amuse mankind. I think it's slightly more theologically nuanced than that. I think it's, yeah, what is life for? What's the purpose of it? What does it exist for? Why has God created it?

All that kind of thing. And as he's going around Latin America, he's at sea, he's on land, he's looking at the way that mountains rise up. He goes to the Andes, he visits at sea, he's on land, he's looking at the way that mountains rise up, he goes to the Andes, he visits flat plains, and he sees fossils of fish high in the mountain peaks, and he sees the fossils of mountain creatures in lowlands. And he's thinking about how the face of the earth seems to constantly be molded and how creatures have come into existence, and then they seem to vanish from the place where they were. So all this kind of stuff is ticking along, and he's keeping constantly be molded and how creatures have come into existence. And then they seem to have vanished from the place where they were. So all this kind of stuff is ticking along and he's keeping a daily log about it. He's writing notebooks. He's building it up into a diary. This becomes a journal.

And he's thinking about the relationship of geology to natural history and how the two might be interlinked. The particular question is starting to to kind of nudge him a bit like i guess a kind of you know the first onset of a cold at the back of your throat the kind of tickling yeah this question of our species constant which is the absolute religious orthodoxy that god has created species at the beginning of time and the assumption is is that they have remained constant throughout the whole process of time ever since yeah darwin is just kind of start it's starting to niggle at him is that actually the case and it's as he's getting niggled by this question that the beagle sails from mainland Latin America out to sea, and they arrive at the Galapagos Islands.

So they already knew the Galapagos were there, obviously. They absolutely do. So the Galapagos Islands, well, shall I read you Darwin's description of them? Do. Yeah, I will. That'd be lovely. So this archipelago consists of 10 principal islands, Darwin wrote, of which five exceed the others in size. They're situated under the equator and between 500 and 600 miles westward off the coast of America.

They are all formed of volcanic rocks. A few fragments of granite curiously glazed and altered by the heat can hardly be considered as an exception. So they are a long way off. And they seem to have first been discovered by the spanish um and then they uh they become a very popular haunt of english pirates right and and then of whalers yeah so if you remember in master and commander the film yeah the french are preying on english whalers yeah it's actually an american whaler who discovered it in 1818 so that portrait in master and commander is anachronistic as actually is the portrait of them playing cricket because uh in that film they're shown bowling over arm

oh they would have been bowling under arm so that's another mistake oh dear so in 1818 an american whaler had had arrived off there and he discovered um this huge number of sperm whales and all the whalers come piling in so yeah that's basically what it's for but then in 1832 so um we're now in 1835 uh so darwin's been at sea for what that's four years so he's been at sea a long time ecuador had annexed in 1832 um and they've on one of the islands an island that the um the ecuadorians callediana, they set up a prison colony. But the guy in charge of this prison colony is an Englishman called Nicholas Lawson. And obviously, they're perfect as a prison colony because they're completely barren.

They're completely isolated. There is no prospect of any convict escaping. So the Beagle arrives on 15th of September, 1835. And should we take a break at this point? And then when we come back, I'll describe what Darwin saw. What a cliffhanger. What's he going to see, Tom? And in the long run, the impact that this has on him.

Excellent. We'll come back after the break and you'll find out what Darwin saw. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip, and on our Q&A we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club.

If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome back to The Rest Is History. As is his want, Tom Holland has ended the first part of his story on a cliffhanger. We don't know what Charles Darwin is going to see on the Galapagos Islands. Tom, what does he see? Well, first off, of course, I talked about how Darwin is preeminently, at this point, a geologist. That's what interests him.

Yeah. He loves a bit of rock, Domin what interests him. He loves a bit of rock, Dominic. Right. He loves a bit of rock. I'm not. I mean, I can take or leave a rock, if I'm completely honest. So the appearance of the Glaucus is rather grim. So Fitzroy, in his diary, says, a black, dismal-looking heaps of broken lava forming a sure fit for pandemonium.

And Darwin himself brilliantly says that nothing could be less inviting than the first appearance and uh he then compares it to regions of staffordshire staffordshire yeah and he then goes on to compare it to wolverhampton well there's a lot of very interesting wildlife from wolverhampton tom i think that's fair to say but it's not the wildlife so he says from the regular form for the many craters they gave to the country an artificial appearance which vividly reminded me of those parts of staffordshire where the great iron foundries are most numerous so he's thinking of the industrial revolution you know he as you said he's familiar with the back country and so he's comparing it to this kind of industrial wasteland if adrian chiles and noddy holder are listening they will be shocked by this comparison but you know the hollands come from um they come from stoke stoke where they originate from so

stoke yeah it could have been he could have been talking about stoke i mean stoke small potter is though yeah so he's basically what he's looking at is volcanic cones most of them have calcified but he you know there's the odd one where a drift of you know wisps of smoke arising so he's very very interested in that but of course what is really striking about the galapagos island and what it is globally famous for is its wildlife, which is very, very distinctive. And again, Fitzroy, who's not a naturalist, but he immediately notes about it. In his journal, he says, innumerable crabs and hideous iguanas started in every direction

as we scrambled from rock to rock. So that's very kind of Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World or something, isn't it? Absolutely. The hideous iguanas. I mean, even you must be able to picture the iguanas of the Galapagos Islands. Are they enormous? Are they big?

They're not as big as they are in a million years BC, if you've ever seen that. Right. Where they, like a Welsh guest menace by a giant iguana. But they're pretty large. And what's distinctive about them is that they can swim. Okay, I would find that disturbing. Yeah. That's something that gets picked up in in um master and commander i think one of the boys the little boy the midshipman yeah he's had his arm chopped off but uh it doesn't matter

because his love of natural history keeps him going mr blatant comes and tells yeah yes comes and tells maturin that the iguanas are swimming yeah and he goes what and then they get attacked by the french and yeah so so paul bettany is denied the chance to come up with the theory of evolution anyway so you've got the iguanas darwin is still at this point very very keen on shooting things he he loves a hunt but he finds the wildlife on uh the galapagos islands disappointing because it's so tame and so he gets his gun and and he sees a hawk they're very unthreatening aren't they and when he sees a hawk and he pokes it with his gun yeah and the hawk just kind of stares at it this is not good sport at all uh so that's the source of disappointment for darwin and basically

he leaves the the shooting to his his servant sims covington who uh was recruited according to the ship's list as a fiddler and boy to the poop cabin right so he was 15 when the beagle embarked from Plymouth so he's 19 by this point and Darwin is is using him to shoot specimens it's the only way that you can you shoot a specimen and then you stuff it so that's what he's he's doing interestingly he he's not particularly interested in the iguanas because they've been labeled as mainland, as coming from the mainland. So he thinks there's nothing particularly interesting in them. And he doesn't appreciate that their ability to swim makes them distinctive.

So that's one for Maturin, nil for Darwin. Yeah. Very poor from Darwin. He doesn't notice that. Then there are the tortoises, for which the Galapagos Islands are famous. Huge, giant tortoises, enormous tortoises. And again, Darwin is not particularly interested in them either because his theory is that they have been brought from the Indian Ocean by the English pirates.

Because obviously tortoises make wonderful food if you're a sailor going to sea, you just plonk them on and turn them upside down and then you eat them. So he's not particularly interested in them. But there is a comment that Lawson, who's the Englishman in charge of the penal colony, makes to him that subsequently he will recall. And this comment is that Lawson can tell from which of the various islands of the Galapagos a tortoise comes from the shape of its shell. So in due course, that will be something that Darwin picks up on. But at the time, he doesn't pick up on it. Then there are the birds. And the thing that Darwin really focuses

in, there are mockingbirds. And again, he starts to notice that the mockingbirds, like the tortoises, differ from island to island. This does interest him. When the specimens are brought back to him, he tags them according to which island they've been shot on. tortoises differ from island to island this does interest him when the specimens are shot brought back to him he tags them according to which island they've been shot on right and keeps them separate so he he's starting to get the sense that maybe there's something intriguing here that these birds are different on each island why is that a revelation because surely darwin must be aware that for example you know there are different animals in Italy than there are in, or birds, than there are in Britain? Or how is this a tremendous revelation to him

that different parts of the world, even in close proximity, will have a slightly different kind of flora and fauna? Because the assumption is that these are birds that can be found, say, in South America. So that's why he's not interested in the guanas, or elsewhere South America. So that's why he's not interested in iguanas or elsewhere in the world. That's why he's not interested in the tortoises. And so the assumption is about the mockingbirds as well, that there is the species of mockingbirds that were created by God, and that's what they're like. When he starts to notice that

not only are the mockingbirds on the Galapagos Islands different from the ones on the mainland, but that the different kind of mockingbird on each island is different. That's something unexpected. He hasn't seen this up close before. That's unusual. The sheer variegated nature of the variety. That's what impresses itself upon him. Yes. So it's not like he sees this and he immediately comes up with the theory of evolution, which is perhaps the kind of the cliche about Darwin and the Galapagos Islands. That's not what happens. And it's not even like, you know, it strikes him as a kind of great insight. It's just, it's something interesting and unexpected that is worth recording and worth making, worth detailing. There are also finches, lots and lots of different kinds of finches, lots and lots of small birds.

And Covington, his servant, shoots vast numbers of these birds. They're very, very tame. He keeps them, but he finds it very, very difficult to tell them apart. Lots of these finches look pretty identical. And so Darwin writes, an explanation of the plumage was almost identical nor were the birds habits distinguishable for they feed together in large irregular flocks and you know he's sitting covington is bringing him back all these kind of finches darwin is sitting in in his um cabin in the beagle trying to work them out and basically he he throws his hands up and says he can't because all these specimens just form an inexplicable confusion, he calls them.

But again, there is something about the finches, the variety of the finches, that strikes him as being very curious. So again, it's not like he's saying, wow, there's something amazing here that I need to explain. Maybe theory of evolution by natural selection would explain it. That's not what happens. But again, to go back to that analogy, it's a tickling at the back of his throat. It's the sense of something odd that is worth considering. So they're just basically there for a couple of weeks. They're not there for very long. And then they set off across the Pacific. They head to Tahiti. And on the way, it's on the way that Darwin really starts to kind of, he's looking at the mockingbirds. He's put them into different groups according to different

islands. And he's really, really intrigued by the fact that, say, the birds from one island and another, that there are kind of little differences in them. And he's pondering this and pondering this. And it's just kind of adding to his doubts about the stability of species because the implication is that if these birds have got the Galapagos Islands and they've you know they've gone to different islands and yeah they're different on each island then perhaps the implication of that is that they have changed over the course of time and he hasn't been reading anything in Britain before he left that has fueled this or has put some of these ideas in his head? Because there's some degree of historical debate, isn't there, about whether Darwin is genuinely the

first or whether he's getting ideas from other people? Well, there's Erasmus Darwin. So it's in the family. Yes, it is bubbling away there. But Darwin, had he not gone on the Beagle, would probably have become a clergyman. And so there are kind of religious dimensions to this that will, of course, trouble him. Anyway, so on they sail and they end up back in Britain. And Darwin has all this, you know, he has his collection. All the collection he got in Latin America, he'd sent back to England via another ship. But the Galapagos finches, the Galapagos mockingbirds, all these specimens that he's brought, he's got them with him throughout

the entire voyage. And so he, on the 4th of January, 1837, he presents these to the London Zoological Society. And there are 80 mammals and there are 450 different types of birds. Crikey. And among these are the finches that basically basically darwin had thrown his hand up and said i can't make any sense of this and darwin is you know he's not particularly interested in them um he he remains confused by them he since he hasn't really got a handle on them um and he hasn't even identified all of them as finches so he thinks that some of them are wrens he thinks some of them are relatives of blackbirds um so he's really not got on top of them at all. And he certainly doesn't have a sense

that all these different kinds of birds that are in fact finches might be closely related. He's not on top of that. And so he hands them over to the Zoological Society. They're very badly labeled. He's labeled some finches he's labeled some wrens you know so on however fortunately there is a guy who's perfectly suited to going through all these specimens and making sense of them this is a guy called john gould who unlike darwin is not a gentleman so he is actually um the son of a gardener um he makes a living as a taxidermist so he's the um the taxidermist for the uh for the zoological society right the animal preserver is his official name

um so he's not hugely well paid but he's a very very brilliant ornithologist this is his great love and you know he's he's sitting in uh the offices of the zoological society stuffing things when these finches get delivered to him yeah and he's so intrigued by them that he pauses the work for which he's being paid and starts trying to to work out what all these different birds are and he rapidly realizes that actually the wrens and so on um the blackbirds that all of them are finches and and he spends um basically a week studying them six days concentrated work and by the end he has he has realized that they are 12 distinct species of finch and in due course he will realize that a third one that darwin had catalogued as a wren,

that that is also a finch. So 13 different species of finch in all. I'll be frank with you, Tom. I don't understand why this is a dramatic breakthrough in... I mean, who cares? I mean, maybe I'm not a birder, or indeed, I have no knowledge of science at all. So explain to me why this is exciting so perhaps it's moderately interesting if you're interested in birds for their own sake yeah that they're all these new species of finch yeah brilliant you know you're a fan of the finch i love finches can't get enough of them you love a finch you can't get enough of them this is great but for darwin yeah it sharpens the question that his analysis of the mockingbirds,

and then remembering what Lawson, the prison governor, had said about the tortoises. Oh, the shells, yeah. The different kinds of shells. The problem is, how do you explain that each island has a distinct species? In other words, what is the process by which that might have happened? Did God create? Is it best to be explained by the idea that, yes, that God creates the Galapagos Islands, and he decides each island will have its own distinct species of finch?

Yeah. Or is it evidence of speciation? In other words, a species of finch gets blown across the seas from the mainland, and they land on different islands and they start to adapt to the different situation that you get on each island and the thing that's absolutely key to this is the beaks because the beaks oh right okay each species of finch yeah has a different kind of beak and the beak is proportionate to you know whatever the nuts or whatever it is the trees the plant life that you need to to get your your food if you're a finch okay so the beak is is perfectly adapted

as though it had been designed tom well as though it had been designed although or perhaps it has been selected by natural means would be the alternative theory. And so this is the theory that Darwin starts to ponder. And in 1839, so that's a couple of years after he's got back and presented his finches to the Zoological Society, he publishes what he calls his journal remarks. It will be reissued and is more famously known as the voyage of the beagle. And he writes in that about the, about the beaks that the finches on the Galapagos islands, that it is very remarkable that a nearly perfect gradation of structure in this

one group can be traced in the form of the beak from one exceeding in dimensions out of the largest grow beak to another differing, but little from that of a warbler and this isn't the conclusive proof for a theory of evolution by natural selection but it's a it's a very very neat illustration of it and when in 1845 um this this journal gets published again under the title of the voyage of the beagle dar. Darwin is, again, he's testing the waters more boldly. And he writes, seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one small, intimately related group of birds, one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago,

one species had been taken and modified for different ends. So the passive voice there had been taken i mean it leaves it open that perhaps god had done this but it's also leaving open the possibility that there might be some other explanation for it and again he hints very strongly at what this might be because he says he writes both in space and time we seem to be brought somewhat near to that great fact that mystery of mysteries the first appearance of new beings on the earth and you get the sense that you know he's he's nervous because he knows how sensitive how in fact how explosive this theory may prove to be and when in due course he comes to write The Origin of Species and to publish it, the finches are on the Galapagos Islands feature. And so the role that the Galapagos Islands plays

is always recognized and acknowledged. But I think the reason that it plays this kind of key role in, if you like, the mythology of Darwinism is the fact that if you want a kind of physical portrayal of how evolution works how the theory of natural selection functions you have fossils so the classic one is gradations of horse evolving over the course of geological time another one is whales palaeontologists have found uh the land animal that becomes the marine animal and you can kind of trace the progress. But if you want living animals, the beaks of those finches are pretty good. And so they've come to be called Darwin's finches because they're emblematic of the theory that he comes up with. But I think that the myth is that he goes to the Galapagos Islands and he comes up with the theory of evolution, of bionatural selection. That's not true.

It's a much longer process. But it is, you know, they play an important role in the theory that he will come to. If you compress that story, there's a line, you're drawing a line from his arrival in the Galapagos to him publishing The Origin of Species all those years later. Because there's quite a long interval, isn't there? There is. Between his return and then publishing the theory. And Steve Jones writes brilliantly on Darwin. I mean, he has written about how actually it's the stuff that Darwin sees in England

once he's got back from the voyage of the Beagle that's just as important, if not more important, on influencing all his stuff with worms and all his stuff that he's doing it down house and so on but that's that's as important it's not as good a story though is it tom let's be honest not as good a story no it's not and also don't you think the galapagos have this they play an outsized part in this story partly because the galapagos have this sort of in the in the popular imagination they're the garden of eden aren't they untouched you know unspoiled untouched um a sort of vision of

paradise that's still the way that they are sold to tourists today i mean it's interesting you say they're sold as the garden of eden and paradise because of course you know the bits i read make it sound like hell well if you don't like wolverhampton i mean well fitzroy is just calling it pandemonium you know the the word from milton's paradise lost yeah uh the the vision of of hell that it's black rock smoke inhabited by fearsome monsters but that for us has now become yes as you say a kind of vision of paradise and the environmental stresses that the galapagos islands are under are seen as you know globally as a kind of temperature check on the state of biodiversity absolutely yeah yeah so there we go ecuador fascinating story tom and i think you've done tremendous justice to the richness and

sophistication of ecuador's history and um no no it's a i'm kidding it's a it's a genuinely fascinating story and i say that as somebody who's not saying that some you know you you love your science i'm not really into science it's fair to say but um well i what i don't like about so i don't like abstract nouns basically and um i think what's lovely about the darwin story is that it humanizes it and it places it in time um which i do like i thought um i thought you did that sir i thought you did that beautifully tom i don't often say that to you on this podcast. Thank you very much. I'm sure that specialists in the theory of evolution listening to this, I apologize if I got any of that wrong. I think the outline is basically right.

Tom, we're a podcast, we're not a monograph. Exactly. We're not Radio 3. So that's Ecuador. And on that bombshell, we will see you tomorrow for something else goodbye bye-bye thanks for listening to the rest is history for bonus episodes early access ad-free listening and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com.

That's restishistorypod.com. weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip and on our Q&A we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com.