The Beak of the Finch tells the story of two Princeton University
scientists - evolutionary biologists - engaged in an extraordinary
investigation. They are watching, and recording, evolution as it is
occurring - now - among the very species of Galapagos finches that
inspired Darwin's early musings on the origin of species. They are
studying the evolutionary process not through the cryptic medium of
fossils but in real time, in the wild, in the flesh. The finches that
Darwin took from Galapagos at the time of his voyage on the Beagle led
to his first veiled hints about his revolutionary theory. But Darwin
himself never saw evolution as Peter and Rosemary Grant have been seeing
it - in the act of happening. For more than twenty years they have been
monitoring generation after generation of finches on the island of
Daphne Major - measuring, weighing, observing, tracking, analyzing on
computers their struggle for existence. We see the Grants at work on the
island among the thousands of living, nesting, hatching, growing birds
whose world and lives are the Grants' primary laboratory. We explore the
special circumstances that make the Galapagos archipelago a paradise for
evolutionary research: an isolated population of birds that cannot
easily fly away and mate with other populations, islands that are the
tips of young volcanoes and thus still rapidly evolving as does the life
that they support, a food supply changing radically in response to
radical variations of climate - so that in a brief span of time the
Grants can see the beak of the finch adapt. And we watch the Grants'
team observe evolution at a level that was totally inaccessible to
Darwin: the molecular level, as the DNA in theblood samples taken from
the birds reveals evolutionary change. Here, brilliantly and lucidly
recounted - with important implications for our own day, when man's
alterations of the environment are speeding the rate of evolutionary
changes - is a scientific enterprise in the grand m
