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 Galápagos 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 Galápagos 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
Galápagos 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 the
blood 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
manner, and abstraction made concrete, a theory validated in life.