MARC Record from marc_columbia

LEADER: 03459fam a2200433 a 4500
001 1478389
005 20220602043438.0
008 930922s1994 nyu b 001 0deng
010 $a 93036755
020 $a0679400036 :$c$25.00
035 $a(OCoLC)123252074
035 $a(OCoLC)ocn123252074
035 $9AJA1436CU
035 $a(NNC)1478389
035 $a1478389
040 $aDLC$cDLC$dNNC
043 $apogg---
050 00 $aQL696.P246$bW45 1994
082 00 $a598.8/830438$220
100 1 $aWeiner, Jonathan.$0http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n85180943
245 14 $aThe beak of the finch :$bevolution in real time /$cJonathan Weiner.
250 $a1st ed.
260 $aNew York :$bKnopf :$bDistributed by Random House,$c1994.
263 $a9406
300 $ax, 332 pages :$billustrations ;$c25 cm
336 $atext$2rdacontent
337 $aunmediated$2rdamedia
338 $avolume$2rdacarrier
504 $aIncludes bibliographical references (p. [305]-321) and index.
520 $aThe 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.
520 8 $aThe 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.
520 8 $aWe 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.
520 8 $aWe 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.
520 8 $aAnd 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, an abstraction made concrete, a theory validated in life.
650 0 $aFinches$xEvolution$zGalapagos Islands.
650 0 $aFinches$xEvolution$xResearch$zGalapagos Islands.
600 10 $aGrant, Peter R.,$d1936-$0http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n85341603
600 10 $aGrant, B. Rosemary.$0http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n88276300
852 00 $bsci$hQL696.P246$iW45 1994