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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 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.
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Previews available in: English
Subjects
Evolution, Finches, Research, United States, United States. Bureau of the Census, Population, Grant, Peter R., 1936-, Birds, evolution, Birds, galapagos islands, Galapagos islands, Speech Disorders, Collected works, In infancy and childhood, Language Disorders, Volkserzählung, États-Unis. Bureau of the Census, États-Unis, Umschulungswerkstätten für Siedler und Auswanderer, Pets, Nature, Birds, Census of population (1970)Places
Galapagos IslandsShowing 6 featured editions. View all 6 editions?
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1
The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time
May 1995, Turtleback Books Distributed by Demco Media
Unknown Binding
in English
0606314091 9780606314091
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2
Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time
May 1995, Tandem Library, Turtleback Books
School & Library Binding
in English
1417639849 9781417639847
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3
The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time
May 30, 1995, Vintage
Paperback
in English
067973337X 9780679733379
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4
The beak of the finch: a story of evolution in our time
1995, Vintage
in English
0099468719 9780099468714
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5
The beak of the finch: a story of evolution in our time
1994, Jonathan Cape
in English
0224042300 9780224042307
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6
The beak of the finch: a story of evolution in our time
1994, Knopf, Distributed by Random House
in English
- 1st ed.
0679400036 9780679400035
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Book Details
Edition Notes
Includes bibliographical references (p. [305]-321) and index.
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First Sentence
"Half past seven on Daphne Major."
Work Description
On a desert island in the heart of the Galapagos archipelago, where Darwin received his first inklings of the theory of evolution, two scientists, Peter and Rosemary Grant, have spent twenty years proving that Darwin did not know the strength of his own theory. For among the finches of Daphne Major, natural selection is neither rare nor slow: it is taking place by the hour, and we can watch.
In this dramatic story of groundbreaking scientific research, Jonathan Weiner follows these scientists as they watch Darwin's finches and come up with a new understanding of life itself. The Beak of the Finch is an elegantly written and compelling masterpiece of theory and explication in the tradition of Stephen Jay Gould.
With a new preface.
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