The Beak of the Finch by Jonathan Weiner

The Beak of the Finch by Jonathan Weiner

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 Gal pagos 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 Gal pagos 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 Gal pagos 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.

Jonathan Weiner is one of the most distinguished popular-science writers in the country: his books have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Slate, Time, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Scientific American, Smithsonian, and many other newspapers and magazines, and he is a former editor at The Sciences. He is the author of The Beak of the Finch; Time, Love, Memory; Long for This World; His Brother's Keeper; The Next One Hundred Years; and Planet Earth. He lives in New York, where he teaches science writing at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780679733379
ISBN 10	067973337X
Title	The Beak of the Finch
Author	Jonathan Weiner
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Random House USA Inc
Year published	1995-05-30
Number of pages	352
Prizes	Winner of Pulitzer Prize 1995, Nominated for ALA Best Books for Young Adults.
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable