The Beak of the Finch: a Story of Evolution in Our Time

Publisher Marketing:"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, and abstraction made concrete, a theory validated in life." Review Citations: New York Times 12/03/1995 pg. 86 (EAN 9780679733379, Paperback) Publishers Weekly 05/29/1995 (EAN 9780679733379, Paperback) Wilson Public Library Catalog 01/01/2004 pg. 325 (EAN 9780679733379, Paperback) Booklist 04/15/1994 pg. 1484 (EAN 9780679400035, Hardcover) - *Starred Review Wilson Public Library Catalog 01/01/1994 pg. 68 (EAN 9780679400035, Hardcover) Library Journal 05/15/1994 pg. 95 (EAN 9780679400035, Hardcover) Publishers Weekly 04/18/1994 pg. 56 (EAN 9780679400035, Hardcover) LJ Best Sci-Tech Books 03/01/1995 pg. 37 (EAN 9780679400035, Hardcover) Booklist Editors Choice/Adult 01/15/1995 pg. 853 (EAN 9780679400035, Hardcover) Wilson Senior High Core Col 01/01/1995 pg. 34 (EAN 9780679400035, Hardcover) Wilson Senior High Core Col 01/01/1997 pg. 205 (EAN 9780679400035, Hardcover) Wilson Public Library Catalog 01/01/1998 pg. 297 (EAN 9780679400035, Hardcover) Contributor Bio:  Weiner, Jonathan Jonathan Weiner, formerly a writer and editor for The Sciences, is the author of Planet Earth and The Next One Hundred Years. He lives in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, with his wife and their two sons. Contributor Bio:  Bevine, Victor For over thirty years, Victor Bevine has worked as an actor, screenwriter, audio book narrator, director, and more. A graduate of Yale University, his acting credits include many prestigious roles onstage as well as roles in the film version of A Separate Peace and countless television shows. He has read over one hundred and eighty titles as an audiobook narrator; in 2010, he received an Audiophone Award for his narration of the Pulitzer Prize winning book The Beak of the Finch. He has written several screenplays, including Certainty, which was chosen for two prestigious writers conferences and which served as the basis for his first novel. His thirty-minute short film Desert Cross, which he wrote and directed, won accolades at the Athens International Film Festival. Currently, he serves as CEO of the World Freerunning Parkour Federation (WFPF), of which he is co-founder. He resides in New York City.