|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Jonathan Weiner, The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time (Knopf, 1994) Reissued in paperback by Vintage in 1995. Finches' beaks are fascinating—and the credit is due entirely to Jonathan Weiner. The birds in question live on Daphne Major, a crater island in the Galápagos archipelago. They eat seeds, hop about, and compete for mates, generation after generation. Weiner artfully reveals what Charles Darwin himself failed to recognize as he traversed the same sun-baked lava almost 170 years ago. Because of their isolation, the islands are a ready-made laboratory for scientists to document natural selection in action. The finches are proving Darwin's eminently logical—yet heretofore—scientifically-unverifiable theories. The Beak of the Finch is a story about birds and humans, especially a pair of remarkable people who have made the destiny of finches their life's work. Peter and Rosemary Grant, both professors of evolutionary biology at Princeton, first came to Daphne Major in 1973. They have known more than 20,000 individual finches from egg to end. "Only God and Peter Grant can recognize Darwin's finches," says the staff at the Charles Darwin Research Center. Weiner connects the story of the Grants' experiments to the broad history of scientific inquiry into the variability of species, natural selection, and evolution. Along the way, he explores the role of human beings in evolution through such topics as bacterial resistance and global warming. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction in 1995. The subject of Creationism could hardly be avoided in a work about evolution written by an American at the end of the 20th century. Weiner saves a brief discussion for his epilogue, "God and the Galápagos," where he notes: "This year a poll will show that nearly half the citizens of the United States do not believe in evolution. Instead they believe that life was created by God in something like its present form, within the last ten thousand years." Weiner wastes few words on this belief. He has just spent almost 300 pages gracefully explaining why Creationists might be misled. MORE: About Jonathan Weiner About Peter Grant's work About Rosemary Grant's work Exploring the Creation-Evolution Controversy |
|
 |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||