Mark Reece's Blog - Posts Tagged "finches"

The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time by Jonathan Weiner

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This was a very interesting book. Many works on evolutionary biology discuss the topic in overarching terms, with a focus on evolutionary change as it appears over long period of time. By contrast, The Beak of the Finch gave a much more detailed case study, which was interesting both in showing the practicalities of how scientific research is conducted, and also how evolution can occur very rapidly in harsh environments.

Most of the book focuses on the work carried out by Peter and Rosemary Grant, a husband and wife team who devoted many years to studying finches on the Galapagos islands. They carried out their work with great diligence- trapping birds to mark them, recording their ancestry, and studying aspects of their environment, including, for example, the availability and hardness of the nuts the birds feed on. This careful research enabled the grants to record evolutionary change in real time. It is fascinating to know that during a drought, a difference of less than a millimeter in beak size was often the difference between life and death. This harsh selection pressure led to a rapid change in the peak size of the birds within a few generations.

The passion of the Grants for their science is evident in the writing, which lovingly describes the care they took over their work, in addition to their care for the finches and other wildlife on the islands. The book has a novelistic in passages where the Grants' lifestyle and thoughts are described (this does get slightly strange in places, where their clothing and mannerisms are noted at some length).

Although heavily focused on the finches, the book also touches upon similar empirical studies that show evolutionary change over a small number of generations, including guppies and pesticide resistant insects. The latter subject was particularly interesting in the description of how the speed of the change took pesticide companies by surprise. The book has made me want to read some of the original studies.

All in all, a very fine popular science book, which has developed me understanding of the topic considerably.



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