The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time
Winner of the Pulitzer PrizeOn 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...
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Winner of the Pulitzer PrizeOn 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.
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Format: paperback
ISBN:
9780679733379 (067973337X)
ASIN: 067973337X
Publish date: May 30th 1995
Publisher: Vintage
Pages no: 332
Edition language: English
Category:
Non Fiction,
History,
Science,
Popular Science,
Environment,
Nature,
Natural History,
Biology,
Animals,
Evolution,
Birds
I'm ashamed to say that I didn’t know until recently (after reading Dawkins’ magnificent book The Ancestor’s Tale) that evolution can in fact be observed happening in real time and not only in as short a time as centuries, but also in decades and even years. In that book, Dawkins spoke about Rosemar...
Over and over you hear "evolution happens over immense spans of time. We can't see it happen." Baloney. These researches watched it happen and wrote a wonderful book about it. "Read this and deal with it!" to people who won't learn about natural selection and insist in bathing in ignorance!
A very complete and persuasive argument for evolution, Jonathan Weiner accompanies and interviews some of the most respected professionals in the fields of biology- evolutionists, ecologists, ornithologists, botanists, conservationists, geneticists, molecular biologists, and microbiologists, all sho...
This book is really important. The study of how micro-evolution happens from one year to the next to the next in the Galapagos gave me a lot of insight into how the environment shapes species. Traits are constantly changing, yet the graph jitters back and forth around some more-or-less average val...