''The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time'' () is a 1994 nonfiction book about

evolutionary biology Evolutionary biology is the subfield of biology that studies the evolutionary processes ( natural selection, common descent, speciation) that produced the diversity of life on Earth. It is also defined as the study of the history of life ...

, written by Jonathan Weiner. It won the 1995

Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction The Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction is one of the seven American Pulitzer Prizes that are awarded annually for the "Letters, Drama, and Music" category. The award is given to a nonfiction book written by an American author and published duri ...

. In 2014, a substantially unchanged 20th-anniversary edition e-book was issued with a preface by the author.

Content

The finches of the title are the Galapagos or 'Darwin's Finches,'

passerine A passerine () is any bird of the order Passeriformes (; from Latin 'sparrow' and '-shaped'), which includes more than half of all bird species. Sometimes known as perching birds, passerines are distinguished from other orders of birds by th ...

songbirds in the Galapagos Islands. The species are so distinct that when

Charles Darwin Charles Robert Darwin ( ; 12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was an English naturalist, geologist, and biologist, widely known for his contributions to evolutionary biology. His proposition that all species of life have descended ...

collected them in the islands he thought they were completely different birds, and it was only when he was back in London in 1837 that the ornithologist

John Gould John Gould (; 14 September 1804 – 3 February 1881) was an English ornithologist. He published a number of monographs on birds, illustrated by plates produced by his wife, Elizabeth Gould, and several other artists, including Edward Lear, ...

revealed that they were closely allied, reinforcing Darwin's growing view that “species are not immutable.” The adaptations of their numerous species, in three genera, show diverging evolution to exploit several ecological niches in the rugged and dry Galápagos Islands. Weiner follows the career of two biologists,

Peter and Rosemary Grant Peter Raymond Grant (born October 26, 1936) and Barbara Rosemary Grant (born October 8, 1936) are a British married couple who are evolutionary biologists at Princeton University. Each currently holds the position of emeritus professor. The ...

, who have spent twenty years proving that Charles Darwin did not know the full strength of his theory of evolution. On a desert island among the Galapagos,

Daphne Major Daphne Major is a volcanic island just north of Santa Cruz Island and just west of the Baltra Airport in the Archipelago of Colón, commonly known as the Galápagos Islands. It consists of a tuff crater, devoid of trees, whose rim rises above the ...

, the Grants are showing that among the finches of the Galapagos, natural selection sometimes takes place so rapidly we can watch it at work.

Kim Sterelny Kim Sterelny (born 1950) is an Australian philosopher and professor of philosophy in the Research School of Social Sciences at Australian National University and Victoria University of Wellington. He is the winner of several international prizes ...

(2007) cites this rapid natural selection as illustrating an important point about periods of relative stasis in the

punctuated equilibrium In evolutionary biology, punctuated equilibrium (also called punctuated equilibria) is a theory that proposes that once a species appears in the fossil record, the population will become stable, showing little evolutionary change for most of i ...

hypothesis of

Niles Eldredge Niles Eldredge (; born August 25, 1943) is an American biologist and paleontologist, who, along with Stephen Jay Gould, proposed the theory of punctuated equilibrium in 1972. Education Eldredge began his undergraduate studies in Latin at Columb ...

and Stephen Jay Gould: "In claiming that species typically undergo no further evolutionary change once speciation is complete, they are not claiming that there is no change at all between one generation and the next. Lineages do change. But the change between generations does not ''accumulate''. Instead, over time, the species wobbles about its phenotypic mean. Jonathan Weiner's ''The Beak of the Finch'' describes this very process". Darwin's finches are different closely related species which Darwin discovered on the Galapagos Islands. Darwin's voyage on the ''Beagle'', and the finches in particular, are known to have influenced his thinking so that he would later produce a basic

theory of evolution by natural selection Natural selection is the differential survival and reproduction of individuals due to differences in phenotype. It is a key mechanism of evolution, the change in the heritable traits characteristic of a population over generations. Charle ...

. Darwin reasoned that there had to be a common ancestor. Later, extensive research was done by Peter and Rosemary Grant. The birds are all about the same size (10–20 cm). They mainly differ in the form of the beak. The beak is adapted to the food they eat. The birds are all brownish or black. They have short rounded wings and a rounded tail that often appears cocked to one side. Most male finch mature to a solid black color, while the females mature to a drab grayish color. Exceptions are made for the Vegetarian and Tree Finches the males never become completely black rather they have a black head, neck and upper breast. Warbler, Woodpecker and Mangrove Finches have more of an olive color. In the conclusion the author relates the speed of evolution to the growing resistance of insects to insecticides and of bacteria to penicillin and related anti-bacterial drugs.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Beak Of The Finch, The 1994 non-fiction books Books about evolution Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction-winning works 1994 in biology