A Finch in Time

"If living things are well made, Darwin argued - if they are admirably adapted to their places in nature, contrivances more elaborate than watches - then even the slightest variations must make a difference to the individual animals and plants that are saddled with them. Some variations must help living things run better, some worse, and some - a very few variations, arising only once in thousands of generations—might help them fit into an entirely new spot in the economy of nature."

(page 50)

Book review, Title The Beak Of The Finch, Author Jonathan Weiner, Rating 4.0,

The Beak Of The Finch Jonathan Weiner Book review

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The Beak of the Finch follows a husband and wife scientific team, Peter and Rosemary Grant, in their studies of Darwin's finches on Daphne Major island in the Galapagos archipelago, looking for evidence of natural selection. They have spent twenty years observing the finch population for direct evidence of natural selection. They concluded from these observations that natural selection is occurring daily.

One of the difficulties in the study of the Theory of Evolution is to find clear evidence of natural selection at work, and to find evidence of the process of the formation of new species. Darwin postulated long periods of time, many thousands of years, which severely handicaps those who employ the modern scientific approach: to look back so long a time is to find only trace evidence, much being either destroyed or simply unrecorded, so to speak. Yet Peter and Rosemary Grant found measurable evidence of natural selection operating in the finch population, and in the populations of other organisms in their ecosystem.

The author helps to show that natural selection is demonstrably operating on the scale of seasons, and that it is ubiquitous, no more clearly relevant than in the study of resistance to human biological control efforts for pests and infectious diseases.