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

Media:	Paperback
Author:	Jonathan Weiner
Publisher:	Vintage
Release date:	30 May, 1995
List price:	~~$14.00~~
Our price:	$11.20 that is 20% off!

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

Average rating: Stars

Wonderful field biology account, poor defense of evolution.

This book is about 2 subject areas, really. First, field biology, population genetics and research on birds in the Galapagos Islands.

The author gives an in-depth look into research done by two biologists named the Grants and their graduate students over many years in the Galapagos islands. He interviews, follows and discusses the Grants. He also explains a lot of their work and what it means in a general ecological sense. For example, lots of this book concerns measuring bird's beaks and how they change over time as conditions also change over time.

This part of the book may lose the average reader and page after page of bird beak information may not thrill everyone. If this kind of stuff isn't your cup of tea, then give this book a pass. I, personally, found the great detail fascinating and necessary to really get at what the Grants work is all about.

From a literary point of view, there is only so much you can do with bird beaks and that Weiner makes this reading as rewarding and interesting as he does is commendable.

From a scientific point-of-view the Grant's work is observational and their work is limited by these constraints; That is, their work is not really experimental. A good null hypothesis comparing data needs to have some single factor manipulated in a controlled way to yield the best data. Now I know you can't really do that in a natural ecosystem, doing something like removing all the seeds of a certain type and see if the beak changes in the predicted manner. But you can do this on a small scale in the laboratory and the Grants have not done this. This lack is why their work, although painstaking and excellent, is not that earthshaking. Their research is usually pigeon-holed in a little niche and not something that makes its way into the average college ecology text.

The author does a creditable job for a layman in describing field research and ecological concepts. Ideas like competition, predation, selection, gene pools and the like are really best described using complex mathematics involving the calculus, matrices, and statistical models, so being able to understand what the heck the Grants are getting at is a coup for the author.

The second subject area is gradually included in the book and then the book shifts character and ends with an unscientific defense of something vaguely referred to as evolution.(Thus, the title "A story of evolution in our time") Weiner mixes up several concepts and includes them all under a charged word that means different things to different people, as you can see from the reviews already here.

This book does a great job in describing field work and specific observations regarding selection in response to pressures like change in rainfall. It does not do a good job supporting evolution- In part, because the author never adequately defines what he means when he says the word "evolution". Do the data show that bird beaks change over time? Yes. Do they demonstrate what drives this change? Only in part, because correlation is not the same as causality.

Then you come to the concept of evolution. I take it that Weiner means everything from adaptation and organic evolution theories stating that all life started from changes in the primordial soup to atheism. These are not at all the same topic and Weiner fails completely to explain this. Since the reader never knows what exactly Weiner is defending, the last part of the book where some of the scientists involved dis others due to religion or being a member of some religious group that, it is implied, feels differently is head-scratchingly vague and out of place.

The bird's beaks grow, shrink, thicken and thin back and forth and in the end there is really no major change. So do the data prove "evolution"? No, they do not. So if you're looking for a defense of your zealously held political beliefs regarding "evolution" you should read elsewhere. And if you read the bibliography and are outraged that there are no articles "proving" creationism to balance the other articles, you need to realize that this is really not the purpose of this book. Unfortunately, the author never realized this and thus the imprecise title that leads you away from what this book really should be.

Overall, this is an excellent layman's book on biology and some basic concepts like natural selection and competition. It also is excellent in portraying field biology and those who work in the field. But it fails completely to explain what "evolution in our time" means and implies. Three stars.

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

Wonderful Attention To Detail

The authors spent years of their lives on a secluded island, taking painstakingly detailed measurements of the local finch population (literally checking every bird on the island time and time again), and how it changes in response to local shifts in the environment. It's a fairly simple and straightforward book, but it absolutely skewers every half-cocked objection you've ever heard to Darwin's work. Like Gould's Wonderful Life, the strength of the book is its remarkable ability to notice the little details, and use them as a foundation for a powerful statement on the history of life, and our place on this little rock.

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

No evolution here

After discussing evolution with a friend, she handed me this book to show me that evolution is indeed an observable fact. She told me that this book demonstrated "evolution in action." This excited me, so I read this book hoping to find some convincing evidence for evolution.

Jonathan Weiner did a remarkable job of recording the Grant's work into an extremely readable book, and I hope that what I'm about to say doesn't detract from the dedicated fieldwork of the Grants, whose incredibly detailed measurements of thousands of birds over a 20-year period on the small island of Daphne Major are a major contribution to the study of population dynamics and ecology.

It is very unfortunate that neither Weiner or the Grants couldn't understand the simple act that, while natural selection is a necessary aspect of the evolution model, demonstrating it does not in and of itself demonstrate evolution(if by evolution you mean single cell creatures becoming today's biosphere). What I mean is that natural selection does not produce NEW GENETIC INFORMATION. For bacteria-to-man evolution to work, there MUST be an increase in new genetic information. Neither Weiner nor the Grants demonstrated one example of an increase in new genetic information. Rather, they demonstrated many examples of a LOSS of information, which is what natural selection does.

Another unfortunate aspect of this book were the serious misrepresentations of creationists. Both the Grants and Weiner seemed to think that any inheritable change in a population is a deathblow to creationists. Nothing could be further from the truth. Creationists have no problem with the concept of "change through time." What we have a problem with is "change with the increase of NEW GENETIC INFORMATION." Throughout the book, Wiener creates these straw men, and many more. I could go on all day on how Wiener seriously misrepresented creationists, but I would rather end this review on a good note.

To the creationist, this book greatly confirms the biblical account of creation, that God created plants and animals according to their kind(not species), and that there are genetic limits to these kinds. For me, natural selection is powerful evidence for an intelligent designer, that God programmed each kind of animal with the genetic information to adapt to many different environments.

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