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

by Jonathan Weiner

  Acclaim for Jonathan Weiner’s

  The Beak of the Finch

  “Admirable and much-needed … superb at explaining very complex scientific and philosophical concepts in lucid prose.… Weiner’s triumph is to reveal how evolution and science work, and to let them speak clearly for themselves.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “A sparkling exploration of the single most powerful and compelling force in nature.”

  —Philadelphia Inquirer

  “This is science writing at its most accomplished: both an account of how science is done and an eloquent illustration of why we do it.”

  —Globe and Mail (Toronto)

  “Wise and intelligent … Weiner’s engrossing book shows just how profoundly Darwin underestimated the power of his own ideas.”

  —The Sciences

  “It has every chance of becoming a classic.”

  —The Times (of London)

  “This is an exceptional book, artfully crafted, lucid and richly descriptive. It is the best exploration of evolution written in recent years. It conveys a powerful insight into life that helps us to understand the fundamental forces of nature and our relationship to the world about us. Highly recommended.”

  —Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “First class … one of the best pieces of science writing that I have read in a long while.”

  —Nature

  “Spectacular, page-turning … the ideal book to recommend to any doubter who asks, ‘where’s the evidence for evolution.’ ”

  —Sunday Times (London)

  “Jonathan Weiner is a science writer who makes complex research accessible to the ordinary person, and he does so with wit and style.… Reads like a combination detective story and adventure book.”

  —Dallas Morning News

  “Leads us deeper and deeper into what Darwin called ‘the mystery of mysteries’.… Weiner picks up the pieces of this puzzle and holds them up to the light at just the right angle.… He leaves us with not only a greater understanding of the forces of nature but also a greater sense of wonder at creation.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Lyrical … as intimate, precise and meticulous as his subjects groundbreaking work, and deserves to have the same wide influence.”

  —The Economist

  “An invaluable living lesson in evolutionary change.”

  —San Diego Union

  “This remarkable book will forever change your sense of the pace of nature—once you’ve read Weiner’s elegant and absorbing account, the world will seem infinitely more fluid, shifting, alive.”

  —Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature

  “Well-written, fascinating … this classic of science writing deserves to be as widely read as any Tom Clancy thriller.”

  —Roanoke Times & World-News

  “Combines vivid and witty on-the-scene reporting with a sound and evocative explication of Charles Darwin’s place in the history of ideas. Succinct and highly readable, The Beak of the Finch is science writing of a high order.”

  —Timothy Ferris, author of Coming of Age in the Milky Way

  “Darwin’s finches make for a scientific thriller … in The Beak of the Finch, Jonathan Weiner took me on an astonishing voyage of discovery that, in many ways, is a sequel to the most famous scientific voyage in history.”

  —Rochester Democrat and Chronicle

  BOOKS BY JONATHAN WEINER

  The Beak of the Finch

  The Next One Hundred Years

  Planet Earth

  FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, JUNE 1995

  Copyright © by 1994 by Jonathan Weiner

  Original drawings copyright © 1994 by K. Thalia Grant

  Map copyright © 1994 by Anita Karl and James Kemp

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1994.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  Cambridge University Press: Excerpt from Charles Darwin’s Natural Selection, edited by R. C. Stauffer. Reprinted by permission of Cambridge University Press.

  Evolution: Excerpts and two tables from “The Hybridization of the Habitat” by Edgar Anderson (Evolution 2, 1948, pp. 1–9). Reprinted by permission of Evolution.

  Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., and Faber and Faber Limited: Excerpt from “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” from Collected Poems by Wallace Stevens, copyright © 1923, copyright renewed 1951 by Wallace Stevens. Rights outside the U.S. and Canada administered by Faber and Faber Limited, London. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., and Faber and Faber Limited.

  Science and Robert Holt: Excerpt from “Birds Under Selection” (review of Evolutionary Dynamics of a Natural Population by B. Rosemary Grant and Peter R. Grant) by Robert Holt (Science, Vol. 249, 1990, pp. 306–307), copyright © 1990 by the AAAS. Reprinted by permission of Science and the author, Robert Holt.

  Darwin’s route through the Galápagos Islands, in the book’s map, is redrawn from Frank J. Sulloway, “Darwin and the Galápagos,” Biological Journal of the Linnaean Society 21 (1984):32.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Weiner, Jonathan.

  The beak of the finch: a story of evolution in our time / Jonathan Weiner.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references (p. ).

  ISBN 0-679-40003-6

  eBook ISBN 978-1-101-87296-3

  1. Finches—Galápagos Islands—Evolution. 2. Finches—Evolution—Research—Galápagos Islands. 3. Grant, Peter R. 4. Grant, B. Rosemary. I. Title.

  QL696.P246W45 1994

  598.8′830438—dc20 93-36755

  Vintage ISBN: 0-679-73337-X

  v3.1_r1

  For Deborah

  And where is the place of understanding?

  It is hid from the eyes of all living;

  And concealed from the birds of the air.

  —Job 28:20–21

  Preface to the Twentieth Anniversary Edition

  Twenty years have passed since The Beak of the Finch was published. Since then, books have been evolving faster than beaks. E-books were still novelties back in 1994.

  For this twentieth-anniversary edition, I have decided to keep the text unchanged, except for a few small corrections. I want to let it stand as the portrait of a moment. But the remarkable story of Darwin’s finches has expanded in significance on every scale, from the smallest to the largest.

  On the smallest scale, the story of evolution is written in DNA. Back in 1994, no one could observe Darwin’s process in Darwin’s finches from season to season at the molecular level. In The Beak of the Finch, we watch Peter and Rosemary Grant and a few others as they begin to try.

  Ten years later, in 2004, a team of researchers led by Cliff Tabin, of Harvard Medical School, working with the Grants, announced the first success of this kind. Tabin and his team identified one of the key genes that sculpts and resculpts the finches’ beaks under the pressure of natural selection. The gene is called BMP4. The very same gene helps to shape the human face.

  On a larger scale, the story of evolution is written in the death and birth of species. In The Beak of the Finch, the Grants struggle to make sense of their masses of data and discover new insights into the great process of speciation—the origin of species. I
t would have been thrilling to look over their shoulders and witness the origin of a new species in the Galapagos, but that was too much to hope for. It would have been like peeking through a telescope for just a second, and seeing a supernova.

  In 2009, fifteen years after this book was published, the Grants announced a success on this front, too. For me, the memory of the news is bound up with a trip to Kyoto. That year, the Grants won the Kyoto Prize, which is awarded annually by the Inamori Foundation to “those who have contributed significantly to the scientific, cultural, and spiritual betterment of mankind.” The industrialist Kazuo Inamori, the founder of the Kyoto Prize, was kind enough to invite my wife, Deborah, and me to attend the ceremony. When I first met them, the Grants were famous within their field, but obscure outside it. By 2009 though, Peter and Rosemary were celebrities of science, with many international honors and awards to their names. Just the year before, they had been among the winners of the Darwin-Wallace Medal, which is bestowed every fifty years by the Linnean Society of London.

  Deborah and I boarded the plane to Kyoto with Peter and Rosemary. Just before we fastened our seat belts, Peter darted down the aisle and handed me a preprint of a new paper. And as I skimmed the first few lines, I knew why he wanted me to see it. It was a report about a certain family of finches on the island of Daphne Major. The Grants had never mentioned these particular finches to me—they had not wanted any premature publicity—but they had been following the birds for seven generations. During the previous three generations (for interesting, somewhat complicated reasons) the birds of that lineage had bred only among themselves. In other words, the Grants had witnessed the origin of an incipient new species of Darwin’s finches, in Darwin’s islands, through Darwin’s process. Whether this fledgling, still nameless species will last, only time will tell. But it provides a kind of capstone to the Grants’ work, and a fulfillment of Darwin’s magnificent line about the Galapagos finches in Voyage of the Beagle: “Hence, both in space and time, we seem to be brought somewhat near to that great fact—that mystery of mysteries—the first appearance of new beings on this earth.”

  The Grants’ paper came out later that same year, 2009. It was the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the Origin of Species.

  On the very largest scale, the story of evolution is planetary. Life first appeared on Earth several billion years ago and has proliferated and diversified, with five terrible setbacks, five mass extinctions. In 1994, it already seemed likely that our kind was changing the conditions of life so much that we had entered a sixth mass extinction, and a new geological age. Back then, I coined a word for it—the Nooscene, the Age of Mind. But that was not quite right, because we never planned our transformation of Earth’s atmosphere, cryosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere. Collectively, human impact on the rest of life on Earth is mindless as the impact of an asteroid. Today, geologists have begun to call our new age the Anthropocene. That is a better description of the action that we see all around us now. It is change on a planetary scale, without mindfulness.

  Each year more people visit the Galapagos than the year before. Almost everyone sees Daphne Major from a distance, because the little island is plainly visible from the airport on Baltra. But still, no tourist boat ever goes to Daphne. The place is just as lonely and austere as ever. I have returned to the Galapagos twice in the last twenty years, with my family—two trips, ten years apart. Each time, as our boat sailed around Daphne, I was shocked all over again. The island is so bare, blank, steep, and difficult, and yet—how much the Grants have made of it. Peter and Rosemary have retired from Princeton but they still work on the island part of every year. They have been famous in the Galapagos for decades. On our last trip, the captain of the boat told us that the month before, when he sailed past Daphne, he spotted the Grants on the bare steep rock slope of the island. And they waved.

  Jonathan Weiner

  2014

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Map

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Preface to the Twentieth Anniversary Edition

  PART ONE: EVOLUTION IN THE FLESH

  1. Daphne Major

  2. What Darwin Saw

  3. Infinite Variety

  4. Darwin’s Beaks

  5. A Special Providence

  6. Darwin’s Forces

  7. Twenty-five Thousand Darwins

  PART TWO: NEW BEINGS ON THIS EARTH

  8. Princeton

  9. Creation by Variation

  10. The Ever-Turning Sword

  11. Invisible Coasts

  12. Cosmic Partings

  13. Fusion or Fission?

  14. New Beings

  PART THREE: G.O.D.

  15. Invisible Characters

  16. The Gigantic Experiment

  17. The Stranger’s Power

  18. The Resistance Movement

  19. A Partner in the Process

  20. The Metaphysical Crossbeak

  Epilogue: God and the Galápagos

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  PART ONE

  Evolution in the Flesh

  As we have heard, so have we seen.…

  —Psalm 48:8

  Chapter 1

  Daphne Major

  The Creation is never over. It had a beginning but it has no ending. Creation is always busy making new scenes, new things, and new Worlds.

  —IMMANUEL KANT,

  A General Natural History of the Heavens

  Half past seven on Daphne Major. Peter and Rosemary Grant sit themselves down on stones, a few steps from their traps. Peter opens a yellow notebook with waterproof pages. “Okay,” he says. “Today is the twenty-fifth.”

  It is the twenty-fifth of January, 1991. There are four hundred finches on the island at this moment, and the Grants know every one of the birds on sight, the way shepherds can tell every sheep in their flocks. In other years there have been more than a thousand finches on Daphne Major, and Peter and Rosemary could still recognize each one. The flock was down to three hundred once. The number is falling toward that now. The birds have gotten less than a fifth of an inch of rain in the last forty-four months: in 1,320 days, 5 millimeters of rain.

  The Grants, and the Grants’ young daughters, and a long line of assistants, keep coming back to this desert island like sentries on a watch. They have been observing Daphne Major for almost two decades, or about twenty generations of finches. By now Peter and Rosemary Grant know many of the birds’ family trees by heart—again like shepherds, or like Bible scholars, who know that Abraham begat Isaac, and Isaac begat Jacob; and Abraham also begat Jokshan, who begat Dedan, who begat Asshurim, Letushim, and Leummim.

  In each generation there are always a few birds, just one or two in a hundred, that keep away from the Grants and refuse to be caught. This morning Rosemary, after a week of watching and plotting, has just captured two of the wariest, most difficult finches on the island. She caught them both in the space of a single minute, high on the island’s north rim, next to a fallen cactus pad, in black box traps baited with green bananas. “How about that,” she cried, when the traps’ doors clicked shut. And when Peter strode through the cactus trees and across the lava rubble to join her, Rosemary lifted up her first prize, fluttering in a blue pouch. “I deserve a bottle of wine for this!”

  Now the Grants are sitting beside the traps at the edge of a cliff, 100 meters above the Pacific Ocean. Except for the honking and whistling of two masked boobies, courting on a rock nearby, the scene is quiet. The ocean is more than pacific; it is flat as a pond. The morning’s weather is what Charles Darwin described in his diary when he first saw the Galápagos archipelago, “a steady, gentle breeze of wind & gloomy sky.”

  From the upper rim of Daphne Major, on clearer mornings than this one, Rosemary and Peter can see the isla
nd of Santiago, where Darwin camped for nine days. They can also see the island of Isabela, where Darwin spent one day. They can make out more than a dozen other islands and black lava ruins that Darwin never had a chance to visit, including an islet known officially as Sin Nombre (that is, Nameless) and another black speck called Eden.

  “If I have seen further,” Isaac Newton once wrote, with celebrated modesty, “it is by standing upon the shoulders of Giants.” The dark volcanoes of the Galápagos are Darwin’s shoulders. These islands meant more to him than any other stop in his five-year voyage around the world. “Origin of all my views,” he called them once—the origin of the Origin of Species. The Grants are doing what Darwin could not do, going back to the Galápagos year after year; and the Grants are seeing there what Darwin did not imagine could be seen at all.

  Rosemary unlatches their tool kit, a tackle box. From it, Peter extracts a pair of jeweler’s spectacles, a plastic mask with bulging lenses, which make him look like Robinson Crusoe from Mars. “Okay, Famous Bird,” Peter says. “Ow! Famous Bird has decided to bite the hand that feeds him.” He grasps the finch with one hand, and its head sticks out observantly from his fist. The bird is about the size of a sparrow, and jet-black, with a black beak and shiny dark eyes.

  Rosemary hands Peter a pair of calipers. “Now, here we go,” Peter says. “Wing length, 72 millimeters.”

  Rosemary jots the number in the yellow notebook.

  “Tarsus length, 21.5.” (The tarsus is the bird’s leg.) Rosemary writes it down.

  “Beak length, 14.9 millimeters,” Peter recites. “Beak depth, 8.8. Beak width, 8 millimeters.”

  “Black Five plumage.” The Grants rate the birds’ plumage from zero, which is brown, to five, totally black. Black Five means a mature male.

  “Beak black.” Normally these birds’ beaks are pale, the color of horn. A black beak means the bird is ready to mate.