Charles Darwin's experiences in the Galapagos Islands in 1835 helped to guide his thoughts toward a revolutionary theory: that species were not fixed but diversified from their ancestors over many generations, and that the driving mechanism of evolutionary change was natural selection. In this concise, accessible book, Peter and Rosemary Grant explain what we have learned about the origin and evolution of new species through the study of the finches made famous by that great scientist: Darwin's finches.

Drawing upon their unique observations of finch evolution over a...

Renowned evolutionary biologists Peter and Rosemary Grant have produced landmark studies of the Galapagos finches first made famous by Charles Darwin. In How and Why Species Multiply, they offered a complete evolutionary history of Darwin's finches since their origin almost three million years ago. Now, in their richly illustrated new book, 40 Years of Evolution, the authors turn their attention to events taking place on a contemporary scale. By continuously tracking finch populations over a period of four decades, they uncover the causes and consequences of significant...

Through an integration of systematics, genetics, and related disciplines, the Modern Synthesis of Evolutionary Biology came into being over fifty years ago. Knowledge of evolution has since been transformed by several revolutions: the way we interpret the fossil record has been radically affected by theories of continental drift and asteroid impacts; the way we classify organisms has been influenced by the development of cladistics. Perhaps the most dramatic revolution has been the explosion in molecular biology of information about the genome. Aiming to capture the excitement of modern...