Quotes from The Beak of the Finch, by Jonathan Weiner

- ‘The Origin of Species says very little about the origin of species… Darwin talks about the breeding of pigeons. He talks about Malthus, fossils, patterns in the geographic distribution of the world’s flora and fauna. He marshals an enormous mass of evidence that evolution has happened. Yet Darwin never saw it happen, either in the Galapagos (where he spent only five weeks [in 1835] or anywhere else.’ (6)

- ‘[Evolution] is at work right now around us, ‘whenever and wherever opportunity offers’, as Darwin emphasizes with his italics: not confined to a moment of creation in the dim past. It goes on this year as much as last year, now and forever, here and everywhere, like Newton’s laws of motion.’ (6)

- ‘Now the Grants’ work on Darwin ’s finches is entering the textbooks too. This is one of the most intensive and valuable animal studies ever conducted in the wild; zoologists and evolutionists already regard it as a classic. It is the best and most detailed demonstration to date of the power of Darwin ’s process. To study the evolution of life through many generations you need an isolated population, one that is not going to run away, one that cannot easily mix and mate with others.’ (9)

- ‘These new studies suggest that Darwin did not know the strength of his own theory. He vastly underestimated the power of natural selection. Its action is neither rare now slow. It leads to evolution daily and hourly, all around us, and we can watch.’ (9)

- ‘Because [the islands] are so young, the creation of new forms from old is still in the early stages in the Galapagos: life is evolving as fast and furiously as the volcanoes.’ (10)

- ‘The study of evolution in action throws light on our origin and on our history, on the silent bones of Olduvai Gorge and Koobi Fora. It also casts a new light on our tumultuous present and our destiny.’ (16)

- ‘Whether or not we choose to watch, evolution is shaping us all.’ (16)

- ‘Two other species of Darwin ’s finches use tools. They pick up a twig, a cactus spine, or a leafstalk, and they trim in into shape with their beaks. Then they poke it into the bark of dead branches and pry out grubs.’ (17)

- ‘Peter Grant’s service to biology has been extreme. He has shown that the most important and pervasive theory that biology has really does work, and that almost all of the varied and fine details of evolution that he has found occurring are understandable by this theory, and, so far, seem to need no other.’ (19)

- ‘ Darwin joined the voyage… at the age of twenty-two, as the unpaid gentleman’s companion to the captain, who was very young too and worried about the loneliness of his command, the ship’s previous captain having committed suicide.’ (21)

- ‘Contrary to legend, Sulloway has shown, Darwin did not think the finches were very important.’ (22)

- ‘ Darwin was not yet an evolutionist; he was still partly a Creationist. He was on his way home to become a country parson. That was the career for which he had trained at Christ’s College,Cambridge .’ (23)

- ‘To [Linnaeus], and to other pious naturalists of his generation, the myriad relationships and family resemblances that Linnaeus used to bring order to nature did not represent anything like a genealogy of descent. Rather they represented the plan of God.’ (24)

- ‘Slight variations, in Darwin ’s view, are what the process of natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing. Variations are the cornerstones of natural selection , the beginning of the beginning of evolution.’ (37)

- ‘To mate, a barnacle sticks a long penis out of its crater and thrusts it down the crater of a neighbor. Since every barnacle in the colony is both male and female, this is not as chancy as it sounds.’ (38)

- ‘First, why, if species have descended from other species by fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms?’ Darwin (40)

- ‘ Darwin ’s finches are extraordinarily variable.’ (47)

- ‘What a trifling difference must often determine which shall survive, and which perish!’ Darwin (49)

- ‘ ‘In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there. I might possibly answer, that, for anything I new to the contrary, it had lain there forever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground.’ A watch, says Paley, implies a watchmaker. Someone had to invent it; someone had to put it together. And if that is true of a watch, Paley asks, how much more so of the living things we find on the heath?... They imply ‘an artifice of artificers’… a God.’ William Paley, Natural Theology, 1802 (49)

à ‘That was [ Darwin ’s] worldview.’ (49)

- ‘No one anywhere has duplicated the kind of fieldwork we did in the Galapagos – because it was so simple. Those ecosystems are stripped to the bare bones.’ Peter Boag (58)

- ‘The doctrine that all nature is at war is most true. The struggle very often falls on the egg & seed, or on the seedling, larva & young; but it must sometime in the life of each individual, or more commonly at intervals on successive generations & then with extreme severity.’ Darwin (58)

- ‘Now that they were reduced to tough foods, the birds’ tool-kit beaks were determining what the birds ate. They had become specialists.’ (59)

- ‘Darwinian competition is not only the clash of stag horns, the gore on the jaws of lions, nature red in tooth and claw. Competition can also be a silent race, side by side, for the last food on a desert island, where the competitors never fight one another, and the only sound of battle is the occasional crack of a Tribulus seed.’ (63)

- ‘The surviving fortis [finches] were an average of 5 to 6 percent larger than the dead… variations too small to see with the naked eye had helped make the difference between life and death. The mills of God grind exceedingly small. Not only had they seen natural selection in action. It was the most intense episode of natural selection ever documented in nature.’ (78)

- ‘All over the island, the male finches, the drought’s survivors, did what they do each year in the first bout of rain. They flew to the highest points in their territories: to the crown of a tree that rises from a fissure toward the sky, or the crazy steeple of a cactus on the summit of a rock fall. Perched on these wet command posts, looking as skeletal and tattered as they had ever been in their lives, each cock opened his famous beak, like a rooster in a barnyard in the first light of day, and began singing in the rain.’ (80)

- ‘The skewed sex ratio put a spin on that breeding season. Among fortis these were now six males for every female. Each female could choose among many males, but only one male in every six could win a female… the finch watchers watched and measured. They found that the males the females had picked were not a random sample. The successful males tended to be the largest of the large. They were the males with the very blackest, most mature plumage and the ones with the deepest beaks.’ (80)

- ‘The average fortis beak of the new generation was 4 or 5 percent deeper than the beak of their ancestors before the drought. In the drought of 1977 the Finch Unit had seen natural selection in action. Now in its aftermath they saw evolution in action, in the dimensions of the birds’ beaks and in many other dimensions too… Not only is Darwin’s process in action among Darwin’s finches, not only can natural selection lead to evolution among their flocks, but it leads there much more swiftly than Darwin supposed possible.’ (81)

- ‘The guppy experiments suggested to Endler what Darwin ’s finches were suggesting at about the same time to the Galapagos finch watchers: that natural selection can be swift and sure. The process is flowing along, all around us, much faster than Darwin ever dreamed… ‘We have a serious public relations problem,’ Endler says. ‘People don’t realize this is real science.’ ’ (96)

- ‘Of all the chronic pathologies of weather on this planet the worst single repeat offender is El Niño, the Child, so called for its tendency to visit the Pacific shoreline of South America around Christmastime. During an El Niño a patch of abnormally warm water appears in the Eastern Pacific and spreads until much of the eastern half of the ocean is running a fever of several degrees centigrade. Such a vast acreage of abnormally warm water stirs strange winds and weather virtually around the world. El Niños are born at irregular intervals, usually three to six years apart.’ (100)

- ‘Both big males and big females were dying, he noticed, but many more males than females – again, the reverse of the drought. Everything the drought had preferred in size large – weight, wingspan, tarsus length, bill length, bill depth, and bill width – the aftermath of the flood favored in size small… With ten times more small seeds lying around, the large finches had trouble finding large seeds. They could still eat small seeds, of course, but they had the tools for large seeds and they had a lifetime of experience hunting and cracking large seeds; and of course being big birds they had to eat many more small seeds to stay alive. So as seed supplies ran lower and lower, the bigger birds had more and more trouble.’ (104)

- ‘Not only can evolution push a species fast in one direction. Evolution can reverse direction and push it back just as swiftly. This was not just a freak of Darwin ’s finches. Naturalists are now documenting similar reversals of fortune elsewhere in nature as well.’ (106)

- ‘Most of us think of the pressures of life in the wild as being almost static. Robins sing in an oak tree year after year. We imagine that life puts more or less the same pressures year after year on the robin and the oak. But the lives of Darwin ’s finches suggest that this conception of nature is false. Selection pressures may oscillate violently within the lifetimes of most of the animals and plants around us, so that the robin must cling to the oak, and the oak to the ground, in chafing and contrary winds. It is as if each living thing on earth is holding on at the very shore of an ocean, in rough and invisible seas, swaying in place as each wave shoves it toward the shore and then tottering as the broken surf drags it back again.’ (106)

- ‘Species of animals and plants look constant to us, but in reality each generation is a sort of palimpsest, a canvas that is painted over and over by the hand of natural selection, each time a little differently.’ (106)

- ‘The apparent lack of action in the fossil record confirmed for Darwin his belief that evolution by natural selection must be a rare event, and that any and all action must be unendurably, geologically slow.’ (109)

- ‘Haldare defined one darwin as a change of 1 percent per million years… [Philip Gingerich] discovered a simple pattern, a patter that is just the opposite of what early evolutionists – the whole lineage of evolutionists from Darwin to Haldare – would have expected. The close you look at life, the more rapid and intense the rate of evolutionary change. The farther back in time you stand, the less you see. In a single year, you can find rates of change as high as 60,000 darwins . But in the fossil record the average is only a tenth of a darwin . The reasons for this discrepancy are not far to seek. If at any time in those millions of years a species changed swiftly, but the rest of the time it changed slowly, that start-and-stop motion would average out into a very sluggish movement. What is more, if the species changed first one way and then the other way, over and over again, as Darwin’s finches did in the first decade of the Grant’s watch, then the fossil record would register virtually no change, a near equilibrium.’ (110)

- ‘The evolution of life turns out to be rather like the eruption of a volcano. The closer you look, the more turbulent and dangerous the action; the farther [sic] your remove, the more the living world seems fixed and stable, hardly moving at all. It is amazing to think of all these species around us not fixed but in jittery motion.’ (111)

- ‘We can no longer picture the story of life as slow and almost static, a worldview for which the chief emblem of evolutionary change is a fossil in a stone. What we must picture instead is an emblem of life in motion. For all species, including our own, the true future of life is a perching bird, a passerine, alert and nervous in every part, ready to dart off in an instant. Life is always poised for flight. From a distance it looks still, silhouetted against the bright sky or the dark ground; but up close it is flitting this way and that, as if displaying to the world at every moment its perpetual readiness to take off in any of a thousand directions.’ (112)

- ‘Probably no other major branch of science today is so haunted, dominated, and driven by the thoughts of one man.’ (128)

- ‘Can the Darwinian process really produce something as marvelous as an eye, a wing, or a feather – let alone a flying bird, a thinking human being? Without being allowed to watch, without the spectacle actually before them, scientists have found it hard to picture how Darwin ’s process could lead again and again to such magnificent results.’ (130)

- ‘There are somewhere between two million and thirty million species of animals and plants alive on the planet today. Something like a thousand time that many species – about two billion, by the most conservative guess – have evolved, struggled, flourished, and gone extinct since the first shelly fossils were laid down in the Cambrian explosion, about 540 million years ago.’ (134)

- ‘The standard textbook description of speciation sets the story in the dim past, like a scientific book of Genesis. The textbook diagrams and charts suggest that the flora and fauna of theGalapagos Islands are end points, products of a process of creation that went on once, ‘in the beginning,’ and is now more or less complete. But in Darwin ’s islands the forces of creation are still at work, in plain view, with ‘the manufactory still in action.’ ’ (134-135)

- ‘Conventional wisdom said seeds would be killed by salt water. So Darwin at Down House tried soaking seeds from his garden, including lettuce, carrots, and celery, in little bottles of brine. Then he planted the seeds in glass dishes on the mantelpiece of his study, and was tickled to see them sprout, even after forty-two days in salt water. In forty-two days the average current in theAtlantic could have carried these seeds 1,400 miles. They could have lasted the length of an ocean voyage. That was the point of Darwin’s pottering about with mud from the edge of a pond. ‘Wading birds, which frequent the muddy edges of ponds, if suddenly flushed, would be… most likely to have muddy feet [Darwin].’ They could carry mud, and seeds with it, from one place to another. Darwin was not above gathering bird droppings and picking out undigested seeds with a tweezers. He planted these seeds, and they germinated too. So the first birds to fly over an island could help make the islands fit homes for more birds.’ (136)

- ‘He fed oats to sparrows, and fed the sparrows to an eagle and a Snowy Owl at the zoo. Then he waited a few hours, collected their pellets, and planted them. A seed came up.’ (136)

- ‘Anyone who takes off from or lands in Simon Bolivar International Airport , in Guayaquil [ Ecuador ], can look down at these fateful rafts: green mats in the dark green delta, perpetually floating out to sea. In Darwin ’s view, this was the first step in the origin of Galapagos species – colonization, immigration.’ (136-137)

- ‘In the struggle for existence one variety or species must often squeeze another. Nearest neighbors, closest cousins, will pinch each other very hard, generation after generation. They collide because they are so much alike in equipment, instincts, and needs. Again, like finches scrabbling through the cinders of Daphne Major for the last Tribulus seed, the more alike the varieties the more frequently they will find themselves going for the same seed, the same nook, the same niche, at the same time. Competition though kinship… the effect will be continually to move varieties apart and repel them… And the result of this sort of adaptation would be forks in the road, partings of the ways, new branches on the tree of life: the pattern now known as an adaptive radiation.’ (142)

- ‘As varieties and species ramify they will become better and better consumers of the world around them, like Jack Sprat and his wife who between them licked the platter clean.’ (143)

- ‘A population of finches splitting in two… can be imagined as setting off on a sort of lonely pilgrimage or mass migration across an adaptive landscape. Some birds leave one peak and migrate to another. First there is just one species in the landscape, clustered around one peak. Then these are two, clustered around two neighboring peaks. In between there lies a valley.’ (152)

- ‘ ‘The struggle will generally be more severe between species of the same genus, when they come into competition with each other, than between species of distinct genera [Darwin].’ Yet in principle Darwin ’s process of character displacement can occur even between living things spaced far apart on the evolutionary tree, if they are thrown into competition. There can be competition between kingdoms: say between plants and animals, or plants and insects, or insects and bacteria.’ (154)

- ‘On northern islands like Genovesa, where there are no bees, nectar makes up about 20 percent of these finches’ diet; it is an important dietary supplement to the small seeds they spend their lives scrabbling for. But on southern islands, where there are bees, nectar makes up less than 5 percent of the birds’ diet… Apparently, then, on islands where there are no bees, selection pressure has reduced the size of two species of Darwin ’s finches, and these birds have squeezed into the bees’ niche. On islands where bees have arrived, the birds have been forced back out of the niche.’ (155-156)

- ‘Evolutionists understand now that the isolation of species is not merely a matter of populations locked apart by mountains, canyons, or seas… The isolation of species consists chiefly in the invisible barriers that can carve off a corner of a population into a new islands or carve a single large population into a sect of scattered, more of less lonely gene pools.’ (159)

- ‘At some point they do have to learn to breed with their own kind – their own new kind. Otherwise a new line would blend with the lines around it and disappear.’ (160)

- ‘So on what basis do we assume these things are more or less stable, like the rocks in the stream, and not merely waves and ripples in the stream? Arrangements between males and females – arrangements and behaviors we think of as primary, as given, fixed, almost as immutable as naturalists before Darwin considered species – these are not permanent at all.’ (170)

- ‘If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.’ Darwin (181)

- ‘As long as each stage in the evolution of a complex adaptation is adaptive for its own sake, it is likely to be preserved within each generation and be embellished by the next, by Darwin ’s process of natural selection. The process does not look ahead. The watchmaker is blind.’ (181)

- ‘Vision that is 5 percent as good as yours or mine is very much worth having in comparison with no vision at all. So is 1 percent vision better than total blindness. And 6 percent better than 5, 7 percent better than 6, and so on up the gradual, continual series.’ Richard Dawkins (181)

- ‘Here natural selection favors great genetic variability, and hybridization is one way to generate it fast. Cross a tree with star-shaped leaves and a tree with pear-shaped leaves, and you can get generations of hybrid leaves with shapes like splayed hands, pyramids, hearts, and arrowheads. That is only the variation that catches the eye – imagine the variation beneath the surface.’ (200)

- ‘The Grants are looking at a pattern that was one dismissed as insignificant in the tree of life. The pattern is known as reticulative evolution, from the Latin reticulum, diminutive for net. The finches’ lines are not so much lines or branches at all. They are more like twiggy thickets, full of little networks and delicate webbings. This sort of reticulate evolution doesn’t bind lineages together forever; eventually that part ways or fuse.’ (201)

- ‘Species that are competitors over ecological time may be mutualists over evolutionary time, each providing a store of genetic variation that can be tapped by the other.’ Robert Holt (201)

- ‘Their lines come together and come apart, and in this way the birds are created and recreated, again and again.’ (202)

- ‘Those who criticize the theory of evolution by natural selection often do so on the grounds that it is impossible to test it by making quantitative predictions. Rosemary and Peter Grant now show this view to be wrong… Their predictions have been precisely correct.’ Jeremy J.D. Greenwood (205)

- ‘The intense selection pressures that shape and reshape the beaks of the finches also keep all these beaks from disappearing. Darwin ’s process created the many out of one, and Darwin ’s process is in the act of their creation even now. If natural selection did not go on working hard on each island, in each generation, the many would very soon vanish into one again.’ (206)

- ‘This same tension between fission and fusion runs through all the kingdoms of animals and plants. Everywhere hybrid swarms are rare; good, solid, more-or-less-separate species are common. Yet it many of the birds flying overhead, in many of the fish in the sea, and in almost all of the green things growing around us the genes are intermingling. The chisel is hard at work daily and hourly in every landscape on the planet.’ (206-207)

- ‘In times of stress, when the temperature shoots up or down, for instance, or the environment goes suddenly more wet or dry, colonies of bacterial cells in a Petri dish will begin to mutate wildly… The SOS response has been observed in the DNA of maize when it is shocked by hot or cold temperatures. Recently it has been discovered in yeast. Apparently many different kinds of living cells can switch up their mutation rate under stress and relax it again when the stress dies down. They can also make select portions of their DNA unstable in the extreme… When stressed in a Petri dish, many cells of E. coli, whose normal habitat is the human gut, will even open pores in their membranes and take in DNA from outside their cell walls… The process is known as transformation, and it can be stimulated by the stress of unfriendly chemicals or ultraviolet radiation. ‘The implications… are significant… at precisely those challenging moments in evolutionary history when major adaptive shifts are required, genetic mechanisms exist that increase the probability that the appropriate variants will be provided [Darwin].’ ’ (221-222)

- ‘For Darwin the whole of the Galapagos archipelago argues this fundamental lesson. The volcanoes are much more diverse in their biology than their geology. The contrast suggests that in the struggle for existence, species are shaped at least as much by the local flora and fauna as by the local soil and climate. Why else would the plants and animals differ radically among islands that have ‘the same geological nature, the same height, climate & c [ Darwin ]’?’ (225)

- ‘[English sparrows] were newcomers to New England… One of the first pairs had been released in New York ’s Central Park in 1851 by an eccentric bird lover who wanted to import every one of the birds in Shakespeare’s plays to the United States .’ (227)

- ‘It is almost a law of science: the more indirect the evidence, the more polarized the debate.’ (231-232)

- ‘The second generation [of hybrids] will be made up of individuals each of which will require its own peculiar habitat for optimum development.’ Edgar Anderson (241)

- ‘The number of different habitats the hybrids require ‘will rise exponentially with the number of basic differences between the species. With ten such differences, around a thousand different kinds of habitat would be needed to permit the various recombinations to find a niche somewhere… With only twenty such basic differences (and this seems like a conservative figure) over a million different recombined habitats would be needed.’ You don’t find situations that chaotic under natural conditions, but you do find them in the havoc that human beings bring in their train. Our arrival, Anderson says ‘can provide strange new niches of hybrid recombinations.’ Thus, our disturbances hybridize both the environment and the species. We are hybridizing the planet.’ (242)

- ‘Let a man profess to have discovered some new Patent Powder Pimperlimplimp, a single pinch of which being thrown into each corner of a field will kill every bug throughout its whole extent, and people will listen to him with attention and respect. But tell them of any simple common-sense plan, based upon correct scientific principles, to check and keep within reasonable bounds the insect foes of the farmer, and they will laugh you to scorn.’ Benjamin Walsh, The Practical Entomologist, 1866 (251)

- ‘These people are trying to ban the teaching of evolution while their own cotton crops are failing because of evolution. How can you be a Creationist farmer anymore?’ Martin Taylor (255)

- ‘A single wipe of toilet paper comes away with as many as two trillion individuals of the Bacteroides species, twenty billion individual enterobacteria, and dozens of other species that have never been named by science.’ (258)

- ‘How fast can evolution proceed in a human? My wife took ampicillin. I took erythromycin. Within a few days, we were both dominated by resistant bacteria. Not only was tetracycline resistance coming up, but also streptomycine, kanamycin, carbenicillin – our bacteria were going from almost nothing to multiple resistance.’ (259)

- ‘Suppose in the year they were first reported, 1848, the incidence of black mutants around Manchester was one in a hundred (almost certainly a generous estimate). Fifty years later, in 1898, ninety-nine out of a hundred were black… Today carbonaria is declining rapidly virtually everywhere in Britain . So are dark forms of ladybirds and dozens of other British insects whose bodies had blackened with the Industrial Revolution.’ (273)

- ‘Of this volume [of life] only here and there a short chapter has been preserved; and of each page, only here and there a few lines.’ Darwin (276)

- According to the fossil record, only five times in the past six hundred million years has there been such abrupt havoc in the biosphere. Only five times have so many twigs and branches been lopped from the tree of life at once.’ (276)

- ‘When you write you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner’s pick, a woodcarver’s gouge, a surgeon’s probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory.’ Annie Dillard, The Writing Life (283)

- ‘A part developed in any species in an extraordinary degree or manner, in comparison with the same part in allied species, tends to be highly variable.’ Darwin (287)

- ‘The mind is our beak, and the human mind is ever more variable than the brain.’ (287)

- ‘Infinite variety of minds and talents helps them to radiate into all these crafts and specialties.’ (288)

- ‘The Simiadae then branched off into two great stems, the New World Monkeys and Old World Monkeys; and from the latter at a remote period, Man, the wonder and glory of the universe, proceeded!’ Darwin (292)

- ‘The questions were born then, as we stared down, or looked up at the sky, turning to follow the turning flocks, revolving our head on our featherless shoulders: high above the plains of our first hours, winged only with questions.’ (293)

- ‘This year [1994] a poll will show that nearly half the citizens of the United States do not believe in evolution. Instead they believe that life was created by God is something like its present form, within the past ten thousand years. ‘People talk about Creationism,’ says Dolph Schluter. ‘We can actually see evolution at work. We might ask the Creationists to demonstrate similar principles at work.’ ’ (295)

- ‘Darwin himself didn’t use the word evolution in the whole of the Origin.’ (297)

- ‘There can be no finished form for us or for anything else alive.’ (300)

- ‘In the laboratories, the trial soups are kept hermetically sealed, or each experiment would be cut short before it got interesting because the new molecules in the soup would be scavenged by bacteria. The waiting Pyrex ponds are sterile as the seas and shorelines of this planet before life began. But in the ocean, of course, as fast as molecule make their first gestures towards life, they are devoured. Creation in the sea has never stopped, but the niche of life is taken.’ (301)