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Charles Darwin
Peter and Rosemary Grant are a married pair of evolutionary biologists and professors emeritus at Princeton University. The two are best known for their work studying Darwin’s finches on the island of Daphne Major in the Galápagos archipelago off the coast of Ecuador. The Grants began traveling to the Galápagos in 1973, and at the time The Beak of the Finch was published, they were still regularly spending the majority of each year there. In the early 1990s, Jonathan Weiner spent time traveling with the Grants, interviewing them in their laboratory at Princeton and accompanying them to the Galápagos to study how they worked. Throughout The Beak of the Finch, author Jonathan Weiner portrays Peter and Rosemary as meticulous yet lighthearted researchers who have come to know each one of the finches on Daphne Major on sight alone. The Grants have mentored many notable biologists, scientists, and researchers, including Peter Boag, Dolph Schluter, Jamie Smith, and Trevor Price. The Grants’ research has expanded upon Darwin’s own—while Darwin believed that evolution was a slow process that could only be observed from a distance, the Grants’ yearly work with the finches has illustrated that natural selection can be observed in the wild from month to month and year to year. Dedicated, good-humored, and often eerily in sync with one another, the Grants appear in Weiner’s book to be perpetually mesmerized by nature’s surprisingly powerful forces. As of the late 2000s, they continue to give talks and interviews about their ongoing research. Both of the Grants are Fellows of the Royal Society, recipients of the Linnean Society of London’s Darwin-Wallace Medal, and recipients of the Kyoto Prize, among many other awards and honors.
Peter and Rosemary Grant Quotes in The Beak of the Finch
The The Beak of the Finch quotes below are all either spoken by Peter and Rosemary Grant or refer to Peter and Rosemary Grant. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 4
Quotes
Where there are many finches, each mericarp has fewer seeds, but it has longer and more numerous spines. In the steep, rugged, protected place, the mericarps have more seeds and fewer, shorter spines. Peter [Grant] suspects that the caltrop is evolving in response to the finches. Where the struggle for existence is fierce, the caltrop that is likeliest to succeed is the plant that puts more energy into spines and less into seeds; but in the safer, more secluded spot, the fittest plants are the ones that put more energy into making seeds and less energy into protecting them. The finches may be driving the evolution of caltrop while caltrop is driving the evolution of the finches.
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Chapter 8
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Half a millimeter can decide who lives and who dies. Since these slight variations are passed down from one generation to the next, the brood of a small beak and a medium beak would be likely to have intermediate beaks, equipment that would sometimes differ from their parents' not by one or two tenths of a millimeter but by whole millimeters, maybe by many millimeters. […] Daphne Major is not a forgiving place. A line of misfits should not last.
[…]
That is why the Grants are so puzzled now.
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Chapter 11
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Thus the Grants suspect that the finches here are perpetually being forced slightly apart and drifting back together again. A drought favors groups of one beak length or another. It splits the population and forces it onto two slightly separate adaptive peaks. But because the two peaks are so close together, and there is no room for them to widen farther apart, random mating brings the birds back together again.
These two forces of fission and fusion fight forever among the birds. The force of fission works toward the creation of a whole new line, a lineage that could shoot off into a new species. The force of fusion brings them back together.
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Chapter 17
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The arrival of human beings means a new phase in the evolution of Darwin's finches, and its directions are still unclear. […] Rosemary and Peter do think they see something odd about the finches of Santa Cruz. The birds around the research station, and in the village, seem to be blurring together. The Grants have never made a systematic study of this: but to their eyes the species almost look as though they are fusing. "They just sort of run into each other," says Rosemary. There is no difference between the largest fortis and the smallest magnirostris.
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Peter and Rosemary Grant Quotes in The Beak of the Finch
The The Beak of the Finch quotes below are all either spoken by Peter and Rosemary Grant or refer to Peter and Rosemary Grant. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 4
Quotes
Where there are many finches, each mericarp has fewer seeds, but it has longer and more numerous spines. In the steep, rugged, protected place, the mericarps have more seeds and fewer, shorter spines. Peter [Grant] suspects that the caltrop is evolving in response to the finches. Where the struggle for existence is fierce, the caltrop that is likeliest to succeed is the plant that puts more energy into spines and less into seeds; but in the safer, more secluded spot, the fittest plants are the ones that put more energy into making seeds and less energy into protecting them. The finches may be driving the evolution of caltrop while caltrop is driving the evolution of the finches.
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Chapter 8
Quotes
Half a millimeter can decide who lives and who dies. Since these slight variations are passed down from one generation to the next, the brood of a small beak and a medium beak would be likely to have intermediate beaks, equipment that would sometimes differ from their parents' not by one or two tenths of a millimeter but by whole millimeters, maybe by many millimeters. […] Daphne Major is not a forgiving place. A line of misfits should not last.
[…]
That is why the Grants are so puzzled now.
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Chapter 11
Quotes
Thus the Grants suspect that the finches here are perpetually being forced slightly apart and drifting back together again. A drought favors groups of one beak length or another. It splits the population and forces it onto two slightly separate adaptive peaks. But because the two peaks are so close together, and there is no room for them to widen farther apart, random mating brings the birds back together again.
These two forces of fission and fusion fight forever among the birds. The force of fission works toward the creation of a whole new line, a lineage that could shoot off into a new species. The force of fusion brings them back together.
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Chapter 17
Quotes
The arrival of human beings means a new phase in the evolution of Darwin's finches, and its directions are still unclear. […] Rosemary and Peter do think they see something odd about the finches of Santa Cruz. The birds around the research station, and in the village, seem to be blurring together. The Grants have never made a systematic study of this: but to their eyes the species almost look as though they are fusing. "They just sort of run into each other," says Rosemary. There is no difference between the largest fortis and the smallest magnirostris.
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