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Peter and Rosemary Grant
Peter Boag is a contemporary of Peter and Rosemary Grant’s who conducted research on Darwin’s finches on the island of Daphne Major in 1976 and 1977. During this time, the island was experiencing a major drought, which prevented Boag from conducting the experiments he’d originally planned to. But through the drought—and the selective pressures it placed on the finches—Boag and his team witnessed natural selection in action. Most notably, smaller birds died out while larger ones, who could more easily extract rare seeds from tough pods, survived. By the early 1990s, Boag had pivoted to studying the DNA of Darwin’s finches, becoming one of the first people on Earth to sequence the finches’ DNA.
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Peter Boag Character Timeline in The Beak of the Finch
The timeline below shows where the character Peter Boag appears in The Beak of the Finch. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 4: Darwin’s Beaks
...not all of his contemporaries—or even evolutionists working in the early 20th century—believed him. Peter Boag, a contemporary of the Grants, decided to undertake a study measuring relationships between parent beak...
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Chapter 5: A Special Providence
...more prolifically, and their young prosper. But in years of extended drought—such as the years Boag spent on the island in 1976 and 1977—there are fewer birds that mate, fewer chicks...
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...learned new ways of attacking the mericarps to extract fruit, while some began relying on Boag and his team’s camp for sustenance, drinking water and scavenging food from their tents. Some...
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Boag went home dispirited, his data ruined. When he and his team returned in January of...
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Chapter 6: Darwin’s Forces
...on the island early in 1979. Because of the research of those who came before him—Boag, the Grants, and their teams—Price could follow Darwin’s finches more closely than anyone else. He...
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Chapter 15: Invisible Characters
Weiner watches as Peter Boag extracts DNA from frozen finch blood, bathes the DNA in an enzyme solution which fragments...
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...the finch, allowing it to survive and pass that favored mutation on again and again. Boag looks for slight differences in the sequences of letters that make up the birds’ DNA.
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...manuscripts that are being written and revised constantly, there are still many answers that evade Boag and his team.
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Epilogue: God and the Galápagos
Trevor Price, Lisle Gibbs, Peter Boag, Laurene Ratcliffe, and Dolph Schluter continue their research projects around the world. The Grants, meanwhile,...
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