Previous
Darwinism
El Niño, which means “the child” in Spanish, is a weather event defined by patches of unusually warm water in the Pacific Ocean. Those patches spread and create strange winds and weather events all over the world. El Niño, like a child throwing a tantrum, is named for its unpredictable climatological effects on different places around the globe.
El Niño Quotes in The Beak of the Finch
The The Beak of the Finch quotes below are all either spoken by El Niño or refer to El Niño. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 7
Quotes
Natural selection had swung around against the birds from the other side. Big birds with big beaks were dying. Small birds with small beaks were flourishing. Selection had flipped.
Both big males and big females were dying, [Gibbs] 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.
Related Characters:
Related Symbols:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 13
Quotes
These two oscillations are driven by the same events. They are both governed by the same changes in the adaptive landscape. In an adaptive landscape that is wrinkling and rolling as fast as Daphne, a landscape in which the peaks are in geological upheaval, it can pay to be born different, to carry a beak 3, 4, or 5 millimeters away from the tried and true. Since the super-Niño, some of the old peaks have turned into valleys, and some of the old valleys are peaks. Now a hybrid has a chance of coming down on the summit of a new peak. It can luck onto a piece of the new shifting ground.
Related Characters:
Related Symbols:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire The Beak of the Finch LitChart as a printable PDF.
El Niño Term Timeline in The Beak of the Finch
The timeline below shows where the term El Niño appears in The Beak of the Finch. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 7: Twenty-five Thousand Darwins
...weeks were torrential, leading to landslides and flash floods. The source of the storms was El Niño —the Child—a weather phenomenon that generally appears every three to six years. During El Niño,...
(full context)
The El Niño that Lisle Gibbs and his assistant experienced was the strongest recorded in the 20th century....
(full context)
Chapter 9: Creation by Variation
As natural forces—like the massive El Niño —encourage animals to hop between islands and carry new seeds to different places, hybridization continues...
(full context)
Chapter 13: Fusion or Fission?
...the Grants are well into their sabbatical year. Their data has revealed that since the El Niño of 1982-83, the adaptive landscape on the islands has changed dramatically. There is far less...
(full context)
Chapter 16: The Gigantic Experiment
Just as El Niño spurred an evolutionary event on Daphne Major, the introduction of a new species of plant...
(full context)
Chapter 19: A Partner in the Process
If global warming did cause the El Niño of 1982, and if the planet continues to warm, selection will create more fusion in...
(full context)
Epilogue: God and the Galápagos
...hopping on the ground before them and perching on their shoulders. There have been three El Niños in a row. It is the Grants’ 21st year on the islands, and more birds...
(full context)
