Peter and Rosemary Grant

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Peter R. Grant and B. Rosemary Grant, a married couple, are both British evolutionary biologists at Princeton University. They are noted for their work on Darwin's Finches on the Galapagos Island named Daphne Major. The Grants have spent six months of the year each year since 1973 capturing, tagging, taking blood samples, and releasing finches from the islands. Peter Grant also helped to discover that natural selection by itself is not evolution but a mechanism within the complex process.

Whilst the Grants' detailed studies have demonstrated the effects of natural selection beyond a reasonable doubt, it has also shown that the alleged 13 species of Galapagos finches are, in practice, able to interbreed and are therefore correctly identified as varieties of a single species. This discovery might be regarded as particularly ironic since it finally vindicates Charles Darwin's own reading of the situation:

"... when I see [the Galapagos islands] in sight of each other and possessed of but a scanty stock of animals, tenanted by these birds but slightly differing in structure and filling the same place in Nature, I must suspect they are only varieties."
(quoted in Charles Darwin: Evolution by Natural Selection, Sir Gavin De Beer. Nelson, Edinburgh:1963. p. 82.

The Grants were the subject of the book The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time by Jonathan Weiner (Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), ISBN 0-679-40003-6, which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1995.[1]

In 2003 the Grants were joint recipients of the Loye and Alden Miller Research Award. They won the 2005 Balzan Prize for Population Biology [2]. The Balzan Prize citation states:

"Peter and Rosemary Grant are distinguished for their remarkable long-term studies demonstrating evolution in action in Galápagos finches. They have demonstrated how very rapid changes in body and beak size in response to changes in the food supply are driven by natural selection. They have also elucidated the mechanisms by which new species arise and how genetic diversity is maintained in natural populations. The work of the Grants has had a seminal influence in the fields of population biology, evolution and ecology."

Rosemary Grant was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2007. In 2008 both Peter and Rosemary Grant were among the thirteen recipients of the Darwin-Wallace Award, which is bestowed every 50 years by the Linnean Society of London.

[edit] See also

• For other Peter Grants, see Peter Grant

[edit] References

• Pulitzer Prize: 1995 General Non-Fiction
• UCTV: Evolution in Action: Darwin's Finches of the Galápagos Islands - Peter R. Grant & Rosemary Grant
• PBS: Evolution Library - Finch Beak Data Sheet

[edit] External links

• Peter Grant's webpage
• Rosemary Grant's webpage