Gary & Robyn Wilson | Guest Contributors
The diversity and distribution of finches in the Galapagos Archipelago was a key component of Charles Darwin’s 1859 On the Origin of Species.
While Darwin’s work was fundamental to our understanding of evolutionary process, it was not until work by David Lack in the 1940s, and subsequently across four decades by Peter and Rosemary Grant and their associates, that the drivers and fine details of that process have been described and explained.
This book review considers the publication in 2023 and 2024 of autobiographies by Peter and Rosemary Grant that provide an overview of the lives, work and accomplishments of this husband and wife biologist team.
Jonathon Weiner’s The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time, winner of the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, provided a popular account of Peter and Rosemary Grant’s work in the Galapagos.
Subsequently, the Grants published 40 Years of Evolution: Darwin's Finches on Daphne Major Island in 2014, and How and Why Species Multiply: The Radiation of Darwin's Finches in 2020, with updated reprints in 2024, in addition to a slew of scientific papers.
In Introgressive hybridization and natural selection in Darwin’s finches (Biol. J. Linn. Soc. 117(4): 812–822), the Grants described homoploid hybrid speciation that from the second generation onward bred endogamously and, despite intense inbreeding, was ecologically successful. This example shows that reproductive isolation, which typically develops over hundreds of generations, can be established in only three.
All of this is the result of 40 years research into Darwin’s Finches (sic) of the tiny, inhospitable island of Daphne Major in the Galapagos Islands. Thus the title of Peter Grant’s 2023 autobiographical volume, Enchanted by Daphne: The Life of an Evolutionary Biologist (Princeton, 2023) wherein he describes his and his wife (and research partner) Rosemary’s life-long investigation into the lives and evolution of the enigmatic birds found there. They have been able to record and band all the avian inhabitants of the island, note the fluxes in populations and successes of the species over time and through climatic events, and finally the arising of a new species.
But the book is much more than this: it is a memoir of life well spent.
I was delighted when in 2024 Rosemary produced her own memoir, and what an interesting volume it is. In One Step Sideways, Three Steps Forward: one woman’s path to becoming a biologist (Princeton 2024), she details the challenges of being a wife, a mother, and a partner in research. It provides the other side of the story, and documents the glass ceiling that has for so long impeded women and particularly those in science.
It also provides an insight on the meeting of two minds. Indeed, as Sarah Blaffer Hrdy observes in her notes on the back cover of Rosemary’s volume, “Over sixty years ago as the bride stood at the altar in her tiny seaside village northern England, the groom lent over and whispered ‘I heard this morning that the DNA code has been cracked.’ Thus began a now legendary partnership between generalist Rosemary Grant and ecologist Peter Grant.“
It is worth noting that Rosemary finally received her PhD from Uppsala University in 1986, 22 years after Peter, despite their working together in the interim. They are Emeritus Professor and Emeritus Research Fellow respectively at Princeton University.
I recommend both volumes to you. Read them in the order in which they were published, and enjoy Rosemary’s humane and thoughtful approach to life and learning.
Gary W Wilson
Parua Bay, Northland, New Zealand
Email: gwwilson064@gmail.com
References
Weiner, J. (1994). The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time. Alfred A. Knopf. New York, NY.
Grant, P & Grant, R (2014). 40 Years of Evolution: Darwin's Finches on Daphne Major Island
Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey.
Grant, P & Grant, R (2016). Introgressive hybridization and natural selection in Darwin’s finches Biol. J. Linn. Soc. 117(4): 812–822).
Grant, P & Grant, R (2020). How and Why Species Multiply: The Radiation of Darwin's Finches. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey.
Grant, P (2023). Enchanted by Daphne: The Life of an Evolutionary Naturalist. Princeton University Press, Princeton. New Jersey.
Grant, BR (2024). One Step Sideways, Three Steps Forward: One Woman’s Path to Becoming a Biologist. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey.