Customer Reviews

How and Why Species Multiply: The Radiation of Darwin's Finches (Princeton Series in Evolutionary Biology)

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This makes a nice book to read along with Beak of the finch, a more popularized treatment of the same topic and Pulitzer Prize winner from a few years ago. In some ways the Beak book does a better job on the same material, since it includes fascinating personal information on the Grants and their quest, which is entirely absent from this more scholarly tome. Even so the Grants have made a noble effort to write a readable yet serious and detailed treatise on their life's work that would be accessible to an intelligent layman. Give the complexity and uncertainty of reconstructing the finch phylogeny and ecological history of bygone eras in the Galapagos, they have done an admirable job. The Grants make every effort, with a strong structure designed to get across their main ideas. Introductions, careful descriptions largely free of jargon, and nice summaries for each chapter, then a summary chapter at the end.

The most surprising and disappointing feature of the book is the treatment of the color plates. The photos themselves are mostly excellent, taken from the vast reservoir the Grants have amassed for over 30 years. They show the beaks of the finches like no one else ever has. But the tiny size of the photos is quite remarkable. Some measure only an inch or two high and not much wider. Most are virtually impossible to appreciate. What a shame.

This concise and well written book is the distillation of over 30 years of landmark work on natural selection and speciation in the famous Darwin's finch radiation of the Galapagos islands. This research project generated dozens of important papers and 2 prior, thick scholarly monographs. The Grants now present a clear and thoughtful digest of their immense amount of work. The Grants present their work as a test and exploration of the major model of speciation, the allopatric model articulated by the late Ernst Mayr. Using painstaking longitudinal study of Galapagos finch populations and modern genetics techniques, the Grants fused traditional field biology with modern laboratory biology in a particularly illuminating manner. Since evaluating the allopatric speciation model requires a good deal of inference of past events, much of the work and much of the explication in this book is devoted to careful logical analysis of the predicted consequences of the model and evaluating the model by comparing these predictions with the actual distribution and characters of Galapagos finch species. The Grants' longitudinal dataset gave them also the opportunity to actually witness and characterize some features, such as initial colonization events and natural selection in action, predicted by the model. The result is largely a vindication of the model. The Grants found some particularly interesting and to me surprising features, such as the potential importance of hybridization and introgression for generating genetic diversity. The systematic analysis of several features of evolution make this set of studies a classic in the literature. This book gives a nice idea not only of the evolutionary processes that are its subject but also of the difficult experiments needed to study these processes.
This book is written and illustrated quite well. It is pitched for a general scientific audience and is easily understandable by anyone with knowledge of basic biology. My only complaint, and it is minor, is that the publisher put all the color plates in the middle of the book. Some of the plates could have been larger.
This book deserves a wide readership.

The Grants have written an excellent, direct, and clearly description of the formation of new species from their unique vantage point as long time researchers. They use their 30+ years of experience with Galapagos finches to great advantage by including their data and data analysis to illustrate the key features of speciation. A wonderful starting point for any serious student of evolution. Also a great way to discover how important the Galapagos islands still are for our understanding of that great "mystery of mysteries."

I greatly enjoyed reading this book. My interest was backed up with a vacation trip to the Galapagos Islands that occurred about a month after I received the book which was very well packaged so it arrived in 1st class shape.

This is another great book on the Galapagos Finches, especially designed for the tyro at evolutionary thinking.

The book tells us the story of the Grants in the Galapagos since 1973 up to 2008. They try to prove the Darwinian theory, but honestly say that there are huge problems. Unfotuntately since the works of Woese, Forterre, Ingber, Sapp and some others we now know that Darwin was wrong. But evolutionists are not interessted in the works of biologists.
Anyway a good book.