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Article Excerpt
HOW AND WHY SPECIES MULTIPLY: THE RADIATION OF DARWIN'S FINCHES. By Peter R. Grant and B. R. Grant. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, USA. 2008: xix and 218 pages, 31 color plates, 58 figures, 3 tables, 442 references. ISBN 978-0-691-13360-7. $35.00 (hard cover).--The authors have observed Darwin's finches in the Galapagos Islands over 34 years, surely a record long-term field study of birds. The book describes their comprehensive field studies. The introduction presents four theses: (1) molecular biology traces the evolutionary history of species; (2) the finches have evolved ecological divergence, but this has not led to sterility between the species; (3) hybridization is a source of genetic variation; and (4) songs are signals of species identity. The first chapters introduce the finches, their habitats and foraging ecology, and the process of evolution as observed in colonization, natural selection, and adaptation. The next chapters compare models of speciation, and ecological circumstances of divergence in allopatry and coexistence in sympatry. They discuss song, the nature of a behavioral barrier to interbreeding and how it evolves, in part in response to ecological selection on bill size and shape, and the effect of bill size on song. The final chapters discuss species and speciation in these birds and the process of adaptive radiation.
The ancestral finches colonized the islands 2-3 MYA. The current...
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