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The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time?
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12 reviews of this product found across Reddit:
If you like philosophy, consider PHI/HPS 314 Philosophy of Science with Creath. It's a great course, there is zero homework through the whole semester except reading 2.5 books, and they're very easy reads (and one of the books is just excellent anyways, Weiner's The Beak of the Finch). There are 3 tests, which, if you do the reading and just come to lectures most of the time, you'll do fine on them. Creath is a great lecturer, the material is interesting, the reading is good, and it's an upper division HU.
If you're Barrett there's also a discussion component course you can take (HON 394 topic) to get honors credit for the class, and all you do in it is sit around with Creath and a few other students and discuss additional topics.
>Yes, evolution takes place over long periods of time, but there are also hard start and stop points.
I'm going to need you to either explain that more fully, or provide evidence for this.
>At one point, one of our ancient ancestors gave birth to the first being
that would meet the biological criteria of being a modern human.
No. This simply isn't true. That's not how any of this works.
>That being was indeed the first modern human, and it was birthed by a non-modern human mother.
What are you basing this on?
> Individual organisms do not evolve into different organisms over the course of their lifetime.
Of course they don't.
>Evolution occurs because sometimes enough genetic mutations occur in a
single organism that when it is born it comes out as a different species
than its parents.
That's simply not true.
The changes accumulate in a population over a long period of time. That population slowly becomes a different species. At any individual point in time, the population looks pretty uniform. Over the course of 100,000 years? You can see the differences emerge.
A mother gives birth to a child of the same species. That child may have some small differences that don't distinguish it as a "different species". Maybe those traits get passed on to subsequent generations. That child grows up, reproduces, and produces children of her own. Maybe that child has further changes in her DNA - but she still looks like the same species as her parents. And on and on, down the genetic line. Everyone looks basically like their parents, and the differences between generations are fairly small.
It's the time that's the key. Evolution, after all, is change over time.
You should read up on the Galapagos finches to get a good idea of how divergence happens in the real world. The Beak of the Finch is a superb read, if a little dated.
This was a fantastic book about people studying evolution in the field. No need for her to "believe" in fossils or carbon dating, this is actual observation of evolution and how it works:
There's a great book called The Beak of the Finch. It tells the story of how evolution has been observed occurring in the field, today, now, in the same Galapagos finch populations that Darwin observed.
I really enjoyed reading the popular book on Darwin's Finches in the Galapagos, entitled "The Beak of the Finch", wherein they describe the fascinating research on evolution of these finches in the isolated islands. In some cases, they've tracked every single bird on a small island and their entire family tree for dozens of generations.
What are some of the difficulties in your research that come about because you don't have a ridiculously isolated study group like Galapagos Finches?
Beak of the finch by Jonathan Weiner is a pretty darn good book. It tells of one experiment on evolution and how it works. I have read a lot, but this one is more about the people as well as the new ideas of experiment than the theory of evolution.
Religious thought has been eliminated from the UK, perhaps by people like mark204, who made a new account just to post that unuseful trolling.
Also, JSavage37 didn't even bother to quote from the book he referred you to. That is lazy, not helpful.
Frankly, the guardian article was sensationalistic. However, it addresses the difference between epigenetics and Lamarckianism.
I didn't see your article as promoting Creationsim, and I doubt the other posters even read the article. But the title attacking evolution will invite a knee-jerk downvote here in /r/science.
You should read The Beak of the Finch. It's about two scientists, Rosemary and Peter Grant, who have been studying a population of finches in the Galápagos since the 1970s. They are highly respected in their field. This book would give you a much better understanding of natural selection and evolution, and it's not a hard read. There are also similar, and more recent books, on the same subject. Stephen Jay Gould also explains this well, and he's a really engaging writer.
People study these things rigorously for decades in order to better understand how it all works. It makes much more sense to look at their results and conclusions than to just wonder about these things yourself, without the necessary background.
https://www.amazon.com/Beak-Finch-Story-Evolution-Time/dp/067973337X
The Beak of the Finch is a fantastic book for non-scientists curious about evolution. I read it in high school and it's probably what led me to science in the first place.
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