Jessie and John Danz Lecture Series: Peter and Rosemary Grant May 1, 2008

Peter and Rosemary Grant have been studying Darwin's finches on the Galapagos islands since 1973. Their fieldwork is designed to understand the causes of an adaptive radiation. It combines analyses of archipelago-wide patterns of evolution with detailed investigations of population level processes on two islands, Genovesa and Daphne. Their work is a blend of ecology, behavior and genetics. They have collaborated with investigators to estimate phylogenetic relations among the species of finches and their relatives on the continent and in the Caribbean, and to identify the molecular mechanisms involved in the development of beaks that vary so conspicuously among the species.