The Beak of the Finch: The Story of Evolution in Our Time.

WEINER, Jonathan.

$750.00

Item Number: 112993

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.

First edition of the author’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work. Octavo, original half cloth, cartographic endpapers. Lengthily inscribed by the author on the half-title page, “For John Rogers, With Best Wishes Jonathan Weiner ‘Darwin’s Finches will keep their covenant with Darwin’s islands, witnessed by a heap of stones.’ May 2016.” Also, includes a signed letter on the author’s letterhead to the same recipient. Fine in a near fine dust jacket that shows light shelfwear. Jacket design by Chip Kidd and signed by him on the rear flap. Drawings by K. Thalia Grant. A unique example.

On a desert island in the heart of the Galapagos archipelago, where Darwin received his first inklings of the theory of evolution, two scientists, Peter and Rosemary Grant, have spent twenty years proving that Darwin did not know the strength of his own theory. For among the finches of Daphne Major, natural selection is neither rare nor slow: it is taking place by the hour, and we can watch. In this dramatic story of groundbreaking scientific research, Jonathan Weiner follows these scientists as they watch Darwin's finches and come up with a new understanding of life itself. The Beak of the Finch is an elegantly written and compelling masterpiece of theory and explication in the tradition of Stephen Jay Gould.