At the Annual Meeting, Peter R. Grant and B. Rosemary Grant received the Eisenmann Medal, The Linnaean Society of New York’s highest award, given for excellence in ornithology and encouragement of the amateur.
In the Origin of Species Charles Darwin established the scientific basis for understanding how evolution occurs by natural selection. To explain how species form he envisioned a three-step process involving colonization of a new area, divergence through natural selection, and the formation of a barrier to interbreeding between divergent lineages. The challenge for us is the same as the challenge for Darwin, to reconstruct evolutionary history and interpret it. A productive strategy to address the challenge now and into the future is to combine the fields of genetics, ecology, behavior, and genomics in laboratory and field investigations. We illustrate how this research program can be carried out with an example of adaptive radiation of Darwin’s finches.
Peter and Rosemary Grant have been studying Darwin’s finches on the Galápagos Islands since 1973. The 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. The work is a blend of ecology, behavior, and genetics. The research has been published in four books, most recently How and Why Species Multiply (2008) and 40 years of Evolution (2014), both published by Princeton University Press.
Peter R. Grant is the Class of 1877 Professor Emeritus in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University, having trained at Cambridge University and the University of British Columbia. Before joining Princeton in 1986 he taught at McGill University and the University of Michigan. B. Rosemary Grant is Research Scholar and Professor Emerita in the same department. She received her training at Edinburgh University and Uppsala University, and taught at Princeton University.