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

WEINER, Jonathan.

$650.00

Item Number: 137989

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.

First edition of the author’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work. Octavo, original half cloth, cartographic endpapers. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author in the year of publication on the half-title page, “To Betsy and Joe with best wishes Jonathan Weiner May 1994.” Additionally signed three times by jacket designer Chip Kidd, on the front panel, on the half-title page and the jacket rear flap. Fine in a fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Chip Kidd. 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.