Seeing Darwin’s Finches (the Geospizinae) was one of the great highlights of my trips in 2012. This group of 13 or 14 species of passerine birds (sources differ) is native to the Galápagos archipelago (with one further species inhabiting Cocos Island) and one of the immediate links to our understanding of evolution, adaptive radiation and natural selection in particular. According to today’s widely accepted theory, all of Darwin’s Finches evolved from one ancestral species which reached one of the islands. The birds started to occupy empty ecological niches of the young, largely uninhabited archipelago, transforming their morphology (look at their beaks!) driven by natural selection, developing separate populations and stopped to interbreed: new species evolved.
Understanding evolution must be one of the most significant realizations of modern humankind, here squeezed into a few sentences. For detailed and more profound explanations I really do recommend Jonathan Weiner’s detailed, yet comprehensible „The Beak of the Finch“ which was my read while cruising the Galápagos Islands in August.
