It is the twenty-fifth of January, 1991. There are four hundred finches on the island at this moment, and the Grants know every one of the birds on sight, the way shepherds can tell every sheep in their flock.
This is not quite the opening line of Chapter 1, but it’s pretty close. There is a short paragraph preceding it and, truthfully, an editor should have recommended excising it. This is a far better choice for kicking off the book because it situational to the extreme. In a remarkably efficient economy of words this sentence informs the readers of the centerpiece of the narrative. Details are sketchy, admittedly, but for the average reader does it really matter where the island or what it’s called? You’ve got a time, you’ve got a place, you got a much more essential detail of the characters than their first names. All in all, this is too good a sentence to be wasted at the beginning of the second paragraph.
“What a trifling difference must often determine which shall survive, and which perish!” To many of his critics this has seemed pure conjecture, but after a good part of a lifetime on Daphne Major, the Grants find it obvious.
The critical view toward this quote from the writings of Darwin is that conjecture it must surely be because the evolutionary process plays out on a such a broad epochal scale that it seems impossible that the alterations in species which can millions of years could really turn on a trifle. A counterargument is immediately provided by Rosemary Grant as she contemplates how much easier it would be for her to play the piano if her fingers were just the slightest bit longer. The intimation here is that an evolutionary advancement in the average length of human fingers by the most “trifling” amount could potentially have the consequence of flooding the planet with concert pianists. On a grander scale, of course, what Darwin is suggesting and the Grants are confirming is that with such minor evolutionary alterations in a species comes much greater potential: that between which species survive and which become extinct.
In other words, in the present climate of the Galapagos, it would take only a thousand years of not unlikely weather to create a new species of Darwin’s finches on the islands. And if the climate were to change and inflict a series of grim droughts or floods at just the right intervals, without missing a beat, it could create a new species in a single century.
The central thesis of the book is one that sets out to challenge the convention notion that the processes of Darwinian evolution relying on natural selection is something which plays out over geologic time that is far to slow-moving to witness even within a single human’s lifespan. The premise argues that natural selection is not a stop-and-start staccato system, but is always present and always happening. For things to speed up fast enough for evolution to actually be witnessed requires only a change in variables.
And—spoiler alert—take a guess as to what has been the single most contributory variable to the process of natural selection over the past two-hundred years? The contributions of human activity to comprehensively resetting the ecological equations will likely never be fully known, but the evidence that it permeates into literally every square inch of the planet should no longer be a point of contention. Incase it hasn’t been made clear, the use of the word “climate” in the quote above is not figurative, but specific to the literal meaning associated with the weather and how things have been getting warmer.
