AP: Those Darwin Finches are Still Evolving

Charles Darwin listed the species of finches on the Galapagos Islands, with their clear common heritage but wide range of physical features and habits, as a particularly obvious example of recent, ongoing evolution. In Science magazine this week Peter and Rosemary Grant, researchers from Princeton University, reveal yet another example of fast evolution among the birds. Their work gained wide exposure in the popular book The Beak of the Finch by Jonathan Weiner some years ago. In this latest case, an existing species rapidly shifted its beak size to take advantage of different foods after a competitor bird showed up. (Of course the Creationist crowd will just say this is merely microevolution, not real evolution, but picky, picky, picky.) AP’s Randolph E. Schmid writes it to broad pickup.

Stories:

AP Randolph E. Schmid; National Geographic News Mason Inman;