) and were the subject of Jonathan Weiner's Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Beak of the Finch. The Grants are as close to celebrities in the evolutionary biology world as there are. I, along with a pack of other graduate students, got to eat Jimmy John's subs with them for lunch. There was a lot of fawning and very few good questions, except for the Grants, which was a bit disappointing. Books were bought (proceeds to charity lest you think the Grants soulless capitalists) and autographs inscribed. The Grants themselves were friendly, smart, and interested. It was a bit like talking to brilliant grandparents.
I did learn that their ability to uncover interesting stories of evolution is dependent on strong droughts (good for science, bad for finches). The 14 "species" of Darwin's finches are not species, but varieties, as Darwin himself thought. The finches are currently in the muddy middle ground between being behaviorally and morphologically distinct, but not reproductively isolated. Someone badly needs to apply some next-gen sequencing in order to get the research out of the molecular genetic Dark Ages (they've been working with only 16 microsatellite markers).
Unfortunately, I think one of the take home messages for the day was that the number of experimentally (or observationally) tractable natural systems for studying evolution is too small and too historically contingent to really develop and test general principles. For that, we are going to have to look to experimental evolution in the lab using micro-organisms.
