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Acknowledgments
I met the Grants in January 1990, when they were on their way down to the Galápagos. Peter put aside the packing to have lunch with me. No one had ever written about the Grants’ work in all their time on Daphne Major (aside from a few squibs in newspapers and magazines) and despite Peter’s enormous charm I could tell he was not eager for me to write about them either. In the middle of lunch he sprang up from his chair to pace off the size of their campsite on Daphne. “Not much bigger than this table!” he said cheerfully. Too small for visitors.
After lunch he introduced me to Rosemary and their younger daughter, Thalia, who was joining her parents once again on Daphne. I remember thinking that the three of them might have been picked by central casting to play roles in The Swiss Family Robinson. But again along with the lighter-than-air charm there was an equally strong air of reserve, a reluctance to be cast in any roles by anyone. Just before they left for Ecuador, Peter wrote me a note suggesting that I put them out of my mind for a few years, until they had a chance to wrap up their study. He thought I might prefer not to write about a work in progress.
When the Grants got back from the islands that year, they found me sitting in Princetons Biology Library, reading their team’s technical reports: more than 150 scientific papers and several monographs on Darwin’s finches. I had also begun gathering other eyewitness reports of evolution in action, a collection that now approaches two thousand technical papers and books. (The ones that contributed most to the final draft of this book are listed in the bibliography.) I was convinced that the Grants’ watch on Daphne Major is one of the most remarkable works in progress on this planet, and I had to write about it.
THE GRANTS WARMED TO MY PROJECT (or took pity on me). John Tyler Bonner, who first told me about the Grants and their work, and who made the introduction, encouraged me throughout. I am grateful not only for his help but also his friendship. More than eighty other evolutionary biologists consented to be interviewed. Marty Kreitman, who was then at Princeton, opened his lab to me, and I spent many months there, learning about the study of evolution at the level of DNA. I enjoyed the hospitality of Kreitman and his crew, and wish I could have written more about them here. Many thanks to Hiroshi Akashi, Andrew Berry, Jeffrey Feder, John McDonald, Martin Taylor, and Marta Wayne.
I am also very grateful to many people at the Charles Darwin Foundation in Quito, and at the Charles Darwin Research Station in Puerto Ayora, who helped me make a trip to Daphne Major. Special thanks to David Anderson, one of the Grants’ former finch watchers, who gave me a tour of some of their field sites, and showed me the vampire finches of Española.
I could not have written the book without the help of a few other veterans of the long watch. Their names and my debts to them fill this book. Special thanks to Trevor Price for lending me the memoir he wrote on Daphne. It is an amazing adventure story and I have read it many times.
Halfway through the writing I found out that the Grants’ daughter Thalia is an artist as well as an ecologist. (She learned both the art and science in the islands.) Since this book is so preoccupied with the successions of generations—generations of finches, and generations of scientists—it seemed fitting to illustrate it with drawings from the books of Charles Darwin, and from the sketchbooks of Thalia Grant.
Peter Boag, John Bonner, John Endler, Lisle Gibbs, Peter and Rosemary Grant, Trevor Price, Laurene Ratcliffe, Dolph Schluter, and Frank Sulloway checked the manuscript for scientific and historical accuracy, and some of them read more than one draft. So did my friends Keith Sandberg and Dick Preston, and Floyd Glenn helped with some of the statistics. Raouf Grissa and Karen Slattery gave me a home away from home at the Paganini Cafe. My mother, Ponnie, helped me prospect in several libraries; my father, Jerry, gave me a Macintosh. As Darwin wrote to his friend Hooker, “I thank you most sincerely for all your assistance; & whether or no my Book may be wretched you have done your best to make it less wretched.”
I am extremely lucky in my editor, Jonathan Segal, and am grateful for all his help with this book. My agent, Victoria Pryor, has been supportive in big ways and little ways, and I am thankful. Ida Giragossian has been a pleasure to work with. I am also grateful to Sonny Mehta, whose enthusiasm for the book has done a great deal for it.
I thank my friends and my family for support of many kinds. My sons, Aaron and Benjamin, have now heard more about Darwin’s finches than any other children their age since Nicola and Thalia. My wife, Deborah, read many drafts, and weathered many gusts and squalls.
Working on this book has given me an extraordinary view of evolution in action. For this view, I cannot imagine a better place to stand than the rim of Daphne Major. I want to thank the Grants again, not onl
y for the time and help they have given me, but for the view itself.
Jonathan Weiner worked as a writer and editor at The Sciences. He is the author of Planet Earth, The Next One Hundred Years, and The Beak of the Finch, which won both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Pulitzer Prize. During the writing of Time, Love, Memory, he was Visiting Fellow in the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University, and then McGraw Professor in Writing. He lives in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, with his wife and their two sons.
ALSO BY JONATHAN WEINER
TIME, LOVE, MEMORY
Jonathan Weiner, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Beak of the Finch, brings his brilliant reporting skills to the story of Seymour Benzer, the Brooklyn-born maverick scientist whose study of genetics and experiments with fruit fly genes has helped revolutionize our knowledge of the connections between DNA and behavior both animal and human. How much of our fate is decided before we are born? Which of our characteristics is inscribed in our DNA? Weiner brings us into Benzer’s Fly Rooms at the California Institute of Technology, where Benzer, and his associates are in the process of finding answers, often astonishing ones, to these questions. Part biography, part thrilling scientific detective story, Time, Love, Memory forcefully demonstrates how Benzer’s studies are changing our world view—and even our lives.
Science
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