After spending an either understandably or inordinately long time at it, depending on whether sitting on a couch watching a lot of hours of one-sided soccer instead of lying in a bed reading seems like a sensible short-term tradeoff to you or not, I finally finished David Quammen's The Song of the Dodo, and forged directly into the somewhat breezier The Beak of the Finch, Jonathan Weiner's companionable survey of experimental evolutionary biology. If I were required to have one life-course regret (rather than none or several), it might be that I did not (or have not, at least, but it might be too late) become a scientist. It's not entirely clear, to be honest, why I didn't. My father and his father were both physicists, and on my college applications I claimed, in what felt like earnest at the time, that I intended to major in Physics myself. In the car, on the way up the Mass Pike to Cambridge for my Freshman year, flipping through the Harvard course catalog, I suddenly realized that I didn't want to take any of the Physics courses, while almost every Philosophy course in the book sounded earth-shattering. Latter I found flaws in the second half of this apparent revelation, and opted to concentrate in art (which Harvard, stodgily, refers to as Visual and Environmental Studies), probably the farthest available remove from Physics. I believe my rationale at the time was that if I did Physics I'd have no social life, while VES would let me play with cool toys. I may even have been dense enough to admit this to my parents, who did not immediately see how four years of taking pictures, making documentaries about grubby local rock bands, and pondering the social significance of gas-station architecture would justify their spending the daunting amount of money that Harvard's delirious financial-aid department was convinced they had to spare. They showed heroic restraint, however, by not actually preventing me. In retrospect, it almost always seems like a good decision to me. I'm particularly proud of my younger self for recognizing that cameras are cooler than computers. Still, stories like Peter and Rosemary Grant's, which most of The Beak of the Finch is given over to telling, remind me why I once, simplistically, assumed that experimental science was by far the highest-order human activity, and thus the only fit pastime for smart people. The Grants spend half their time as biologists at Princeton, and the other half marooned in the Galápagos, measuring finches. Measuring birds may sound like an even more patrician hobby than merely watching them, but they do it for an extremely good reason, which is that after more than a hundred years of treating evolution as purely a matter of theory, it finally occurred to somebody that if you were clever, you might be able to find some of it literally taking place. The great virtues of the Grants' two study islands, Daphne Major and Genovesa, are that they are very small, they are very isolated, they have very simple ecosystems (in relative terms), and they are populated by distinctly speciated birds that reproduce quickly enough for generations to go by within the span of human observation. So the Grants, and their revolving cast of assorted graduate students, have been tagging, tracking and measuring every finch on their islands for the last twenty years, building up a database from which it finally becomes possible to extract factual and statistical observations about the effects of natural selection. You don't get a complete lineage from amoebae to Tisha Venturini out of calipered finch beaks, of course, but you go a long way towards demonstrating that the principle we think was responsible for the transformation is, in fact, both capable of, and inclined towards, transforming. If the value of this labor isn't self-evident to you, I'm not going to try to explain it, nor, probably, am I going to be civil to you at parties.