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The Grants and Darwin

The Grants and Darwin share an important connection to Brown University. That connection is with Hermon Carey Bumpus, who was a biology professor at Brown in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. One day while walking to work, Professor Bumpus came upon a number of sparrows that had been buried beneath a snow drift near the Providence Athenaeum. Weiner describes what happened next in The Beak of the Finches:

Bumpus collected as many of the sparrows as he could and brought them to the Anatomical Laboratory. In the warmth of the lab, seventy-two of the sparrows revived; sixty-four died. He recorded the sex, body length, wingspans, and weight of both the living and the dead; he also measured the length of the head, the humerus, the femur, the tibiotarsus, the skull, and the sternum. When he tabulated all these results he found that most of the survivors were males, and that among the males the survivors tended to be shorter and lighter than average, with "longer wing bones, longer legs, longer sternums, and greater brain capacity" (Weiner, 227).

Peter Grant analyzed Bumpus' data in the 1970s using more advanced statistical tools and "concluded that Bumpus had actually seen not one but two kinds of natural selection. For the female sparrows the storm was stabilizing. The event killed the largest and the smallest, but preserved the mean, just as Bumpus had said. In the males, however, the pressure of the storm was directional, pushing the birds toward smaller size. The reanalysis of Bumpus' classic data helped to inspire the Grant's first trip to the Galapagos" (Weiner, 227-228).

What are the Grants doing now?

Peter and Rosemary Grant

About Darwin

Charles Darwin

Learn about the life and work of Charles Darwin, and the impact he continues to have on science and culture.

Images: Picture of the Grants by Denise Applewhite, courtesy of www.princeton.edu. Charles Darwin, undated print from a photograph by Elliot & Fry, Albert E. Lownes Manuscript Collection, courtesy of the John Hay Library, Brown University