What Darwin Never Saw

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St. John's University *

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1200

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Anthropology

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Apr 3, 2024

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ANTH 1200 Human Origins Fall 2022 Assignment: What Darwin Never Saw Due date: August 31, 2022 by 10:00 pm The documentary, What Darwin Never Saw (1995), part of the PBS series The New Explorers , features the work of evolutionary biologists Peter and Rosemary Grant. Set in the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador, it documents the process of natural selection operating on Darwin’s finches. The long-term study of the Grants continued for four decades and made many significant contributions to evolutionary biology. Fill in your answers as you are watching the documentary. Link to the documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MR0zmGwglE 1. In the first few minutes of the movie, the narrator says: “the finches held the secret to the origin of life”. Is this an accurate statement? Do you agree with it? 2. Why was it important for the Grants to ensure that nothing was brought onto the island from the “outside world”? 3. The Grants point out that the finches (and other animals) on Daphne Major, the Galapagos Island where they conducted their research, are not afraid of humans. How may this be both a good and a bad thing? 4. How many different species of Darwin’s finches inhabit the Galapagos Islands, and what is one of the most obvious ways in which the species differ? 5. The three questions Peter and Rosemary Grant were trying to answer by studying the finches were: a) Do species compete? b) Why are some populations so variable? c) 1

6. What kinds of data do the Grants collect to monitor the individual finches in the Geospiza fortis population on Daphne Major? 7. The population of ground finches on Daphne Major shows considerable variation. In 1977 there was a severe drought on the island coinciding with the Grants’ research. What happened to the finches during the drought? Describe how the size of the finches and their beaks interacted with changes in the availability of their food. 8. What trait did the survivors of the drought pass on to their descendants? 9. There was a severe El Niño event in the Galapagos in 1982-83. What weather conditions occurred, and how did this event influence the ground finches on Daphne? 10. What does the movie’s title mean? Do studies like that of the Grants suggest that Darwin was correct, and that evolution by natural selection is a very slow process, always taking many thousands of years to produce an obvious change? 11. Did the Grants’ research, and the observations they made over the decades, support or refute the hypotheses they set out to test and add to the theory of evolution by natural selection? 12. Based on what you saw in the video, explain what natural selection is. 2

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What Darwin Never Saw

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