That summer of 2007 was all birds and writing. I could see finches everywhere. Here a finch there a finch. There were purple finches, house finches etc. In summer of 2008, I had a bird feed in my front lawn and had visitors since then. Initially, there were house finches and purple finches. Purple finches even built a nest on our lamp on the porch. It took a couple of weeks for the little finches to empty the feed. Thereafter, it took a week and then in a month it got famous and its emptied in few days.
One bright morning in 08 I opened the door and saw a small yellow birdie on the feed. It was astonishingly beautiful. I wondered what it was. I was sure I haven't seen him before. It was an American Gold Finch. Was excited that my bird feed is getting famous. And then on I have sparrows, cardinals, finches , sparrows visiting my feed everyday.
Whenever the word or the bird finch, crosses my mind, I remember Darwin. Here is some information on Darwin's theory of evolution.
http://anthro.palomar.edu/evolve/evolve_2.htm
Darwin identified 13 species of finches in the Galápagos Islands. This was puzzling since he knew of only one species of this bird on the mainland of South America, nearly 600 miles to the east, where they had all presumably originated. He observed that the Galápagos species differed from each other in beak size and shape. He also noted that the beak varieties were associated with diets based on different foods. He concluded that when the original South American finches reached the islands, they dispersed to different environments where they had to adapt to different conditions. Over many generations, they changed anatomically in ways that allowed them to get enough food and survive to reproduce. Darwin came to understand that any population consists of individuals that are all slightly different from one another. Those individuals having a variation that gives them an advantage in staying alive long enough to successfully reproduce are the ones that pass on their traits more frequently to the next generation. Subsequently, their traits become more common and the population evolves. Darwin called this "descent with modification." The Galápagos finches provide an excellent example of this process. Among the birds that ended up in arid environments, the ones with beaks better suited for eating cactus got more food. As a result, they were in better condition to mate. Similarly, those with beak shapes that were better suited to getting nectar from flowers or eating hard seeds in other environments were at an advantage there. In a very real sense, nature selected the best adapted varieties to survive and to reproduce. This process has come to be known as natural selection. Darwin did not believe that the environment was producing the variation within the finch populations. He correctly thought that the variation already existed and that nature just selected for the most suitable beak shape and against less useful ones. By the late 1860's, Darwin came to describe this process as the "survival of the fittest." This is very different from Lamarck's incorrect idea that the environment altered the shape of individuals and that these acquired changes were then inherited.
People started believing in Lamarckian theories recently with the latest developments in genetics and with the completion of human genome project (Survival of the sickest - Dr.Shroan Moalem).
