Part 2, Chapter 8 Summary

Rosemary and Peter Grant took a year from teaching to clean and run preliminary analyses of the data gathered over the last twenty years. Rosemary sits at a table in her Princeton office sorting data about the finches on her computer. The walls of her office are lined with boxes full of information about the islands and the birds, from seeds and songs to mating and lineage. Their data gathering and analysis are very thorough and extensive.

There has been a strange twist discovered through their data. By all accounts, the hybrid fledglings produced by the mating of two species are usually sterile and do not survive. However, the Grants research has shown on both Daphne Major and Genovesa that the hybrids are not conforming to the norm, but are surviving and reproducing.

Rosemary and Peter are struggling with the numbers...