This is just excellent. A close look at the finches of the Galapagos Islands, following a monitoring programme which has been going on for decades - scientists returning year after year to record the populations of various finch species - and using the results of that programme to tease out evolution in real time. And that is the exciting focus of all that work: the discovery that evolution is happening there in visible, short term form, in the finch populations. (And this visibility is not just confined to the finches! Weiner has constructed this book amazingly well, and has compared the finch work with similar projects on fish from Venezuela, for instance, and a number of other relatively short-lived species in which natural selection is clearly illustrating evolutionary principle.)

This is deeply exciting and relevant work, and it's presented here in a way that anyone can understand it... should they choose to. These experiments should be talked about in every biology class from high school on. Hell, from primary school if possible. It is clear, rational, illuminating work.