The Kyoto Prize has gone to Peter and Rosemary Grant, I see from 80 Beats. Congratulations to them both for this Nobel-esque honor. If you don’t immediately recognize their names, you can start with this post I wrote last fall about the Grants’ research on the evolution of Darwin’s Finches, and then finish up with a couple books: their own How and Why Species Multiply: The Radiation of Darwin’s Finches and the Pulitzer-Prize winning The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time
A Big Prize For Finch Beaks
June 19th, 2009 at 3:40 pm
Wow, what a well-deserved honor to two brilliant scientists and two very humble, extremely friendly people (I had the honor of hearing them talk about their work earlier this spring here in New York City and spoke to both briefly afterwards.). For those who don’t know why their work is so importan, it is the best long-term study I know of studying natural selection in the wild – not merely because the study animals in question are Darwin’s Finches – and one that is still ongoing.
June 19th, 2009 at 10:13 pm
June 20th, 2009 at 8:55 am
Carl,
Just read again your original post from last fall, and it reads like a concise summary of the talk I heard B. Rosemary Grant give a few months ago. Only additional comment that I might make is that their principal collaborator at Harvard University is a young evolutionary developmental biologist, Arkhat Abzhanov, who may be the only Kazakh scientist working here in the USA.
June 21st, 2009 at 7:36 am
Especially satisfying is that the prize goes to Rosemary Grant too.