Peter Raymond Grant (born October 26, 1936) and Barbara Rosemary Grant (born October 8, 1936) are a British married couple who are evolutionary biologists at Princeton University. Each currently holds the position of emeritus professor. They are known for their work with Darwin's finches on Daphne Major, one of the Galápagos Islands. Since 1973, the Grants have spent six months of every year capturing, tagging, and taking blood samples from finches on the island. They have worked to show that natural selection can be seen within a single lifetime, or even within a couple of years. Charles Darwin originally thought that natural selection was a long, drawn out process but the Grants have shown that these changes in populations can happen very quickly. In 1994, they were awarded the Leidy Award from the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. The Grants were the subject of the book The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time by Jonathan Weiner, which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1995. In 2003, the Grants were joint recipients of the Loye and Alden Miller Research Award. They won the 2005 Balzan Prize for Population Biology. The Balzan Prize citation states:
Peter and Rosemary Grant are distinguished for their remarkable long-term studies demonstrating evolution in action in Galápagos finches. They have demonstrated how very rapid changes in body and beak size in response to changes in the food supply are driven by natural selection. They have also elucidated the mechanisms by which new species arise and how genetic diversity is maintained in natural populations. The work of the Grants has had a seminal influence in the fields of population biology, evolution, and ecology. The Grants are both Fellows of the Royal Society, Peter in 1987, and Rosemary in 2007. In 2008, the Grants were among the thirteen recipients of the Darwin-Wallace Medal, which is bestowed every fifty years by the Linnean Society of London. In 2009, they were recipients of the annual Kyoto Prize in basic sciences, an international award honouring significant contributions to the scientific, cultural and spiritual betterment of mankind. In 2017, they received the Royal Medal in Biology "for their research on the ecology and evolution of Darwin's finches on the Galapagos, demonstrating that natural selection occurs frequently and that evolution is rapid as a result".
Early years Barbara Rosemary Grant was born in Arnside, England in 1936. In her youth, she collected plant fossils and compared them to living look-alikes. At the age of 12, she read Darwin's On the Origin of Species. Despite being told by her headmistress that pursuing an education in a male-dominated field of study would be foolish, in addition to contracting a serious case of mumps that temporarily stalled her academic activity, she decided to continue forth with her education. In 1960, she graduated from the University of Edinburgh with a degree in Zoology. For the next year, she studied genetics under Conrad Waddington and later devised a dissertation to study isolated populations of fish. This project was put on hold when she accepted a biology teaching job at the University of British Columbia, where she met Peter Grant. Peter Raymond Grant was born in 1936 in London, but relocated to the English countryside to avoid encroaching bombings during World War II. He attended school at the Surrey-Hampshire border, where he collected botanical samples, as well as insects. He attended the University of Cambridge and later moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, and began work on a doctoral degree in Zoology at the University of British Columbia. Peter met Rosemary after beginning his research there, and after a year, the two wedded.
Education and career
Peter Grant BA (Hons) – Cambridge University- 1960 PhD – University of British Columbia- 1964 Post-doctoral fellowship – Yale University- 1964–1965 Assistant Professor – McGill University- 1965–1968 Associate Professor – McGill University- 1968–1973 Full Professor – McGill University- 1973–1977 Professor – University of Michigan- 1977–1985 Visiting Professor – Uppsala and Lund University – 1981, 1985 Professor – Princeton University- 1985 Class of 1877 Professor of Zoology- Princeton University- 1989 Professor of Zoology Emeritus – Princeton University- 2008
Rosemary Grant BSc (Hons), University of Edinburgh, 1960 PhD (Evolutionary Biology), Uppsala University, 1985 Research Associate, Yale University, 1964 Research Associate, McGill University, 1973 Research Associate, University of Michigan, 1977 Research Scholar and lecturer, Princeton University, 1985 Senior Research Scholar with rank of Professor, Princeton University, 1997 Senior Research Scholar with rank of Professor Emeritus, Princeton University, 2008
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