The Week in Review: Darwin's Finches and Natural Selection

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Our current unit is entitled Lucy's Locking Knees: Our Human Ancestry. As all units this year, Lucy blends elements of history and science. From the previous unit, we transitioned from a study of geology and stratigraphy to a survey of geologic time (with a 45 meter timeline suspended from the ceiling, with each meter equivalent to 100 million years), and are presenting progressing systematically through scientific classification toward our family, Hominidae, our genus, Homo, and our species, sapiens.

We took a couple of days last week to explore the beaks of finches, natural selection, and the life of Charles Darwin. Students were asked to test the efficiency of a variety of beak designs (tools such as pliers, scissors, clothes pin, and wire cutters were used to simulate this) to collect food (grains of rice). The guiding questions were, which beak is best adapted to the food source, and what is the consequence of beaks that are less well suited?

Following a discussion of Darwin and natural and artificial selection, our application question now becomes, how might we artificially select for a long-haired arctic zebra?

Note video clips of the activity here: finch1 finch2 finch3 finch4 finch5, and a link to the beak activity itself.

The following media was also shown, and served as a springboard to discussion:

The finches of the Galapagos

Carl Sagan explains natural selection

Charles Darwin & the tree of life (hosted by David Attenborough)