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Trevor Price
Lisle Gibbs was a graduate student of Peter Grant’s who took up the watch on Daphne Major after Trevor Price left. Price had been waiting for rain to come to the island, because he believed that a significant weather event could begin a major selection event on the island. Price’s theory was confirmed when Gibbs and his assistant arrived just in time for the strongest El Niño recorded in the 20th century. The storm reversed the tides of natural selection on the island and began pressuring finches to evolve to become smaller, with narrower beaks that would allow them to hunt in the soil for the now-plentiful seeds that new plant growth brought to the island.
Lisle Gibbs Quotes in The Beak of the Finch
The The Beak of the Finch quotes below are all either spoken by Lisle Gibbs or refer to Lisle Gibbs. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 7 Quotes
Natural selection had swung around against the birds from the other side. Big birds with big beaks were dying. Small birds with small beaks were flourishing. Selection had flipped.
Both big males and big females were dying, [Gibbs] noticed, but many more males than females—again, the reverse of the drought. Everything the drought had preferred in size large—weight, wingspan, tarsus length, bill length, bill depth, and bill width—the aftermath of the flood favored in size small.
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Lisle Gibbs Character Timeline in The Beak of the Finch
The timeline below shows where the character Lisle Gibbs appears in The Beak of the Finch. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 6: Darwin’s Forces
...March of 1981, it was “too little too late”—not many finches bred. Price left, and Lisle Gibbs , another of Peter Grant’s graduate students, took up the watch. A year passed with...
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Chapter 7: Twenty-five Thousand Darwins
Lisle Gibbs and his field assistant rushed to Daphne Major to find nests all over the island...
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The El Niño that Lisle Gibbs and his assistant experienced was the strongest recorded in the 20th century. The desert island...
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Back in the U.S., Lisle Gibbs looked at his research. It was September of 1985. What he found was astonishing: natural...
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Epilogue: God and the Galápagos
Trevor Price, Lisle Gibbs , Peter Boag, Laurene Ratcliffe, and Dolph Schluter continue their research projects around the world....
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