Princeton Couple Wins Kyoto Prize for Galapagos WorkBy Janet Frankston Lorin

June 19 (Bloomberg) — A husband and wife team of Princeton University biologists won the Kyoto Prize for more than 35 years of studying bird beaks on the Galápagos Islands, showing how small evolutionary changes lead to big ones.

Studies by Peter and Rosemary Grant, both 72, of birds known as Darwin’s finches showed “morphology and behavior of organisms are altered rapidly by natural selection in response to recurrent environmental changes,” Japan’s Inamori Foundation, which sponsors the prize, said today in a statement. The couple studied the same kind of Galapagos birds that helped Charles Darwin shape evolutionary theory in the 1800s.

Peter Grant is a professor emeritus of zoology at Princeton, in New Jersey, and Rosemary Grant is a retired senior research scholar, both in the department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Their work, subject of author Jonathan Weiner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Beak of the Finch” (Knopf, 1994), “made the most important contribution since Darwin” toward evolutionary biology, the Inamori Foundation said.

“Their work has not only made enormous contributions to evolutionary biology and ecology, but also has a profound influence on the general public through demonstrating the evolution by natural selection in the field,” the foundation’s citation said.

The Grants are the first husband-wife winners in the 25- year history of the Kyoto Prize, which honors lifetime achievements in science, technology, arts and philosophy, Princeton said. The award will be presented in November in Kyoto, Japan, and includes a cash prize of 50 million yen ($516,689).

To contact the reporter on this story: Janet Frankston Lorin in New York jlorin@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: June 19, 2009 12:41 EDT
taken from bloomberg.com 6-22-09