Reading: On Darwin's finches

My work—if you could call it that, because I don't get paid—entails much reading. Every day of every week, I delve into books, magazines, journal articles and new feeds—all in the name of reading widely and becoming informed. Doctoral research requires it and, as I've come to discover, the quality of my thinking has probably improved as a result.

Today, my readings included an interesting short piece entitled Darwin's Finches. While I'm no evolutionist, this article did set me thinking about the validity of natural selection and adaptation to one's environment. Peter and Rosemary Grant's work was fairly compelling. It showed that natural events can precipitate small but significant changes within a population. That set off another train of thought—where does natural selection stop? Does it continue through to evolution (apes to humans, as has been speculated by evolutionists), or is natural selection real and evolution simply a theoretical position promoted by those whose worldview excludes the supernatural? Now I'm nudging against a big philosophical question. Better that I get back to my core reading I suspect!