Why are the Galapagos finches referred to as nature's "most famous toolkit?"?

Question

These are questions from the book The Beak of the Finch by Jonathan Weiner. You can answer if you want. It would totally help me out :]

2.What hints do we have that Linne wondered about evolution?

3.How did Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology influence Darwin?

4.How did John Gould's discovery that there were 14(13) species of finches on the Galapagos help spark Darwin's revolutionary ideas?

5.Why did Darwin begin the Origin with a detailed description of pigeon breeding?

Answer 1

I'll answer them in order of, well, how quickly they come to mind:

5. Darwin wanted to provide an easy way to "ease" the understanding of natural selection into the general public. So, he used a form of selection humans have used for centuries without even realizing it--artificial selection. He used the pigeons to illustrate the "hand of selection," by breeding certain pigeons that displayed certain traits with like pigeons--to test if the traits were heritable to the offspring. This artificial selection is the same when it comes to growing tomatoes. Farmers harvest all of their tomatoes, but they prefer to breed the plants that produce the biggest, reddest tomatoes. In doing that, plants that produce large, red tomatoes are "selected." This is a way he could relate natural selection (done by the natural forces of the world) with human (or artificial) selection.

3. The Principle of Geology--and you are thinking of Charles Lydell--proved that Earth was not 6000 or so years old, as the biblical account did. Charles was a "uniformitarian," who believed the earth's topography and geology came about from millions of years of gradual chances to the landscape. This was against catastrophicism, which said huge, divinely-induced events occurred in the past that made the Earth the way it is. Anyway, uniformitarianism introduced a VERY OLD Earth, and evolution, according Darwin, required a LOT of time. It was a perfect marriage.

4. It showed that the finches were very related, but different species. This goes with Darwin's theory of descent with modification. They all seemed to have a common ancestor: the grassquill warbler, which came off of mainland South America. When it hit the Galapagos Islands, natural selection shaped the traits of the birds, from their sizes to their beak length, etc.

As for number 2, I'm not sure if you're talking about Linneus...but those other answers are pretty darn accurate. I did a lot of reading about Darwin and his famous finches. If there are further questions, or I wasn't too clear on something, please let me know. Good luck!