 We're going to discuss natural selection and how Charles Darwin observed natural selection and evolution in the finches that are now called Darwin's finches in the Galapagos Islands. So Darwin was a naturalist aboard the HMS Beagle, which was set sail in order to do a mapping expedition. And Darwin was brought along in order to catalog and draw and look at all of the life that they encountered in these new places where they were mapping. So Darwin got to the Galapagos and noticed that there were a group of finches, a group of birds that all seemed to be pretty closely related. They seemed very similar except they had some phenological differences like their beaks. For example, one of the groups of birds were insectivorous birds. They fed on insects and they had thin, sharp beaks that are best suited to spearing insects in the air. Another group of finches fed on the ground, on seeds that were found on the ground, and they had shorter, squatter beaks that were best suited to eating seeds off the ground. There was a third group of finches that eat from cactuses and they had sharper, longer beaks that are best suited to getting seeds out of cactuses, out of cactus flowers. So Darwin was able to see that the variation in a population combined with a preference for a certain type of food could lead over time to the development of separate species differences aided them in survival and fitness for the type of food that they consumed.