Princeton University professors are following in the footsteps of Charles Darwin by spending more than 35 years discovering how rapidly evolution and natural selection can take place in the Galapagos and Archipelago islands.

ASU’s Darwinfest brought professors Peter and Rosemary Grant to the Tempe campus to lecture on the evolution of finches Wednesday night.

The Grants are 2009 winners of the Kyoto Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the category of basic sciences, said ASU spokeswoman Margaret Coulombe.

The lecture explored the couple’s research about the diversity of species, the process of speciation, hybridization, environmental effects and genetic variation among finches.

Peter Grant said they spent 36 seasons in a tent on the Galapagos Islands, taking special care in what they bring to prevent any disturbances to the land or animal population.

Each season the Grants capture, measure and tag finches in order to track the progression of each species as they evolve, Peter Grant said.

Natural selection occurs as ecological conditions affect the food supply, he said. In years of drought, large-beak finches can be more likely to survive than small-beak finches because the large-beak finches are able to eat the hard seeds left on the island, Grant said.

The Grants’ research has helped discover how quickly evolution can take place, he said.

“The value of the finches is that they are a wonderful example of the diversification of a group of animals from a common ancestor,” Peter Grant said.

Rosemary Grant said people must take care of the environment in order to continue research to understand evolution and its processes.

“To conserve species and their environments, we must keep them both capable of further change,” Rosemary Grant said.

Grant Yamashita, a post-doctoral fellow at ASU’s Center for Biology and Society, said he has read the Grants’ work for many years. They are an inspiration for their dedication to their studies, he said.

“This kind of long-term study is very rare to see,” Yamashita said.

Reach the reporter at rvanvelz@asud.edu.