One Step Sideways, Three Steps Forward: One Womans Path to Becoming a Biologist

The story of the unorthodox and inspiring life and career of a pioneering biologist

Scientist Rosemary Grants journey in life has involved detours and sidestepsnot the shortest or the straightest of paths, but one that has led her to the top of evolutionary biology. In this engaging and moving book, Grant tells the story of her life and careerfrom her childhood love of nature in Englands Lake District to an undergraduate education at the University of Edinburgh through a swerve to Canada and teaching, followed by marriage, children, a PhD at age forty-nine, and her lifes work with Darwins finches in the Galápagos islands. Grants unorthodox career is one womans solution to the problem of combining professional life as a field biologist with raising a family.

Grant describes her youthful interest in fossils, which inspired her to imagine another world, distant yet connected in timeand which anticipated her later work in evolutionary biology. She and her husband, Peter Grant, visited the Galápagos archipelago annually for forty years, tracking the fates of the finches on the small, uninhabited island of Daphne Major. Their work has profoundly altered our understanding of how a group of eighteen species has diversified from a single ancestral species, demonstrating that evolution by natural selection can be observed and interpreted in an entirely natural environment. Grants story shows the rewards of following a winding path and the joy of working closely with a partner, sharing ideas, disappointments, and successes.