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As early as the late 19th century, a flood of visitors began arriving at the Galapagos Islands. The visitors and researchers, most of them American, collected thousands of bird specimens. For example, the California Academy of Sciences alone added more than 8,000 birds (including Darwin's finches), to its collection in 1905-1906.228 Galapagos finches soon found their way into many museum collections—not without an objective, of course. The aim was to complete the work that Darwin had left half-finished and to rescue evolution from its predicament by finding valid evidence.
There was another important reason for the last century's evolutionary research into the Galapagos finches. In The Origin of Species, Darwin had written that a new species' emergence by way of natural selection was a very slow process, for which reason it could not be observed, but only deduced. This was not acceptable by the standards of developing science. Neo-Darwinists embarked on a search for new evidence on which to maintain their claims that evolution was scientific. At this point, the story of the Galapagos finches came to be regarded as saviors.
These birds became the focus of wide-ranging studies. Many evolutionists issued statements based on their observations. In an article in the April 1953 Scientific American, David Lack claimed that the evolution of the birds on the Galapagos Islands had taken place recently, for which reason the islands were an exceptional place.229 Another evolutionist, Peter Grant, even maintained that the Galapagos finches were still evolving.230
One can see the names of Peter and Rosemary Grant in most articles and papers about these finches. These two researchers first went to the Galapagos Islands in 1973 with the aim of seeing the effect of evolution on the finches, and have carried out detailed observations and studies ever since. They are thus considered experts on Darwin's finches.231