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Natural selection is the differential survival and reproduction of individuals due to differences in phenotype.It is a key mechanism of evolution, the change in the heritable traits characteristic of a population over generations.
Different factors motivated people to propose non-Darwinian mechanisms of evolution. Natural selection, with its emphasis on death and competition, did not appeal to some naturalists because they felt it immoral, leaving little room for teleology or the concept of progress (orthogenesis) in the development of life. Some who came to accept ...
Natural selection is emphasised as the most important mechanism of evolution; large changes are the result of the gradual accumulation of small changes over long periods of time. [ 39 ] [ 40 ] The modern evolutionary synthesis is the outcome of a merger of several different scientific fields to produce a more cohesive understanding of ...
Professor of biology Jerry Coyne sums up biological evolution succinctly: [3]. Life on Earth evolved gradually beginning with one primitive species – perhaps a self-replicating molecule – that lived more than 3.5 billion years ago; it then branched out over time, throwing off many new and diverse species; and the mechanism for most (but not all) of evolutionary change is natural selection.
Evolution is the change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. [1] [2] It occurs when evolutionary processes such as natural selection and genetic drift act on genetic variation, resulting in certain characteristics becoming more or less common within a population over successive generations. [3]
Chapter X examines whether patterns in the fossil record are better explained by common descent and branching evolution through natural selection, than by the individual creation of fixed species. Darwin expected species to change slowly, but not at the same rate – some organisms such as Lingula were unchanged since the earliest fossils.
The controversial jokes from Natural Selection. Natural Selection, which was shot at DAR Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., kicks off with Rife discussing a trip to Baltimore, Md., during ...
The idea of evolution by natural selection was proposed by Charles Darwin in 1859, but evolutionary biology, as an academic discipline in its own right, emerged during the period of the modern synthesis in the 1930s and 1940s. [19] It was not until the 1980s that many universities had departments of evolutionary biology.