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"NCT argues that niche construction is a distinct evolutionary process, potentially of equal importance to natural selection. The skeptics dispute this. For them, evolutionary processes are processes that change gene frequencies, of which they identify four (natural selection, genetic drift, mutation, migration [ie. gene flow])... They do not ...
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.
These processes include natural selection, common descent, and speciation. Evolutionary psychology is the study of psychological structures from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify which human psychological traits are evolved adaptations – that is, the functional products of natural selection or sexual selection in human ...
Social selection is a term used with varying meanings in biology. Joan Roughgarden proposed a hypothesis called social selection as an alternative to sexual selection . Social selection is argued to be a mode of natural selection based on reproductive transactions and a two-tiered approach to evolution and the development of social behavior . [ 1 ]
R. A. Fisher (1890–1962), whose 1930 fundamental theorem of natural selection recognised the power of rigorous application of the theory of natural selection to population biology. [19] David Lack (1910–1973), a follower of Charles Darwin, worked to merge the fields of evolutionary biology and ecology, focusing mainly on birds and evolution.
Adaptationism is an approach to studying the evolution of form and function. It attempts to frame the existence and persistence of traits, assuming that each of them arose independently and improved the reproductive success of the organism's ancestors.
Adaptation raises philosophical issues concerning how biologists speak of function and purpose, as this carries implications of evolutionary history – that a feature evolved by natural selection for a specific reason – and potentially of supernatural intervention – that features and organisms exist because of a deity's conscious intentions.
E. B. Ford was an experimental naturalist who wanted to test natural selection in nature, virtually inventing the field of ecological genetics. [61] His work on natural selection in wild populations of butterflies and moths was the first to show that predictions made by R. A. Fisher were correct.