Name: Adaptive Radiation
Uploaded: 2019-07-19
Duration: 6 min 34 s
Description: Adaptive radiation occurs when a species is confined to an isolated region and adapts to its new habitat, raising multiple diverse species from a single comm...

Question

Describe Darwin's theory of natural selection.

Accepted Answer

Charles Darwin was a British naturalist who proposed the theory of biological evolution by natural selection. Resources are limited in nature, organisms with heritable traits that favour survival and reproduction will tend to leave more offspring than their peers, causing the traits to increase in frequency over generations. Natural selection causes populations to become adapted, or increasingly well-suited, to their environments over time. Natural selection depends on the environment and requires existing heritable variation in a group.

In the 1850s, Darwin wrote an influential and controversial book called The Origin of Species. He proposed that species evolve and that all living things can trace their descent to a common ancestor. The basic idea of biological evolution is that populations and species of organisms change over time. For example, Darwin finches in Galapagos island.

Darwin's concept of natural selection was based on several key observations:

Traits are often heritable. In living organisms, many characteristics are inherited, or passed from parent to offspring.

More offspring are produced than can survive. Organisms are capable of producing more offspring than their environments can support. Thus, there is competition for limited resources in each generation.

Offspring vary in their heritable traits. The offspring in any generation will be slightly different from one another in their traits (color, size, shape, etc.), and many of these features will be heritable.

Describe Darwin's theory of natural selection.

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