Natural Selection: Understanding the Concept and Examples

Evolution is defined as the change in adaptive features of a population over time as a result of natural selection.

Natural selection favors individuals with advantageous characteristics or alleles that are better suited to the environment, leading to a change in the species over time.

Adaptation by natural selection occurs when individuals with certain advantageous traits survive and reproduce, passing on those traits to the next generation, making the population better suited to the environment.

A mutated phenotype may provide a survival advantage in a changing environment, leading to natural selection favoring individuals with the new allele or characteristic.

Populations become better suited to their environment over time through the process of adaptation by natural selection, where advantageous traits become more common.

The development of antibiotic resistance by bacteria is a good example of adaptation by natural selection.

Natural selection can lead to changes in allele frequency by favoring individuals with specific alleles that provide a survival advantage, thus increasing the prevalence of those alleles in the population.

Variation within a species provides the raw material for natural selection to act upon, leading to the evolution of the species over time.

Natural selection, by favoring certain characteristics that provide a survival advantage in a given environment, drives the change in the characteristics of a species over time.

The evolution of the peppered moths, where darker moths became more prevalent due to industrial pollution, is an example of adaptation by natural selection favoring traits that provide camouflage in a changing environment.