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The term natural selection is most often defined to operate on heritable traits, because these directly participate in evolution. However, natural selection is "blind" in the sense that changes in phenotype can give a reproductive advantage regardless of whether or not the trait is heritable.
For example, J.B.S. Haldane estimated in 1924 the rate of evolution by natural selection in the peppered moth in his first series of A Mathematical Theory of Natural and Artificial Selection. He estimated that for the peppered moth having reproductive cycle in a year, it would take 48 generations to produce the dominant (melanic or black) forms ...
The development and spread of antibiotic resistant bacteria provides evidence that evolution due to natural selection is an ongoing process in the natural world. Natural selection is ubiquitous in all research pertaining to evolution, taking note of the fact that all of the following examples in each section of the article document the process.
Other evolutionary forces outside of mutation and natural selection can also play a role or be incorporated into experimental evolution studies, such as genetic drift and gene flow. [ 3 ] The organism used is decided by the experimenter, based on the hypothesis to be tested.
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.
The article was the first announcement of the Darwin–Wallace theory of evolution by natural selection; and appeared in print on 20 August 1858. The presentation of the papers spurred Darwin to write a condensed "abstract" of his "big book", Natural Selection. This was published in November 1859 as On the Origin of Species.
Natural selection – Mechanism of evolution by differential survival and reproduction of individuals Sexual selection – Mode of natural selection involving the choosing of and competition for mates; Mutation – Alteration in the nucleotide sequence of a genome; Gene flow – Transfer of genetic variation from one population to another
Where the fact of evolutionary change was accepted by biologists but natural selection was denied, including but not limited to the late 19th century eclipse of Darwinism, alternative scientific explanations such as Lamarckism, orthogenesis, structuralism, catastrophism, vitalism and theistic evolution [a] were entertained, not necessarily separately.