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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.
In addition, selection mechanisms are also used to choose candidate solutions (individuals) for the next generation. The biological model is natural selection. Retaining the best individual(s) of one generation unchanged in the next generation is called elitism or elitist selection. It is a successful (slight) variant of the general process of ...
A unit of selection is a biological entity within the hierarchy of biological organization (for example, an entity such as: a self-replicating molecule, a gene, a cell, an organism, a group, or a species) that is subject to natural selection. There is debate among evolutionary biologists about the extent to which evolution has been shaped by ...
In this context, natural selection promotes a correspondence between features and factors, defined as synerg. [4] [10] Ecological inheritance occurs when an organism experiences an altered factor-feature relationship with selected pressures originating from parents or ancestral generations. [4]
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]
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.