charles darwin

hThe mechanism that Darwin proposed for evolution is natural selection. Because resources are limited in nature, organisms with heritable traits that favor survival and reproduction will tend to leave more offspring than their peers, causing the traits to increase in frequency over generations.

hborn: 02/12/1809died:04/19/1882 Charles Darwin was a British naturalist who proposed the theory of biological evolution by natural selection. Darwin defined evolution as "descent with modification," the idea that species change over time, give rise to new species, and share a common ancestor.

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charles darwin

Darwin proposed that species can change over time, that new species come from pre-existing species, and that all species share a common ancestor.s.

evolution

natural selection

charles darwin

But natural selection is also capable of much more. Given enough time and enough accumulated changes, natural selection can create entirely new species, known as "macroevolution." It can turn dinosaurs into birds, amphibious mammals into whales and the ancestors of apes into humans.

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natural selection

Even though scientists could predict what early whales should look like, they lacked the fossil evidence to back up their claim. Creationists took this absence as proof that evolution didn't occur. They mocked the idea that there could have ever been such a thing as a walking whale. But since the early 1990s, that's exactly what scientists have been finding.

a welth of evidence

To make natural selection more concrete, let's consider a simplified, hypothetical example. In this example, a group of mice with heritable variation in fur color (black vs. tan) has just moved into a new area where the rocks are black. This environment features hawks, which like to eat mice and can see the tan ones more easily than the black ones against the black rock.

natural selection

how natural selection works