It is a key law or mechanism of evolution which changes the heritable traits characteristic of a population or species over generations. Charles Darwin popularised the term "natural selection", contrasting it …

May 7, 2025 · English naturalist Charles Darwin developed the idea of natural selection after a five-year voyage to study plants, animals, and fossils in South America and on islands in the Pacific.

But in the mid-1800s, Darwin and the British biologist Alfred Russel Wallace independently conceived of a natural, even observable, way for life to change: a process Darwin called natural selection. …

Natural selection, or “survival of the fittest,” is the more prolific reproduction of individuals with favorable traits that survive environmental change because of those traits. This leads to evolutionary change.

Dec 5, 2025 · In natural selection, those variations in the genotype (the entire complex of genes inherited from both parents) that increase an organism’s chances of survival and procreation are …

The 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 …

Discover what natural selection theory is, how adaptations work, the story of Darwin's finches and whether we are still evolving.

Natural selection, also known as “survival of the fittest,” is the more prolific reproduction of individuals with favorable traits that survive environmental change because of those traits. This leads to …

Aug 15, 2024 · After returning from his voyage, Darwin spent decades developing his theory and gathering evidence. The core principle he proposed was elegantly simple yet profoundly powerful: …

The theory, first proposed by Charles Darwin in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species, explains how populations of living organisms change over time through the process of natural selection.