How can we know about natural selection? All I understand it to be is nature itself deciding who is supreme and who is not.
We can know all about natural selection, because it isn't some abstract force of nature; it's merely the observation that an individual's unique traits have a considerable influence on the likelyhood that that individual will survive long enough to mate.
Imagine two populations of foxes and rabbits in a snowy wilderness. Some of the rabbits are white and some are brown. The foxes are hungry and eat rabbits, but you can't eat what you can't see. After a round of predation, we find that a lot more brown rabbits have been eaten than white ones, and those white rabbits mate and produce more white rabbits. A few more rounds of this and the brown rabbits might be all but extinct.
It isn't nature that does the selection; in this case it's the environment and the foxes.
Yes we may have a definition for it, but can somebody explain what it is?
It's merely the simple fact that not every organism in a population succeeds in passing on offspring, and that this pre-reproductive mortality is not typically random, but determined by the interactions between an individual's traits and the environment in which it lives.
People have talked to God but nobody has talked to natural selection.
Nobody has ever talked to God, but it's easy to observe natural selection.
This message has been edited by AdminJar, 03-26-2006 04:38 PM
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