How did Darwin apply these observations?
Answers
Explanation:
All offspring compete within their natural environments for food, resources, mates, and safety from harm. Those with the weakest combinations of traits die, whereas those with the best combinations of traits survive to reproductive maturity more often. There is a natural selection for those individuals that are the fittest.
The survivors pass on their traits to the next generation and the process is repeated. Over millions of years, such gradual changes lead to changes in the whole population and hence to the origin of an entirely new species.
Put in modern terms, Darwin explained that random events create changes in the genotype of the organisms. These changes are then reflected in variations in the phenotype.
Combinations of these variations, distributed among large numbers of offspring and expressed as different phenotypes, are in competition for survival.
Nature and the natural environment "select" the most fit phenotype and discard the least fit phenotypes. Darwin, therefore, viewed evolution as the gradual accumulation of genotypic change in a population of organisms to the point that the