Question

Write Darwin's two major contributions with regard to evolution. What is the function
of 'Natural Selection'? With which group of animals do humans share their immediate
ancestors ?​

Answer 1

Answer:

Explanation:

Key points:

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.

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 offspring than their peers, causing the traits to increase in frequency over generations.

Natural selection causes populations to become adapted, or increasingly well-suited, to their environments over time. Natural selection depends on the environment and requires existing heritable variation in a group.

What is evolution?

The basic idea of biological evolution is that populations and species of organisms change over time. Today, when we think of evolution, we are likely to link this idea with one specific person: the British naturalist Charles Darwin.

In the 1850s, Darwin wrote an influential and controversial book called On the Origin of Species. In it, he proposed that species evolve (or, as he put it, undergo "descent with modification"), and that all living things can trace their descent to a common ancestor. [What exactly is a species?]

Darwin also suggested a mechanism for evolution: natural selection, in which heritable traits that help organisms survive and reproduce become more common in a population over time. [What does "heritable" mean?]

In this article, we'll take a closer look at Darwin's ideas. We'll trace how they emerged from his worldwide travels on the ship HMS Beagle, and we'll also walk through an example of how evolution by natural selection can work.