natural selection
the process by which forms of life having traits that better enable them to adapt to specific environmental pressures, as predators, changes in climate, or competition for food or mates, will tend to survive and reproduce in greater numbers than others of their kind, thus ensuring the perpetuation of those favorable traits in succeeding generations.: Compare survival of the fittest.
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Origin of natural selection
1Words Nearby natural selection
Dictionary.com Unabridged Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2024
How to use natural selection in a sentence
Such proteins might seem unlikely to evolve because natural selection for the first shape and function could easily be detrimental to the second, and vice versa.
Some Proteins Change Their Folds to Perform Different Jobs | Viviane Callier | February 3, 2021 | Quanta MagazineFor this capacity to be a target of natural selection, however, the new information that dreaming discovers must provide at least some periodic survival benefit.
In that sense, there is a kind of natural selection taking place for human information itself, like a bottleneck or founder effect in biological evolution.
The virus is not static, and although the mutations are random, natural selection will lead to variants that are more capable of infecting and replicating in human beings.
CDC foresees spread in U.S. of highly contagious coronavirus variant | Joel Achenbach, Ben Guarino | January 6, 2021 | Washington PostThe famous 19th-century correspondence between Charles Darwin and Wallace, which prompted Darwin to quickly finalize his own writings on natural selection, is one example of such competition.
How fossil preservation and public health are intertwined | By Colella & McLean/The Conversation | December 18, 2020 | Popular-Science
Darwin was a British Scientist who developed the theory of evolution and natural selection.
‘Gods of Suburbia’: Dina Goldstein’s Arresting Photo Series on Religion vs. Consumerism | Dina Goldstein | November 8, 2014 | THE DAILY BEASTHis observations of the many varieties of Finch birds in the Galapagos Island led him to solidify his theory of natural selection.
‘Gods of Suburbia’: Dina Goldstein’s Arresting Photo Series on Religion vs. Consumerism | Dina Goldstein | November 8, 2014 | THE DAILY BEASTThis crucial point—the third and most crucial condition for natural selection—is absent from the paper.
I suppose the main argument goes like this: We are no longer subject to Darwinian natural selection.
On Transhumanism and Why Technology Is Our Silicon Nervous System | Jason Silva | April 26, 2014 | THE DAILY BEASTWe have taken the reigns of natural selection to become the chief agents of the evolutionary process.
On Transhumanism and Why Technology Is Our Silicon Nervous System | Jason Silva | April 26, 2014 | THE DAILY BEASTIt was decided to let the law of natural selection operate freely.
The Leaven in a Great City | Lillian William BettsBy a system of evolution and working of the law of natural selection, four families use the house at the same time.
The Leaven in a Great City | Lillian William Bettsnatural selection plus geographical and ecological isolation has undoubtedly been operative in speciation and in subspeciation.
Speciation in the Kangaroo Rat, Dipodomys ordii | Henry W. SetzerDr. Roth has conjectured that phratries were introduced "by a process of natural selection" to regulate the food supply.
The Secret of the Totem | Andrew Langnatural selection acts by suppressing, or developing, structurally distributed colour.
Colouration in Animals and Plants | Alfred Tylor
British Dictionary definitions for natural selection
a process resulting in the survival of those individuals from a population of animals or plants that are best adapted to the prevailing environmental conditions. The survivors tend to produce more offspring than those less well adapted, so that the characteristics of the population change over time, thus accounting for the process of evolution
Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012
Scientific definitions for natural selection
The process by which organisms that are better suited to their environment than others produce more offspring. As a result of natural selection, the proportion of organisms in a species with characteristics that are adaptive to a given environment increases with each generation. Therefore, natural selection modifies the originally random variation of genetic traits in a species so that alleles that are beneficial for survival predominate, while alleles that are not beneficial decrease. Originally proposed by Charles Darwin, natural selection forms the basis of the process of evolution. See Notes at adaptation evolution. Compare artificial selection.
The American Heritage® Science Dictionary Copyright © 2011. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
Cultural definitions for natural selection
Notes for natural selection
The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition Copyright © 2005 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
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