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Charles Darwin was an English scientist who proposed that evolution happened through ‘natural selection’. According to Darwin, the organisms that lived on are those which had the best traits to survive their environment, and passed on those traits to following generations. |
Charles Robert Darwin, (12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was an English naturalist, geologist and biologist, best known for his contributions to the science of evolution.
The Theory of Evolution by natural selection was first formulated in Charles Darwin’s book “On the Origin of Species” published in 1859. In his book, Darwin describes how organisms evolve over generations through the inheritance of physical or behavioral traits, as National Geographic explains. The theory starts with the premise that within a population, there is variation in traits, such as beak shape in one of the Galapagos finches Darwin studied.
According to the theory, individuals with traits that enable them to adapt to their environments will help them survive and have more offspring, which will inherit those traits. Individuals with less adaptive traits will less frequently survive to pass them on. Over time, the traits that enable species to survive and reproduce will become more frequent in the population and the population will change, or evolve, according to BioMed Central. Through natural selection, Darwin suggested, genetically diverse species could arise from a common ancestor.
Credit: Live Science
Picture Credit: Google
