Natural Selection In Coyne's On The Origin Of Species

What made Darwin stand out from the crowd was his ideas that took all supernatural factors, even God, in the design of the natural world. His ideas were simply evolution and the mechanism of natural selection. Darwin was a big follower of Paley’s work on Natural Theology, but Paley relied too heavily on supernatural factors. Darwin published his work On the Origin of Species in 1859, and in it contained the components of his theory of evolution. Coyne talks about the six components: evolution, gradualism, speciation, common ancestry, natural selection, and nonselective mechanisms (3). Coyne begins with the first being evolution. Evolution is the change in genetic structure of a population over time. Coyne determines that these changes in the genetic structure come from mutations. Evolution can occur in every species, but the rate of evolution is the same between the species. The rate at which a species may evolve can be highly determined by the environmental factors set before them. If …show more content…
In Darwin’s publication, his theory of evolution was supported by the mechanism of natural selection. For natural selection to be at work on a species, there must be a variation within the population. The variation within the population has to be heritable. The variation will cause many different individuals within the population and thus the struggle for existence begins, and the strongest will be on top that are able to withstand the pressures of the environment. The individuals that can withstand the pressures will have a better survival rate and will be able to reproduce. Natural selection does not create any variation, it only works on the existing variation in the population. Natural selection is not progressive, and does not strive for perfection. The thing about natural selection that separates it from evolution is that natural selection works on the phenotype of individuals while evolution works on the genotype