Adaptation Essay: The Importance Of Natural Selection

Natural selection is very important in the addition of adaptations to bring forth more able and stronger individuals that can survive in their harsh environment. Selection can make some organisms deadlier, like the Asian giant hornet, or can make other organisms better at finding food in hard to reach areas, such as woodpeckers with thicker skulls. Each of these adaptations are unique to these organisms because these adaptations allow them to live in their unique niches. For natural selection to work on an adaptation, three things must occur: the genes have to be variable in the population, the variable genes have to be heritable, and lastly selection must affect the fitness of the individual. As Coyne calls natural selection, “it is a combination of randomness and lawfulness” (118). The randomness creates the mutations that allow for different variables, and the lawfulness puts those variations in order, with the best at the top, and the bad at the bottom to be gotten rid of. It is also important to know that this does not happen by chance. The driving force is the random mutations in the genes. It is also important to note that selection does not affect the fitness …show more content…
That amount of time can make it hard to be certain to know if selection was actually involved in the evolution of a complex trait. Many creationists criticize selection saying it is powerless on the more complex traits. A simple example includes the flagellum on bacteria that assists in movement; it must have been created by something supernatural. The issue with this criticism is that there aren’t any traits that couldn’t have been impacted by selection. The fossil record shows the evolution of many traits which allows them to be placed in order of when the changes took place. The record allows for a somewhat accurate explanation for many of these