Tyler's Blog Death of Destiny

Naturally Selecting Death

Excuse me for citing Wikipedia, but this isn't for marks, and most of the things I'll be linking to will simply be for definitions or common background information.

Natural Selection is a major contributor to the process of Evolution. Evolution, biologically is the change of allele frequencies within a population. That is, evolution is a genetic change of a population ("Wikipedia: Evolution", 2009). Natural selection is a process by which evolution occurs. Through natural selection, favorable alleles (that is, those that favor survival of the organism; alleles are simply different versions of a gene) are favored and succeed into the next generation; unfavorable alleles which lead to death do not succeed into the next generation and therefore decrease the frequency of their occurance ("Wikipedia: Natural Selection", 2009). That being said, death is what ultimately drives natural selection. Things that die become unable to reproduce and pass on their genes to offspring; this decreases the chances that future generations will get the unfavorable alleles.