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Natural Selection
Sean D. Pitman M.D.© July 2003
According to evolutionary theory,natural selection is the driving force behindthe process of evolution. The mindlessprocesses of nature are thought by mostmodern scientists to be the creative forcesthe mold and govern everything that wesee in and around us - to include all life forms. Truly then, Nature is the Creator. Natureis a mindless god of sorts. But, by what power does this god create all the fantasticvariety and creativity that we see around us? - especially when we look at the workingsof living things?
 
As far as the variety of life forms are concerned, the theory of evolution proposesthat the nature created and is still creating the huge variety of living creatures viarandom genetic mutations that can be selected as advantageous or disadvantageous inparticular competitive environments over vast spans of time.
 
Nature is said to do this by
 
preferentially selecting those life forms that survive and pass on their genes to their offspring the best. This "natural selection" uses competition for survival. Theproduction of slightly different offspring provides the opportunity of sorting outadvantageous traits from the less advantageous ones. More and more traits are addedor subtracted in this way until a creature's offspring are fine tuned to the particular environmental niche that they occupy. The whole process is often referred to as, "TheSurvival of the Fittest." This is rather a neat idea, but exactly how does it work? Doesnatural selection tend toward genetic diversity or stability?A famous example of naturalselection is England's peppered moth(
Biston betularia).
Despite the currentdebate on the actual methods of theoriginal study it is still a good example toillustrate natural selection. In the originalstudy by H.B. Kettlewell, he was wondering why the peppered moth was morecommonly dark than specimens that had been collected and saved from earlier times inEngland’s history. The peppered moth had been generally much whiter in color, butnow it was much blacker. Why this change? It was suggested that when the industrialrevolution arrived in England, the pollution had turned the bark of the trees a muchdarker color. Since light colored moths are much easier for birds to see on a darkbackground, they were preferentially eaten. However, the few darker moths survivedbetter to pass on their darker coloring to their offspring. Pretty soon, there were lots of dark moths and very few light colored moths - or so the story went. In reality, England's
 
peppered moths do not generally rest on tree trunks (despite what some of the stagedpictures produced by Kettlewell seem to suggest). However, subsequent studiesseemed to confirm Kettlewell's main hypothesis that England's peppered moths were infact getting darker over time. Still, this is still not necessarily an example of evolutionin action.Gregor Johann Mendel(1822-1884), an Austrian monk and acontemporary of Darwin, is generally recognized as the father of modern genetics and the study of genetic inheritance. Mendel showedconclusively that the genes (alleles) of creatures contained built-inabilities for inherited variation that are
not 
dependent upon mutationalchanges but upon the built-in variety potential of a given gene pool of allelic options. Hefound that some allelic traits were "dominant" while others were "recessive." Each traitwas coded for by two separate allelic codes on equivalent positions on two separate butmatching chromosomes. As long as one of the codes was the dominant code, it wouldblock out the other code. So, an individual with two different codes for the same allelicpositions would express the dominant trait. For example, if one parent had twodominant color codes and the other parent had two recessive color codes at the allelicposition coding for hair color, then the offspring would all be the dominant color (i.e.,brown vs. blond). However, if each parent had one dominant and one recessive color code then, according to the calculated odds of inheritance, three-quarters of theoffspring would be dominant in color and one-quarter recessive (The offspring with bothdominant and recessive codes would express the dominant color. Only those offspring
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