Biology Essay on:

Natural Selection and Evolution

People tends to have a misconception with the idea of evolution where they think that a person or animal change from one form to another over time spontaneously. Where you have the an ape looking creature that exist in the past evolve through time to a modern homo-sapiens; also one other example of misconception is that of a giraffe it got its long neck through a pre-existing quadruped that eventually evolve to a longer neck. This is scientifically false. What really is assumed to happen is that natural selection made the effect. Natural selection is the process by which nature selects the characteristics that will help a species survive. Consider some bacteria living in a pond. Now due to certain factors for example global warming, the temperature of the pond rises. Most of the bacteria will die as they are not used to this change in temperature but the few bacteria which survive will proliferate and pass on their genes so that the next generation of bacteria is resistant to heat. Thus, nature selects this ability to resist heat to help the bacteria survive. Another example that with the giraffe is that giraffes used to have shorter necks but because they needed to reach high for their food the giraffes with the longer necks survived and reproduced to give offspring with longer necks too. After a while all the giraffes with shorter necks died out, and now there are only giraffes with long necks. But on the other hand, there is nothing that natural selection contributes to the theory of evolution, because this mechanism can never increase or improve the genetic information of a species. Neither can it transform one species into another: a starfish into a fish, a fish into a frog, a frog into a crocodile, or a crocodile into a bird. The biggest defender of punctuated equilibrium, Stephen Jay Gould, refers to this impasse of natural selection as follows; The essence of Darwinism lies in a single phrase: natural selection is the creative force of evolutionary change. No one denies that selection will play a negative role in eliminating the unfit. Darwinian theories require that it create the fit as well. Another of the misleading methods that evolutionists employ on the issue of natural selection is their effort to present this mechanism as conscious. However, natural selection has no consciousness. It does not possess a will that can decide what is good and what is bad for living things. All and all, we still see natural selection into effect. Bacteria, viruses or moth all undergo adaption and elimination. That being evident, scientists assume that every species undergo that same process. Hence the advent of the theory of evolution.

By: Mohammad Anwar Al Haq Malik Nabeel Khamis 12th Grade