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Charles Darwin's Theory Of Natural Selection Essay

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Purpose: The purpose of this experiment is to explore Charles Darwin’s theories of natural selection and his theory of descent with modification. Background: In this experiment, we were modeling Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection and his theory of descent with modification. His theory of natural selection states that “individuals with heritable traits better suited to the environment will survive” (NDSU). Descent with modification is “passing traits from parent to offspring” (Study.com). This idea was a major part of his theory of evolution (by natural selection). In Activity 1, the predators were modeled by four different utensils: a spoon, a fork, sticks and forceps. Prey were modeled by white, yellow and blue pom-poms. We tested Darwin’s theory of natural selection in three different environments: water, sand and yellow paper. Testing his theory in different habitats shows how an organism can survive in one habitat, but not in another. It also shows how organisms with traits that are “better suited to the environment will survive” (NDSU) while others who don’t have those traits will die out. Procedure:
Set up the three habitats by using two …show more content…

To model Darwin’s theory, we varied the predator, prey and habitat. The pom poms in this experiment represented the prey, while the utensils represented different animals (the predators). Our results indicate that the blue pom poms were captured in greater amounts compared to the other two colors. A possible explanation for this is the blue pom poms stand out more in each habitat than the white and yellow pom poms. In other words, the blue pom poms couldn’t “blend in” with any of the habitats.On the other hand, the white pom poms were captured in the smallest amounts, proving that the lighter the color of the pom pom, the better chance it has to “survive” and “reproduce” since it can “blend in” with its

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This meant that in the population there were already ten different color of prey that occurred naturally. However, when the environment was a blue background with colorful flowers and butterflies, many of the different colored prey had gone extinct and the red prey had the highest number of survivors. Also, environment two was pink, white, and black plaid and the prey that had the most number of survivors in that environment was white. This demonstrates that depending on the environment, different variations of a trait would be successful. It also demonstrates that the adaptations in this experiment depended on the environments.

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