Natural Selection: The Driven Force Of Evolution

Natural Selection as The Driven Force of Evolution The main driving force of the incredible biological phenomenon named evolution is natural selection. “Natural selection is a process that produces descent with modification, or evolution” (Scott and Herron,2007). The father of evolution Charles Darwin expose his amazing theory in the book of On the origin of species by means of natural selection. This theory gives a pretty straight forward idea that the natural selection process bases on survival and reproduction, which drives the major phenomenon that affect the population by producing small changes over time. Natural selection is a key mechanism for evolution, since it operates in a population where there is phenotypic (traits) variation, Darwinian fitness (differential reproduction), and lastly where a population has heredity. “If you have variation, differential reproduction, and heredity, you will have evolution by natural selection as an outcome” (Scott and Herron,2007).

“Genetic drift takes place when the occurrence of variant forms of a gene, called alleles, increases and decreases by chance over time.” (Carol, n.d). The random fluctuations of variants alleles are mostly express on small populations. For instance, when a population goes to bottleneck which cause the reduction of population causing the extinction of infrequent alleles. It is important to note that genetic drift drives evolution by producing new genetically different population from its starting population. Secondly, gene flow as another driver of evolution. Gene flow commonly known as migration, which mechanisms consist on any movement of a particular individual genetic material from one population to a different one. Gene flow acts on a population in producing gene