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Natural Selection and Evolutionary Change

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2017

Kevin Padian
Kevin Padian*
Affiliation:
Department of Integrative Biology and Museum of Paleontology, University of California, Berkeley, California, 94720-3140 USA
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Extract

In modern biology, natural selection is widely treated as the central mechanism of evolution. Darwin built his greatest book on it; largely ignored for the latter part of the 19th Century, its centrality was restored during the Modern Synthesis of the 1930s. Since then, its importance has sometimes been exaggerated into claims that selection drives adaptation toward optimality. Its effects have been studied in captive and wild populations of all sorts of organisms, and in past as well as present biotas. But it has also been downplayed as only one of many factors of evolutionary change, an editor with no creative force, incapable of guiding any real change in lineages. Natural selection is as intrinsic to ecological theory as to evolutionary theory, and links the two fields as few other concepts do. But like nearly all population processes, its effects on evolution in the long run remain an open question, difficult to test directly.

Type
Section 4: Mechanisms of Evolution
Information
The Paleontological Society Special Publications , Volume 11: Evolution: Investigating the Evidence, 2nd ed. , 2002 , pp. 237 - 248
Copyright
Copyright © 1999, 2002 by The Paleontological Society 

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