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Evolution And Evolution Of Evolution

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Evolution is the concept published by Charles Darwin that organisms change over time. Evolution transpires by natural selection, which is the process where an organism with beneficial traits, or fitness, produces more offspring than organisms with non-beneficial traits. Over time, this creates organisms that are more adapted to survive for whatever place they are living in, because nature passes on the variations of organisms that are most useful, and with the greatest chance of surviving. In order for evolution to occur, the traits must be heritable, there must be a difference in fitness within the population, there must be limited resources, which leads to competition, and there must be variation.
Darwin knew the facts that must be true in order for evolution to occur and he had much evidence backing up his theory, but he did not have a complete understanding of the pathways of evolution because the laws of genetics put forward by Gregor Mendel were not known to him. It wasn’t until the early 1900s when Mendel’s work was published, that scientists understood the full process of evolution. From Mendel’s experimentation, we are now taught that variations of traits are heritable, and the variations are caused by alleles. Microevolution is evolution that occurs because of the constant change in alleles over time. Macroevolution occurs over geologic time above the level of the species, which is shown by fossil records, (CK-12 275). It is caused by microevolution happening over

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