Natural selection is the process by which individuals with characteristics that are advantageous for reproduction in a specific environment leave more offspring in the next generation, thereby increasing the proportion of their genes in the population gene pool over time. Natural selection is the principal mechanism of evolutionary change, and is the most important idea in all biology. Natural selection, the unifying concept of life, was first proposed by Charles Darwin, and represents his single greatest contribution to science.
Natural selection occurs in any reproducing population faced with a changing or variable environment. The environment includes not only physical factors such as climate or terrain, but also living factors such as predators, prey, and other members of a population.
Mechanism of Natural Selection
The mechanism of natural selection depends on several phenomena:
• Heredity: Offspring inherit their traits from their parents, in the form of genes.
• Heritable individual variation: Members of a population have slight differences among them, whether in height, eyesight acuity, beak shape, rate of egg production, or other traits that may affect survival and reproduction. If a trait has a genetic basis, it can be passed on to offspring.
• Overproduction of offspring: In any given generation, populations tend to create more progeny than can survive to reproductive age.
• Competition for resources: Because of excess population, individuals must compete for food, nesting sites, mates, or other resources that affect their ability to successfully reproduce.
Given all these factors, natural selection unavoidably occurs. Those members of a population that reproduce the most will, by definition, leave more offspring for the next generation. These offspring inherit their parents' traits, and are therefore also likely to succeed in competition for resources (assuming the environment continues to pose the same challenges as those faced by parents). Over several generations, the proportion of offspring in a population that are descended from the successful ancestor

Uloborid spider eggs and spiderlings. In any given generation, populations tend to create more offspring than can survive to reproductive age.
increases, and traits that made the ancestor successful therefore also increase in frequency. Natural selection leads to adaptation, in which an organism's traits conform to the environment's conditions for existence.
I think the correct answer among the choices listed above is option D. Diuretic is an unhealthy way to lose weight because it get<span> rid the body of fluids as well as nutrients. This method involves taking drugs that will cause an increase in the passing of urine.</span>
<span>When cells divide uncontrollably, then there is a huge number of them and they take up most of the space in the body. Thus, lumps start to appear on and in a person's body, on organs and skin, and these lumps often represent cancer. So, uncontrollable division of cells can lead to cancer. Hope this helps. Let me know if you need additional help!</span>
Imagine you are surveying a population of a mountain range where the inhabitants live in the valleys with no inhabitants on the large mountains between. If your sample area is the valleys, and you use this to estimate the population across the entire mountain range, <u>you overestimate the actual population size</u>
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Explanation:
- An estimate that turns out to be incorrect will be an overestimate if the estimate exceeded the actual result, and an underestimate if the estimate fell short of the actual result.
- The mean of the sampling distribution of a statistic is sometimes referred to as the expected value of the statistic. Therefore the sample mean is an unbiased estimate of μ.
- Any given sample mean may underestimate or overestimate μ, but there is no systematic tendency for sample means to either under or overestimate μ.
- Bias is the tendency of a statistic to overestimate or underestimate a parameter. Bias can seep into your results for a slew of reasons including sampling or measurement errors, or unrepresentative samples
