But other phenomena that look like diseases are known to be maintained by natural selection.
Viruses have genes, can reproduce and are subject to the evolutionary pressures imposed by natural selection.
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Those mutations that make a difference to the operations of genes will be affected by natural selection.
The theory of evolution by natural selection states the "fittest" animals or plants are more likely to survive and reproduce.
Darwin said evolution occurred by natural selection where the "fittest" animals or plants were more likely to survive and reproduce.
Darwin's theory - of random mutation followed by natural selection according to environmental suitability - changed science, changed the world.
Wallace, who was born in Monmouthshire and also lived in Neath, was the co-discoverer of the theory of evolution by natural selection.
Thousands of Wallace's letters have been put online for the first time, including correspondence with Darwin about evolution by natural selection.
Scientist Alfred Russel Wallace, who proposed the theory of evolution by natural selection with Charles Darwin, corresponded with the great and good of 19th Century society.
BBC: Search for Alfred Russel Wallace's 19th Century letters
In theory, if you did manage to trace how the brain was shaped by natural selection, you might shed some light on how the mind works.
Letters written by scientist Alfred Russel Wallace, who proposed the theory of evolution by natural selection with Charles Darwin, will be published online for the first time.
The first bagged salads in the United States were introduced in 1986 by Natural Selection Foods--the same company that has recalled its spinach--under its organic Earthbound Farm brand.
These included well known naturalists such as Alfred Russel Wallace, who collected specimens in the Amazon and Malay Archipelago and independently formulated a theory of evolution by natural selection.
BBC: NEWS | Science/Nature | Darwin's letters archived on web
He reasoned that harmful mutations which have their effect before the menopause (or, in the more sophisticated version, before the last child has fled the nest) will be eliminated by natural selection.
In summary, Dr Saetre and his colleagues have vindicated Dobzhansky and thus confirmed a mechanism for the origin of species that is directly caused by natural selection, rather than being an accidental by-product of it.
In the same way that evolution by natural selection can produce purposeful designs without an intelligent designer to prefigure the purpose, so animals can show behavior that evolved to be purposeful but is not psychologically motivated.
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Those elements that exist in vast numbers of copies in some species may not be the result of gradual accumulation, but of a sudden burst of proliferation that, for some reason, was permitted by natural selection years ago.
Humans are dead-end hosts as far as Toxoplasma is concerned, so the exact effect will not have been honed by natural selection and may therefore be different from the one in animals that are actually useful to the parasite.
Another reason for expecting that disease-related genes would be recently evolved is that the older a gene is, the more likely it is that errors and weaknesses that could lead to disease will have been eliminated by natural selection.
Though the genes in question have yet to be identified, this result suggests they are too abundant to be there by chance in other words they are being kept in the population by natural selection because psychopathic behaviour confers a selective advantage.
Darwin, who published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859, came fourth in a poll run by the BBC in 2002 to find the public's greatest Briton of all time.
Darwin showed in detail how life changes over the course of time by the process of natural selection, but failed to explain how those changes can take different courses, dividing a species in two and thus multiplying the number of species.
Natural selection (not to mention deliberate selection by people) might therefore be expected to dumb domestic animals down.
Many researchers think that which cells live and which die is decided by a process similar to natural selection.
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If individuals tend to be better off by not remembering certain things, natural selection will tend to construct their brains that way.
More intriguingly, an experiment carried out in 2004 by Brian Hare, then at Harvard and now of Duke University in North Carolina, suggested that natural selection in the context of domestication had boosted dogs' intelligence, too, by allowing them to understand human behaviour in a way that their ancestors, wolves, cannot.
By intervening to eliminate failure, government has nullified this natural selection of the better producers.
FORBES: By Eliminating Failure, The Government Robs Us Of Success
Natural selection eliminates organisms from the gene pool by killing them.
Charles Darwin, by contrast, found a lead for his theory of natural selection in the whimsical hobby of pigeon fancying, where the birds showed an enormous variety of form and behaviour.
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