Natural Selection
Natural selection is a process by which the genotypes in a population that are best adapted to the environment increase in frequency relative to less well-adapted genotypes over a number of generations. It is a process by which biological populations are altered over time, as a result of the propagation of heritable traits that affect the capacity of individual organisms to survive and reproduce. This process is based on competitive situation: many individuals are in selfish competition with each other, and in this struggle of existence, only the fittest survive and reproduce themselves successfully (survival of the fittest).
Natural selection leads to an adaptation and accommodation of a species to a certain ecological or economic niche. According to John H. Holland, natural selection can be considered as a selection of persistent combinations from the sea of possibilities:
- "If we equate simplicity to a limited number of "building blocks" (atoms, nucleotides, linguistic phonemes, computer instructions) and complexity to the vast number of ways of combining those building blocks (molecules, DNA, speech, programs), then we open the possibility of deriving complexity from simplicity. Darwinian selection is, from one point of view, the selection of persistent combinations" [1]
The concept of natural selection can be meaningful applied to different levels, see Group Selection and Multilevel Selection, if these levels are influenced by replicators. Natural selection acts on the genotype and selects alaways something which is replicated. This replicator can be a gene or meme.
