Darwin: Survival of the Fittest
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Charles Darwin and The Survival of the Fittest
Born on February 12, 1809, Charles Darwin was made famous by his voyage on the HMS Beagle and his book The Origin of Species. One of the many ideas discussed in this book is natural selection, or the survival of the fittest. This theory states that "individuals having any advantage, however slight, over others, would have the best chance of surviving and of procreating their kind." Put simply, this means that favorable traits are preserved in a group of organisms and harmful traits die out. For natural selection to happen, there are four conditions to be met. The first is that a population of organisms must have variations of traits, or that everyone has to be slightly different. For an example, humans are the same species but we are all different. Some of us are taller than others, have different colored eyes, and so on. The second condition is that not all individuals of a population can survive. For an example, frog eggs are a popular meal for fish all over the world. So not all of those eggs survive to be frogs. The third condition is that survival is not random, and that individuals who do survive must have an advantage over others of their kind.
