Question

Identify THREE selection pressures that Charles Darwin would have had to rule out before determining that competition for limited food resources drove natural selection on the Galápagos Island.

Answer 1

Step-by-step explanation:

Natural selection is an inevitable outcome of three principles: most characteristics are inherited, more offspring are produced than can survive, and offspring with more favorable characteristics will survive and have more offspring than those individuals with less favorable traits.

As Darwin wrestled with natural selection he spent a great deal of time with pigeon breeders, learning their methods. He found their work to be an analogy for evolution. A pigeon breeder selected individual birds to reproduce in order to produce a neck ruffle. Similarly, nature unconsciously “selects” individuals better suited to surviving their local conditions. Given enough time, Darwin and Wallace argued, natural selection might produce new types of body parts, from wings to eyes.