Question

A wildlife biologist is studying a population of penguins at the South Pole. These penguins are endangered by global warming and the destruction of their habitat. How will natural selection produce change in the penguins? a. Natural selection will only act upon the penguins with harmful traits and produce increasingly disadvantageous changes over several generation. b. Natural selection will act upon each penguin individually to produce advantageous changes within one generation. c. Natural selection will only act upon the penguins with advantageous traits and produce increasingly disadvantageous changes within two generations. d. Natural selection will act upon the entire population of penguins to produce advantageous changes over several generations.​

How will natural selection produce change in the penguins?
a. Natural selection will only act upon the penguins with harmful traits and produce increasingly disadvantageous changes over several generations.
b. Natural selection will act upon each penguin individually to produce advantageous changes within one generation.
c. Natural selection will only act upon the penguins with advantageous traits and produce increasingly disadvantageous changes within two generations.
d. Natural selection will act upon the entire population of penguins to produce advantageous changes over several generations.

Answer 1

Natural selection acts on the population's heritable traits, selecting for beneficial alleles and increasing their frequency, while selecting against deleterious alleles. It acts on entire organisms, not on individual alleles. Individuals with advantageous traits have greater contributions to the gene pool of the next generation, allowing for adaptive evolution.

Step-by-step explanation:

Natural selection acts on the population's heritable traits: selecting for beneficial alleles that allow for environmental adaptation, and thus increasing their frequency in the population, while selecting against deleterious alleles and thereby decreasing their frequency. Scientists call this process adaptive evolution. Natural selection acts on entire organisms, not on an individual allele within the organism. An individual may carry a very beneficial genotype with a resulting phenotype that, for example, increases the ability to reproduce (fecundity), but if that same individual also carries an allele that results in a fatal childhood disease, that fecundity phenotype will not pass to the next generation because the individual will not live to reach reproductive age.

Natural...New species develop naturally through the process of natural selection. Due to natural selection, organisms with traits that better enable them to adapt to their environment will tend to survive and reproduce in greater numbers. Natural selection causes beneficial heritable traits to become more common in a population and unfavorable heritable traits to become less common. For example, a giraffe's neck is beneficial because it allows the giraffe to reach leaves high in trees. Natural selection caused this beneficial trait to become more common than short necks.

Natural selection only acts on the population's heritable traits: selecting for beneficial alleles and thus increasing their frequency in the population, while selecting against deleterious alleles and thereby decreasing their frequency—a process known as adaptive evolution. Natural selection does not act on individual alleles, however, but on entire organisms. An individual may carry a very beneficial genotype with a resulting phenotype that, for example, increases the ability to reproduce (fecundity), but if that same individual also carries an allele that results in a fatal childhood disease, that fecundity phenotype will not be passed on to the next generation because the individual will not live to reach reproductive age. Natural selection acts at the level of the individual; it selects for individuals with greater contributions to the gene pool of the next generation, known as an organism's evolutionary (Darwinian) fitness.