Final answer:
Natural selection is the driving force behind the principle of fossil succession, enabling it by favoring individuals with beneficial traits. The main tenets of natural selection include inheritance, competition for limited resources, and offspring variation.
Step-by-step explanation:
Natural selection is the driving force behind the principle of fossil succession. It enables the principle by favoring individuals with beneficial traits that help them survive and reproduce in their specific environment. Darwin and Wallace identified three main tenets of natural selection:
- Characteristics are inherited, or passed from parent to offspring.
- More offspring are produced than can survive, leading to competition for limited resources.
- Offspring vary in their characteristics, and those with traits that allow them to better compete for limited resources will have more offspring. These traits will be better represented in the next generation, leading to evolutionary change over time.
The principle of fossil succession is driven by natural selection, which ensures that favorable traits become more common over generations, affecting the appearance and disappearance of species in the fossil record and allowing scientists to trace evolutionary changes.
The driving force behind the principle of fossil succession is the process of evolution by natural selection. Natural selection, a concept brought to light by Darwin and Wallace, describes how species change over time through the survival and reproduction of individuals with favorable traits. The mechanism of natural selection involves three key principles:
Variation in traits among individuals within a population, and these traits are inherited from parents to offspring.
A struggle for survival ensues because more offspring are produced than can survive given limited resources, leading to competition for those resources.
Offspring with advantageous inherited characteristics are more likely to survive and reproduce, causing these traits to become more common in the following generations, resulting in evolutionary change or 'descent with modification'.
This fundamental mechanism enables the principle of fossil succession, as it leads to the sequential appearance and disappearance of species in the fossil record, which we can then use to study the evolutionary history of life on Earth.