Final answer:
It is false to say that both natural selection and genetic drift systematically select for favorable traits. Natural selection does favor individuals with beneficial traits for survival and reproduction, but genetic drift is a random process that affects gene variation regardless of the trait's utility.
Step-by-step explanation:
The statement is false. While natural selection does systematically select individuals with favorable traits that contribute to adaptation and increase their chance of survival and reproduction, genetic drift is a random process that can change the frequency of a trait in a population, regardless of whether the trait is advantageous or not.
Natural selection acts on a population's heritable traits, particularly selecting for beneficial alleles that allow organisms to better adapt to their environment, which scientists refer to as adaptive evolution. On the other hand, genetic drift is a change in the frequency of an existing gene variant (allele) in a population due to random sampling of organisms. For example, an allele may increase in frequency one generation due to chance and then decrease by chance in the next.
Mutations and gene flow are the evolutionary forces that can introduce new genetic variation into a population, not natural selection or genetic drift. These variations can then be acted upon by natural selection or become more common or rarer in the population due to genetic drift.