Final answer:
Through Natural Selection, adaptive traits are favored, enhancing fitness and increasing offspring that inherit these beneficial traits, leading to adaptive evolution.
Step-by-step explanation:
Through the process of Natural Selection, adaptive traits are favored and lead to greater fitness within individuals. Natural selection is a key mechanism of evolution, where traits that enhance an organism's ability to survive and reproduce become more common over generations. For example, the adaptation of a better running speed may enable an individual to escape predators more effectively, thus increasing its chances of surviving and reproducing. These adaptive traits may arise due to gene mutations or gene flow, but for them to become prevalent within a population, they must confer a survival or reproductive advantage, as seen when comparing the long necks of giraffes to their short-necked ancestors.
Individuals with advantageous traits tend to have more offspring, ensuring the continuation of these traits in subsequent generations. This contributes to a population's adaptive evolution, amplifying the beneficial heritable traits and reducing the frequency of unfavourable ones. Such adaptations can range from physical advantages like camouflage or speed, to behavioral characteristics that improve mating success or predator avoidance.