Process
Antimicrobial resistance
Microbes evolving to survive drugs meant to kill them. Bacterial resistance was associated with an estimated 4.95 million deaths in 2019.
Natural selection
Individuals better suited to their surroundings leave more offspring, so their inherited traits become more common. Darwin's finches and peppered moths are well-studied examples.Source: NHGRISource: Grant & Grant, 2006Source: Cook et al., 2012
Process
How Natural selection connects
Natural selection includes the example
Process
Human adaptation
Examples include lactase persistence, which evolved separately in Africa and Europe, and the sickle cell trait, which protects against malaria.
Process
C4 photosynthesis
A carbon-concentrating form of photosynthesis that evolved many separate times, in plants such as maize.
Natural selection is part of
Process
Evolution
The process by which living things change over generations through changes in their genomes.
Studied in
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Sources & further reading
The explanations on this page are our own summaries of these sources. Follow a link to read the original; if anything here disagrees with it, the original wins. How we choose and check sources.
Evolution (opens the original in a new tab)
National Human Genome Research Institute. Talking Glossary of Genomic and Genetic Terms. National Human Genome Research Institute, NIH.
ReferenceGovernment sourceEducationalEvolution of character displacement in Darwin's finches (opens the original in a new tab)
Grant PR, Grant BR (2006). Science 313:224-226.
Peer-reviewedPrimary researchSelective bird predation on the peppered moth: the last experiment of Michael Majerus (opens the original in a new tab)
Cook LM, Grant BS, Saccheri IJ, et al. (2012). Biology Letters 8:609-612.
Peer-reviewedPrimary research