And it was designed by natural selection, the process of natural selection, over many millions of years.

Natural selection is survival of the fittest.

It was a clever move of natural selection itself.

Is it a product of natural selection, like our hands?

It's a powerful way of solving intractable problems using natural selection.

There was natural selection for the evolution of lightly pigmented skin.

So it works. But not only that, if you think about how natural selection works, then it turns out that natural selection would only make sense in such a relational universe.

Paradoxically, once established, natural selection actually favors the continued growth of cancer.

So, natural selection will favor organisms that are more likely to cause damage.

The designs discovered by the process of natural selection are brilliant, unbelievably brilliant.

And when evolutionary biologists talk about design, they really mean design by natural selection.

Each of you possesses the most powerful, dangerous and subversive trait that natural selection has ever devised.

So Gary Bauer is not too far behind has slightly different theories about evolution and natural selection.

And yet, despite all of that Darwinian evolution and natural selection, they've been constrained to lie on a line.

Each dot corresponds to an islet from a different person a lot of variation on which natural selection can act.

That is, natural selection works on properties, like fitness, which are about relationships of some species to some other species.

I'm a biologist, and the central theorem of our subject the theory of design, Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection.

Darwinian natural selection is so stunningly elegant because it solves the problem of explaining complexity in terms of nothing but simplicity.

So a theory of biology based on natural selection requires a relational notion of what are the properties of biological systems.

And when you have that, then evolutionary theory tells us that natural selection will favor the more exploitative, more predator like organisms.

Darwin himself, in his autobiography, tells the story of coming up with the idea for natural selection as a classic eureka! moment.

I know you know the idea, natural selection, but let me just paraphrase The Origin of Species, 1859, in a few sentences.

Charles Darwin seemingly overturned this optimistic view of the potential beneficial effects of nurture. Species evolve, Darwin said, through natural selection the random selection, through competition, of biological traits favorable to survival in a world of scarce resources.

In a sense, sexual selection is the psychological extension of natural selection. But, instead of gaining an advantage from traits that enhance one s ability to survive, one gains an advantage from qualities that potential mates have evolved to find appealing.

Put them all together, and put all this under kind of natural selection, under mutation, and rewarded things for how well they can move forward.

It is Darwin s second powerful idea the idea that even the most complicated features of organisms are the outcome of natural selection that has been the key to his theory s long term success. Natural selection has provided scientific explanations of traits as diverse as the mammalian eye, the bird s wing, and the ability of plants to transform light into sugars.

It is the most valuable trait we have for converting new lands and resources into more people and their genes that natural selection has ever devised.

I also did and I don't want to start a little fight in the next panel but I did a Google Share analysis of evolution and natural selection.

Just as both empathy and xenophobia can be explained by natural selection, both can be modulated by cultural factors. But do they have equal claims to being moral emotions?

Invert Selection

Selection Committee

And all of a sudden, the basic algorithm of natural selection kind of pops into his head and he says, Ah, at last, I had a theory with which to work.

The first of these is natural selection that's random mutation and selective retention along with our basic anatomy and physiology the evolution of the pancreas or the eye or the fingernails.

And what Gruber found was that Darwin had the full theory of natural selection for months and months and months before he had his alleged epiphany, reading Malthus in October of 1838.

Natural selection also explains many basic revulsions, such as the horrid smell of rotting meat, or fears, such as the fear of snakes or standing close to the edge of a cliff.

Natural selection also explains pleasures sexual pleasure, our liking for sweet, fat and proteins, which in turn explains a lot of popular foods, from ripe fruits through chocolate malts and barbecued ribs.

We have selection.

Selection of indicators

Selection of mandates

Now what is wonderful about the evolution of human skin pigmentation, and the phenomenon of pigmentation, is that it is the demonstration, the evidence, of evolution by natural selection, right on your body.

Instead of looking for changes in genes that take many generations to accumulate until they can be detected, we have measured natural selection directly. This method can reveal selection in action, working over periods of time as short as one generation so that it can answer the question of whether modern culture has stopped evolution.

So, it seems, complexity is not really naturally selected, but instead arises as a short term fix to the effects of selection inefficiency. At first reading, this assertion seems counterintuitive, but the root of the paradox is simply our dogmatic way of thinking, where complex traits are expected to be an outcome of natural selection.

Over millions of years, variation and selection, variation and selection trial and error, trial and error.

They've made a selection.

Selection of the winner