Natural selection

Natural selection is the process by which organisms with traits better suited to their environment tend to survive and reproduce more than others, so that those traits become more common over generations. The idea was presented jointly by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace at the Linnean Society in London in 1858, after Wallace independently reached similar conclusions while working in Southeast Asia. Darwin's book On the Origin of Species, published the next year, laid out the evidence in detail. Natural selection later merged with genetics in the twentieth century into the modern synthesis, and it remains the central explanation of how populations adapt and how species diverge.

Open on the timeline