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The process by which individuals have beneficial characteristics for reproduction in a specific environment and can produce more offspring is called?Natural selectionInheritanceEvolutionNone of the aboveHint: Natural selection is the process in nature by which organisms better adapted to their environment tend to survive and reproduce more than those less adapted to their environment.The correct answer is: Natural selectionNatural selection is the process through which populations of living organisms adapt and change. Individuals in a population are naturally variable, meaning that they are all different in some ways. This variation means that some individuals have traits better suited to the living environment than others.For example, treefrogs are sometimes eaten by snakes and birds.If you're seeing this message, it means we're having trouble loading external resources on our website. If you're behind a web filter, please make sure that the domains *.kastatic.org and *.kasandbox.org are unblocked.  Understanding: • Natural selection increases the frequency of characteristics that make individuals better adapted and decreases the frequency of other characteristics leading to changes within the species
The key components to the process of natural selection are:
Overview of Natural Selection In evolutionary theory, adaptation is the biological mechanism by which organisms adjust to new environments or to changes in their current environment. Although scientists discussed adaptation prior to the 1800s, it was not until then that Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace developed the theory of natural selection. Wallace believed that the evolution of organisms was connected in some way with adaptation of organisms to changing environmental conditions. In developing the theory of evolution by natural selection, Wallace and Darwin both went beyond simple adaptation by explaining how organisms adapt and evolve. The idea of natural selection is that traits that can be passed down allow organisms to adapt to the environment better than other organisms of the same species. This enables better survival and reproduction compared with other members of the species, leading to evolution. Organisms can adapt to an environment in different ways. They can adapt biologically, meaning they alter body functions. An example of biological adaptation can be seen in the bodies of people living at high altitudes, such as Tibet. Tibetans thrive at altitudes where oxygen levels are up to 40 percent lower than at sea level. Breathing air that thin would cause most people to get sick, but Tibetans’ bodies have evolved changes in their body chemistry. Most people can survive at high altitudes for a short time because their bodies raise their levels of hemoglobin, a protein that transports oxygen in the blood. However, continuously high levels of hemoglobin are dangerous, so increased hemoglobin levels are not a good solution to high-altitude survival in the long term. Tibetans seemed to have evolved genetic mutations that allow them to use oxygen far more efficently without the need for extra hemoglobin. Organisms can also exhibit behavioral adaptation. One example of behavioral adaptation is how emperor penguins in Antarctica crowd together to share their warmth in the middle of winter. Scientists who studied adaptation prior to the development of evolutionary theory included Georges Louis Leclerc Comte de Buffon. He was a French mathematician who believed that organisms changed over time by adapting to the environments of their geographical locations. Another French thinker, Jean Baptiste Lamarck, proposed that animals could adapt, pass on their adaptations to their offspring, and therefore evolve. The example he gave stated the ancestors of giraffes might have adapted to a shortage of food from short trees by stretching their necks to reach higher branches. In Lamarck’s thinking, the offspring of a giraffe that stretched its neck would then inherit a slightly longer neck. Lamarck theorized that behaviors aquired in a giraffe's lifetime would affect its offspring. However, it was Darwin’s concept of natural selection, wherein favorable traits like a long neck in giraffes suvived not because of aquired skills, but because only giraffes that had long enough necks to feed themselves survived long enough to reproduce. Natural selection, then, provides a more compelling mechanism for adaptation and evolution than Lamarck's theories. Is the process by which individuals that are better adapted to their environment?Natural selection is the process through which populations of living organisms adapt and change. Individuals in a population are naturally variable, meaning that they are all different in some ways. This variation means that some individuals have traits better suited to the environment than others.
What is the name for the process in which the organisms best adapted to their environment survive apex?Natural selection is a process that favors heritable traits that increase the survival chances of an organism, allowing the organism to reproduce more!
How does it benefit an individual to have adaptations to the environment?Adaptation can lead to organisms that are better suited for their environment because individuals with the traits adaptive to the environmental change pass those traits on to their offspring, whereas individuals with traits that are less adaptive produce fewer or no offspring.
Can an individual adapt to its environment?Adaptations acquired by individuals during their lifetime, such as muscles strengthened by exercise or behaviors honed by experience, make an individual organism better-adapted; species as a whole, however, generally become better adapted to their environments only by the process of natural selection.
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