Adaptation, Fifth Principle of Natural Selection
Adaptation is the fifth of the five principles of natural selection introduced by Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species. The long-necked giraffe once served as a popular example of adaptation. Darwin explained –
“The structure of each part of each species, for whatever purpose it may serve, is the sum of many inherited changes, through which the species has passed during its successive adaptations.”
Two twentieth-century contributors, Ernst Mayr and Yuri Filipchenko, however, developed our modern understanding of adaptation in Earth’s biosphere.
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