Adaptation, Fifth Principle of Natural Selection
Adaptation is the fifth principle driving Charles Darwin’s theory, with the long-necked giraffe once serving as a classic example. Natural selection is contingent on cumulative adaptive changes over long periods of time. In The Origin of Species, Darwin wrote –
“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 key twentieth-century contributors, Ernst Mayr and Yuri Filipchenko, framed a scientific understanding of adaptation in Earth’s biosphere.
