BIOC31H3 Lecture Notes - Mendelian Inheritance, Microevolution, Modern Synthesis (20Th Century)

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Natural selection is not forward looking: natural selection adapts populations to conditions that prevailed in the past, not conditions that might occur in the future, adapting for the future is impossible and is often a misconception. New traits can evolve, even though natural selection acts on existing traits: the evolution of new traits is possible for two reasons: During reproduction in sexual species, meiosis and fertilization recombine existing alleles into new genotypes. Mutation and recombination yield new suites of traits for selection to sort. Preadaption improves an individual"s fitness fortuitously not because natural. Natural selection is nonrandom, but it is not progressive: mutation and recombination are random with respect to the changes they produce in phenotypes. But natural selection, the mechanism that sorts among variant phenotypes and genotypes, is not random. Evolution makes populations better only in the sense of increasing their average adaptation to the environment. Selection acts on individuals, not for the good of the species.

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