Describe the natural selection and explain its importance

The natural selection is a phenomenon whereby the cumulative effect of heritable traits results in
adaptive evolution. The origin of the term is attributed to British naturalist Charles Darwin, who
published his theory in 1859.

Natural selection is at work all around us, but has the power to drive significant changes during short
periods of time; a few minutes can make a big difference when it comes to preservation and
extinction. How organisms evolve depends on whether they are able to adapt, with individual species
having different adaptations suited for their environments and living as prey or predators that co-
evolve with each other's adaptations. Each species has certain traits that enable it to adapt, called
adaptations. These are inherited and passed down from generation to generation.

Natural selection is a continuous process driven by various factors.

As an example, consider an individual animal of the same species in a very different environment,
such as being in a zoo in front of a crowd of people when compared to an individual animal in its
natural habitat without being seen by another similar animal. The two individuals might be two
different species, but they have been specifically bred for their qualities to be exhibited at their
current location over generations; there are no other individuals of their own species nearby and the
chances of any other members of the same species wandering into their environment are almost
nonexistent. So, each individual animal has a different fate depending on its environment.

Variation is the process by which new traits come into existence. The traits that an organism
possesses are passed down from parent to child. Each parent may only possess one or two of these
traits, and so the offspring contains even less. In this way, small random changes in one generation
will accumulate until some are more extreme than others; ultimately the trait "wins" and becomes
inherited by more individuals than any other possible alternative trait (mutational load). Through this
process of variation, new genes can come into existence by mutation which then get passed down to
future generations through reproduction.