Question

Explain why “editing” is a metaphor for how natural selection acts on a population’s heritable variation.

Short answer

The term editor is a metaphor for natural selection because natural selection edits the naturally occurring heritable variation by favoring one genotype over another.

It causes a change in population gene frequencies because it chooses those who will live and pass on their genes to the next generation. As a result, individuals with better heritable features live and reproduce more successfully than those who do not.

Step-by-step solution

Definition of natural selection

Natural selection is a culling process in which individuals with beneficial qualities survive and reproduce more frequently than those with unfavorable characteristics. Giraffes with longer necks, for example, had an advantage over their shorter-necked counterparts because they could quickly eat from towering trees.

As a result, long-necked giraffes reproduce more frequently, resulting in a higher prevalence of long-necked giraffes in the next generation. This treatment resulted in giraffes with longer necks, allowing them to consume the tall trees. Long-necked giraffes eventually won over short-necked giraffes.

Effect of natural selection on species

Natural selection must meet the following three conditions for evolutionary change to occur:

1. Individuals in a population must differ: Natural selection favors people with certain traits over people with different traits. Natural selection cannot work if there is no variance.
2. Individual differences result in differences in the number of offspring who survive to the following generation: Because of their phenotype or behavior, some individuals are more successful than others in generating offspring, which is the core of natural selection. Although many features are phenotypically variable, survival and reproductive success do not necessarily differ between individuals.
3. The variation must be genetically inherited: The selected differences must have a genetic foundation for natural selection to result in evolutionary change. When phenotypically dissimilar individuals are genetically identical, changes in the number of their offspring do not affect the genetic composition of the population in the next generation, and, hence, no evolutionary change can occur.

Step 3:Natural selection as “editor”

Natural selection operates by creating gene combination variants with variable viabilityand reproduction outcomes regularly. The success of a variant is determined by its ability to expand its combinatorial variants in the future.

Other than being able to reproduce, success is defined as the ability to reproduce. It is pretty successfully reproducible with fidelity and predictability.

Thus, natural selection acts as an editor because it occurs in life that already exists and causes it to evolve to survive in the existing conditions. As a result, there is descent with a variation that alters the heritable property of the population.