David Joiner, The Shodor Education Foundation, Inc.
Contributor:
none listed
Publisher:
The Computational Science Education Reference Desk
Description:
Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection was the first plausible mechanism to explain the change of species over time, however, in it's original form it did not explain how new traits could form, or how traits that had formed could be passed on to successive generations. The rise in modern genetics helped to modify biologists understanding of evolution by attributing the origin of new traits in a species to random genetic processes of mutation and sexual recombination, with the survivability of species with the new traits subject to natural selection. This combination of random mutation and natural selection is often referred to as Neodarwinism.
