← 🌱 Biology · usually met in Std 9-12
Living things vary; some variations help survival and reproduction in a particular place; those get passed on more often. Repeat for long enough and populations change.
Darwin's argument needs only three facts: more offspring are born than can survive, they differ from one another, and some of those differences are inherited. The individuals whose variations suit the conditions leave more descendants, so those variations become commoner. Nobody is choosing — the environment simply filters what was already varying.
Two misunderstandings are worth clearing up. Evolution does not act on an individual; a giraffe does not stretch its neck and pass that on. And it has no goal and no ladder: a bacterium is not a failed attempt at being a human, it is extremely good at being a bacterium. The evidence comes from fossils, from shared anatomy, from the geographic distribution of species, and now most powerfully from DNA, where the family tree built from sequences matches the one built from bones.
Want to see it moving? Search YouTube for “Evolution by natural selection” ↗ — we send you to the search rather than to one video, because a link to one video eventually rots.
This entry was written for Star Student in our own words — it is a summary, not a source. Here is where the people who actually hold these facts keep them. Go and check.
Your own textbook ↗Balbharati publishes the textbooks free to read online. Your chapter is the thing to check first — an encyclopedia is a summary, and the syllabus is the syllabus. Zoological Survey of India ↗India's animal life, surveyed and catalogued since 1916.Last gone through: 1 October 2026 · How these entries are written
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