Chance as Necessity

Abstract

How does evolution actually function? Charles Darwin was the first to recognize that natural selection is the crucial factor in the environment: it is responsible for the fact that the variously endowed organisms, which stand in direct competition with one another, have correspondingly different probabilities of reproductive success. The logical consequence of this is that even relatively minor differences in the biological fitness of organisms lead to numerical changes in the composition of animal populations; these changes can ultimately even lead to the development of new species. The total of all physical and ecological environmental conditions—in the form of natural selection—therefore decides the evolutionary fate of an organism.

Does evolution depend on random search?

C. H. Waddington

Some admirable intellects, even today, appear still not to have accepted or even understood that selection alone has produced the whole concert of living nature. Selection operates namely on the products of random chance since it cannot feed itself from any other source.

Jacques Monod