It’s difficult to overestimate the significance of natural selection. As I see it, no other biological principle or concept comes close to being as important as the fundamental mechanism of evolutionary change that Charles Darwin unearthed and described back in the 19th century when it comes to understanding and explaining the natural world.
In previous articles, I’ve talked at length about the nature of natural selection, as well as its relevance to nutrition, medicine, and psychology. What I haven’t done though, is to provide a Darwinian account of life from a bird’s eye perspective. That’s something I thought I’d do now…
The bigger Darwinian picture of life
One of the truly remarkable things about natural selection is that it underpins pretty much everything that has to do with life here on this planet. This follows from the recognition that life, since it’s inception, principally evolved via natural selection (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). In other words, one would expect that all major biological phenomena can be described in Darwinian terms. To a non-Darwinian, this might seem far-fetched; however, to a Darwinist such as myself, it appears to be the way things have to be, given the nature of life.
So as to give an account of this selection-centered view of life, I recently created the infographic below, which explains certain major aspects of life from a Darwinian point of view.
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