Question

Suppose that you wanted to stimulate Natural Selection in this lab? What experiment could you conduct to stimulate Natural Selection? What instructions would you give for that step?

Answer 1

Natural Selection:

Natural selection is the process by which species adapt to the environment. They increase the capability to reproduce more than the other individuals.

• It occurs due to predators, environmental factors, competition for food.
• Natural selection occurs over long period of time, it take generations to study the changes.
• In order to study the natural selection in lab, scientist induces different environmental condition for the organism they study and calculate the effect.

This method of inducing a natural selection in lab is known as simulation of natural selection.

Example:

Drosophila melanogaster is the organism that is most frequently used in any laboratory to study.

• Drosophila with specific marked identification is used to initially set up the experiment. (Eye colour, wing type etc).
• The organisms are placed in new medium.
• The challenge faced by individuals differs greatly depending on when they start development relative to the age of the culture.
• An egg that begins development immediately after transfer to new medium has lot of time to complete development to its large size.
• Egg laid some days later faces a desperate struggle to complete its development.

Organisms are studied in different stressful conditions induced. Final results will be obtained from calculating the population of the organisms that has been obtained, whether they were able to withstand the stress, ability to reproduce and many other factors can be studied.