AP BIOLOGY

Detailed explanation-1: -As Darwin (1859) realized, this massive discrepancy between the number of offspring produced and the number that can be sustained by available resources creates a “struggle for existence” in which often only a tiny fraction of individuals will succeed.

Detailed explanation-2: -noun phrase : the automatic competition of members of a natural population for limited vital resources (such as food, space, or light) that results in natural selection.

Detailed explanation-3: -Overproduction is a driving force in natural selection, as it can lead to adaptation and variations in a species. Darwin argued that all species overproduce, since they have more offspring than can realistically reach reproductive age, based on the resources available.

Detailed explanation-4: -A struggle for existence inevitably follows from the high rate at which all organic beings tend to increase [so that] on the principle of geometrical increase, its numbers would quickly become so inordinately great that no country could support the product.

Detailed explanation-5: -These included “dependence of one being on another, ” animals that “struggle with each other” over limited food resources, plants that “struggle for life against the drought” and that “struggle with other fruit-bearing plants, in order to tempt birds to devour and thus disseminate its seeds.”