AP BIOLOGY

Detailed explanation-1: -Natural selection is a mechanism of evolution. Organisms that are more adapted to their environment are more likely to survive and pass on the genes that aided their success. This process causes species to change and diverge over time.

Detailed explanation-2: -Gradualism in biology and geology refers most broadly to a theory that changes of organic life and of the Earth itself occur through gradual increments, and often that transitions between different states are more or less continual and slow rather than periodic and rapid.

Detailed explanation-3: -Charles Darwin understood that evolution was a slow and gradual process. By gradual, Darwin did not mean “perfectly smooth, ” but rather, “stepwise, ” with a species evolving and accumulating small variations over long periods of time until a new species was born.

Detailed explanation-4: -A species can evolve by only one of these, or by both. Scientists think that species with a shorter evolution evolved mostly by punctuated equilibrium, and those with a longer evolution evolved mostly by gradualism. Gradualism is selection and variation that happens more gradually.