What is Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution?

April 23, 2023

Over 1,800 scientists, teachers, educators and science popularisers across the country recently written an open letter criticising the NCERT's latest move to remove Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution from classes 9 and 10 textbooks.

About Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution:

Darwin in his Theory of Evolution describes how organisms evolve over generations through the inheritance of physical or behavioral traits.
The mechanism that Darwin proposed for evolution is natural selection.
How Natural Selection Happens?
- Individuals with traits that enable them to adapt to their environments will help them survive and have more offspring, which will inherit those traits.
- Individuals with less adaptive traits will less frequently survive to pass them on.
- Over time, the traits that enable species to survive and reproduce will become more frequent in the population and the population will change, or evolve.
- Natural selection depends on the environment and requires existing heritable variation in a group.
- Through natural selection, Darwin suggested, genetically diverse species could arise from a common ancestor.