In Support of Natural Selection

Darwin gets a boost by a new study citing evidence for the environmental basis of natural selection.

Amidst the hubbub of pundits and policy-makers bickering over evolution, intelligent design and creationism, a group of researchers working at Vanderbilt University have published the results of a wide-ranging study in the online version of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that provides evidence for an environmental basis for the origin of species, rather than a random series of genetic mutations, supporting the theory of natural selection.

"Since science never conclusively proves any theory, we cannot claim that our study does so," said Daniel Funk, assistant professor of biology at Vanderbilt and the main author of the study. "However, it is highly consistent with an integrated evolutionary perspective."

Several studies of individual species—such as cichlid fish in Lake Victoria—support Darwin's hypothesis of natural selection as a direct cause of speciation. Funk's study is the first to look for a general pattern across many species. The team found existing data on eight different animal and plant groups that tracked interbreeding capacity over time and compared it with data on environmental factors such as habitat and diet.