by the Understanding Evolution team

Natural selection is a powerful process: it produces amazing adaptations (such as the “leaf-disguise” of the katydid shown below) and helps us understand much of what we observe in the natural world — but natural selection is often misunderstood. Frequently, the process is misconstrued as one that simply grants a species any trait that it might need for survival. However, as we will see, natural selection has its limitations, and many characteristics of organisms can be better understood with a more realistic view of the process.