Natural selection, in this formulation, can be thought of as a procedure for searching through the set of possible individuals, the search space, to find individuals of progressively higher fitness. Even when a natural population consists of a single species – say the current generation of humans – there is considerable variation within that population. These variants constitute samples of the search space. | Natural selection, in this formulation, can be thought of as a procedure for searching through the set of possible individuals, the search space, to find individuals of progressively higher fitness. Even when a natural population consists of a single species – say the current generation of humans – there is considerable variation within that population. These variants constitute samples of the search space. |