What Influence Did the Writings of Thomas Malthus Have on Darwin's

question 42

Multiple Choice

What influence did the writings of Thomas Malthus have on Darwin's ideas of natural selection?

• A) Malthus described the reproduction of elephants to Darwin.
• B) Malthus explained how variation was maintained within populations.
• C) Malthus illustrated that some individuals possessed favorable traits while others did not.
• D) Malthus wrote a detailed history of artificial selection examples.
• E) Malthus proposed that the human population grows faster than the food supply, meaning that death and famine are inevitable. The socioeconomist Thomas Malthus described that the human population grew faster than the food supply and death and famine were inevitable. Darwin applied this concept to organisms that overproduce and struggle to survive in an environment with limited resources.

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Definitions:

Distribution

The way in which something is shared or spread out over a certain area, or among a population.

Age Categories

Classifications of individuals based on their age, often used in statistics and research to analyze differences among age groups.

Replacement Fertility Rate

Number of children a woman must bear to replace herself with one daughter of reproductive age.

Reproductive Age

Typically refers to the timeframe in which individuals are biologically capable of reproducing, varying by sex.