Overview: This simple activity allows students to discover or reason through a portion of Darwin's theory of natural selection. Students use seeds from common fruits (e.g. apple seeds) to hypothesize/calculate the reproductive rate of a population, realize that such large populations do not exist, and conclude that organisms face a constant struggle to survive. Author/Source: Access Excellence Grade level: 13-16 Time: 15-30 minutes Teaching tips: Students should have simple graphing skills. For large classes, use a document camera to display a fruit with seeds. Concepts: An individual’s fitness (or relative fitness) is the contribution that individual makes to the gene pool of the next generation relative to other individuals in the population. An organism’s fitness depends on both its survival and its reproduction. Fitness is often measured using proxies like mass, number of matings, and survival because it is difficult to measure reproductive success. Teacher background: Natural Selection

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