There is variation in the cockroach population. Variation is the differences in a population, and the raw material of natural selection.
Oh no! Jack is walking over here with the bug spray!
These cockroaches are “bugging” me.
Wow, that hurts my feelings
Hey, we're alive? Why didn't we die?
Hooray! I got rid of those cockroaches!
I guess he didn't apply the pesticides correctly.
Since we were the ones who didn't die, we must have genes that gave us a strong resistance to the pesticides.
Yeah, that would mean the pesticide acts as a selective pressure. A selective pressure is something that puts pressure on an organisms fitness. Selection favors certain genotypes by acting on the organisms phenotype.
Population: all members of the same species in a certain area
The type of selection that happened to us is called directional selection. Directional selection occurs when individuals at a one end of the phenotypical range have a higher fitness than the rest. This can be seen in us since only the individuals with the highest pesticide resistance survived.
Wait a minute. Since we all have high pesticide resistance, then our offspring must have high resistance too through inheritance of genes. We can create a new and evolved population. Well, what are we waiting for? Let's reproduce!
Hooray! The pesticide has no effect on us anymore, and due to microevolution, this population will be staying for a while. Microevolution is a change in the allele frequencies over time in a population. In our case, the parent generation had a wide variety of alleles while the new generation has strong resistance alleles.
2 weeks later...
I guess you could say we have un-bug-lievable strong resistance
Now they will never die. I hate directional selection!
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