Species can settle . This happens when the species’ environment is stable for many generations. Faced with an unchanging niche, the species will start to lose genetic diversity as the blind process of natural selection weeds out genes that aren’t perfectly optimal for that niche. The result will be a relatively homogeneous gene pool and a species

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Settling into a niche

For the rest of this article, I’d like to talk about settling , the process of moving into a niche and devoting more resources to its exploitation.

This is a very general phenomenon, but again Ellsworth (the man looking for silver) provides a great illustration. After prospecting for a while, when he finds a good claim he’ll

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