The story
Coined by British biologist Charles Darwin in 1859 in his work On the Origin of Species.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
natural selection
Today it means: A process by which heritable traits conferring survival and reproductive advantage to individuals, or related individuals, tend to be passed on to succeeding generations and become more frequent in a population, whereas other less favourable traits tend to become eliminated; the differential survival and reproduction of phenotypes. Full definition →