Adaptive radiation is the evolution of many species from a single, ancestral population. Throughout the history of life, many species have become extinct, either by natural selection or simply bad luck, while others have produced many new species by adaptive radiation. The net result has been a steady increase in biodiversity through evolutionary time. Adaptive radiation occurs because the single ancestral population separates into distinct populations that do not interbreed, thus allowing separate directions of evolution to occur in each.

The world is full of numerous examples of adaptive radiation. Nearly every genus that contains more than one species, or any family that contains more than one genus, can be considered as an example.

While the adaptive radiation of oaks occurred over the course of about 80 million years, the adaptive radiation of the approximately 500 species of cichlid fishes of Lakes Malawi, Tanganyika, and Victoria in Africa has occurred just in the last few thousand years. From what was probably a single ancestral species, the cichlids in Lake Victoria have radiated into such different species as: fish with heavy jaws that crush mollusks; slender, swift fish that eat plankton; small fish that eat parasites off of the skins of larger cichlid fishes; large fish that eat other fishes; and fish with sharp teeth that scrape algae off of rocks. There is very little genetic variation among these species, so rapid and recent has been their adaptive radiation. . .

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