Definition of "selection"

selection

/səˈlɛkʃən/

noun
countable and uncountable, plural selections
1. The process or act of selecting.
2. Something selected.
3. A variety of items taken from a larger collection.
4. A musical piece.
5. (databases) A set of data obtained from a database using a query.
6. (linguistics) The ability of predicates to determine the semantic content of their arguments.
7. (programming) A list of items on which user operations will take place.
8. (algebra) A unary operation that denotes a subset of a relation.
9. (historical) The free selection before survey of crown land in some Australian colonies under land legislation introduced in the 1860s.
10. (biology) The stage of a genetic algorithm in which individual genomes are chosen from a population for later breeding.
11. (biology) Ellipsis of natural selection.
  Quotations
  Slow though the process of selection may be, if feeble man can do much by his powers of artificial selection, I can see no limit to the amount of change, to the beauty and infinite complexity of the coadaptations between all organic beings, one with another and with their physical conditions of life, which may be effected in the long course of time by nature’s power of selection.
  1859 November 24, Charles Darwin, “4, Natural Selection”, in On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, […], London: John Murray, […]

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