Natural selection is a term that, if you stated it fully, would say something like "The fittest individuals are naturally selected for reproduction." Unfit organisms do not survive to reproduce and pass on their genes.
Populations evolve, but individuals are selected. Natural selection affects individual organisms.
It acts on populations.
Only natural selection could be the answer here as natural selection is the main driver of adaptive change leading to evolutionary change and speciation in large populations.
Directional selection
No. Natural selection works in all populations. However, new alleles spread more slowly in large populations; the large size has a stabilizing effect. So one should expect large populations to change more slowly than smaller populations.
Natural selection
To a very low extent, yes.
Charles Darwin Theory of natural selection
Compete? The need to be a moron. Complete? The lack of natural selection.
A simplified explanation. Natural selection is the nonrandom survival and reproductive success of randomly varying organisms who by this reproductive success change the allele frequency over time in populations of organisms, which is evolution.
Genetic variation. If there were no variation in the genes/phenotype then natural selection would have nothing to select from.
differential reproductive success caused by genetic variation is necessary for the process of natural selection.