 This view became broadly accepted, and accordingly, the term macroevolution has been used widely as a neutral label for the study of evolutionary changes that take place over a very large time-scale.However, the tenet that large-scale evolutionary patterns were ultimately reducible to microevolution has been challenged by the concept of species selection, which suggests that selection among species is a major evolutionary factor that is independent from and complementary to selection among organisms.Accordingly, the level of selection (or, more generally, of sorting) has become the conceptual basis of a third definition, which defines macroevolution as evolution through selection among interspecific variation.