The historical application of mols. of natural origin as starting points for drug discovery has largely been replaced by today's primary hit-seeking strategies of library screening (diversity-based, fragment-based, knowledge-based, virtual) and exploitation of known compoundAccordingly, the computed natural product (NP) probability score of approved oral drugs has fallen significantly for drugs invented after 1990, when primary in vitro screening at cloned human targets began to be widely adopted.Pseudo-natural products (PNPs) provide a new approach to quantifying the appearance of NP structural elements.The aim of this work is to seek further support for the existence of natural selection in drug discovery.We employ a highly curated dataset 22 from ChEMBL (version 32) 23 to assess the impact of quant. NP measures, including the presence of PNPs, in marketed drugs and phase 1-3 clin. compounds in comparison with a background of relevant, target-matched reference compounds