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Evolution

The process by which living things change over generations through changes in their genomes.Source: NHGRISource: OpenStax, 2018

Step 1 of 8ReadingProcess

How Evolution connects

Evolution includes

  • Process

    Natural selection

    Individuals better suited to their surroundings leave more offspring, so their inherited traits become more common. Darwin's finches and peppered moths are well-studied examples.

  • Process

    Genetic drift

    Random changes in how common alleles are from one generation to the next, strongest in small populations.

  • Idea or model

    Common ancestry

    All known cellular life is thought to descend from a last universal common ancestor. Researchers infer its features from genes shared across life, and the details are still debated.

  • Idea or model

    Endosymbiosis

    Mitochondria and chloroplasts descend from bacteria that came to live inside other cells long ago.

Evolution is made possible by

Evolution includes the example

  • Idea or model

    Transitional fossils

    Fossils with in-between features, such as a Late Devonian fish from Arctic Canada that is intermediate between finned fish and four-limbed animals.

  • Process

    Experimental evolution

    Watching evolution in the lab: in a long-running E. coli experiment, one population evolved the ability to use citrate after about 31,500 generations.

Evolution is related to

  • Level of life

    Population

    All the members of one species living in the same area at the same time.

Explore further

In the knowledge graphFind papers about Evolution

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Sources & further reading

The explanations on this page are our own summaries of these sources. Follow a link to read the original; if anything here disagrees with it, the original wins. How we choose and check sources.