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Evolution is the change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. [1] [2] It occurs when evolutionary processes such as natural selection and genetic drift act on genetic variation, resulting in certain characteristics becoming more or less common within a population over successive generations. [3]
Evolutionary biology is the subfield of biology that studies the evolutionary processes (natural selection, common descent, speciation) that produced the diversity of life on Earth. It is also defined as the study of the history of life forms on Earth. Evolution holds that all species are related and gradually change over generations. [1]
In biology, evolution is the process of change in all forms of life over generations, and evolutionary biology is the study of how evolution occurs. Biological populations evolve through genetic changes that correspond to changes in the organisms ' observable traits .
Biology – Science that studies life Evolutionary biology – Study of the evolution of life Evolutionary developmental biology – Comparison of organism developmental processes; Genetics – Science of genes, heredity, and variation in living organisms; Biogeography – Study of distribution of species
Evolution is a central organizing concept in biology. It is the change in heritable characteristics of populations over successive generations . [ 88 ] [ 89 ] In artificial selection , animals were selectively bred for specific traits.
Professor of biology Jerry Coyne sums up biological evolution succinctly: [3]. Life on Earth evolved gradually beginning with one primitive species – perhaps a self-replicating molecule – that lived more than 3.5 billion years ago; it then branched out over time, throwing off many new and diverse species; and the mechanism for most (but not all) of evolutionary change is natural selection.
These genes have been highly conserved through hundreds of millions of years of evolution. [1] Evolutionary developmental biology (informally, evo-devo) is a field of biological research that compares the developmental processes of different organisms to infer how developmental processes evolved.
Speciation is the evolutionary process by which populations evolve to become distinct species.The biologist Orator F. Cook coined the term in 1906 for cladogenesis, the splitting of lineages, as opposed to anagenesis, phyletic evolution within lineages.