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The age of the Earth is about 4.5 billion years. [1] [2] [3] The earliest undisputed evidence of life on Earth dates from at least 3.5 billion years ago. [4] [5] [6] Evolution does not attempt to explain the origin of life (covered instead by abiogenesis), but it does explain how early lifeforms evolved into the complex ecosystem that we see ...
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]
The four causes or four explanations are, in Aristotelian thought, categories of questions that explain "the why's" of something that exists or changes in nature. The four causes are the: material cause , the formal cause , the efficient cause , and the final cause .
Beginning of animal evolution. [54] [55] 720–630 Ma Possible global glaciation [56] [57] which increased the atmospheric oxygen and decreased carbon dioxide, and was either caused by land plant evolution [58] or resulted in it. [59] Opinion is divided on whether it increased or decreased biodiversity or the rate of evolution. [60] [61] [62 ...
Four ways of explaining the Westermarck effect, the lack of sexual interest in one's siblings (Wilson, 1998:189–196): Function: To discourage inbreeding, which decreases the number of viable offspring. Phylogeny: Found in a number of mammalian species, suggesting initial evolution tens of millions of years ago.
Mosaic evolution – Evolution of characters at various rates both within and between species; Parallel evolution – Similar evolution in distinct species; Quantum evolution – Evolution where transitional forms are particularly unstable and do not last long; Recurrent evolution – The repeated evolution of a particular character
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.
More recently, the merge between biological science and applied sciences gave birth to new fields that are extensions of evolutionary biology, including evolutionary robotics, engineering, [2] algorithms, [3] economics, [4] and architecture. [5] The basic mechanisms of evolution are applied directly or indirectly to come up with novel designs ...