Understanding:
• Evolution occurs when heritable characteristics of a species change
Evolution at its most fundamental level simply describes a change over time
- In living organisms this change refers to the heritable characteristics of a species (biological evolution)
Heritable characteristics are encoded for by genes and may be transferred between generations as alleles
- Hence biological evolution describes cumulative changes that occur within a population between one generation and the next
A concise definition for biological evolution is:
- A change in the allele frequency of a population’s gene pool over successive generations
Evolution = Change Over Time
