Overview of Evolution

Evolution is the process of change that has given us the Reality we have today.It has painted Life in the size, shape, colors, population frequency and activities that we find in every part of the World.It is not something of the past, but it is more of the present that leads to the future.It is the inherited traits of a population of organisms through successive generations. This change results from interactions between processes that introduce variation into a population, and other processes that remove it.

MUTATION is a major cause of genetic changes. These hereditary changes are passed on through reproduction and may give rise to alternative traits in organisms. Mutation may also be caused by variations in genetic recombination, which shuffles the genes into new combinations that can result in organisms exhibiting different traits.

NATURAL SELECTION – Traits that aid survival and reproduction become more common, while traits that hinder survival and reproduction become rarer. Natural selection occurs because only a small proportion of individuals in each generation will survive and reproduce, since resources are limited and organisms produce many more offspring than their environment can support.

ADAPTATION is a process that adjusts traits so they become better suited to an organism’s environment. Over many generations, heritable variation in traits is filtered by natural selection and the beneficial changes are successively retained through differential survival and reproduction which is Adaptation.

GENETIC DRIFT is another cause of evolution which leads to random changes in how common traits are in a population. Genetic drift is most important when traits do not strongly influence survival—particularly so in small populations, in which chance plays a disproportionate role in the frequency of traits passed on to the next generation.

SPECIATION is a key process in evolution in which a single ancestral species splits and diversifies into multiple new species. Ultimately, all living (and extinct) species are descended from a common ancestor via a long series of speciation events.