5.1 evolution evidence

Question 1

what is evolution and how does it occur?

Answer 1

• evolution at its most fundamental level simply describes a change over time
• in living organisms this change refers to 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