All life on earth is descended from a last universal ancestor that lived approximately 3.8 billion years ago.
Where does life's diversity come from? Where do new species come from? Why do some species go extinct? These are just a few of the questions that can be answered by understanding of evolution.
Evolution is the change in the inherited characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organization, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins. All life on earth is descended from a last universal ancestor that lived approximately 3.8 billion years ago. Repeated speciation and the divergence of life can be inferred from shared sets of biochemical and morphological traits, or by shared DNA sequences.
Advances in technology have given us tools that have dramatically advanced our understanding of how evolution occurs.