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)
- When heritable characteristics of a species or a biological population change over successive generations
- These traits cannot be acquired over a lifetime, they are heritable traits or alleles in an organism’s DNAthe cumulative change in the heritable characteristics of a population, or
- Evolution is the change in allelic frequency in a gene pool of a population over time, as a result of natural selection, genetic drift, gene flow, and mutation pressure.