Evolution

For as long as there have been people on Earth, there have been Questions about how and why life exists as it does. Many different ideas and explanation have been suggested over the year. Scientist have shown that idea known as evolution is the best explanation. There have proved that idea works by looking at fossils and by studying the way in which animals and plants adapt themselves to changes in their environments.

Animals and plants that are well suited to their environments will survive best and pass on their characteristic to the following generations. Groups of plants or animals that share similar features are a kind of family. Known as a species. Scientists can look backwards into history and show that all species come from the same ancient parents. Each living thing is a blend of older and newer features, and each species is always developing and adapting, and this branching out looks rather like an enormous and complicated family tree.

Evolution Facts

Identical twins have exactly the same information in their DNA.

The ‘human genome project’, begun in 1990, is an international effort to decode the information in human DNA. It will be finished in 2005.

Mistakes in the copying of DNA from generation to the next are called mutations.

Life on Earth seems to have begun arround 3.500 million years ago, as simple one-celled organisms in the sea.

Humans beings evolved from apes, about three million years ago.