Evolution

?Mendel, widely acknowledged as the first geneticist.

the answer is either lamarck or darwin

it's lamarck. he believed that characteristics developed by parents are passed on to their offspring.

If this happens then Natural Selection occurs because Natural Selection is the increase or decrease in allele frequencies due to the impact of the environment.

The above answer is partially true. An allele's frequency may also change due to genetic drift.

Evolution always involves adaption. The genes that allow an organism (s) to adapt to the environment will pass on their genes.

Mutation may produce that gene and the organism will inherit them and their shape (morphology) may be what the genes produce but adaptation is the key to evolution. "The fittest survive".

Earth is estimated to be about 4.5 billion years old, and for much of that history it has been home to life in one weird form or another.

Indeed, some scientists think life appeared the moment our planet's environment was stable enough to support it.

The earliest evidence for life on Earth comes from fossilized mats of cyanobacteria called stromatolites in Australia that are about 3.4 billion years old. Ancient as their origins are, these bacteria (which are still around today) are already biologically complex - they have cell walls protecting their protein-producing DNA, so scientists think life must have begun much earlier, perhaps as early as 3.8 billion years ago.

But despite knowing approximately when life first appeared on Earth, scientists are still far from answering how it appeared.

"Many theories of the origin of life have been proposed, but since it's hard to prove or disprove them, no fully accepted theory exists," said Diana Northup, a cave biologist at the University of New Mexico.

The answer to this question would not only fill one of the largest gaps in scientists' understanding of nature, but also would have important implications for the likelihood of finding life elsewhere in the universe.

Lots of ideas

Data: The rise and fall of Earth's species

Today, there are several competing theories for how life arose on Earth. Some question whether life began on Earth at all, asserting instead that it came from a distant world or the heart of a fallen comet

or asteroid. Some even say life might have arisen here more than once.

"There may have been several origins," said David Deamer, a biochemist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. "We usually make 'origins' plural just to indicate that we don't necessarily claim there was just a single origin, but just an origin that didn't happen to get blasted by giant [asteroid] impacts."

Most scientists agree that life went through a period when RNA was the head-honcho molecule, guiding life through its nascent stages. According to this "RNA World" hypothesis, RNA was the crux molecule for primitive life and only took a backseat when DNA and proteins - which perform their jobs much more efficiently than RNA - developed.

"A lot of the most clever and most talented people in my field have accepted that the RNA World was not just possible, but probable," Deamer said.

It depends first on the context and definition of the terms "evolution" and "progress(ive)". The term evolution may be used in many different contexts; such as the evolution of species, or the evolution of technology. And the term progressive may have more than one meaning; such as implying some form of improvement over time, or merely implying non-stasis.

Colloquially, the term evolution may refer to progress in terms of improvement. We might say, for example, that the rapid evolution of technology has led to great improvement in the quality of life. However, the same is not true when the terms are applied to science.

Biological evolution, for example, describes how populations diverge, adapt, and differentiate over time resulting in new species. We might say that evolution progresses because it is not static, or because information is being added to the genomes of species over time; but not because there was any quantifiable improvement.

I presume the questioner requires 4 points of information about evolution.

Four brief points are;

1. Evolution is driven by natural selection

2. The base unit of variation is the gene

3. Charles Darwin was the original propounder of evolution

4. Comparative anatomy and the fossil record can give clues to the evolutionary of today's extant organisms

Four points is scarcely enough, so below is a little more background.

Charles Darwin formulated the theory of evolution, suggesting natural selection as its driver. He delineated his ideas in On the Origin of Species in 1859.

These days the theory of evolution gleans insight into the evolution of species by examining fossils, dating fossils, comparing anatomies and comparing nucleic acid sequences.

The Theory of Evolution has managed to get this far in tracing the history of life.

Life started in the ocean in the form of the simplest single cells. A likely theory is life started around hydrothermal vents. But whatever the abiogenetic origin of life, as soon as it could be defined as 'life' it began to evolve by nucleic acid mistakes in replication and mutations as such.

Eukaryotic life branched from the main clade of life billions of years after the first life.

The earliest animals were jellyfish and worms and sponges. Note that the sponge species today are not the same as those of the Precambrian Era. That is not how evolution works. The following illustrates, as a diversion, common misconceptions about evolution;

Humans evolved FROM chimpanzees

This is an incorrect statement. Chimpanzees are extant. Humans are extant. It was a human-chimpanzee common ancestor a couple of million years ago that humans and chimpanzees evolved FROM. It is due to the recentness in time from the divergence from the common ancestor of human and chimpanzee that the two are so anatomically and genetically similar.

Thus, in the case of sponges - those sponges extant today are not the original sponges of the world. Sponges today evolved from the same common ancestor as humans, but this common ancestor was billions of years ago. This great time span has given time for animals to diversify and become more complex, explaining the complexity and vast phenotypic differences between sponges and humans. Sponges exist today as the spongeform (which was/is so simple that it could develop first of all among the animals) has been conserved throughout time (since their common ancestor), while the other offbranches - those that may have lead to echinoderms or annelids or sea squirts- changed within their own clades and since they were more complex than sponges, develped later.

All life has a common ancestry. There was once a bacteria-archaebacteria-eukarya common ancestor. That was the first cell or couple of cells of all life. Evolution works by common ancestry. (We can trace this by modern phylogeny and taxonomy, grouping everything into their own groups called monophylies).

Finally, a point on complexity. Obviously things have to start out simple and end up complex, or to put it better, to gain greater complexity as time goes on. But evolution's 'goal' is not to gain complexity. Evolution works by natural selection. Selction selects those characterists of organisms that CAN SURVIVE. Simple sponges can survive just as well as complex mammals or insects. So selection allows them to continue to exist.

Evolution does not seek intelligence either. Intelligent organisms can simply survive a little better than a lot of other things. Intelligence is simply an attribute that allows organisms that acquire it to survive being weeded out by selection.

In short evolution has no goal at all, which is why 'goal' is in inverted commas above.

Still, admiring all species that survive today, that selection allows to survive because they CAN SURVIVE, one can still identify all species' beauty; Darwin's 'forms most beautiful'.