Question: how do animals evolve into other others,or living creatures?

Kate Clancy answered on 14 Jun 2011:

Hi Molly! I wonder if you might take a look at my answer for the question about apes evolving “into” humans here to get you started: /copperj11-zone/2011/06/how-did-apes-turn-in-to-humans

Then on to the more general question, which is a fun question to answer since I am a human evolutionary biologist! Evolution just means change over time, and pretty much all species are going to change over time, just a little bit, due to non-random mating (meaning, they choose who they have babies with) and random mutations. When you add in the fact that there will be differential reproductive success — meaning, some individuals will be successful and have lots of babies, and some will be less successful and have few or no babies — then you start to see how that change over time can occur.

The one other piece of this that is worth thinking about, is WHY some individuals might be more successful than others, and WHY individuals choose some mates and not others. This is where environment comes in! Your environment is a selection pressure — that is, your environment is the setting that you have to respond to. So if you have good adaptations to your environment, you will have lots of babies, if you don’t have as good adaptations, you may not have as many. And adaptations can be physiological — long arms to reach the highest fruit — or behavioral — being able to build complex societies that help you interact and gain useful relationships.