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Evolution all the changes that have transformed life over an immense time Adaptation an inherited characteristic that improves an organisms ability to survive and reproduce in a particular environment descent with modification process by which descendants of anastral organisms spread into various habitats and accumulate adaptations to diverse ways of life natural selection the process by which individuals with inherited characteristics well-suited to the environment leave more offspring on average than do other individuals fossil preserved remans or marking left by organisms that lived in the past homologous structures similar structures in a species sharing a common ancestor vestigial structures remnants of structures that may have had important function in an ancestral species but have no clear function in some of the modern descendants population a group of individuals of the same species living in the same area at the same time variation differences among members of the same species gene pool all the alleles in all the individuals that make up a population Hard-Weinberg equilibrium condition that occurs when the frequency of alleles ina particular gene pool remain constant over time punctuated equilibrium evolutionary model suggesting species often diverge in spurts or relatively rapid change followed by long periods of little change embryology the study of the process of multicellular organisms as they develop from fertilized eggs to fully formed organisms radiometric dating determination of absolute ages of rocks and fossils through calculations based on a radioactive isotopes fixed rate of decay half-life number of years it takes 50% of the original sample to decay