That's not really a clarification, as it's misleading.
Every single child inherits traits from its parents with variation, and the frequency of their being passed on to another generation is subject to selection pressure. That's all evolution is. Biological evolution happens with every generation - hours in bacteria, decades with humans. And since we're reproducing asynchronously, it's happening second by second across the population.
This is important to understand. Evolution does NOT operate on scales of thousands or millions of years. It can not, because there are no reproduction-variation-selection operations working on that timescale in biology (that I know about). There may be large time spans between what look like interesting things - speciations, the advent of birds, etc. But this is just in the mind of the observer.
Consider that the bacteria that cause infectious disease are becoming resistant to the antibiotics we've had for only a few decades. We can see evolution happening in petri dishes.
Don't try to draw any technical insight from Ricky Gervais' comment. Chimps today, like all animals today, are are equally evolved.
Every single child inherits traits from its parents with variation, and the frequency of their being passed on to another generation is subject to selection pressure. That's all evolution is. Biological evolution happens with every generation - hours in bacteria, decades with humans. And since we're reproducing asynchronously, it's happening second by second across the population.
This is important to understand. Evolution does NOT operate on scales of thousands or millions of years. It can not, because there are no reproduction-variation-selection operations working on that timescale in biology (that I know about). There may be large time spans between what look like interesting things - speciations, the advent of birds, etc. But this is just in the mind of the observer.
Consider that the bacteria that cause infectious disease are becoming resistant to the antibiotics we've had for only a few decades. We can see evolution happening in petri dishes.
Don't try to draw any technical insight from Ricky Gervais' comment. Chimps today, like all animals today, are are equally evolved.