Question: can you tell that something has evolved by looking at it?

Michel Dugon answered on 12 Nov 2014:

All forms of Life that we can see around us today (from bacteria, plants, fungi and animals) have continuously evolved since our common ancestor that appeared some 4 billion years ago! Evolution is a dynamic process that has no aim, no desire or ideas. Evolution is the product of random mutations in the DNA of organisms that produce different “physical” variations of a same organism. The variations that work best survive better and manage to breed (and pass down their genes) to the next generation).

To see if something evolved, you need to compare what you see today with what existed a 100,000 years ago or 100,000,000 years ago. That’s why fossils are so important. When I look at the fossils of centipedes from 200 or 300 million years ago, I am sure that I am looking at a centipede, because all the important bits are there, but some of those bits (shape of the legs, number of body parts, complexity of the eyes) are very different from today’s centipedes. By comparing the old and new centipedes, I can see what direction evolution has taken for centipedes, and how they have adapted through the times.