Currently it is believed that male/female (sexual) reproduction seems to be an indisputable factor facilitating the genetic evolution of animals and plants. Combinations, permutations, random mutations, speciation, and population genetics, along with other and unknown concepts, influence coded DNA information delivered to offspring by two opposite gender parents. Thus, offspring produced from males and females have greater differences from their parents than offspring from a single (asexual) parent. The children then have a greater ability to adapt in ways that will increase or decrease their chances to survive and reproduce in a changing environment. Those that better adapt and most often survive and reproduce will pass on their different inherited genetic characteristics to their offspring. Thus, there is change or evolution, and if the advantageous adaptation is markedly different, species characteristics may be modified greatly over time. These are arguments validating Charles Darwin's theories and also some of the reasons, following the development of sexual reproduction, that there has been an increase in the speed of biological evolution on Earth.

Cosmic evolution

It seems evident that another kind of evolution takes place when energy/matter has changed or evolved through time to form particles. The particles sometimes seem to change and further increase in mass. To explain this, it is theorized that matter evolved or changed from energy when subsequently related strings, or maybe multiple quarks, emerged as matter's constituents following the big bang, which seems to be the first event in cosmic history. Afterward protons, electrons, and neutrons were fashioned from matter's constituents along with antimatter, other particles, and possibly even more things not yet considered. However, it is better understood that hydrogen and helium probably would have been the primary products of the big bang. Later some of the gasses were concentrated and compressed by their own gravity, forming stars, and the heavier elements were created by fusion reactions in those stars or later in supernovas. Consequently, energy and matter seem to be naturally changing in a kind of cosmic evolution, and although energy can be transformed, it cannot be created or destroyed.

According to Einstein's most famous equation, E = mc2, it is apparent that matter and energy are fundamentally interrelated. This being the case, energy seems to be the original stuff of matter's cosmic evolution. Life might or might not be the ultimate result of the cosmic evolution of matter from energy. However, life in the universe is a fact and a consequence of cosmic evolution, because without the required elements created by star/supernova fusion there would be no materials to make life.

Adapt or perish

Living things that are better adapted to their environment have an advantage over their competitors. The better adapted probably will have a greater chance to survive. Successful reproduction is necessary to facilitate adaptive change; otherwise the change will have great difficulty being introduced into a gene pool. Furthermore, dispersion of matter increases the chances that life will develop in different places in the universe. Also dispersion of life on a planet, or in the universe, is preferable so life will not easily be obliterated by local or cosmic catastrophe. Thus, forms of life will have a greater chance to survive a catastrophe and produce offspring.

Organisms that incorporate changes in genetics, life style, and habitat resulting in successful adaptation, dispersion, and reproduction tend to increase their chances of survival over competing organisms not changing. Therefore, organisms better at adapting, dispersing, and reproducing will be the probable progenitors of future generations occupying a similar biological niche. In the long run, when the environment is in a constant state of change, as it seems to be in our universe, biological evolution is fundamentally essential to the ongoing existence of life itself. This is because, in a constantly changing environment, forms of life that can not adapt to change probably become extinct, if for no other reason than the death of their sun, which would be the ultimate cosmic catastrophe. These brief fundamental principles are essential in order to understand the evolution of Homo sapiens as a species capable of protecting and/or dispersing life on/or from the Earth.