`  == Inadequate definition in the first lines ==  Set aside the gradual issue for a second. I find the first sentence ``Evolution is the change in the inherited characteristics of biological populations over successive generations.`` inadequate, a pretty feeble attempt to define a momentous concept that has irreversibly altered the way mankind thinks about itself and its place in the world. That first sentence utterly fails to indicate anything at all about the nature of the change, its direction, its rate or the mechanism which brought it about or the mechanism that perpetuated it, or of its consequences.   Then while we are still floundering in a miasma of doubt, before we are even introduced to the possibility that evolution is actually a process rather than just an event, we are subjected to  ``Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organization . . .``.  This introduction is vague, confusing, unencyclopedic, assumes too much of the reader's background knowledge. We must be able to do better than this.  We need to come up with a new form of words that nails the essential features of the concept in as few words as possible.  `