Mutation. It is the key to our evolution. It has enabled us to evolve from a single-celled organism into the dominant species on the planet. This process is slow and normally taking thousands and thousands of years. But every few hundred millennia, evolution leaps forward.

The speaker calls mutation the driver of evolution, crediting it with carrying life from single cells to the dominant species. Change normally creeps forward over vast stretches of time, they say, yet at rare intervals of hundreds of thousands of years evolution takes a sudden leap.

Context reviewed 29 September 2026