The last man alive is Jan Rodricks, a physicist, who will witness mankind's final evolutionary transformation.

According to Tsoukalas (2012) REM sleep is an evolutionary transformation of a well-known defensive mechanism, the tonic immobility reflex.

An evolutionary transformation.

Bejder, Lars and Hall, Brian K. Limbs in whales and limblessness in other vertebrates: mechanisms of evolutionary and developmental transformation and loss.

The American anatomist C. Judson Herrick described the development of the neocortex in the following terms: "Its explosive growth late in phylogeny is one of the most dramatic cases of evolutionary transformation known to comparative anatomy."

He was a saltationist who opposed the theory of gradual evolution, and in the 1930s suggested that major evolutionary transformations must have occurred in large leaps between species.

He emphasized the role of evolutionary thinking in Goethe's discovery of the intermaxillary bone in human beings; Goethe expected human anatomy to be an evolutionary transformation of animal anatomy.

Zarathustra thus acts as a bookend for the beginning and end of the film, and as a motif signifying evolutionary transformations, first from ape to man, then from man to Star-Child.

With the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859 Charles Darwin had denied saltational evolution by writing that evolutionary transformation always proceeds gradually and never in jumps.

"It did that the first time I visited the place... Apparently, it gives each of us only one chance for evolutionary transformation."