Figure 2 from: Zanella A (2024) The spiral of plants and soil in the cycle of life. Italian Botanist 17: 1-11. https://doi.org/10.3897/italianbotanist.17.107071

Figure 2 Evolution takes place in a kind of soil. Life and death belong to this same cyclical process which we call evolution; the first (production of new functional structures) needs the second (decomposition of old machinery, to recycle dead branches no longer adapted to the new present time and environment). The two phases must be able to occur at different scales, cyclically and continuously. At the beginning the building blocks were small systems (lumps of particles, then quarks); more recently the units of such material structures became complex, labile and malleable; this made them easier to use in "cells" of even more complex new systems. New systems grew to higher-scale and cyclically collapsed (major mass crises). All this still happens today. On Planet Earth, this process is more visible in the soil (or in soil-like processes), where life and death pass the baton.