To fully understand evolution, and life itself, one must be able to grasp quantum theory (quantum mechanics is mostly mathematical equations at the microscopic level and not at all required to conceptually understand quantum systems). General relativity is also a quantum system.
Seeing time only through clocks and calendars will never give us any kind of appreciation of time on a larger scale. Those are metrics, but are not really time itself. Same with evolution: it exists at many points and flows back and forth. It really can't fit into what we consider as 'time'.
Biophysicist Werner Loewenstein succinctly presents evolution as a quantum system of information.* Rather than thinking of evolution following a linear path in time, it is information in the quantum realm, constantly shifting places like tiny sand particles on an ocean beach.
Thus, evolution is chunks of information existing in the future and the past. What we see is how it manifests only at any point within that realm. There is no moment of 'creation' just as there is no moment of 'end'. Species don't magically appear; they evolve, and devolve.
"It is difficult to even talk about an instant of time, because we can’t even say with certainty which “chunks” of space-time lie in the future and which in the past." -physicist Jonathan Oppenheim
Evolution requires us to jump off that restrictive scale and think in terms of shifting sands.
* The Touchstone of Life. Werner Loewenstein, 1998.
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