At least at the level of multicellular creatures — fungi, animals, plants, algae — scientists are pretty sure that DNA - based life forms did beat out their competition (just look around). (discovermagazine.com)
Although the oldest animal fossils date back 544 million years, most evolutionists agree that complex, multicellular creatures probably appeared at least 150 million years earlier than that. (sciencemag.org)
From the single cell, to a simple multicellular creature, and then through stages corresponding to a fish, a lizard, a mouse, a monkey and then a human. (newscientist.com)