Does "modification" here mean "genetic mutation in the common ancestor's genome"?

Context:

I confess that I didn't pay much more attention to the potential for conflict between science and faith for several years-
it just didn't seem that important. There was too much to discover in scientific research about human genetics, and too
much to discover about the nature of God from reading and discussing faith with other believers.
The need to find my own harmony of the worldviews ultimately came as the study of genomes -our own and that of
many other organisms on the planet-began to take off, providing an incredibly rich and detailed view of how descent by
modification from a common ancestor has occurred. Rather than finding this unsettling, I found this elegant evidence of the
relatedness of all living things an occasion of awe, and came to see this as the master plan of the same Almighty who caused the universe to come into being and set its physical parameters just precisely right to allow the creation of stars, planets, heavy elements, and life itself. Without knowing its name at the time, I settled comfortably into a synthesis generally referred to as "theistic evolution," a position I find enormously satisfying to this day.