I'm gonna go longwinded on this, because I feel like the term "Evolution" that people use most regularly does not actually mean Evolution.
Evolution is the long slow process of one form of life becoming a different form of life due to changes in its genetic structure.
What people mean when they talk about Evolution is ACTUALLY mere natural selection and specialization. In fact, Darwin's original "Origin of the Species" is about Specialization (where we get the term species) and not necessarily evolution. Take the Galapagos Islands, where Darwin studied. He found tons of unique species of birds, tortoises, and all kinds of other cool shit there. Clearly, CLEARLY their isolation resulted in those Species originating. They'd Specialized to that environment. But that wasn't evolution. Let me explain.
Long ago, Birds and Tortoises got to the Galapagos. Might have been due to continental drift, an ice-age landbridge, the S.S. Minnow, or anything at all. Not important. But when they were there, the ones that were shit to survive in those environments died. Their genes were lost, because they were liabilities. Meanwhile, traits that were beneficial were spread throughout the future generations until they were exaggerated due to inbreeding. Like the Hapsburgs. But nobody thinks that one England Bag who was so inbred that he couldn't even chew his own food was "Evolved." Birds are still birds, Tortoises are still tortoises; they've just specialized into new species due to the preponderance of redundant DNA causing exaggerated and beneficial )in those locales) traits. Specialization happens all over the place.
Natural Selection is unquestionably real too. Slowass meat gets eaten before fast meat does. Fast eaters eat that slowass meat, while slowass eaters suck and die. This improves populations over time too, even if there's no new species coming about. An existing species will become stronger as a whole as weak traits (again, for that location) are bred out or at least minimized.
But the thing is, none of those things are EVOLUTION. Cheetahs are still Cheetahs. They still have Cheetah DNA. More to the point, their Genome still consists of the same number of genes that it always has. Another thing about Cheetahs is kinda sad: They have incredibly low genetic variability. This means that they're specialized as all fuck... but can't really go anywhere, because they've lost genes to allow them to adapt and change as a species. Side Note: I'm usually not in favor of going out of our way to protect animals, and am content to just stop CAUSING them harm and let them do what nature wants, but Cheetahs really can't adapt to nature, so if you ever have the opportunity to shoot a cheetah or steal its home, please don't.
Now, the problem is that the Theory of Evolution, as it is now, takes those two very solid, observable things and connects them with a whole lot of "we don't know." How did life originate? We don't know. Why and how does a genome suddenly expand to allow for a greater quantity of genetic information? We don't know. Why are there so many fossils of accepted species, but an absolute lack of even a single complete fossil of a proposed missing link, especially since evolution as proposed takes so long that literal hundreds of thousands of years, if not millions of years, would go by while that missing link species was as viable in the natural world of its time as all current living species are today? We don't know.
Even still, I can't fault anyone for following the Theory of Evolution as it is written now, because honestly we have no definitive proven truth, because that can only come by using a time machine to go back and actually observe this stuff, and as I keep telling people, my Time Machine can only go forward, and it can only go forward at the rate of one second per second. It was a HUGE waste of money, let me tell you.
What it all comes down to is that everyone who has any stance on the subject will invariably get to a point where they either go, "I don't know what happened here or then, but I believe THIS because someone explained THAT to me."
And honestly, can't it be BOTH? I mean, I'm a writer. I can right this very morning take pen and paper and create a character that's older than I am. And I'm just a fatso on the internet. If there is a God, couldn't that God create a world whose story starts 7000 years ago, but whose history stretches back billions of years before that first word on paper? I don't know. Again, Internet Fatso, not God Science Guru. But here's to the search, eh? (Raises mug.)
