[Rune]

Evolution is a topic that requires so much education to fully appreciate and understand that once you get on the other side of that hurdle the proof is so obvious it hurts on a molecular level.

I used to think it was simple, but turns out I had no idea how it worked and what qualified as evolution, and a year of painfully dull graduate level classes fixed that. So forgive us, Flight. Like many complex topics, if you're serious about understanding evolution in a scientific context rather than the way it is used colloquially you can't jump straight to it.

Some of the examples I remember is that giraffes have a nerve innervating their face or something, that instead of going from the back of the skull, it goes all the way down to the heart (making no connections or innervations) before looping around the clavicle and traveling back up the very lengthy neck - for no reason at all. Now, in lower level mammals and fish, it isn't a big deal because we're talking about inches and a few milliseconds difference in response time. But the physiology of the giraffe is such that the basic make-up of the skeleton was tweaked so that this small flaw became a glaring mishap.

One of the common things in embryology they bring up is something, I think it was ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. See the attached drawing:

Bottom line is this isn't something that we can spoonfeed you to your satisfaction. You've got to spend the time on it to understand it, and most likely you won't because it's not worth it. To give you the understanding you outline, as to how new species come about, you would need to learn how genetic modification works, selfish dna, mutations, transposons, retro-transposons, critical areas of dna which can drastically alter the appearance of the organism (homeoboxes maybe? It's been a while)

Chimps for example share something like 97% or 99% of human DNA, but a few small changes in a few genes drastically altered our appearance, if not our behavior (lol). Understanding what, exactly, the rest of that DNA does is critical to understanding evolution. Anyway, my point is it would probably take a good ten hours for me to write out even a basic outlining of evolution, how it works, and the evidence - without going into the controversies which are minor and only of significance to academics trying to vie for tenure.

You benefit thousands of times a month from medically significant biological progress fundamentally based on evolution - Do you really need to understand it for it to work?