Dear Leonard,
I disagree, Floo is just like me, befuddled by evolution, it is a complicated subject and we are led astray by off the cuff remarks like, top of the tree, highly evolved, or that damned T shirt that everybody wears.
It has been promoted by more than one scientist ( Hawking is the most prominent ) that scientists should make science more user friendly, everyone should have a basic and thorough understanding of subjects like evolution.
Science effects us all, and it should be part of being a scientist that they make it more accessible to us less educated types.
Gonnagle.
Gonners, you'll just have to get used to not understanding evolution, just leave it alone, it's neither a pro religious or an anti religious theory, it's the best we've got, content yourself nobody has presented a serious challenge to it in over 150 years, so it's a pretty solid theory.
Think of a tree growing sending branches here and there we shared a branch with other primates for a time and then we took another branch and left the other primates, apes etc on another separate branch; I think you will find that research has traced the actual times these branchings off took place, it's all delightfully simple, I really can't see where you find any difficulty with it.
Some of us are born from time to time, with birth mutations some advantageous others not quite so, so it amounts to simply those with advantageous mutations are more likely to survive and pass on their blueprint, advantageous, DNA, on to the next generation that gain by the good chance mutation gained by their parents, these are the basic principles of how it works.
There was some other scientific research I heard of recently where there are indications that when our ancestors gained the ability to cook this had a major effect on brain development, apparently because of the amount of calories our brains need to function and cooking food enriches the amount of calories released from any given amount of food, compared to food in it's uncooked state, this was a major step forward allowing a lot more of the calories necessary for a step forward of our brain development in effect it allowed an extra press on the accelerator and allowed humans to pull away from our close relations, ancestors if you like, the apes.
I'm sure some of the detail in my post can be nit picked but I'm only offering a rough outline of how evolution works, as I understand it but I thought it was worth a try who knows you might pick it up one day Gonners, there's no need for a god with evolution it works quite well on it's own.
Ippy
