I'm awake! Glad I didn't miss any more of Vizio's reply to my thread. But it seems there is someone in here who has some problems understanding Evolution, I think I know what is bothering him. I am going to paint a scenario - it wont be 100% accurate (in fact, I'll probably make it super improbable), but it'll be close enough to explain the essential function. First let me start off by saying - at birth there are mutations with every offspring, most bad or neutral, but rarely, some beneficial. But to be clear, something beneficial is only beneficial if it supports them in their environment.
Okay, I am going to make up an animal. Lets say it looks kind of like an otter, but it lives on land. It eats mostly plants and some insects. It's all happy and cute and furry. One day, my awesome god hand grabs a couple thousand of them, and dumps them into a special area of my making.
This area is essentially a beach front area. It is cut off from the rest of the world, surrounded by sheer cliffs on 3 sides, and a large body of water on the other. The supply of food is minimal - there is a little stream in the area, and around it grows some of the fruits that my little creature is known to eat, but not very many, just enough to sustain the amount of creatures I plunked here, barely. There are also large birds that fly around, and occasionally scoop up these creatures, because most of the area is sandy and the creatures aren't used to running on sand, they are easy targets. And they can't really swim for too long, or go too deep, so the fish in the water are unattainable to them.
These creatures are fucked right? They should be - but in this 1 in 1,000,000 situation, they survive - and prosper. How you ask? Evolution.
So some of these creatures start to have their regular mutations at birth. One particular dude all of a sudden tries to eat some sea-weed. A lot of his ancestors tried this shit before, but they just barfed it up, or it passed through their system uselessly. They just couldn't break down this plant. But this guy, this guy right here? He had a mutation, a simple mutation that worked off his ability to break down the fruits he loves, now - it can break down sea weed. Well now this guy is set for life. Instead of having to fight for the occasional fruit, he just runs around the beach, grabs seaweed and is done for his day. Giving him plenty of spare time to mack on the honies, and this dude gets laid -a lot- and has like 50 kids. And most of these kids inherent his sea-weed eating genes! Then they continue doing their thing for generations and generations.
Now there is another guy, this guy doesn't luck out with the sea weed gene, but he does get a mutation. What is it? Weird fucking feet. Every once in a while this used to happen with his species, it's a reasonably common mutation, but it usually led to death at a young age, because it made you stumble around a forest and get eaten easy. But now? It makes him run on sand like a mother fucker. No one can catch this dude, I'm talking other otters, birds, no one. Now this guy is set for life, he doesn't have to worry about getting eaten and he can spend more time out and about rather than hiding. He spends this extra time fucking every honey that moves. Spreading his gene, etc etc, generations have this gene etc etc.
Another bro? His fur got all oily. He thought "Oh man, now I gotta be like... on jersey shore or some shit" But no, one day he tries taking a bath, and notices he doesn't get as cold as he normally does. In fact, now he can stay in the water nearly indefinitely - which is great cover from birds! And luckily, this dude is one of Sea-weed eating dudes great great great grand kids! So now, this guy is SET. He can just swim around all day like a boss, eat all the sea weed he wants, and all the honies love a swimmers body, so he does good. He even nails a weird footed chick.
And his kids use this weird foot to swim even better, guess it was good for sand AND water eh?
Eventually all these genes make it around, and after thosands and thousands of years, there are bunch of oily creatures with big flat feet that eat sea weed, spend most of their day in the water and who knows what else in all this time.
If they were to be re-introduced to their ancestors? they would look substantially different, and their chromosomes would be so different, they wouldn't be able to have any sort of viable offspring. So what is this called? Speciation.
Did all that make sense to you? Mind you, it honestly doesn't work exactly like that, I added too many clauses, I sped up the process, made beneficial mutations pop up left right and centre, but it should give you an idea of what could happen.
Also remember, no species is perfect - and species are always changing. What may 'seem' to be perfect now can always be improved, and it may not be perfect in the future, or somewhere else.
