Ask a biologist

[nihilistcat]

Why can't you guys dumb down evolution enough so that even theists can understand it?

That might be the best question I've heard yet ... but there are simplistic explanations out there, it's just that theists are so deeply indoctrinated, and the system (government, media, corporations, etc.) isn't all that interested in going to war with religion, so it's difficult for the message to get through to these knuckleheads. 

The logic of evolution is about as straightforward as it gets. Spontaneous mutations happen, in fact at this point we well understand the statistical frequency in which they happen. If a mutation makes an organisms better suited for survival, then (well) they're more likely to survive (captain obvious says you're welcome). If they're more likely to survive, then they're more likely to reproduce (since I'm unaware of dead organisms conceiving offspring). Since they're more likely to reproduce, with each passing generation, their mutation becomes progressively more prevalent relative to members of the species who do not possess that mutation.  

But even theists who concede on evolution (which at this point is probably most theists, at least in the west), they still turn to intelligent design nonsense. This is something that I think Stephen Hawking dealt with pretty well (though it's a much more complex argument which intersects with theoretical physics) ... but here again, your average jesus freak isn't exactly rushing to the bookstore to pick up a book by someone like Dr. Hawking (and I suspect that even if we had a Stephen Hawking for dummies book out there, these numskulls still wouldn't read it)