It's hard to believe all the fuss that's been caused over such a simple concept. These pages contain a little bit of the evidence for evolution. Natural Selection Charles Darwin didn't invent the idea of evolution - that was around before he was born. He simply proposed a mechanism for evolution and provided evidence for evolution and the idea that many widely divergent organisms shared common ancestry. The mechanism Darwin proposed to explain evolution was natural selection.
All organisms produce far more offspring than can survive to adulthood and reproduce.
This means that many of those offspring will die without reproduction. Organisms vary in many ways, and much of that variation is heritable - that is, variations that exist in the parents are passed on to the offspring. Some of those heritable, variable traits affect an organism's fitness - its ability to survive to reproductive maturity. Those traits that increase an organism's fitness will tend to be passed on to the organism's offspring and to subsequent generations. What Darwin realized was that this tendency of organisms to increase in fitness by the increase of certain traits would lead to divergences in the characteristics of the offspring.