Regarding the nature of evolution:

A surprisingly high percentage of the American public does not believe in evolution.  Frankly, this makes no sense to me.  I can only believe that they assume it is something it is not.  For one thing, they seem to think it is all about Charles Darwin's ideas, which they boil down to "Darwin said that humans are descended from monkeys."  That may be one of the conclusions that Darwin came to, but it isn't his theory.  Building on the ideas of a number of earlier thinkers, includinig his grandfather Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin provided us with the principle of natural selection as the means by which species change through time.  

His concept is based on several easily provable observations: 
            a)  Individuals in all species vary from one another in many characteristics.
            b)  Characteristics are inherited from an organism's parents.
            c)  Some characteristics are better suited to a particular environment than others.
            d)  More individuals in any species are born than will live to reproduce.
            e)  Those with characteristics best suited to the environment have a better chance
                 of surviving and reproducing.
            f)  Therefore, the next generation will contain more individuals with those
                characteristics.

This means that over time the nature of the species will slowly change as some characteristics become more common and their alternatives become less.  There seems to me to be little to argue with in any of this.  The evidence in support is absolutely overwhelming.
 

Darwin called his concept "natural" selection because plant and animal breeders had been practicing artificial, or human-directed, selection for over two thousand years.  Even Plato wrote about it. 

However, Darwin's concept of natural selection is only one component in modern evolutionary theory.  Most of the rest are derived from the principles of genetics developed over the decades following the work of the monk Gregor Mendel in the years after Darwin's publication.