Natural selection is such a clear, simple idea that biologists around the world were wacking themselves in the forehead when they read [Darwin's] book, saying, “Of course! Why didn’t I think of that!” He laid out the facts as everybody already knew them, with simple and irrefutible logic leading to an undeniable conclusion. The members of a species exhibit heritable variability; they don’t all look alike. Not all individuals are equally successful at reproducing or surviving, and it is those variants that are best able to live under existing conditions that will leave the most offspring, meaning that the average composition of the next generation will change. Because the forms least able to thrive will not thrive, the population as a whole will slowly drift in the direction of optimality.

The emphasis is mine. Natural selection really is a brilliant and somewhat obvious theory.

Natural selection is basically a tautology, which is why denying it as a mechanism is “not even wrong”.

The argument (although many on both sides seem to miss this) is whether the mechanism of natural selection is sufficient to describe the variety of living organisms on earth. Anyone who thinks that it isn’t hasn’t spent any time suffering, I mean studying, invertebrate palaeontology (apologies to all fossil bivalve lovers out there).

Proper appreciation of the massive chains of development, the enormous time scales and the huge variety of life both past and present is hard and boring, which is why a lot of people don’t really do it and which so many see ID etc. as a viable alternative – because they can’t imagine how you get from bacteria to horse. Seeing in detail even one section of the journey is enough for you to say “Yes, OK, I give up, the evidence is overwhelming, please don’t ask me to identify another brachiopod”. But without the detail to make it real you are just left with the limits of your imagination, which is actually a pretty restrictive limit.

People forget how god damn long 3 billion years is. The Earth has been here for 4 billion years. They estimate life got started about 1 billion years later, or about 3 billion years ago. Just for reference, if you consider a human generation starts every 25 years or so, that is 120 million generations. By contrast, Jesus lived only 80 generations ago and Adam only 240 generations ago. Anatomically modern humans first showed up about 4000 generations ago. That only gets us back 100,000 years or 0.003% of the way back to 3 billion years ago.

The point being, you and I can’t conceptualize how long that is and our intuition fails us when we try to contemplate what is and what is not possible in that time frame.