What is evolution?

To put it in simpler terms, evolution is the theory where organisms change over time due changes in the natural selection or genetic drift.

Natural selection is simply a non-random mechanism where the most apt organisms are the ones that will most likely survive to pass on their traits.

Genetic drift is a random mechanism where mutations such as genetic duplication, addition, or deletion may cause loses, gains, or changes in genetic information which translate to changes in the organisms' traits. If such a mutation is beneficial, it may be passed on to future generations.

In the life sciences, evolution is a change in the traits of living organisms over generations, including the emergence of new species. Since the development of modern genetics in the 1940s, evolution has been defined more specifically as a change in the frequency of alleles in a population from one generation to the next.In other fields evolution is used more generally to refer to any process of change over time.

In the biological sciences, evolution is a scientific theory that explains the emergence of new varieties of living things in the past and in the present; it is not a "theory of origins" about how life began. Evolution accounts for the striking patterns of similarities and differences among living things over time and across habitats through the action of biological processes such as natural selection, mutation, symbiosis, gene transfer, and genetic drift. Evolution has been subjected to scientific testing for over a century and has been (and continues to be) consistently confirmed by evidence from a wide range of fields.

http://ncseweb.org/evolution
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/evo_01

Basically, it is a word to describe any sort of gradual change.

2 cans connected by string....next.................cell phones!

It is a theory.

Yes, the THEORY of Evolution. I thought that had passed away when they found everybody was faking the remains of "evolved " animals?

The result of the truth of the statement that "only the strong survive" and the adaptation that allows them to be the "strongest".

Something that pisses off the Religious Right very much because it exposes their fantasy world for what it is

For a well-written article on human evolution, try:
http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2008/10/how_we_evolve_1.php

its BS that scientist made up one day because they were bored and are athests that want people to go to hell but beleve in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved from all of these athests