Your response is odd given what you quoted from my last post in response to you. There is no logical connection between asking you to name who you think has misled the flock and what I know about evolution. That said, so we can move on beyond the basics of science you claim to already know, I will give very basic answers.
What do you know about Evolution?
Plenty. I have a BA in Anthropology and I focused on genetics in most of my physical anthropology classes. I am not a geneticist, but my background included that because I am fascinated by genetics.
What are the mechanics?
What do you know about Mutation? Natural Selection?
Well, questions 2 and 3 here are the answers to question 1 if we are doing basic high school biology. Evolution is change over time. In the case of living matter (plants and animals) evolution is change in allele frequency over time through natural selection as driven by the ecological niche to be filled. Mutations are usually neutral, but sometimes they provided an advantage, even if they are otherwise detrimental (sickle cell carriers are malaria resistant).
For example, human brain size is driven by the fact that the beginning of our genus, our ancestors (probably homo habilis) began preparing food in new ways - primarily through cooking, which releases calories. Human bodies are evolved to eat starch, which is the preferred fuel for the brian. Cooking starch and pounding meat before eating it (raw or cooked) reduced time needed to chew and digest, which lead to a few key changes. First, the brain had more fuel and so could grow. Second, our guts became shorter in comparison to our body size than is found in other apes. This freed up more calories that could be used for brian function and size. Finally, it also meant that we did not have to spend the whole day eating to get sufficient calories. The last few million years of our evolutionary history would have also been marked by increasing leisure time (opportunity to develop culture). We are the cooking ape. By learning to control and create fire, our ancestors created an ecological niche that has been filled by us.
Some mutations that also occured in the evolution of humanity and became common as advantageous due to the nature of our diet include increased amylaze production (starch digestion in the mouth) and not turning off the gene for lactose digestion after childhood (lactose tolerance). Different human populations that developed dairy production have lactose tolerance, and the mutations for this occur in different locations on the genome because these populations developed the adaptation independently.
For more about cooking making us human, see
Catching Fire. The book is a quick easy read. I highly recommend it.
This!
I wrote the headline for this OP, so let me explain it for you. Those were my words carefully chosen to start an interesting discussion. I was taking a literal read of paragraph 37 of HG to frame and bait the hook.