There are a couple of things some folks don't get about evolution, so I'm going to go all science teacher on you and try to set you straight.
First of all, there's this idea that evolution works as a series of small steps. This is not always true.
Evolution works through taking advantage of beneficial traits. The more beneficial traits you have, the more babies you get to have, and the better those babies do (ie. the more babies
they have). This is slow, boring, normal natural selection. However, there are also the occasional mutation, where an unusual and accidenta re-sequencing of some genes creates a brand new trait. If the new trait is good for you - and not, say, a third arm or a fatal inability to digest certain proteins or a tumor - then evolution can leap... well, forward still isn't a good term, because it implies that there's a forward and a backward. It can suddenly
go more.
The way DNA works, this happens more often then you'd think. There's a lot of blah blah blah here, but it basically comes down to this: DNA is made of discrete sections that do different things, and these sections can be altered by mutation in ways that coherently effects the entire section, rather than randomly scrambling bits and leading to fatal mutations and death.
So, for example... the original animalian body plan was four limbs, one head, tube through the middle. Insects have six limbs. How did this happen? Some bug-ancestor came along with the "limb" section of DNA doubled, but this gave him an advantage. The extra set of limbs didn't have to start off as little nubbins that gave some kind of obscure advantage (I dunno, maybe they looked cute to the other bugs...). They may have just appeared and the bugs were like "woah, cool!"
I also touched on sexual selection here. A lot of people leave this out of their inner calculations about how fast evolution can go. Evolution doesn't just work based on survives, it also works on who gets to get busy. So let's say that our ancestors thought that brains were attractive, so only the smartest males and females got to make babies, because nobody wanted to breed with the dumb ones. This can seriously speed up the rate at which evolution... goes.
You've got to remember that your sense of time and scale is incredibly skewed by your perspective. This is for two reasons. Firstly, looking back at human history, it's easy to think that the parts of our past that we know about are long - because they're filled with so much stuff that we know about! - while the stuff that came before it must have been short. After all, we don't know anything about it. Secondly, we like to look at our evolutionary history and draw a line, saying "here! This is the moment that we became human - everything before that doesn't count."
What you've got to remember is that the period of time between "first primate ancestor" and "first tool-using, language-using human" is many, many times longer than the entirety of human "history" so far. You can't say "we accelerated to intelligence so quickly! How bizarre! Surely someone must have intervened!" when you don't really have a sense of how long it took. Primates first took off from other mammals
85 million years ago. The first hominids appeared
14 million years ago. The first tool users were
2.3 million years ago.
We spent 85 million years getting to where we are now. Tell me again how our evolution was unnaturally fast?
Finally - and this is the weird one - you've got to acknowledge the role culture plays in our "intelligence." In this age of gigabits of storage and Shakespeare being drawn with a laser on the butt of a dust mite, it's easy to forget that the amount of information on this page, right in front of you, is incredibly dense. I'd say I'm writing at roughly the level of one of my students, so it's fair to say that it probably took you about twelve years (maybe less - wargamers tend to be smartish) to get to the point that you could - at a glance - decode this information. How long do you think it took humanity to develop the systems and protocols that allowed you to do this? We know from the few "wild child" natural experiments - children abandoned in the woods or locked in closets and raised without language - that language is not natural to humans. It doesn't just boil up out of our brains - it's something we've learned how to do. Something we invented. And we invented it over a long time, organically. This parallel evolution of our meta-organism - language, culture, large-scale organization - is something that scientists still don't understand the history of.
And this brings me to one final actual point - how we have evolved ourselves.
It sounds like you understand the basics of natural selection evolution, and if you didn't understand sexual selection, you probably do now. What you need to get is that one humans started doing this "culture" thing (probably about 2.3 million years ago)
we started to change our own environment. What do you think happened to all those humans or human-ancestors who couldn't hack it in our culture? Who weren't bright enough to get this weird new "language" thing? Who couldn't see past the urge to eat, fight, breed - wash, rinse, repeat?
They died. They certainly didn't breed.
Since the creation of culture,
we have been evolving ourselves. We have been creating an environment that - rather aggressively - selects for certain social and psychological traits.
This is certainly natural. Other animals do it, too. I mean, the wild and crazy dog that bites every dog who gets near it - male and female - doesn't get to help make baby dogs. The thing is that our culture became increasingly complex and increasingly picky, far more so than the culture of dogs, which accelerated the... uh... goingness of evolution (can't say "speed" - that would imply direction, and evolution hasn't got any).
I mean, look, if what we're arguing about here is the correct rhetorical categorization of "human" and "animal," then there's a conversation. The fact is that there is no viable alternative to evolution at this time. I have seen no actual counter-arguments that are not based on deep misunderstandings of evolution or a failure to grasp the scale - in time and change - of the process. Although there are questions that we cannot answer, there is no data that actually supports any other theory. You can ask questions like "how did wings evolve?" or "what about eyes?" or "aren't we awfully smart?" but the inability of the answer to satisfy you does not equate to evidence for an alternative theory. Show me actual data for intervention - again, actual evidence, not a gap in evolution's understanding - and we'll talk.
• • •
I am a creationist and an evolutionist. Evolution is God's, or Nature's method of creation. Creation is not an event that happened in 4004 BC; it is a process that began some 10 billion years ago and is still under way.
— Theodosius Dobzhansky, "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution" (1973)