In honor of the upcoming 200th birthday of Charles Darwin (Feb. 12, 2009) Nature has published 12 very elegant examples of evolution.

If you have a Nature subscription you may go here: Darwin's enduring legacy

Otherwise it is summarized at Wired magazine: 12 Elegant Examples of Evolution

There are some cool examples listed such as the intermediate ancestor to whales, dinosaur feathers, competing epochs of water fleas and more.

And as an added bonus to our vast readership here at techRivet, here is the wikipedia article on Charles Darwin for your elucidation: Charles Darwin

http://www.livescience.com/culture/080811-brain-evolution.html

The conjecture goes like this: because we learned to cook our food, humans were able to get more and better calories than our raw food eating cousins thus spurring a leap of cognitive ability.

In most animals, the gut needs a lot of energy to grind out nourishment from food sources. But cooking, by breaking down fibers and making nutrients more readily available, is a way of processing food outside the body. Eating (mostly) cooked meals would have lessened the energy needs of our digestion systems, Khaitovich explained, thereby freeing up calories for our brains.

Makes intuitive sense.

Go over here and have a look.

Print it out and show your kids.