Use Illustrator. Download a 30-day trial from Adobe. Whenever I need it again, I just delete the entry in my registry and reinstall. Illustrator is good because it gives you great vector-based graphics, which means you can make it as big as you want, regardless of the size at which you drew it. Photoshop and GIMP suck because it's all pixel-based and when you enlarge things and shrink things it just aliases the hell out of them. Antialias I mean.
"I understand this... yet... HOW do the animals evolve? What causes them to adapt and change?
Let's say for sake of argument I was alone in the world with millions of animals and I had guns. MANY GUNS.
So I'm winning for like 10 years, shooting animals, eating, winning.
Suddenly, a species has evolved with armour plated skin, so now I'm screwed.
How does this evolution of adaptation occur? Do the animals themselves choose to adapt, or ... do the cells and DNA somehow understand what is occurring in the world around them?"
First of all, that would never occur in 10 years. And second of all, armor is inorganic. But I see what you're saying. Mutations. Mutations can be caused by anything- bad cell replication, recombinant DNA implanted by viruses, light rays, x-rays, gamma rays, and neutrinos. Mutations happen hundreds of times a day, and 99.99999% of mutations are fixed by patrol enzymes inside our nucleolus. Additionally, nearly all mutations don't even have a discernible effect on the human body. There are two important types of mutations- point mutations and frame-shift mutations. Point mutations change one amino acid being produced into another by flipping one base in a tricodon, which rarely changes the ultimate effect of a protein. But when a base on a chain of DNA or RNA is deleted or added, it literally "shifts" the reading frame for DNA polymerase, sometimes creating a premature "stop" codon, and sometimes creating a completely different chain of amino acids if not corrected by enzymes (this is worse if it occurs in the gonads of course, because then the offspring has the mutation as well.). What you should realise is that proteins are the foundations for almost everything in the human body and every other organism on the planet. For instance, digestive enzymes, hair, skin, porcupine spikes, and toenails are all made of proteins. For everything that isn't a protein (cell walls, etc.), they are all synthesized by proteins designed specifically for that purpose. So, quite literally, your DNA is, quite literally, a book of recipes inherited from your parents. So, the reasoning is, if your parent survived long enough to reproduce, there most likely is something in their giant book of recipes that would be beneficial to survival, whether it be slightly longer claws, longer teeth, or excellent hand-eye coordination (of course, humans have pretty much altogether destroyed natural selection in every single species on earth, but that's a story for another day.). So while it may be unrealistic to say that next generation there will be a dog with the back of an armadillo, it is completely realistic to say that in a few years, there will be a mouse with slightly tougher skin than a normal mouse. But, you ask, everything is up to chance. How would a mouse with a slightly less fragile skin suit be more likely to survive? A tiger is not a picky eater. To which I say, while that may be true, imagine this mutation happening thousands and millions of times over (which is not unlikely over millions of years). All it takes is a falling branch that would have barely killed a normal mouse to barely not kill this tougher and more fit mouse. And so it begins. One weak allele is knocked out of the mouse gene pool and one more beneficial allele is kept in. Evolution.
edit: oh shit my bad, I didn't realize that this had already been answered.
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