I agree. The difficulty people, including myself, have of realizing that evolution is actually a impersonal, negative process (resource starvation and the culling of the unfit) rather than a sentient, positive process is astounding.
I'd say it's simple when you actually "step through" a few steps of a simplified simulation. On paper or in your head, picture a few critters reproducing and dying, with random feature changes occuring every reproduction step and with chance of death being directly tied to those features. Step a few generations and you can clearly see that what really drives the evolutionary process is the criterion you chose to determine which critters die and which survive.
But yeah, I know most people have problem grokking processes like these. School definitely doesn't teach it - not in a proper, abstract, "algorithmic" way. Only with stories about butterflies and dinosaurs. I know I finally grokked evolution somewhere in my mid 20-s, after a) reading enough Less Wrong articles, and b) simulating it in my head, pretty much in the way I described above.
