Survival of the Fittest?

I was thinking this morning on the way to work about evolution and the survival of the fittest and all of those theories, and I've run across something that I just can't figure out. In my understanding of the situation, the theory of evolution says that one species will give way to a better species through a series of mutations and mating encounters create entirely new species, and that the strongest of the population survive to mate and pass along their superior genes. If I don't have at least the general concept right, then stop me here and let me know, but I'm pretty sure that's the gist of it.

I can't even begin to get my brain around how a dog could give birth to something that's not a dog. Maybe they would have to mate with a cat or something, but I'm not sure that a dog could get a cat pregnant. So, I really have a hard time grasping how one day a monkey gave birth to a human (I know it wasn't that direct, but work with me). Or more specifically, two monkeys gave birth to two humans and those two humans just happened to find each other and mate to give birth to more humans.

On the other hand, we watch the Discovery channel and see that natural selection allows the fast zebras to escape the cheetah, while the weak and slow ones are devoured. At the same time, it allows the fastest cheetah to catch its prey and eat while the slowest goes hungry. Two sides of the same coin, and it makes good logical sense….at first.

Now, let's try to reconcile the two. Monkeys have animal instincts. They can hunt, forage for food, eat the right plants, make nests, climb trees, and so on all by themselves. Humans cannot. Humans are basically idiots compared to most other animals when they are born. A human baby will put his hand in a fire, eat poisonous foods, play with snakes, and walk off the side of a cliff if not attended to by their parents. Pretty much no other animal has offspring that stupid. Yet, we are the pinnacle of evolution. How exactly did the first baby humans survive without human parents to raise them? And how did the second generation survive without grandparents to babysit? Seriously, how did we pop out of the oven with no hair and survive the winter; with no claws and find our dinner; with no sharp eyesight and survive the night? It doesn't make good sense. Wouldn't we have been the weakest link when the cheetah came along? Wouldn't we have been the weakest hunter, forced to starve because we couldn't feed ourselves?

You would think so when you take natural selection at face value, but assuming that we did somehow survive. Maybe there was a compassionate gorilla somewhere, like in Tarzon, that took care of us. How did we end up with so many dorky nerds in the world? Think about it. How are there any slow cheetahs left? How are there any slow zebra left? Wouldn't all of those genes have been bred out by now through natural selection? Only the strongest and fastest survived to mate and they mated with another strongest and fastest so how did they have slow, stupid kids?

Back in the day, the strongest humans could hunt and fight and keep the Roman hordes from invading their city. No one wanted to be married to a sissy that couldn't put meat on the table, so how come we didn't breed all of the ugly nerds out of the human race back around the time of cave paintings? It must be something else. It seems obvious to me that natural selection doesn't tell the whole story and evolution still just doesn't make sense.

And this dorky nerd is definitely thankful for that.