How did evolution begin?

It began when life began. Life is always evolving. Anti-evolutionists ask for transitional forms as proof but the fact is that every species is in a constant transition.

Mutations occur of which the majority are neutral. Some are harmful, with which the animal will not pass on it's genes or atleast fail to somewhere down the line. This is because it's survival of the fittest. Good mutations, by definition, are useful to the animal's survival and ensures that it's genes will be passed on. Add millions of years and you get good mutations building up on one another (evolution). Hope this was informative.

As long as there are things in the universe that replicate with modification, and environments they have to survive in, evolution operates.

It's not some "thing" that had to have a "beginning" -- it's really, at its core, just very simple statistics.

Stuff that works sticks around and spreads, stuff that doesn't, doesn't.

It's not magic, nor is it very hard to understand.

Very good question, although most answerers don't understand it. Science cannot adequately explain how a single celled organism that reproduces itself, might come about. It's impossible, so they appeal to future science by saying, we have not figured that out yet. When religion responds to confrontations with a similar answer, it is a mystery, or we will know when Jesus returns, it is said to be evidence that religion is false.

Life cannot come from non-living matter. Amino acids don't just get together to form complex proteins, that get together with fatty acids to form cell walls and nuclei. It cannot happen. The existence of life is strong evidence for the existence of an eternal living God to begin life.

The first single celled organisms reproduced by making exact duplicates of themselves. It is only through damage, a mutation, that variation could happen, 99% of which results in death to the organism. But in that 1% that lives, change is possible. Single celled organisms grouped together, mutated to act symbiotically to survive, eventually becoming so essential to each other they formed a single multi-celled organism. This is the origin of species, and represents God's divine plan for the human race.

Evolution began with the first self-reproducing pattern.

The process, or our understanding of it?

Basically, absolutely anything that self reproduces, will undergo evolution because:

1) no copy process is perfect all the time

2) variations which are more likely to survive and or reproduce, become the norm in their given environment

Just because nobody knows how it began, does not make it untrue. The earth has always been round, even when everyone thought it was flat.

In the mind of some man.

It didn't. The Bible says "In the beginning God created".