First, lets define our terms. It’s easy in talking about evolution to combine the fact of evolution with theoretical explanations of evolution.

Evolution – the statement that life forms show a sequence of development over time – has been accepted as a fact since c1830 – long before Darwin’s work.

Look here for 29+ Evidences for macroevolution.

To pick just two – the fossil record shows a clear, if incomplete sequence of development. This sequence is independent of dating assumptions and never is a descendant species found before an ancestral one (note that an ancestral species occurring at the same time as a descendant is not only natural, but expected).

As has been said Chimpanzees and Man share common ERV – virus DNA injected into the Chimp/Man DNA. The evolutionary explanation is that this happened in a species ancestral to both. To explain it without common descent, you have to propose that exactly the same virus was injected in exactly the same position in both Chimp and Human DNA totally independently of each other, which is preposterous. It is worth noting that this can be carried further back: Gorillas, Chimps and Humans also have shared EVAs, and so on.

Those are just some examples I could think of for the moment, there are plenty more.

Felicity: I want to know how they have proven evolution.

Your first problem is that nothing in science is ever proven, certainly not in the final sense. Your second is that scientific theories, and especially evolutionary theory, do not come into being by someone thinking up an idea (like say, writing a creation story) and then looking for evidence to prop up that idea. Rather science begins with observations (facts) and attempts to explain them. So the question is does evolutionary theory explain the facts in a coherent and testable manner, not “how do you prove it?”

For example it wasn’t Darwin who came up with the idea of the fossil record showing a clear pattern of progressive change; it was the creationist scientists who came before him who documented that this was the case. Darwin merely took what was already accepted as fact by the creationists and gave it (and many others) a better explanation.

I mean, tested it, found real, stable evidence.

That there is a progressive pattern to the fossil record has been considered established fact since the 1830′s.

I have a science project to do within the next few weeks, and I am going to try to prove my hypothesis by testing it out on multiple subjects, etc. Can you prove evolution like that?

You can’t “prove” anything like that.

Everyone seems to think that it is real scientific material, proven and everything, but I think it’s not so much of a scientific standpoint as a philosophical standpoint.

And you’re mistaken.

To be fair, I have to put the same standards to my own beliefs – creationism/ID isn’t really a scientific standpoint so much as it is a philosophical standpoint.

Even calling it a “philosophical” standpoint is perhaps being overgenerous but I won’t quibble.

No one knows for absolute certain where life came from or how it got to be the way it is now. We can only speculate.

As far as the origin of life goes we can do more than speculate we can continue to search for possible natural explanations for how it may have occurred. How life got to be the way it is now (regardless as to how it fist formed) is pretty well established, your desire to believe otherwise notwithstanding.

dsmith77: So far, there is little evidence to support a naturalistic (evolutionary) origin for life in the scientific research.

Me: You can give up and take a faith position on the question if you like but it will be just that, a faith position.

Felicity: This is what I’m trying to say. No matter what your beliefs are about evolution or ID, they are faith positions, as Troy Britain just said.

No Felicity that is not what I said. I was talking about the origin of life only, not evolution. And there is a non-faith, ‘scientific’ position to take on the origin of life… we don’t know. If dsmith77, or you, claim that you do know how life originated and that it was God that did it, then you are taking not only a faith position but an untestable one at that.

A history book will give you further references. It is 150 years of research, on the order of 100 000 papers, and 10′s of thousands of independent tests, so you can’t expect anyone to detail them all for you. Do your homework.

Oh, and read Glazius comment for an excellent example among those thousands of independent tests.

Felicity says:

I want to know how they have proven evolution. I mean, tested it, found real, stable evidence.

K.

There are two types of genetic mistakes which leave broad-ranging evidence. They’re called “pseudogenes” and “endogenous retroviral sequences”, or ERVs.

Psuedogenes are flawed copies of actual genes that are nonfunctional. ERVs are what happens when a retrovirus writes itself into the DNA but can’t get back out again. There are a lot of possible ERV sites in any given genome, but only a few where a retrovirus has actually gotten stuck.

PURPOSE: Prove that humans and chimpanzees share a more recent common ancestor than any other extant species.

METHODS: Sequence several human and chimpanzee genomes. (and some other species like dogs, cattle, gorillas, etc.) Since pseudogenes and ERVs don’t affect survival one way or the other these sequences should be conserved in the long run.

HYPOTHESIS: Humans will share more pseudogenes and ERVs with chimpanzees than with any other species tested.

RESULTS: well, look here for starters.

That’s how you test evolutionary theory. Use it to make a prediction and see if the prediction holds up.

Everyone seems to think that it is real scientific material, proven and everything, but I think it’s not so much of a scientific standpoint as a philosophical standpoint. If so, then you can’t really prove it.

You’re only half right.

Evolutionary theory is a framework which, on its own, cannot be tested – only the predictions it makes about the ancestry and progress of life can be tested. Fortunately we have some life here on Earth and we can observe its ancestry and follow its progress. Otherwise evolution would be useless.

Similarly, algebra would be useless if we didn’t have any numbers, and no critical analysis of Shakespeare’s Hamlet would be any good if there was no Hamlet.

You see where I’m going with this, I hope. Evolution and whatever coat creationism has chosen to wear today are both frameworks for thinking about the progress of life. You’re right to say that you can’t test a framework. However, you CAN test the predictions made by the framework, and if they don’t come out the way you thought, then either your assumptions going into the test were wrong or the framework is flawed.

And the difference between evolution and crintelligent designtionism is that evolution makes testable predictions and the other one doesn’t.