This isn’t really a question for atheists – it’s a question for evolutionary biologists.

And the answer is yes, evolution is very testable. I refer you to the mighty internet which can give you thousands of examples.

I’ll give you one myself:

Biologists have, for a long time, grouped organisms into classifications based on their apparent similarities. Dogs and wolves are similar, dolphins and whales are similar, zebras and horses are similar.

So, they constructed a tree of life which groups living and extinct species by similarity.

This was all done before evolution was formalized.

Now, one of the outgrowths of evolutionary theory is that change will accumulate over time, and therefore the longer it has been since two species had a common ancestor, the farther apart their genetic code will be.

Or, to put it another way, we expect that the genetic similarity between organisms will be correlated with the similarity from existing classification systems.

We’ve only recently been able to do genome mapping, and when we do it on organisms at various points on the tree of life, we find that their genetic similarity is pretty much exactly what we would expect to see based on existing classification.

So, we had some existing data, evolutionary theory made a prediction about what some other not-yet-available data would be, and when we were finally able to collect that new data, it agreed with the prediction.

There are lots of other examples, but many require a bit of biology to understand.

Posted: February 17th 2009

See all questions answered by Eric_PK

It has been successfully tested many times. I won’t go into that except to say that the Talk Origins Archives are more than thorough enough.

However, there are still tests that can be done. We can map the human genome now and, a few centuries from now, compare today’s genome with the genome from that time and see what’s changed. That’s one of the many awesome tests I’m sad I can’t live long enough to see happen.

Posted: February 16th 2009

See all questions answered by Reed Braden

Got your speciation right here, including observed examples.

Ken Miller, respected evolutionary biologist (and devout Catholic), described in a lecture the results of the initial observation by researchers that humans have one chromosome pair fewer than our nearest ape relatives. The outright loss of a chromosome pair would have been catastrophic and could not feasibly have given rise to a healthy new species.

There was only one possibility: that four of the old chromosomes had fused into a single pair. That’s easy to check, because it causes the stuff on the ends of chromosomes to also appear in the middle, where the two old ones met. If they hadn’t found this, evolutionary theory as we know it would be dead wrong.

Sure enough, chromosome pair #2 fits the bill perfectly. It used to be pairs #2 and #3 in apes, and the little joins are plain as day. Nobody knew to look for those joins until they realised that evolution could only have reduced the number of chromosomes in this way. It was a genuine, specific prediction.

Posted: February 15th 2009

See all questions answered by SmartLX