[Mr. Blonde]

I'm reading Origin of Species right now and it has just prompted me to address some of the things heuris mentioned before

Originally Posted by heurisdick

Gravity is a daily observable, testable phenomenon. Darwin's theory is an interpretation of left over evidences.

That last part has been likened to being a detective coming on the scene of a crime with a copious amount of evidence pointing to what actually happened. Regardless, you're kind of asking for an (almost) impossible test: To see evolution happening when it takes thousands or hundreds of thousands of generations to make any significant, observable changes. Humans have only really been closely observing/classifying plants and animals for a few hundred years. While your line of skeptical thought is definitely more cerebral, it's directly related to "why don't we see monkeys evolving into humans today?"

In any case, it is testable to some degree:

E. coli long-term evolution experiment - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

And Natural Selection, given enough time, makes perfect sense in light of our domestication of plants and animals:

Originally Posted by Charles Darwin

As man can produce a great result with his domestic animals and plants by adding up in any given direction individual differences, so could natural selection, but far more easily from having incomparably longer time for action.

...but if man can in a short time give beauty and an elegant carriage to his bantams, according to his standard of beauty, I can see no good reason to doubt that female birds, by selecting, during thousands of generations, the most melodious or beautiful males according to their standard of beauty, might produce a marked effect.

It may metaphorically be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, the slightest variations; rejecting those that are bad, preserving and adding up all that are good, silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life. We see nothing of these slow changes in progress, until the hadn of time has marked the lapse of the ages, and then so imperfect is our view into long-past geological ages, that we see only that the forms of life are now different from what they formerly were.

Also it should be noted that Darwin writes the longest sentences i've ever read. Average 10-12 line paragraph, with enough commas, dashes, and semicolons, comes out to about two sentences.

I think the main things that will need to be addressed in the future are whether or not there are limits to what natural selection can produce. There's some question about information actually being added through mutation.

Natural selection doesn't "produce" anything -- copying errors in DNA structure produce the mutations. At the heart of it, that comes down to genetics, not evolutionary theory.

Originally Posted by Charles Darwin

Several writers have misapprehended or objected to the term Natural Selection. Some have even imagined that natural selection induces variability, whereas it implies only the preservation of such variations as arise and are beneficial to the being under its conditions of life.