Sorry; you're the one who is wrong.  Evolution is as much a fact as the
nearly-elliptical orbits of planets around a focal sun, waves of electro-
magnetism, and the composition of (ordinary) matter in "atoms" made up
of electrons and nuclei themselves composed of protons and neutrons.

Each of these facts has a long history of origin within, and continued
entanglement with and explanation by, theories -- and some of those old
theories are no longer of direct scientific relevance.  Each fact could
be "dissolved" by a sufficiently hard-boiled "skepticism" -- but only at
the expense of calling into question just about anything else one would
like to call fact.  In other words, I am not making ultimate ontological
statements (which I regard as futile, anyway), but practical ones.

And Creationists who question the "fact" of evolution are playing a
semantic shell-game, in that they *will* not apply the same criteria
uniformly (e.g., to putative religious "facts" or even to everyday
or scientific facts that THEY have no agenda to attack.)

The fact of evolution was granted by serious investigators within a
decade or so of Darwin's extremely convincing presentation of the data;
all life is marked by signs of a common descent which can be "questioned"
only by adopting criteria that question *all* empirical conclusions.
Such Humean questioning is valuable -- but not when done in a rhetorical
game that pretends evolution is any more vulnerable than the factual
underpinnings of our physical and chemical world.

The theoretical explication of the fact also began with Darwin, and
his treatment of variation and adaptation -- both of which are again
facts, the theory being the logic which combines these to explain the
commonalities within the differences observed in life.  Darwin's theory
had some serious problems at the genetic level: why doesn't inheritance
just "blend" everything back to statistical population means?  And
post-Mendelian population genetics and molecular biology both help to
address this point, and raise others (about genetic drift, for example.)
But questions in the logic of the theory, or unresolved issues in the
comparison of theory and fact, do not reduce the factual status of:

      a) massive variation of genotypes and phenotypes in populations
      b) variety of phenotypes in a population with only arbitrarily
         small phenotypic differences between many nearby taxons
      c) continued introduction of variation both at a combinatorial
         level and by mutation
      d) phenotypic change in populations over time, on a basis of
         genetic change over time
      e) divergence of previously mutually interbreeding populations
         under selection and/or drift
      f) dispersion of phenotypes in time and space as "radiations"
         from localized origins, with variations increasing over this
         dispersion
      g) fossil evidence of gradations quite as small as any in the
         contemporary evidence of b) over geological ages sufficient
         to *document* descent with modification as taxonomic levels
         much higher than the species (e.g., reptile -> mammal)

Evolutionary theory is indeed a live and lively body, only started (in
a manner related to current theory) by Darwin, not now or in the for-
seeable future a "finished" product.  A Creationist might logically pin
*some* hopes on lacunae and problems in current evolutionary theory --

Some would like to suggest [and this is fine] that adaptation and drift
are NOT sufficient mechanism for the observed record -- and some paleon-
tologists would be sympathetic, if the suggestions are not vitalistic
or otherwise obscurantist.  But typically, such suggestions are made
with an absurd dichotomization which wants to *deny* selection and drift.

Some want to posit "barrriers" to descent-with-modification [i.e.,
evolution] "beyond" the "bounds" of species (or some vaguely construed
"kind" -- which has the advantage that it can continually retreat before
new factual evidence of speciation :-))  But in FACT species don't HAVE
"bounds" and the whole archaic notion of "kinds" simply fails to be an
adequate basis for the taxonomy of living things.

Most Creationist attacks on evolution are bizarrre -- operating by
mistakes about what the weak points are, and only plausible when the
facts ARE rejected.
--
Michael L. Siemon             "Of course, we can not guarantee our
mls@panix.com                  Bibles against ordinary wear or abuse."
mls@ulysses.att.com                   -- Oxford University Press