Even assuming your claims were true, what, are we supposed to accept the religious explanation as more plausible? Because not only has that never been proven,

Even assuming your claims were true, what, are we supposed to accept the religious explanation as more plausible? Because not only has that never been proven, it's a lot harder to swallow in the first place, which means we should expect even more evidence that it's true before we take it seriously. And besides. It's pretty much rock solid that one species can evolve into another, or at least that multiple current species sprang from single earlier species. When you look at genetic data across living things, the signs of a tree-like structure are absolutely fucking unmistakable. Sure, it's not a trivial problem to actually extract the entire tree of life (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phylogenetics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phylogenetics - the difficulty is that we only get to touch DNA from the leaves of the tree, and we have to infer the rest), but the tools biologists use are more than powerful enough to distinguish a set of leaves that likely came from an underlying but hidden tree structure from "leaves" that came about in some other way. I don't know numbers off the top of my head, but IIRC from conversations I've had with bioinformatics folks the confidence levels are extremely high, the only debate is over which particular tree should be inferred from a given set of leaves.