Is evolution based on empirical science?

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OoSnap said:

Absolutely not! Have we ever observed bacteria evolve into something else other than bacteria? Nope.

That's not how evolution works. A bacteria doesn't suddenly evolve into a fungus.

We have actually witnessed evolution in our lifetime. Fundamentally evolution means some individuals of a species changing sufficiently in its genetics to become a separate species. We've seen this happen a few times in the last 50 years or so with some viruses and prions. Canine parvovirus, for instance, only appeared in the 1970s and became a global disease of dogs within a few years. Before the 1970's there was no such disease as canine parvovirus. This disease evolved from the feline panleukapenia virus. These 2 viruses are as related to each other as humans are to chimps (i.e. 98%), but they are distinct species within the same virus genus.

Bovine spongiform encephalopathy is a prion disease that evolved from the sheep scrapie prion. Prior to the late 80's bse did not exist. Routine expose of cattle to scrapie infected feed (derived from boiled up sheep) over several decades eventually lead to the mutation of the scrapie agent such that it became a prion that was able to cause BSE in cattle and unfortunately vCJD in humans.

I'm not sure we've directly observed any splitting at the genus level, but given we've directly witnessed speciation it's not terribly hard to conceive of genus, family, order etc separation over much longer time scales of population separation and with much more varied environmental influences. The mechanisns are the same.