I wish the book TBW had data linked to each claim (granted, my copy is a PDF 
)
Oh, I see. Well itâs great that you want data! The thing is, TBW is not meant to be a book about the ins and outs of evolutionary data and theory. Dawkins is actually explicit about this as a I recall, and you can check his forward or introduction to see if Iâm right. He wanted the book to be a narrative, to capture (my words here) what it feels like to take in the concept of design being explained by the processes of evolution. TBW includes brilliant narratives of biological marvels and it tackles questions like âyes but how could this be.â Itâs not meant to be a point-by-point examination of the data. Other books do that. (Such as his Greatest Show on Earth.)
One of its coolest explanatory tools was the Blind Watchmaker program, which you can still play with. He was trying to show how variation and selection, cumulatively, can yield complexity and design. That, in my view (and in Dawkinsâ view, I assert) is the point of TBW.
Almost finished. Dawkins has the clearest explanation of evolution I have read, so am curious how reliable his specific claims are. For instance, the molecular clock that allows us to calculate the distance of a common ancestor sounds very nice and testable, but I suspect the reality requires a lot of parameter tweaking to generate consistent dates. In other words, genetic distance is probably not a hyper metric, i.e. always produces isosceles triangles for any three species.
I will cautiously add this addendum: if you find something in TBW and are curious about the data that is linked to it, I invite you to ask me. Iâll probably know, or someone else here on the forum will know. I say âcautiouslyâ because of a very busy life but for no other reason. 
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I think you will find some very good (and up-to-date) resources here at BL on this and other topics.
So the BL material is reliable? The problem I have with evolutionary theory is it is so squishy. It is hard to pin down specific claims to test them.
Itâs excellent.
Then you probably havenât read it.
I agree. Can you link to a specific evolution claim that I can independently verify? E.g. by downloading genomes A, B, and C and doing X I should see Y if evolution is true, and Z if it is false.
If you think that evolution can be disproved by a single data point, then I probably canât help you. Huxleyâs quip about rabbits in the Precambrian is a good one, I guess, but it presupposes that a single finding can undo the mountains of data that support evolution.
So, IMO the first thing you should do, if you are truly interested in understanding evolution*, is to find out what itâs about, what data it explains, what it claims and what it doesnât claim, and so on. BL is a superior source for this basic information.
Then you should be able to judge whether, for example, papers like this one are convincing to you.
*I donât mean any disrespect to you at all when I write this: very few self-identifying Christian skeptics (re evolution) are truly curious about what evolution is about. The vast majority in my experience are seeking reasons to discount it, for apologetic reasons and/or to protect their own faith. I will commit to you that I wonât mock your faith or attribute any unreasonable motivation to you. But for my part, I wonât engage the kind of skepticism that can claim out of the gate, without any significant understanding of evolutionary biology, that it is âsquishyâ or something like that. In short, weâre not off to a good start, and you may need to find answers to your questions in the vast resources of human knowledge that have already answered most (or all) of your questions thousands of times over. BL is loaded with resources. I think you should start there.
[Edit: oops I now include the link above, to work by the Theobald group that addresses questions related to what we might call âtestingâ evolutionary predictions.]
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I am very interested and would like to persuade myself if possible. I have read a decent amount, ranging from Darwinâs original book, to recent work by Koonin, to Kauffmanâs theoretical book about emergence, a thick bioinformatics textbook, a smattering of BL, and now Dawkinsâ book. My impression is when the claims are straightforward and testable, such as Dawkinsâ excellent book, they are false or turn squishy when I get into details. Otherwise, claims about evolution are very obscure (Kauffman) and/or the data also fits other theories such as intelligent design, what I saw in the bioinformatics textbook and Kooninâs work. I am trying to figure out what makes the theory so compelling, and I would think we should be able to easily demonstrate the theory quantitatively now that we have such a vast amount of bioinformatics data available to everyone on the internet.
My final advice to you is to consider that thousands of brilliant scientists who know the claims, and the data, and the analysis, find it compelling. (Admittedly itâs hard to tell what you mean by âitâ since evolution is a broad and encompassing theory and discipline.) The vast majority of âskepticsâ are some very non-random cross-section of religious people and people who donât even know what the theory is about. So. The ball is really in your court. If you are curious, then investigate, and start with the materials that my friends at BL have worked very hard to create. If and when you have a specific question about something in the scientific literature, my invitation to Vanessa (with the huge caveat that my day job is pretty overwhelming right now) stands for you too.
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I mean common descent through random variation and natural selection.
Kooninâs entire job is studying the topic with the most quantitative data, and he may give lip service to evolution, but then proposes totally unexpected things like most genes have been around since the beginning of evolution, and organisms exhibit Lamarckianism.
Thanks for your responses. I will mine through the BL material for hard testable claims.
And one more bizzarre thing I noticed. I thought the one area we can see evolution happen in real time is microbiology. That is always held up to be the one really practical application of the theory. Yet even there I see what appear to be big information infusions that exceed the evolutionary time and resources.
Sorry, yet one last befuddlement in my reading of TBW. At the end Dawkins discusses the different schools of taxonomy research, and apparently the one methodology where evolution is controversial is when they donât assume evolution a priori. He calls these the âtransformed cladistsâ whom he ridicules because they claim theyâve tested and falsified Darwinian evolution.
Ok ranting done 
Have a good day everyone!
Thereâs nothing wrong with Dawkinsâ science, which includes his critique of theology. But, as I told him, he needs to love his enemies.
You do know what event drove him?
How strong are you making this claim? Is it just âDawkins is generally right, but once you get into specifics there are lots of corner cases and we have to fudge with BLAST substitutions matrices to get things to look like what Dawkins claimsâ or âDawkins claims are as rigorous as they get, if I pick any three species at random their genetic distances form an ultrametric without any parameter fiddling necessaryâ?
I strongly suggest you try first to understand the experiments and results of experimental evolution before writing things like this. It seems you think that you can see things (âinformation infusionsâ) that professional biologists, some of the best in the world, canât.
This will be my last comment on your posts, but again, if you have questions after you have read about the the basics of the theory, Iâm game.
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The problem is that the evolution of religion came first. For at least a hundred times longer than the Enlightenment birth of science, incipient in Renaissance Humanism. Whereas rationally, propositionally, physicalism comes first. It doesnât have to deconstruct theism to justify itself. It just doesnât have to go there. Itâs pre-theistic. It is the default dialectical synthesis. It cannot be critiqued from any religious perspective. Only built upon. As is. Without question, apart from rationally. Not âtheologicallyâ. [Accepted.] Ruthlessly. Nakedly. Theism, faith, religion, belief, Christianity are matters, stories of fear driven desire. I want God to be and to be true in Christ, who is the only warrant for Him. The warrant for Jesus is the Church. That must never distort rational enquiry of which science is the most obvious weapon in that arsenal. In fact a rational approach to the proposition of God helps. It removes all the Bronze Age nastiness we still project on Him. It reveals Him as good.
The physical wants for nothing. Except hope. A want answered in faith. And death. And for its investigation to deconstruct âtheologyâ and âmoralityâ is mandatory.
[Again, there is no philosophical jump in, to physicalism from a pre-physicalist position. The only jump is the leap of faith from it.]
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No. Do you?
I do not consider the Blind Watchman a primarily scientific book. I consider The Selfish Gene to be the main work by Dawkins on evolution, even though he begins it with a ideological statement on page 1.
The main contributions of Dawkins are in the areas of theory, such as all animals are âsurvival machinesâ, which presumably includes humans. How does one make a scientific evaluation of a statement like this. He biggest scientific problem was the failure to accept the truth of ecology.
Donât worry. Some of us are actually humanities majors. So your soft science has me beat.
In my experience on atheist websites the only thing more suspicious or more lowly regarded than philosophy is theology. I appreciate that here at this site the necessity of doing some thinking over and above the research is respected.
That you remain vigilant about your epistemic position would serve you well in both the sciences (as you obviously already know) and in philosophy, rhetoric being an entirely separate department.
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