Has natural selection really been tested and verified?

First, you have the title of that article wrong. The correct title is:

Do peahens not prefer peacocks with more elaborate trains?

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=...You may consider this picky, but if you are going to try to do science you must learn to be very precise.Second, this study may not be as clear cut as creationists would like. Here is a response:Choosey Peahens Choose EvolutionHighlight:

...as I noted in a guest entry on Denis Ford’s This Week in Evolution. Essentially, the paper has two major problems (my article deals with some other minor ones as well):

1. The authors used a different methodology to determine male reproductive success than the other studies, which makes comparing them very difficult. While the British and French studies measured male reproductive success by observed successful copulations, the Japanese one estimated the number of successful copulations, based on female pre-copulatory behavior.
   
2. The genetic variance in tail morphology in all of the studies was very low (Takahashi et al.’s study had the lowest), which only magnifies the differences in methodology. Small differences in number of successful copulations have greater weight because the very low variation makes determining any kind of selection very difficult.

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The main thrust of my article is that the differences in methodology for determining male reproductive success were magnified by the very low variance in the trait, invalidating comparison between the studies. It should be noted that Marion Petrie and Adriane Loyau, primary authors of two of the three major studies confirming peahen’s preference for more elaborate male trains, are in the process of publishing a reply to Takahashi et al’s paper.

Did you perhaps get that title from a creationist website? If so, it should serve as a reminder that you should always check a few non-creationist sources to see if the creationist websites are lying to you.

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

You are correct; two articles in the same journal with virtually identical titles published in the same year.And I missed the difference in authors.Not good! I am usually more careful than that. I apologize for the error.

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

There are changes among the various human groups; the Human Races classes I took detailed a lot of these changes.But none resulted in speciation; all human populations are of one species and fully capable of interbreeding.

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

The nearest thing on the horizon that could foster speciation would be space colonization.That would lead to very different adaptive pressure to deal with different gravities, perhaps higher levels of cosmic radiation, and a host of other differences.To the degree that any population, such as in the distant reaches of the solar system, became somewhat isolated from the bulk of the human population you could begin to get speciation.You would probably also have some degree of founders effect, as different parts of the solar system could be occupied by different races or by groups with some other differences. These themes have been well-treated by science fiction authors.A problem to be solved first: we don't know yet if humans are viable in weightless conditions. Gestation and birth have not yet been determined to be possible, and growing up in weightless or reduced gravity conditions may do strange things to organisms conditioned over several billions of years to standard gravity.Stay tuned!

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

Then you are wrong from the very beginning.Science is not about "proof." Or truth, Truth, TRUTH, or even TRVTH.Scientific theories are simply the best explanations we currently have for a particular dataset.But Creationists generally reject both scientific evidence and the scientific method because they have produced evidence and theories that contradict their a priori religious beliefs.Because they reject science and the scientific method, Creationists do not feel the need to accept the definitions used by science either. To do so would, apparently, be to accept the findings of science.Instead they tend to avoid any real study of science, and make up the most outrageous and inappropriate definitions of scientific terms, and they feel completely free to contradict the findings of scientists who have spent 40 or more years of hard work learning their particular fields. And they feel free to contradict the results of hundreds of years of investigations by thousands of scientists.And on what basis do they contradict those scientists? Why, religious belief! Facts and evidence--who needs them?!? Just believe and all of science will crumble before you.On another website I witnessed a Creationist tell the world that the "second law of thermal documents" prohibited evolution. And another told us quite seriously that the odds against evolution and common descent were 1⁷²⁰. He couldn't understand why we laughed at him.So you need to go back to the beginning and look up the nature of the scientific method and scientific evidence, and look up the meaning of "hypothesis," "theory," and "proof" while you're at it. Then look up "dogma" and "faith" just for comparison. Figure where you are in the midst of all of this.And if you find that the vast majority of scientists disagree with you, perhaps what you are peddling isn't science.And if you really think about it you might realize that what Creationists are peddling is the exact opposite of science.But then you knew that when you came here to peddle your particular religious beliefs, didn't you?

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

Yes. Those who doubt the theory of evolution are not relying on science, but on religious belief. Science supports the theory of evolution.So who is it that relies on science, and who on religious beliefs? QED. Creationists are about the only folks who dispute the theory of evolution. Not ridiculous. The scientific evidence supports the theory of evolution.Religious belief is what engenders the attacks on evolution--those attacks have been going on for 150 years. And they have proved futile.That seems to be the genesis of this thread--doubts (engendered by religious belief) of different parts of the theory of evolution.

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.