While I completely agree with the main points of your posts CapnG, I have to object to your mention that tonsils serve no purpose. While one can live without them, Tonsils are one of the first stages of protection from germs and bacteria, and they do serve to fight infection. [source]
Now there are other vestigial remains in the human body that serve no apparent purpose. There's a fairly interesting blog that discusses these as well. My favorite is the Palmaris muscle: since a small percentage of people have it, and some will have it on one arm and not the other.
As far as irrefutable proof that evolution exists, all one has to do is look at the family dog. Dogs have evolved, through selective breeding (not natural selection) into the critters that grace our homes. There are over 200 breeds of dogs and all of them can interbreed-and breed with wolves to produce viable offspring. Yes, your Toy Poodle can mate with your Great Dane and produce fertile offspring.
An interesting experiment is ongoing in Russia, breeding Silver Foxes and selecting for friendliness towards humans, as well as conversely selecting for aggressiveness towards humans (the darker side of the experiment.) Though the animals still remain Silver Foxes, their appearance has changed dramatically. To wit, this experiment is considered a long running experiment though it would be interesting to see if there is a resultant DNA mutation over 100 years, 500 years or a millenia.
We humans are short sighted, relative to time. We live on average 70 years and do not get to see the true long term changes that are occuring over time. The planet is over 4 billion years old, which is over 57million consecutive human lifetimes. So we get to see 1/57,000,000 of change-if we're lucky.
