Thanks for your thoughtful response. Take a look here: http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-the-simplest-organism-known.htm
That simplest living organism is incredibly complex. Was it simpler at some earlier period of earth’s history. I’m not bothered by the Theory of Evolution on a religious basis, but a scientific one.
How do you falsify the Theory of Evolution? What would definitively prove it wrong?
The key word in your sentence above is "living".
For any organism to be scientifically classified as "living", it must necessarily be "incredibly complex."
But there are many chemical compounds and organic molecules which are not classified as "living" and are much simpler than living organisms, but which have some of the characteristics of living cells.
The question is whether any of these organic chemistries could have, over billions of years, evolved into organisms with enough characteristics of life for scientists today to classify they as "living"?
But, before we get too deep into the weeds here, it's important to note first that the Theory of Evolution itself says nothing about the origins of life from non-life.
Evolution itself only says that over time -- millions and billions of years -- life descends with modifications, and natural selection chooses which modifications are best fit for survival.
How life got started here in the first place, Evolution doesn't say -- though it's pretty easy for scientists to speculate that the first primitive organisms very likely evolved from even more primitive "non-life".
1010RD: "How do you falsify the Theory of Evolution? What would definitively prove it wrong?"
Remember, the two basics of evolution -- descent with modifications and natural selection -- are both confirmed observations, meaning in other words, they are facts.
They have been observed and confirmed so many different ways that you are simply not going to disprove them, short of some discovery no one now imagines.
As far as the grand theory -- what anti-evolutionists like to call "macro-evolution" -- it is in fact nothing more than the extension of "micro-evolution" over millions and billions of years.
Projecting "micro-evolution" back so far in time leads to the scientific hypothesis that all life may have evolved from common ancestors.
That hypothesis is confirmed, making it a theory, by the fossil record, by DNA analysis, and by inputs from virtually every other field of science.
So, to disprove it would require, first, a scientifically recognized mass of evidence which is not explained by evolution, and second, an alternate scientific hypothesis / theory which better explains all the data -- both data supporting evolution and that alleged to contradict it.
So far, despite some claims to the contrary, I've seen no evidence of either of the above.