[BroJoeK]

glennaro: "Bottom line for me: After all these many decades of intensive study, the 'theory of evolution' remains just a theory (yet it is taught in many places as scientific fact)."

dmz: "You may want to do a teensy bit of reading of what constitutes a theory when in scientific circles."

Evolution is both theory and fact, in this sense:

• What can be observed and confirmed is, by definition, fact.
  In the case of basic evolution theory, both "descent with modifications" and "natural selection" are daily observed & confirmed, making them facts.

• Unobservable explanations and predictions are hypotheses, which can either be confirmed or falsified by discoveries or experiments.
  If strongly confirmed, a hypothesis graduates to the level of theory.
  Evolution of new species is an innumerable-times confirmed theory.

The often-repeated claim that there is no evidence of new species is falsified by innumerable fossils, careful morphological comparisons and detailed DNA analyses.
Indeed, there's nothing unusual about speciation, since by definition of the term, whenever two populations of the same species no longer interbreed, they have become separate species.
Examples can be found throughout nature, and are even, on a very simple basis repeatable through experiments.

[glennaro]

Thank you for this explanation. I appreciate the time you took to clarify this for me.

[Boogieman]

“Indeed, there’s nothing unusual about speciation, since by definition of the term, whenever two populations of the same species no longer interbreed, they have become separate species.”

Well, that’s just a truism. If you simply define “species” so loosely as to be able to claim “new” species based on simple accidents of circumstance, of course you will be able to cite “new” species being created. However, that doesn’t prove Darwin’s central thesis that species are endlessly malleable and can transform from single celled organisms to the variety we see today merely through the mechanisms of evolution.