Could we figure out evolution without fossils?

It's and intriguing question.

Some creationists and fundamentalists seek to explain away the fossil record, take huge exception with the so called gaps and anomalies and sometimes, outright reinterpret all the fossils studied and accumulated till today, with simplistic generalizations.

In spite of such intellectual laziness there are more witnesses of evolutionary processes than a bunch of cold hard rocks.

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Darwin was able to deduce descent with modification by observing geographically isolated living species and artificially selected and bred domestic animals. Fossils just helped him figure how this all worked out over much longer time periods.

Artificial selection used by farmers and other breeders of domestic animals, while selectively breeding for desired traits, hinted at the other side of the evidentiary coin, genetics.

Darwin never had the tools and mass of understanding that now exists around genetics, so without fossils it might have taken longer, but once, we as the human race got to being able to observe biology at the molecular level, evolution would have become just as apparent to us, as it was to Darwin on his voyage on the Beagle.

Professor Richard Dawkins in The Ancestor’s Tale describes it this way...

"If every fossil were magicked away, the comparative study of modern organisms, of how their patterns of resemblances, especially of their genetic sequences, are distributed among species, and of how species are distributed among continents and islands, would still demonstrate, beyond all sane doubt, that our history is evolutionary, and that all living creatures are cousins. Fossils are a bonus. A welcome bonus, to be sure, but not an essential one. It is worth remembering this when creationists go on (as they tediously do) about “gaps” in the fossil record. The fossil record could be one big gap, and the evidence for evolution would still be overwhelmingly strong. At the same time, if we had only fossils and no other evidence, the fact of evolution would again be overwhelmingly supported. As things stand, we are blessed with both."

What makes this doubly interesting is that "Britons most Pious Atheist" ends up demonstration the Biblical law of witnesses.

2 Corinthians 13:1 "...In the mouth of two or three witnesses shall every word be established."

So now the creationist has to deal with two witnesses and the atheist could be left wondering also.