Predicting Natural Selection — and Failing

Proponents of atoms-to-entomologist evolution include natural selection as a means of evolution, although that has been largely abandoned. Except when it is convenient to equate natural selection with evolution. It is often included with mutation as a means of upward changes. Evolution itself is not operational (observable) science, but is historical science instead. Also, science needs to make predictions, which is something that evolution fails more often than not.

Walking stick image credit: Aurea Moragón, US Department of Agriculture
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A study of those stick insects ("walking sticks") was undertaken to see if random chance could be predictable. Yes, it doesn't make sense to me either: random doesn't lend itself to predictability. What did researchers find? Disagreement.




via GIPHY
David Coppedge, the author of the article linked just below, shows how the concepts of Darwin and his successors fit the "Stuff Happens Law". This law is just as scientific as Darwinism (and the they have some things in common), as he explains after the link.

Every once in awhile, biologists argue over whether evolution is predictable. The latest flap over stick insects sticks up for predictability, but flops.

An international group of scientists, publishing in the journal Science, studied stick insects—those long, skinny walking insects that try to blend in with plants by mimicking twigs. In their paper, “Natural selection and the predictability of evolution in Timema stick insects,” they do their best to estimate the trajectory of these bugs. Laura Zahn, however, in a summary of the paper in the same issue of Science, has this to say:

Not happening here. To find out what Zahn said, the study findings, and the Stuff Happens Law, click on "Natural Selection Is Not Predictable".

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