… or maybe, indeed, outside the proper business of science. Is natural selection a regularity in nature, or a near-infinite series of mostly incalculable contingencies?
If the former, its results ought to be predictable according to scientifically determinable laws (as opposed to laws that predict how a feature or gene will behave, assuming it has been selected.)
If selection cannot be reduced to laws (ie it is not a lawlike process), then it would seem science can only (in the main) observe it in the same way that one can observe historical events, such as the results of wars or elections, without being able to formulate laws of history that explain reliably who will win any particular struggle and why.
One can, after all, make a pretty good theory that the winners of wars will always write the history-books, but that doesn’t make winning wars a scientifically predictable process.
This, of course, ignores the preponderance of near-neutral changes in current theory, in which survival is simply the result of not perishing - even more contingent and non-lawlike. But do we really make natural selection, in its pure adaptive sense, non-random by saying something as vague as “it always selects the fittest”? Is warfare lawlike because the best team (defined entirely by its winning, whether by nuclear arms, a meteorite strike on the enemy or a vision of angels) always wins? No - war may not be truly (ontologically) random, but it is contingent and therefore not amenable to scientific explanation (and therefore, actually, random as far as science is concerned).
If science is the study of the repeatable, what makes natural selection any more a scientific process, than is contingent history - which is as much as to say a product of providence?