You mean the same way that ghosts in the barn loft are hard to find?
Charles Darwin’s idea that an unguided natural process led to all the beauty and diversity of the world, including its Undeniable appearance of design, guides scientific thinking to this day. But what if his signature mechanism — natural selection — cannot be measured? Without measurement, a theory reduces to anecdote. A recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences threatens to do that, at least in regard to “the evolution of human body form.” The implications go far beyond human physiology.
Consider limb length. Say you want to deduce how natural selection has affected the dimensions of the femur bone. The authors point out that one cannot measure directional selection on one bone without taking into account how all the other bones are affected.More.
The late Lynn Margulis probably offered the most succinct summation of natural selection: Not all life forms that come into existence can survive.
Apart from the need to preserve Darwinism (natural selection acting on random mutations) as a pretended mechanism for the production of information, when it is wholly improbable, that fact does not point to any specific pattern about which life forms will survive or what information they will develop or retain.
The future of evolution lies in discovering actual mechanisms, not hypothetical ones.
See also: What the fossils told us in their own words
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