> I'm wondering why the process of natural selection should be comprehensible to begin with, except maybe in hindsight.

A further exposition on this topic:

For example, Margulis (1974) has 
argued that evolutionary biologists are in the same logical predicament as historians
and "can only present arguments based on the assumption that of all the plausible
historical sequences one is more likely to be a correct description of past events than
another. " This is a serious issue because although evolution is an on-going process, and
many studies have been successful in predicting the course of future evolution in both
natural and experimental populations … 

… organisms today are the products of approximately 3.5 billion years of unwritten
and unrecorded history. Wittgenstein famously declared in 1922 that ''whereof one cannot
speak, thereof one must be silent", an exhortation that Woolhouse (1967) modified to
''whereof one cannot know, thereof one should not speak."

Obviously, the advice of either Wittgenstein or Woolhouse has not been followed,
because throughout the history of mankind, humans have struggled to understand the
history of the natural world using contemporary methods -- be it inferences, indirect
evidences, successively advancing techniques or actual experimentation; and wherever
understanding failed, the supernatural often took over.

* * *

That's what we are doing, holding back the flood of nonsense that pours into empty spaces between our knowledges.

PLB

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