Could not the predictive ability of your working theory also be predicted by the theory that all the ADAPTIVE ability you see and base predictions on is
“built into” the organisms you study, and not a matter of adding these abilities through ADDITION of information through mutation?
Aren’t you just observing adaptation and attributing that to “evolution”?
Aren’t you just observing adaptation and attributing that to “evolution”?
Not really.
If I were going to assume a created system, first of all, I would not expect adaptive changes, since presumably, components of the created system would have been specifically designed for the niche they occupy and wouldn't need to adapt.
But let's say that despite that, some change is occurring anyway. In that case, I would only be able to look at the change within any given species in isolation; I would not be able to look at how a given change in, e.g., a protein, occurred in one species and make any predictions about how that protein would have changed in another species. In fact, I wouldn't even be able to assume the same protein exists--arguably, an organism designed to live in a barrier reef has drastically different needs than an organism designed to live in a temperate deciduous forest, so I wouldn't assume design similarities between them.
I don't see anything consistent with a designed world in actual practice. Everything I see is consistent with an evolved world.
For instance, a main feature of evolution is that species share common ancestors. That means that at some point in the distant past, there was only one version of the protein. But as time goes by, that ancestor spreads out, resulting in many population groups. The protein changes over time in all of the groups, but the change isn't the same in each group. So, when I compare the protein (or, more correctly, the DNA sequence coding for it) after a few thousands of years, I see that most of the sequence is still the same between all the groups, and I can use that to extrapolate the original sequence. Furthermore, if different groups migrated at different times, that is reflected in the changes (because two separate groups might share a change that is not seen in other groups, suggesting that they shared ancestry at a later point, but they also have changes unique to each group). Knowing nothing about the species' history, I can develop what is called a cladogram, which is a visual representation of the changes, which typically corresponds quite well to other evidence regarding population migrations.