you: When new instruments are invented, science uses them. Examples: the compass, the telescope, the microscope, etc. I know of not a single instance of science refusing to investigate when it had the tools for conducting an investigation. There are, unfortunately, historical (and current) examples of areas of research being closed to science by political or ecclesiastical authorities.
Evidence for such historical science is incomplete though certainly whatever evidence exists can be and is measured in a variety of ways. But the scientist in all these disciplines must reach to tools other than measurement to fill in the gaps and offer an explanation – tools such as analysis, modeling, reasoning and the ilk.
Personally, I find evolution to be even closer to cosmology than to other historical sciences because certain features and components can be more strictly tested against other observations or under laboratory conditions.
Conversely, I find evolution to be completely opposite of cosmology in that there are many theories of cosmology which accept the evidence but have alternative explanations for the gaps and big picture --- whereas evolution is taken as a paradigm which does not allow alternative explanations for the gaps or the big picture.
Like alternative cosmologies, it differs from evolution theory in explaining the gaps and big picture: asserting that certain features of life v non-life/death in nature are best explained by intelligent cause rather than an undirected process.
But unlike alternative cosmologies, it is dismissed out-of-hand by those who hold to evolution as a paradigm.
It's not, as the ID advocates claim, a case of narrow-minded intolerance for alternatives. Alternative explanations for the proliferation of life on earth (or for any other natural phenomenon) are allowed, provided -- as in your example of cosmology, or any other science -- they can fit the existing evidence. And provided further, as with any scientific hypothesis, such an alternative explanation leads to some kind of prediction that would distinguish it from the current theory. (As the cosmic background radiation did in the days when Steady State was a competing theory.)
As it is, given the chronological fossil record, and then the amazingly consistent picture that the DNA evidence provides, it's been rather difficult (an understatement) to take the immensity of that evidence and rearrange it into any coherent scenario other than the one that evolution provides. It's true that where gaps still remain in the record (and I assume there will always be some gaps) one can imaginatively insert any desired causal agent. But does such a conjecture lead to any testable observations? So far, the ID camp has failed to come up with anything -- thus the "intolerance" for what is rightly seen as an unscientific proposal.
With an equal dose of imagination, I could assert that the hemisphere of a planet that faces away from us has a big smiley face on it, which always moves out of sight when the planet rotates that side toward us. I can make such a claim because there's aways a "gap" in our observational ability where my smiley face may exist. But to me, that's not much of an alternative theory.
I would pose this question to you. Scenario A: all the diversity of life formed via a process of unguided mutations followed by natural selection. Scenario B: all the diversity of life formed by a process of natural selection of mutations that are identical to those found in scenario A, but were caused by some guiding intelligence. What observable difference would there be between scenario A and scenario B? If there's no observable difference, then the question is not a scientific one. There is no way to test whether scenario A or B is the correct one. I would contend that there is no such test, and therefore that ID is not a scientific theory, at least the form of ID that does not deny that the primary mechanism leading to biodiversity is mutation and natural selection.