Survival of the fittest and prediction

Yesterday I attended the Robert Taft Club's "Darwin, Genetics, and Conservatism" event, featuring Charles Murray, John Derbyshire, Ron Bailey and Tom Bethell. (Full disclosure: I've been to many events and enjoyed them, so I joined the club.) Bethell made a point that Ann Coulter once did: In "survival of the fittest," the fittest are defined as those who survive. Thus, one can make up an explanation for anything, and it's not useful.

If a certain species is aggressive, it must have faced situations where it needed to be aggressive. All you have to do is find a situation where that would be the case (say, fighting a predator or capturing prey) and voila, you've explained it. You don't have to prove that the value of aggression actually outweighed the value of passivity (getting along with others, not being detected by predators in the first place) -- natural selection is assumed, so the fact that aggression "won" is proof enough.

However, I think it's plainly obvious that as a concept, "survival of the fittest" has a lot of value. If a certain trait leads to premature death in an organism, that organism won't be able to pass its genes on. If you introduce a predator that runs fast enough to kill off many lizards, the remaining lizards will have longer legs (on average), and the next generation will likewise have longer legs than the previous one did.

Thus, survival of the fittest is more testable when it predicts the future as opposed to explaining the past. With the past we already have the outcome -- Species A is aggressive -- so we can only assume that natural selection took place and try to figure out how. It serves more as an analytical framework than a testable hypothesis, unless you happen to have ridiculously detailed information about a species' environment through history, allowing you to weigh the advantages of two different traits.

At this point there's no doubt that some aspects of evolutionary theory are true. DNA tests show common descent, and we have seen genetic mutations and "survival of the fittest" occur. The big question is whether these concepts can explain all of evolution, or if there's another mechanism involved. Positing some designer, as Intelligent Design folks do, is a bit of a cop-out (we don't know how it happened, so let's say there's this really smart thing that directed it), but I wouldn't be surprised if scientists discovered some process that complements the established genetic mutation/natural selection theory.

If that happened, it would prove both Darwinists (mutation and selection explain everything) and ID people (there is no way this could have happened without a designer) wrong.