> The reason we don’t think of history as science but we think of meteorology as science even though both build models based on observation, known regularities and constants, is because the sort of reliable predictions a historian can make are of no use to anybody, while any kind of even moderately accurate weather prediction is extremely useful to everybody. No. This is false. One does not need to produce anything u…
You're cheating with the non-obvious bit. That's not at all what makes something science. Also the falsifiablility criterion is far too strict for much of biology and many others. Many if not most of the facts of botany or zoology are observational and only non-obvious in the sense that nobody bothered to look. Much of taxonomy is not very falsifiable and can only be said to be correct with respect to its own assumpt…
I'd also add that you absolutely do not need 500 years to verify natural selection, see e.g. this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plVk4NVIUh8