[randcraw]

I like to think of abductive reasoning as the basis for science that explains natural processes that happened in the past -- like astronomy and geology and evolution -- where experiments are too big to conduct or processes too slow to observe in real-time. So we propose mechanistic explanations for nonobvious outcomes like the formations of stars, or motion of large land mass via plate tectonics or glaciation, or long-range organism speciation over millennia. That's the role for abduction, to explain how all that happened.