The last few centuries have seen a number of theories of history which tried to make history a science and tried to articulate laws of history, including natural history. All of these have failed to find anything like a physical law. Natural history was treated as a science with “principles” substituting for fixed laws. The evolutionary paradigm supplied a theme and a mindset of progress but still no laws. Darwin tried to make survival into a law but it’s really a form of happenstance–Darwinism is not law and chance but chance and chance. Population thinking is in the opposite direction from law thinking.
A genuine science of nature would have laws that abstract from experience and are invariably true. Those who believed in the existence of such laws in the 19th century were called “idealists” which did not mean philosophical or political idealism but the belief that there was an overall plan of creation, for example, that was shown in a harmonious taxonomic system. Unfortunately, these people either died out or were co-opted by an acceptance of “designed evolution”, an early form of theistic evolution. (See Peter Bowler’s Darwinism and the Argument from Design, Journal of the History of Biology, vol. 10, no. 1).
Scientists should be looking for a system of nature (recall that Linnaeus’ work was called Systema Naturae). Evolutionists focus on the population and species level; they refuse to look for a larger system. Common descent is not a system, it’s happenstance. The real ‘law’ of evolution is that there are no laws of biology–things just happen and can only be described with an eye toward the possible.
The idealist approach, which emphasizes the timeless plan of creation that is still observable today, can and should be revived. Scientists should seek physical laws, which despite chance noise are the scientific way to understand nature. Ironically, Monod was right that science is about law and chance but apart from physics and chemistry, necessary laws are lacking in science today.