You cite the same rhetoric by Dawkins that I do. Dawkins is one of those whom I am arguing against. The issue is simple enough not to require an appeal to authority to resolve. Natural selection does not involve prediction if it acts on a system which does not make predictions. It does involve prediction when it acts on a system which does make predictions. If the selecting agent is intelligent, and thinks about the future, you cannot fully model the resulting process without modelling that predictive process. Tree leaves do not make predictions - and I never claimed that they did, so that example is irrelevant. It is not plants but organisms with complex brains that make predictions.

As for my rejection of Popper meaning that I support Kuhn: philosophy of science has moved on a bit since the 1960s.