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Technological advances have already made Ecology an experimental science since the early 20th century, including replication, controls, hypothesis testing, etc. It seems like you have confounded the non-realisation of ecological experiments with the quality of the scientific framework, when it is actually due to the absence of means available to do large-scale experiments. Physics has the Large Hadron Collider, etc, because governments made it a political imperative to invest in these types of costly facilities. This has absolutely not happened for ecology. The factor of financial investment is many orders of magnitude different.

Predictability is about having a suitable framework for the object(s) of study and is not a feature of a particular area of investigation. Achieving predictability is, at least in part, technology dependent (e.g. the technology provides an observation in adequation with the hypothesis), as well as being dependent on individual researchers having the means to invest in and use said technology.

The only area of Ecology that has received *any significant* financial investment is in Life Support Systems for space travel, etc - where ecological studies *have shown* that experiments on complex systems are possible, reproducible and predictable and they can lead to identifying conditions of stability. I would just add that the amount of investment remains miniscule relative to any big physical sciences infrastructure. I guess what misses is that Ecology has never really developed a collective focus on a single motivating factor - like understanding the conditions of survival. When Elon Musk realises that he needs a life support system on Earth to ensure his colony on Mars, he will dump money into Ecology. And then I predict Progress Will Be Made.

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Life support systems is for ecology the same as Experimental economics. But how useful are those controlled results for policy decision?

As much as economics have not solved economic policy controversies, Ecology progress has not created consensus on very relevant conservation policy issues. For example, fire suppression is still extremely controversial:

https://fireecology.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s42408-024-00301-y

When moving from the lab back to complex systems intervention, Ecology and Economics look relatively weak.

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I don’t want to be too negative: path prediction is impossible even for a trivial 3 dimensional differential equation as the Lorentz attractor.

In reality you have many complex systems, they work together and the data generating process has to inferred. The mission of this post is precisely to avoid nihilism as a consequence of the fact that the kind of path prediction we have for planets and engines is no possible beyond the systems we have designed to be predicted. An impossible standard leads to desperation.

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