Making predictions and conducting manipulation experiments isn’t possible / practical in all fields of science. Medicine, astronomy, archaeology, evolution and climate studies are other examples.
Astronomy at least collects a lot of data from those one-time observations and try to model the physics, hoping to be able to see something similar again to calibrate the models. For medicine it varies, for rare disease and injuries that are unethical to replicate its a valid issue but they still have scientific models of the affected organs, etc, and similarly to above they try to model it and predict what treatments would work. And all your examples have historical data to some extent.
Evopsych have essentially zero usable historical data and adds no new understanding over regular psychology, and I’ve never heard anybody talk about how they expect behaviors to actually have formed over generations (nor does it meaningfully cover learned and taught behavior)
Yes. It is unethical to give someone a disease so you can study it. Best we have are case studies of people who got the disease and are being treated for it.
In climate studies, it is not practical to increase temperature or humidity by x% and see the effects. Again, you have case studies - either from the past or from parts of the world that are warming much faster than the rest. Or you can do mesocosm experiments where you warm, say, a square metre of grassland, and see the effects. But then there is a lot of uncertainity in scaling up the findings of such small-scale studies.
Making predictions and conducting manipulation experiments isn’t possible / practical in all fields of science. Medicine, astronomy, archaeology, evolution and climate studies are other examples.
Astronomy at least collects a lot of data from those one-time observations and try to model the physics, hoping to be able to see something similar again to calibrate the models. For medicine it varies, for rare disease and injuries that are unethical to replicate its a valid issue but they still have scientific models of the affected organs, etc, and similarly to above they try to model it and predict what treatments would work. And all your examples have historical data to some extent.
Evopsych have essentially zero usable historical data and adds no new understanding over regular psychology, and I’ve never heard anybody talk about how they expect behaviors to actually have formed over generations (nor does it meaningfully cover learned and taught behavior)
Astronomy is mostly history sprinkled with physics.
It is impossible to make prediction or cobduct manipulation experiment in medicine and in climate studies? Do you read what you post?
Yes. It is unethical to give someone a disease so you can study it. Best we have are case studies of people who got the disease and are being treated for it.
In climate studies, it is not practical to increase temperature or humidity by x% and see the effects. Again, you have case studies - either from the past or from parts of the world that are warming much faster than the rest. Or you can do mesocosm experiments where you warm, say, a square metre of grassland, and see the effects. But then there is a lot of uncertainity in scaling up the findings of such small-scale studies.
You don’t need to give anyone a disease to study medicine. Moreover, medicine is not limited to diseases. And it has both predictions and experimets.
You still can observe, describe, analyze and model(predict). The goal of every science is to create prediction function.