Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that the problem is complex systems, not biology per se. But physics is able to be quite predictive because it is able to isolate one basic phenomenon at a time and model it with great precision (gravity, electromagnetism, particle physics, etc). Then, if we want to build devices based on these phenomena from the ground up, we can also do that and predict their behavior with great accuracy (e.g., behavior of…
> Physics does have predictive problems when it is applied to weather, climate, etc, because those are complex systems. But that kind of the thing is a minority of the subject matter in physics. There is a far greater number of humans working in applied physics than in characterizing isolated aspects of theoretical systems so I'd question how you judged "minority" there :) Perhaps our disagreement is just in choice o…
Using any definition for "physics" close to this, while the percentage of biological questions that involve complex systems is close to 100%, it is much lower in physics. The subsets of physics problems that do involve complex systems will suffer the same predictive problems.
In fact, this conversation has got me wondering whether "complex system" really means anything more than "a system whose behavior is hard to predict". I know that complex systems have other common attributes, but really the unpredictability seems to be the defining feature.
This is a long way of saying "I agree that we don't really disagree" :)