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)
You explained the limitations astronomers and medical researchers face. Psychologists face similar problems, which is why all their results should be treated with a certain amount of scepticism. But that does not mean their work is worthless; just that it is hard. A lot of traditional psychology was based on what one person thought, rather than logical arguments or experimental evidence. Evolutionary psychology is an attempt to place the study of the brain’s workings in the context of evolution.
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)
Individual human behaviours depend on a lot of other factors. All you can do from an evolutionary perspective is to explain some common trends. For example, in almost all cultures, some people are gay / ace. Traditional psychologists long thought of this as some sort of mental condition. But if you think of society in the context of inclusive fitness and r/K strategy, it makes a lot of sense to have a certain percentage of the population not reproduce. Is this why some people are gay / ace? I don’t know, and I don’t think we’ll ever know. But at least we can try to explain some things.
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.
In climate studies, it is not practical to increase temperature or humidity by x% and see the effects.
You still can observe, describe, analyze and model(predict). The goal of every science is to create prediction function.
