Chaos (as much as the second principle of thermodynamics and the efficient market hypothesis) is mostly a negative result. It is a wall, that the scientist has to face, not a tool.
It is not very surprising that there are not “applications”. More generally, principles about complex systems are useful in a fuzzy way.
What are the applications of Darwin evolution? Perhaps all modern biology, perhaps only genetic optimization algorithms. Difficult to say: it is huge and fuzzy.
Evolution also came up over on my blog. Here’s part of what I said there:
it made a bunch of facts weird where they previously hadn’t been, drawing attention to especially educational edge cases. This contributed to the discovery of plate tectonics, which does make strong predictions.
Darwin’s insight wasn’t that you could breed for traits- everyone knew that, just like everyone knew apples fell when you dropped them. The insight was that this was the same process by which species formed/planets orbited, which let you share math between them.
Was a huge deal to Christianity and a major contributor to the secular revolution.
Epidemiology
I personally predicted the endemic course of covid, from the beginning (evidence). I don’t consider this impressive and didn’t even think of it as a prediction at the time- I was just describing what naturally happens in these situations.
I’ve also predicted PEP/PreP resistant HIV and am mad no one is taking it seriously.
Evolutionary models helped inform the original HIV cocktail.
It took more work, but we now can make predictions about how fast traits should evolve under selection. Biology is messy so these are often wrong, but that highlights that we haven’t found all the relevant factors.
Chaos (as much as the second principle of thermodynamics and the efficient market hypothesis) is mostly a negative result. It is a wall, that the scientist has to face, not a tool.
It is not very surprising that there are not “applications”. More generally, principles about complex systems are useful in a fuzzy way.
What are the applications of Darwin evolution? Perhaps all modern biology, perhaps only genetic optimization algorithms. Difficult to say: it is huge and fuzzy.
Evolution also came up over on my blog. Here’s part of what I said there: