Natural selection. No, it's unpredictable.
Just a hunch from my side, Entropy and Survival of the Fittest strike me as the underpinning principles behind life in general. Since we know empirically that the universe prefers increasing entropy, I like to treat it as a "push" towards increasing the number of possible states (like a search space of sorts). Survival of the Fittest then acts as another "push" towards choosing the right configurations to thrive in any given environment.
With that description, I'd consider such forward planning to be inherently chaotic. Everything on earth (and the universe in general, though sparser) will end up affecting each other via common systems to some extent, so I say just let it loose and observe what happens.
We let loose our carbon and our methane to predictable results. Planets are mostly closed systems at the scale of life. So from generation to generation the variables are constrained. If low probability events are ignored, it seems quite ordered to me like a complex statistics problem.
Is it possible to define an ecosystem in such a way that one can predict how it will evolve in stages?
Intuitively, I think this would be a chaotic system, much like the weather. Chaotic systems cannot be predicted over long time scales.
Very few things are truly chaotic. E.g. the weather. It has chaotic elements, that make long range, hyper accurate predictions hard. We can still make larger scale predictions, like India's monsoons.
The same applies to ecosystems. We can make broad observations and predictions, without knowing the finer details. E.g. You will have a hierarchy of predators/prey. A lot of organisms on the bottom, with less as you move up. The other classic is colonisation of volcanic islands. Mosses etc come first, with progressively larger and more complex plants following, as soil develops. Animals follow the tiers of plants.
Vibes.
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