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Virtual Earth Plays Out Fate of Life on the Planet

posted by Woods on Thursday April 24 2014, @01:09AM   
from the now-make-it-without-trolls dept.

AnonTechie writes:

We can simulate the climate and we can even simulate babies. Now, we can simulate life on Earth, too the vast and complex interactions of the living organisms on our planet.

Named Madingley, after the village in Cambridgeshire, UK, where the idea was dreamed up, it's a mathematical model that could help us predict the future. It could tell us what would happen if all the bees disappeared, the difference it would make if pandas died out, and what the world might have looked like if humans had never invented intensive farming. The work also suggests that the basic structures of all ecosystems can be predicted using a small number of universal ecological principles.

• Re:Any Prediction is as good an another. Re:Any Prediction is as good an another. (Score: 2, Insightful) by smallfries on Thursday April 24 2014, @06:03AM

  by smallfries (4219) on Thursday April 24 2014, @06:03AM (#35368)

  It is not always the role of science to prove or disprove. There are two different phases in scientific progress: exploration and validation. Simulation and modelling normally lies within the former. The idea is not to validate causual relationships, but rather to suggest causal relasionships that can then be validated by experiment.

  It is always difficult to evaluate the worth of simulations: the same questions about demonstrating the realism of assumptions are in the reviews of all simulation work ever published. Among their arbitrary tuning choices I thought that the 10:1 predator to prey ratio sounded a bit dubious. Besides it is a distribution of values and picking the average for the model seems a bit unsound: is the rario preserved by a pride of lions taking down an elephant?

  The most interesting simulations make their assumptions explicit: we found the no matter what value we set parameter X to, property Y always emerged in the simulation results, we are not sure why but it leads us to speculate relationship Z...

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• Re:Any Prediction is as good an another. (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 24 2014, @08:56AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 24 2014, @08:56AM (#35417)

  I believe once you dispose of the scientific method, it becomes philosophy.

  So while this "study" could be thrown into the 'Bad Science' bin by insistence;

  It could be equally categorized into the 'Awesome Philosophy' bin by choice.

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