“Science has some basic structural flaws that make it unsuitable for solving problems in real farming; or any living system. Almost by definition, science is constantly trying to deconstruct living systems into smaller and simpler pieces; trying to find a stable place with few variables, where hypotheses can be tested repeatedly with the same results. But when these partially alive fragments are joined back together with the whole, variables multiply exponentially, and it becomes once again difficult to predict and steer outcomes.

My favorite concept from all of academic biology is that each separate species occupies an “dimensional hyperspace” (ecological niche), where n is an unknown and potentially infinite number. This means that each species occupies a space with so many dimensions (time, temperature, geographic location, associations, pH, light level, water availability, etc) that many of them are unknown and maybe even uncountable.

[Note from Darin: That dimensionality includes the relational dimensions (nominally infinite) between any given organism (or ecology) and all other beings (including its constituents…), and the ‘hyperspaces’ »there are abjectly inconceivable.]

This may be the closest thing we have to an admission by science itself that Nature, as we have it here on earth, is in the end unknowable; and that the more we know about one tiny part of it, the less we know of the whole.”

— Kirk Webster