I dont have that high an opinion of astronomy, but my issue is what counts as an explanation (a model with causal variables), and what counts as an experiment (setting the value, etc.) -- astronomy can often pass these tests on the underlying models.. and are usually good at reporting the confidence intervals as a appropriate.
My issue with something like a human being is that the state space is going to be non-linear, in the sense that suppose we have an explanatory model of the human in their environment, state = h(x_env, x_body, t, ...)
This makes controlling, really in any sense, those variables is going to be nearly impossible. So close values in `x` space, eg., two environments that look nearly-identical, are going to have radically different values in state space.
Psychologists, using linear "mereological intuitions" based on classical physics, will deny this. A physicist however, would not make this mistake. In cases of hysteresis and complexity, we're well-aware tiny variations in an environment can produce radically different paths thru' state space.
(And I think people are more complex than magnets!).
The fundamental issue with the field of studying human behaviour with scientific methods, is that (imv), we dont have scientific methods. We shouldn't expect science to provide us a method which works in every env.
I have, perhaps, high standards on what counts as science; it's esteem imv comes from disciplines that can meet those standards. Everyone else is rent-seeking.
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Edit:
> genes do not cause intelligence
If there's an infinite number of possible people P, our genes make a subset of those impossible because they're not "biologically possible".
There is a narrow sense of "cause" which therefore says that genes play a causal role.
I was taking a more robust sense, in which (one plausible view), is that the set of effects we call "intelligence" are gounded in the body, but a cause of the environment.
Splitting these issues out is very subtle however.
One simple way of making this clear: most possible bodies arent intelligent; they dont speak; they dont think; etc. And all those are biologically possible.
Just as genes dont cause English speaking, they dont "obviously" cause intelligence. Most biologically possible people are basically unable to think, never having been developed in a social environment.
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