A prairie is qualitatively different than a billiard table or an asteroid belt: If you tried to use basic kinematics and free body diagrams to describe a prairie ecosystem, you would find that most of the interesting action was left unexplained. To handwave away air resistance and viscosity is to handwave away all the birds. To handwave away friction is to handwave away basically every other mobile life form. And I think it only gets worse if you move from a prairie to a rainforest--floating spores, flying snakes, geckos, soft but breakable eggs, all manner of sticky appendages, etc.
Simple dynamics don’t even get you a decent first approximation of these systems unless you zoom way out and take very coarse averages. (“The biomass generally stays within roughly 10m of ground level, because of gravity.” “These tightly coupled populations of predators and prey roughly trace out this orbit in phase space every X time interval.“) (But I'm interested in counterexamples if you have them.)
...
Anyway, this feels related to the fact that we can’t develop good models for human interactions, either descriptive or prescriptive. When I try to do virtue ethics, I find that all my virtues turn to swiss cheese after a day’s worth of exception handling. When I try to take actions based on first principles of game theory I end up feeling like a maladjusted sociopath. When I try to incorporate the good parts of economic/evopsych cynicism into my view of human affairs, I end up with more questions than answers.