For anyone who wants a concrete experiment to challenge your ideas of just how complex nature is, try making a cell. Just one cell. From scratch with nothing but ions and proteins. If you find that to be achievable (there's likely a Nobel prize in it for you), try making one that divides. Now imagine that somehow an elephant can be encoded in the ions/proteins of just two cells. Humanity has never built anything that even comes close to such complexity. And then to imagine that ecosystems operate on the complex interactions between these immensely complex organisms.
Just because I’m not a skilled enough developer to code Linux from scratch doesn’t mean I can’t make a patch for it.
Also doesn’t guarantee that I won’t generate unintended consequences
Point being - you don’t have to be capable of making the whole to make modifications. (But in any complex system, there are likely to be unintended consequences)
A good example would be immune modulation for cancer therapy - ipilimumab and it’s ilk are miracle workers for many, however because of the complexity of the immune system in a proportion of patients there is a cascade of multi organ failure kicked off by the treatment
