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Read the passage and answer the below question.

The difficulties historians face in establishing cause-and-effect relations in the history of human societies are broadly similar to the difficulties facing astronomers, climatologists, ecologists and evolutionary biologists, geologists, and palaeontologists. To varying degrees each of these fields is plagued by the impossibility of performing replicated, controlled and experimental inventions, the complexity arising from enormous numbers of variables, the resulting uniqueness of each system, the consequent impossibility of formulating universal laws, and the difficulties of predicting emergent properties and future behavior. Prediction in history, as in other historical sciences, is most feasible on large spatial scales and over long times, when the unique features of millions of small-scale brief events become averaged out. Just as I could predict the sex ratio of the $1,000$ newborn but the sexes of my own two children, the historians can recognize factors that made inevitable the broad outcome of the collision between the American and Eurasian societies after $13,000$ years of separate developments, but not the outcome of the $1960$ U.S. presidential election. The details of which candidate said what during a single televised debate in October $1960$ could have given the electoral victory to Nixon instead of to Kennedy, but no details of who said what could have blocked the European conquest of Native Americans.

How can students of human history profit from the experience of scientists in other historical science? A methodology that has proved useful involves the comparative method and so-called natural experiments. While neither astronomers studying galaxy formation nor human historians can manipulate their systems in controlled  laboratory experiments, they both can take advantage of natural experiments, by comparing systems differing in the presence or absence (or in the string or weak effect) of some putative causative factor. For example, epidemiologists, forbidden to feed large amounts of salt to people experimentally, have still been able to identify effects of high salt intake by comparing the groups of human who already differ greatly in their salt intake; and cultural anthropologists, unable to provide human groups experimentally with varying resource abundances for many centuries, still study long-term effects of resource abundance on human societies by comparing recent Polynesian population living on islands differing naturally in resource abundance.

The student of human history can draw on many more natural experiments than just comparisons among the five inhabited continents. Comparisons can also utilize large islands that have developed complex societies in a considerable degree of isolation (such as Japan, Madagaskar, Native American Hisponiola, New Guinea, Hawaii and many others), as well as societies on hundreds of smaller islands and regional societies within each of the continents. Natural experiments in any field, whether in ecology or human history, are inherently open to potential methodological criticisms. Those include confounding effects of natual variation in addition variables besides the one of interest, as well as problems in inferring chains of causation from observed correlations between variables. Such methodological problems have been discussed in great detail for some of the historical sciences. In particular, epidemiology, the science of drawing inferences about human diseases by comparing groups of people (often by retrospective historical studies), has for a longtime successfully employed formalized procedures for dealing with problems similar to those facing historians of human societies.

In short, I acknowledge that it is much more difficult to understand human history than to understand problems in fields of science where history is unimportant and where fewer individual variables operate. Nevertheless, successful methodologies for analyzing historical problems have been worked out in several fields. As a result, the histories of dinosaurs, nebulae, and glaciers are generally acknowledged to belong to fields of science rather than to the humanities.

According to the author, why is prediction difficult in history?

  1. Historical explanations are usually broad so that no prediction is possible
  2. Historical out comers depend upon a large number of factors and hence prediction is difficult for each case
  3. Historical sciences, by their very nature, are not interested in a multitude of minor factors, which might be important in a specific historical outcome
  4. Historians are interested in evolution of human history and hence are hence are only interested in long-term predictions.
  5. Historical sciences suffer from the inability to conduct controlled experiments and  therefore have explanations based on a few long-term factors.
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