Boyle's gas law can be discovered without knowing anything about a kinetic theory of gases or quantum mechanics. You can discover "high level" laws (effective but incomplete approximations to reality) without knowing how to model the system components at the individual level. Inexact, sure, but with (limited) analytic and predictive power.
In Biology you don't know how all the cells of a population of wolves and rabbits works or his present state. But you can use predator-prey models to predict (at some level) population fluctuations.
If science awaited to have a complete description at the most fundamental level to make predictions, there will be no progress at all. By discovering "high level" laws you can get closer to "lower level" ones, as Boyle is an step to get to QM (what's the cart and what's the horse). Maybe all "laws" are emergent and our models only approximations, and there is no fundamental ones to be discovered, so gravity, etc, are much more complex and "systemic" we think.
But sure, there is lot of epistemological traps, pseudoscience, bullshit and honest dead ends in the process.
In Biology you don't know how all the cells of a population of wolves and rabbits works or his present state. But you can use predator-prey models to predict (at some level) population fluctuations.
If science awaited to have a complete description at the most fundamental level to make predictions, there will be no progress at all. By discovering "high level" laws you can get closer to "lower level" ones, as Boyle is an step to get to QM (what's the cart and what's the horse). Maybe all "laws" are emergent and our models only approximations, and there is no fundamental ones to be discovered, so gravity, etc, are much more complex and "systemic" we think.
But sure, there is lot of epistemological traps, pseudoscience, bullshit and honest dead ends in the process.