As highlighted in a recent perspective article (Science 359:738, 2018), in ecology, exact predictions are extremely challenging. In the presentation, we ask how do species evolve in environments with asymmetric fluctuating temperature profiles. We study how natural selection do not lead to adaption to the mean temperature but to a value that is shifted and given by the skewness of the temperature profile. This prediction is derived from first principles and first results are presented in nematodes. More generally, we discuss effects from ergodicity breaking for evolutionary game theory (Stollmeier & Nagler, Phys. Rev. Lett. 120:058101, 2018), coupled ecosystems and for climate change. In the final part, we ask how to beat seemingly universally optimal strategies (Extortion Zero Determinant Strategies) and how seemingly unresolvable conflicts (such as Prisoner's dilemmas) can be resolved in complex noisy environments and how does machine intelligence (Timme & Nagler, Nature Phys. 15:308, 2019) helps in noisy systems.