Dave Hone: belief

Transcript context

……we have cities and… …And rockets. Tiktaalik specifically, there’s something really mind-boggling about a fish that crawls out of the sea, just the image of that. Yeah, but again, you’ve got stuff that’s not a million miles away from that. You have things like frogfish, which are fully marine, but kind of clamber through seaweed and stuff, and they’ve got pseudo-functional limbs. It’s again, because it’s that… Tiktaalik is not a weirdly derived frogfish, but it’s not like it’s a fish that suddenly came on land or a fish that suddenly evolved legs. There was already that selective pressure that was pushing it into a new opportunity, which gave it an… and then on and on and on, and that’s what keeps going. But it also brings up another thing, going back to dinosaurs and the behavior stuff, which again, I think has been a problem, is the functionality thing, and how there’s always been, I think, this big perception of single traits having single functions, which isn’t how a huge amount of biology works. For some, yeah. Like, eyes are used for seeing. They don’t really do anything else. But I think there’s a lot of… again, it comes down to a lot of the sexual selection stuff, but things like horns on Triceratops. That’s probably quite good for fighting off predators, but it’s also quite good for fighting other Triceratops. And then things like elephants dig with their tusks as well as fight other elephants, as well as fight lions, as well as stripping the bark off trees. So, you’ve got to be very careful about how you think of functionality in two different ways. One way is, what possible things could that thing do? And what possible things could have been the main selective pressure before? So, you think about elephant tusks. As I say, they do all these different things. But when an elephant’s just got the tiniest… …little nubs, like the first elephant whose teeth are growing the wrong way and have pushed out of its jaw, and now it’s got a couple of little spikes, it can’t really dig a hole with them. It’s certainly not digging for water. They’re probably not great against a predator, because you’d basically have to get on your knees to try and lean over and try and stab it a bit. But you can show off to the girls, and you can immediately find another elephant who’s head-to-head the same height as you, and you’ve got a massive advantage. So evolutionarily, they probably started as some kind of sexually selected feature. But now, functionally, they are probably compromised by the fact that having the best fighting tusks, but also having the tusks that are best at digging up water to keep you alive during a drought, is putting selective pressure on that. ably compromised by the fact that having the best fighting tusks, but also having the tusks that are best at digging up water to keep you alive during a drought, is putting selective pressure on that. And those are, are those selections, sexual selection appears in both ends. Those are two different things. Digging for water is critical, but it’s probably not what started it. And I think that’s where we get trapped with things like, say, the paddle tail of Spinosaurus or stuff like, or you know, or T-rex arms. It’s like, well, why are T-rex arms like that? Well, maybe we need to consider what a slightly longer arm is like or what it was being functioned for in its ancestors or how it works in other species or what else it might do, rather than every paper is like, “Did it do this,” or, “Did it do this,” or, “Did it do this?” It’s like, you know, it could be all of them. That’s… …a very different question to try and answer, but people don’t tend to think of it. And it ends up being very binary. And again, biology is not like that, because it’s a compromise.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.