Dave Hone: belief

Transcript context

…And so it could be very effective even just with a small amount of data. I mean, you could— But it’s the right amount of data. That’s the thing. We can find dozens of skeletons that we can’t do very much with, and then the right one that… you know, things like stomach contents, that’s a super powerful bit of data, or bite marks, but it doesn’t turn up that often. So it’s not like you can get it off every skeleton. And that’s the thing, it’s the pool of data, and I think that’s what people miss. We as paleontologists get caught up on single superlative specimens and then try and treat them as a silver bullet almost. So Microraptor, I mentioned this before, a little flying dinosaur, crow-sized, or gliding dinosaur, crow-sized thing from China. We’ve got, oh, at least a dozen good specimens of it by now and multiple ones with stomach contents. There’s one I’ve described with a little mammal foot inside it, there’s one with a bird inside it, there’s one with a lizard inside it, and there’s one with a fish inside it. On their own, and this happened for at least two of the papers describing these things, it’s like, “It ate fish. These are fish-eating animals.” No, that one ate one fish once. That one ate one bird once, that one ate one mammal once, and that one ate one lizard once. So what have we actually got here? I suspect we’ve got a group of generalists and we just happen to have found them eating different things at different times. But equally, it’s also possible, at least, that, yeah, this is one of these things and it had learned to eat fish when the others hadn’t, and actually this was mostly fish eaters and the others ate whatever they could get. Maybe one caught a bird up a tree in a nest, maybe one found it dead on the ground. You don’t really know what one of these things on its own is fascinating, but potentially misleading. Well, the way you’re describing it now, it seems like, yes, it’s potentially misleading, but there’s… in your whole way of being and the way you’ve been talking about this stuff, I can see that it’s not just the direct evidence you’re mentioning. It’s like, it’s a bunch of intuitions you build up. It’s like you’re stitching together a bunch of little things. It’s the Sherlock Holmes thing. Not just the clearly this one piece of evidence. It’s like, “Okay, what do I know about the general other dinosaurs that are on the Earth, what the different animals?” “How animals usually behave about this period, about the environment?” And all of that comes together and then… …Figuring out which is true.…

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