Dave Hone: belief

Transcript context

…This is so fascinating, like, once again, figuring out this puzzle. And what does cannibalism tell you? You’re piecing together the story of T-Rex: their life, their hunting life, their social life, from their evolution to their biology to their behavior. That’s so fascinating. Yeah, we try to. But the thing is, it’s always getting better, which is… So that’s what I try to finish on in my book on behavior is, I felt I’d written a couple of hundred pages of, “We keep screwing this up, we’ve overstated this, I think people have misunderstood this.” You know, like the track ways stuff and like, this is not as confident as we think, you need to look at these alternate explanations. This behavior shows that that behavior probably doesn’t correlate the way you said it does, yada, yada, yada. And it’s like, now I feel like I’ve just written a book trashing my entire field and all my colleagues, or at least many of my colleagues. But then you flip it on its head and go, “We’ve got techniques that were undreamed of 10 years ago. We’ve got data streams that were undreamed of 10 years ago. And we’ve actually got a much better understanding of living species.” And then on top of that, we’re just constantly finding new animals. You know, we have not just new species, which are often, I think, a lot less important, but just new specimens of ones we know, because again, it’s building up that database. You know, we drifted off talking about sexual selection, but yeah, if you want to know growth, one or two animals doesn’t tell you how an animal, a species grows. 50 or 100 does, and then that reveals a hell of a lot more about things like sexual dimorphism and growth rate and how vulnerable juveniles are and population structure and maybe how they’re reproducing. So I’d like to think I knocked down. I think I knocked down a few towers that probably a few people were fond of, but I think we have the raw materials to build a much better, stronger edifice of behavior. But as you say, it’s always going to be based around often very piecemeal evidence and possibilities and probabilities rather than certainties. Let’s talk about a sad topic, extinction.…

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