Dave Hone

And one famous one called Cope's Rule I've worked on a fair bit, which is the idea that over time things tend to get bigger and they do for various different reasons.

one of which is just pure, almost like diffusion.

If you start small and you evolve...

well you can't get much smaller but you can always get bigger so you naturally kind of diffuse away whereas if you're a blue whale you probably can't get much bigger and its descendants will probably end up being smaller but there are reasons that bigger things do better you can hunt more stuff you're more energy efficient you can move more efficiently um you're dominant in contests particularly with conspecifics if you're trying to win a territory or win mating rights

Bigger things usually beat up smaller things.

So there's going to be selection favoring them.

But then big things don't usually do well in extinction events.

So that tends to reset the clock by killing off the big stuff and then smaller stuff does better.

So mostly there's evolutionary advantages.

But a fairly big one.

So yeah, it's the classic thing of there's a day-to-day advantage of being bigger and that might last for a few million years right up to the point that suddenly there's the biggest drought the Earth has encountered in five million years and then all the big stuff just gets nailed.

Yeah, there's just less fundamental space.

You know, there's more mice than there are elephants.

There are more elephants than there are whales.

Like, there's only so much biomass that an ecosystem can support.

Right, so they're less likely to survive because they need more fuel.

You know, what would feed a mouse for a year won't feed an elephant for a week.

So if, and, and of course the mice are going to have an easier time finding a few little seeds than elephants going to find tons of food.

And then they've got less genetic diversity.

There might be 5,000 mice.