Dave Hone

Yeah.

We try to, but the thing is it's, it's, it's always getting better, which is, so that's what I tried 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, this, you know, the trackway stuff.

And it's 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, I now feel like I've just written a book trashing my entire field and all my colleagues.

many of my colleagues.

And then you flip it on its head and going, 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 like yeah you 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 maybe how they're reproducing so

I'd like to 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 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.

Yep.

Mostly probably pretty quickly, but it really is the answer that I think most people are now probably familiar with, which is it's an asteroid impact or some kind of extraterrestrial body.