I find it hard to call that paper a smoking gun. It makes a great case and offers testable hypotheses but does not indicate that those hypotheses have been test

I find it hard to call that paper a smoking gun. It makes a great case and offers testable hypotheses but does not indicate that those hypotheses have been tested yet. It was also just one of 16 very different theories submitted to the same meeting: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/toc/rstb/2023/378/1885 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/toc/rstb/2023/378/1885 What I skimmed of the other 15 all had similarly great cases, despite very different thinking, and similarly untested hypotheses. I don't think there is a single easy answer here. Certainly there are a lot of offered "easy" answers, among the 16 above, and all the more you see in threads around here. Again, this seems too complex a puzzle in general and the more pieces we find the more questions we have and hypotheses to test. (Whether or not you agree with my skepticism of calories and belief that they are an outdated and uselessly unscientific metric.)