A Note on Honest Doubts
A naturalist's chief duty is to the truth, including the awkward truth of what is not yet known. The reader will have noticed that this volume, at several turns, declined to give a single tidy number where the science offers a range — the count of taste buds on a tongue, the exact multiple by which umami synergy amplifies a broth, the final verdict on whether fat is truly a sixth taste. This was not evasion but honesty. Where the evidence is genuinely unsettled, the honest course is to say so and to hedge, rather than to borrow a false precision the laboratory has not yet earned. Every quotation in these pages has been checked against its source; every mechanism described is the current best understanding; and wherever that understanding is still an argument rather than a settled fact, the argument has been left visible, as a good field note leaves visible the specimen it could not quite identify.
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