Bigfoot?

[Bignose]

The only difference between us is that I expect all claims to be backed by some kind of proof. It's not enough to cry "fake" as to me that is making a claim. You want to make a claim, fine, now back it up. (emphasis yours)

 

Seriously though, I write off claims of invisible things as rubbish instantly. My comments referred only to the proof or disproof of things like video footage, photographs and casts, physical things.

 

So, somewhere between these two statements, there is some middle ground. Because 1st all statements have to have some proof, and yet you dismiss some things as rubbish instantly. There are some statements which even you don't require proof for.

 

Basically, all this comes down to is, your standards are some things are different that others. That's perfectly fine. I think that we all do this to a certain extent. I accept the word that Penn and Teller faked a video, because as was mentioned above, that is exactly the kind of thing they would do. I don't need any further substantiation.

 

Science is like this too. You give a talk at a conference, and there will be people in the audience who go along exactly with what you say. And there will be some audience members who will ask questions, or will need further evidence to be convinced. This happens everywhere, you just want more proof on hoax claims, and that's fine.

[Edtharan]

If you doubt this, then kindly list any form of evidence (short of a body) that he could have presented.

Lets look at this:

 

Lets say that a defendant is in court and the prosecution shows a video of the defendant robbing a bank (the crime he is accused of). However, then Defence shows another video time stamped at the same time showing the defendant as being in another place.

 

We can easily conclude that one of the videos is faked.

 

At this point we can do one of two things.

 

1) Look for other corroborating evidence or look at the probability of them being faked (and remember both could be faked).

 

2) Analyse the videos for signs of fakery.

 

Neither are perfect. If we take option (1) then this only give a probability of faker and if we take option (2) we can still come up with an inconclusive result.

 

Now, with Foot Prints and other such evidence, we encounter a problem in that we have two options (faked or not faked) and two claims to that effect.

 

Both sides then have a need to show that the other claim is wrong. But if we can't do it, then the safer option is to fall back on the "falsifyability" of the scientific method and leave the evidence out.

 

If the evidence was not faked, then more evidence that has corroborating evidence will be found and then this can be used to re-examine the initial evidence.

 

However, if the evidence was faked, then this mistake could be used to support other false data and we then come to a conclusion that is not based on reality.

 

It is far safer to come to an incorrect conclusion that can subsequently be easily falsified, than to come to an incorrect conclusion that can't easily be falsified.

 

This is why scientists reject these pieces of evidence, as they are inconclusive, it is safer to leave them out than to include them.

 

IF a body of Big Foot was discovered, many scientists would reopen the debate on these other items of evidence and analyse them with the new knowledge that they then have corroborating evidence (the body).

 

It is a bit like me saying that I fliped a coin 1000 times nad the result was that the coin had a 50/50 chance of being heads or tails, then asking you, based on that evidence to reach a conclusion that the coin would land specifically on heads or land on tails.

 

The evidence is inconclusive about whether the coin will be heads or tails. We can not know. So the only response is to state that you don't have enough information to make a judgement.

 

However, what is going on is that when those claiming big foot exists, they then present more inconclusive evidence in an effort to support heir claim that big foot exists.

 

Again, using the coin analogy, it would be like you asking for better information so as to be able to make your determinations, but then I just give you another 1000 coin flips that have the same 50/50 probability.

 

However, if I showed that the coin alternated between heads and tails between flips (so flip 1 would be heads then flip 2 would be tails and so on completely regularly for the 1000 flips), then this is enough information for you to make a prediction about the next coin toss.

 

The problem with the evidence is that they have been show to be faked, or that it could ahve been faked. This makes the evidence inconclusive for big foot.

 

Sure, a large number of items of evidence could be enough, but the items of evidence we have is nowhere near enough to reach such a conclusion.

 

Further what evidence we have, for many and various reasons, is suspect anyway.

 

One of these is consistency.

 

Often there is a lot of variation between the forms of evidence presented. Like footprints, there is differences of the structure of the feet that made the different prints. Now in a large population, this might be acceptable, but if the population is small enough that it could remain hidden, then the genetic variation will be small and you would not get this kind of variation in the population.

 

This is a kind of noise, so that if one or a few of these prints were genuine, the number of faked prints would make detecting the real form fake hard if not impossible to do. It becomes inconclusive and the only safe assumption is to "put it on the back shelf" until we can find more reliable corroborating evidence.

 

Seriously though, I write off claims of invisible things as rubbish instantly.

Why?

 

This is the point being raised.

 

You dismiss it as being rubbish, but that is because you don't have good evidence that it does exist. As you have made the claim that it is rubbish, then according to your argument, you have to prove that their claims are rubbish and that we don't have to prove that it exists any more.

 

Can you now see where we are coming form. We are taking the exact same stance as you are about invisible things and requiring that evidence be presented for them, rather than evidence be presented for fakery first.

 

With Bog Foot it is exactly the same thing.

 

On that basis, no evidence will ever be good enough. Even something authentic has only to be accused of being fake and that's it. You're setting up a situation where one side has to provide "proof of claim" and the other side does not. You couldn't run a high school debate under those rules.

It is not the same as this. When others have accused the evidence presented for Big Foot as being fake, it is not just that we are pulling it out of the air. There is usually a good reason for that claim, but hat it would take a lot of detailed technical knowledge and a lot of time to explain why.

 

I have often been accused on these forums for writing long posts, but that is because I take the time to try to explain why I reached the conclusion I did or hold the positions I do.

 

Not everyone has the time to be able to do this.

 

Also, many people haven't been trained in the art of communication.

 

So, just because someone hasn't written a lengthy dissection and discussion on why that piece of evidence is faked, does not mean that they are just claiming it to be wrong with no real supporting evidence.

[JohnB]

Basically, all this comes down to is, your standards are some things are different that others. That's perfectly fine. I think that we all do this to a certain extent. I accept the word that Penn and Teller faked a video, because as was mentioned above, that is exactly the kind of thing they would do. I don't need any further substantiation.

I just expect a reference. The footage was faked by Penn and Teller for their Bullsh*t program. It's the lack of reference that bugs the daylights out of me. References help establish the validity of the claim, just as they do for a published paper. If we take the reverse situation, someone claiming that their evidence had been validated by "Dr. So and so" would be expected to provide corroboration. For me, someone claiming fakery is expected to do so also. It's quite simple really.

 

You're right, finding the middle ground is the problem. Why write off the "invisible" things? Because there is no possible way to test them. If they were moving things around, then we could test what they do. However, planting cameras and even filming things being moved for no apparent reason is not enough. All this would prove is that things moved, it would not prove the idea that they were moved by invisible fairies. There are two questions here;

1. Do things move? (and if Yes)

2. Why do they move? (Is it the fairies or the 3.6 quake down the road?)

 

Let's try to answer one question at a time and then we might find your invisible fairies. (Or an undiscovered fault line, which is still a plus.)

Lets look at this:

 

Lets say that a defendant is in court and the prosecution shows a video of the defendant robbing a bank (the crime he is accused of). However, then Defence shows another video time stamped at the same time showing the defendant as being in another place.

 

We can easily conclude that one of the videos is faked.

 

At this point we can do one of two things.

 

1) Look for other corroborating evidence or look at the probability of them being faked (and remember both could be faked).

 

2) Analyse the videos for signs of fakery.

Apples and oranges. We don't have footage of bigfoot somewhere else. Don't forget, I only used the courtroom to demonstrate the absurdity of accepting cries of "fake" without some sort of proof. In your example there is equivilent proof and therefore is sufficient to cast doubt on the original footage.

 

As an aside, a Brissy driver won a court case on such proof. A red light camera showed him going through a light and the law is that a red light photo is definitive evidence. Unfortunately, there was a glitch in the system and he was able to produce a second red light camera photo showing him some three miles from the original offence. Apparently the camera fed the same photo to the computer twice, with two different location stamps.

 

I do appreciate your attention to detail, however you didn't answer the question. "Short of a body, what could he have produced?" Because doubt has been cast (quite rightly in most cases) over the previous evidence, what is left? It's in this that I find our expectation to be unfair.

 

Is it fair to ask somebody to produce more (better) evidence while at the same time telling them that because such evidence can be/has been faked before, we are not going to listen to them anyway? This is not the way to get people to think that they will get a fair hearing, is it?

 

Again, it's not about bigfoot, it's about our methodology.

 

You previously gave the example of the platypus. The learned men in Europe knew that such a creature could not exist. Everything they knew told them so. The much simpler and far less educated aborigines had no such trouble. They knew the thing existed, because they ate it. I'm reminded of a time when I saw a man with a Mobius strip in his hand declaring that "A piece of paper with only one side is impossible."

 

Which I think brings us back to "What is extraordinary?" I would think that a reasonable definition is that it is something that challenges our worldview. There is an unconscious worldview programmed into each of us. This is that western thought and science is supreme. This is reinforced by the way we are taught history. Nothing ever happened until a european did it, nothing was discovered until a european discovered it. For 2,000 years we've had it drilled into us that man (generally in the form of christian, western european man) is the ultimate in God's creation. Frankly, I don't buy it.

 

A good example here is the idea of a flat world. That silly primitive idea. The only people who thought it was flat were the early christians. The Romans knew it was round, because the Greeks taught them it was. The Greeks knew because the Egyptians proved it to them. And the Egyptians knew because they bloody measured the thing. But it's not taught that way, is it? We teach that early civs thought the world was flat until European "science" proved otherwise.

 

Things like bigfoot challenge our thinking in that they represent something that science may not know. Should that be the case, then it can't be supreme, can it? It's this challenge that makes the claim extraordinary, not the claim. Similarly with aliens. Noone seriously doubts that life is out there, that doesn't challenge our standing. However, the idea that they can come here, do something we cannot do, in fact do something we say is impossible. That scares us. It makes us feel so second rate as to be out of the running. It challenges our worldview and is therefore "extraordinary".

 

As to dismissing invisible things. Well if there is only someones word for their existence, yes I do. If you want me to agree that there might be invisible fairies in the garden, then give some proof. As I said to Bignose, provide some sort of evidence that can be evaluated, film of them moving something for example.

 

The scientific method can deal with many things, what it does have trouble with are multiple variables. In the case of bigfoot, "No evidence for" may mean the creature doesn't exist, or it may mean it is very rare and very good at hiding. But we can't tell which, hence the use of logical constructions. However, a construction is just that, a construction, an extrapolation. It is not proof.

 

Again. Although this is in a "Bigfoot" thread, I'm not arguing for the existence of the creature. I'm talking about thought processes and how we treat people and their evidence.

Edited September 28, 2008 by JohnB
typos

[Edtharan]

Apples and oranges. We don't have footage of bigfoot somewhere else. Don't forget, I only used the courtroom to demonstrate the absurdity of accepting cries of "fake" without some sort of proof. In your example there is equivilent proof and therefore is sufficient to cast doubt on the original footage.

I am not talking about the location of Big Foot, but I evidence against its existance.

 

Biology and genetics places a certain limit on population densities. We know what limits primate (and even big primates) need in these cases to maintain a viable population.

 

The population densities that are demonstrated by Big Foot in the Capture - Recapture method of determining population densities indicates that the population density of Big Foot is far below the level needed to maintain a viable population.

 

You see I was talking about evidence that casts doubt on the validity of the first piece of evidence. Remember in my example either photo could have been faked. The evidence didn't prove that the first was a fake, it only cast doubt on it.

 

That was my point.

 

I do appreciate your attention to detail, however you didn't answer the question. "Short of a body, what could he have produced?" Because doubt has been cast (quite rightly in most cases) over the previous evidence, what is left? It's in this that I find our expectation to be unfair.

As the list of evidence that could be use is quite large (and I don't know what all of them could be), I instead chose to explain how you could identify evidecne that would answer your question.

 

ie: Evidence that does not ahve doubt about its validity.

 

A body is one easy piece of evidence. Bones (they would die), fossils (they would have had to evolve from something), photographic evidence by a reputable wildlife photographer (all have been from questionable sources so far), large scale sighting (like it wanders into the middle of a town), nest (they would sleep at some time), etc. There is a mountain of such evidence that could be presented.

 

Is it fair to ask somebody to produce more (better) evidence while at the same time telling them that because such evidence can be/has been faked before, we are not going to listen to them anyway?

 

If the evidence is questionable, then it wouldn't be "better" would it.

 

If we say give us better evidence and they don't, is it fair to come to the same conclusion (tha that evidence is still not reliable)?

 

If we say give us better evidence and they did, it would be fair to considder that evidence. However, this has so far not happened.

 

Again, it's not about bigfoot, it's about our methodology.

You are right. It is about the methodology. If someone claims to be doing science, then they should be following the scientific method.

 

Science is about describing reality, it activly tries to avoide making mistakes where by we accept something that is not real. Because of this science uses the process of: Disproving the negative.

 

You can never disprove the posititive. For instance if you start out with the assumption that Big Foot exists, then no matter how much proof of faked evidence: Big Foot still might actually exist. There is no way that you can actually disprove the assuption that Big Foot exists (as this thread clearly shows).

 

However, science uses the "Disprove the Negative". This can be done. For instance if you start with the assumption that Big Foot doesn't exist, then a single conclusive proof of its existance disproves this assumtion and then we can be certain that Big Foot does exist.

[dirtyamerica]

I think that "Bigfoot" exists. I only base my belief on one idea. The fact that we know we have not discovered all living organisms yet leaves the door open....

 

But...

 

I think most "evidence" isn't actually supportive like the above posts also suggest. Data of an unknown source does not = BIGFOOT!

 

Take a yeti hunter, a ufologist and a telepath. Let them perceive something unknown and watch them argue what just happened until they're all blue in the face.

 

There's a lot of "reseach" done on mysterious phenomena that lacks a scientific approach.

[TrickyPeach]

I think that "Bigfoot" exists. I only base my belief on one idea. The fact that we know we have not discovered all living organisms yet leaves the door open....

 

 

 

Google earth would have spotted it.

 

Surely that big of an animal would have been found by now.

[xnebulalordx676]

Scientific observance: A. Hairy suits were available as hoax even during the eighteen hundreds . B. Indians are more convinced of bigfoot than others throughout the ages. C. Hypothesis: Since the 1800's many pioneers have wanted to scare Indians way from their camps. I think they did so by wearing hairy costumes handed down through the generations with their ignorant selves.

Result: bigfoot be preposterous.

[JohnB]

Edtharan, fair enough. I think the only difference here is that of assumptions. I'm not making one.

 

I fully accept that this is not in accord with the scientific method as is usually described. However a thought process can be methodical, logical, valid and use science without following the "disprove assumptions" track.

 

To look at it from a different perspective. You have a dead person with no obvious marks to show cause of death. Murder, suicide or natural causes? By your methodology I must make an assumption of one of these three and disprove it. By my methodology, I make no assumptions. I gather evidence until I can make a conclusion. I work on the basis of evaluating evidence without previous assumptions.

 

I do give (some) weight to eyewitness accounts, for as the "rogue wave" debacle showed, 400 years of eyewitness accounts were right and the 20th C science was wrong. Also, in many nations eyewitness accounts are considered sufficient to send people to be executed, so to write them off out of hand is unreasonable.

 

Concerning bigfoot, on the plus side are poor, possibly faked videos and eyewitness accounts. While on the minus is the genetic evidence that you have outlined. (And lack of otherwise corroborating evidence) My current thinking is "data insufficient" for forming a conclusion.

 

If you reread my posts, you will see that this is the position I've argued for. Rather than arguing for bigfoot, I've been saying that there is insufficient evidence to rule it out. Hence the "Bigfoot is impossible" is an untenable argument. Again, this is not to say that it does exist, just that you are using "lack of evidence" and extrapolations to base your conclusion on, a position I disagree with.

 

xnebulalordx676.

 

Hypothesis incomplete and untenable, as it fails to explain the sightings from other areas of the world. The first "Yowie" sighting in Oz was in 1789:D did your "pioneers" spend time in the Himalyas scaring the sherpas as well?

[xnebulalordx676]

Those who favored scaring native peoples as a manner from their land be a fair scientific guess. Yes Caucasians capable of doing that scaring or any act against some natives would have been to Himalayas exploring during the eighteenth century before. Do you think the idea of hairy suits has not existed before pioneers. The idea of scaring someone out of the woods must predate the bible age.

Hypothesis incomplete and untenable, as it fails to explain the sightings from other areas of the world. The first "Yowie" sighting in Oz was in 1789:D did your "pioneers" spend time in the Himalyas scaring the sherpas as well?

[JohnB]

The various unsavoury methods used to remove natives from their land are well documented, yet there are no records of your proposed method.

 

Are you suggesting that along with the "Illuminati" and "Gnomes of Zurich" there exists "The Most Secret and Most High Society for the Wearers of Hairy Suits"?

[mooeypoo]

... and I was sure that the first time he wrote the idea it was a joke... I mean.. erm.. just for the sake of clarity here, xnebulalordx676 - are you raising a serious hypothesis or is this just a fun-and-laughs thing?

 

.. personally I thought it was funny, but I didn't think to consider this as a serious suggestion after the few jokes that were posted just before it.. do correct me if I'm wrong here.

[Megabrain]

So where did this supposed 'animal' originate? and why hasn't 'Bigfoot City Wyoming POP 12834 Neandathals' been found on Google earth yet?