Most Bigfoot believers were angry that their work had been besmirched by a silly hoax, yet they continue to promote equally unlikely claims on a regular basis. Their gullibility should not be surprising: cryptozoology is built on openness to first-person testimony. More disturbing is the attitude of the mainstream media, which has long tended to approach “silly season” paranormal stories and monster yarns with a looser standard than that applied to other news items. That unfortunate double standard seems to be worsening, rather than improving. Would the Georgia Bigfoot—a story of questionable origin, with no independent sources to back it up—have made the evening news a generation ago, when there were only three networks and limited programming on television? Perhaps not. Those who remember the Watergate scandal and the book All the President’s Men will recall that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had to track down multiple reliable sources before publishing their allegations about the misdeeds in the White House. Today, the situation has changed: the modern television and Internet news are so hungry for anything to fill their airtime and Web space that they are much more likely to accept and report dubious stories from questionable sources without adequate (or in some cases, any) journalistic due diligence. With twenty-four-hour cable television, such a story may run many times before anyone has a chance to check it. Even more to blame is the huge number of “documentaries” of pseudoscience on cable television, including those on stations that used to broadcast actual science documentaries. These stations promote pseudoscientific ideas just to draw audiences, earn high ratings, and justify their existence.
WHAT SCIENCE IS—AND IS NOT
Lost in the media firestorm generated by the Georgia Bigfoot stunt and in the huffing and puffing by the various pro-Bigfoot organizations was any scientific, critical perspective on the entire process. Almost all the “experts” who were interviewed about the hoax were committed believers in the reality of Bigfoot; their claims to “expertise” were that they had a Web site, wrote a book, or headed an organization dedicated to finding Bigfoot. Almost no actual biologists or other real scientists with relevant training were interviewed, and the story died so quickly that there was little commentary on it among scientists, even in the blogosphere. About the only exception was Thomas Nelson, a wildlife biologist and ecologist at North Georgia College and State University. With twenty years of experience in the area, he knows the wildlife of the “Bigfoot habitat” better than most. As he told local reporters, “Science is always open to new discoveries; however, the chances that a Bigfoot species exists anywhere in the world is highly unlikely. If Bigfoot inhabited North Georgia, people would have known about them long ago. Although the southern Appalachians might seem remote to some people, there are thousands of deer hunters, hikers, mushroom hunters, and campers using these forests throughout the year.”10 Nelson pointed out that there are legends of giants and monsters worldwide, but few of these stories have proved to be real. In particular, he pointed out that there are many possible sources of Bigfoot myths, including bears and vivid imaginations. “Or perhaps,” he said, “we just like to think that there are wild things in our world that are bigger and wilder than us. There is an upside to the media coverage, even if it did turn out to be a hoax. The coverage provided a ‘teachable moment’ to demonstrate to people how science works. We are open to new ideas, but skeptical until there is good supporting evidence—even of Bigfoot.”
Nelson raised an important point about the “teachable moment”: despite the gullibility of the media and the public, the Georgia Bigfoot hoax helps us think clearly about the scientific method. Science is about testing hypotheses, or offering ideas that may explain some facet of nature and seeing if they hold up to critical scrutiny. As philosopher Karl Popper pointed out, science is not about proving things true, but proving them false. You can make the general inductive statement “All swans are white,” but all the white swans in the world do not prove that the statement is true. One black swan easily falsifies the claim (figure 1.1). Scientists are open to any and every idea that can be proposed, no matter how crazy it may sound—but ultimately, for the idea to be accepted within the scientific community, it has to withstand the critical evaluation and peer-review process of the legions of scientists who are dedicated to shooting it down. Scientific hypotheses must always be tentative and subject to examination and modification, and they never reach the status of “final truth.”11
Figure 1.1 A native black swan in Perth, Australia. (Photograph courtesy of Kylie Sturgess)
Scientists are not inherently negative sourpusses who want to rain on everyone else’s parade. They are just cautious and skeptical about any idea that is proposed until it has survived the process of repeated testing and possible falsification and has come to be established or acceptable. They have good reason to be skeptical. Humans are capable of making all sorts of mistakes, entertaining false ideas, and practicing self-deception. Scientists cannot afford to blindly accept an unsubstantiated claim by one person or even a group of people. They are obligated as scientists to criticize and carefully evaluate and test it before it is acceptable as a scientific idea.
This cautious approach is necessary in part because scientists are human and thus subject to the same foibles that all mortals are. They love to see their ideas confirmed and to believe that they are right. Yet in all sorts of ways, scientists can misinterpret or over-interpret data to fit their biases. As the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman put it, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.” That is why many scientific experiments are run by the double-blind method: not only do the subjects of the experiments not know what is in sample A or sample B, but neither do the investigators. They arrange to have the samples coded, and only after the experiment is run do they open the key to the code and learn whether the results agree with their expectations.
So if scientists are human and can make mistakes, why does science work so well? The answer is testability and peer review. Individuals may be blinded by their own biases, but once they present their ideas in a lecture or publication, their work is subject to intense scrutiny by the scientific community. If the results cannot be replicated by another group of scientists, then they have failed the test. As Feynman put it, “It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.”
This happens routinely in scientific research, although most people never hear about it because it is so common that it never catches the attention of the media. The media love to report on flashy ideas that have just been proposed, such as a meteorite impact causing a particular mass extinction, but soon move on to other glamorous topics and never report the debunking of the initial assertion a year or two later. The infamous case of “cold fusion” claimed by Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann in 1989 was a rare exception, since it was so astonishing that laboratories all over the world dropped everything and tried to replicate their results. The news media saw the story go from flashy proposal to discredited hypothesis in a matter of weeks. But whether it happens in weeks or years, scientists eventually test important ideas. Over enough time, most of the good ideas in science have been thoroughly vetted by this process and have passed from hypothesis or speculation to a well-established reality. As the late great astronomer Carl Sagan said in his famous television show Cosmos, “There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong. That’s perfectly all right; they’re the aperture to finding out what’s right. Science is a self-correcting process. To be accepted, new ideas must survive the most rigorous standards of evidence and scrutiny.”
SCIENCE, BELIEF SYSTEMS, AND PSEUDOSCIENCE
The scientific method is often in direct conflict with many notions and beliefs that humans use to make decisions and guide their lives. Sometimes, a belief not only contradicts the discoveries of science and even common sense, but can harm the believers, as when members of snake-handling sects incorporate rattlesn
akes and copperheads into their rituals in the belief that God will protect them—but nearly every member of such groups is bitten sooner or later, and more than seventy people have died over the past eighty years. Adherents of some religions and even the recent rash of vaccination deniers refuse to accept the advantages of modern medicine, even though the evidence is overwhelming that vaccines are a safe and effective means to protect themselves and their children from the risk of serious illness (or even death). As Sagan put it, “If you want to save your child from polio, you can pray or you can inoculate.”12
Many nonscientific belief systems try to sound “scientific,” even though their ideas and methods do not correspond to those of science. They try to appropriate the respectability of science—science has done so much for our civilization and is held in high regard by many people—without actually doing science. They include such decidedly nonscientific belief systems as Christian Science (which actually rejects modern medicine) and Scientology, as well as the attempts by Christian fundamentalists to frame their biblical ideas as scientific creationism or creation science. But if their ideas were examined by strict scientific methods, they would fail the test; because their tenets cannot be falsified in the minds of their followers, they have nothing to do with real science.
The creationists, in particular, are tireless in their attempts at subterfuge. They first went by the relatively honest label “biblical creationism” until the federal courts threw out their efforts to include creationism in public-school science curricula because it would be a violation of the First Amendment principle of separation of church and state. So in the late 1960s, they simply renamed themselves scientific creationists and deleted the overt references to God in their textbooks. But it is clear from their documents that scientific creationism is simply old-fashioned biblical creationism without the obvious religious terminology. Even more revealing, creationists in many organizations must swear to an oath of literal acceptance of the Bible, and any scientific ideas they propose must be bent to conform to their version of Genesis. This is hardly the practice of real scientists, whose conclusions must be tentative and always subject to rejection and falsification. A series of federal court decisions saw through this creationist sham, so since the 1980s the creationists have tried to sneak their religious ideas into public schools by increasingly subtle methods. For about a decade, they used the ruse of intelligent design until they were shot down in December 2005 by a court decision in Dover, Pennsylvania. Now intelligent design is on the decline, no longer pushed on school districts. Currently, the creationists are using even sneakier tactics: “teach the controversy,” “teach the strengths and weaknesses of evolution,” and the like. But they always leave a paper trail. If you track down who sponsored the idea and what they have revealed about their religious motivations, it always boils down to yet another attempt to conceal their religious motivation. Once it reaches the court system, this newest attempt to insinuate an anti-evolution agenda into public schools will be rejected.
“BALONEY DETECTION” AND PSEUDOSCIENCE
The practice of making claims that appear to be scientific, but do not actually follow the scientific method of testability and falsification of hypotheses, is usually called pseudoscience. There are many kinds of pseudoscience—trying to give us (or sell us) answers to questions that we want answered or attempting to appeal to our sense of wonder and mystery—but all fail the criteria of science: testability, falsifiability, peer review, and rejection of ideas when they do not pan out. Most educated people have developed a sense of skepticism when it comes to everyday claims, like the lies, half-truths, and exaggerations that we hear in sales pitches, see in commercials, and read in advertisements. Our “baloney detection kit” (as Carl Sagan put it) is good at filtering out these assertions, and in most practical aspects of our lives we follow the maxim “caveat emptor” (let the buyer beware). Yet we ignore these filters when something promises to give us comfort or help with uncertainty. When a psychic claims to be able to communicate with our dead relatives, a snake-oil salesman or faith healer offers us phony cures for our ailments, or an astrologer or a fortune-teller professes to be able to forecast our future, they are preying on our vulnerability.
Even though Americans have one of the highest standards of living in the world, and one of the best educational systems, we are as gullible as ever. Poll after poll shows that high percentages of Americans believe in demonstrably false or pseudoscientific ideas—from UFOs to extrasensory perception (ESP), astrology, tarot cards, palm reading, and so on. It does not seem to matter that these notions have been repeatedly debunked. As Skeptic magazine publisher Michael Shermer points out, people have a need to believe in such things, since they provide comfort or help cope with the uncertainties of the future.13 We can all sympathize to some degree with how people might find reassurance in the predictions made by a fortune-teller or solace in the communiqués from the other world transmitted by a psychic. But it is puzzling that so many people believe in UFOs or give any credence to the vile and scary anti-Semitism of Holocaust deniers.
A number of general tools can be used to detect “baloney.” Most of them were offered by Shermer and Sagan,14 but this list will focus on those directly relevant to the subject of this book.
• Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence: This famous statement by Carl Sagan (based on Marcello Truzzi’s maxim “An extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof”) is the most important to the subject of cryptozoology.15 As Sagan noted, hundreds of routine discoveries and assertions are made by scientists nearly every day, but most are just small extensions of what is already known and do not require thorough testing by the scientific community. But it is typical of crackpots, fringe scientists, and pseudoscientists to make revolutionary pronouncements about the world and argue strenuously that they are right. For such claims, it is not sufficient to have just one or two suggestive pieces of evidence—such as blurry photographs, eyewitness accounts, and ambiguous footprints of, say, Bigfoot—when most of the proof goes against cherished hypotheses. Extraordinary evidence, such as the actual bones or even the corpse of the creature, is required to overcome the high probability that it does not exist.
• Burden of proof: In a criminal court, the prosecution must prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt, and the defense need do nothing if the prosecution fails to do so. In a civil court, the plaintiff has to prove its case based on a preponderance of the evidence, and the respondent need do nothing. In science, extraordinary claims have a higher burden of proof than do routine scientific advances because they aim to overthrow a larger body of knowledge. When evolution by means of natural selection was first proposed 150 years ago, it had the burden of proof because it sought to overturn the established body of creationist thought. Since then, so much evidence has accumulated to show that evolution has occurred that the burden of proof is back with the creationists, who seek to overthrow evolutionary biology. And the burden of proof lies with those who believe in the existence of most of the cryptids discussed in this book, since so much of what is claimed about them goes against everything we know from biology, geology, and other sciences.
• Authority, credentials, and expertise: One of the main strategies of pseudoscientists is to cite the credentials of the leading proponents of their claims as proof that they are credible. But a doctoral degree or advanced training is not enough; the “authority” must have advanced training in the relevant fields. Pointing to an advanced degree is a strategy to intimidate the members of an audience into believing that the holder of the degree is smarter than they are and an expert in everything. But those who have earned a doctorate know that it qualifies the holder to talk about only the field of her training, and during the long hard slog to get a dissertation project finished and written up, a doctoral candidate actually tends to lose some of his or her breadth of training in other subjects. Most scientists agree that anyone who is flaunting a doctoral degree while making his arguments is “
credential mongering.” A good rule of thumb: if a book says “Ph.D.” on the cover, its arguments probably cannot stand on their own merits.
Creationists do this all the time by pointing to lists of “scientists who do not accept evolution.” Those on the list, though, have degrees that are irrelevant to the fields they are critiquing: they often have degrees in engineering, hydrodynamics, physics, chemistry, mathematics, veterinary medicine, dentistry, and perhaps biochemistry. But among them are vanishingly few paleontologists or geologists and almost no biologists trained at major institutions. The absurdity of this strategy, which also is used by those who deny the reality of global warming, was revealed by the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), which fights creationist attacks on public-school science curricula. Rather than try to compile a list of the 99.99 percent of qualified scientists who do accept the reality of evolution (compared with the creationist list of a few dozen), the NCSE organized Project Steve.16 This list consists of just scientists whose name is Steve (or Steven, Stephen, Stefan, or Stephanie) and who accept evolution, which would make up less than 1 percent of all scientists who accept evolution—and it is much longer than the creationists’ total list, with more than 1,200 names so far!
The same can be said for proponents of cryptozoology. Few of those who promote cryptozoology or engage in cryptozoological research—including those on a “hall of fame” list of famous cryptozoologists17—have advanced degrees or relevant training in fields that could make them authorities in finding or documenting mysterious beasts. These fields include wildlife biology and ecology, systematic biology, paleontology, and physical anthropology. Most monster hunters are amateur enthusiasts who are not familiar with the rules of science and are not trained in the basics of ecology, paleontology, or field biology. Others boast impressive-sounding titles such as “zoologist” or “Dr.” while important clarifying information is omitted. For example, the late Richard Greenwell, a co-founder and longtime secretary of the defunct International Society of Cryptozoology (ISC) who collaborated on Roy Mackal’s cryptozoological expeditions, has been referred to as “Dr.” by Bigfoot proponent John Bindernagel and others.18 However, Greenwell had no formal training in relevant fields; his “doctorate” was an honorary degree from the University of Guadalajara in Mexico.19 Similarly, William Gibbons, a champion of Mokele Mbembe, sometimes is described by cryptozoological sources as “Dr. Bill Gibbons” and boasts several degrees.20 Gibbons’s bachelor’s and master’s degrees in religious education were granted by a religious institution, however, and have no academic standing,21 while his doctorate in cultural anthropology was procured from Warnborough College, Oxford—an institution not associated with Oxford University that has been determined (and fined) by the Department of Education to be unauthorized to grant degrees in Great Britain, and therefore not eligible to participate in federal student financial assistance programs in the United States.22 (If the Oxford location makes Warnborough sound more impressive than it is, this is unlikely to be accidental. As the New York Times explained, “Officials at Oxford University say that Warnborough is only the latest and most shameless in a string of institutions that unfairly trade on Oxford’s name and reputation abroad,” with students alleging that they had been misled into the false belief that Warnborough was formally associated with Oxford University.)23
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