Complex Numbers

Tales from the Cryptid

Confession: I kinda like cryptids.

Why We Can’t Rule Out Bigfoot  
How the null hypothesis keeps the hairy hominid alive.

It's not that I "believe in" Bigfoot (or Nessie, or the Jersey Devil, or chupacabra, or whatever). It's that I'm fascinated by what the stories say about us and about the way we approach knowledge.

This article is almost exactly seven years old now, but it's probably not like the science has advanced...

The international collaboration of scientists, led by University of Oxford geneticist Bryan Sykes, found no evidence that the DNA from the hairs belonged to a mysterious primate. Instead, for the most part, it belonged to decidedly unmysterious mammals such as porcupines, raccoons, and cows.

All animals (well, all things, really) are mysterious until they're not, and then a lot of them keep on being mysterious even as we study them. For instance, the opossum. If I didn't have a few climbing up on my deck to say hi every once in a while, I might not believe they existed. Hell, the first report of the Virginia opossum comes from John Smith   (yes, that John Smith, not one of his many namesakes). From that link: Strachey's notes describe the opossum as a "beast in bigness of a pig and in taste alike," while Smith recorded it "hath an head like a swine ... tail like a rat ... of the bigness of a cat." Okay, well, I think Strachey was hitting the hooch there; Smith's notes are a bit closer to the opossums I've seen.

Anyway, Bigfoot.

People often think that the job of scientists is to prove a hypothesis is true—the existence of electrons, for example, or the ability of a drug to cure cancer. But very often, scientists do the reverse: They set out to disprove a hypothesis.

Which is what I've been saying.

Bigfoot advocates have repeatedly claimed that professional scientists are willfully ignoring compelling evidence. The problem, in fact, is that the advocates haven’t been approaching the question of Bigfoot in a scientific fashion. So two years ago Sykes and his colleagues decided to run a scientific study of those hairs from an “anomalous primate.” And that involved creating a null hypothesis to try to reject.

Unlike some people, I don't have a problem with science being science even when the hypothesis is, at first glance, absurd, as in the case of most cryptids. At the very least, negative results provide skeptics with more argumentative ammunition. I'm not what you'd call a hard skeptic: show me compelling evidence and I'll change my tune. This applies to cryptids as well as psychic abilities, faeries, space aliens or whatever.

Thing is, everyone's level of "compelling" may be different.

The results were clear: The scientists found precise matches for all 30 samples in previously known mammals.

Does this mean Sykes and his colleagues have proved that Bigfoot does not exist? No... The question remains open, and—if Bigfoot doesn’t exist—always will.

Which is a long way to go about showing once again that it's very, very difficult, if not impossible, to prove a negative. Russel's Teapot   comes to mind.

That’s not to say Sykes’ study didn’t offer its own surprises. Two hair samples from the Himalayas matched a DNA sequence that was extracted from a 40,000-year-old fossil of a polar bear. Stranger still, their DNA was not a match to living polar bears.

And this is why I like to keep an open mind about these things. Even if we never find Bigfoot (and given that the classic Bigfoot sightings were revealed to be guys in ape suits) (well, hairy ape suits; we already wear ape suits), who knows what strange and cool things we might discover along the way?

Besides, it makes excellent story fodder.

Just to be complete, I'll save you a search: here's the Wiki article on Bigfoot.