Wow, that’s cool, hadn’t heard about this. I’m confused by this statement though (on the page you linked):
Saola is by far the largest terrestrial animal in the world
But the description on Wikipedia doesn’t make it sound that big (roughly in line with its relatives, cattle and buffalo, in fact maybe a little smaller).
Anyway, thanks 
TIL
Yeah I remember (thirty years ago!) being amazed when I heard about it, but not many folks know of it. If a big wild cow has been living in the wilds of Vietnam all this time with no one knowing, who knows? Maybe there is some other large animal on the planet we have somehow missed.
I went back to look at the sentence you cited, b/c you’re right, it is not that big.
Maybe you read it quickly? The full sentence reads (italics are mine): “Saola is by far the largest terrestrial animal in the world (of certain existence) that has never been seen in the wild by a biologist. It remains an enigma into the 21st century.”
In other words, it is far from the largest land animal. It is the largest land animal that is confirmed to exist but that biologists have never seen with their own two eyes…
The Saola is a pretty amazing find, but I still think finding a new genus of bovid in Southeast Asia (where bovids are well documented) is a bit less shocking than finding a new genus of bipedal ape in the Americas would be.
If there are any as-yet-undocumented ape species still lurking out there then it seems like we’d be far more likely to find them in the jungles of Africa or Asia.
LOL, I did indeed, got a bit carried away there, whoops!
I am not weighing in with any kind of opinions by posting this…
But this is sure as hell fun to play with:
If you want to be a killjoy, you can make an overlay with:
I agree with you 100% as to likelihood! I still think it is good to tamp down hubris and realize we kind of regularly discover things that surprise us. That’s all.
Ha! I have had the privilege of seeing a black bear standing up on its hind legs looking and waving at me. I could see that…
Be open minded, but not so open that your brains fall out. I think too often people fall on “agnosticism” as a superior intellectual position, when what they are really doing is expecting the other side to prove a negative.
It’s not possible to definitely prove Big Foot does not exist, of course, but that’s an intellectually dishonest position to take. The burden of proof is on the people making the claim that he does exist, and the evidence is zero for that claim. ZERO
This is one of those topics where the people who think it’s plausible actually just don’t realize how bad the claimed evidence actually is, or don’t realize how thoroughly debunked (over and over) the claims are.
There is no reasonable probability for the Big Foot Hypothesis at this point and saying “it doesn’t exist” actually is the rational position.
Well, zero good evidence.
Your call. The absence of evidence does not equal the evidence of absence. Certainty and hubris are not far removed from each other. Sorry, but there is nothing scientific about that.
Except that more often than not it does. In situations where existence would be expected to produce evidence, and there is none, the absence of evidence itself becomes a form of evidence. This is the case with Bigfoot.
I really hate that aphorism, because it’s so obviously not true. The most one can say is “the absence of evidence does not always necessarily equal the evidence of absence.”
Perhaps, but the absence of evidence suggests that debating Bigfoot’s existence is not a very worthwhile pursuit. Especially compared to something like god or the soul, whose existence would have real and meaningful implications.
The value of Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, the Yeti and so forth is primarily as folklore. If Bigfoot were definitively proven to be real, humanity would very quickly lose interest in it. I think that we can enjoy the mythology without getting sidetracked by whether or not there is (or at some point was) any truth to it. Nobody ever asks, “Was the Minotaur real?” these days, and that’s fine.
The absence of evidence isn’t evidence. It’s a null. A void from which you can drawn no conclusion.
Thing is around that absence you can find evidence. People have done statistical work with regards to the raw number of people in core Bigfoot areas looking for them, the proliferation of cameras etc. Showing how frequently you should expect physical remains, clear photos etc. Tied to earlier studies trying to work out minimum breeding population levels, and ecological stuff like if there’s even appropriate food sources for this kind of creature in these areas.
None of it works out. You can do the same sort of predictive work for fossils. How likely something is to be fossilized, how they might be distributed, and how often you should expect them to be found. We’re very good at estimating and predicting the number and distribution of species in an area or lineage.
Again none of it works out. While that big ole blanks spot isn’t evidence, it isn’t capable of telling you anything. The fact that there is a blank spot despite all this looking certainly can.
Less not true than misconstrued or misrepresented. It’s meant to keep you from drawing conclusions from nothing. Thing is though it’s important to poke that kind of gap with a stick, and often enough there’s plenty of evidence to he had from doing that.
So it just kind of lacks all utility. It certainly doesn’t apply here. It’s just brought up in cryptozoology to avoid looking at all the (good) evidence against.
We’re both on the same side of this thing, so I’m just picking nits here, but I don’t think that the absence of evidence is always just a null. Imagine someone has an enormous cardboard box, and claims he has a live fire-breathing dragon inside. He won’t let you look inside to verify his claim. However, there are number of things one would expect to find if his claim was true: e.g. the sound of movement or roars, or a change in the composition of the gases around the box from the beast’s respiration, or a shift in the position of the box as it moves around, or the box combusting from an errant breath, or a steady supply of maidens being shoved into the box by the owner to feed it. None of these or similar events are observed. You say to the man, “if your claim was true, I would expect to see these evidences of its truth. Indeed, your claim cannot be true without producing such evidence. The fact that I don’t see any is therefore evidence that there is no live fire-breathing dragon in the box.” He says, “Ah ha! Gotcha! Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence!”
Which is the more reasonable position?
Well that wouldn’t be an absence of evidence would it?
Which is sort of my point. The aphorism is more about what evidence is and isn’t.
Imagine your box. But no one has bothered to check for all those things. So the big book of dragon data is blank.
You could not take that blank book, and use it’s blankness to argue that it isn’t a dragon. But instead a unicorn. Or anything at all.
You don’t know anything about the box. So you can’t draw conclusions.
That’s the gap, whether there is data at all. Not that you can’t see the dragon.
Thing is this is not what people are saying when they quote that at you.
In your example not finding those things is evidence, and we deploy the phrase to say it isn’t.
It’s about misrepresenting what evidence is, so that the only evidence is the kind that supports their position.
Effectively what they’re saying is evidence of absence doesn’t exist. But it absolutely does. It goes hand in hand with “you can’t prove a negative”. Thing is you absolutely can, we do it pretty frequently. Particularly in math. It’s just very hard in a lot of contexts.
You are making the Russell’s Teapot argument over and over again and claiming moral high ground for it, to boot.
Recommended reading- Sagan’s The Demon Haunted World, followed by some basic philosophy of science. You are showing some fundamental misunderstandings of how evidence-based reasoning works.
It is not hubris to reject a failed hypothesis. It is science.
Looks like we’re saying the same thing, two different ways.
I’m just trying to pick out why it doesn’t apply.
Which I think is worth doing when people bring this up.
Fact of the matter is that “evidence” does not mean “evidence in favor of Bigfoot”. Not having evidence in favor of Bigfoot is not inherently an absence.
Yup. True “absence of evidence” is exceedingly rare (maybe even nonexistent) in these kinds of subjects.
