Bigfoot can not exist today I am sorry but science cannot support it.

reply to post by theindependentjournal


Science, by its very nature, cannot prove the non-existence of an entity, only existence can be proven. At best, science can only reach a proximate or non-final 'not as far as we know'.

You set yourself a high bar to meet with your argument, and you didn't make it. There are many hidden assumptions built into your argument, some of them false and some questionable, and nothing you cited is definitive or conclusive. Some of them are partly valid, but you did not make your case.

Your assumptions of what Sasquatch would have to be (a mammal, an ape, etc) seem plausible, but are not by any means inclusive or final. People claim to have seen humanoid figures of various sorts that sound ape-like, but that doesn't limit the analysis either. It is unscientific (and futile) to try to insist that a blank space must either be filled by a specific thing or be empty, because it shuts out other possibilities, including those that don't even fit into any known pattern.

Granting those assumptions for the sake of argument, your case is still weak.

In specific:

#1. "If it was plentiful in the past and is going extinct now we should still have some evidence of some kind, bones or dead bodies or pictures. It's not like they live underwater where man is not at a lot, they are claimed to be larger than men by most."

This isn't a argument against existence at all, it's a variation on, "If it existed we'd know about it by now." It's circular, and could as easily apply to any other unconfirmed phenomena.

#3. This too is the 'we'd know it by now', based on a still shakier premise. There are in fact very large areas of wilderness and semi-wilderness in North America, visited only occasionally by humans. In some regions there are _fewer_ people present now than 50 or 100 years ago.

A moderately intelligent animal could indeed avoid human contact in those regions fairly easily. It's easy to make the common mistake that there are people everywhere today and not much empty area left. In fact, there are vast tracts yet where people are rarely found, especially west of the Mississippi and in the montane regions. If the creatures were somewhat less numerous than bears, and somewhat more intelligent, it would not be particularly odd that they are rarely hit by vehicles or shot by hunters.

#4 Pictures and film are rarely ever definitive, esp. those made with low-quality tech like cell phone cameras or the like. Consider the Patterson film, the authenticity of which continues to be debated to this day. It's either a definitive film of a real sighting, or a clever fake, and nobody has convincingly demonstrated either over decades. (And no, the claim that it was a hoax is not settled, either. That story turned out to be questionable in itself.)

#5. As noted above, this argument is simply fallacious. There _are_ large unwatched areas, where people are very thin on the ground, and other areas were they are present but not in large numbers. Further, even in areas with quite a few people, most of those people, most of the time, stay in relatively constrained areas of towns and roads. There's plenty of room to hide.

I could go further, but your whole argument comes down to "If it existed we'd know it by now." That's not a scientific case.

I have no idea what the people claiming to have seen Sasquatch, or otherwise encountered it, are seeing or what the truth behind it is. But you haven't made a good case for non-existence, and the claim that 'there are no large undiscovered mammals left' is not scientifically demonstrable anyway.

Originally posted by J100A2
Your assumptions of what Sasquatch would have to be (a mammal, an ape, etc) seem plausible, but are not by any means inclusive or final.

The "non existence" of Bigfoot/Sasquatch, Fairies, Martians, Reptilian Aliens etc. is unlikely to ever be factual in the strict scientific sense.

As far as I can tell, ultimately the op is saying Sasquatch/Bigfoot has no physical existence in any way that is supported by genuine science. Which not only rules out mammal ape etc, but anything else. Thus, due to this, he personally feels that Sasquatch/Bigfoot definitely does not exist. Therefore I agree it is not a fact of science, more like an opinion backed by science.

It is really bigfoot believers who make proclamations of it's imagined taxonomy. It doesn't seem unrealistic for the op to postulate on what it could be if it existed and give reasons for ruling them out, especially as the whole field seems hypothetical and based on nothing more than assumptions anyway. In the end we are dealing with a mythology/pseudo science and he is saying it doesn't exist at all.

A particular favorite among commonly held "Squatcher beliefs seems to be the Gigantopithecus idea. Using what we do know of evolution, speciation, bipedalism, fossil record etc. there is no genuine scientific backing for this, though perhaps slightly more than for the notion the fairies created bigfoot.

The logic behind the "if it existed by now, we'd know about it" may not be strictly scientific, but it is common sense and I don't see scientists clamoring to search for Bigfoot. It is unscientific in as much as a a negative can't generally be proven, yet the default position will be that there is no reason to believe Bigfoot exists (the same for Fairies, Martians etc), regardless of the claims, until someone provides proof that it does.

Has bigfoot existed in every US state (with descriptions actually pointing to there being more than one species), including Hawaii and since colonisation by Europeans nothing has ever been brought forward (physically) that would genuinely point to it's existence? Under these conditions it has simply managed to escape mainstream detection and verification for centuries?

I can see the flaws in some of your logics but...

I agree. I do not believe in Bigfoot myself. I spend alot of time in the woods, camping, hunting, and photography which puts me on the not so used path alot at all times of the day and night. I think most sightings are cases of mistaken identity. To be honest someone should have found bones or at least some bigfoot poo by now. And that yeti scalp, well if it was real you would think they would want people to take a small sample to prove it was real. I know on TV there are several shows that go around America setting up camera, doing interviews, ect..looking for Bigfoot and for the last four seasons they have found squat!

So, dont think your alone in thinking its just a story alot of people agree with you even if they dont post on here.

Good luck

Originally posted by jenlovesturtles
I agree. I do not believe in Bigfoot myself.

This is your perogative, of course, but I would like to point a few things out to you.

I spend alot of time in the woods, camping, hunting, and photography which puts me on the not so used path alot at all times of the day and night. I think most sightings are cases of mistaken identity.

Mistaken identity? This is a very good explaination, especially for momentary sightings. See something big moving about in the forest for a split second before it disappears into the trees and it could easily be anything. A bear, a moose, a deer, it all depends on where you live. However it does not explain the sightings that last 10 seconds and up, of which there are quite a lot. In fact, misidentification becomes less and less likely the longer that the subject(Whether it be Bigfoot or some other animal) is being viewed.

While misidentification does go a ways to explain some sightings, it does not explain all of the sightings. Not by a very long shot.

To be honest someone should have found bones or at least some bigfoot poo by now.

I don't know if any of us are qualified to say that, if they exist, someone 'should' have found Bigfoot bones or scat by now. The statement really seems rather shaky. Finding bones in the wild is unusual enough as it is without burial of the dead being a potential behavior. Scat, on the other hand, breaks down extremely quickly. Despite this, I think that some number of people have found Bigfoot scat and we just haven't heard about it.

I mean, think of this scenario. You're camping in the woods with your family for several days. You don't really think much about Bigfoot, passing it off as some sort of myth. As you are going for a walk you find a large, unusual pile of animal droppings. It's absolutely disgusting, and you are very glad you didn't step in it. You avoid it and keep on walking, keeping a careful eye out for any other bits of animal dung lying around so you don't ruin your shoes.

A regular person's first reaction would not be to sample it just because it seems a bit unusual. A regular person would not have the equipment to properly sample a bit of scat anyway. They would avoid it and not come even close to touching it. After all, it is just random animal poop on the side of the trail.

I know on TV there are several shows that go around America setting up camera, doing interviews, ect..looking for Bigfoot and for the last four seasons they have found squat!

I'm not precisely sure how many Bigfoot shows there are, but do you honestly think that they're looking for anything else besides good ratings? And even if they were, thats maybe about 70 or so people total looking through the hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of square miles of empty wilderness in the US and Canada.

It is your perogative whether or not you want to believe in Bigfoot. I wouldn't blame you if you continued to belief it a false phenomenon, after all there is no hard evidence. No confirmed or scientifically analyzed blood/flesh/fur/scat.

However, there is an overwhelming amount of circumstantial evidence. There are 4,502 recorded/documented sightings in the BFRO database alone, a dozen or so videos that seem to show something interesting in them, hundreds of casts made and analyzed by Dr. Jeff Meldrum, and things like trackways are being found quite often.

It's true we don't have any hard evidence yet, but that should not discourage any of us from looking. Indeed, It would be scientifically remiss of us if we didn't look at all.

Well, really, we cannot prove that something exists, we can only disprove that something doesn't exist.

In reality, any fur and/or scat would probably be very hard to distinguish on a genetic level since so many of these samples are so highly fragmented and they would (ahem, I hypothesize) be so similar to H. sapiens.

In reality, these populations (assuming they exist) are quite small and hard to locate, and going out seeking them isn't helping anyone.

In reality, the OP's population stats were based on human populations and we'd be looking at more of an Allee effect sort of problem (brownie points to anyone who knows what that is, Wikipedia for those that don't, it's an important concept in cryptozoological sciences).

In realityyy they are likely not (unless they have paranormal capabilities which I would love to see proven) integral to the ecology of their habitats, at least not at this point.

Science can support most things, with the right amount of evidence. Believe me. Just because we haven't found it does not mean it's not there (or that we should find it, ahem, ahem).

Oh P.S. they seem to live in moist, wooded environments in most cases... which are like the worst places ever for the preservation of biological material. If there were samples laying around from one of the likely few remaining individuals and someone happened to be bigfoot-tracking in the same locality, chances are the bones, scat, and fur would have decomposed or been scattered or eaten or weathered.

Could you believe that it still existed one hundred and fifty years ago?

www.youtube.com...

The link is to a short film about a Canadian bigfoot legend.

Originally posted by CosmicEgg
Closed-mindedness and narrow thinking are why science doesn't move ahead as fast as it could. "You don't think so" is not a scientifically valid statement. You attempting to back it up with absent evidence is about the worst scientific thinking possible.

Not very thought-provoking thread. Provoke thought: Don't kill it.

He's just giving his opinion. He's not attacking those who believe in Bigfoot.

Fact is, we know about the Moon and probably even Mars than we do our own backyard here on Earth (ie Oceans and all of the vast wilderness and areas on Earth that we havent explored yet) - So yes, it would not shock me if something like Sasquatch does exist (or the numerous Lake/Oceanic Monsters reported worldwide)

You can't prove something doesn't exist. The scale ranges from proven reality to varying degrees of possibility. Science has done nothing to lower the possibility of bigfoot's existence. There is something out there. For hundreds or thousands of years it has been seen. Natives of many lands to current day. It's something real. The ubiquity of cameras everywhere in the world now is at some point and I think more sooner than later going to provide some incontrovertible proof of whatever it is, be it a humanoid of some kind or another type of animal.

Originally posted by Azadok
reply to post by theindependentjournal

 

Cursed be the man who puts his faith in man , in other words to many people have elevated science to all knowing God like status. Science is always so sure of itself , I mean you have the mathematical numbers to prove it , correct.

i wouldnt say his proof is science based so much as just pure logic. its a pretty sound arguement. only thing i dont like about it is, i WANT it to exist. im sure there are a lot of people that will scoff at his logic for that reason alone. good post.