That's the point--evaluations of ordinary and extraordinary are ENTIRELY subjective. I'm the only person who's offered something even resembling an objective test for the use of the word "extraordinary", and that test has been universally ignored. It's emotional, not rational.
LTC8K6 said:
It's subjective, isn't it?
It's perfectly acceptable for me to think a bigfoot finger is extraordinary evidence, and for someone else to think it's ordinary evidence.
I'm not seeing the problem.
Some people want to make their emotion-based opinion into a hard criteria to which other people's evidence must rise. They want to use the pithy phrase "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" to control what kinds of evidence are acceptable.
The Shrike said:
We don't know big Giganto was, only how big it's jaws and teeth were. Also, does not any suggestion if it's bipedalism trace back to Krantz?
Drewbot said:
Evidently Dinwar has studied the Bill Munns Gigantopithecus recreation, and found it to be not based completely on fabrications supplied by the Bigfoot community.
No, I've looked at the jaws and teeth. If you think estimating body size based on that data is uncommon in paleontology, you don't understand how paleontology works in the real world. I've seen relatively accurate estimates based on a LOT less of the organism, particularly in Mammalia (skulls, jaws, and teeth are what mammology focuses on, including entire species named from one or two teeth). The jaws are significantly larger than those of other, more commonly-known hominins. This pretty clearly demonstrates that known apes aren't the biggest possible. An 8' ape isn't an extraordinary claim by any stretch of the imagination. A 15' ape is a bit odd, but not outside the realm of possibility.
As for the bipedal thing, I'm going by standard English conventions for addressing body size--how big is the animal if you stretch it out? For primates, that means generally a bipedal posture. If I were discussing a therapod, I'd discuss length and height (if available--check out Spinosaurus sometime). Given that many hominins are bipedal, it's not an unevidenced interpretation (looking at how modern relatives work to determine how fossil organisms work is a standard bit of paleontological reasoning). It's not proven, but if it were I'd hardly consider it remarkable. If it were disproven, likewise.
Drewbot said:
BY WHAT STANDARD?
Because it seems to have been forgotten: I'm not a bigfoot believer. I've spent a great deal of time learning North American ecology and studying the fossils of areas where bigfoot is known. The utter lack of any evidence in the fossil record for anything like an ape in North America before the arival of humans is sufficient proof (given the nature of the Pleistocene/Holocene fossil record) for me to dismiss claims about bigfoot. My sole point here is that no one is able to define "extraordinary" in this context--"extraordinary" is used as synonymous with "data that prove me wrong", and that's hardly a valid definition in science. I've offered one, but it's been soundly rejected because, as far as I can tell, it doesn't allow people to emote on the subject.
If someone will provide an alternative standard for calling something extraordinary, I would be happy to consider it. No one has. The word remains, since everyone has de facto rejected my offered definition, undefined. I refuse to use an undefined word as a standard for evaluating evidence--as should any rational person.
LTC8K6 said:
I assure you that my backyard does not include even a sliver of Africa.
You might be surprised. Quite a bit of African coast came away with the Americans when Pangea split up. It's one of hte lines of evidence supporting the idea that continents move.
