ChrisBFRPKY said:
Of course there are many other factors that could account for hallucinations other than sleep deprivation. Those seem to be more limited when we add in multiple witnesses to an animal though.
I see no reason to believe that a group of people constantly re-enforcing their own a priori beliefs regarding some sighting would be any more reliable than an individual. Remember, we're not talking about people who have never encountered one another; these stories are shared. And sharing means evolving. Any hunter, martial artist, or bard can provide proof of that.
I can understand the group tendency to have different perspectives on an event as you described. Some may wish to recall a more exciting version of events. But what if you took that same group to a zoo and showed them an elephant. I think if you asked what they had seen, all would agree they saw an elephant, although one may add "It was comin' right at us".
You've failed to factor in a few things.
First, there's a vested interest in making bigfoot stories evolve in specific ways. The more amazing the story, the more the community praises you. This has POWERFUL influence on how people remember events. Even honest people can be swayed when there's that powerful an driving force to do so--often without their knowledge.
Second, the events I alluded to are widely-known events where crowds of people claim to have seen the same thing--only, there's no proof any of them did. Many alleged miracles fall into this.
Third, again, I've seen stories evolve in exactly that way. I've seen groups sitting around talking about things that happened in SCA battles that clearly didn't happen. I even saw a bard object to someone correcting it-"Never let the facts get in the way of a good story", was the objection. For a bard, that's perfectly valid; the message is important, not the details. However, in biology (and you ARE doing biology, at least allegedly) the opposite is true. And humans just aren't wired that way.
It's true I might not know as much about human sensory errors as others and I don't claim to be an expert in the field. But an elephant is an elephant.
The highlighted part renders the rest irrelevant. If you don't know much about human sensory errors, including hallucinations, you CANNOT say "an elephant is an elephant". But elephants aren't actually a valid comparison, either. We can test statements about elephants. We can actually observe them in the wild, or in a zoo, or inspect a corpse. That's what biologists do--and that's how they overcome the errors that human brains inevitably bring to the table. We have NO record of bigfoot. NONE. AT BEST we have the types of photographs that any half-way competent photographer would delete for being too poor-quality to bother with (hearsay DOES NOT count as evidence). That's kind of an enormous difference--the difference between a fairy tale and real science (no insult intended there; I have a strong suspicion that many fairy tales are rooted in real events that got completely mangled through the centuries).
And once again at the bottom of your post, you're trying to drag me into a "prove Bigfoot exists" argument to defend. I can't do that for you. I merely pointed out that some parts of the argument for its dismissal are flawed.
First off, no you're not. You're pointing out reasons YOU PERSONALLY dismiss them. You've not pointed to a single flaw--all you've done is the equivalent of saying "I don't believe you", while demonstrating your unfamiliarity with the concepts in question.
Second off, you've misinterpreted (I'm leaning towards willfully) my statement. For the purposes of that statement, and those on the nature of the evidence made in this post, I'm merely pointing out the utter worthlessness of the evidence bigfoot researchers
as a whole have brought to the table. Not "inadequacy"; worthlessness. And that may in fact be too generous a term. "Evidence" of the type thus far provided actually HARMS serious inquiry into questions by necessitating the sorting out of dross and chafe from the actual data, and can cause researchers to reject conclusions for flat-out wrong reasons.
What I'm saying is simple: we have NO data, we have NO evidence, we have NOTHING upon which to build a scientific opinion. The widely-known and well-documented flaws in human cognition and perception are improperly downplayed or ignored by bigfoot "researchers". We CANNOT accept your statements. Not without abandoning reason itself.
Second paragraph: If we knew where they go, it wouldn't be very difficult to find them. Being on the move would not make them easier to spot IMO staying in one place would.
Add total ignorance of bushcraft to that list above.
Most guys hunt within few hundred yards from their truck.
Not anywhere I've seen hunters. I've seen deer stands that allowed a hunter to stay put for a full day (bathroom breaks were an issue, they admitted, but I grew up in Ohio; some people took that stuff VERY seriously).
Besides, roads are a fantastic place to find wildlife. Well, former wildlife; the "life" part is typically inapplicable. Given the way highways and roads impact ecosystems, those are your best bet for finding pretty much any organism. There's a term for it in taphonomy....Thenatocaen? Thenatocene? Something like that; I haven't found my copy of "Life History of a Fossil" recently, so it's hard to look up. Anyway, areas where lots of stuff gets killed tend to build up bits of dead things. I know of two outcrops that exhibit this behavior--one in the current issue of Paleontologia Electronica, and the Horned Toad Formation (the famous Tar Pits in La Brea don't count, really, as they're also a conervat lagerstatten so weird things were obviously going on there). At any rate, roads kill large numbers of organisms. Ignoring that, edge effects due to the cutting of larger ecosystems by roadways would have profound effects on any real organism's behavior, from foraging patterns to migrations--happens to literally everything else, so bigfoot cannot be an exception. There's absolutely no reason to believe you'll have better luck finding bigfoot away from roads than at roads; we find every other megafauna species I know of as road kill.
