The Ketchum Report

[Guest Wookie73]

Supposing the undiscovered exists in a way that defies our cataloging methodology, its discovery will require a paradigm shift. When confronted with discordant data, a choice between the data and the existing paradigm must be made by each individual. The argument on behalf of the paradigm is a strong one, yet we must observe that paradigms fail regardless of the strength of the arguments in their favor. To this point, science has largely continued the 19th century attitude that demystified the natural world as a place devoid of any creature that can stare back at man as his equal, and this attitude has served science well. We have rooms full of stuffed creatures staring back at us with fixed, terrified expressions as a result.

Now we are confronted with the possibility of a creature that commands not only similar dignity, such as dolphins or elephants or even chimpanzees, but a creature that may command equal dignity vis-a-vis Homo sapiens sapiens. And the documentation of such a creature presents both logistical and ethical difficulties to the prevailing paradigm. Indeed it will shatter the bedrock of modern science, that man stands alone atop the zoological pyramid, that all before us is mere chattel. BF, should he exist, refutes this ancient claim to the entirety of the natural world. The implications of a discovery are bound to be profound scientifically, but more especially socially. If anyone thinks these implications don't make the redoubts of science grow a little higher and bristle with more artillery against an unwelcome incursion, you are sadly mistaken.

scientists don't think any of this stuff ..... Evolution isn't a ladder with bacteria at the bottom and man at the top. That is misleading and dogmatic to assert as much.

[Guest exnihilo]

It's not about teleology, it's about ethical standing vis-a-vis the human race. And clearly, all other organisms are considered to be non-humans at this point, so the degree to which they factor into ethical deliberations is limited. BF could be a game changer.

Edited February 9, 2012 by exnihilo

[Guest Wookie73]

evidence? Proof of this conspiracy of silence?

[Guest]

Folks, the difficulty in obtaining a bigfoot is immaterial. If you buy Smeja's story and the one from Oklahoma, then you acknowledge that in the past couple of years at least two people have been successful in shooting a bigfoot. It can be done. These creatures are not shape-shifters or interdimensional travelers, they are not so rare and inaccessible that they are for all intents and purposes unable to be encountered by a prepared field researcher, and they do not have super-sensory abilities to detect someone who means to threaten them and escape before the danger materializes. (If they do, then those systems sometimes fail them.) Bigfoots, intelligent though they might be, are mere animals, just like you and me. They eat, poop, mate, and die, and the latter can be hastened by a well-placed bullet. Bigfoots might inspire awe, and their obvious humanity may keep some people from shooting them, but for other people, that's not an obstacle.

Exnihilo raises an interesting point though, i.e., that something about bigfoot makes us really reluctant to retrieve a bigfoot after we've collected it. Sure, that could also happen. But didn't Smeja also return to the scene to see if he could collect some proof of the event, and that's where the "steak" came from? If so, no matter how freaked out he was initially, his story is still that he (1) killed a bigfoot and (2) brought back a piece of it. With Ketchum's analysis, we're all wondering how sure we can be of his story, based on her analysis of that piece. But if his claim is true, look how close he came to just solving this once and for all. If he had collected a whole body, or just retrieved a leg, or just taken some photos we'd be having much different conversations here on the BFF. Smeja might have had a visceral emotional reaction to have killed a bigfoot because it's so "human," but that reaction certainly doesn't keep humans from killing each other every single day, and sometimes they collect evidence of their action too.

The point is that, despite the difficulties be they logistical, emotional, or other, a bigfoot can be shot and collected. It is inevitable, if such things are really out there.

[Guest]

I agree Saskeptic, it probably is inevitable if they exist, but it is not necessary for proof. All we can do is wait,and hope the study sheds some light on it all. I personally do not find the delays,or the NDA's suspicious when dealing with such a project as politically charged,as this. The scientist involved are putting a lot of credibility on the line, I am sure they are crossing their T's and doting there I's on this one.

Or at least I hope they are..

Edited February 9, 2012 by JohnC

[Guest parnassus]

Given the popular description of bigfoot, how can you seriously suggest that a hunter would mistake one for a man? please. Or do you propose a new popular description: how tall, how much hair? eyes glowing/not glowing. Sagittal crest/not. Neck/no neck? clothes/no clothes, even in winter?

Restrictions on shooting animals have only come about in relatively recent years, compared with how long men have had firearms. And even before firearms, it seems that man could figure out ways to kill all the large mammals. They eat them, they take trophies, they brag about, they try to kill the biggest one yet..... Yet no dead sasquatch.

Many hunters blast away at anything that moves, even walking, talking, orange covered anythings. Always have, always will.

.

According to the International Hunter Education Association, approximately 1,000 people in the US and Canada are accidentally shot by hunters every year, and just under a hundred of those accidents are fatalities. Most victims are hunters, but non-hunters are also sometimes killed or injured. Although some other forms of recreation cause more fatalities, hunting is one of the few activities that endangers the entire community, and not just the willing participants.

Men have been killing men since forever. Survival of the fittest; the Norman Conquest; the Crusades, Atilla the Hun, Cold Harbor, Pickett's Charge, the Killing Fields, Holocaust, Gunfight at OK Corral, Mountain Meadows Massacre, Custer's Last Stand. And we have a whole lot of people right now who have been taught by our Armed Forces to purposefully shoot human beings. Hundreds of thousands, in fact.

Those Texas boys poured 10 rounds of 12 gauge into the Oklahoma woods, trying to kill a bigfoot, with great enthusiasm and are looking to do it again.

So please, let's not try to make man into a bunch of teary-eyed ethics professors. Quien es mas macho!?

[Guest]

Instead,lets paint them all with a broad brush, and claim any hunter faced with one would kill it. All hunters are irresponsible killers,so the few who claim they had the chance,and did not take it, are liars.

Edited February 9, 2012 by JohnC

[Guest exnihilo]

parnassus, I had no idea you were a cognitive scientist, it's nice to know we have one in the house.

It's tempting to be an armchair shrink and diagnose Smeja as a psychopath. And by that I do not mean a foaming at the mouth, delusional danger to society. I mean it in a clinical sense: his empathetic response is diminished. In fact, I think Smeja acted in a way that most skeptics would consider to be rational: he saw the opportunity to take a specimen, and he acted on that impulse. The reaction his account has elicited within the community speaks volumes, however: while his actions may be rational, a significant number of people consider them to be morally reprehensible. And it seems that this reaction was shared by his buddy, who according to Smeja was exhorting him from the first moments of the encounter not to shoot. My pop-psychological interpretation of what happened is that Smeja had some sort of reaction or confusion subsequent to the act of killing the juvenile, and combined with his friend's highly emotional reaction to the event, he became open to the suggestion to leave the area, posthaste. I think these were impulses rather than decisions within a highly emotional context. Again, Smeja's actions were rational, but the emotional consequences were unmanageable.

As for how the mind recognizes and categorizes human/nonhuman, I will leave that to the cognitive scientists. But anyone wishing to speak with authority on the subject of man's temperament towards taking human life should inform themselves rather than relying on supposition or conventional wisdom. An excellent work on the subject is On Killing, by LTC David Grossman, USA(Ret). In it he describes the army's significant study into the subject.

Edited February 9, 2012 by exnihilo

[Guest]

Given the popular description of bigfoot, how can you seriously suggest that a hunter would mistake one for a man?

Many hunters blast away at anything that moves, even walking, talking, orange covered anythings. Always have, always will.

An old page on the BFRO website explains why your generalizations are wrong.

http://web.archive.org/web/20000304071934/http://bfro.net/REF/THEORIES/MJM/hunters.htm

Some sections of relevance:

Most non-hunters believe that hunters will shoot any animal they come across while hunting.

...the importance of a more common obstacle shouldn't be underestimated. That obstacle is the average hunter's basic decency and civility toward other humans, and things that might appear to be humans when viewed from a distance. The few casual hunters who've reported random encounters with bigfoots typically claim they didn't know what the things were at first and they didn't want to shoot them because they seemed so humanlike. A good example is a 1970 incident involving three hunters in Routt County, Colorado. A more recent report from Pike County, Kentucky demonstrates the natural shock and uncertainty following a sighting by a truck load of rural hunters. A third report from Jefferson County, Washington shows a hunter's reaction of surprise and wonder when observing a bigfoot -- a reaction that supplants any thoughts of shooting or pursuing the specimen. You'd have to picture these situations and appreciate that a bigfoot / sasquatch looks a lot like a primitive man. Without even considering the influence of hunter safety courses (which everyone must take before getting a hunting license), it is simply not realistic to expect that a hunter's natural reaction will be to shoot a primitive manlike figure in the back as it runs away.

[Guest exnihilo]

Some discussion about the subject of people killing people:

http://www.thenation.com/article/166124/brief-history-drones

The work of animal behaviorists like Konrad Lorenz sheds some light on why. Lorenz—a onetime member of the Nazi party who later renounced his politics and won the Nobel Prize in the 1970s—spent much of his life studying violence in animals. His book On Aggression posited a theory whereby many animals, male and female, have a natural “drive†to be aggressive against opponents, including members of their own species.

The aggression drive, Lorenz posited, was often limited within species by a “submission†phenomenon, whereby potential victims turn off the aggressive drive in others by displaying signs of submission. In this way, most animal violence is checked before it occurs. Lorenz suggested that in humans, the submission safety valve was blunted by the technological creation of weapons, which emotionally “distanced†the killer from his victim. When a spear or sling is used to kill, victims lose the opportunity to engage in submission and trigger the aggression “off switch.†The drone represents an extreme extension of that process. Drones crossed into a new frontier in military affairs: an area of entirely risk-free, remote and even potentially automated killing detached from human behavioral cues.

Military research seems to back this up. Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, a psychologist and former professor at West Point, has written extensively on the natural human aversion to killing. His 1995 book On Killing contains a collection of accounts from his research and from military history demonstrating soldiers’ revulsion with killing—in particular, killing at close range. He tells the story of a Green Beret in Vietnam describing the killing of a young Vietnamese soldier: “I just opened up, fired the whole twenty rounds right at the kid, and he just laid there. I dropped my weapon and cried.†The most telling accounts are with the “close†kills of hand-to-hand combat. Grossman tells of a Special Forces sergeant from the Vietnam War describing a close kill: “‘When you get up close and personal,’ he drawled with a cud of chewing tobacco in his cheek, ‘where you can hear ‘em scream and see ‘em die,’ and here he spit tobacco for emphasis, ‘it’s a bitch.’â€

[Guest BlurryMonster]

Don't forget that such a hybrid could produce a creature with our size & strength, and Neanderthal intelligence!

Mike

Such hybrids existed, and they're now non-African Homo sapiens sapiens:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/05/100506-science-neanderthals-humans-mated-interbred-dna-gene/

Not something huge, or hairy, or "dumb," modern people that went on to populate Europe, Asia, Oceana, and the Americas. Not bigfoot.

[Guest]

I keep checking this thread every day hoping for breaking news on the topic. It's so off track now that it's hardly worth the time to read anymore. Boo!

[JDL]

I'm waiting for the next argument about how to argue.

[Guest parnassus]

Did either Dr. Ketchum or Richard Stubstat deny that the earlier conclusions were premature? I thought they had made that pretty clear. You sound like a one strike you're out kinda guy.

Well, indie, I'll refrain from responding to your ad hom, or suggesting what you sound like.

Let me just say that I don't know what Richard Stubstad says these days on that specific issue. I don't know that he has retracted much if anything. He still has his website up: http://www.scienceal....com/Foo2.html.

Your specific question was "Did he deny that the earlier conclusions were premature?" Gee, I don't know. But I could also report that Winona Ryder hasn't denied that she's in love with me....so? Yippee?

As for Dr. Ketchum, if you are referring to the comment she made about the documentary copyright, what she said (and didn't say) it is available for everyone to read. I'm not sure if you are paraphrasing that, or some other statement. Again, "Did she deny that the earlier conclusions were premature?" need I repeat: "Did Winona....? Yippee?"

just a note: if someone sees a blobsquatch and calls it a bigfoot, and then sees another blogsquatch and calls it a bigfoot, and so on....until n=12 or 15, are those strikes? just askin....

so let me just continue and say that no one bats 1.000, and everyone gets more than one at bat, but........... if the batter points to the centerfield fence, yet seems not to be able to distinguish a fast ball from a changeup from a curve from a wild pitch from a slider, then some in the crowd will not get their hopes up the next time that batter comes to the plate. But really, the issue isn't whether the batter gets another chance...the batter does.

But let's not forget about the first at bat, because: science isn't baseball: a scientist can't change the data, or forget about data, the way a batter forgets about his last at bat: science doesn't just throw away the data that were misinterpreted. That data has to remain as at least a partial basis of the study. It's not like baseball. In science, the first "at bat" has an effect on the second "at bat."

So in what way did Ketchum change her conclusions? we don't yet know. Radical new data could appear. We would all be thrilled if the Sierra Steak had DNA that was on the primate branch yet not within the bounds of Hss or your known apes. But the old data don't support that interpretation.

Lastly I would note that it does seem that she didn't retract the 2011 titles of two papers.

New Contemporary Feral Species of Hominin.

New Species of Contemporary Feral Homo sapiens.

Is she retracting these? (please, no guesses, "must have meant"s, or wishes.)

p.

Edited February 10, 2012 by parnassus

[Guest]

Is there a reason you know of that she should? I understand you consider it very unlikely, but is there a reason we should all consider it a laughing stock before she is given the opportunity to present her study? Don't get me wrong on this,I am not betting the farm on this or anything. But I am not willing to outright slam it, before even seeing it.