The Ketchum Report

[Guest slimwitless]

There's an interesting interview with Melba Ketchum here.

[Guest]

I'm not arguing with you Mulder, just trying to explain why it isn't so cut and dry.

I submit that it is. The data are the data.

There are a lot of limitations to this study that have already been discussed in the thread that I won't bother to rehash, but I chose not to ignore those just to have my belief validated, it doesn't hinge on the study results.

Neither does mine.

In research involving a hypothesis there are only two conclusions you can reach, modus tollens or a confirmed consequence. In modus tollens the data does not support the consequence. In the second, the data does confirm the consequence but you can't be sure that your specific hypothesis was the reason you got your anticipated results. Confirmation is never 100%.

Again, there is NO hypothesis involved. The dna results are the dna results. They either match a known sample meaning they come from a known creature or they do not match and therefore come from an unknown creature.

Why this is so difficult to grasp I simply do not know.

The most you can hope for in all of this is that Dr. Ketchum did dot all of her i's and t's. If so, then there is a high probability that there is something unknown out there in the woods,

No, it would be an absolute certainty. Proven. Beyond any doubt. DNA does not lie.

but you can never logically conclude that the unknown would be bigfoot.

What would it be? An aardvark? A trout? A butterfly?

Sorry to get so strenuous with you, but what else WOULD unknown primate dna come from OTHER than an unknown primate? Put that with the eyewitness testimonies, tracks etc that accompany the case files for some of these samples what other logical conclusion would there be?

[Guest Jodie]

"The most you can hope for in all of this is that Dr. Ketchum did dot all of her i's and t's. If so, then there is a high probability that there is something unknown out there in the woods, but you can never logically conclude that the unknown would be bigfoot."

Jodie, I think there is already enough evidence in anomalous hair samples, track evidence, etc to come to a conclusion like that, I think Ketchum's results will certainly be more specific. Her use of so many samples is a good indication she is crossing her t's and doting her i's, as well as looking on providing some statistical proof as well.

Well we only have speculation on that, 125-150 samples with only 3 that were chosen for complete sequencing. It remains to be seen, but to me three genomes of something unknown does not mean it is bigfoot, assuming any of it is true.

[Guest]

Jodie, I think there is already enough evidence in anomalous hair samples, track evidence, etc to come to a conclusion like that, I think Ketchum's results will certainly be more specific. Her use of so many samples is a good indication she is crossing her t's and doting her i's, as well as looking on providing some statistical proof as well.

That's the way I see it as well. This is a confirming study. There is already a strong case for BF...the dna results simply buttress the existing case to the point of dispositive proof.

[Guest Jodie]

Sorry to get so strenuous with you, but what else WOULD unknown primate dna come from OTHER than an unknown primate? Put that with the eyewitness testimonies, tracks etc that accompany the case files for some of these samples what other logical conclusion would there be?

No apology necessary Mulder, you are looking at this as if we were looking at a piece of fruit and a visual difference could be observed between an apple and an orange, I understand that. It is so much more complicated than that and even though I've lost my patience in waiting on the results of the study, I fully understand why it is taking so long.

To help you understand, you have a chromatogram that looks a lot like an EKG strip of v-fib, the sequencer detects the peaks for T,A,C, and G which are the four nucleotides. These can be confused if the sample is weak or if you have a noisy baseline on the sequencer. A run is a small segment of the billions of base pairs in the genome. Most transcription errors occur at the beginning and end of the run, the longer the run is, the greater chance for an error. You use a computer program to determine which peaks on the chromatogram correlate with one of the four nucleotides. The computer program is not infallible so you also have to visually look at it for errors. And that is a really, really basic description of what goes on in just reading the results.

To put it even simpler terms, it's like a museum trying to decide whether an oil painting is actually an original Van Gogh or a knock off, it looks like the real thing but it might be a cheap imitation if something is a little off here and a little off there. How far off do the paint strokes have to be before you decide that this might actually be a different creature from anything else we have discovered/ That is how I see it. That is how DNA can be misinterpreted.

DNA is DNA, but it can look different or the same depending on the perspective from which you observe it.

Edited February 26, 2012 by Biggie
-Edited to fix big empty space in quote.

[Guest]

That's the way I see it as well. This is a confirming study. There is already a strong case for BF...the dna results simply buttress the existing case to the point of dispositive proof.

I get that for most of us this would effectively prove Bigfoot for all intents and purposes. However, Jodie is right- proving there is an unknown primate out there does not necessarily mean it is Bigfoot. Maybe it's a previously-unknown North American tamarin. Is that likely? No. And if this study proves there is an unknown primate, then to me this is proof of the existence of Bigfoot. However, science requires more than that, as it should. Now, DNA evidence coupled with convincing footage of the donor would be another story...

Or, of course, we could just wait until someone examines Smeja's bodies.

[beerhunter]

This may have been already addressed, are there any purported southern skunk ape samples tested in Ketchum's study?

: edited for grammar

Edited February 25, 2012 by beerhunter

[Guest Biggie]

Jodie in that big empty space of your quote I was hoping there was some secret joke of yours with white letters that you posted which would be visible only if highlighted but I was let down. lol

Weird glitch as I copied your quote and it previewed normally without all of that empty space in it when testing it in my reply.

[Guest Jodie]

I know Biggie, it did the same for me. I was editing out only the part I wanted to respond to but it seems that the big space stayed, I tried re-editing, it wouldn't shrink it. .

I never thought about typing with white or gray letters in the gray space.....hummm

[Guest Biggie]

Next time try clicking the editing mode button on the far left of the reply box and see if that brings up any codes that aren't showing in the quote or post. Deleting those usually takes care of glitches like that. I just did that with your post and it's fixed, although there was absolutely no codes to delete. All I did was click that editing mode button then previewed the post and all was well so I submitted the post and it's fixed.

Edited February 26, 2012 by Biggie
-Added text.

[Guest Jodie]

Alrighty, I'll go to the test thread and see what I can do.

[Guest]

The first hundred or so base pairs,and the end of sequence that come off the chromatogram machine are garbage,but no real interpretation of this is necessary, you just overlap your sequences so you are always reading area's of good sequence. Those brush strokes are not so subjective to perspective interpretation.

Edited February 26, 2012 by JohnC

[Guest Biggie]

Jodie I've seen that happen with a post from another user here recently I can't remember where but I remember thinking at the time why didn't they remove that empty space from their quote after they deleted all that text from it. So now I know that was not the case where it's a glitch since the quote looked identical to the way yours did before I fixed it. Btw your quote in the post 2923 above has a little of empty space in it too. I'll tell gig about this in the board issues thread.

Edited February 26, 2012 by Biggie
-Added text.

[Guest Jodie]

The first hundred or so base pairs,and the end of sequence that come off the chromatogram machine are garbage,but no real interpretation of this is necessary, you just overlap your sequences so you are always reading area's of good sequence. Those brush strokes are not so subjective to perspective interpretation.

You are thinking of DNA as if it were like mathematics where 2+2=4 every single time. There are many different ways to sequence each with its own guidelines to decrease errors, that is why the guidelines are there. It is pretty close to being 100 % accurate if you do everything right.

So once you have the entire genome sequenced it produces copious amounts of data that will have to be synthesized and interpreted. This is a major challenge in an organism that is known, much less one that is unidentified.

This is where your brush strokes start getting subjective IMO because sequencing can't be used to detect large deletions and rearrangements. However, It is the gold standard for detecting mutations. How significant is that if you are working with an unknown?

[Guest]

I guess the significance would depend on if the same mutation started appearing across a broad range of samples, with significant geographical variance? Then what?