18 August, 2011

The Real Deal

This is kind of entertaining. 

From the National Post, an article about a real-life Ogopogo hunter.

Good ground for a game of "Name that Logical Fallacy."

To his credit he seems to be making an honest effort to properly dissecting the evidence. Good for him on that.

But it's in his persistence that he fails.

"We’re finding new species of stuff all the time, all over the place: butterflies, frogs. I mean, it goes on and on. Why couldn’t there be something in the lake?"  The short answer is that it just isn't logically plausible.  But there is more...

For the record, proving that there is no Ogopogo is technically impossible. You cannot prove a negative.  (Which is something briefly touched upon by my character in the film.)  But every day that passes by without real evidence of a 40 ft. serpent in Lake Okanagan is effectively more evidence that it doesn't exist. Everyone has a camera these days - video cameras in most cases. How does something that has been vaguely seen so many times in the past 100 years not get caught on video now? Every existing video is either clearly something else or is far more easily explained (via Occam's Razor) by something far more mundane - something that Steciuk is clearly capable of doing as he identifies the long rolling waves that form in Lake Okanagan as the reality behind many sightings.  (Various other animals and logs make up most of the other sightings.)

Yes, Bill, we are finding new stuff all the time. LITTLE THINGS. The big stuff has no where left to hide. Especially if they exist in the size of a breeding population. He himself acknowledges that they have to exist as a species... which severely complicates his theory that they exist. It is diminishingly likely that a single creature could evade decisive discovery over the period of time under consideration (to say nothing of the fact that it would now be prohibitively old).  To suggest that a minimum viable population could remain a mystery is nothing less than absurd.

Looked at with any degree of rationality, the only Ogopogo that exists is the cartoon representations that he detests so much.

No comments: