Nessies are the new Jesus Horses

When I was a kid I went through a period where I was obsessed with the Loch Ness Monster and related mysterious critters. I read every book the library had, watched the relevant episodes of "In Search Of..." as many times as I could (I never saw the attempted revival with Mitch Pileggi, but I can't imagine he had the narrational gravitas of Leonard Nimoy) and as a result new an unusual (and probably socially unhealthy) amount about entities like Champ, the Flatwoods Monster, and assorted globsters. My dense layers of nerdness are represented by the fact that the first "Doctor Who" book I got was the novelization of "Terror of the Zygons" retitled for print as "Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster".

All these years later, the Zygons

are fondly remembered by fans as

classic monsters. The stop-motion

Nessie, not so much.



Although credulity has waned as I've learned more about science and critical thinking, I still love a good monster story. I love that the traditions continues with cryptids like the mapinguari and the ningen. When I'm out in the field surveying Georgia wetlands, I always keep a hopeful eye out for the skunk ape, because you never know...

That's the thing: it's difficult to prove something DOESN'T exist. Negatives in general are hard to prove. Nonetheless, it's telling that there's no hard evidence for any of the classic cryptids. As my wetland mentor Jake Duncan has said of Sasquatch, "if it existed, someone woulda run one of the things over with their pickup." While I don't want to see any Bigfoots (Bigfeet?) mowed down on the highway, that would be a great development for the cryptozoological community. When it comes to proving the existence of a life form, you gotta have a corpse.

The same skepticism that makes me require a body for my beloved monsters is what makes me doubt (at best) the existence of God, or gods. I just can't see any reason to think those stories are true, and many reasons for them NOT to be true. I consider myself an agnostic in theory, atheist in practice: while I admit that, like Nessie, God COULD exist, and I can't prove He, She, It, or They doesn't, it seems highly unlikely, and I would have to doubt that such a being really has an interest or intervenes in our affairs. (This might be a good general topic for discussion in a future blog post.) Furthermore, the widespread belief in such an entity (not to mention widespread beliefs in many things that are unprovable or, worse yet, demostrably false) has many dangerous effects. Therefore, I prefer to live my life assuming there's no God.

Nevertheless, as a sometime-anthropologist I maintain a general interest in religion and religious stories. Like Douglas Adams, “I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it does mystify me that otherwise intelligent people take it seriously.” Therefore, it was with mixed horror and amusement that I saw this recent story: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/loch-ness-monster-used-debunk-evolution-state-funded-190816504.html

WOW. Just... wow. I was goggle-eyed, open-mouthed, and shaking for a full twelve seconds after reading that.

Besides just the... nuttiness of using one unprovable to try to prove another unprovable, this is an awful argument for some interesting reasons.

The first is that the textbook apparently tries to argue that dinosaurs may be alive today, and that this fact, if true, would disprove evolution. But it wouldn't: there are lots of animals still existing that predate the dinosaurs, like sharks and cockroaches,

But regardless of that, the truth appears to be that dinosaurs ARE still with us, in the form of birds. We eat dinosaurs and their eggs for meals. We keep dinosaurs as pets. Although the evolutionary history isn't yet completely clear, we know enough to say that at least some dinosaurs didn't go extinct - they just changed form.

"Chirp, I say... chirp."

Another remarkable aspect of the story is that they're apprently trying to use the possibility of Nessie being a survived plesiosaur. There's no question that that's a popular idea, given strength by the famous Surgeon's Photo of Nessie. But the thing is, plesiosaurs weren't dinosaurs. They were prehistoric reptiles, sure, but there were lots of prehistoric reptiles, and the term "dinosaur" applies only to two particular groups of those reptiles.

So, yeah... People can of course believe whatever they like, but this stuff is being taught as science to at least SOME students of at least SOME schools that receive SOME public funding. This does not bode well.

By the way, the title of this post is a reference to a "Saturday Night Live: Weekend Update" piece from a while back.