A Plausible Monster? Part Three: Answering Criticisms, section A

Introduction

[Here’s section B]

In the previous installments of this series, I have been arguing for the likelihood of an unclassified animal species living in the Congo.

Skeptics are not buying it, often for understandable reasons. The notion of a large land-dwelling animal still being undiscovered sounds rather larger-than-life to many people, especially with Western civilization enjoying the conveniences of satellite photography, Google Earth, smartphones, and Youtube. And given Mokele-mbembe’s well-known resemblance to a sauropod dinosaur, many people see that as plenty of reason to dismiss the animal as a myth or rumor. Great fodder for a sensationalistic Edgar Rice Burroughs novel, perhaps, but not worthy of serious consideration in the halls of zoology.

The problem is, the typical skeptical responses regarding Mokele-mbembe are not nearly as compelling as they are for other “monsters” like Sasquatch or the Abominable Snowman. (That was stated at length beforehand, but it bears mentioning again)

Of course, it doesn’t help when someone spouts off the libelous declaration that anyone who takes Mokele-mbembe seriously is some fundamentalist tool, trying to find a live dinosaur just so they can stick it to Darwin. (Darren Naish once assured me that anyone who thinks the animal is real is either a creationist or a wishful thinker, a claim which I know for a fact to be inaccurate) If one brings up Roy Mackal as a credentialed scientist who took Mokele-mbembe seriously (and he was certainly no creationist), he is waved off as an eccentric with tenure, and his credentials “aren’t the right kind” for him to be an authority.

Strange, considering that this guy who’s making a big deal about credentials and qualification (and continues his nasty habit of committing the genetic fallacy) has declared the following:

“[Y]ou don’t need a Ph.D. to do good science, and not all people who have Ph.D.s are good scientists either. As those of us who have gone through the ordeal know, a Ph.D. only proves that you can survive a grueling test of endurance in doing research and writing a dissertation on a very narrow topic. It doesn’t prove that you are smarter than anyone else or more qualified to render an opinion than anyone else.” ~ Donald Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters, page 16, emphasis added

I guess credentials and qualifications ultimately don’t matter, until you decide to smear anyone you want to label a pseudoscientist or quirky eccentric who doesn’t merit serious attention.

Of course, this business about credentials amounts to little more than an annoying distraction from the stark, black-and-white question “Is Mokele-mbembe a real animal or not?” That is the real heart of the matter.

So without further ado, let’s address some of the bigger, more understandable objections.

1. “There would have to be a breeding population of these animals to survive, and there would have to be too many for their species to escape notice in the 21st century.”

No one’s proposing Mokele-mbembe is a single animal. So when asking how a big animal species can be reproducing and yet exist in small enough numbers to escape detection, we should probably ask a question: do we have large animals that are critically endangered, that are running out of that oft-mentioned breeding population? The answer seems quite evident when one considers the Giant Panda, Black Rhinoceros, Blue Whale, Mountain Gorilla, Sumatran Tiger, Leatherback Sea Turtle, Orinoco Crocodile, Sumatran Elephant, and numerous others. They have wild populations in serious danger of being wiped out.

Given the (limited) evidence available and its seeming to match the pattern of a rare but real creature, I for one am unwilling to take the chance that Mokele-mbembe is merely a legend after all. The Congo Basin carries many dangers to rare animals in general. These include disease, deforestation, poaching, hunting, the mere fact of human encroachment, and so forth. If this animal does exist I’d rather we discover it before we no longer have a chance to conserve and protect it, thank you. By then we would have lost a unique creature, and much of the blame would lie with Western academics who saw fit to dismiss it as a myth until it was too late.

2. “The natives should be able to provide the remains of this animal, like the animal hides they use for shields or the bird feathers they use in ceremonial dresses. They haven’t shown us anything, so that’s a serious red flag.”

This criticism would be a devastating blow against the idea that Mokele-mbembe is a living animal species, but for one obvious fact: the natives need to successfully hunt a creature before such tangible traces become potentially available. Initially, the sole reason why the scientific community could study physical remains of the okapi was because the natives hunted and killed the animal, from time to time.

The natives in Central Africa that allegedly run into Mokele-mbembe describe its size and ferocity as comparable to (or greater than) those of a hippopotamus, which possesses an infamous temper. If it exists, this rare animal carries too much risk and hassle for even the more adventurous hunters to treat it as quarry. In addition to its short temper, they claim the animal is a large pest that disturbs their fishing activities when it grazes on foliage, and it can capsize canoes when surfacing from the river. Depending on where you go, the natives either think it’s a dangerous god-monster that must not be trifled with, or simply a large and problematic animal they’d rather live without.

[Note: In actuality, there have been a few anecdotes of giant reptilian creatures killed in the Congo, with horns or hides or bones being harvested and kept “somewhere,” but without the physical remains themselves to back these rumors up, I will not use these stories to argue my case.]

3. “Satellites should have photographed Mokele-mbembe long ago. They can photograph elephants on the African savannah, so there’s nowhere this animal could hide.”

Even the supportive skeptics in the comments here realize this argument is hardly airtight. Everyone’s aware that rain forests have a thick canopy, right? Savannahs don’t. Observing animals from above is considerably easier when there’s nothing in the way. Just like in any rain forest, the Congo Basin has plenty in the way.

(to be continued in “Answering Criticisms, section B”)

A Plausible Monster? Part Two

Introduction

My previous post in this series details the reasons why there might be at least one so-called “monster” (well, unknown animal) in one of the most impenetrable regions of the world: Mokele-mbembe, in Central Africa. If it accomplished anything, however, all it did was open the door and display the Congo Basin as a good hiding spot for a large animal. Here, I hope to highlight the evidence that suggests this hiding spot indeed harbors an unknown species.

Important Caveat: I will be upfront and admit this current presentation is less organized than I would like it to be. Certainly nothing compared to the tight argumentation provided by Max Hawthorne in the other post I published today. Sometimes I have been unable to track down the photographs I hoped to link to or include in this post, or was unable to reach some key people, but hopefully that will change very soon. If you’d like to learn more, I have a bibliography and weblinks at the end of this post.

First will come the reports of physical traces, which help as tangible indications that something big, rare, and unknown to science resides in the Congo Basin. Secondly, there will be a brief recap of anecdotal evidence.

Physical Traces

Due to the difficulties mentioned in the first “Plausible Monster” post, I wouldn’t be surprised if a creature of unknown classification lives in the Congo Basin, yet visiting tourists/biologists/explorers have not gathered physical evidence. Nevertheless, there is one incident that stands out above others.

The following information comes from William J. Gibbons’ books “Mokele-Mbembe: Mystery Beast of the Congo Basin” and “The Official Mokele-Mbembe Factbook” and from correspondence with my close friend Robert Mullin, who has been on three trips to Cameroon to attempt to gather information on this animal and search for it (in that country it’s known as La Kila Bembe, along with several other tribal names).

As one expedition in 2004 (members included Brian Sass, Peter Beach, and local guide and hunter Pierre Sima) traveled by boat down the Dja River, they came across a little spit of land known locally as “Swamp Island.” There, the jungle’s normally dense shroud of overhanging vines had been stripped away by an herbivore, to a height of eighteen feet. Large tracks were present on the ground, about the size of an elephant’s, but with prominent claws on the toes. Neither elephants nor hippos nor rhinos have these claws.

According to the local guides they hired (whose livelihood, it’s worth pointing out, depends on their expertise at tracking animals and discerning their behavior from the traces they leave behind), the footprints came from two adult animals and a juvenile, who were moving side to side and grazing on the vines hanging above the bank. The toe of one of those footprints was made into a plaster cast, but unfortunately not enough plaster was available to cast the entire foot (I’ll be happy to post a picture of this cast and/or footprints, as soon as I can obtain one).

From what I understand, the tracks bore a strong resemblance to these ones, found by Michel Ballot in 2013 in Cameroon, on “Bee Island.” Each track is about 12 inches in diameter, and does not bear a resemblance to anything known to live in Central Africa. I got the photo from here.

Near the area of stripped vegetation were several caves in the ground. Caves like this, according to the natives in Congo and Cameroon, are used by Mokele-mbembes to estivate during the dry season (estivation is like hibernation when water is scarce, and is practiced by lungfish and certain frogs on the African savannah). A plaster cast of what looked like a claw mark was allegedly extracted from the surrounding mud by Peter Beach.

If the natives desired to fool the Western explorers, this would seem an unnecessarily elaborate hoax. Perhaps they could fake stripped vines or a footprint or two or put some scratch marks on the walls of an already existing cave. But when the area can only be reached by canoe, to do all three may demand too much time and effort from the natives’ most immediate concern: hunting and gathering to feed their tribe.

What if another large herbivore, already classified by science, could explain what was at the riverbank? Obviously a hippo or rhinoceros does not reach a grazing height of eighteen feet. Giraffes can, but they do not live in this part of Africa — the Congo Basin’s riverbanks might as well be quicksand to any large animal without wide feet to distribute its weight over the soft earth. The best candidate among known animals would be the forest elephant. I’d be willing to allow the possibility of a pair of forest elephants (of unusually great size) with a juvenile, rearing up on their hind legs, and plucking leaves at eighteen feet, if their trunks were extended. The main problem with this alternative is the prominent claws on the footprints, and the fact that the native guides didn’t just identify them as elephant tracks. Additionally, the guides were unaware of any elephant activity in the area.

Given the details of what was found in this area, the simplest explanation appears to be this: the members of this expedition came across the grazing area of an unclassified species, and arguably the largest to live in the Congo Basin.

Anecdotal Evidence

Any “cryptid” can boast of stories and sightings, no matter how unlikely their existence or how bizarre/supernatural the creature. But the general pattern of Mokele-mbembe sightings does appear to match the pattern of seeing a rare animal. First, consider the people claiming they see Mokele-mbembe: native tribes that have little to no contact with each other (several of which have never seen a white man until recent times). Yet they all describe a creature with an elephantine body and four legs with stout digging claws, a small head, long neck and tail, dark and dull coloration, and iguana-like spines running along its vertebrae.

Without a real animal to account for these sightings there would have to be an impressively extensive (and impressively hidden) conspiracy among the tribes to “get their story straight” to fool any explorers who ask them about unusual animals in the region. And given that many particular tribes go without contact for decades by white explorers with an interest in this long-necked animal, they would have to maintain this little conspiracy among their own people for years and years, without any gullible foreigners to string along. Human nature simply doesn’t work like that.

There’s a surprising amount of biological plausibility in their description, as well. For example, the creature’s alleged vocalizations are deep and rumbling, said to be the product of a dewlap they can inflate like a bullfrog. Another example is their tail being used as a weapon to kill hippos or crocodiles straying into their territory. Some tribes in Congo do regard it as a spirit or god, with fantastic attributes (read Rory Nugent’s book Drums Along the Congo for a wealth of details), but in Cameroon the creature is almost always treated as natural, neither mythical nor supernatural.

Afterword

The alternative hypotheses to explain these facts (the natives are just messing with visitors; it’s only folklore; the natives are describing rhinos or giraffes; natives are misidentifying known animals, etc.) do not even come close to explaining the full picture that has been forming in the heart of Africa. Take the earlier post’s explanation of why the Congo Basin is still largely a blank space on the map, and couple it with the lines of evidence stated in this post (with more to come, I pray).

There seems to be too much smoke, if the fire is only a legend. A pattern of ripples starts to form, which seems to point to one explanation above all others:

An unclassified animal species, critically endangered and with reclusive habits, is likely to reside in the river systems and swamps of the Congo Basin.

Alternative explanations have largely focused on trying to wave off or ridicule this hypothesis rather than seriously consider it. These will be dealt with in the final posts.

[Side Note: Contrary to the accusation leveled by Daniel Loxton and Donald Prothero on p. 286 of their book “Abominable Science,” the claim that Mokele-mbembe estivates was not concocted by cryptozoologists, trying to make excuses for why they hadn’t found the animal. It is a claim the natives themselves put forward. In fact, those interviewing the natives expressed skepticism until they got a good look at the alleged caves. Loxton and Prothero put forward some thought-provoking objections, but other arguments of theirs have a pitifully weak foundation.]

Bibliography

“Mokele-Mbembe: Mystery Beast of the Congo Basin” by William J. Gibbons

“The Official Mokele-Mbembe Factbook” by the Cameroon Discovery Team

“A Living Dinosaur? In Search of Mokele-Mbembe” by Roy P. Mackal, PhD

“Drums Along the Congo: On the Trail of Mokele-Mbembe, the Last Living Dinosaur” by Rory Nugent

Links

http://debunkthatjunk.blogspot.com/2012/04/mokele-mbembe-surviving-african.html

Mokele-Mbembe: Mystery Beast of the Congo Basin

Inside Story: Mullin On Mokele-Mbembe

http://visitcryptoville.com/page/2/

Professor Prothero’s Preening, Pungent Prattle

“You must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he came to be so silly….you can only find out the rights and wrongs by reasoning – never by being rude about your opponent’s psychology.” C.S. Lewis, “Bulverism,” God in the Dock (emphasis in original)

In my last post I explained I’m generally no longer inclined to stand up and argue for the existence of Bigfoot, Chupacabra, or the Mongolian Death Worm. But if someone uses faulty argumentation against their existence, it’s still enough to make me cringe. Especially if they have a PhD and wrote an entire book that seems dedicated to this faulty reasoning, and published it under an academic press.

A very exhaustively cited book on cryptozoology, Abominable Science is coauthored by Daniel Loxton (who seems like a very nice, fair-minded guy, and a very talented artist as well) and Donald Prothero, PhD (a paleontologist and professor at Pierce College in Woodland Hills, CA).

It’s not so much the book I am commenting on here (though that may happen after I’ve read the whole thing…honestly, I’m a slow reader, so I don’t know when that’s going to happen). But given the Amazon description, its subtitle (Origins of the Yeti, Nessie, and Other Famous Cryptids), and what I had read of Prothero beforehand, I got suspicious that he’d already decided his conclusion before gathering research. Hence the quote about bulverism above.

Long story short: I expressed my suspicions on Twitter a while back, and it seems Prothero was informed. And judging by a comment on one of his blog posts, he wasn’t very happy about the suspicion. Normally I wouldn’t respond to something like this, certainly not at length. But each sentence was either false or so poorly argued, I elected to craft a response anyway.

Even if a skeptic is right on a particular subject, broken logic will never give him or her a solid basis on which to stand. In this case, it’s about time someone called him out for it. As a scientist, Prothero has a responsibility to use solid argumentation and make his case like a professional.

Okay, so here’s the comment. In its entirety.

“Clearly, this person hasn’t read the book, nor does he understand what we said. The genetic fallacy is only a fallacy if the origins story in question has no relevance to the truth or falsity of the argument being made. But the long story lines that Daniel teased out about the history of each of these cryptids–especially how their descriptions are inconsistent, how they are strongly influenced by cultural factors such as current movies, how they are full of hoaxes and bad data that the cryptozoologists NEVER expunge, and how they compile “lists of sightings” which are houses of cards, with nearly every one of them useless or questionable–is VERY relevant to the credibility of each cryptid.

“Even if we had not compiled the historical record of each cryptid, the rest of the book demolishes the possibility of their existence by a whole range of biological, geological and paleontological constraints that this critic clearly never read about. As usual, he’s doing the usual creationist tactic to avoid the confrontation of hard data against his beliefs: dismiss it with an irrelevant or false argument and then ignore it.”

Oh dear, where to begin?

First of all, I already admitted to not reading the book at the time. Check Twitter to see for yourself. I expressed concern that it was going to be a book with weak argumentation. I have a copy from the library at the moment. While some of its arguments are stronger than I worried, elsewhere those fears are being realized in spades.

Things don’t get any better when he gives the definition of “genetic fallacy” as the necessary condition under which it happens. That’s what the genetic fallacy teaches us: an idea’s origin doesn’t have any bearing on that idea’s truth or falsehood. Prothero is basically saying “a frog is only a frog if it’s a tailless amphibian of the order Anura.”

Duh. That’s what it means.

The next sentence makes a fair point, but Prothero doesn’t justify his position. He’s right that the case for most mystery animals appears lacking. I’ve stated at length that I don’t expect Bigfoot or Nessie or Yeti to be real, even if I want them to be real. (Mokele-mbembe, on the other hand…might be a different story)

Given the absence of a foundation of hard evidence, I’m inclined to agree with his overall conclusion. However, he then overestimates what the evidence gathered thus far actually tells us; then he dives to the bottom of the barrel, trying to make the proposal of unknown large animal species look like ridiculous, even dangerous pseudoscience. To do this, he scoops out cryptozoology’s familiar and well-established legacy of hoaxes, some genuinely preposterous ideas (Bigfoot being able to move to other dimensions, for instance), and the fact that humans can be made vulnerable to deception. To which Prothero himself, of course, is blessedly immune. The starting assumption in the book and his worldview appears to be that these sightings are most emphatically not caused by unclassified species of animals (even though that sounds like a perfectly modest and reasonable possibility, at least for some cryptids), therefore the explanation must lie in psychology and old-fashioned gullibility, and this is sufficient to explain pretty much the entirety of cryptozoology.

In other words: “It’s never credible and none of these animals exist, because look at all the weirdos and liars who go looking for monsters. Ta-da! No unclassified animal species needed. All you need are hoaxers, the credulous, and fundamentalists on a crusade to destroy science, and there you have it.”

Welcome back to the genetic fallacy, Professor. You have provided a textbook example of it, in more ways than one.

Oh, but you see, it’s totally okay that he does this, because SCIENCE! tells us that these creatures can’t possibly exist anyway. “The rest of the book demolishes the possibility of their existence…”

Oh? Says who? Is it scientifically impossible that there is an ape of unknown classification in the Himalayas? Is it impossible that a large something-or-other is lurking in the cloudy waters of Loch Ness?

Of course not! It’s unlikely, but no possibility is demolished. Why take the position that it’s impossible?

• “Says the fossil record,” which Prothero seems to believe is overall complete with no big surprises awaiting us. Never mind that they keep finding a new species of dinosaur every couple of months. Many of which are totally unexpected. Not to mention the numerous other newly identified animal and plant species routinely recovered from the field or dusted off in museum archives. Paleontology is a great scientific endeavor, but when they can’t even get the nonexistence of Brontosaurus right, you’d be wise to learn to never say never.
• “Says biology,” because of course we’ve learned every single impact an organism can have on its environment. We can instantly detect the impact a species has when something is amiss. Oh, except for the 125,000 extra gorillas found in the Congo in 2007. And the new species we discover all the time on submarine dives to the darkest corners of our oceans. Hmm, maybe we don’t have all the evidence in yet?
• “Says geology” because…well, I’m not sure what he means. It seems paleontology would have more to say about animals than would general geology. It was kind of a broad brush to start with.

Then he throws out a red herring that implies anyone who says he commits the genetic fallacy is on the wrong side of the origins fence. As if no one who accepts evolution could possibly see anything wrong with his logic, or as if this has anything to do with the veracity of his claims.

Basically, he got caught committing the genetic fallacy. But rather than owning up to it or beefing up his arguments or retracting them, he opted to flaunt his dubious line of reasoning in everyone’s face, and yell that he’s totally justified in doing so. This is such an insult to logic that Mister Spock would do a “Live Long and Prosper” facepalm.

Skeptics, you’ll do yourselves and others a huge favor if you can please get your act together.

UPDATE, APRIL 29, 2015: Regarding Prothero’s stance that the fossil record doesn’t hold animals that can be properly called “cryptids,” I’d like to point out yet another unexpected discovery reported today: a pigeon-sized dinosaur in China, with elongated arms and fingers, and membranes underneath that strongly resemble the wings of a bat.

That’s right. If this fossil is genuine, they basically discovered a small dragon. You’re welcome.

A Plausible Monster? Part One

[Now that they are published, here’s part two and part three-A, and three-B will be released soon]

I could go back to staying “safe” on this blog, and not stick my neck out again. Nothing weird or controversial.

But that’s boring. And in some respects, it wouldn’t be right. For today, I thought a nice swim into deeper waters would do us some good. It’s invigorating.

Come on in! The water’s quite pleasant.

Today’s topic involves cryptozoology — the practice of investigating and searching for animals that have not been classified by science, but are reported by sightings and/or folklore. Think Sasquatch, the Loch Ness Monster, sea serpents, etc.

Here and now, I mean to neither take down nor advocate cryptozoology as a practice. This is not being written to defend or demolish it, or classify it as science or pseudoscience. That last distinction is odiously bureaucratic. I care much less about whether a claim is classified as science than I care about whether it is true. My main concern is in whether the animal really exists or not.

If you want to know my position on cryptozoology, here it is: In short, I reluctantly take the position that most “cryptids” (the animals cryptozoologists seek to find) most likely do not exist. But I’d be more than happy to be proven wrong if someone can show proof of their existence.

I used to think the world full of monsters, waiting to be discovered and ushered into our textbooks, zoos, and museum displays. From Nessie to Yeti, I was fascinated by the possibility of weird and spectacular creatures, and treated their existence like it was a near certainty. Of course, they haven’t showed up thus far. Nowadays, I hold out little to no hope in a monster at Loch Ness. Tourists and live webcams can only miss a large creature for so long. Nor does Bigfoot seem at all likely, as far as I can tell. In the Pacific Northwest you can hardly throw a rock without hitting somebody’s log cabin or pickup truck. Not the environment I’d expect an undiscovered primate to call home.

I’d love to be wrong about Bigfoot and/or Nessie, but I’ll be deeply shocked if I am.

On the other hand, this should never be cause to discount all cryptids as equally ridiculous or unlikely. You are no doubt familiar with the phrase “even a broken watch can be right twice a day.” A species of large animal can still persist undiscovered and unclassified, even today. Most of the new animals we are finding consist of insects and deep sea-dwellers. But on occasion, something a bit more spectacular can be uncovered. Several factors can be conducive to a species escaping detection by the scientific community:

1. It lives in an environment where it can easily hide. By now this would be limited mostly to dense tropical rain forests and deep oceans.
2. It is critically endangered, either through human activity or environmental factors. Specimens will be rare, as will physical traces (carcasses, footprints, scat, etc.).
3. The animal’s environment can quickly erase traces, making it difficult to detect or track. Again, rain forests and oceans are the biggest offenders. Such an environment also presents great difficulty in bringing proof of a new species to the outside world, either from remains not getting refrigerated before they rot away, or the hostility of its native species and/or human populations.
4. The animal has reclusive habits, tending to avoid human habitation (as a lot of animals do, from okapis to panda bears to cougars).
5. If natives in a remote region tell about an unknown animal living in their part of the world, a biologist can be biased against the creature’s existence and assume that the animal is mythical rather than biological. It is quite possible his suspicions are correct, of course. If there ever was such an animal, it may have become extinct or migrated to another area. Still, one has to wonder how many times the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater, and a legitimate species had been missed by the biologist because he’d assumed it could not be there.

There is at least one cryptid that matches all of these factors. Therefore I am prepared to argue that its existence is more likely than its nonexistence. I speak of Mokele-mbembe, from the Congo swamps and jungles of Central Africa. Its range purportedly extends across Congo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic, Gabon, and Cameroon.

One of my latest paintings, “Cameroon.” Acrylics on watercolor paper, approx. 7 by 9 inches.

The name means either “One who stops the flow of rivers” or “He who divides the waters.” Its described morphology bears a resemblance to that of a small sauropod dinosaur. These are the long-necked herbivores sometimes informally called “Brontosaurs.” Both sauropods and Mokele-mbembe possess long necks and tails, small heads, and elephantine bodies with four feet.

Please take care to note: I am not here to argue whether dinosaurs persist in Africa today. I am arguing for the likelihood of a rare and unrecognized species living in the Congo basin. So please don’t comment with a post like “Sauropods can’t live in swamps, because of x, y and z.” We can discuss that in a later post, an addendum to this one.

Regardless of what kind of animal it is, what does Mokele-mbembe have that most other “cryptids” don’t? What keeps its existence plausible, even (in my estimation) likely?

The answer in a nutshell: The right environment and obstacles, where we could expect its discovery to be delayed.

I suspect very few of those who roll their eyes and mock the mere possibility of this animal being real would maintain their contempt if they took time to consider the kind of environment the Congo basin really is:

• A region shredded by guerilla warfare, poaching and disease outbreaks that have a habit of shutting down expeditions to the area
• Stifling jungles that pose a serious challenge to even the most seasoned explorers
• An almost total lack of internet and technological infrastructure (so long, smartphones) outside the cities of the region — electricity is “expensive and unreliable” in Cameroon, for instance
• A dense canopy of trees a hundred and fifty feet high that does a great job at hiding the rain forest from satellite photography
• This Florida-sized jungle is so dense that it’s mostly unexplored to this day, even to the point that it hid over 100,000 western lowland gorillas from scientific eyes until just eight years ago. Another discovery made at roughly the same time was the Bili Ape, a new type of chimpanzee that plausibly eats lions and other big cats. (makes you wonder what else could be hiding in that region, doesn’t it?)
• Largely corrupt governments, held together by miles of red tape, which don’t exactly roll out the red carpet to Western explorers, unless they’re with bigger organizations like the BBC, National Geographic or the World Wildlife Fund

Neither the Pacific Northwest nor any Scottish Loch can boast of such an ideal hiding place for an unclassified, critically endangered species.

At the risk of stating the painfully obvious, a good hiding spot does not necessarily harbor an unknown species. But in the next installment of this series, I’ll provide the main reasons why I think the evidence thus far gathered is quite sufficient to warrant further, more thorough investigation.

And then I can add another post, to tackle what have been some embarrassingly bad arguments against the Mokele-mbembe’s existence. I do allow for the possibility that the skeptics are correct, but they are in desperate need of improved reasoning. As I have stated before, being right for the wrong reasons is almost as bad as being flat-out wrong.

Watching the Watchmen: Thoughts on Abiogenesis

I will be upfront and say I lack training in microbiology and biochemistry, and this post is intended to be a big-picture pondering on the subject, rather than a paper for peer review. So feel free to take what I write with a five pound bag of salt.

Abiogenesis is the notion that biological life can coalesce out of molecules. In this scenario, no more than the right circumstances and chemicals are required, and they can be acted upon by natural laws to bring about a complex self-replicating molecule that could eventually give rise to what we would normally call a cell.

It is also something that has never been replicated in the laboratory. The actual results behind the optimistic rhetoric of life’s “building blocks” (amino acids, etc.) being generated in the laboratory pales in comparison to our increased understanding of what would be required to be present in even the simplest conceivable cell, one much simpler than the ones we have yet detected under a microscope. And yet abiogenesis is taken for granted as having occurred at some point in the past, whether on Earth or elsewhere.

Some time ago on Facebook, I had a couple of debates with natural history illustrator and paleoartist Julius Csotonyi, who is also very well-trained in microbiology. My position was (and is) that decades of experimentation give us excellent reason to harshly criticize the assumption of abiogenesis, and even discard it. He pointed me to many, many papers on the subject and the basic argument put forward was, “We’re working on it, and are getting more answers. We just need more time to figure out how [not if] abiogenesis happened.” I would point out more problems after looking over the arguments given (and the papers I had time to peruse), and more papers would be thrown down to trip me up. All in the name of benevolently “educating” me, you understand.

Nonetheless, I know enough to recognize what we should be seeing if Csotonyi and other microbiologists are correct in saying abiogenesis must have happened. The issue was not what the papers contained, but what was missing from them. My basic requirement, that went all but ignored, was “Show me a cell or self-replicating complex molecule.”

We all know that either one of those showing up in a test tube would be the biggest biochemical breakthrough in this century and would instantly flood journals and social media both. In the meantime, the gap between laboratory results and the requirements to generate a cell should be shrinking. If that gap expands, it’s a good bet that abiogenesis is a faulty hypothesis, and to hold it as the clear explanation for life’s origin is to engage in pseudoscience.

As far as I can tell, a handful of possible but hotly debated answers have been uncovered, but that handful is dwarfed by the mountains of newly uncovered questions and obstacles. The gap between lab results and the requirements to generate even the simplest cell seems to grow every year.

Still, is there some chance that the stated results of abiogenesis experiments give any cause for excitement at someday creating a cell, or at least a self-replicating complex molecule?

Let us imagine a compulsive gambler who has racked up several million dollars in debt. Hoping to win it back, he returns to the tables, and manages to win a few hundred bucks. But he has not come close to paying it off. He’s even lost enough times, in his renewed efforts, to add another million to the bill.

Would any hope or optimism on the gambler’s part be warranted?

The obvious answer also applies to the ever-hopeful microbiologist who still seeks to find a way to generate a basic cell in a test tube. (I invoke gambling not to say life would generate “randomly.” This is a question of debt, or the criteria that an experiment’s results must satisfy before we can reach a cell.)

I admire the dogged persistence for a desired result. What disappoints and frustrates me is the double header of assuming the process must be possible, combined with a climate of hubris in academia, which perceives anyone who says abiogenesis cannot happen to be uneducated, or unwilling to consider it — perhaps out of some nefarious religious motivation.

It would be more accurate (and more gracious) to say that those more removed from the assumption that life can start by natural means may, ironically, be more observant and more willing to follow where the data points. Not only have the predictions of abiogenesis failed (or “been revised” to put it more politely), but the hurdles of statistics and chemistry have added to the problems with even the simplest conceivable cell assembling from a state without biological life.

This is much more than scientific inquiry whittling down explanations and refining the hypothesis. The debt does not merely still stand; it has been augmented.

The insistence of the True Believer combines with the momentum of grant money and an assumption that is less warranted than ever, that life “must have spontaneously generated” by natural process (the words of Stephen Hawking). Thus today’s model of Spontaneous Generation spins its wheels, all the while demanding exclusivity in laboratory and classroom alike.

My request remains. A cell or self-replicating complex molecule will do. Neither a computer simulation of a cell nor the laughably mislabeled “protocells” so far generated will satisfy the demand for abiogenesis to be scientifically tenable.

If the hypothesis fails, what should we replace it with? I am even less qualified to offer an answer to that, so I won’t dare speak on any replacement theory. All I can do is give speculation:

The changeable rules of “proper” science may cling to abiogenesis in the teeth of the evidence and hang a no-creators-allowed sign on its clubhouse door. But, if such a creator happens to exist, the necessity of such a being’s handiwork may insist on giving Him a hearing anyway.