We just note when the professionals don’t do what they think they know they’re supposed to do.

That word “belief.” Hurts my ears.

This is about evidence.

And the evidence, indeed, seems to say that some of us know A LOT more about what science is charged with doing than professional soccer players do.

Or, er, right. Them too.

But no, this does not mean what you want to believe it means. When the character “Superman” was created in 1932, the population of earth was about 2 billion people, but not a single one of them could fly or were impervious to bullets. Today the population is up to about 7 billion, but still no one can fly or reasonably expect bullets to bounce off him. The big numbers don’t really make it “more likely” that a literal “Superman” is out there to be found. Likewise, how many unclassified insects there are in the Amazon or bacteria in the soil makes no difference whatsoever to whether or not there exists “an eight-foot bipedal ape” — or rather, several thousand of them in at least one undescribed species, though some true believers think several — loping around the USA.

On a somewhat different topic, when I was a kid I sometimes played soccer. None of us were very good at it, and we didn’t exactly play by all the rules, but we all thought we had the essentials down. I haven’t played soccer for years now, but I have some ideas about how it should be played. Seriously, I think the game would be much better if they instituted some rules from basketball, suitably scaled up for the much larger field — specifically, I mean some kind of shot clock and an over-and-back rule. These rules saved basketball from being a boring, low-scoring sport, and I’m sure they would make soccer more appealing to Americans.

In spite of all this I do not regularly denounce professional soccer players for not understanding soccer as well as I do, or for not implementing the changes I would like to see. I wouldn’t expect them to take me seriously if I did.

But in the comments on this blog there are certain people who show evidence of understanding science as well as I understand soccer. Just as I played soccer in middle school, they presumably took science classes in high school, and probably required courses in college. They also have ideas for how things should be done and for changes they would like to see. However, they seem to actually think that the professionals should give a damn about their opinions and advice. Well, it doesn’t work that way.

Actually, gang, far more time is being spent looking for the animals that are being referred to here than is being spent looking for the ape. Which would say something to anyone who applies serious thought to this.

In science one is not allowed to presume anything. But many scientists do it, all the time, to the detriment of scientific progress.

Yeah, that’s what the case against the ape amounts to: a presumption piled on a host of assumptions, the most prominent one being that if you aren’t a scientist your eyes can’t be trusted.

Except if you are a scientist who saw one, in which case you can’t be trusted either.

Sounds like science to me. Only Science would object.