The other day at a used-book sale I damn near bought and why didn’t I? “The First Human: The Race to Discover Our Earliest Ancestors” by Ann Gibbons. The title alone should tell you how much emotion has factored into this area of science. My, I assure you, most cursory review of the book’s contents confirms this for me: every aspect of this “race” was as saturated with emotion as any church service I have been to. And it struck me as pretty typical, given what I know about science. (Remember the recent demotion of Pluto?)

Emotion is as integral a part of science, as practiced by humans, as research is. Argument, critical to the practice of proper hard science, is well infused with emotion.

It’s channeling emotion, not keeping it out, that distinguishes the best science. George Schaller’s and Jane Goodall’s emotions inform their science in a truly beautiful way. (Hmmmm. They both take the sasquatch and the yeti seriously. Coincidence?) Without that interaction we’d know precious little about some of our most charismatic megafauna. Indeed, scientists at first derided Goodall’s naming of her subjects and interacting with them. Jane Goodall is directly or indirectly responsible for well over half - maybe over 80% might be a better estimate, someone correct me if I’m wrong - of what we know about chimps.

We’re human, we’re emotional, and science, really, was inspired by emotion. We need to know. That need pulls at us in a way no book will ever dissect. And without that need, there is no science.

One might rather think that those who believe science demands blood sacrifice are treating science just a wee tad too much like a religion.

Photography really made it unnecessary.

From the time wildlife photography came into its own (so OK, wildlife photography specifically), there has been no need to kill in order to do the one thing one needs to do to broadcast a true likeness of the animal to the scientific community and the public: do a clear illustration of it. Animals didn’t hold still for illustrations, so dead specimens were needed. Photography took care of that problem.

As kittenz notes, once you have nailed down the animal’s presence, you will have more than enough opps to study specimens. There is now, however, no need to rush that process yourself.

Thanks, T-I-W.

I agree with mystery_man. Thank you for that eloquent comment.

However greenmartian2007 has riled me enough that i have to respond. I am not so much responding to the ‘kill’ argument that is put (although I disagree- my position is clearly stated above), but to some of the background reasoning, and surrounding argument.

Greenmartian2007 ends by saying; “I have stated my case well, I think.”

In my opinion I have rarely seen anyone on this site post such an incoherent and contradictory series of statements (although MK Davies springs to mind), and to so fail to understand the point of what others are saying.

Firstly, lets deal with classification:

Greenmartian2007 (from now on, for sake of brevity, ‘GM’- I will also refer to ‘her’ for the same reason) repeatedly states that sasquatch is “homin-OID but not homin-ID”. That is, GM is willing to make an attribution, such that the being belongs to the biological ’superfamily’ Hominoidea, but specifically not to the biological ‘family’ Hominidae.

This is interesting, not least because GM also repeatedly argues that only a body will allow us to say “what kind of animal it is”, whether it is “perhaps an interim species between the great apes and Man”, whether it is “closer to humans that Bonobos”. Indeed GM says “We won’t know actually where it is in the primate lineagy until we have a necropsy, and can do substantive DNA testing”.

Perhaps I am missing something here, but GM’s argument seems to me to be

(1) we should not worry about killing a sasquatch because we can be sure that it is definately not a hominid (which, in any case, is irrelevant to the moral argument here), and

(2) we need to kill a sasquatch because otherwise we will not be able to say where it fits in the ‘primate lineage’.

Both of these cannot be simultaneously true. GM, whatever her scientific expertise (she has worked with Nobel laureates-but fails to say in what capacity- co-researcher? editor? hairdresser? domestic?), certainly needs a refresher course in basic logic.

Perhaps we should ask, then, how GM arrives at her biological designation. Well, GM doesn’t really give us any answer. Indeed, again, GM argues that we need an ‘actual specimen’ before we can make a ‘classification’. Essentially the only justification comes from repeated reference to Meldrum’s theory that bigfoot footprints reveal closer relationship to ‘pongids’ than hominids. So GM’s biological classification is made on the basis of footprints. Hardly a firm basis for such a momentous claim (Indeed, this is especially true when Meldrum’s claims are themselves questionable in this regard. All pongids have divergent big toes. Sasquatch does not. Just compare the foot of a chimp or a gorilla with a sasquatch print, and then compare the sasquatch print with a modern human print or the feet of extinct hominids).

GM also is highly dismissive of other’s “misnomers”. This is rather unfortunate, given that GM seems to have rather a weak grip on the classificatory system herself. GM says that sasquatch is not a ‘direct ancestor’ of humans, and therefore is is a hominoid, not a hominid. In fact, it is the case that there is no requirement that a hominid be a direct ancestor of humans (as is probably the case with, for instance, the robust australopithecine species- they are rather probably an extinct ’side-branch’ of the family ‘hominidae’, that is not ancestral to humans). Furthermore, as far as hominoids go, there must have been at least some member species of the hominoidea that were directly ancestral to human species (that is, as the hominoidea superfamily includes all great apes and their common ancestors, then by definition it also includes our direct ancestors). Unless GM believes that humans evolved directly from some animal outside the hominoidae (that is, not from the common ancestors of the great apes) then the fact that sasquatch might be hominoid is irrelevant, in itself, to whether or not it might be a direct ancestor of humans.

GM also seems a little bit confused as to the classification of modern humans. GM says “we have an ape on our hands”. This, of course, is true whether or not sasquatch is hominid or hominoid, because, as far as biological classification goes, even modern humans are members of the ape clade.

Secondly, we can deal with the question of ‘emotion’:

GM accuses those in the no-kill camp of being ’squeamish’, and of letting ‘emotion’ interfere with science. She also claims that ‘emotion has no place in science’.

However, contrary to GM’s rather arrogant implication I have seen no indication that any of those who have stated their ‘no-kill’ position here consider that sasquatch are, or could be, ‘pets’, or that they display a “woogie woogie” reaction. On the contrary, they seem very well aware that it is a potentially dangerous wild animal. Furthermore, no-one seems to be particularly ’squeamish’ here. Many of the no-kill advocates are self-professed avid hunters. I expect that I am pretty much alone among those posting here in holding an all-encompassing ‘no-kill’ attitude to all animals. However, even in my case this is not a result of ’squeamishness’, but of extensive rational consideration of the capacities of animals to feel pain, and experience fear, frustration and suffering, and the moral obligations that these facts entail.

It is a typical (and invalid) strategy for those who disagree with a moral position to dismiss it as ‘emotion’.It is also a typical (and invalid) strategy for those who disagree with claims that non-humans deserve consideration to suggest that by doing so one neglects, or doesn’t care about human suffering.

I am especially worried by GM’s arguments regarding ‘emotion’ (by which it seems GM means morality) and science, because they represent such a fundamentally dangerous view of the role of science in society.

GM says;
“Science, to function as it should, has to be out of the realm of emotion. Emotion cannot prove or disprove results. Those results have to be garnered through proofs. Physical proofs, mathematical proofs, etc. Not on faith. Not on belief. (But one can have faith or belief in one’s approach to getting the answer.)….That doesn’t mean the people who do the research aren’t emotional individuals. They are. But to get to the truth that they are seeking, emotion has to be removed. Doing the research correctly precludes the injection of emotions.”

But this is not the same as saying that ‘emotion’ (morality) should have no impact on science. GM fails to distinguish science as a social phenomenon, and science as a heuristic methodology.

It is certain that we could solve many scientific and medical problems (uncover many ‘truths’) if, for instance, we were to kill and dissect human infants. Quite rightly, of course, we don’t. In fact, those who did completely remove ‘emotion’ from the scientific ‘quest’ were those Nazi doctors who carried out experiments on prisoners in the concentration camps.

Of course, I am not suggesting that this is equivalent to the suggestion that we should kill a sasquatch. What I am pointing out is that it is perfectly legitimate for questions of morality (what GM dismisses as ‘emotion’) to set limits on what scientists do. Indeed, thank God we allow it to.

What is not right, is for ‘emotion’ to play a part in the actual carrying out of science (that is, bias the ways that one interprets the result of an experiment, for instance), that is, to effect the rationale of the scientific method. But the no-kill camp are not advocating this. Indeed, it is hard to see how someone might think they were. We do not want ‘emotion’ (or faith) to weigh as evidence in assessing the truth of scientific theories (if GM thinks we do, I challenge her to give one instance of any of us suggesting that). Rather, the no-kill camp has made a moral judgment (at least, those for whom it is a moral judgment) regarding our behaviour towards a certain kind of being, a moral judgment that it is wrong to kill such a being whether in a scientific investigation, or simply for fun. This sets limits on what science should do, but says nothing about how, within those limits, one should carry out science (indeed, I know that at least many of those who are in the no-kill camp- DWA, Kittenz, mystery_man, to name but a few- are upfront advocates of the beauty, power, and centrality of the scientific method).

Science (by which I mean the scientific method) does not demand that we do anything and everything that we can do (Einstein, for one, regretted his work on nuclear physics because of its resulting in nuclear weapons). Rather, it is simply a methodology to guide how we do what we decide to do. How we decide what we do is (if we are not to risk becoming amoral) the realm of morality.

Lets have a bit more rigour here.