There’s this obsessed Bigfoot prof at Oxford — no, he’s not a Bigfoot at Oxford, he’s a professor at Oxford who claims to study Bigfoot — who’s treated as a serious guy by the London Times. He just got shot down by the science editor, though, who rolled his eyes at Syke’s “evidence” and also got a revealing quote from him.
This is the best part:
The paper gave Syke’s affiliation as the Institute of Human Genetics at Wolfson College, Oxford. Sykes is a fellow of Wolfson, but he admitted the institute was mythical. “The journal required some sort of additional address in the college and, hey presto, I became an institute!”
It’s a mythical institute studying a mythical beast! And it just goes to show that you can find loons at any university, including Oxford, and someone in the press who won’t look past the credentials. Fake institutes are a plague upon the land: the Discovery Institute, the Heartland Institute, the Secular Policy Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, anybody can invent any fancy title for their collection of cranks and it sounds like something substantial…like Department of ProtoBioCybernetics and ProtoBioSemiotics, Origin of Life Science Foundation.
Just say no to proliferating meaningless institutes.
There is more evidence for Bigfoot than there is for sane conservatives.
PWNED!
Bigfeets are the ambulatory stage of Entwives.
Hoosier X,
Can we not go down this road, please.
Ah, a picture from the Patterson taped, an admitted fake by one of the participants, which also jives the timing of the suit purchase, and ultra quick film development (time travel?), and without the proper documentation standards being met for authenticity. Myth all the way down….
Who else is waiting for the befedora-d “true skeptics” to show up and start squawking about PZ finally posting something about “real” skepticism?
I’m hoping they’ll read my list of institutes for comprehension, and somewhere along the way they’ll go “Hey, wait a minute…”
Hey, you got something against big feet? I’ve got proof that they exist. I gotta couple of monsters right here at the end of my legs.
Not only is his institute fictitious, his position at Oxford is a fiction, too. I read, probably SciAm, that Sykes’ claim about archaic polar bears in the Himalayas was disputed. The samples were probably starndard Himalayan bears.
PZ: I think you may be too kind in assuming that the fedora crowd reads for comprehension.
No, it wasn’t. It was from an area near where some people had reported a Bigfoot sighting. These two statements are not equivalent.
So many things wrong with this.
1) Referencing “publishers” right after saying he hasn’t published research on this. Presumably they’re referring to people who published something else, but this is just sloppy writing. That’s on the reporter.
2) The publishers are making this claim, meaning that Sykes doesn’t have to defend it. He can just disavow it if it becomes inconvenient. On the other hand, the publishers aren’t scientists, so they can refuse to be held to the same standard… while still capitalizing on his reputation as a scientist.
3) Since this is a statement, rather than a publication, they don’t have to give any specifics or allow other people access to the information they’re using to form their opinion. They’re isolating themselves from criticism. That’s not how science works.
4) Weasel words abound. “May have”. “Sub-species.” Notably free of clear definitions or specific claims. They imply a lot to the true belever, but they can’t be pinned down on anything specific by the critic: A clear hallmark of the con artist.
Furthermore, as you pointed out, he just flat-out admits to lying about his credentials. I don’t understand how he can be so blase about that. Even if that was his only offense, it would be pretty damning.
If you lie about your professional affiliations, you don’t get to be taken seriously. It’s not that complicated.
And finally, this all a blatant publicity stunt for his new book. No, not his newly published peer-reviewed article. His new book, marketed to the public.
If you’ve got a serious scientific claim to make, the proper place for it is the literature. People who market their ideas directly to the public are usually doing so because they know damn well they can’t stand up to serious scrutiny and they’re trying to do an end-run around criticism.
Just wait for it. He’ll be claiming to be a latter-day Galileo in no time.
There’s AATer Marc Verhaegen’s “Studiecentrum Antropologie”, and he got the idea to create his fake affiliation from a correspondent who’d created one. There must be a ton of these around. Certainly not a literal ton given the weight of daydreams.
I recently read a short critique of Sykes. If I can find it again soon I’ll post it.
Well, I read it and was hoping, just hoping you’d include who you did, and you did. Well done. Thought leaders, indeed.
A bigfoot/yeti body or it’s all bullshit.
@9: I think you’re being unfair to the article. The “publisher” comment, for example, clearly refers to the publishers of the book about to be published (around which the whole article is framed.) Putting that claim immediately after a sentence that shows he was to cowardly or disingenuous to publish his “research” in scientific channels gets the point across.
And since the lead is the “institute does not exist” and “colleagues claim he’s spouting nonsense” I really think it does a fine job painting him as a loon.
Not a big fan of science reporting to laymen but for what it is this seems fine.
Just to clarify, since the last sentence is garbled, by saying I don’t like science reporting to non-experts I meant the quality of what’s usually done. Not the concept in general or the handful of people who do a good, measured job.
The (pseudo)Science channel on cable TV heavily promotes bigfoot. I noticed that they now have a bigfoot hunter[sic] “reality” show. My spouse watched it once (I have not bothered) and told me that the “hunters” appear to be the stupidest people on the planet. That last claim is debatable since there are always a continual stream of “even stupider” claims being made by ultra-credulous nitwits.
Maybe he’s a professor of genetics at Wolfson Used Cars in Omaha??
@briquet
You’re right, that’s probably what they meant. I wouldn’t have written it that way, but fine.
“Subspecies”, note the distinct lack of a hyphen, isn’t necessarily a weasel word at all; it refers to a rank in taxonomic nomenclature officially enough that the codes of nomenclature mention it several times.
Whether it refers to anything that exists in nature depends on which species concept you pick. :-) Some people simply call the smallest diagnosable groups “species”, obviously making the existence of subspecies impossible.
This reminds me of Canada’s Gordon Spowart, who the Global newscast included in a news report when November 11, 2011 came around and got a bunch of superstitious people all excited. He claimed to be a rep of the Numerology Institute of Canada, but when I looked at their website it became pretty obvious he was its sole member.
And is that the way it’s meant here? How would we know? I’ll bet dollars to donuts if/when the facts don’t bear out the conclusion he’ll immediately introduce his own personal definition, because that’s what they always do.
When a con artist is being vague, it’s never an accident. It’s plausible denial.
A lot of mormons are Bigfoot or Sasquatch believers. Their leader on this subject is also a professor, though in a less famous institution than Oxford.
Oregon Live link.
Excerpts from Meldrum’s bio:
I said “Hey Bigfoot hunter, that’s astute,”
I said, “Why don’t we get together and call ourselves an institute?”
*snicker* *tee hee* *bwahahahahhahahahahaha*
Meldrum hasn’t a skeptical bone in his body.
And in case anybody is interested, Meldrum has posted here about bigfoot, (magimage (?) or their real ‘nym started it, might be back in SciBlog) and couldn’t supply the necessary evidence: 1) live critter; 2) carcass; 3) skeleton; 4) hair/dung with DNA. Typical of a True Believer™ in that such minor matters like conclusive scientific evidence aren’t needed to make him have his leap of faith.
But that’s my point: “subspecies” is hardly more vague than “species”.
And that a journalist doesn’t know how to spell that word has to be expected in any case.
I think it was Mythmage, not magimage. I’ll probably have the aha! for the name in the middle of the night.
Update after the aha!, Mythusmage, and Allen (?spelling) Kellogg.
@ pentatomid
I’ll try to be more politically correct in the future.
The section here on ‘Alleged Hominid Samples’ updates and de-sensationalises the story that was carried in one episode of Channel 4’s ‘The Bigfoot Files’ in 2013 concerning the Yeti mystery:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_Sykes
The Channel 4 programme (episode 1 of the three part series I think) took the apparent ‘Yeti’ hair genetic discovery by Sykes very seriously as I recall ie presenter Mark Evans did not sound sceptical:
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/bigfoot-files/on-demand/54735-001
Hoosier X
See that you do.
Oh people, Sasquatch was real but has gone extinct.
The Sasquatchi were all taken up in the Rapture, along with a few farmers from Anvilania. All the rest of us are living in the Tribulation.
I hereby announce the foundation of the Institute for the Study of Spurious Institutes: ISSI. Its first major project will be an in-depth study of the Institute for the Study of Spurious Institutes.
I stopped reading at ” no, he’s not a Bigfoot at Oxford”….
zetopan @ 15:
I wonder if this is the show that my mom is, quite literally, watching right now. I’ve only caught bits and pieces of it, but boy are the bits that I’ve seen bad. They seem to have a token “skeptic” who actually argued that a high pitched scream that allegedly lasted over a minute that a person claimed to have heard might have been…. wait for it… victims of the mafia. Because a high pitched scream heard in the middle of the woods is obviously a human being killed/tortured by the mafia (who were said to have dumped bodies in those woods), and not, say, an animal (likely being killed; I’ve heard what I presume are death screams in the woods, and they can be quite terrifying). The other “investigators” said it had to be a sasquatch, because literally every “unusual” sound they hear is obviously a ‘squatch (because reasons). I have a sneaking suspicion that if they brought along someone who was actually familiar with animal vocalizations, they wouldn’t have a show. Their standard for evidence is so low that you’d have to dig a trench to limbo under it.
Can’t we just invoke taxonomy and say: no type specimen, no species?
Obligatory XKCD, etc.
https://xkcd.com/1235/
After Ray Wallace died, his own family openly admitted that bigfoot was a fraud of his creation. But even the truth from the source has never been nor will ever be enough to convince “true believers”. It’s true of this nonsense, 9/11, UFOs and every other form of delusion.
Menyambal @32:
I’d have to agree with you there.