To catch a predator ghillie suit series#

Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument. Primo Levi, the Italian-Jewish chemist and writer, once described memory as Fear, or other strong emotions, can alter the way our brains receive, interpret, and store information in what is known as a 'flashbulb memories' which, although people may swear by them, are often found to be erroneous. Healthy brains commit logical fallacies all the time (we are, for example, prone to think that if one thing follows the other, the first must have caused the other, which is obviously not always the correct assumption), and have even been known to hallucinate. The human brain, as remarkable as it is, is not perfect. Null and alternative are widely used in statistics, but can be applied to all science disciplines.ДЄnother aspect of science is that the scientific process takes into account the well known pitfalls of the human brain.

(Example: ' Giant spiders do not exist in the Amazon rain forest.') The alternative hypothesis is, essentially, all other hypotheses that are not the null (Example: ' Giant spiders do exist in the Amazon rain forest.') and it is important to note that, unless the null hypothesis is shown to be incorrect, nothing is ever done with the alternative hypothesis. The null hypothesis is the default position, and it is the hypothesis which is always worked on initially. Science does not look to prove things, rather, it looks to disprove them this is done with a pair of hypotheses (usually a pair, although, in more complicated scenarios, more than two hypotheses can exist), a null hypothesis and an alternative hypothesis. Preceding those, and perhaps the only discipline with the ability to prove anything with certainty, is mathematics. Physics, chemistry, and biology are the three main examples, on which all other disciplines (organic chemistry, biochemetry, theoretical physics, arachnology, anthropology) are based. For example, science is the appropriate use of the scientific method to discover truths about the natural world in which we live. We first have to establish what science is, and what science is not. Then there are the outright frauds, like (as I will discuss in detail later) 'Doctor' Melba Ketchum, who claims big things about sasquatch. Most other personas in the 'field' are nowhere near reliable, taking too much stock in eyewitness testimony (the lowest form of evidence in science).

To catch a predator ghillie suit series#

There are, at best, two credible personages in the cryptozoology movement - the first is Idaho State University professor of anatomy and anthropology Don Jeffery Meldrum, who collects and has analyzed perported Sasquatch foot-casts and has extensively analyzed the infamous video (more on that later) the other is host of the Animal Planet series 'River Monsters' Jeremy Wade, if he can even be said to be a cryptozoologist (he defines himself as simply a biologist). And that is the hub of which this essay rests, the things which I eventually realized weren't accurate with that position.

To reiterate the position I'm taking on this, I should acknowledge the fact that, in my pre-academic life, I was a big proponent of cryptozoology. Animal planet has released no less than three pseudoscience documentaries ('Dragons: A fantasy made real' 'Mermaids: The Body Found' 'Mermaids: The New Evidence', at least two of which were not properly and clearly labeled to viewers as fiction) and Discovery began it's 2013 Shark Week run with a similar pseudoscientific, cryptozoological mockumentary ' Megaladon: The Monster Shark Lives.' This has seemingly become quite a popular subject for the layperson, something that seemingly responsible 'science' program channels (Science channel, Discovery, and Animal Planet) have picked up on. Biology in general, and zoology in particular, has it's own pseudoscience counterpart - cryptozoology, the 'study of hidden animals'. Sometimes these are precursors to modern scientific disciplines (for example, the science of astronomy and the pseudoscience of astrology) or are completely new ideas that have formed after major discoveries in a legitimate scientific field (example: Deepak Chopra's 'quantum consciousness' hypothesis in the wake of real discoveries made in quantum mechanics). For every science, there seems to be a pseudoscience that trails happily along in its wake, gaining proponents even though they seldom make any real discoveries for themselves.