Weak coffee

As I see it, quite a few people examine the Ivory-bill evidence and do recognize that the individual video, sighting and audio pieces are weak. However, they conclude that the combination of all three pieces is compelling. In my view, that type of thinking is not solid.

Benjamin Radford, managing editor of Sceptical Inquirer magazine, said this about weak evidence:

"I liken it to a cup of coffee - if you have many cups of weak coffee, they can't be combined into strong coffee...It's the same with scientific evidence. If you have lots of weak evidence, the cumulative effect of the evidence doesn't make it strong evidence...".

One of my readers emailed to say "There is no control for this experiment". That's an important point. If you're testing a new drug, it's not enough to find that in testing, 55% of patients get better after a month on your drug. If 60% of patients get better after a month on a placebo, then you don't have evidence that your drug is effective.

Similarly, if you get some double-knocks and kent-like calls in 18,000 hours of ARU data, that's not necessarily significant evidence. If ARUs were set up in areas with no Ivory-bills, such as Minnesota, I think just as many (or more) double-knocks and kent-like calls might be recorded. Likewise, if you left some video cameras running in woodpecker territory in Minnesota, focused at 1 or 2 meters, I'd bet that you'd get some fuzzy video of fleeing black-and-white birds. And finally, if you told people that an Ivory-bill had been sighted in Minnesota and they spent 20,000 hours looking, I'd bet that some would get glimpses of large dark birds that appeared to have trailing white wing edges.

It's very unpopular to say this, but I think if you look at the current Bigfoot and Ivory-bill evidence objectively, you really do have to acknowledge that there are many uncomfortable similarities (ie many sightings, fuzzy pictures, inconclusive audio, and tree damage, yet no definitive proof). Maybe the Ivory-bill lives. However, it's also possible that the similarities in the Bigfoot and Ivory-bill evidence are not coincidental--this body of weak evidence may actually be the expected result when you search hard for a nonexistent creature.