hitchhikingfrog

Howdy, the first half-dozen or so of my posts act as mirrors for Reddit posts and adhere largely to that style, just modifying the contents of these posts slightly, I will eventually come back and amend these when I decide on a cohesive format for my posting. This post combines two different, informal pieces I wrote in one accessible place for convenience.  In my opinion, cryptozoological discourse has become increasingly redundant and paltry over the last decade. There are a variety of factors at play, however one of the least-acknowledged but most crucial is cryptozoology’s general refusal to concede - we preserve our monsters at the cost of progression. The constant discussions on the possibility of Bigfoot and Nessie are the clearest example. I am not the first to point this out, but I’ve seen very few in this sub speak about it. Cryptozoology needs critical discussions of this sort if it ever wants to obtain academic legitimacy, so let’s have ...

Howdy, the first half-dozen or so of my posts act as mirrors for Reddit posts and adhere largely to that style, just modifying the contents of these posts slightly, I will eventually come back and amend these when I decide on a cohesive format for my posting. This post combines two different, informal pieces I wrote in one accessible place for convenience.  As per Wikipedia, some general-audience books on science, the occasional academic interviewed for a bigfoot news story, and many people in this sub, cryptozoology is a pseudoscience. But is it really? What does this label mean, what does it imply, is it accurate? I don’t think so, I think the label is applied without adequate nuance. I’ve written this post to share some scattered thoughts (this is not a complete, cohesive argument) in the hopes of starting some discourse. I believe that cryptozoology is not an inherent pseudoscience, but is instead a practiced one. There are pseudoscientific individua...

Howdy, the first half-dozen or so of my posts act as mirrors for Reddit posts and adhere largely to that style, just modifying the contents of these posts slightly, I will eventually come back and amend these when I decide on a cohesive format for my posting. Supernatural is an anthropological term without an adequate definition (see Dein 2016). Anthropological disciplines survey a variety of cultures, and having terms which can be reliably applied across different cultures is incredibly useful, but a naive goal that’s often doomed to fail. “Supernatural” is a term rooted in the West, science has drawn a clear line between “natural” and “supernatural”. There are many cultures where this is simply not the case. As such, people using the term should define it within the context of the cultures being discussed, something that very rarely happens. This issue affects cryptozoology in two ways. Cryptozoology has historically excluded Western supernatural beliefs...

Howdy, the first half-dozen or so of my posts act as mirrors for Reddit posts and adhere largely to that style, just modifying the contents of these posts slightly, I will eventually come back and amend these when I decide on a cohesive format for my posting. A usual and consistent line of inquiry within cryptozoological circles is whether a purported cryptid could represent a late-surviving population of a group of animals thought to be extinct (e.g. "is Mokele-Mbembe a living sauropod?", "if the coelacanth survived, why couldn’t some other Mesozoic marine animals?"). I’m seeking to thoroughly challenge most of these lines of thought. To put it simply, the fossil record is adequate enough to depict the general ecological composition of prehistoric ecosystems, and the absence of certain megafaunal groups is often genuine evidence of absence. Cryptozoology enthusiast’s search for an identity leads them to propose completely anachronistic species as ...

Howdy, the first half-dozen or so of my posts act as mirrors for Reddit posts and adhere largely to that style, just modifying the contents of these posts slightly, I will eventually come back and amend these when I decide on a cohesive format for my posting One of the key traits which separates science from non-science is progress (Thagard, 1978) - whether an area of inquiry is making, or has the potential to make, new contributions to a broader body of knowledge. If cryptozoology is a science, it should be finding new things; this means discovering and describing cryptids. Is that occurring? The answer to this is complex, best summed up as "ehhh..kinda?". To answer this question you first have to establish what counts as discovering. Cryptozoology is an inherently an anthropological discipline, it is dealing with the knowledge of people and their role in shaping it. Although a significant portion of cryptozoological anecdotes are describing zoological species, there are equ...