by Hundreds of people are set to join what has been described as the biggest search for the Loch Ness Monster in more than 50 years.
Two hundred volunteers are to help record natural - and any unusual - sights on Loch Ness from vantage points on land.
Almost 300 have signed up to monitor a live stream from the search, which is taking place on Saturday and Sunday.
This even made the news here!
Anyway, I think this is a great example of what happens when claims are treated as if they're true absent evidence; the "open-minded" approach has seen generation after generation spend time and resources looking for, and so far failing to find, evidence of the claims.
In fact, there's really not been any corroboration at all from all the various types of exploration done over the past decades that's given justification to consider Nessie a reality. All we have is all we ever had, anecdote and a couple of poor resolution photographs that really could be many much more mundane things.
But ok, let's have 200 volunteers monitor webcams etc., and look again - maybe there's something we missed before. Maybe we find Nessie this time, right? Or at worst, our directed observations may make some other unrelated discovery that partially justifies all this investment.
But if and when this doesn't turn up any evidence, does it mean that the Nessie idea will die? Will people who already believe that Nessie lurks in the loch then become less confident that the idea they hold holds water? I think we've all seen the answer to that many times here.
I've encountered a number of people over the years who act as if they can simply maintain this kind of guru like ambivalence about the truth-value of unsupported claims, that it's close-minded to be skeptical of claims just because there's no evidence supporting them. But at some point, the claimant has to answer to reason.
From an ecological point of view, every species needs a range. Within that range, they will search for food, rest, search for mates, and possibly socialize. Most biomes are open in the sense that they are transversable by living organisms meaning ranges can be large and overlap with other biomes, but Loch Ness is a fresh-water lake surrounded by land, and quite hilly land at that. Any organism unable to walk on land cannot leave.
This then produces some more constraints about the existence of a large aquatic animal living in Loch Ness.
A resident plesiosaur must have been there since the last time Loch Ness had a direct route to the ocean, and thus we're not looking for A plesiosaur, but for a viable breeding group that was somehow trapped in freshwater lakes in the Scottish Highlands when their species was still extant in other parts of the planet. It really shouldn't be like looking for a needle in a haystack. How many individuals would it take to maintain a viable breeding population over the millions of years since plesiosaur type critters went extinct?
Given the surface area of the lake (56 km2), is this required minimum population number even realistic at all, let alone addressing why we don't see these numerous creatures all the time? The alleged creature also apparently prefers to live in deeper waters as it would be much more frequently seen if it hunted and lived in the shallows, and while the deepest point of Loch Ness is 230 metres, the underwater topography is basically a V shape, so the deeper you go, the smaller the navigable horizontal area.
What else can we tell from the local ecology about the behavior of this alleged creature from what is taken as 'know' about it? If it's some kind of aquatic reptile then it breathes air. So even if it is very well adapted to water-living, it's still going to need to come to the surface several times a day.
It lives in a lake, so sources of nutrition are limited strictly to the plants and other animals found there. If we assume that the notional creature has approximately the same dimensions as a harbor seal (i.e. small compared to the anecdotes), that would put it around 150-200KG. Sedentary modern humans eat a little under 2% of their body weight each day, while seals can eat as much as 6% - assuming a median for the sake of the argument, let's say the alleged creature eats 4% of 150KG per day, and let's make that food fish as predation means more available nutrition by mass, so these creatures would need to be eating 6kg of fish each per day. Several dozen creatures needing to eat several eels/trout/pike per day, and this trophic cycle having lasted for millions of years, would mean the predated fish in Loch Ness would need to breed so quickly to maintain viable populations themselves that the lake should be instantly odd comparative to other similar lakes in terms of the vast number of resident fish.
While it may be philosophically rigorous to maintain claims absent evidence in perpetual agnostic space, I don't think that's 'open-minded'. I think an open mind is one that's willing to review all the evidence before deciding, and lack of evidence - counterfactuals - are themselves a form of evidence. If X is true, then Y should be observed. Why then, claimant, don't we observe Y? A resident population of medium to large size creatures inhabiting Loch Ness does not seem to stand up to scrutiny at any level, so when we next turn stones looking for them and find nothing, shouldn't that be the last time?
