Monday, June 9, 2008

Dr. Chris Clark on the Almasty

Dr. Chris Clark, who will be traveling to Russia with Richard and Co. (or as I like to call the team: CFZski), gives his own thoughts on the quest for unknown hominds:

"Of all the possible subjects of cryptozoological inquiry, I believe that the search for hominids is the most important. The orang-pendek of Sumatra that the CFZ searched for in 2003 and 2004 may represent an ape that has taken one of the fundamental steps in human evolution, the ability to walk upright; the almas could be a snapshot of human evolution itself.

"Palaeo-anthropology at present is only barely an experimental science. The gulf that separates us from the earliest australopithecines is spanned only by a few bones and simple tools, widely scattered in space and time. Many of the questions that we have about human evolution can never be answered on the basis of fossils alone.

"This is why it is of the highest importance to look for any possible pre-human survivors.You might naively expect that scientists would be clamouring to investigate any reports that suggest surviving hominids. Certainly there are plenty of them: there is not a mountain range in Asia that does not have local stories about large bipedal creatures.

"Unfortunately, too many scientists prefer to take the safe route, as though it is more important to dispute the precise interpretation of a cranial measurement on a fossil skull than to find the creature itself. Any researcher who suggested actual field work to look for pre-human survivors would risk losing their research grant, which is all too often awarded by a committee of elderly academics who have no wish to see their life work rendered irrelevant by a dramatically new approach. Curiously, the physical sciences never seem to suffer from this: physicists get a billion dollars to search for the Higgs boson, or astronomers for black holes, without anybody deriding them on the basis that these things exist only in the realms of mathematical speculation.

"More often than not, their courage is rewarded. In cryptozoology we have one of the few ways in which the amateur can still make worthwhile scientific discoveries; in the field of human evolution it may even be the only way".

Chris has accompanied Richard Freeman on every one of his CFZ expeditions since 2003.

4 comments:

cryptidsrus said...

Good comments there by Clark...

We live in a "horizontal world."
9 to 5. This a "vertical world" phenomena. Outside of the paradigm.

Like Plato's cave. One goes outside and sees the world. How can one explain this to the people inside the cave? How can people in the "scientific establishment" cave deal with Almas? Yeti?
They prefer the shadows on the wall.

Maybe in 2012 we'll see a "horizontal-vertical" union. New paradigm, eh?
Heh-heh-heh.

We'll just have to have a dead body, I guess. Unfortunately.

Sorry for the sarcasm. Medication has not kicked in. Just tired of the dismissiveness of the "experts."

Wish Clark and the others best of luck...

Nick Redfern said...

C:
Thanks, hopefully if nothing else they'll get good witness testimony to follow up on.

JTankers said...

"Unfortunately, too many scientists prefer to take the safe route"

I wish that were true. How many scientists do you know that are listening to some of their peers who are warning of possible danger from the Large Hadron Collider that might be just a coin flip or two difference between safety and catastrophe.

The first hearing in US Federal Court to compel reasonable proof of safety is in a few days (June 16, 2008).

JTankers
LHCFacts.org

JTankers said...

Something else that might not be safe... very interesting apparent discrepancy between very reputable and credible teams of physicists at LHCFacts.org Internal Blog of the day...

See what 2001 Physics Nobel Laureates Dr. Cornell and Dr. Wiesman say about the possibility of micro black hole creation from a Bose-Einstein Condensate bosenova implosion (Dr. Cornell, diplomatically) “probably not a black hole, more likely…“, and (Dr. Wieman more bluntly) “I can state ABSOLUTELY CATEGORICALLY that it is totally inconceivable" then compare that with what MIT Physicists appears to be predicting in their papers. "We verify that the picture presented by Ueda and Huang is correct. For N > Nc , a “black-hole” does appear at the center of the trap"

Appear to be very different predictions. Waiting for better clarification...

Details at LHCFacts.org -> Collider Incidents

JTankers
LHCFacts.org