This is why I blocked Pygoscelis. And yet because you guys insist on continuing to quote him I can never really be free of him. I say “scientific evidence”, he reads that as “evidence, period”. And then says, “How about dowsing, telekinesis, and alien abductions?” That is so, so typical. And so, so telling.
But as long as we are on the subject of aliens, here is another quote from Skeptical Investigations:
Pseudoskeptics tend to accept conventional "explanations" for unconventional phenomena very easily, no matter how weak, contrived or far-fetched. A good historical example is the rejection of the crop circle phenomenon. Doug Bower and David Chorley claimed in 1991 that they had created all of the British crop circles since 1978 (all 2000 of them). This was an extraordinary claim of the highest order. Two old men claimed that for over a decade, they have been creating geometrical designs in crops whose complexity defies easy geometrical construction, but they were never able to demonstrate that they can do what they claim they could do. Any true skeptic would have rejected Bower's and Chorley's claim, since "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. Yet, the organized skeptics endorsed the claims enthusiastically and denounced the whole crop circle phenomenon a proven hoax…
Let us assume a scenario in a hypothetical new science in which there are two pieces of evidence to be discovered, A and B, each equally credible, each one suggesting an obvious, but incorrect explanation (call them (1) and (2)). (1) and (2) are mutually incompatible, and a third, highly non obvious explanation (3) that accounts for both A and B is actually correct. As chance would have it, one of the two pieces of evidence A,B will be discovered first. Let A be that piece of evidence, and further suppose that the scientists working in that hypothetical field all subscribe to the principle of the double standard. After the discovery of A, they will adopt explanation (1) as the accepted theory of their field. At a later time, when B is discovered, it will be dismissed because it contradicts (1), and because A and B are equally credible, but A is ordinary relative to (1) and B is extraordinary. The end result is that our hypothetical science has failed to self-correct. The incorrect explanation (1) has been accepted, and the correct explanation (3) was never found, because B was rejected. I therefore submit that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence is not suitable as a guiding principle for sound scientific research. All evidence, whether it supports accepted theories or not, should be given the same level of critical scrutiny.
Let me note that not only did Chorley and Bower not demonstrate that they were able to do all these crops circles in that space of time, they also didn't offer a scrap of evidence that they ever had done anything at all.
I neither know nor care what the origin of the crop circles was. In fact I think the likeliest explanation for the UFOs people see (most of the time, at least) is top secret military vehicles. According to an episode of How the States Got Their Shapes the sightings tend to be statistically clustered around the type of bases where these things are developed; old military hulls and prototypes have been found and photographed which strongly resemble flying saucers. But the point remains the same regardless of the details of the analogy. That’s why, I think, the second part of the quote was posed in purely hypothetical terms without any specific reference point. It leaves the skeptics reading it with no such outs.
hew