Is yeti real? Not a matter of science

A couple of years ago when I tagged along with a friend to watch a poorly critiqued Bengali movie, Yeti Obhijaan, little did I know that awful experience one day would come handy to write about the legendary beast. Though the movie, like most researchers, dismissed the claim of a giant primate species wandering in the Himalayas, it ended with a mysterious unseen creäture lurking and watching humans leave the mountains, and thus helped keep the belief in folklore alive.
 
Stories about yeti, popular among sherpas and among millions worldwide, are back in the spotlight after the Indian Army recently tweeted photographs of giant footsteps, claimed of a yeti.   

 
It’s important to note that creatures like komodo dragon, giant panda and gorillas were all discovered partly because of folklore. Also, Gigantopithecus blacki, an extinct species of 10 ft tall apes that existed 100,000 years ago, lived in the region which today comprises India, China, Vietnam and Indonesia.
 

In 2004, Henry Gee, editor of the journal Nature, wrote: “The discovery that Homo floresiensis (3-4 ft tall cousin of humans) survived until so very recently, in geological terms, makes it more likely that stories of other mythical, human-like creatures such as yetis are founded on grains of truth.”
 

Earth is a big planet and many species still remain undiscovered. Could yetis be one of them? Unlikely.
 
Two studies of “yeti” samples in the past five years — one published in 2014 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B and the other published in 2017 in the same journal — have indicated that the samples be­l­o­n­g­ed to bears and not a primate spe­cies. Similar studies in the past, too, have discouraged any belief in yeti.
 
But as the popular aphorism goes: “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence!” No re­s­earch, so far, has disproved the existence of a yeti or a bigfoot (the western version of a yeti-like creäture).

 
So, should we believe in Nepalese folklore? No. And here comes the need for encouraging people towards critical and sceptical thinking.
 
The study of animals whose existence has yet to be proved is known as cryptozoology and cryptids, or “hidden animals,” start their lives as blurry photographs, grainy videos, footmarks and countless stories. The yeti/bigfoot theory is based on such anecdotes only.
 
And, in the words of social scientist Frank J Sulloway: “Anecdotes do not make a science. Ten anecdotes are no better than one, and a hundred anecdotes are no better than ten.”
 
Science cannot completely disprove that “yeti is real” because it is not a question for science. Non-scientific theories could not be falsified as they aren’t testable in a legitimate way. There was no possible objection that could be raised which would show the theory to be wrong.

 
Noted astrophysicist Carl Sagan in his book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, to encourage sceptical thinking, offers a story concerning a fire-breathing dragon that lives in his garage.
 
When Sagan persuades a rational, open-minded visitor to meet the dragon, the visitor remarks that he couldn’t see the creäture. Sagan replies that he “neglected to mention that she’s an invisible dragon”. The visitor then suggests spreading flour on the floor so that the creature’s footprints could be seen, to which Sagan says “this dragon floats in the air”. When the visitor considers using an infra-red camera to view the creature’s invisible fire, Sagan explains that the fire is heatless. He continues to counter every proposed physical test with a “reason” for why the test will not work.

 
Sagan concludes: “Now what’s the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there’s no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true.”
 
According to the principle of Ockham’s Razor, attributed to 14th-century scholastic philosopher and theologian William of Ockham, more straightforward explanations are, in general, better. That is, if you have two possible theories that fit all available evidence, the best theory is which has fewer abstract ideas, or guesses.

 
So, a better and scientific theory would be that there is no giant hairy primate roaming the snowy peaks of the Himalayas. Because all it takes to prove this idea wrong is to find one!
 

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