Word from yesterday's New York Times is that Dr. Blum and Dr. Robbins have been given access to recordings made in the Cache River swamps of Arkansas. They are apparently now convinced that there are at least two Ivory-billed Woodpeckers there. They are either withdrawing their pending article critiquing the video or, at least, re-evaluating its content.
The true-believers are piling on the I-told-you-sos, choosing to ignore the fundamental problem in the originally presented evidence. The original evidence was tantalizing and provocative, but not definitive. It required criticism. And the result was more and better evidence. This is how science operates and it's the reason why claims tempered by the fires of the scientific method are generally more reliable than those generated by faith alone. The claimants are evaluated on the evidence. The burden of proof is on the claimants. It is the evidence that counts, not the letters behind the names of the claimants. Nothing by authority.
Let's not confuse the Ivory-billed Woodpecker with the evidence for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. Lack of evidence is not evidence against. Hours and hours of field time searching for something and NOT finding it is not lack of evidence, though. The hours spent not finding Ivory-billed Woodpeckers tells us a lot and should not be discounted. Every claim for an Ivory-billed Woodpecker should continue to require high skepticism and scrupulous evidentiary documentation.
Posted by mbalame at August 3, 2005 5:25 PM