Something really annoyed me today and I am going to write about it, Goddamnit!

360 Documentaries must be in my podcast list for some reason. But a recent episode — Among Animals — was certainly not a documentary. More like half relaxation tape and half animal rights propaganda piece. (Not that I am against animal rights… but propaganda is propaganda.)

But the awful nature of the “documentary”, as a whole, is not what annoyed me. It was this particular sentiment that was brought up by one of the interviewees:

The other scientific taboo is anecdotes. But think of all we miss if we don’t permit stories to be told about the way we see and hear and sense and think about animals and instead we limit our descriptions of them to formal measurements. To dismiss anecdotes is really to distort an individual animal’s life.

That’s not quite all…

The documentary’s narrator (who is a child of maybe eight years, no doubt to aid the propaganda push) then goes on to “prove” the point:

This is a true story.

In the snowy mountains, where there are many brumbies, one had died beside a creek. After two days a mob of wild horses appeared in the south. Then another in the north. And a third in the west. Together they formed one long line, and each turning to face the fallen horse they filed slowly past.

(I would normally mention the name of the person who made the anecdotes-are-awesome claim, but unlike most ABC radio material this does not have a transcript. I’m not keep to trawl through the whole thing again to find a name. Doubtless it is one of the people mentioned as guests.)

Hopefully you can see why I am annoyed.

Anecdotes are useless. If we paid any heed to anecdotes we’d have to seriously consider bible miracles, UFO abductions, the existence of dragons, and so much more crap.

The unscientific mind sees the horses doing this and jumps straight to a conclusion. “Horses have the same emotions as me.” For them, the matter is settled.

But true science doesn’t end with anecdotes. Anecdotes are where you start. The scientific mind, upon seeing this odd behaviour, wants to know more. This is where experiments and observation come in. Watch horses in the wild to see how they normally treat their dead. Plant dead horses (or taxidermic simulacrums) and see if they cause the same reaction. I’m sure a zoologist could think up more and better tests. The end results are — shock — formal measurements.

Animal behavior isn’t some airy-fairy mystery we can’t understand. Clever scientists have devised ways to test very specific capabilities.

So, why does this annoy me? What do I care what some fool has to say about science and anecdotes?

I care because the fact that such a stupid thought can be so boldly mentioned is symptomatic of a lack of scientific thinking in the public at large. And that is bad because the public at large votes. The type of person who thinks anecdotes are valid science is the type of person who thinks climate change is impossible because they had a cold winter, or that evolution is a lie because the eye is a complex organ.