Hunting the undebunkable
Before I come to the boffin on the radio, here’s a question: how many plesiosaurs do you know by name (ie by Christian name, surname, or both)? Right, time’s up, and the answer is . . . pause for tension-stretching fanfare . . . one. And that one is, altogether now, at the tops of your voices, Nessie.
I apologise to those of you who didn’t realise the Loch Ness monster is a plesiosaur, but she is. It’s obvious from the few faked photographs, obvious at least to anyone who, at the age of seven, had a brief but burning crush on dinosaurs in general to the extent that he read every book on the subject in the Hassocks District Library and who to this day can tell his triceratops from his diplodocus and who has never forgotten the lesson of the allosaurus.
The allosaurus was every bit as terrifying as tyrannosaurus rex, but it was so forgettably named that everyone forgot it. Branding, even among the extinct, is everything.
Anyway, a plesiosaur was an aquatic brontosaurus, long-necked, longtailed and big-bodied. But whereas the brontosaurus supported its weight on legs the size of kauri stumps, the plesiosaur handed that duty over to salt water and evolved a set of flippers for propulsion. It needed propulsion because, unlike the plodding vegetarian bront, it was a predator.
Now, it is generally agreed that the last plesiosaur turned up its flippers 66 million years ago. Yet there’s said to be one in Loch Ness. It is into this apparent contradiction that our boffin on the radio steps.
The boffin’s field of expertise is environmental DNA, which, as far as I could gather from the snatch of interview I heard with the excellent Kathryn Ryan, works on the same principle as the Theory of Napoleon’s Urine.
I learned the Theory of Napoleon’s Urine (Tonpis to the French) at the same time as I was learning about dinosaurs. Its one tenet is that every glass of water you drink contains at least one molecule that passed through Napoleon’s bladder.
Now, while being aware that there are trillions of molecules in a glass of water, and while being further aware that Napoleon was fond of a drink, I am not sure that I have ever quite believed Tonpis. Environmental DNA, however, I am more inclined to trust.
Essentially it argues that you and I and all living things are forever shedding stuff containing DNA, and that stuff gets broken up and distributed randomly through the environment like Napoleon’s urine.
It follows, therefore, that if you take a few cups of water from Loch Ness and you sieve out the fish DNA and the pondweed DNA and the dead sheep DNA and the bathing human beings’ DNA and of course the tonpis, then whatever DNA you’re left with is Nessie’s. And that is precisely what the boffin on the radio is doing.
Who’s paying him to do it, I can’t tell you. But I can tell you what he’ll find, which is nothing at all. As he surely already knows. There is no Nessie.
Why then is he doing it? Why is he scouring a lake on the other side of the world for what obviously isn’t there? Is it for the publicity? If so, then he’s a cunning bugger. The world’s media are clamouring.
But if he’s hoping to debunk the myth of Nessie, then he’s a fool. Nessie’s undebunkable. You can disprove her all you like but she’ll endure. We much prefer our pretty stories to the dreary truth. Look at ghosts. Look at god.