Evidence and Proof

Evidence and Proof
(also posted at Wilde Karrde)

During the West-ward expansion of America, many people found themselves in wagon trains traveling across plains and deserts. Occasionally, they found themselves trapped by winter weather far short of their destination, and went through extreme hardship before spring came.

One such party was the Donner party, which began travelling towards California in 1846. Trapped by snows in the Sierra Nevada mountains during the winter of '46-47, the party was forced to eat anything they could find, including their own pack animals.

There are also debates over whether the party ever resorted to cannibalism of their dead members.

Very recent research into the subject is outlined by David Nishimura at Cronaca. Historians cannot prove that the cannibalism did happen, but they can prove that human bones buried there weren't charred.

It is a case of absence of evidence. We don't have direct evidence to prove that survival cannibalism occurred. As David argues in his short post, this is not absence that no such cannibalism occurred. From his own research into other such claims, he knows that such events rarely leave evidence behind in the form of charred bones.

This simple discussion of a grisly subject reminds me of many other discussions that have been held recently. From the question of what happened to Saddam Hussein's weapons labs to the question of whether the President was right to order wiretapping of suspected terrorists calling friends in the United States, we are dealing with situations where there is absence of evidence on at least one side of the case.

However, the absence of evidence does not prove that that we have evidence of absence. This applies equally to questions about the legality of Top Secret programs, the historicity of survival cannibalism, data sent by CIA sources all over the world, and knowledge about another government's secret weapons programs after significant effort by that government to hide most of the data from the outside world.

The fact that we don't have direct evidence about the Iraqi weapons program does not mean that we have direct evidence that the weapons program never existed and was never a threat.

Likewise for the legality of wiretapping by the NSA. The fact that we don't have the evidence to show that the wiretapping was legal does not mean that the wiretapping was illegal. It means that the evidence is unavailable to us right now.