“Forgotten were the elementary rules of logic, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and that what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”  — Christopher Hitchens  Author and Journalist, Slate, October 2003 

Hi all
I have been researching the origin of this concept: "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." Of course, it hinges on what is considered extraordinary. One thing that comes to mind is honey bees surviving without treatment. Many people claim to have them, but often produce no evidence, or else anecdotes and just so stories.  In the final analysis, the second part of the above is true, "what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.” A statement made with no attempt to support it, is not in need of refutation, it falls on its face. However, the other half is not exactly true. 

What is required to refute an extraordinary claim is a more plausible claim. As in Occam's Razor, the simplest explanation is most likely to be the correct one. For example, if a colony survives without treatment off in the woods somewhere, the explanation is far less likely to be some genetic mutation than it is simply isolated. If we all could keep our hives singly with no other hive within the flight range, probably diseased bees would be a thing of the past. Of course, that information is lacking in usefulness. We live in the actual world and we need to find the real solutions. 

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” was a phrase made popular by Carl Sagan who reworded Laplace’s principle, which says that "the weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness" --   Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827)

"No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish."' -- David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 1758.

PLB

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