BY STEWART SLATER

In an ever-changing world, there are some things you can rely on. Death and taxes, England’s male footballers losing on penalties, Wile E Coyote never catching that pesky Roadrunner. Among that select number of certainties is the fact that, at any time, someone will be trying to find the Loch Ness Monster. Equally guaranteed is the fact that they will fail to do so but the press will be willing to publicise their efforts.

For there has recently been another large scale effort to find the planet’s shyest, but possibly most famous, creature. Two hundred volunteers journeyed North to line the banks of the loch. Two hundred volunteers returned South having seen nothing. The occupants of a boat heard noises (too many egg sandwiches perhaps) but had, unfortunately, forgotten to plug in the recording device. Checking that, in the event you found evidence to overturn centuries of scientific orthodoxy, you would be able to supply proof to a sceptical world is not, it appears, as obvious as one might think. Or perhaps, the cryptozoology mob were not sending their best.

No matter. When one door closes, another opens. Just days after this latest crushing blow, The Telegraph (once considered a serious paper) published pictures taken in 2018 but only now released showing the creature’s back. Or perhaps it is just a picture of some rocks. Or maybe a fish. For, the history of Nessie photos is not good. Either they turn out to be pictures of something else (driftwood etc), or, as in the case of the “Surgeon’s Photo”, they turn out to be faked.

There is, of course, a good reason for this. It is spectacularly unlikely that the monster actually exists. While there are specific problems with each of the proposed theories for what it is (plesiosaur proponents, for example, need to explain how, uniquely amongst their kind, its ancestors avoided the extinction event which killed the dinosaurs and their fellows, and also how they failed to evolve at all in the intervening 60mn years), there is a general problem with all of them. Since we know of no similar creature anywhere else, the population must be isolated. But that means that its members must breed amongst themselves. As owners of pugs, or fans of mediaeval Habsburg portraiture know, such inbreeding reduces fitness and, in males, promotes infertility. If there ever had been a Loch Ness Monster, it would, from what we know of zoology, have gone extinct and probably looked rather strange before it did so.

Just because people have no reason to believe does not, of course, mean that people will not want to believe.

And many people, it seems, do. The press coverage shows that. For, while we may no longer officially believe in monsters, this, like indoor plumbing, democracy, and reduced murder rates everywhere but American cities, makes us very odd. Open any book of myth, from any region in the world, and you will soon be reading about fantastical beasts even if you will be unable to find them. Believing in strange creatures is something, from all the evidence, that humans have long done.

It is argued that these stories were actually an early form of science. Palaeontologists today dig up bones and use them to reconstruct the dinosaurs they composed, earlier people came across fossils which were clearly not from creatures they recognised, and so invented dragons etc. to explain them. The difference is that scientists stop once they have reconstructed the animals, the ancients carried on, ascribing powers to them, and bringing them into the present so they could interact with humans as in the story of Perseus and Andromeda.

These stories shaped how subsequent fossils were interpreted. There are giants in the Bible, so when a large femur was excavated in Oxfordshire in 1676, it was ascribed to a giant. In a perfect encapsulation of Anglo-Gallic differences, the first English academic to study it decided it was a leg bone, while the first Frenchman made the ballsy call that it was a scrotum. It was not until 1818 that it was discovered to be a dinosaur.

This, scientific, account may have the benefit of accuracy, but it lacks the romance of the myths, a romance which we appear still to need. We may know, in contrast to the ancients, that dinosaurs are long gone, but we like to imagine they are not, trooping to the cinema to see Jurassic Park and its ever less justifiable sequels. Like the author of many of Hercules’ Labours, King Kong took an invented beast and let him loose in 1930’s New York, while Godzilla did the same to post-war Tokyo.

At one level, Nessie fits into this pattern – it is a strange creature about which we can tell stories as those old enough to remember The Family Ness will attest. But there is something deeper going on. Those hardy souls who travel North with their plastic clothes and soggy sandwiches are not doing so to tell stories, they are trying to find a real animal.

In their quest, they are seeking to over-turn two features of modernity: knowledge and power.

That old maps included the label “Here Be Dragons” is a zombie fact: completely untrue, but oft repeated. Even if no chart ever did bear it, does not, however, mean that none could have. It was late in the 19th century that the map of Africa was filled in. As long as there was unexplored territory, there could be undiscovered animals. Now, of course, the surface world is known, implying that all the large animals are known (insects and small mammals continue to be discovered but are not, unfortunately, very glam while the resources required to reach the deep ocean are beyond most Nessie-hunters). The search is an attempt to avoid this fact and its implication, horrifying to a curious, driven species, that this is all there is. There are no more (surface animal) worlds to conquer.

Not only are we unique in knowing all the animals, we are also unique in having mastered them. Human history is the story of our struggle with the animal kingdom. To our earliest ancestors, they were threats and rivals. With the first agricultural revolution, some became workers and friends. With the invention of gunpowder, all became prey. Some may still be a threat to a man, none can stand up to a man with a big enough gun – as the Romans knew, a lion was a match for even the best trained gladiator, to a fat modern American dentist, they are just target practice.

Francis Fukuyama wrote that Man “will struggle for the sake of struggle…[he] cannot imagine living in a world without struggle”. It is a coincidence, but an informative one, that sightings of Nessie kicked into high gear (and the original King Kong was released) just three years after the last tiger was shot in Singapore. Almost as soon as Man had shown his dominion over real creatures, he decided to find  mythical ones to challenge him. For, the Monster is a big animal, not some timid rodent scurrying through the undergrowth. Big animals are a threat. They can take us on, particularly in their own environment.

It is easy to sneer at Nessie hunters. The quest to find a creature which cannot exist, not particularly competently in the latest instance, is, at best, quixotic. But they are attempting to give us something modern humans lack but earlier humans always had – an adversary worthy of ourselves. Sitting at the top of a fully-understood creation is a lonely place. We need a mystery and we need a rival. And that, perhaps, is why we want to believe.

Stewart Slater works in Finance. He invites you to join him at his website.