…and this is a 
The Sheldrake phenomenon
Category: Kooks • Skepticism
Posted on: June 8, 2008 1:54 PM, by PZ Myers
Richard Dawkins interviewed Rupert Sheldrake on Sheldrake's remarkable assertions about the existence of psychic abilities. Here's Sheldrake's rationalization:
He then said that in a romantic spirit he himself would like to believe in telepathy, but there just wasn't any evidence for it. He dismissed all research on the subject out of hand. He compared the lack of acceptance of telepathy by scientists such as himself with the way in which the echo-location system had been discovered in bats, followed by its rapid acceptance within the scientific community in the 1940s. In fact, as I later discovered, Lazzaro Spallanzani had shown in 1793 that bats rely on hearing to find their way around, but sceptical opponents dismissed his experiments as flawed, and helped set back research for well over a century. However, Richard recognized that telepathy posed a more radical challenge than echo-location. He said that if it really occurred, it would "turn the laws of physics upside down," and added, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
"This depends on what you regard as extraordinary", I replied. "Most people say they have experienced telepathy, especially in connection with telephone calls. In that sense, telepathy is ordinary. The claim that most people are deluded about their own experience is extraordinary. Where is the extraordinary evidence for that?"
Hang on there. Notice the devious twist?
Extraordinary claims do require extraordinary evidence. So what does Sheldrake do? He simply asserts that the idea that people can read minds over long distances for the ever-so useful purpose of occasionally detecting who is making a phone call (What? We have awesome telepathic powers that do nothing more than act as a flaky version of caller ID?) is not an extraordinary claim … on the basis of the unlikelihood that people could possibly be deluded about their own experiences. The man is nuts.
People fool themselves all the time. Millions claim that Jesus talks to them; other millions claim to be following the will of Allah. People believe in UFOs and Bigfoot and that the moon landings were a hoax. It is not at all extraordinary to suggest that human beings are eminently capable of swallowing truly crazy stuff.
On the other hand, Sheldrake's telepathy lacks a mechanism and doesn't even make sense. His 'experiments' are exercises in gullibility, anecdote, and sloppy statistics. His "morphic resonance" babble is embarrassingly gullible nonsense.
And I'm afraid Sheldrake is grossly in error in the way he pursues science. You can't just simply carry out a Fortean exercise in collecting odd anecdotes and unexplained phenomena. You have to propose mechanisms — you need to make hypotheses that can be used to guide tests of the idea. What is the mechanism behind the claimed ability of people to sense who is calling them on the telephone? Having some suggestion about how it works would allow investigators to design experiments that block the effect, or better yet, enhance the effect.
I can guess why Dawkins turned down Sheldrake when he insisted on presenting his "evidence". It wasn't evidence. Evidence is data that provides support for a proposition: Sheldrake has no testable proposition, no mechanism, no quantitative description of a measurable phenomenon. He has self-selected collections of numbers, addled by poor experimental design and confirmation bias, and all he'd do is reel off streams of context-free numbers accumulated in the absence of a quantifiable thesis. I've read enough of Sheldrake's work to know what a godawful load of substanceless bollocks he can spew at will.
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Comments
"I made it clear from the outset that I wasn't interested in taking part in another low grade debunking exercise." Richard said, "It's not a low grade debunking exercise; it's a high grade debunking exercise." "
I'm not sure about the rest of the scientific community, but I know in my soft-science (cognitive psychology) we refer to "debunking exercises" as a testable null-hypothesis. And, if I remember correctly, testing a null hypothesis is pretty darn important to the scientific method.
You would think that Sheldrake would be eager to throw a few testable null-hypothesis at his claims. =)
Posted by: Amber Culbertson-Faegre | June 8, 2008 2:07 PM
But surely, PZ, we should "teach both sides." What are you afraid of? Let the children decide. Stop the censorship. Teachers should be free to present the "strengths and weaknesses" of your orthodoxy. Let's have a little bit of "academic freedom" here. Why do you persecute those with whom you disagree? This is blatant "viewpoint discrimination."
(I'm buckin for a job at the Discovery Institute.)
Posted by: PatrickHenry | June 8, 2008 2:10 PM
This happens often enough that it doesn't surprise me any more. I decide to call someone on the telephone, put my hand on the phone, the phone rings and it is the person I was going to call. Sometimes the phone rings while I am looking up the person's number. It is kinda spooky!
Quite often, when someone calls, I know who it is before looking at the caller ID. I think it is a matter of situational awareness, and a limited number of potential phone callers. Nothing paranormal involved.
Posted by: Jim Thomerson | June 8, 2008 2:10 PM
Did you ever see the TV program "A Glorious Accident"? Solo interviews with Stephen J. Gould, Daniel Dennet, Freeman Dyson and Sheldrake, followed by a roundtable discussion. After talking about homing-pigeon telepathy, Sheldrake says something to the effect of "What if the sun has conciousness? Why dismiss that out of hand?" The look on Dennet's face was priceless.
Posted by: horrobin | June 8, 2008 2:12 PM
See here
http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/features/science/index.html
(episode #9) for more Sheldrake. Speaks for itself.
Posted by: SC | June 8, 2008 2:12 PM
I was in the middle of commenting on the fact that Sheldrake's assertion simply ignores the fact that we can sometimes perform deductive reasoning without being fully aware of it. (i.e., The phone rings and we - almost involuntarily - sort through the possibilities, and posit a guess as to who is calling - and sometimes the guess is correct. But, then again, sometimes it isn't.)
But you beat me to it...
Posted by: brokenSoldier, OM | June 8, 2008 2:17 PM
If telepathy did exist as Sheldrake claims then he might have been able to see this coming:
http://www.santafenewmexican.com/Local%20News/Man-accused-of-stabbing-speaker-at-La-Fonda
Posted by: Sigmund | June 8, 2008 2:20 PM
Arguments for paranormal phenomena depend on supplementary arguments that (e.g.) telepathy or precognition are not practically usable. Otherwise the stock market, horse racing, etc. would be dominated by seers, to the point that they'd have to be closed down since no one else could win.
Posted by: John Emerson | June 8, 2008 2:21 PM
Re deductive reasoning -
I was hanging out with a few friends and one of them heard her cell phone ring. Before she even picked it up she said "Who could that be? All the people who ever call me are here."
Posted by: mandrake | June 8, 2008 2:26 PM
You have to propose mechanisms -- you need to make hypotheses that can be used to guide tests of the idea.
I agree with the second clause of this sentence, but not the first. Consider the Law of Universal Gravitation - Newton proposed no mechanism but, after noting that the inverse square law explained the motion of the moon, presumably hypothesised that the same law applied to the planets - for which observations supplied the evidence to substantiate this. "I feign no hypotheses... It is enough that gravity does really exist and acts according to the laws I have explained"
Later, Henry Cavendish's experiments with masses in his laboratory - following up another hypothesis! - demonstrated that gravity wasn't just a 'heavenly' force. (Not that there's anything special about the results of experiments performed in a laboratory as opposed to observations made in nature - just a means of getting more control, I suppose.)
Certainly the proposal of a mechanism might suggest further experiments, however.
Posted by: JM | June 8, 2008 2:30 PM
I sure hope that guy doesn't know what I'm thinking now.
Posted by: Bachalon | June 8, 2008 2:32 PM
A while back, Sheldrake got the chance to write an essay for Edge's annual shindig. That year, the theme was, "What is your Dangerous Idea?" His contribution was, I have to say, rather underwhelming.
Posted by: Blake Stacey | June 8, 2008 2:33 PM
@ Bachalon, (#11),
I sure hope he knows what I was thinking when I read this. And I hope he took offense. =P
Posted by: Amber Culbertson-Faegre | June 8, 2008 2:34 PM
How come moron Sheldrake didn't see that knife coming by way of telepathy? These demented morons are so easy to put down through sheer logic and forceful demands to put up or shut the hell up. I have Mackay's book, and is still current as applied to today's insane crap of the masses.
Posted by: Holbach | June 8, 2008 2:47 PM
Posted by: Bob O'H | June 8, 2008 2:48 PM
Woohoo! Good to see other people than me have read that book this century.
Posted by: Julian | June 8, 2008 2:51 PM
But you beat me to it...
Or something...else?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1Y73sPHKxw&NR=1
(OK. Sorry. Can't promise it's the last time. I do so love that clip.)
Posted by: SC | June 8, 2008 2:54 PM
It's not even that it's not all that extraordinary to suggest that humans are eminently capable of swallowing truly crazy stuff, it's been verified in many studies. Here's a good article on false memories:
http://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus/Articles/sciam.htm
...and a relevant quote from said article:
I mean, if people can be fooled into believing they have been raped, impregnated, and subsequently had an abortion with a coat hanger, it's really not a stretch to believe that some people can be fooled into believing that they have telepathy.
That said, it seems to me that telepathy isn't completely out of bounds of physics. I mean, it would certainly be possible for people to communicate with neither sound nor visible light: we could, for example, use radio waves. A region of tissue with rotors attached to magnets and lots of nerve tissue near the surface of the skin would do pretty well. Of course, we have no such organ, but some limited form of radio transmission of information is not completely nonsensical in principle. Though many of the claims these nutbags make, of course, are (such as that humans have such a capacity, or the various ideas that wouldn't work even in the presence of some other communications medium than those we can make use of).
Posted by: Jason Dick | June 8, 2008 2:55 PM
It's really simple. First we need evidence that telepathy exists, even if it only exists in one out of a thousand. Then we need to verify the evidence. Then, as telepathy *is* "extradinary, we need to discover how it works. First we need to explore "ordinary" mechanics that could result is in extraordinary results (for example, perhaps telepathy is folk being so astute and aware of body language and empathy they can read very very specific thoughts and feelings to an uncanny degree; i.e. "psychics" are several standard deviations above average at empathy intuition that if it where the equivilent of I.Q they'd have be above 220) and *then* we'd start turning physics on its head.
Write now let's start by looking for evidence. *looks under couch* None here? How are you guys doing?
Posted by: woozy | June 8, 2008 2:58 PM
If telepathy were real, I suspect that we'd have evolved deeply ingrained behaviors and social practices around it, without even knowing it was there. And, of course, science would have figured out how it worked back around the 1940s.
Put another way - even the ancients, who didn't know how brains and hearts worked, understood that you didn't want your brains bashed out or your heart pierced with a spear. 100% of the time. If mankind had an innate telepathic ability, even very simple behaviors like kids playing "hide and go seek" would be different. Our interactions with animals would possibly be very different. For example, a simple behavior like riding horseback would have possibly "evolved" without the need for bits and reins.
One of the true but misleading doctrines of logic is "you cannot prove a negative" and this often comes up when we're confronted with woo-woo thinking and religion. But it's actually possible to make very strong arguments that the negatives are, in fact true by asking "what if the inverse were the case?" and examining what the world would be like if it were. For example "what if prayer worked?" Well:
- Las Vegas would still be a single gas station in a desert
- Mortality statistics for one of the faiths would be significantly skewed
etc.
These are not 'absence of evidence' they are, in fact, evidence of absence.
Posted by: Marcus Ranum | June 8, 2008 2:58 PM
If there were anything in telepathy or precognition, natural selection would've gone crazy with it because it'd be so beneficial. Unless, of course, the necessary genetic mutations have only just occurred, which is statistically unlikely.
Posted by: Richard Harris | June 8, 2008 3:09 PM
Richard Harris writes:
If there were anything in telepathy or precognition, natural selection would've gone crazy with it because it'd be so beneficial
Unless it came with some other costs (which it would)like increased skull size, awkward highly-visible antennas, massive metabolic impact, or whatever. It would sure make for an interesting arms race. Predators and prey would be rewarded at various times for either being in "listen only" mode.
All of these things would result in massive behavioral changes in hunting, mating, and other behaviors. The impact would be clearly visible and that's why I'm guessing science would have found it by the 1940s - it would represent a huge unexplained hole in physics at the very least. If telepathy had anything to do with our brains (since we're talking about transmitting thoughts I'd rather expect it would!) then some kind of effect or activity would be inescapably measurable with a PET scan or other brain scans.
When someone talks about stuff like telepathy as if it's real, and points out that 'science doesn't understand everything yet' I usually explain that for telepathy to be real it would be as if someone was to discover a previously unnoticed continent in the Atlantic, in 2008. Is it possible? Well, maybe, but it'd be vastly harder to explain how something so significant escaped professional notice until just now than it is to simply dismiss the idea as "extremely unlikely." Scientists who want to search for hithertofore undiscovered continents should not be discouraged from doing so (it's their life, let them waste it as they see fit) but in scientific terms it's like betting your house on very very long odds at Las Vegas because of a hunch.
Posted by: Marcus Ranum | June 8, 2008 3:22 PM
"You have to propose mechanisms"
I agree with #10. You do not need a hypothesis about mechanisms to describe something. Once you have shown it exists, they will certainly come. But if I had two people who could read each other's thoughts I could claim the one million dollar prize, from Randi, become famous and get the scientific community a twitter without having to explain by what mechanism they did it.
Electric shock therapy has been used for a long time for depression, it works, I still don't think anyone knows exactly why.
Posted by: sailor | June 8, 2008 3:25 PM
Wait. Spallanzani? Wasn't that the guy who made Coppelia?
Methinks Sheldrake would do well to read some Feynmann:
Posted by: Sili | June 8, 2008 3:27 PM
Damn. Richard beat me to it.
This is, I think, one of the best arguments against telepathy ever. (Other than "What's the mechanism?" and "It contradicts all the evidence we have about how the mind works," of course.)
If telepathy existed -- even to a tiny degree -- it would confer an ENORMOUS selective advantage. Both for survival and, need I say, for reproduction. A tiny amount of telepathy would be far more useful than a tiny amount of camouflage, a tiny amount of a wing for gliding, a tiny amount of language. It would have been selected for so fast it would have made everybody's head spin.
Posted by: Greta Christina | June 8, 2008 3:28 PM
The knowing is calling before answering the phone is an old one. And one that has been refuted time and time again.
Most people have a fairly small number of people who call them regularly, and quite often those people will tend to call on the same day of the week, and at a similar time. Also one reason for calling is to tell people some news. Well if you know a friend was having a job interview that day it would not be a total surprise if they called that evening.
When you take the above into account, along with the fact people remember when they guessed right and not when they guessed wrong.
Posted by: Matt Penfold | June 8, 2008 3:34 PM
This comment is anon - you'll find out why in a sec.
"What is the mechanism behind the claimed ability of people to sense who is calling them on the telephone"
For a number of years after I broke up with my first wife she had the uncanny ability to know when I was going on a date, and ringing me either just as I was heading out the door or actually during the date. It was stunning, we would only talk occasionally about our affairs, and sometimes she wouldn't contact me from one week to the next, but then call me at exactly the worst time. One time this extended to her calling me in the middle of a lunch date in a different country.
She no longer has that magical ability thankfully.
I mentioned this to a female acquaintance a few months ago and she explained it me as "we can tell, you guys change your behavior when you're playing up. You get distant and non-committal and it makes us suspicious"
So no telepathy there, just lots of cues from the real world that allow someone to intuit a hypothesis.
Posted by: anon | June 8, 2008 3:36 PM
Forget the whole "people can fool themselves" angle: "Most people say they have experienced telepathy"? Really, "most people"?
Posted by: Citizen Z | June 8, 2008 3:45 PM
I wrote:
Newton proposed no mechanism but, after noting that the inverse square law explained the motion of the moon, presumably hypothesised that the same law applied to the planets - for which observations supplied the evidence to substantiate this.
Kepler had already identified the orbits of planets as ellipses, of course - Kepler's Laws were known to Newton, and were a basis for Universal Gravitation.
What a difference there is between science and woo-woo.
Posted by: JM | June 8, 2008 3:46 PM
Be careful about comments on Sheldrake. I wrote a short article on him and got more hate mail from it than I have from those who are offended by my Atheism.
The woo-woos will pronounce you guilty of a skeptic's "disconfirmation bias!"
The sheer amount of tap-dancing performed by people trying to justify Sheldrake's poor work is on par with the verbal gymnastics performed by many Texas politicians.
Posted by: Calladus | June 8, 2008 3:47 PM
Sheldrake is of course a nutcase and JM is also correct that there is no commandment in science that one must present a mechanism. That is ignorant in the extreme.
Still, the question of what is meant by extraordinary is clearly a political one and a deft bit of verbal judo by Sheldrake. Any unproved hypothesis is by definition extra-ordinary. Who gets to decide? Typically it is left to entrenched authority. They often have their own biases and prejudices. Or they simply are defending their own legacy. Ideas that represent a new paradigm must either do battle or wait for the old farts to die off.
Posted by: Brenda | June 8, 2008 3:52 PM
But if I had two people who could read each other's thoughts I could claim the one million dollar prize, from Randi, become famous and get the scientific community a twitter without having to explain by what mechanism they did it.
If you actually had 2 people who could do that, you'd be a fool to reveal the capability for a measly $1million. Think bigger. Think Wall Street.
Once you'd pocketed a couple hundred million, you could donate some to JREF and use the rest to finance your congressional campaign. And, of course, make sure you spread your genes around as vigorously as possible by covering lots of willing females; it'll be easy since you can read their minds... ("OH honey.. I got you a green Porsche 911 and let's go see Penn and Teller!" - squeeeal!)
As others have pointed out - even limited telepathy would be such a huge advantage, you'd be the proverbial one-eyed man in the land of the blind. Which is exactly why eyes are such a popular adaptation. :D
Posted by: Marcus Ranum | June 8, 2008 3:53 PM
If there were anything in telepathy or precognition, natural selection would've gone crazy with it because it'd be so beneficial. Unless, of course, the necessary genetic mutations have only just occurred, which is statistically unlikely.
The ability to process and communicate with abstract language is a bit like telepathy, isn't it? And abstract reasoning is a bit like procognition, no?
I mean, if we consider that telepathy *might* exist we must consider it a natural rather than a magical phenomenom, right? Hence it'd have both evidence and natural mechanics?
We don't consider language and reason "extraordinary" as it is very common in humans. And things that do exist in humans that are very rare and "extraordinary", such as genius or savantism or synesthesia, we consider rare extensions of "ordinary" mechanics. They aren't "magic".
Right now, I'd say there's no evidence and no mechanics for telepathy. I'm *willing* to consider an argument that the appearance of telepathy could be akin to something like being a "genius" at personal empathy and emotional intuitiveness, or some rare neurological perception like synesthesia (although exactly how it'd work is a bit beyond me; perhaps automatic sherlock holmes like deduction being percieved as smell or something weird like that-- actually that'd be pretty cool; wouldn't it? Make a good sci-fi story). However, there's utterly no evidence.
Posted by: woozy | June 8, 2008 3:57 PM
My daughter is fifteen years old. Up until last week, she didn't have a cell phone (yeah, I know, today that's child abuse). If the phone rang between four in the afternoon and nine at night (her friends knew not to call her after nine (and my large size, beard, and penchant for cowboy hats has most of her friends scared), I would pick up the phone and answer "K------'s answering service, how may I help you?" Half her friends are convinced I'm psychic. And my success rate was about 80%. The only time I didn't do that was at (give or take) 7:30. That was the time my brother-in-law would call, so I just pick up the phone and say "Hi, D---------. How ya doin'?" He just thinks I am strange.
I think the phone call deductive reasoning hypotheosis is right on.
Posted by: (((Billy))) | June 8, 2008 4:09 PM
So no telepathy there, just lots of cues from the real world that allow someone to intuit a hypothesis.
This raises an interesting question, and one to which I have devoted some thought, if not actual investigation. There is a common trope about "women's intuition," and I've always considered myself intuitive (I've even been called a "witch" - meant in a good way) and thought that this ability has helped me to avoid some dangerous situations. But I've always thought of it as more of a skill - of reading social/behavioral clues - rather than an innate ability. It seems to me that it's beneficial for women, and members of other subordinate groups, to be able to read - even if not entirely consciously - certain clues. This helps people in these groups both to accomplish their ends and to recognize potential threats (e.g., when a man is on the verge of a physical attack).
But I've long wondered: If women are indeed more intuitive (and I don't know whether or not this is true), is it possible for one gender to have developed a greater potential for this through evolution, or is it entirely an acquired skill? Or does the potential for it exist among both women and men, but develop only among those for whom it is more needed (as recent studies concerning empathy, etc., would suggest)? Has there been any research done on this?
Posted by: SC | June 8, 2008 4:17 PM
I've listened to the Trialogues at the Edge of the Millennium (it's on google video) with Sheldrake, Terence McKenna and the mathematician Ralph Abraham. It's not "science"; it's psychedelic esoterica, speculations about a disembodied consciousness, historicism etc., and it is hugely enjoyable. I recommend it.
Posted by: ali baba | June 8, 2008 4:33 PM
I don't understand this "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". The fact is that they just require sufficient evidence, meaning that it needs to be more conclusive than something that fits with current knowledge, but nothing really extraordinary.
Suppose we were to find some people who (with all of the proper controls) could be consistently 50% right or higher about the others' (truly) random picks, when only 25% would be expected by chance. Would that be extraordinary evidence? Certainly not in the usual sense of statistical inference. Maybe just because it would truly be unexpected it could in a sense be considered to be "extraordinary", yet it would be ordinary evidence according to the rules of science.
My main point is that, without an understood mechanism, it's true that the standards of evidence are somewhat higher. However, one might even see that as happening because there is contextual evidence already existing for the phenomena that fit with current physics, while the statistical inference for telepathy would have stand alone. So in some sense I doubt that any extraordinary evidence is required at all, just what is needed for a bare inference sans existing mechanism.
This does matter, because I really don't think that the new ought to have to pass higher hurdles than whatever might be considered to be "sufficient". I'm afraid that saying that "extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence" suggests, and possibly excuses, prejudice against new science. Yet I believe that the only basis for requiring greater evidence for that which does not have mechanism is the entirely sensible fact that claims that fit current physics have a tacit evidentiary basis which the "extraordinary" claims, such as telepathy, lack.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
Posted by: Glen Davidson | June 8, 2008 4:37 PM
Sigmund, Holbach,
Come on, Sheldrake's either a fool or a fraud, but sneering at him for being stabbed in the leg is simply unpleasant.
Posted by: Nick Gotts | June 8, 2008 4:48 PM
I don't understand this "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". The fact is that they just require sufficient evidence, meaning that it needs to be more conclusive than something that fits with current knowledge, but nothing really extraordinary.
I think all this means is extraordinary claims require more scrutany.
Example: A Newfoundlandian claiming "There was a moose in my backyard this morning" would require almost no evidence to be believed. Simply a guy whom you trust saying so would probably be enough.
A Montrealean claiming "There was a moose in my backyard this morning" would probably be met with a "No way" but a footprint in the mud is probably sufficient evidence.
A Hawaiin claiming "There was a moose in my backyard this morning" would probably be met with "Your a @#*-@!$# liar!" and a foot-print, moose-dropings, leaves with dental indentations matching moose teeth, and a photograph would probably be scoured several times for falsification and even then it probably wouldn't be enough evidence.
Posted by: woozy | June 8, 2008 4:49 PM
Re #35, by SC:
I intend no insult to women and their fabled intuition, but dogs (of both genders) are good at reading our emotions. It's what they do for a living, as it were. No magic involved, however.
Posted by: PatrickHenry | June 8, 2008 5:10 PM
dogs (of both genders) are good at reading our emotions
And that is perfectly consistent with the thrust of my comment. Where on earth did you get the impression that I was implying anything magical? I was talking about the capacity to read subtle behavioral clues. Please read my remarks again.
Posted by: SC | June 8, 2008 5:17 PM
If we had telepathy then we wouldn't need telephones.
Posted by: bigjohn756 | June 8, 2008 5:41 PM
P.S. If it's the "witch" that threw you off, I meant that in a sort of this-is-how-unscientific-people-typically-interpret-intuition-woo-of-the-gaps kind of way.:)
Posted by: SC | June 8, 2008 5:43 PM
Re #42 The day is surely not far off when it will be possible to have a mobile 'phone implanted in the body and activated by thought (like the recent experiment with a monkey activating a robot arm). Then we will have telepathy.
Posted by: Nick Gotts | June 8, 2008 5:48 PM
Re #43 by SC:
Relax. I'm on your side. I was just giving an example of yet another perfectly natural instance. I guess I didn't express myself very well. (If you were really intuitive, you'd have known that.) And that, too, is an attempt at humor; it isn't intended to be insulting.
Posted by: PatrickHenry | June 8, 2008 6:04 PM
Extraordinary claims do require extraordinary evidence.
Oh, PZ, do think about that stupid statement from Sagan for a moment. Even if one is extremely generous to the late astronomer in offering the broadest possible interpretation, there are only two logical possibilities:
1. "Extraordinary evidence" simply means "scientific evidence".
2. If "extraordinary evidence" does not simply mean ordinary scientific evidence, then the "extraordinary claims" statement is false. I find it very hard to believe that you, Dawkins or any of the science fetishists here would reject genuine, peer-reviewed, reputable journal-published scientific evidence for telepathy that you accept for everything else.
Now, Sheldrake may well be a nut; I've never heard of him anyhow. But it's hard to take your dismissal seriously when you invoke an illogical chestnut like the "extraordinary claims" nonsense. Just out of curiousity, just what would constitute "extraordinary evidence" for the supernatural, and what would distinguish it from "ordinary evidence"?
Posted by: VD | June 8, 2008 6:06 PM
PatrickHenry,
I took no offense, and of course fully predicted that this would be your response ;).
Posted by: SC | June 8, 2008 6:11 PM
Several years ago it was shown that a fMRI could read thoughts. What if telepathy has a similar mechanism? Up until recently nobody believed there was magnetite in the human brain but now respectable studies are being published. Maybe magnetite or a substance yet to be investigated is involved. Declaring science can't explain such things and so we don't need to look is strangely like intelligent design.
Posted by: tguy | June 8, 2008 6:11 PM
(I suppose I'm kinda feeding the troll here, but no matter.)
VD: "extraordinary claims" just means "claims of very low prior probability"; "extraordinary evidence" just means "more and better evidence than would be needed if the prior probability were higher, which ends up being an extraordinary amount because the prior probability is so low"; the prior probability for claims of telepathy like Sheldrake's is (at least for me, and I expect for Richard Dawkins and PZ too) extremely low because for his claims to be true it seems that lots of what currently appears to be well understood and well verified science would have to be terribly wrong.
So, e.g., the fact that Rupert Sheldrake claims to have done some experiments that show evidence of telepathy is not enough evidence (for me at least; I can't speak for PZ or Dawkins), because other explanations for that such as incompetence or fraud seem more likely. But a sufficient accumulation of well-conducted, carefully checked research could of course change my mind.
It's impossible (for me at least; I can't speak for PZ or Dawkins) to answer the question about "the supernatural" because that's so vague a term. Some supernaturalist claims are more improbable / extraordinary than others.
There is nothing "illogical", or even very difficult, about any of this.
Posted by: g | June 8, 2008 6:16 PM
VD, you evidently have a very naive idea of the way science works. If a psychologist submits a paper with experimental evidence that (say) bilingual subjects do better on a word-recall test if given the words to remember after reading a story in which translations of those words occur, then reviewers will, quite reasonably, accept a result at the 1% level (i.e., results showing a difference that would occur by chance no more than 1 in 100 times). The finding would fit with existing theories about how the mind, and the world in general, work. If the psychologist submits a paper claiming, on results of the same statistical significance, that performance on the task is improved if the experimenter stands on his head for half an hour before running the experiment, the reviewer would, equally reasonably, reject it. It is much more plausible that that 1-chance-in-100 event has occurred, than that our entire understanding of the world, based on centuries of rational enquiry, is wrong.
Posted by: Nick Gotts | June 8, 2008 6:19 PM
I might also check whether a local zoo was missing a moose and whether there was a wealthy practical joker around. However I agree it would probably be like the Palo Alto black mamba (last seen crossing highway 101 at high speed).
Posted by: erp | June 8, 2008 6:20 PM
A Hawaiin claiming "There was a moose in my backyard this morning" would probably be met with "Your a @#*-@!$# liar!" and a foot-print, moose-dropings, leaves with dental indentations matching moose teeth, and a photograph would probably be scoured several times for falsification and even then it probably wouldn't be enough evidence.
The Hawaiian's attitude is certainly understandable, but actually says nothing about what's required to establish the facts. When my four year-old brother walked in the house and said there was a monkey in the crab apple tree in our front yard, I didn't believe him for a second and continued with what I was doing. When my mother went outside, came back in, and wanted to know if I had any ideas for catching a monkey before it bit someone, I figured that was sufficient evidence that, against all my assumptions, there was in fact a monkey in our tree. In Minnesota.
And there was. It turned out to be a monkey named Wolfman Jack who had escaped from the Como Zoo a few weeks before.
Posted by: VD | June 8, 2008 6:27 PM
Declaring science can't explain such things and so we don't need to look is strangely like intelligent design. - tguy@248.
Who has said anything like that? Attempts to demonstrate telepathy, clairvoyance etc. go back well over a century, and "successes" never seem to be repeatable. Yes, we should remain open to the possibility, but there is a long history of apparently strong results in parapsychology which have later been shown to be unreliable. Try googling "Rhine fraud" for example.
Posted by: Nick Gotts | June 8, 2008 6:27 PM
No, it wasn't — not for any reasonable definitions of "read" and "thoughts". Functional MRI scans are notoriously difficult to interpret and easy to over-interpret.
Posted by: Blake Stacey | June 8, 2008 6:34 PM
So, one unverifiable anecdote of an unusual occurrence is supposed to illustrate the nature of scientific evidence?
Vox Day has always been good for a laugh.
Posted by: Blake Stacey | June 8, 2008 6:38 PM
It's amusing to see how the same logical fallacies and word-twisting and fantasizing evidence is used by ufologist, moon landing deniers, psychics, and creotards.
Posted by: slang | June 8, 2008 6:38 PM
slang (#56):
There's a Tolstoy pastiche in that: "All bad science is alike. Each bit of good science is good in its own way. . . ."
Posted by: Blake Stacey | June 8, 2008 6:40 PM
Nonsense.
And not just because proof doesn't exist in science in the first place.
Nonsense. The evidence gets to decide. If it isn't compatible with the hypothesis, the hypothesis is dead, and I haven't even mentioned Ockham's
war axrazor yet.Posted by: David Marjanović, OM | June 8, 2008 7:02 PM
Take plate tectonics as an example. Yes, there was resistance, but it lasted less than 10 years. Probably less than 5, I'm not familiar with the relevant literature. If the establishment had needed to die out, the debate would still be ongoing.
Posted by: David Marjanović, OM | June 8, 2008 7:09 PM
VD, you evidently have a very naive idea of the way science works.
I do so enjoy how science fetishists tend to assume that no one could possibly understand a fairly simple and well-known process rather than entertain the possibility that they didn't understand what they read.
If the psychologist submits a paper claiming, on results of the same statistical significance, that performance on the task is improved if the experimenter stands on his head for half an hour before running the experiment, the reviewer would, equally reasonably, reject it.
You're not talking about science here, you're talking about editing. Or, if you prefer PZ's terminology, you're talking about the profession of science and not the scientific method. One repeatable experiment that works consistently is all that's required to turn the scientific world on its head. Or, are you still rejecting the scientific evidence that cloning animals is possible because the experiment hasn't been repeated enough yet?
"extraordinary claims" just means "claims of very low prior probability"; "extraordinary evidence" just means "more and better evidence than would be needed if the prior probability were higher, which ends up being an extraordinary amount because the prior probability is so low"; the prior probability for claims of telepathy like Sheldrake's is (at least for me, and I expect for Richard Dawkins and PZ too) extremely low because for his claims to be true it seems that lots of what currently appears to be well understood and well verified science would have to be terribly wrong.
Wow, you sound almost like you know what you're talking about! Now, what are those probabilities? And how low must the probability be to qualify as "extraordinary"? If you can't do the math, I suggest you'd do well to avoid the quantitative terms that suggest a level of accuracy that you simply can't provide. We've been discussing this very topic over the last two days at my blog and a few folks there are insisting that "extraordinary evidence" simply means "scientific evidence". Now, you're saying it means "more and better evidence". Do you mean more and better scientific evidence or more and better evidence of any kind? And how do you define "better"?
From the sounds of it, Sheldrake merely has a bit of inconclusive testimonial evidence supporting his hypothesis. I very much agree that it's not enough to establish grounds for accepting telepathy; I disagree with the idea implied here that his evidence is sufficient for an ordinary claim. Does anyone really think it is?
Posted by: VD | June 8, 2008 7:19 PM
horrobin:
Found it!Part I
Part II
Posted by: Nova | June 8, 2008 7:23 PM
Take plate tectonics as an example.
I know Naomi Oreskes has written about this:
http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=65-0813341329-1
I haven't read the book yet, but I suspect it's good.
Posted by: SC | June 8, 2008 7:23 PM
I think that it's extremely unlikely (about as unlikely as a deity) that telepathy exists, but I don't believe that if it WERE to exist it'd be a strange violation of the laws of physics;
If the rudiments of a transmitter/receiver array had suddenly mutated in the human brain (and it's not impossible to fathom - some mutation of the optic nerve or something to that effect) at a time when true natural selection pressures determined gene frequency, then the possibility of that array becoming refined enough to complex communication would definitely exist; as a bio-electronic system, such a development would not be impossible for the brain to evolve.
Posted by: Steven Alleyn | June 8, 2008 7:28 PM
Nick Gotts @ 38 I'll sneer, and with ridicule, at anyone who purports to have magic powers, and is then rendered helpless in the face of stark reality when those "powers" fail him at the most importune moment. He may have thought himself invincible from such physical attacks because his mind was his guiding power, but even his mind let him down, and this was when he first became unhinged. I'll bet he was on his way to Sedona, Arizona to communicate with a whole town of wackos and engage in mass levitation. No quarter to irrational minds.
Posted by: Holbach | June 8, 2008 7:34 PM
I think the crucial issue, in most cases, is repeatability. The "extraordinary" in Sagan's phrase is what has not been shown to be repeatable as yet.
My previous post was questioning the "extraordinary" in relation to establishing a scientific claim, not about the odd hallucination or lie, etc.
It's understandable, of course, that someone doubts the claim that humanoid forms were photographed by the rovers on Mars, while the claim that rocks were photographed is not. Why? Because of the issue of repeatability. Rocks simply repeat what we've found in other (relatively) non-icy planetary systems. Humanoid forms, granted, are well-known on one planet circling Sol, however they have not been found to be native under Martian conditions.
Sagan no doubt meant well enough with his phrase, but it begs too many questions to be used as a guideline to understanding claims. For, there's nothing so "extraordinary" about telepathy that normal repeated scientific evidence (well-controlled conditions and results significantly above or below those of mere chance--not Sheldrake's, of course) couldn't give strong evidence in favor of telepathy. It just hasn't happened that way.
Likewise with humanoids on Mars. It wouldn't take too many repetitions to show that these exist, if they do. But to say that rocks exist on Mars wouldn't take as much solid evidence, since those are just a repetition of what have been seen around the solar system.
Repetition needn't be successive, I would note. Seeing a single penguin fly once would be good evidence that penguins fly. But if you had only one instance you might insist on several observations of it, or anyway, extremely good evidence from one observation (a single eyewitness wouldn't do, but a single shot of a penguin flying might be good enough, if the picture is unambiguous and so is the chain of possession of the film, tape, flash card, whatever--but do multiple viewers of a single footage count as repetition or not?).
Sagan's point is good, but it leaves too many questions to be asked of what is "extraordinary" both as a claim and as evidence. Roughly, the proper repeatability of evidence is all that is needed to establish a claim.
Glen Davidson
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
Posted by: Glen Davidson | June 8, 2008 7:46 PM
Holbach, what you say would only have some justification if Sheldrake had claimed he could read minds at will. He has done no such thing.
Posted by: Nick Gotts | June 8, 2008 7:50 PM
One wonders why Sheldrake isn't hounding entymologists and epidemiologists to work together to understand the obviously widespread epidemic of insect endoparasitic infect in humans known as 'butterflies in the stomach'? The evidence for its existence is quite ordinary: I don't know of anyone who hasn't experienced the phenomenon at least a few times.
As long as we're abandoning experimental rigour for the conviction of the gut anyway....
Posted by: Brownian, OM | June 8, 2008 7:55 PM
I well remember the controversy over plate tectonics and the drubbing Alfred Wegener endured over his allied continental drift. But as Science has shown, observation and reevaluation in the face of established facts have now proven the inconrovertible idea. Raw nature at work, not some imaginary ghost. Science rules!
Posted by: Holbach | June 8, 2008 8:00 PM
Now, Sheldrake may well be a nut; I've never heard of him anyhow. But it's hard to take your dismissal seriously when you invoke an illogical chestnut like the "extraordinary claims" nonsense. Just out of curiousity, just what would constitute "extraordinary evidence" for the supernatural, and what would distinguish it from "ordinary evidence"?
When Sheldrake claims, "Most people say they have experienced telepathy, especially in connection with telephone calls. In that sense, telepathy is ordinary," it is an extaordinarily stupid claim. How often does the phone ring on any given day, and how often can you make a pretty good educated guess who is on the other end, that turns out to be correct? How memorable is it when the guess turns out to be wrong? How much more notable when correct? This is no more remarkable nor extraordinary than our ability to be eager to fool ourselves when confronted with a good cold reader, using the techniques of any professional, fast talking performer, like James Randi or Penn Jillette, techniques Houdine used to fool Arthur Conan Doyle: People who need to believe in telephone telepathy or psychics count the hits and ignore the misses. It's a stupid human trick that enables people to believe weird things, as Michael Shermer describes it. To claim that there is mundane telepathy because a lot of credulous people don't examine the proposition, and to provide no basis for its mechanism, especially in the absence of any evidence that there is any phenomenon to investigate in the first place, is extraordinary question begging.
Posted by: Ken Cope | June 8, 2008 8:15 PM
Nick Gotts @ 66 He may not have said so directly, but he was thinking that he could do it, but not getting through to the like afflicted. His opinions are well known, and it is just a matter of time, and mind, that he starts to exert his nonsense to a compatible audience. Small insane ideas eventually lead to the bigger ones, and then are latched onto by the insane rabble.
Posted by: Holbach | June 8, 2008 8:21 PM
I've always understood the "extraordinary claims" motif as being a more artful and concise way of saying that "claims of something at wild variance with ordinary experience warrant heightened skepticism." On a purely epistemological level, I find it hard to dispute that, although there are probably many philosophical notpicks I'm unfamiliar with.
Posted by: Tyler DiPietro | June 8, 2008 8:28 PM
He may not have said so directly, but he was thinking th