Evolution of Telepathy - Rupert Sheldrake"
by frankiespeakin 5 Replies latest jw friends
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Xanthippe
Thanks Frankie, very interesting. I still haven't finished Sheldrake's book but it was good to hear him in person. What a reasonable, calm, intelligent man. As he says if only other scientists would come out they would have so much more fun. Like the idea of phone apps., and the public participating in the research.
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truthhurts13
There's are very specific reason why other scientists don't come out with this. Remember who is in control, and who signs their paychecks
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frankiespeakin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Sheldrake
Reception [edit]
Sheldrake's work has little support in the mainstream scientific community. Members of the scientific community consider Sheldrake's claims to be currently unfalsifiable and therefore outside the scope of scientific experiment. The "morphic field" concept is believed by many to fall into the realm of pseudoscience. [52] [60] [61]
Writers such as Arthur Koestler, [62] Brian Inglis [63] and John L. Randall have supported the work of Sheldrake. [64]
Sheldrake's ideas have resonated with the general public [65] and some physicists such as David Bohm. [66] Bohm suggested that Sheldrake's hypothesis was in keeping with his own ideas on what he terms "implicate" and "explicate" order. [10] Hans-Peter Dürr has called for further discussion of Sheldrake's hypothesis, describing it as one of the first to reconcile 20th-century breakthroughs in physics, which emphasize fields and the indivisible nature of matter, with biology, which he says for the most part remains rooted in 19th-century Newtonian concepts of particles and separateness. [10] [67] The idea that fields may influence cells has received cautious support from biologists Janis Roze and Sue Ann Miller. [10] However, Sheldrake's work has met with a hostile reception from some other scientists. [51] Biologist Michael Klymkowsky contends that "[w]e live in a macroscopic world. Quantum effects are essentially irrelevant". [10] For more details on this topic, see quantum biology. In his Skeptic's Dictionary, Robert Todd Carroll stated, in an article highly critical of Sheldrake's theory of morphic resonance, that "although Sheldrake commands some respect as a scientist because of his education and degree, he has clearly abandoned conventional science in favor of magical thinking." [68] Sheldrake has responded to Carroll’s polemic, describing it as “unscientific and unreliable”. [69]
Germano Resconi and Masoud Nikravesh are sympathetic to Sheldrake's ideas, and base their concept of morphic computing directly upon Sheldrake's morphic fields and morphogenetic fields, but acknowledge that "Morphic fields and its subset morphogenetic fields have been at the center of controversy for many years in mainstream science and the hypothesis is not accepted by some scientists who consider it a pseudoscience." [70]
The concept has attracted speculation from neurolinguistic programming, as an explanation for action at a distance. [71] Sheldrake's book The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature was positively reviewed by the physicist Amit Goswami . [72]
Scientific reception [edit]
Morphic resonance predicts that memories of one generation are automatically passed on to the next generation, though unconsciously, or to other conspecifics. A neuroscientist and memory expert, Steven Rose, has been critical of this view. A major reason for the criticism is that Rose does not feel there to be any anomalous phenomena which require the theory of morphic resonance as an explanation. Rose suggested an experiment to resolve the matter. In Sheldrake's opinion the resulting study (see below), done in collaboration with Rose, supported morphic resonance, [73] but Rose has challenged this. [74] Sheldrake refuted Rose's challenge. [75]
Sheldrake's ideas have often met with a hostile reception from some scientists, including accusations that he is engaged in pseudoscience. [10] [51] [52] However, at least two scientists who have attacked his work, thoroughgoing metaphysical naturalists Lewis Wolpert and Richard Dawkins, reportedly refused to even examine his evidence—a fact cited as illustrating the allegedly dogmatic nature of mainstream science alluded to in Sheldrake's book The Science Delusion. [76]
Testing formative causation [edit]
In 1990 neurobiologist Steven Rose experimented jointly with Sheldrake to test the hypothesis of morphic resonance. The experiment involved training day-old chicks to react negatively to a small yellow light when the light was followed 30 min later by an injection which caused temporary illness. Chicks become strongly averse to pecking the stimulus again. Sheldrake predicted that successive batches of day-old chicks would progressively become more averse to pecking the light for the first time, because morphic resonance would cause them to "remember" the experience of previous generations of chicks. Rose predicted that no such effect would be observed. [77] [78]
Rose wrote that he and several scientists who reviewed the data were convinced that there was no evidence of morphic resonance. [77] Sheldrake, however, said that the proportion of test chicks taking longer than 10 sec for the first peck, compared with control chicks, gradually increased in successive batches and believed therefore that the experiment supported his theory. [78]
In a separate paper, Rose responded that there were several confounding details of the experiment which skewed the results, such as the experimenter improving his skills with practice over the course of the experiment. Rose said there was no trend for an increase in the latency, in fact a slight decrease, thus disconfirming Sheldrake's prediction. In an independent analysis of the data, biologist Patrick Bateson agreed with Rose that the results ran counter to the prediction of morphic resonance. [79]
Sheldrake responded that Rose's analysis omitted a significant portion of the data, thus skewing the results. Sheldrake contended that repeating Rose's analysis with the full set of data shows that the trends in aversion were in fact significantly different and morphic resonance was confirmed, not disconfirmed. [80] Rose and other researchers in the field, however, rejected this interpretation of the results. [77]
Tests of the staring effect [edit]
David Marks and John Colwell, writing in the Skeptical Inquirer (2000), criticized the experimental procedures Sheldrake had developed for tests designed to demonstrate the existence of the staring effect. [81] Apart from the fact that Sheldrake had encouraged the involvement of lay members of the public in research of the effect, Marks and Colwell suggested that the sequences used in tests followed the same patterning that people who guess and gamble like to follow. [81] These guessing patterns have relatively few long runs and many alternations. [81] The non-randomness of test sequences could thus lead to implicit or explicit pattern learning when feedback is provided. [81] When the patterns being guessed mirror naturally occurring guessing patterns, the results could go above or below chance levels even without feedback. [81] Thus significant results could occur purely from non-random guessing. [81] Non-randomization is one of seven flaws in parapsychological research identified by Marks. [82]
Michael Shermer wrote in Scientific American (2005) that there were a number of objections to Sheldrake's experiments on the sense of being stared at, reiterating Marks' and Colwell's points about non-randomization and the use of unsupervised laypeople, and adding confirmation bias and experimenter bias to the list of potential problems; he concluded that Sheldrake's claim was unfalsifiable. [83]
Sheldrake (2004, 2005) responded to the criticisms by stating that the experiments had been widely replicated; the results from an independent meta-analysis by parapsychology researcher Dean Radin, which had excluded all data from unsupervised tests, were shown to be highly significant; and the Marks-Colwell suggestion of non-randomization had been refuted by thousands of trials with different randomization methods, including coin-tossing, yielding positive and highly statistically significant results, whatever the randomization method. [84] [85]
2006 British Association controversy [edit]
In September 2006, Sheldrake and Peter Fenwick (a near-death experience researcher) were invited by the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BA) to speak at an event at the University of East Anglia, which resulted in criticism from Lord Winston, Peter Atkins, Richard Wiseman and the Royal Society. [86] [87] [88] [89] [90] [91] [92]
The editors of The Times took a different view in an editorial entitled "It goes without saying that telepathy works". [93] BBC Radio 5 brought together Sheldrake and Atkins to discuss Atkins' claim that "There is absolutely no reason to suppose that telepathy is anything more than a charlatan's fantasy." Atkins admitted that he had not studied any of the evidence and felt no need to do so. [94] The controversy was summarized in an article in The Science Reporter by the science writer Ted Nield. [95]
2013 TED Talks Controversy [edit]
On January 13, 2013, Sheldrake gave a TED talk in London questioning ten assumptions of modern science. TED's scientific advisors recommended that the video of his talk only be posted on the TED website if it were "framed with caution", as they disagreed with many of Sheldrake's assertions. [96] In an interview, Sheldrake criticized the decision to place his talk "in a kind of Naughty Corner of the Internet, and not on the main TED site", and stated that the objections raised to his talk were "very easy to refute". [97] He also criticized TED's criteria for "how to tell science from pseudo-science", claiming it would have labeled the work of Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin as pseudo-science.
Personal life
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still thinking
Ooooh another video to watch...thanks frankie. Marking.
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Satanus
Several seasons of a study of meerkats - meerkat manor. Every morning, the tribe goes foraging. One kat stays behind w to babysit the kids. I always wondered how they decide who stays behind, by who and how it is communicated to the babysitter. Its not always the same meerkat. It is from the lower level members.
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