When pop science TV wants to hear only one side ...

Biologist Rupert Sheldrake, who researches animals and telepathy, recalls the day Richard Dawkins Inc. descended on him:

Soon before Enemies of Reason was filmed, the production company, IWC Media, told me that Richard Dawkins wanted to visit me to discuss my research on unexplained abilities of people and animals. I was reluctant to take part, but the company’s representative assured me that “this documentary, at Channel 4’s insistence, will be an entirely more balanced affair than The Root of All Evil was.” She added, “We are very keen for it to be a discussion between two scientists, about scientific modes of enquiry”. So I agreed and we fixed a date. I was still not sure what to expect. Was Richard Dawkins going to be dogmatic, with a mental firewall that blocked out any evidence that went against his beliefs? Or would he be open-minded, and fun to talk to?

In the event,

He produced no evidence at all, apart from generic arguments about the fallibility of human judgment. He assumed that people want to believe in “the paranormal” because of wishful thinking.

We then agreed that controlled experiments were necessary. I said that this was why I had actually been doing such experiments, including tests to find out if people really could tell who was calling them on the telephone when the caller was selected at random. The results were far above the chance level.

The previous week I had sent Richard copies of some of my papers, published in peer-reviewed journals, so that he could look at the data.

Richard seemed uneasy and said, “I’m don’t want to discuss evidence”. “Why not?” I asked. “There isn’t time. It’s too complicated. And that’s not what this programme is about.” The camera stopped.

The Director, Russell Barnes, confirmed that he too was not interested in evidence. The film he was making was another Dawkins polemic.

I said to Russell, “If you’re treating telepathy as an irrational belief, surely evidence about whether it exists or not is essential for the discussion. If telepathy occurs, it’s not irrational to believe in it. I thought that’s what we were going to talk about. 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.”

In that case, I replied, there had been a serious misunderstanding, because I had been led to believe that this was to be a balanced scientific discussion about evidence. Russell Barnes asked to see the emails I had received from his assistant. He read them with obvious dismay, and said the assurances she had given me were wrong. The team packed up and left.

Now, one of Sheldrake's subjects is animals and telepathy. I don't know what to make of animals and telepathy, but this much I know is true: As Mario Beauregard and I discussed in The Spiritual Brain, there is good reason to believe that the human mind is not as tightly bound to the brain as many believe. I don't know a clear reason that animal minds would differ from human ones in that regard.

Those who deny animal telepathy almost always also deny human telepathy - because they are materialists. Telepathy is a threat to materialism, not to human uniqueness. Put another way: Telepathic animals seem to be telepathic about the things they can understand as animals. As I wrote to a friend recently,

For example, a dog knows he loves his master, but he does not say to himself "Someday my master will die, and I will die too. I wonder which of us will die first?" Such a mental operation is not part of the type of intelligence that a dog has.

Now consider the dog who was videotaped "sensing" when his mistress was starting for home from a remote location, and beginning to show signs of alertness: The dog knows he is waiting for his mistress, but he has no idea what she is doing when she is away from home or why, let alone how these activities might affect the timing of her arrival.

The dog's telepathy, if demonstrated, functions around his existing canine intelligence; it does not admit him to new worlds of intelligence that would give him a human type of information.

That is how one might reasonably expect animal telepathy to function, and some of Sheldrake's papers do look quite interesting.

Methodological naturalism: If that's the way forward, ... let's go sideways

Having connected the dots of the vast conspiracy run by the Discovery Institute so as to include non-materialist neuroscience, Steven Novella goes on to cheerlead, for methodological naturalism - about which I will say only this:

Methodological naturalism is usually described as meaning that science can consider only natural causes. But by itself that doesn't mean anything because we don't know everything that is in nature. For example, if - as Rupert Sheldrake thinks - some animals can demonstrate telepathy, then telepathy is a natural cause. And so?

And so Richard Dawkins goes to a great deal of trouble to attempt to discredit Sheldrake because the hidden assumption is that nature mustn't include telepathy.

In practice, methodological naturalism frequently becomes a method of defending bad - and often ridiculously bad- ideas in order to save naturalism. Think of the persistent efforts to "prove" that humans don't "really" behave altruistically. In fact, we sometimes do. Here's a recent story, for example, about a Texas woman named Marilyn Mock who went to an auction of foreclosed homes, ran into Tracey Orr - an unemployed woman she had never met - who had come to endure the sale of her home, and ...

Orr couldn't hold it in. The tears flowed. She pointed to the auction brochure at a home that didn't have a picture. "That's my house," she said.

Within moments, the four-bedroom, two-bath home in Pottsboro, Texas, went up for sale. People up front began casting their bids. The home that Orr purchased in September 2004 was slipping away.

She stood and moved toward the crowd. Behind her, Mock got into the action.

"She didn't know I was doing it," Mock says. "I just kept asking her if [her home] was worth it, and she just kept crying. She probably thought I was crazy, 'Why does this woman keep asking me that?' "

Mock says she bought the home for about $30,000. That's when Mock did what most bidders at a foreclosure auction never do.

"She said, 'I did this for you. I'm doing this for you,' " Orr says. "When it was all done, I was just in shock."

But it was true. Mock bought the house for her and said she would accept as repayment only what Orr can afford. Why?

"If it was you, you'd want somebody to stop and help you."

Now, a "methodological naturalist" would

(1) try to find a chimpanzee who does something similar and make up a story that explains how that behaviour was naturally selected for in primates

or (since that might take a while)

(2) assign a selfish motive for Mock that is consistent with survival of the fittest.

One might at first be tempted to conclude that methodological naturalism is methodological idiocy. But no, let's look a bit more carefully. Notice what is not a permitted assumption: We can't assume that some people just think they should help others - even at considerable cost. In other words, the plain evidence of human behavior cannot be accepted at face value.

Now, there is nothing especially scientific about that belief. "Scientific" means "dealing with the evidence from nature," which includes a fair sprinkling of unselfish or not-very-selfish humans (as well as of the other type). Indeed, superior human intelligence probably explains the tendency to imagine another's feelings (= "If it was you, you'd want somebody to stop and help you"). So we can account scientifically for why humans can behave as Mock did.

The problem is that such an account, while useful, fails to support a key false belief underlying methodological naturalism: That humans are really the 98% chimpanzee and cannot in principle have motives absent in chimpanzees. Apart from that false belief, no one would bother trying to find an exotic explanation for Mock's behaviour.

The principle role that methodological naturalism plays right now is to enable false beliefs to pose as science and to prevent them being discredited by evidence.

ESP: Will Evidence Survive Posturing?

Benedict Carey reports,

One of psychology’s most respected journals has agreed to publish a paper presenting what its author describes as strong evidence for extrasensory perception, the ability to sense future events.

The decision may delight believers in so-called paranormal events, but it is already mortifying scientists. Advance copies of the paper, to be published this year in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, have circulated widely among psychological researchers in recent weeks and have generated a mixture of amusement and scorn.

- "Journal’s Paper on ESP Expected to Prompt Outrage", New York Times (January 5, 2011)

We hear, of course, the familiar "craziness, pure craziness. I can’t believe a major journal is ..."

ESP may be the victim of a sort of materialism in science that has long since functioned more as a stopper on science than a filter. Briefly, there have been many honest studies that confirm the existence of some sort of entanglement, as Mario Beauregard and I discuss in some detail in The Spiritual Brain.

ESP is a psi phenomenon, the apparent ability of some humans and perhaps animals, to consistently score above chance in controlled studies of mental influences on events. It is seen in such phenomena as extrasensory perception and psychokinesis, and is a low-level effect, to be sure, but efforts to disconfirm it have failed.

It isn't popular.

These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming. It is very difficult to rearrange one’s ideas so as to fit these new facts in.

—Artificial intelligence pioneer A. M. Turing, quoted in A. M. Turing, excerpt from “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind 59, no. 236 (1950), reprinted in Hofstadter and Dennett, Mind’s I, p. 66.

And it seems nothing much has changed since Turing's (1912-1954) day.

Carey mentions an argument against study of the psi effect which was once offered against Newton's laws of gravity: No mechanism is proposed. That's not a very good argument when there is persistent evidence for a small effect. We still don't have a definitive mechanism for gravity, but Newton's laws proved outstandingly useful in subsequent decades and were accepted on that basis, mechanism or no.

Lets hope that study wins out over furore and posturing.

See also: Psi effect: The Teton Mountain Stomp! Stamp! has not worked, I guess ... and Neuroscience and Physicalism: A Key Letter

Does religion protect us against pseudoscience?

A recent study from Baylor University suggests that the answer is yes. In "Look Who's Irrational Now" (Wall Street Journal, September 19, 2008), Mollie Ziegler Hemingway notes,

"What Americans Really Believe," a comprehensive new study released by Baylor University yesterday, shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians.

Now, that in itself should not be a surprising finding. For one thing, traditional religious groups tend to oppose occult practices, so the regular attender is likely to be aware of the group's negative view.

One can't help but recall King Saul and the Witch of Endor in 1 Sam 28:

When Saul saw the Philistine army, he was afraid; terror filled his heart.

6 He inquired of the LORD, but the LORD did not answer him by dreams or Urim or prophets.

7 Saul then said to his attendants, "Find me a woman who is a medium, so I may go and inquire of her."

"There is one in Endor," they said.

8 So Saul disguised himself, putting on other clothes, and at night he and two men went to the woman. "Consult a spirit for me," he said, "and bring up for me the one I name."

9 But the woman said to him, "Surely you know what Saul has done. He has cut off the mediums and spiritists from the land. Why have you set a trap for my life to bring about my death?"

Saul's original view, however "non-diverse", was the normal one for traditional Western monotheistic religion. The image here at Wikimedia Commons features Saul and the Witch, and - I think - pretty much captures the terminal goofiness of all that stuff.

Another interesting Baylor finding: Higher education does not affect whether people believe in ghosts, psychic healing, haunted houses, demonic possession, clairvoyance, and witches.

I am not sure what to make of this finding, as reported, because the beliefs are not all equally ridiculous. As Mario Beauregard and I noted in The Spiritual Brain, there is some laboratory evidence for telepathy as a consistent low-level effect.

And demonic possession is an especially difficult case for surveys. Traditional religions assume that possession is possible in principle, so adherents may say that they believe in it in principle. But they may almost always seek other explanations in practice, believing that God would not permit possession to happen to believers. That does not mean that they literally deny the possibility.

The haunted houses I will simply pass by ...

In any event, as for late night comic Bill Maher - the inspiration for Hemingway's Wall Street Journal piece - and the sponsor of Religulous, an anti-religious documentary:

it turns out that the late-night comic is no icon of rationality himself. In fact, he is a fervent advocate of pseudoscience. The night before his performance on Conan O'Brien, Mr. Maher told David Letterman -- a quintuple bypass survivor -- to stop taking the pills that his doctor had prescribed for him. He proudly stated that he didn't accept Western medicine. On his HBO show in 2005, Mr. Maher said: "I don't believe in vaccination. . . . Another theory that I think is flawed, that we go by the Louis Pasteur [germ] theory." He has told CNN's Larry King that he won't take aspirin because he believes it is lethal and that he doesn't even believe the Salk vaccine eradicated polio.

Wow. I am old enough to have been in the long line of people getting the Salk vaccine at my local elementary school in Regina, Saskatchewan, in 1956, and I remember the general disappearance of the polio scare in the following years.

Anyway, it turns out that traditional religion is an excellent prescriptive against many superstitions and much pseudoscience

Note: With "psychic healing," we need to define our terms carefully. There is massive evidence for the placebo effect (in research studies, people often get better because they believe they will). Is that psychic healing?

This qualification probably did not affect the surveys of religious folk because they would attribute the healing to the power of prayer and would not use the word "psychic" to explain matters. The main research question in recent yeas has been to distinguish between the effect of prayer for one's own health and prayer for the health of others - intercessory prayer - which, for many, is a religious duty.

Straws in the wind: Why did “skeptics” society CSICOP change its name?

Call me slow, but I only recently twigged to the significance of the name change that Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP, founded in 1979) underwent in 2006, to become the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI). Various explanations are given, including that the former name was “too long” and

The change comes, in part, due to the prominence of the word “paranormal” in the well-known acronym. Executive Council member Kendrick Frazier, editor of Skeptical Inquirer magazine, said the reference sometimes led those unfamiliar with the group to narrowly limit their concept of the organization’s goals. Also, misconceptions of motives had to be continually corrected.

The November 30 press release also goes on to say that the problem was that the old name caused people to think that CSICOP promoted the paranormal.

Oh, I doubt anyone thought that about CSICOP. And few missed the significance of the "COP" part. No doubt, for many members, that was the real attraction.

I bet the real story (whatever it is) is entangled with something that Mario Beauregard and I discuss in The Spiritual Brain: Laboratory research confirms telepathy as a low level effect, and has done so for decades. As New Scientist's John McCrone noted in 2004,

In many ways, it is the skeptical community that is on the back foot, unable to explain away the results in terms of cheating, artefact or fluke. They are back to making suspicious noises about why believers get results.

Yes, that and changing the name of an organization to bury the problem?

Whatever causes the CSI people take up, they will remain unidirectional skeptics. But they seem to be backing off wholesale disproof of the non-material elements of our lives (the paranormal).

Here’s a further explanation from CSI/CSICOP and here from founder and chairman Paul Kurtz.