Morphic resonance
Rupert Sheldrake again. What about those experiments he does? Pretty rigorous, are they? Well, here’s what he says in one paper:
The experimenter (either R.S. or P.S.) telephoned the randomly selected callers in advance, usually an hour or two beforehand, and asked them to call at the time selected. We asked callers to think about the participant for about a minute before calling…A few minutes after the tests, the experimenter rang the participant to ask what his or her guess had been, and in some cases also asked the callers. In no cases did callers and participants disagree.
Uh…that doesn’t count? Look – suppose you set up an experiment in which you phone me and tell me to fly from here to Calgary and back. A few minutes after the test, you ring me to ask me if I did it; I say yes indeed. Would you then rush to a scientific jamboree and say you’d conducted experiments that show people can fly? I don’t know, maybe you would, maybe you’ll do anything for attention. But you get my drift – asking people if they guessed correctly is not a very rigorous kind of experiment, is it.
Sheldrake thought deeply about this problem, and he has solved it.
What about deliberate cheating? Perhaps participants and their callers simply lied about the guesses, falsely reporting incorrect guesses as correct…The cheating hypothesis is implausible for three main reasons. First, it is very improbable that a large majority of the participants would have cheated.
Okay…so if you set up an experiment in which you phone 63 people and tell them to fly to Calgary and back and then a few minutes later phone to ask them if they did it – it will be very improbable that a large majority of the participants would have told whoppers; therefore, if 45% of them say yes, some people can fly. Hmm…I’m not sure I’m convinced.
He did get a clue eventually.
Third, as we describe in a separate paper (Sheldrake & Smart, 2003), we carried out further series of experiments in which the participants were filmed continuously on time-coded videotape, starting 15 minutes before each trial. We selected the caller at random only after the filming had started.
Bingo! Well done! But surely the experiments that were not filmed are just plain worthless. Phoning people up and asking them ‘Who’dja guess?’ doesn’t cut it.
Never mind, it’s all morphic resonance, maybe.
Sheldrake prefers teleological to mechanistic models of reality. Rather than spend his life, say, trying to develop a way to increase crop yields, he prefers to study and think in terms outside of the paradigms of science, i.e., inside the paradigms of the occult and the paranormal…He prefers a romantic vision of the past to the bleak picture of a world run by technocrats who want to control Nature and destroy much of the environment in the process. In short, he prefers metaphysics to science, though he seems to think he can do the former but call it the latter…In short, although Sheldrake commands some respect as a scientist because of his education and degree, he has clearly abandoned science in favor of theology and philosophy. This is his right, of course. However, his continued pose as a scientist is unwarranted. He is one of a growing horde of “alternative” scientists whose resentment at the aspiritual nature of modern scientific paradigms, as well as the obviously harmful and seemingly indifferent applications of modern science, have led them to create their own paradigms. These paradigms are not new, though the terminology is. These alternative paradigms allow for angels, telepathy, psychic dogs…
And the ability to fly to Calgary and back without breaking a sweat.
I applaud you for ploughing through one of Sheldrake’s turgid papers. Good catch.
Amazing! When I was reading OB’s post I was just thinking about Skeptico’s piece on how 140 years of psychic research had produced absolutely bugger-all, and there’s the man himself in the comments. I must be psychic!
[But surely the experiments that were not filmed are just plain worthless]
I don’t think this is right; the fact that he got the same results in the videotaped tests is good evidence that lying *wasn’t* a big problem, although something else might have been.
by the way, this is classic “policing the boundaries” stuff. The facts here are that Sheldrake has done an experiment which satisfies the experimental standard that you regard as valid, and you have chosen to report it by first referring to an earlier experiment carried out by the same person that didn’t meet this standard, and then secondly referring to an obviously biased summary of his views written by someone else who doesn’t like him. Did that feel like good scientific practice when you were doing it?
I did what most of us do when asked to click on a link: I clicked on a link from the recommended link, and then another. I came across the sceptics’ website’s take on the hundredth-monkey theory put forward by Lyall Watson. I’m not as well read in this area as, I suspect, most who use this site, but what appeared to be a rather obvious question occurred to me: is it not possible that, although the monkeys on Island A learn to wash sweet potatoes and, naturally, pass that knowledge among themselves in that enclosed group, other monkeys, on other islands, with no contact with Island A, find themselves using that technique not because of some morphic resonance, some telepathy, but because at any given point in the (shared) evolution of any species it is going to do something different, such as wear clothes, sharpen tools that have become blunt and so on and so forth? Is Watson missing the point, the point being (my point being, anyway) that there may be seeming coincidence, but, just because phenomenon X happens on Island A and then on Island B a thousand miles away, it does not mean that the phenomenon was transmitted as such? After all, when it goes cold in London and New York, residents of both cities put on warm clothes without telephoning each other. That change of season is just like a change in the evolutionary process within a species, and it could trigger similar behaivour in different members of that species even if they’re at polar opposites geographically. Just a thought …
If “Morpic Resonance” exists, it should be detectable – it is supposed to be a form of signal, after all ……
Tingey:
That’s a good point, but:
1) We simply haven’t yet developed the necessary “morphic resonance decoding amplifier”. As soon as we do, then we’re bound to find it. Apparent non-existence is therefore no longer a problem for the theory.
2) Anti-morphic resonance forces in the science establishment have placed a de facto ban on anyone developing such a tool, since it challenges the current scientific-military-industrial power elite. So no one’s looking. If they were only allowed to, they’d find it.
3) The US government already has morphic resonance technology (they keep it with all the UFO stuff), and is using it on a regular basis to keep the world sufficiently de-stabilised to justify the Dept. of Homeland Security’s next extension of powers. We can’t prove this (see points 1 & 2 above), but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening!
Excuse me, I’m going to put my tin foil hat back on…
Andy, that was instructive. Did you know also that the entire G Bush bloodline are made of dark matter ?
While you’re probably right, don’t we often infer the existence of something in order to retain the usefulness of a useful model? Don’t we posit the idea of dark matter, for instance, the way we once had to infer ‘ether’?
“the fact that he got the same results in the videotaped tests is good evidence that lying *wasn’t* a big problem, although something else might have been.”
Sure; retroactive evidence; agreed. But that wasn’t the point; the point was that the phone up and ask experiment was obviously not very tight and that he didn’t seem to see that as a problem.
“Did that feel like good scientific practice when you were doing it?”
Of course not. It wasn’t aiming to be good scientific practice! It was mere journalism and polemic, obviously.
Although I guess if he hadn’t found an effect in the first study (file drawer effects aside) then there would have been little need for the follow up study i.e it might be considered a pilot.
That’s true. Fair enough.
Erm… I thought that recent results showed fairly direct gravitational evidence for the existence of “Dark Matter”
Unlike “Dark Energy” which I suspect is a red herring …..
GT I started that, making a bit of a lame joke about whacko conspiricists – I understand that there is some worthwhile research going on into dark matter.
Andy:
FYI, the hundredth monkey story is a fable – never happened.
G Tingey: I know ‘recent results showed fairly direct gravitational evidence for the existence of “Dark Matter”‘ (although only from reading encyclopedia entries, for I’m no expert on the subject), but the point I was making is that we need something else to infer it. Perhaps gravity is enough (a) to prove that it exists (and I suppose something exists) and (b) to prove what it actually is, I dunno.
Skeptico: I feel insulted, but I’ll let you off. I didn’t for one moment think that Watson had been out there and counted exactly 99 monkeys and then watched another join the group! I’m well capable of knowing when something is a parable, a metaphor. I was talking about the principle, and about how, possibly, behaviours can change in the same way in two or more groups of the same species even though there’s no transmission of information between them, only something happening to both or all of those groups, at this stage of their evolution and at more or less the same time. Or even that it was something exogenous that caused changes in their behaviour – something that affected them all, but with no need for direct communication between them. Some would then see that as mysterious communication, telephathy, morphic resonance, oofle dust …
[I thought that recent results showed fairly direct gravitational evidence for the existence of “Dark Matter”]
there has never been any problem of evidence for the *existence* of dark matter. The concept was brought into being precisely because there was more gravity around than there was detectable mass to produce it. The controversy over dark matter has always been that it’s so bloody dark; we don’t know anything about it other than that there has to be a hell of a lot of it somewhere.
In other words, “dark matter” is a theoretical placeholder meaning “whatever it is that explains the discrepancy between gravitational experiments and visible mass”, in exactly the same way in which “morphogenetic fields” are a theoretical placeholder meaning “whatever it is that explains the Sheldrake phenomena, assuming that they are not artifacts of inadequate statistical tests or experimental procedures”.
I have no idea why anyone decided to bring conspiracy theories into it as these are not claims made by Sheldrake or anyone else. In general it is both possible and the best way to do science without polemics or satire; these are excellent tools of politics, but kind of the whole point of people like Steve Fuller is that they are a lousy way to do science.
My understanding of the “hundredth monkey” story is that monkeys did start washing potatoes quite suddenly in the 1950s, but that there were no observations of this behaviour spreading non-locally, and in fact very little evidence that adult monkeys (as opposed to juveniles) were capapble of learning it at all.
The interesting thing to me is that as far as I can tell, Sheldrake has not actually cited the 100MP as an example of his theory (the Wikipeda page on morphogenetic fields says he did, but it looks like a very bad Wikipedia page to me and no other source does). The phrase doesn’t appear on his website other than in the title of an interview. The flow of citations between Sheldrake and the New Age 100MP literature appears to be one-way. Sheldrake does AFAICT believe in something similar in rats, but I was surprised to see that he basically doesn’t reference the mythical monkey story at all.
killjoy.