Do come in, the door is wide open
So what is the British Association for the Advancement of Science up to?
Organisers of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (the BA) were accused of lending credibility to maverick theories on the paranormal by allowing the highly controversial research to be aired unchallenged. Leading members of the science establishment criticised the BA’s decision to showcase papers purporting to demonstrate telepathy and the survival of human consciousness after someone dies. They said that such ideas, which are widely rejected by experts, had no place in the festival without challenge from sceptics…Critics including Lord Winston and Sir Walter Bodmer, both former presidents of the BA, expressed particular alarm that the three speakers were allowed to hold a promotional press conference.
So what did the organizers have in mind? Were they just trying to get more media attention? Were they trying to be more “fair”? Or what? It would be interesting to know.
Other scientists said that while discussion of the subject was acceptable, the panel’s lack of balance was like inviting creationists to address the prestigious meeting without an opposing view from evolutionary biologists. Several members of the BA said that they would raise the matter with its ruling council…Lord Winston, the fertility specialist, said: “It is perfectly reasonable to have a session like this, but it should be robustly challenged by scientists who work in accredited psychological fields. It’s something the BA should consider, whether a session like this should go unchallenged by regular scientists.”
It should be peer-reviewed, in other words. Other researchers should try to replicate Sheldrake’s results. Inquiry should be properly conducted. You know – the usual boring routine.
The Indy gives a suggestive comment by one of the organizers of the panel.
Helen Haste, a psychologist at the University of Sussex and the organiser of the paranormal session, said:”We at the British Association feel we should be open to discussions and debates which are seen as valid by people generally inside and outside the scientific community.”
Ah. Ah yes. Do you. Notice all the wiggle language there – feel, open, seen, as valid, outside, community. In other words, the issue is not cognitive but emotive; it’s political and moral, about being open and inclusive as opposed to closed and excluding; it wants to include what people see “as valid” as opposed to, say, what they legitimately consider valid; it (again) wants to be open and inclusive to people outside the “scientific community” as well as inside it; and it wants to treat the whole thing as an exercise in community-building or expansion or cohesion as opposed to an epistemic one. “We at the British Association feel we should be open to fuzzy woolly wishful ideas that are seen as valid by people outside the cold excluding rejecting overintellectual elitist scientific community, and we want to join their community and make it bigger and more accepting and democratic and warmer and better.” That’s what that sounds like. More of the old “science excludes ideas that millions of people see as valid and that is fascism” routine. No wonder Atkins and Winston and the others are furious.
And the right for Stan to have a baby. That should be explored too.
It could have been worse. They could have had crystals. ley lines, dowsers. i bet they think they are being ‘scientific’ you know.
I googled Helen Haste; her research seems interesting. I’m getting curious about the politics of what seems to be a split between organizers of this festival and the non-woolly scientists.
strikes me that the BAAS has policed the boundaries in the most effective way possible here. If they had set up a proper discussion of Sheldrake’s paper, then it would presumably have centred round his experimental procedures, statistical techniques and so on. I’ve had only a cursory look at these and while they appear to me to have the common problem to all these stuides of relying heavily on statistical tests with too much power, they’re not at all heterodox in the tools they use. So it would certainly have looked (assuming that the discusant behaved remotely ethically and discussed the paper fairly rather than just starting a fight with Sheldrake) as if what he was doing was legitimate research (I think it quite likely is, and so do the editors of quite a few reasonable quality journals AFAICT).
However, by keeping sceptical discusants out, they avoid this situation and instead provide an opportunity for the likes of Lord Winston to issue ritual denunciations, conveying the message that even though Winston is basically Lady Di’s gyno, he is nevertheless qualified to talk about psychological research because he is a /scientist/, while in the same breath saying that this should be left to psychologists (of which he isn’t one). God that man is full of it; Wiseman is the only person on the Times’ list who appears to me to be qualified to assess Sheldrake’s research and it is notable that he is much more measured in his words.
I like the concept of a “non-woolly” scientist; presumably it is a reference to Sheldrake’s hair. Presumably this would make Winston a “bushy scientist” based on his moustache, because Lord knows there is not any particular point of difference in the science that the two of them actually do.
It’s dangerous crap, that’s what it is ……
There CANNOT be any sort of “psi” – unless evloution isn’t true – ooops..
Why?
So the BAAS (British Association for the Advancement of Science) has thought it possibly worthwhile to give publicity and some degree of supposed respectability to the ideas that Parapsychology and Paranormal powers, usually generically referred to as “Psi” have some worth.
Can I point out that this is impossible, unless a long well-accepted body of scientific knowledge and experience is completely wrong?
If any of these so-called “Psi” forces and supernatural powers had any real effect, or existence, then consider the enormous evolutionary advantage that such a talent, skill, or ability would give to any person, or any other animal, so endowed. No such advantage has ever been seen, or noted. The simple reason is that “Psi” is not merely a myth, but a possibly comforting lie. It is also a source of great exploitation of the gullible by stage magicians and unscrupulous fraudsters. By the way, all of the above applies to “miracles” as well.
So, if there are any paranormal/ parapsychological powers available to any humans, their effects would have shown up, very rapidly, as a distinct evolutionary advantage. Alternatively, the whole body of evolutionary theory and practice is wrong.
Therefore, there is no such thing as “Psi”, in any shape of form, and we are wasting huge amounts of time, money and effort on a phantasm.
I find it hard to believe that so-called educated people can fall victim to this pernicious nonsesnse.
That’s an interesting and amusing interpretation – it was a gotcha exercise staged in order to give an occasion for people to give lectures about normal science. Interesting and amusing but not altogether convincing, because it’s Sheldrake’s stuff that’s been getting the air time, not the opposition. The World Service fell all over itself in its haste to tell the world telepathy is probably real.
Airtime, not ink. And I didn’t say “all the airtime” – do be careful about putting quotation marks on things people haven’t said. But, to be sure, I haven’t listened to all the air, so I don’t actually know that Sheldrake has been getting the air time; he got some of it, rather uncritically, on the World Service.
The methods he uses to investigate are normal but flawed, from what I can gather. The samples are too small and they have prior expectations.
The New York Review of Books has a short summary of a new collection of essays by physicist and mathemetician Freeman Dyson entitled “The Scientist as Rebel” (nybooks.com – search Dyson). It includes this strange statement:”…surprisingly, Dyson argues that paranormal phenomena may actually exist yet be inaccessible to scientific verification.” So why bother with the BAAS at all?
Well of course all sorts of phenomena may exist and be inaccessible to scientific verification. But if they’re inaccessible, then they’re inaccessible. There’s not some special magical antiscientific verification that can confirm their existence for us; we just have to remain in the dark. What we can’t know, we can’t know.
Exactly – and if it is inaccessible how can you skeptically challenge it?
Ophelia wrote:
>I googled Helen Haste; her research seems interesting. I’m getting curious about the politics of what seems to be a split between organizers of this festival and the non-woolly scientists.< Before checking the responses on B&W I also googled Haste. Excuse my prejudices, but I thought her CV less than encouraging:
“Helen Haste’s research and numerous publications (both academic and popular) include the field of science and society, particularly images and metaphors of science and scientists, and their relationship to cultural values and to young peoples’ beliefs about science. She also researches and writes on moral values and citizenship, and she has an interest in gender issues in all these fields. She is currently working on a book on citizenship, supported by the Leverhulme Trust.”
http://www.bath.ac.uk/pr/releases/helenhaste-ba
I note that Haste succeeded Professor Colin Blakemore when he had to retire early as Chair of the British Association for the Advancement of Science following his appointment as Chief Executive of the Medical Research Council. Expressing my prejudices again (and on admittedly limited knowledge of Prof Haste) I know which of the two I’d prefer for views on the way the paranormal claims of Sheldrake et al were presented at this year’s BA session.
http://www.mrc.ac.uk/index/public-interest/public-events/public-specific_events/public-cb_roadshows/public-cb_biog.htm
Thanks, Allen. I didn’t look at her CV, so missed the “particularly images and metaphors of science and scientists,” which would have put me right off. I read an interview with Australian Broadcasting Corp about her research on political motivation, which does sound interesting and non-silly.
Then again…it could be non-silly in its own terms but still not make HH the best person to evaluate Sheldrake’s claims.
I’m hoping Ben Goldacre will provide some inside dope on all this.
“So, if there are any paranormal/ parapsychological powers available to any humans, their effects would have shown up, very rapidly, as a distinct evolutionary advantage.”
Well that’s just wrong, I’m afraid. They might not be the effect of genetics, for example. Or they might be genetic in the way that cancer is genetic – e.g., they might be a function of localised damage to DNA – but not inheritable (in the way that most cancers are not inheritable).
Or they might be so rare as not to confer an evolutionary advantage; they could be disadvantageous, for example (maybe people don’t want to have babies with people who claim to have visions).
Or they might kick in after the age of reproduction.
Not that I believe in paranormal powers (except my own, which are definitely real).
That is known as the stipulatio ex potentia sui.
A paper on the Sheldrake telephone experiment is here:
http://www.sheldrake.org/papers/Telepathy/exptests_abs.html
A potential problem with the experiments described is that they do not appear to be sufficiently controlled. A common outcome in psychic experiments is that the more tightly controlled they are, the smaller the effect.
Funny that, innit?
Keith -BBC Radio 4’s Material World yesterday afternoon (UK) broadcast a very recent seminar with some these people and an audience, from the UEA. I must admit the presenter seemed much less sceptical than I might have expected. It was all rather cosy. One of Sheldrake’s fans (or even he himself, can’t remember) countered this finding on diminishing effects by asserting that ‘lab-like’ situations were ‘unsympathetic’ to people tested on these phenomena and that participants were made by that sort of hostile environment to feel ‘fraudulent’; therefore the effectiveness of their ‘abilities’ being measured/tested/proven was reduced. Bless. It’s so easy when you can blame those nasty rough bullying unsympathetic variables isn’t it ? Or maybe that’s just me not being in touch with my emotional intelligence…
[The methods he uses to investigate are normal but flawed, from what I can gather. The samples are too small and they have prior expectations.]
That wasn’t what Dean Radin’s meta-analysis of his data found in “The Sense of Being Glared At”
http://www.sheldrake.org/Articles&Papers/papers/staring/pdf/JCSpaper3.pdf
(this is from Sheldrake’s reply to critics, but I doubt that the JCS would have allowed him to completely misrepresent it. Radin himself is a bit flaky but I don’t think he would have been allowed to get away with saying things that were outright untrue in the JCS which is a reasonable quality journal).
Whatever problems Sheldrake’s research has, they aren’t simple ones of “non-science”. He uses samples that would be considered large enough in most other contexts and experimental procedures that would also normally be considered valid.
G. Tingey’s argument above is much too strong. The ability to detect objects in front of your face also confers a huge advantage over people who don’t have it, but we do not conclude from the existence of vision that evolutionary theory must be wrong. If there is a “sense of being stared at” then it’s a sense like any other and presumably evolved like any other.
Keith: what do you mean in this context by “sufficiently controlled”? You normally need a control group in a treatment experiment, but in a case like the telepathy experiments I’m not sure what a “control” would mean because there isn’t a treatment given.
My personal opinion is that what this research is telling us is something about the power of statistical effects; that the standards currently used by scientific journals (to name something concrete rather than use the highly contested term “science”) can’t tell us everything we want to know, because any test that is sufficiently powerful to detect small effects of interest is also going to detect effects like telepathy which aren’t there. I do think Sheldrake is guilty of putting far too much faith in exact binomial tests when he says that something “is well above what could be possible by chance”, but if we’re hanging people for that the tumbrils would never stop rolling.
What’s interesting to me is the way in which people who believe themselves to be scientists behave in dealing with Sheldrake. None of us has thought to read the paper he presented; I don’t know if it’s even online. We just start digging up people’s CVs to see what sort of bias they have, what sort of side they’re on. This isn’t science; it’s science-politics (as far as I can tell, anyone who has achieved the rank of full professor at a British university or equivalent, has given up science long ago and is a full time science politician.) I’m a big believer in science; I just wish that scientists would spend more than a twentieth of their time doing it. And not call the non-science things they do “science”.
dsquared – you obviously have a science background; I don’t, and I admit to having bias generally on this subject. But can I come at your finishing remark from another direction – are scentists *allowed* to practice as much science as they ought ? And does the sort ‘research’ discussed here do them any favours ?
My suspicion is that much post-doc research is dictated by what the senior academic ‘science politicians/profs’ can blag for their departments and schools, and that headline grabbing papers – like ones about telepathy – can be better for business, which puts a squeeze on resource for duller but perhaps more fruitful lines of enquiry. Please excuse my untrained approach to the matter, but it is a genuine question so feel free to blow it out of the water if it ain’t so !
A science “background” is about right; my parents were scientists and my siblings are doctors, but I’m a jobbing economist and statistician (“an economist currently working as a stockbroker” is how I’d describe myself). I am presumably attracted to the cases of fringe scientists, science studies and other redheaded stepchildren of the science world as a way of subconsciously rebelling against my father.
I think you’re half-right and half-wrong. On the one hand yes, there are huge institutional impediments to science. And I’d also argue that the borders of science *do* need to be policed; there are a hell of a lot of genuine, dangerous irrationalists of one sort or another out there who need to be kept at bay, and the fact that I’m prepared to stick up for Sheldrake as someone who ought to find it easier to get his papers published, doesn’t mean that I don’t think there need to be people calling out the Discovery Institute loud and often.
On the other hand, scientists themselves engage in a lot of science-politics that nobody forces them into. Nobody forced Stephen Pinker to stop doing interesting work in linguistics and start talking crap about sociology; he did it because he wanted to capture intellectual territory. Nobody forced the psychologists to cold-shoulder Sheldrake’s research and refuse to review his papers fairly but they did. We full stop *know* that this does shut out important science from time to time, and therefore it’s important to be on guard against this territory too.
I think “policing the borders” is an excellent metaphor; borders *do* need to be policed, but on the other hand many border guards are corrupt and/or bigoted. I basically agree with Steve Fuller that the way in which the Intelligent Design crowd have been treated is not scientific behaviour; I just disagree with him on the question of whether they deserve any better treatment.
I agree with dsquared that the experimental claims in question must be examined in terms of the methodology employed, regardless of the CVs of the experimenters. But my citing of a CV was not, as he implies, an example of how “people who believe themselves to be scientists behave in dealing with Sheldrake”. It was in relation to the person who defended the way the BA chose to present the evidence at their event (and, it seems, was responsible for the presentation). That she (Helen Haste) has a background in what I would call the woollier side of science is not decisive, but I don’t think it is entirely irrelevant to one’s assessment of her defence of the presentation.
The letter from a longstanding member of the Magic Cicle in today’s Times (8th September) and referred to on Mick Hartley’s blog seems sensible. They had an occult committee which offered a cash prize for anyone who coul;d prove these phenomena existed. The prize was never claimed. He suggested that a magician be used as a verifier of these sort of tests as they were much less gullible than scientists.
“borders *do* need to be policed, but on the other hand many border guards are corrupt and/or bigoted.”
Agreed. Carl Sagan (for one) took the same view; he attracted a fair amount of ridicule and/or criticism for spending time investigating the claims of Velikovsky.
Matt Ridley made much the same point in his contribution to the article on the Kitzmiller decision here. “In this case I find it absolutely right that the overhwelming nature of the consensus should count against creationism. But there have been plenty of other times when I have been on the other side of the argument and seen what Madison called the despotism of the majority as a bad argument.” And Jerry S also made the same point in a post a few months ago.
But Atkins and Winston and the unnamed other scientists were making reasonable claims, as far as one can tell from the articles. They weren’t saying Sheldrake shouldn’t have been there; they were saying there should have been skeptics on the panel. Some of the critics “expressed particular alarm that the three speakers were allowed to hold a promotional press conference” – but a promotional press conference is not the same thing as a panel, so that’s a reasonable worry, I would think.
But I certainly do think people should be bending every nerve to try to replicate Sheldrake’s results.
dsquared: “Keith: what do you mean in this context by ‘sufficiently controlled’? You normally need a control group in a treatment experiment, but in a case like the telepathy experiments I’m not sure what a ‘control’ would mean because there isn’t a treatment given.”
Sorry!
I meant controlled to ensure that the person doing the guessing was not cheating or getting subtle cues about who was calling.
I’ve read the Sheldrake paper several times and I’m not convinced that such possible problems have been ruled out.
Along these lines, replications of Sheldrake’s earlier study on “being stared at” did not find the effect Sheldrake claimed and concluded that he had used poor methodology (see link at end).
“My personal opinion is that what this research is telling us is something about the power of statistical effects; that the standards currently used by scientific journals…because any test that is sufficiently powerful to detect small effects of interest is also going to detect effects like telepathy which aren’t there.”
I don’t think so. The power of the test has nothing to do with the chance that a correct null hypothesis (ie the observed effects are due to chance) will be (incorrectly) rejected. A more powerful test only will be able to detect a smaller effect than a less powerful test *assuming that the null is false*. A more powerful test is NOT more likely to detect an effect which is not there.
http://www.csicop.org/si/2000-09/staring.html
I stand by my evolutionary argument.
The whole thging is impossible UNLESS evolution is wrong.
Religious fundamentalism anyone?
I agree with Jerry S. and Dsquared’s objections. If people like Radin and Jessica Utts are correct in that there are statistical indications that psi effects exist, we’re talking about a very weak, quite erratic effect. It’s quite possible that it would be too small and unpredictable to bestow any evolutionary advantage. I mean, if people could write tomorrow’s paper, we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
That is even if psi effects would be genetically determined, which, as Jerry S indicated, is only one of many possibilities we could imagine.
So there’s no reason to dismiss psi effects out of hand, as principally impossible. And there’s every reason to try and scientifically investigate such effects. And if they are indeed found to exist – they are no longer “supernatural” or “paranormal”.
I think both Winston and Atkins (particularly Atkins) were unfair to these papers; they referred to them as charlatanry without having read them, and Atkins made a version of G. Tingey’s argument which is clearly quite embarrassingly fallacious:
“If telepathy were a real phenomenon, evolution and natural selection would have developed it into a serious ability”
[A more powerful test is NOT more likely to detect an effect which is not there.]
I don’t agree with this; you’re right that “power” is defined in terms of the false-negative rate, but for any test actually used (and certainly for the exact negative binomial used in perception experiments) high power means high false-positive. It could scarcely be otherwise; a higher power means rejecting the null more often, and if we had some means of only rejecting the null when it was false, we wouldn’t need to be doing statistics.
“If telepathy were a real phenomenon, evolution and natural selection would have developed it into a serious ability”
Did Atkins say that? Bloody hell.
What was he thinking?
It’s such a daft argument. Not least it assumes that the laws of physics (or whatever) that govern the ability allow it to develop into a serious ability. But, of coruse, they might not; natural selection might already have given us as much as we’re ever going to get.
Not that the ability – if it does exist – necessarily has anything at all to do with genes (except in the most general sense that we’re evolved entities).
“Not that the ability – if it does exist – necessarily has anything at all to do with genes (except in the most general sense that we’re evolved entities).”
Well, where did it come from otherwise?
“where did it come from otherwise?”
It might be:
1. An effect of peculiar in utero development;
2. An effect of environmental trauma;
3. An effect of localised DNA changes (i.e., not visible to natural selection because not carried in the germ line);
etc, etc
Of course, as I said, in the most general sense genes are implicated in everything we do (because we’re evolved organisms). But it doesn’t follow that any particular behaviours or abilities that we manifest have evolved through natural selection.
Sheldrake’s paper on telephoning (reference given above by Keith McGuiness 2006-09-08) seems to make two claims:
(a) many people can say, before they answer the phone, which randomly-selected one of four predetermined people is telephoning them at a predetermined time;
(b) they do so by paranormal means, inaccessible to science.
Unless I misread it, the paper is unconvincing on (a), because Sheldrake just asked the callees to say (and the caller to “confirm”) whether they got it right.
Suppose however that (a) is true. What is supposed to be the evidence for (b)?
on a) I think you did misread it; the experimenters chose which person was going to call (so no possibility of the subject misreporting there) and they made the subject predict the caller in writing before picking up the phone. When they say “confirm”, they mean “confirm to the subject” ie provide feedback.
on b), clearly Sheldrake thinks this is not in principle inaccesible to science or he would not bother doing science on it. He thinks that it’s inconsistent with our current understanding of human perception (and as far as I can tell it is) and that it’s got something to do with his theory of morphogenetic fields (which is his own theory; he’s entitled to it).
The point is that there’s no way to communicate to someone in New Zealand that you’re about to phone them, so if this communication did in fact take place (which is the controversial bit), it did so through some means that we’ve not currently got a theory of.
My reading of the Sheldrake papers is that they are fairly low-tech low-grade science. They’re righly subject to criticism because they make such highly implausible claims from relatively poorly controlled methodology, but they’re science, just not very good science. But then a hell of a lot of scientific research is poor, particularly the stuff that gets the headlines.
As to evolution and psychic powers, I guess you can’t really say until you have some kind of handle on how they’re supposed to work, taken at face value they rather undermine a whole raft of well established scientific theories, no reason for natural selection to escape unscathed!
“The point is that there’s no way to communicate to someone in New Zealand that you’re about to phone them, so if this communication did in fact take place (which is the controversial bit), it did so through some means that we’ve not currently got a theory of.”
Instant messaging, probably.
Dsquared:
What am I missing? The bit I read says:
“In all cases, when a trial was taking place, when the participant picked up the telephone he or she immediately indicated the person guessed by saying that person’s name. The caller then revealed his or her identity, so the participants received immediate feedback.
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.”
Nothing about writing the guess down, and no independent verification.
However, IF Sheila in (say) NZ can say that Bruce is about to phone her from (say) England, how do we know there is no way she does it, other than magic (or the obvious possibilities of trickery or collusion?) OK, it seems impossible that Bruce can generate enough electromagnetic radiation to bounce round the earth and be detectable by Sheila. But, just for the sake of argument, because Bruce and Sheila are second cousins, or once kissed, or whatever, their brains could contain a pair of quantum-entangled selenium atoms whose spins they can flip in order to convey an instantaneous one-bit message.
And yes, I agree that is if anything madder than Sheldrake’s morphogenic whatnots, but in principle can you totally rule it, or some variant of it, out?
This is from early in this one
http://www.sheldrake.org/papers/Telepathy/experiment_tests.html
“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.”
That’s completely ridiculous. That experiment is worth exactly nothing. Presumably he’s tightened things up by now – he describes one where everything is on camera.
Farther down he says: “What about deliberate cheating? Perhaps participants and their callers simply lied about the guesses, falsely reporting incorrect guesses as correct. Or perhaps after potential callers had been informed that they had been picked, they rang or e-mailed the participant to pass on this information. Even if callers who knew they had not been selected told this to the participant, the choice would have been narrowed, and hence the chance of successful guessing increased. .
The cheating hypothesis is implausible for three main reasons. First, it is very improbable that a large majority of the participants would have cheated. It is perhaps conceivable that a few might have done so, but a few cheats could not have produced the pattern of results we observed in which most participants scored above chance levels.”
That’s completely batty, isn’t it? Am I missing something? He doesn’t design the experiment so as to rule out cheating or joking, and then claims it shows something?
Surely the experiments are tighter now. Surely he wasn’t basing his claims at the ‘paranormal session’ on experiments like that? Surely?!
AFAIK, Sheldrake has progressively tightened up the methodology as he has gone on; remember that he doesn’t have any research funding at all so it is much more difficult for him to set up videotaped controls, etc, than for someone with access to an experimental psychology lab.
As PM says, they’re no worse designed than a lot of scientific experiments; a lot of perception and consciousness research experiments have a lot of room for lying or cheating.
[But, just for the sake of argument, because Bruce and Sheila are second cousins, or once kissed, or whatever, their brains could contain a pair of quantum-entangled selenium atoms whose spins they can flip in order to convey an instantaneous one-bit message.]
Well, this sort of thing would be possible; it would involve an entirely new theory of the brain though (not that this would necessarily be a bad thing). IIRC, Sheldrake does occasionally go off on one suggesting that morphogenetic fields are something to do with quantum entanglement, but when he does he sounds no more convincing than any other reader of pop science books.
The problem is the usual one of trying to prove a negative.
“Psi” effects do not exist, says I, for reasons given above ….
But this is (almost) like saying “god” does not exist.
Now you can get round the second (and I have) by pinching an idea of Uncle Albert’s, and reformulating it to the testable statement that:
“NO god is detectable. ( even if that god exits )
Now Psi effects should be detectable, if they exist.
So far, after well over 100 years of looking, we’ve got nothing.
Sheldrake’s stuff certainly used to be very wobbly methodologically speaking. And, judging from the comments above, he hasn’t got much better.
Let us suppose, just for the sake of argument that my suggestion about evolutionary advantage is “too strong” (BTW how can you have too strong or successful argument/case?), then, still, there should be some reliable way of detecting this stuff.
Nothing so far.
I really think we are wasting huge amounts of time and money on this one…
If there really is a “psi” effect, then how is the message being transmitted?
It should be detectable – and it isn’t and hasn’t been.