The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science (53 page)
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Authors: Will Storr
Tags: #BIO000000
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255
compiled the data from more than thirty thousand trials like this:
Actual number: 30,803.
255
mysterious ‘sense of being stared at’:
Rupert Sheldrake, ‘The Sense of Being Stared At Part 1: Is it Real or Illusory?’,
Journal of Consciousness Studies
12, no. 6 (2005), p. 15.
255
Sheldrake grew up in a herbalist’s shop:
Biographical information from interview with author.
257
the
Observer
had called it ‘fascinating and far-reaching’:
Rupert Sheldrake,
A New Science of Life
, Blond and Briggs, 1981. [Reviews excerpted from Icon Books, 2009 edition.]
257
‘A Book for Burning?’:
‘A book for burning?’,
Nature
293, 24 September 1981, pp. 245–46.
258
Nobel Prize–winner Francis Crick, who wrote:
Francis Crick,
The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search For The Soul
, Scribner, 1995.
258
Sheldrake’s explorations into telepathy:
Rupert Sheldrake, ‘The “Sense of Being Stared At” Confirmed by Simple Experiments’,
Biology Forum
92 (1999), pp. 53–76.
258
one in ten thousand billion billion:
Rupert Sheldrake, ‘The Sense of Being Stared At Part 1: Is it Real or Illusory?’,
Journal of Consciousness Studies
12, no. 6 (2005), p. 15.
258
Next, he studied a psychic terrier from Ramsbottom:
Rupert Sheldrake and Pamela Smart, ‘A Dog That Seems To Know When His Owner is Coming Home: Videotaped Experiments and Observations’,
Journal of Scientific Exploration
14 (2000), pp. 233–55.
259
Lewis Wolpert, who described telepathy research as ‘pathological science’:
The RSA Telepathy Debate, Royal Society of Arts, London, 15 January 2004.
259
tapping his pencil, ‘looking bored’:
Philip Stevens, ‘Rupert Sheldrake and the
wider scientific community’, dissertation, London Centre for the History of Science, Medicine and Technology 2008/09.
259
asked to speak at the 2006 Festival of Science, his presence was denounced:
Mark Henderson, ‘Theories of telepathy and afterlife cause uproar at top science forum’,
The Times
, 6 September 2006.
259
‘No, but I would be very suspicious of it’:
BBC Radio Five Live debate, 6 September 2006.
260
The first paragraph of Wiseman’s bestseller:
Richard Wiseman, 260
Why We See What Isn’t There
, Macmillan, 2011.
260
In 2006 Rupert Sheldrake was given a ‘Pigasus’ award:
The 11th Annual Pigasus Awards, awarded 1 April 2007,
http://www.randi.org/pigasus/index.html
.
260
Randi writes, somewhat cryptically:
James Randi’s
Swift
blog, 8 September 2006,
www.randi.org/jr/2006-09/09806guess.html
.
261
It began, for Richard Wiseman, when he was eight:
Biographical information from interview with author and from Richard Wiseman,
Paranormality: Why We See What Isn’t There
, Macmillan, 2011.
262
a German academic named Stefan Schmidt:
Stefan Schmidt et al., ‘Distant intentionality and the feeling of being stared at: Two meta-analyses’,
British Journal of Psychology
95 (2004), pp. 235–47.
262
a study by academics at the University of Amsterdam:
Eva Lobach and Dick J. Bierman, ‘Who’s Calling At This Hour? Local Sidereal Time And Telephone Telepathy’, University of Amsterdam, Parapsychological Association Convention 2004.
262
to replicate Sheldrake’s staring tests with parapsychologist Marilyn Schlitz:
R. Wiseman and M. Schlitz, ‘Experimenter effects and the remote detection of staring’,
Journal of Parapsychology
61 (1997), pp. 199–207.
263
Wiseman went on to conduct four tests on Jaytee the dog:
R. Wiseman, M. Smith, and J. Milton, ‘Can animals detect when their owners are returning home? An experimental test of the “psychic pet” phenomenon’,
British Journal of Psychology
89 (1998), pp. 453–62.
263
‘Psychic dog is no more than a chancer’:
The Times
, 21 August 1998.
263
‘Psychic pets are exposed as a myth’:
Daily Telegraph
, 22 August 1998.
263
While Wiseman admits this is true:
‘Collaboration Between Skeptics and Paranormal Researchers’,
Skeptiko
, 17 April 2007.
264
Later I find the paper Wiseman had sent me:
Richard Wiseman, Matthew Smith and Julie Milton, ‘The “Psychic Pet” Phenomenon: A reply to Rupert Sheldrake’, accessed on Wiseman’s website:
http://www.richardwiseman.com/resources/psychicdogreply.pdf
.
265
another that was
proposed by Wiseman himself
:
Rupert Sheldrake, ‘The Sense of Being Stared At Part 1: Is it Real or Illusory?’,
Journal of Consciousness Studies
12, no. 6 (2005), p. 24.
265
the authors of the University of Amsterdam study … admit:
From the above study: ‘These simulations show that the effects found in staring studies involving feedback to the staree might explain the difference between the effects reported by Sheldrake and the absence of those effects in ours.
However, as we noted above, Sheldrake has since reported quite a number of studies that do not provide feedback to the staree, and these show somewhat smaller, but still large effects (Sheldrake, 2001b), unlike our three studies, so it leaves our question in part still unanswered’.
265
But then Wiseman sends more concerns. And Sheldrake counters them:
For those interested, I’ll note a brief summary of these concerns and Sheldrake’s responses:
Wiseman’s concerns about the dog trials:
The first series of thirty dog trials wasn’t randomised, therefore the dog might know from Pam’s routine or dress or reactions of other people.
Sheldrake’s response
: The first series did have Pam returning at a wide variety of times. Jaytee had already been observed to wait at the window when Pam was on the way home at different times of day when she was returning in a non-routine manner. These data were documented in the part of the paper that described preliminary investigations [
http://www.sheldrake.org/Articles&Papers/papers/animals/pdf/dogknows.pdf
]. The distribution of return times is shown in Fig. 1 and the details of each journey, including the distances are given in Table 1, and show that Jaytee anticipated Pam’s return on 85 out of 100 occasions, irrespective of the time of day and mode of transport.
Says Sheldrake, ‘We had documented his behaviour, and done some experiments on random return times and modes of transport in considerable detail before we began our filmed tests. We already knew from these observations that this was not a matter of routine, and that Jaytee’s responses could not be explained in terms of hearing familiar vehicles. The 30 filmed tests took further this series of observations under real-life conditions. Only by disregarding all the details can Wiseman suggest that these could be explained in terms of routine anticipations of Pam’s patterns of behaviour.’
Another concern about the dog trials:
The second series of trials was randomised. But in these, the dog might simply be going to the window more and more over time (and therefore is there most when Pam returns).
The way to assess this is to compare short, medium and long trials. There are not enough of them in the random series to do this. Sheldrake does do this with the non-random homecomings, but that isn’t of any use because they might have cues regarding when Pam might return (see above).
Sheldrake’s response:
The complaint that Jaytee might have been simply going to the window more and more over time had been controlled for.
Sheldrake: ‘The reason we did the control trials when Pam was not coming home was precisely to address the question that Wiseman raises as to whether Jaytee went to the door more and more the longer Pam was out. We had already shown he did not do that in the 30 trials, comparing long, medium and short, and there is no suggestion he was doing that in the randomised trials. But the control data show clearly that there was no such pattern. Wiseman simply ignores these data. You can see these in Fig. 5 of this paper:
http://www.sheldrake.org/Articles&Papers/papers/animals/pdf/dog_video.pdf
.’
265
adding a meta-analysis that confirms his view:
Dean Radin, ‘The Sense of Being Stared At: A Preliminary Meta-Analysis’,
Journal of Consciousness Studies
12, no.6 (2005), pp. 95–100.
266
Computer pioneer Alan Turing once said:
John Horgan, ‘Brilliant Scientists are Open-Minded about Paranormal Stuff, So Why Not You?’,
Scientific American
, 20 July 2012.
266
New Scientist
has reported:
Robert Matthews, ‘Opposites Detract’,
New Scientist
, 13 March 2004.
266
As far back as 1951, pioneering neuroscientist Donald Hebb admitted:
Montague Ullman,
The Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry
, Vol. 3, 3rd edition, Chapter 56, Section 15, pp. 3235–45, 1980. [Accessed:
http://siivola.org/monte/papers_grouped/copyrighted/parapsychology_&_psi/Parapsychology.htm
].
266
in 2008, a famously sceptical psychologist:
Danny Penman, ‘Could there be proof to the theory that we’re ALL psychic?’,
Daily Mail
, 28 January 2008. [In its original form, this quote specifically refers to remote viewing. Elsewhere, Wiseman confirms this as ‘a slight misquote because I was using the term in more of a general sense of ESP. That is, I was not talking about remote viewing per se, but rather Ganzfeld, etc. as well’: [
http://www.skeptiko.com/rupert-sheldrake-and-richard-wiseman-clash/
].
15: ‘A suitable place’
page
271
Wired
magazine says that ‘he knows more:
Rob Beschizza, ‘10 Tips For Dealing With James Randi: Claim Your Million Today!’,
Wired
, 26 October 2007.
271
Richard Dawkins has given him a ‘Richard Dawkins award’:
About James Randi: detailed biography on the JREF website:
http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/component/content/article/58.html
.
271
hosted sell-out thousand-dollar-a-head fundraising dinners:
Sheilla Jones,
Globe and Mail
(Canada), 10 July 2010.
271
Celebrity magicians Penn and Teller call him:
‘“I don’t know”—and that’s no act’, Penn Jillette,
Los Angeles Times
, 3 July 2008.
271
Wiseman credits his 1982 book
Flim Flam
:
‘Richard Wiseman on Debunking the Paranormal’,
The Browser
, 2 April 2012.
271
The former editor of
The Skeptic
magazine says:
Interview with author (quote is from Professor Chris French).
271
The founding editor of the US edition has called him:
Patricia Cohen, ‘Poof! You’re a Skeptic: The Amazing Randi’s Vanishing Humbug’,
New York Times
, 17 February 2001.
271
The
New York Times
has described him as:
Michael Sokolove, ‘The Debunker’,
New York Times
, 25 December 2005.
271
Isaac Asimov has said:
Interview with Scot Morris,
Omni
Magazine, April 1980, p. 78.
271
Sir John Maddox, the former editor of the … science journal
Nature
:
‘The $18,000 question’,
Straits Times
, 30 May 1991.
272
the man the Skeptics exalt as their ‘patron saint’:
Interview, Chris French and James Randi, YouTube, April 2008, on behalf of
The Skeptic
magazine.
273
James Randi was born an illegitimate:
Trailer for documentary, ‘An Honest Liar’, viewed at:
http://www.skepticmoney.com/an-honest-liar-the-story-of-the-amazing-james-randi/
.
273
‘genius or near genius’:
Interview with author.
273
A child prodigy:
Interview, Chris French and James Randi, YouTube, April 2008, on behalf of
The Skeptic
magazine.
273
IQ of 168:
Jeanne Malmgren, ‘The “quack” hunter’,
St Petersburg Times
(Florida), 14 April 1998.
273
making photo-electric cells:
Paul Vallely, ‘Now he sees it …’,
The Times
, 5 February 1987.
273
chemistry experiments in his basement:
Chris Beck, ‘On the Couch’,
The Age
, 26 June 1993.
273
By the age of eight he was arguing with other children:
Patricia Orwen, ‘The Amazing Randi’,
Toronto Star
, 23 August 1986.
273
invented a pop-up toaster:
Patricia Orwen, ‘The Amazing Randi’,
Toronto Star
, 23 August 1986.
273
too intelligent to benefit from school … educated himself:
Interview, Chris French and James Randi, YouTube, April 2008, on behalf of
The Skeptic
magazine.
273
geography, history … mathematics:
Interview, Chris French and James Randi, YouTube, April 2008, on behalf of
The Skeptic
magazine.
