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TED - and Censorship

Open_Minded

Nothing is Separate
I just became aware of this situation today. It seems best to link the article and let the conversation unfold.

Banned TED Talk: Rupert Sheldrake – The Science Delusion

Rupert Sheldrake is a fascinating member of the scientific world. The video below is of his TED talk where he covers “The Science Delusion.” This TED talk was controversially banned by the TED community after being aired.

If you have studied any area of science on your own or in school, you may have noticed or have come across the fact that there are many differing beliefs in the scientific world. While this statement seems impossible given that science is supposed to be based on evidence which produces theory, it is a delusion not to realize that much of what is strictly believed in the scientific world is only believed due to the common acceptance that is put into mainstream ideas — much like what takes place within religion. That is not to say that there aren’t amazing scientists out there coming up with profound findings and adding powerful contributions to all fields, it’s to bring light to the fact that in a mainstream sense one could say science is “stuck” or more accurately put, we have put a freeze on certain areas of science. ....


Rupert Sheldrake outlines 10 dogmas he has found to exist within mainstream science today. He states that when you look at each of these scientifically, you see that they are not actually true.

  1. Nature is mechanical or machine like
  2. All matter is unconscious
  3. The laws or constants of nature are fixed
  4. The total amount of matter and energy is always the same
  5. Nature is purposeless
  6. Biological heredity is material
  7. Memories are stored inside your brain
  8. Your mind is inside your head
  9. Psychic phenomena like telepathy is not possible
  10. Mechanistic medicine is the only kind that works

There are two things going on here

  1. Censorship of a site who's stated mission is "TED is a nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design."
  2. And the larger conflict happening within the sciences
I look forward to the thoughts of others .....
 

Revoltingest

Pragmatic Libertarian
Premium Member
I just became aware of this situation today. It seems best to link the article and let the conversation unfold.

Banned TED Talk: Rupert Sheldrake – The Science Delusion



There are two things going on here

  1. Censorship of a site who's stated mission is "TED is a nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design."
  2. And the larger conflict happening within the sciences
I look forward to the thoughts of others .....
As with all other overturnings of the scientific apple cart, one must find documentable real world examples which disprove
accepted norms. It happens, eg, relativity replacing Newtonian mechanics, quantum mechanics replacing a more clockwork
approach, etc. This Rupert fellow has some homework to do before his novel ideas will gain any traction. Hell...if methodical
observations weren't needed, I could get TED to air my program about how pixie dust is the fundamental building block of the universe..
 
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Open_Minded

Nothing is Separate
As with all other overturnings of the scientific apple cart, one must find documentable real world examples which disprove
accepted norms. It happens, eg, relativity replacing Newtonian mechanics, quantum mechanics replacing a more clockwork approach, etc.
We agree completely


This Rupert fellow has some homework to do before his novel ideas will gain any traction.
I'm not disagreeing here, either. But.. he is putting his ideas out there. He is willing to go through the process of analysis ... he was invited to speak by the organizers of this particular TEDx event ..... So what's the problem??? One doesn't have to agree with what he is exploring, one doesn't even have to listen to his video. He was invited to speak at a TEDx event, by the organizers of said event. The video was pulled only after an outcry from those who disagreed. :shrug:
 

Revoltingest

Pragmatic Libertarian
Premium Member
I'm not disagreeing here, either. But.. he is putting his ideas out there. He is willing to go through the process of analysis ... he was invited to speak by the organizers of this particular TEDx event ..... So what's the problem??? One doesn't have to agree with what he is exploring, one doesn't even have to listen to his video. He was invited to speak at a TEDx event, by the organizers of said event. The video was pulled only after an outcry from those who disagreed. :shrug:
I'm not privy to their reasoning on the matter, but were I in their position, I'd reject unsupported loopy proposals.
Apparently, others would disagree. But with limited time & money, one can't provide the venue to every crackpot
who wants his 15 minutes of infamy.
 

Skwim

Veteran Member
From Wikipedia.
"Sheldrake's ideas have often met with a hostile reception from some scientists, including accusations that he is engaged in pseudoscience, and at least two respected scientists who have sought to discuss 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"
Obviously Sheldrake is working on fringe-science at best, and therefore TED doesn't see his work as "ideas worth spreading" (TEDs slogan). It's there prerogative. So it isn't censorship at all. No more so than a publisher rejecting a manuscript for whatever reason. I say, quit whining and go back to your parapsychology.
 

Open_Minded

Nothing is Separate
I'm not privy to their reasoning on the matter, but were I in their position, I'd reject unsupported loopy proposals. Apparently, others would disagree. But with limited time & money, one can't provide the venue to every crackpot
who wants his 15 minutes of infamy.

Well ... firstly let's set aside the obvious bias implications of using the word "crackpot" :)

Now let's go to the source

From TED
UPDATE: Please see our new blog post Graham Hancock and Rupert Sheldrake, a fresh take, which replaces the x-ed out text below.


To discuss the talks, view them here:
The debate about Rupert Sheldrake’s talk
The debate about Graham Hancock’s talk


After due diligence, including a survey of published scientific research and recommendations from our Science Board and our community, we have decided that Graham Hancock’s and Rupert Sheldrake’s talks from TEDxWhitechapel should be removed from distribution on the TEDx YouTube channel.


We’re not censoring the talks. Instead we’re placing them here, where they can be framed to highlight both their provocative ideas and the factual problems with their arguments. See both talks after the jump.


All talks on the TEDxTalks channel represent the opinion of the speaker, not of TED or TEDx, but we feel a responsibility not to provide a platform for talks which appear to have crossed the line into pseudoscience.


(The following strike out text was included by TEDx as well)


According to our science board, Rupert Sheldrake bases his argument on several major factual errors, which undermine the arguments of talk. For example, he suggests that scientists reject the notion that animals have consciousness, despite the fact that it’s generally accepted that animals have some form of consciousness, and there’s much research and literature exploring the idea.
He also argues that scientists have ignored variations in the measurements of natural constants, using as his primary example the dogmatic assumption that a constant must be constant and uses the speed of light as example. But, in truth, there has been a great deal of inquiry into the nature of scientific constants, including published, peer-reviewed research investigating whether certain constants – including the speed of light – might actually vary over time or distance. Scientists are constantly questioning these assumptions. For example, just this year Scientific American published a feature on the state of research into exactly this question. (“Are physical constants really constant?: Do the inner workings of nature change over time?”) Physicist Sean Carroll wrote a careful rebuttal of this point.
In addition, Sheldrake claims to have “evidence” of morphic resonance in crystal formation and rat behavior. The research has never appeared in a peer-reviewed journal, despite attempts by other scientists eager to replicate the work.
Response to the TED Scientific Board’s Statement


Part of Rupert's response:
I would like to respond to TED’s claims that my TEDx talk “crossed the line into pseudoscience”, contains ”serious factual errors” and makes “many misleading statements.”


This discussion is taking place because the militant atheist bloggers Jerry Coyne and P.Z. Myers denounced me, and attacked TED for giving my talk a platform. I was invited to give my talk as part of a TEDx event in Whitechapel, London, called “Challenging Existing ParadigmsThat’s where the problem lies: my talk explicitly challenges the materialist belief system. It summarized some of the main themes of my recent book Science Set Free (in the UK called The Science Delusion). Unfortunately, the TED administrators have publically aligned themselves with the old paradigm of materialism, which has dominated science since the late nineteenth century. .......


TED say they removed my talk from their website on the advice of their Scientific Board, who also condemned Graham Hancock’s talk. Hancock and I are now facing anonymous accusations made by a body on whose authority TED relies, on whose advice they act, and behind whom they shelter, but whose names they have not revealed.


TED’s anonymous Scientific Board made three specific accusations: (You can find the rest of his rebuttal - where he addresses the accusations - at the link)

Now the facts are pretty straight-forward.


  1. TED was a sponsor of the TEDx event in Whitechapel, London, called “Challenging Existing Paradigms.
  2. I think it's fair to say that Rupert's position definitely fits the subject matter of "Challenging Existing Paradigms"
  3. The material was not removed from the site until there was a campaign against it.
  4. And ... the one highest ideals of scientific inquiry is to "Challenge Existing Paradigms" - I mean - isn't that what science is suppose to be about always pushing ahead into new frontiers of knowledge? And won't that push sometimes lead down dead-end roads? And isn't it suppose to be the job of the entire scientific community to analyze and test the new frontiers?
TED set itself up as a place to air information. And - more to the point of this discussion - the speaker at this event was addressing the main topic of the event. So ... why should TED remove the material only after the outcry of detracters????
 

Revoltingest

Pragmatic Libertarian
Premium Member
Well ... firstly let's set aside the obvious bias implications of using the word "crackpot" :)
I used "crackpot" in its clinical sense.

Now let's go to the source
From TED
Part of Rupert's response:
Now the facts are pretty straight-forward. TED was a sponsor of the TEDx event in Whitechapel, London, called “Challenging Existing Paradigms.
  1. I think it's fair to say that Rupert's position definitely fits the subject matter of "Challenging Existing Paradigms"
  2. The material was not removed from the site until there was a campaign against it.
  3. And ... the one highest ideals of scientific inquiry is to "Challenge Existing Paradigms" - I mean - isn't that what science is suppose to be about always pushing ahead into new frontiers of knowledge? And won't that push sometimes lead down dead-end roads? And isn't it suppose to be the job of the entire scientific community to analyze and test the new frontiers?
TED set itself up as a place to air information. And - more to the point of this discussion - the speaker at this event was addressing the main topic of the event. So ... why should TED remove the material only after the outcry of detracters????
I can't speak to the clumsy politics of this debacle.
But he should keep trying to collect evidence & develop his ideas.
We shall see if they lead anywhere productive.
 

Open_Minded

Nothing is Separate
I used "crackpot" in its clinical sense.

I can't speak to the clumsy politics of this debacle.
But he should keep trying to collect evidence & develop his ideas.
We shall see if they lead anywhere productive
.
We agree completely ... time will tell. But... it is important for folks (if they are going to work within the scientific paradigm) to do the experiments. Put the experiments out there for peer review and replication.

It is also important for the scientific community to do the work of living up to its highest ideals of unbiased objectivity, and avoid biased treatment of scientists who are going against the mainstream.
 
So ... why should TED remove the material only after the outcry of detracters????
For the same reason that any organization might make a mistake of judgment and not realize it, until people call attention to it.

The relevant question is whether TED gave plausible reasons for judging the talk to be factually misleading pseudoscience. You presented TED's reasons, but then ignored them when you summarized what happened in your three-point list, giving the misleading impression that TED had no reason. Finally, you say TED "removed the material" but they actually just moved it.

They are supposed to be "Ideas worth spreading", not "Any idea that we can spread". That pretty much sums it up.
 

WyattDerp

Active Member
TED? Bleh! If anyone has a good idea, why would they present with these self-important whimps? Even @google talks are a better medium ffs.

ku-medium.png


ku-medium.png


^ That's such lame posturing and brownnosing over mere 18 minutes that were clearly too good for those *******, that it actually wraps around from pathetic to slightly funny.

[youtube]ci5p1OdVLAc[/youtube]
Sarah Silverman: A new perspective on the number 3000 - YouTube
 
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We agree completely ... time will tell. But... it is important for folks (if they are going to work within the scientific paradigm) to do the experiments. Put the experiments out there for peer review and replication.

It is also important for the scientific community to do the work of living up to its highest ideals of unbiased objectivity, and avoid biased treatment of scientists who are going against the mainstream.
Yes but biased treatment of scientists who are going against the evidence, or against the scientific method, is a good thing. There is a reason we take Einstein very seriously, even though he was wrong about a number of things and even though he went against the mainstream a number of times. The reason is because he was diligent, thorough, knowledgeable, careful, objective. And his theories successfully predicted the outcomes of detailed experiments. So he commanded respect, even from scientists who disagreed with him. This, however, does not command respect:
TED said:
According to our science board, Rupert Sheldrake bases his argument on several major factual errors, which undermine the arguments of talk. For example, he suggests that scientists reject the notion that animals have consciousness, despite the fact that it’s generally accepted that animals have some form of consciousness, and there’s much research and literature exploring the idea.
He also argues that scientists have ignored variations in the measurements of natural constants, using as his primary example the dogmatic assumption that a constant must be constant and uses the speed of light as example. But, in truth, there has been a great deal of inquiry into the nature of scientific constants, including published, peer-reviewed research investigating whether certain constants – including the speed of light – might actually vary over time or distance. Scientists are constantly questioning these assumptions. For example, just this year Scientific American published a feature on the state of research into exactly this question. (“Are physical constants really constant?: Do the inner workings of nature change over time?”) Physicist Sean Carroll wrote a careful rebuttal of this point.
In addition, Sheldrake claims to have “evidence” of morphic resonance in crystal formation and rat behavior. The research has never appeared in a peer-reviewed journal, despite attempts by other scientists eager to replicate the work.
Why doesn't this command respect? It's because Sheldrake is playing fast-and-loose with facts. Not because of unfair prejudice against anyone outside the mainstream.
 

Open_Minded

Nothing is Separate
According to our science board, Rupert Sheldrake bases his argument on several major factual errors, which undermine the arguments of talk. For example, he suggests that scientists reject the notion that animals have consciousness, despite the fact that it’s generally accepted that animals have some form of consciousness, and there’s much research and literature exploring the idea.
From Rupert's Rebuttle
I characterized the materialist dogma as follows: “Matter is unconscious: the whole universe is made up of unconscious matter. There’s no consciousness in stars in galaxies, in planets, in animals, in plants and there ought not to be any in us either, if this theory’s true. So a lot of the philosophy of mind over the last 100 years has been trying to prove that we are not really conscious at all.” Certainly some biologists, including myself, accept that animals are conscious.
He also argues that scientists have ignored variations in the measurements of natural constants, using as his primary example the dogmatic assumption that a constant must be constant and uses the speed of light as example. But, in truth, there has been a great deal of inquiry into the nature of scientific constants, including published, peer-reviewed research investigating whether certain constants – including the speed of light – might actually vary over time or distance. Scientists are constantly questioning these assumptions. For example, just this year Scientific American published a feature on the state of research into exactly this question. (“Are physical constants really constant?: Do the inner workings of nature change over time?”) Physicist Sean Carroll wrote a careful rebuttal of this point.
From Rupert's rebuttle:
TED’s Scientific Board refers to a Scientific American article that makes my point very clearly: “Physicists routinely assume that quantities such as the speed of light are constant.”
In my talk I said that the published values of the speed of light dropped by about 20 km/sec between 1928 and 1945. Carroll’s “careful rebuttal” consisted of a table copied from Wikipedia showing the speed of light at different dates, with a gap between 1926 and 1950, omitting the very period I referred to. His other reference (Molecular Expressions Microscopy Primer: Physics of Light and Color - Speed of Light) does indeed give two values for the speed of light in this period, in 1928 and 1932-35, and sure enough, they were 20 and 24km/sec lower than the previous value, and 14 and 18 km/sec lower than the value from 1947 onwards.
1926: 299,798
1928: 299,778
1932-5: 299,774
1947: 299,792
In my talk I suggest how a re-examination of existing data could resolve whether large continuing variations in the Universal Gravitational Constant, G, are merely errors, as usually assumed, or whether they show correlations between different labs that might have important scientific implications hitherto ignored. Jerry Coyne and TED’s Scientific Board regard this as an exercise in pseudoscience. I think their attitude reveals a remarkable lack of curiosity.
In addition, Sheldrake claims to have “evidence” of morphic resonance in crystal formation and rat behavior. The research has never appeared in a peer-reviewed journal, despite attempts by other scientists eager to replicate the work.
And ... again ... from Rupert's rebuttle:

I said, “There is in fact good evidence that new compounds get easier to crystallize all around the world.” For example, turanose, a kind of sugar, was considered to be a liquid for decades, until it first crystallized in the 1920s. Thereafter it formed crystals everyehere. (Woodard and McCrone Journal of Applied Crystallography (1975). 8, 342). The American chemist C. P. Saylor, remarked it was as though “the seeds of crystallization, as dust, were carried upon the winds from end to end of the earth” (quoted by Woodard and McCrone).


The research on rat behavior I referred to was carried out at Harvard and the Universities of Melbourne and Edinburgh and was published in peer-reviewed journals, including the British Journal of Psychology and the Journal of Experimental Biology. For a fuller account and detailed references see Chapter 11 of my book Morphic Resonance (in the US) / A New Science of Life (in the UK). The relevant passage is online here: Science Set Free


The TED Scientific Board refers to ”attempts by other scientists eager to replicate the work” on morphic resonance. I would be happy to work with these eager scientists if the Scientific Board can reveal who they are.
I wonder if he's gotten any calls from these "other scientists eager to replicate the work". .....


Anyway - Rupert's Bio lists the following qualifications ....


Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist and author of more than 80 scientific papers and ten books. A former Research Fellow of the Royal Society, he studied natural sciences at Cambridge University, where he was a Scholar of Clare College, took a double first class honours degree and was awarded the University Botany Prize. He then studied philosophy and history of science at Harvard University, where he was a Frank Knox Fellow, before returning to Cambridge, where he took a Ph.D. in biochemistry. He was a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, where he was Director of Studies in biochemistry and cell biology. As the Rosenheim Research Fellow of the Royal Society, he carried out research on the development of plants and the ageing of cells in the Department of Biochemistry at Cambridge University.

While at Cambridge, together with Philip Rubery, he discovered the mechanism of polar auxin transport, the process by which the plant hormone auxin is carried from the shoots towards the roots.

From 1968 to 1969, based in the Botany Department of the University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, he studied rain forest plants. From 1974 to 1985 he was Principal Plant Physiologist and Consultant Physiologist at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) in Hyderabad, India, where he helped develop new cropping systems now widely used by farmers. While in India, he also lived for a year and a half at the ashram of Fr Bede Griffiths in Tamil Nadu, where he wrote his first book, A New Science of Life.

[FONT=&quot]From 2005-2010 he was the Director of the Perrott-Warrick Project funded from [/FONT][FONT=&quot]Trinity[/FONT][FONT=&quot]College[/FONT][FONT=&quot],[/FONT][FONT=&quot]Cambridge[/FONT][FONT=&quot]. He is a Fellow of Schumacher College , in Dartington, [/FONT][FONT=&quot]Devon[/FONT][FONT=&quot], a Fellow of the [/FONT][FONT=&quot]Institute[/FONT][FONT=&quot] of [/FONT][FONT=&quot]Noetic Sciences[/FONT][FONT=&quot] near [/FONT][FONT=&quot]San Francisco[/FONT][FONT=&quot], and a Visiting Professor at the Graduate Institute in [/FONT][FONT=&quot]Connecticut[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Hardly a resume to snub ones nose at. [/FONT]:shrug:
 

Open_Minded

Nothing is Separate
Stop that! We're boring the hoi polloi.
Call me a bad word or challenge my ethnicity.
:D

Well ... I'm sure we'd have different views on Rupert's actual assertions about the "dogma" within Science. And I'd be more than willing to have a philosophical discussion on those points.

Since we agree on the basic foundation of the scientific process, I feel no need to scientifically prove philosophical assertions. But philosophical discussion around those assertions, makes complete sense. :)
 
Hi Open_Minded,

I read Rupert's rebuttal. I also watched his TEDx talk. I'm still not seeing how it wasn't totally misleading. I'm a physicist and I am shocked that anyone can claim it's an unquestioned "dogma" that the fundamental constants don't change over time, matter/energy is constant, etc. That's simply not true. We're open to the possibility in fact that's how many astrophysics and high-energy particle physicists justify their funding and their existence, trying to test the fundamental constants, etc.

Specifically, on morphic resonance and Sheldrake's publications in the British Journal of Psychology: TED admitted that it's reply that there were NO publications was too hasty. But TED is still right to be thoroughly skeptical of this guy. First, the fact that Sheldrake published in the British Journal of Psychology undermines his argument that scientists are too closed-minded to consider questioning of their "dogma". Second, a bunch of other researchers published their own follow-up experiments to Sheldrake's "psychic dog" research, also published in the BJOP, and they concluded the dog wasn't psychic. When different researchers arrive at different conclusions, even though they did essentially the same very simple experiments on the same supposedly psychic dog, that should raise red flags that someone might not be doing very good science. Call me closed-minded, but my money is that it's the guy claiming that dogs are psychic, and not the countless other people who disagree. On the face of it, that is the simplest and most probable explanation for the discrepancy. Furthermore, physics experiments in general provide indirect evidence against psychic phenomena generally, so that must be piled onto one side of the scales, too. There's just no known physical mechanism that could make this phenomenon work in principle--it would be like claiming that eating pizza has an effect on earthquakes in China, there's just no reason to believe it from the start. But there is every reason to believe, on the basis of psychology experiments, that it is easy to fool oneself into seeing psychic phenomena when none are there. So all this evidence, direct and indirect, must be piled on the scale opposite Sheldrake, and weighed.

Open_Minded said:
I wonder if he's gotten any calls from these "other scientists eager to replicate the work". .....
As I understand in one instance he called them, actually. And the conclusion that was reached was opposite that of Sheldrake's. See Wiseman, R., Smith, M. and Milton, J. 1998. Can animals detect when their owners are returning home? Anexperimental test of the `psychic pet' phenomenon British Journal of Psychology 89: 453-462.

When two different researchers do the same experiment and come to opposite conclusions, on a hypothesis which was dubious and fraught with possible error to begin with, I don't dismiss it because it goes against my dogma. I dismiss it because there's not enough evidence to command taking it seriously.
 
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Open_Minded

Nothing is Separate
Hello Mr. Spinkles:

a bunch of other researchers published their own follow-up experiments to Sheldrake's "psychic dog" research, also published in the BJOP, and they concluded the dog wasn't psychic. When different researchers arrive at different conclusions, even though they did essentially the same very simple experiments on the same supposedly psychic dog, that should raise red flags that someone might not be doing very good science. Call me closed-minded, but my money is that it's the guy claiming that dogs are psychic, and not the countless other people who disagree. On the face of it, that is the simplest and most probable explanation for the discrepancy. Furthermore, physics experiments in general provide indirect evidence against psychic phenomena generally, so that must be piled onto one side of the scales, too. There's just no known physical mechanism that could make this phenomenon work in principle--it would be like claiming that eating pizza has an effect on earthquakes in China, there's just no reason to believe it from the start. But there is every reason to believe, on the basis of psychology experiments, that it is easy to fool oneself into seeing psychic phenomena when none are there. So all this evidence, direct and indirect, must be piled on the scale opposite Sheldrake, and weighed.
I found a pretty interesting essay (Rupert Sheldrake -and the wider scientific community)on skepitico.com

Skeptiko is, by no means, biased towards things like ESP, etc... but - over the years I've found some of their work to be pretty fair. This article falls into that category. It seems to treat the subject matter pretty even-handidly.

Following are a few excerpts from the article:

Introduction Rupert Sheldrake is one of the most fascinating individuals in science today, though the scientific community’s treatment of him is perhaps even more intriguing. At one time he was a Research Fellow at Clare College, Cambridge, as well as a Research Fellow of the Royal Society. Sheldrake perplexed and in some cases angered many of his colleagues when he proposed a new theory of development which was described as putting forward ‘magic instead of science’ and caused the editor of Nature to ask whether Sheldrake’s ideas were ‘a book for burning’. This would lead to Dr Sheldrake being condemned and ostracised by many of his peers, after which he would upset orthodox science even more by investigating claims such as telepathy and precognition, described for many years as ‘pseudoscience’.

This dissertation will look at how the scientific community has dealt with someone who went from the centre of mainstream research to beyond the pale of most scientific thinking. This dissertation will not look at whether Dr Sheldrake is right or wrong, nor will it seek to explain why he broke away from conventional science. Instead it will focus on the issue of whether Dr Sheldrake, his theories and his research have been treated fairly by those within the scientific establishment. For this it is necessary to examine what ‘fairness’ means in the context of science and whether by this standard Dr Sheldrake and his work has been treated fairly. How new scientific theories are treated is a balance between giving the proponents of such theories a fair hearing and protecting science from too readily accepting hypotheses which might be incorrect. So the first chapter will examine the meaning of ‘fairness in science’, looking at the ethos of science as well as its rules and code of conduct in science, focusing especially on the
Mertonian norms, and how these are deployed to make sure science is fair but also protected.
Specific to the dog research:


In 1994 Dr Sheldrake began an experiment to test whether pets could sense through anomalous means when their owners were coming home. He tested a dog named Jaytee, a male mongrel terrier, to see if he reacted at a distance to the intention of his owner, Pamela Smart.

In the experiment, Smart would leave Jaytee at home and travel to a location more than ten minutes journey time away. After a randomly selected period of waiting at that location, Smart was asked to return home in an unfamiliar car and via several different routes. Jaytee’s behavior was recorded during this time to see if he could sense Smart’s intention to return home. To ensure that the dog was not using his conventional senses to detect Smart’s return, only the first ten minutes of the return journey were used in analysis of the results.

After conducting more than 200 such trials conducted between 1994 and 1995, Dr Sheldrake found that Jaytee went to the window overlooking the road (where his owner’s approach would be first seen) significantly more when his owner was returning home than when she was not. Jaytee spent 18% of the time at the window before Smart was told to return home, 33% of the time when she had been told to go home but had not yet started off in the car, and 65% of the time when she was travelling home.

Dr Sheldrake proposed that these results suggested that the dog was aware of his owner’s intention to return home through anomalous means which he defined as telepathy. Before publishing his findings, Dr Sheldrake contacted Richard Wiseman, Professor of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire who wished to conduct his own experiments with Smart and her dog after hearing about the research in the media. Dr Sheldrake invited Wiseman to attempt to replicate the results of the experiments. This was agreed to and Wiseman, assisted by Matthew Smith from Liverpool Hope University and Julie Milton from Edinburgh University, conducted four tests with Smart and Jaytee similar to those of Dr Sheldrake’s.

After the four tests Wiseman et al concluded that the dog did not show signs of telepathy and that any appearance of such abilities in Jaytee and other animals was due to them responding to routine, sensory cueing from the owner and people remaining with the pet, selective memory on the part of owners, multiple guesses, misremembering and selective memory.

Specific to Dr Sheldrake’s experiment, Wiseman et al cited methodological problems, first pointed out by Susan Blackmore, to explain the seemingly positive results. Wiseman then published his findings, disputing the concept of what he called the ‘psychic pet’ phenomenon in the British Journal of Psychology, before Dr Sheldrake’s paper on his own research was published. Dr Sheldrake later remarked, “I would have liked to ‘bunk’ before I was ‘debunked’”.

The British media picked up on Wiseman’s paper which resulted in newspaper headlines such as “Pets have no sixth sense, say scientists” (The Independent , 21 August 1998), “’Psychic’ dog is no more than a chancer” (The Times , 21 August 1998) and “Psychic pets are exposed as a myth

Following this, Dr Sheldrake requested the results of Wiseman’s tests which were given and examined by Dr Sheldrake who in a post hoc analysis found that the results of the four trials conducted by Wiseman et al actually closely matched those of his own 200 trials, with the same pattern of Jaytee going to the window far more frequently when his owner was on her way home than when she was not.


This was never denied by Wiseman, Smith or Milton, despite Dr Sheldrake’s assertions to the contrary. However, neither in the original Journal of Psychology paper, nor in the reply to Dr Sheldrake’s critique of their work, did Wiseman et al state that they had repeated the pattern observed by Dr Sheldrake.


In 2007, nine years after the original paper was published and over eleven years after the completion of the research, during an interview with Alex Tsakiris on Skeptiko, Richard Wiseman said “I don't think there’s any debate that the patterning in my studies is the same as the patterning in Rupert’s studies...it’s how it’s interpreted.” (there's that old sticky wicket of human subjectivity rearing its ugly head again)

A few months later, in an interview with Steven Novella in The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe, Wiseman repeated his belief that the patterns found in Dr Sheldrake’s study could also be found in his own. Dr Sheldrake has stated that he believed these were the first times Wiseman had publicly agreed, at least in part, that he had replicated Dr Sheldrake’s results.
 
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Open_Minded

Nothing is Separate
And - from the paper's conclusion
From the conclusion
The guiding philosophy of modern western science is an idea of being predominantly open minded, impartial and objective. These virtues are said to maintain ‘fairness’ in the scientific community, yet many of Dr. Sheldrake’s critics (most of who are well-respected in their fields) seem go against the norms of science. John Maddox seemed to become emotionally committed to denouncing Dr Sheldrake’s theories by using extreme language to attack his work. Such emotion against fellow scientists itself goes against the core values of science, and at the same time perhaps explains why so many scientists seem to lose objectivity in relation to Dr Sheldrake, and why they are compelled to break the norms of science.
When Peter Atkins admitted he hadn’t read the research on telepathy, he justified his criticism of it by saying “I’ve read [Sheldrake’s] experiments in the past on other off the wall ideas that [he’s] had.” During a debate at the Cambridge Science Festival in 2009, Lewis Wolpert said he wouldn’t trust Dr Sheldrake’s research ‘for a second’.

Judging a scientist’s research based on their past work goes against the norm of universalism which is the view that research should be judged on its own merits. The way in which Richard Wiseman presented the results of his dog experiment would seem to go against the norm of disinterestedness, as although his results matched those of Dr Sheldrake’s, Wiseman’s paper did not state this and instead the results were given in a way which support his view that the dog was not telepathic. Institutions such as CSI (formally called CSICOP) claim to be good examples of organized scepticism, however many of their actions would seem to be more like those of the counter- norm organised dogmatism. Scientist David Marks unexpectedly repeated Dr Sheldrake’s results in a staring experiment, and then searched for and found a ‘flaw’ in his experiment which he went on to suggest was the reason for Sheldrake’s positive results as well. Although Marks spent a great deal of time critically scrutinising why he repeated Dr Sheldrake’s research, he did not do the same with his resulting theory on how he achieved positive results. Organised Scepticism is clearly applied to Dr Sheldrake’s work but not to the theories and research which disputed his results. Perhaps, one day, the theory of morphic resonance will be vindicated and telepathic phenomena accepted. In which case Rupert Sheldrake will surely be remembered alongside Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein, and his detractors looked upon with the same indifference as the Cardinals who refused to look through Galileo’s telescope. But even if Dr Sheldrake’s theories are disproved and his experimental results shown to be unsound, it still seems unlikely that those within the scientific community who have condemned Dr Sheldrake and his work will be looked on kindly by future generations of scientists. For surely the harsh rhetoric, the refusal to look at results before criticising them, and the misrepresentation of events and data is far more damaging to science than some incorrect theories and a few flawed experiments.
 
Open_Minded,

The relevant question is whether enough of the criticism of Sheldrake is justified for TED to suspect him of peddling pseudoscience. The answer to this question is "yes", even if it is also true that Sheldrake's critics have occasionally overreached or treated him unfairly.

Now, to take up this separate topic of whether Sheldrake has occasionally been treated unfairly:

First of all, notice once again how the dissertation and interview posted on skeptico you cited undermines Sheldrake's argument that scientists can't tolerate questioning of their "dogma". To the contrary, the links you have posted indicate skeptics, scientists and TED bending over backwards to give Sheldrake (and his critics) a hearing.

Secondly, you can read all the papers that were published and all the replies and counter-replies between Sheldrake and Wiseman here. I find the dissertation you quoted, by Stevens, unconvincing. His most serious objection is the following. Using a particular metric for "success" which wasn't established beforehand in Wiseman's study, the full video data in both studies can be explained by either a new psychic dog phenomenon, or established phenomena and ordinary chance. What Stevens seems to miss is that, when that is the case, then according to the ordinary standards of scientific rigor, no new phenomenon has been demonstrated. Only data which unambiguously rules out known, non-psychic explanations can potentially establish a new, psychic explanation. For example, if I do an experiment in a particle accelerator, and obtain data which I admit could be interpreted as a new particle OR random noise, then I have not demonstrated anything. Occam's razor alone says we provisionally assume, by default, that my results were caused by noise. This default assumption becomes even stronger when the proposed phenomenon was implausible to begin with, based on the entire body of experimental knowledge. The fact that multiple studies obtained the same result--the data does not require psychic-dog phenomena to explain--makes this conclusion stronger, not weaker.

Of course, it is true that sometimes the critics of pseudoscience may overreach and become overly dismissive or exasperated, especially in live debates or media appearances. This is partly because the supporters of pseudoscience are often frustratingly impervious to contradictory (or absence of) evidence in a way that good scientists are not. Personally, if I called a colleague and asked her to repeat my very own experiment, and she arrived at an opposite conclusion, my confidence would be quite shaken. Something has gone seriously wrong when that happens. Either my reputation and credibility, or my colleague's, would now have to be called into question, unless we could quickly reach some kind of mutual agreement. Things would look quite embarrassing for me if the phenomenon I claimed to see was implausible to begin with.
 
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Alceste

Vagabond
Can someone explain how the percentages describing the pattern were arrived at? Seems to me that a dog going to the window with increasing frequency the longer his owner is away would result in that pattern no matter how long she was away.

I need a more detailed breakdown to get a sense of what the findings mean. For example, what percentage of time was the dog at the window when she came home after half an hour, and how does that compare to how long he spent at the window when she came home after three hours? Etc.

Unless it's fifty percent of the time in both cases, it doesn't mean anything that the average is fifty percent.
 
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