[David Bailey]

Chris,

Whether or not Sheldrake ends up like Blondlot, only time will tell. Look up the history of continental drift for an alternative analogy.

However, you really do need to realise that you are raising a lot of issues regarding Sheldrake's research that he himself has thought of and settled. Just as one example, consider your explanation 7 - that the dog hears the approaching car. If you read Shelrake's paper, you will find that he considered this explicitly and drops the last few minutes of the return home to avoid any such possibility. The same thing goes for a lot of the issues you have raised with me and Open Mind.

Simply deriding Sheldrake's work does not cut it, as Lott has already pointed out. It is worth listening to Sheldrake's radio discussion with Peter Atkins, or his debate with Lewis Walpert to realise that conventional scientists of high repute can easily underestimate Sheldrake, and suffer public embarrassment as a result.

Go and find these tapes at Sheldrake's site and listen and think, otherwise your protestations have no more value than those of the endless queue of nuts finding fault with Special Relativity!

Please read the paper carefully before you criticise it, and relate any remaining criticism to the actual procedures that Sheldrake used.

N-rays are an interesting example, because as I understand it, they were provisionally accepted scientifically and then found to be non-existent. If people had not done N-ray experiments, and just argued about the methodology of the few that had been done, we might still not know if N-rays exist!

David