[Chris Noble]

Originally Posted by 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.

But according to the Journal of Scientific Exploration plate tectonics is a paradigm in crisis!

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.

Sheldrake assumes rather than demonstrates that he has covered this possibility. I don't think explanation 7 can play a large role in the Jaytee experiments but it most definitely would play a role in the phenomenon in general.

The important point that I am making is that if you investigate natural explanations you can make real progress. Do a set of trials with the owner returning in their own car and do another set with the owner returning in a differnet car. Is there a statistical difference in the dogs behaviour? At what point do you see a statistical difference in the dog's behaviour? In the last 5 minutes? In the last 10 minutes?

Either way you have made progress and you can then design better experiments.

However, Sheldrake is not really interested in any explanations other than "morphic resonance".

His experiments use rejecting the null hypothesis that the dog's behaviour is completely random as the criteria. This effectively biases the experiment to confirm his preconceived ideas.

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.

I am not simply deriding his work. I am offering practical suggestions for the way forward.

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.

I have read the papers and all of my comments are directed at exactly what I have read.

Stop pretending that Sheldrake's experiments are methodologically pure.

You have repeatedly told me to forget "morphic resonance" because the idea is too vague. How can I possibly ignore the theory that Sheldrake is supposedly confirming with these experiments? This is the root of the problem. Sheldrake starts with his "morphic resonance" and looks for phenomena that he can use as evidence to support it. He then uses a strawman null hypothesis (that he can easily reject if there is any sensory leakage whatsoever) to cofirm his own bias.

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!

?
I guess we'll probably never know if invisible purple, rainbow farting uniocorns really exist either.



David[/quote]