[Chris Noble]

Originally Posted by David Bailey

Chris,

OK - maybe the owner should ring home sometimes and say "back in half an hour". However, I would have thought that reducing the predictability of the return time still further would be more fruitful. After all, surely arrangements could be made for the owner to be given a return time based on a random number generator AFTER she had left and was not in communication with anyone in the house - but surely that is what Sheldrake did in at least some of his trials? This is what I don't understand about your approach, surely you want to eliminate the possibility of sensory leakage, not test what would happen if you deliberately introduce it!

OK, you could go the other way. Do some trials with non randomised return times and some with properly randomised return times, keep everything else the same. Is there a statistical difference in the dog's "success"? If the performance drops when randomised return times are used then this suggests that at least part of the effect can be explained by natural explanations. If the performance keeps on dropping when more controls are introduced then this would suggest that most if not all of the effect could be explained by natural explanations.

Note this is not what Sheldrake did. He changed some trials by adding partially randomised return times and others by returning by an unfamiliar car and others by having Jaytee alone. The "effect" remained to differing degrees and Sheldrake apparently concluded that these controls didn't have an influence on the effect. In none of these trials did he explicitly calculate the effect of the controls. It was however evident from the 50 trials where Jatee was alone that his "performance" dramatically dropped. This could be because he was getting some information from the owner's parents or it could be because he doesn't have an audience for his "signal". The evidence is compatible with both explanations.

BTW, at the time when our cat was anticipating our return times, it was the neighbour that observed the effect most clearly because he was sat in her lounge and would ask to be let out. Our return times would vary from about 7.00 to about 11.00 or even later sometimes! We certainly did not tell the neighbour when we were coming home, and often it was a spur of the moment decision anyway.

I suspect that the vast majority of these cases are explained by the animal hearing the car and problems remembering misses vs hits. I certainly can't be expected to explain your case on the information you have given.

Tell me how you would analyse Alex's experiment if he randomly introduced possible sensory leakage into (say) half his experiments. To judge from the video, the dog could hardly improve his performance, so (am I being too cynical) you would compare the 'with leakage' result with the 'without leakage' result and say "See the dog does no better when he knows the answer, so there must be sensory leakage of some sort - not morphic resonance!"

If the dog really does this every time then you would have a point. Your suggestion of going the other way and tightening controls would be better.

If the dog really does this every time then Alex would not have a problem with defining a hit as starting the behaviour within 2 minutes of the beginning of the return journey.

I think it is obvious that the dog isn't doing this every time.

Please tell us what you would use as the sign of genuine morphic resonance (or ?, if you prefer).

This is the root of all problems. There is no theory of morphic resonance or "psi" that makes specific predictions. Psi is defined entirely by what it isn't. Morphic resonance is just the same. It's all about asserting that some phenomenon cannot be explained by any natural means. The only way to prove "psi" or "morphic resonance" is by eliminating all natural explanations. As all natural explanations are not known this effectively makes it impossible.

"Psi" and "morphic resonance" cannot be controlled. You can't do some trials with "psi" turned on and some with "psi" turned off. If you could and the dog's performance was better with "psi" then you could conclude that "psi" explains at least part of the phenomenon.

As it is not possible to do this the only thing you can do is explicitly test natural explanations.

Do some trials with the owner returning in their own car and another set with the owner returning in a different car (randomised return times and other controls the same for both set). If the dog's performance is better when the owner returns in their own car then we can conclude that some of the effect can be explained by the dog hearing the car approaching. Even better by comparing these sets of trials you could get a good idea of how far the dog can hear the car. If there is only a difference in the last 3 miles then you can conclude that the dog can only hear the car from less than approximately 3 miles.