Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id UAA02144 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-bounces@mmu.ac.uk); Fri, 24 Aug 2001 20:37:03 +0100 Message-ID: <002b01c12cd3$e916ed40$1524f4d8@teddace> From: "Dace" <edace@earthlink.net> To: <memetics@mmu.ac.uk> References: <2D1C159B783DD211808A006008062D3101746040@inchna.stir.ac.uk> Subject: Shaggy Dog vs. Psychic Dog Date: Fri, 24 Aug 2001 12:35:17 -0700 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.50.4133.2400 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.50.4133.2400 Sender: fmb-bounces@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
From: "Vincent Campbell"
> <Morphic fields can be demonstrated according to non-contact
> influence from
> > one organism to another. Sheldrake produced a test demonstrating this
> > effect between pets and their owners. A skeptic by the name of Wiseman
> > tried to refute Sheldrake by replicating the experiment and, to his
> > astonishment, generated exactly the same data. No one has successfully
> > refuted Sheldrake's findings in this test.>
> >
> This isn't true. Sheldrake disputes Wiseman and colleagues
> refutation of his experiment which they published in a pyschology journal
There was no refutation. Wiseman merely repeated the experiment, got
exactly the same results Sheldrake had gotten, and then tried to spin it as
a refutation. According to Wiseman's own experiment, the dog, Jaytee, was
at the window 78% of the time that its master was on her way home and only
4% of the remaining time.
As Sheldrake says, "He makes no mention of the fact that Jaytee waits by the
window far more when Pam is on her way home, nor does he refer to my own
experiments. He gives the impression that my evidence is based on one
experiment filmed by a TV company, rather than on more than two hundred
experiments, and he implies that he has done the only rigorous scientific
tests of this dog's abilities. I confess that I am amazed by his persistence
in this deception."
Wiseman makes an equally absurd claim regarding Sheldrake's staring
experiment, which involves a sequence of trials in which cometimes the
individual is being stared at from behind while other times the subject is
not being stared at. Wiseman claims that subjects learn to detect the
pattern in the allegedly random sequence. Wiseman claims Sheldrake's
sequence is not actually random, though it was arrived at by flipping a
coin, and that to make it truly random you need to play with the numbers.
He says Sheldrake is sending out this allegedly random sequence to school
children around the world who then conduct their own staring experiments.
In fact, he recommends that people create their own random sequence by
flipping a coin, just like he did when setting up his experiment.
> But even if such studies suggested psychic dogs and people with
> psychic eyes in the back of their heads, to leap from this to saying the
> cause of this is MR through MF, is a massive and invalid leap
Sheldrake starts with the recognition that vision cannot be a kind of TV
screen in the back of the head, for this would imply the Cartesian error
that we exist somewhere deep inside our brains. He argues argues that we do
actually see what's around us and not merely an image of it reconstructed in
our brains. Rather than passively taking in light, we cast a field of
vision over everything we see. While I find this explanation problematic to
say the least, he does appear to have demonstrated that people can sense
when others are watching them.
As to the "psychic pets," Sheldrake explains this according to morphic
fields. Like termites in a nest or birds in a flock, the cells of our
bodies are regulated holistically by a field. When a woman becomes
pregnant, her fetus is simply another aspect of her body regulated by her
field. Rather than breaking, this field is merely extended when she gives
birth. The mother and child are always connected through this shared field.
But it doesn't have to involve childbirth. A collective field can appear
among any two people or any group, no matter how large. It can also occur
across species. Where there's "love"
(or hate) there's a field embracing the individuals involved. Not being
distracted by reflexive consciousness, dogs are much more aware of these
fields. This is how they can sense when their beloved master is coming
home.
> <Nobody has isolated any mechanisms by which genetic information is
> > translated into organic structure.>
> >
> See, one of the problems here Ted is you'r constant use of absolutes
> that are wrong. Here's a short article from New Scientist (more detail in
> 'Science', vol 293, p1068):
>
> 'Proteins called histones play such an important role in regulating
> genes that we should think of them as a "histone code". complementary to
the
> genetic code, says biochemist David Allis of the University of Virginia.
> "For some time now, we have known there is more to our genetic
> blueprint than DNA itself", says Allis. individual genes can be turned
off
> by adding methyl groups to DNA, a process called imprinting. what's more,
> imprinted DNA can be passed from one generation to another, effectively
> passing down information that isn't directly encoded in our genome.
This is exactly what researchers were saying in the 80s, and Sheldrake deals
with this in The Presence of the Past. Yes, histones are among the "master
proteins" that interact with genes, but this merely *describes* rather than
explains what goes on in the cell. When proteins tell genes what to do,
who's telling the proteins what to do? Why, of course, the genes are
telling them. And these genes are instructed by still other proteins, and
on and on it goes like this, round and round. For every answer we arrive
at, another question automatically pops up. It's an endlessly recursive
loop. There's no possibility that chemistry can ever explain the basis of
form in the body. It's a joke with no punch line, a shaggy dog story.
> DNA molecules wrap themselves around histones, and it has recently
> emerged that a variety of chemical changes to these proteins, such as the
> addition of acetyl groups, can regulate gene expression. Now an
> international team including Allis has found that adding methyl groups to
> specific parts of a histone called H3 has a dramatic effect. It doesn't
> just affect single genes, but can turn large stretches of our genome on or
> off, says Allis.
>
> In an accompanying paper, Allis and Thomas Jenuwein of the Vienna
> Biocenter in Austria go beyond these findings, arguing that the "histone
> code" considerably extends the information encoded in the genome, and
plays
> a vital role in determining the fate of cells.
>
> "We've now got our whole genome sequenced- and that's going to
> lead to a lot of important studies," says Allis. But he points out that
> studying the genome alone will never reveal what leads to gene expression
or
> lack of expression.
>
> Unravelling histone switches will be important for future stem
> cell work, says Allis. "The goal of being able to make tissues we need
> isn't going to be much more than fantasy until we understand the
> consequences of the histone code over time".
>
> Emma Young, New Scientist, 18/08/01, p 16'
>
> In the same issue, it was also reported that comparing genes in
> fungi, land plants and animals, they have worked out that fungi reached
land
> first as much as 1.3 billion years ago.
>
> Organisms have had an inordinately long time (in human terms) to
> produce an incredibly complex systems, that we've been spending, what...
150
> years tops researching. Of course there are gaps in our knowledge, but we
> are getting closer and closer to how it all works through exploration
> oriented around the genes.
And the Holy Grail is always just around the corner.
Ted
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