...I took part in a debate on “What Science Can’t Tell Us” last night at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts. It was chaired by the “fabulous” (my friends’ word) Vivienne Parry, and there's a review of the event at Spoonfed.
Almost inevitably, we ended up discussing Rupert’s experiments with dogs that allegedly know when their owners are coming home. When I made the point that no other scientists agreed that the experiments were conclusive proof a psychic ability in pets, he said that the skeptic Richard Wiseman had gotten exactly the same results. But then, in public, Wiseman denied it, Sheldrake says.
That’s just not true: the truth is, Wiseman and Sheldrake interpreted the same experimental results very differently. Here’s an extract of what Wiseman has to say (you can download the pdf this is taken from here). RS=Rupert Sheldrake; RW=Richard Wiseman
We do not believe that RS’s re-analysis of our data provides compelling evidence for the notion that Jaytee [the dog] could psychically detect when PS [the owner] was returning home.
First, it appears that RS's observed patterns could easily arise if Jaytee did very little for some time after PS left home and then began to visit the porch more often, and for longer periods, the longer she stayed away. This pattern of behaviour would make sense for a dog waiting for its owner's return and would result in Jaytee being at the window most often when PS is returning, as her journey home will always constitute the final time period in each experiment. It is therefore possible that the pattern that RS describes is not evidence of some inexplicable power of Jaytee to detect PS's return but an artefact of an easily explicable pattern in Jaytee's natural waiting behaviour.
And later…
we feel that the description of our experiments in RS’s book, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home and Other Unexplained Powers of Animals, is misleading. RS has presented the results of our work in the main text of this book. However, instead of stating that we had concluded that our experiments did not support the existence of Jaytee’s claimed abilities, he described our data as follows:
The pattern was very similar to that in my own experiments, and confirmed that Jaytee anticipated Pam’s arrival even when she was returning at a randomly chosen time in an unfamiliar vehicle. (Sheldrake, 1999b, p. 46).
RS only described our actual conclusions (i.e., that we believe that our experiments do not support claims about Jaytee’s psychic abilities) in an endnote, published in a very small font, at the very back of the book (Footnote 1).
In short, we strongly disagree with the arguments presented in RS’s commentary. We believe that our experiments were properly designed and that the results did not support the notion that Jaytee could psychically detect when PS was returning home.
Rupert’s claims that the world is permeated by special (almost magical, in that they lie outside the ken of science) fields still lacks the extraordinary evidence it needs for me to be convinced.
Not that I care a great deal: I think that many dog and cat owners have beliefs about their pets’ abilities/preferences, and there’s no harm in it. It’s no different to believing in God, really: some people do, some people don’t and some say they just don’t know. And most of the time, as long as we live and let live, that works fine. It’s not like there’s much you can do to change people’s fundamental beliefs.
Rupert, for instance, thinks he can probe the canine telepathy best by studying the dogs that do it best. It seems obvious to me that this route starts with a founding assumption: that the effect is real. It’s going to be far more instructive to take animals that “can” and animals that “can’t”, and compare and contrast. The trouble is, that approach runs the risk of seeing the effect evaporate…
I actually think - and I didn’t get to say this last night – science benefits from the work of people like Rupert Sheldrake. They are an irritation that keeps scientists on their toes and hones their critical faculties. It would be terrible to get complacent, after all.
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