Has Natural Selection Met Its Match?

[CreepingJesus]

"There is increasing evidence - much better than this - of telepathy in nature."

Oh is there?

And is this evidence published in any of the scientific journals? "Nature" for instance.

Something as important as this would be of great interest to the scientific community.

Oddly I and others I've asked about it seem to have missed this momentous dicovery.

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"I have considered poltergeists very carefully. I have read nine books on the subject and, to my mind at least, they are indisputably real."

followed by;

" "she'd spent a fortune on books about poltergeists, and had been considering an exorcism."

So what? If she knew about poltergeists, in the first place, she would not consider exorcisms, because exorcisms have never been known to work on poltergeists. The cases I have in mind are much more complicated, and harder to disprove, than this one you mention about the floorboard. Poltergeists exist: the evidence collectively proves it."

So. You are an authority on this because you've read nine books, and my friend is dismissed because she had read several books.

What you should be looking at is the provenance of the information in these books, and the target readers of the books themselves.

There is a huge amount of money being made by publishing houses and writers specialising in producing "Unsolved mystery" literature aimed at the credulous who are willing to part with cash for smoke and mirors and no hard evidence.

A set of unexplained events means nothing more than that nobody knew why they happened.

Extrapolating the event to say "it was a Poltergeist" is a post hoc argument and carries no logical weight.

All of your argument is based on fanciful thinking and speculation with no hard evidence to support it.

If you say there is evidence - show me the evidence.

Show me the reports, the investigative techniques used, the data produced and how it was analysed.

I bet if you go looking for that, the best you'll find is language along the lines of "Scientists have proved" without any specific reference to which "scientists" or how they managed to prove whatever it was.

You're making claims here that you'll find difficult to substantiate with proper evidence.

Which brings me to this wee beezer.....

"Professor Robert T. Caroll, of the Skeptics Dictionary, is a fool. I have read his arguments and find most of them unimpressive."

OK Give us one of Carroll's arguments and demonstrate how unimpressive it is.....

Really tear him apart. Let's see your Einstein-like reasoning power demolish his credibility.

No I didn't think so.

[ScabbyDouglas]

Hi...
in an effort to counter allegations that Tom is forced to deal with multiple attackers, all by himself, I am merely checking in, to say "Hi".

No need for me to add anything at present, I don't think...

[CreepingJesus]

Now

The "Bermuda Triangle"

"Mysteries of the sea"

Here's a quote from the US Navy Historical Centre website.

These are people who actually deal with the sea instead of reading about it in sensationalist books.

"Lt. Cmdr. Peter Quinton, meteorologist and satellite liaison officer with the Fleet Weather Service at Suitland, Md., said, "You can come up with hundreds of possibilities and elaborate on all of them and then come up with hundreds more to dispute the original ones."


"It's all statistical," he said, "there's nothing magical about it." According to Quinton, the Bermuda Triangle is notorious for unpredictable weather. The only things necessary for a storm to become a violent hurricane are speed, fetch (the area the wind blows over) and time. If the area is large enough, a thunderstorm can whip into a hurricane of tremendous intensity. But hurricanes can usually be spotted by meteorologists using satellite surveillance. It is the small, violent thunderstorms known as meso-meteorological storms that they can't predict since they are outside of normal weather patterns. These are tornadoes, thunderstorms and immature tropical cyclones.


They can occur at sea with little warning, and dissipate completely before they reach the shore. It is highly possible that a ship or plane can sail into what is considered a mild thunderstorm and suddenly face a meso-meteorological storm of incredible intensity.


Satellites sometimes cannot detect tropical storms if they are too small in diameter, or if they occur while the satellite is not over the area. There is a 12-hour gap between the time the satellite passes over a specific part of the globe until it passes again. During these 12 hours, any number of brief, violent storms could occur.


Quinton said, "Thunderstorms can also generate severe electrical storms sufficient to foul up communication systems." Speaking of meso-meteorological storms, which she dubbed "neutercanes," Dr. Joanne Simpson, a prominent meteorologist at the University of Miami, said in the Cosmopolitan article that "These small hybrid type storm systems arise very quickly, especially over the Gulf Stream. They are several miles in diameter, last a few minutes or a few seconds and then vanish. But they stir up giant waves and you have chaotic seas coming from all directions. These storms can be devastating."

Read the whole article http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq8-3.htm

There is nothing mysterious about it.



"Why was there no wreckage?"

The sea is a big deep thing and stuff that sinks in it is hard to find.

Clear enough?

No mystery.

A big pile of sensationalist garbage aimed at making money from the gullible.

I have links to people who go to sea for a living, risking their lives to bring the fish home.

Occasionally we'll hear of a boat being lost. It happens more or less each winter.

For people connected with fishing communities such an event is devastating.

The suggestion that when a boat sinks with all hands and can't be found, it is some "mystery of the deep" to be connected with the occult or some pseudoscientific gibbering, trivialises the lives of the men who are lost and is actually quite insulting.



[Edited by CreepingJesus on 7th October 2003 at 11:56]

[ScabbyDouglas]

Howdy.

Everyone OK?

Fine.


Ohh.. by the way... even when it was known approximately where it had sunk, it took over 70 years to locate the wreckage of the "Titanic" - one of the biggest vessels ever built. The sea is a bigger place than you think.


Sorry, sorry... I know I said I wasn't going to chip in..

I'll shut up now...

[ANDY-J2]

Bears don't attack seagulls because it's easier to catch salmon.In food terms a seagull provides a comparatively poor return for the effort expended in catching it whereas a salmon provides the bear with a great deal of meat for very little effort.The bear knows instictively that it's energy would be better employed catching salmon and furthermore it has physical characteristics such as long sharp claws which mean it is ideally suited to catching fish rather than birds.For the same reason sharks-one of nature's most voracious predators seldom expend the effort on attacking healthy fish.They have evolved physical characteristics such as sensory organs which are stimulated by certain things like the presence of blood in the water or the distress signals of an injured fish.I recently watched a documentary about squid which showed that these creatures can live in relative harmony in social groups however once one of their number receives even a slight injury it will literally be torn to shreds by other squid.This is a conditioned response just as the bear is conditioned to hunt salmon rather than seagulls and the shark is conditioned to hunt wounded prey rather than waste valuable energy pursuing healthy fish.

[ANDY-J2]

The Bermuda triangle has been well and truly debunked in recent years to such an extent in fact that it is very rarely mentioned nowadays.In fact the rate of sinkings within the triangle was not remarkably higher than in any other maritime area.It is perhaps not surprising that wreckage from ships and planes etc. should never be found when one considers a few facts about the triangle.Firstly it covers an area of over 500 000 square miles and much of that area is beyond the continental shelf in one of the deepest parts of the Atlantic ocean.Furthermore the prevailing currents-the Gulf stream-would tend to push debris in an easterly direction and it is not unknown for flotsam from shipwrecks off the coast of Florida to be washed up on the coast of Britain and Ireland.When one looks at the various "mysteries" it becomes clear that many of the disappearances can have a natural explanation.The flight of Avenger bombers for example had only one experienced pilot who at the time of the disappearance was not wearing a watch which makes navigation difficult.Also an Avenger was a heavy aircraft which would be unable to remain afloat after ditching even in a calm sea and at the time of the flight's disappearance weather conditions were stormy.If there were any supernatural explanation for the Bermuda triangle one would have to wonder why it has stopped all of a sudden-no mysterious occurences have been reported by pilots or ship's captains for over two decades.Of course nowadays ships are equipped with navigational aids such as global positioning instruments therefore even inexperienced navigators are less likely to fall victim to the various currents and tides which could have proved hazardous to sailors in the past.

[CreepingJesus]

" "The sea is a big deep thing and stuff that sinks in it is hard to find. Clear enough? No mystery." (Creeping Jesus)

Respectfully, that is the worst explanation I have ever heard."

And why would that be then?

A ship sinks without trace in deep water is just that. You're looking for mystery where there is none.

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""And is this evidence published in any of the scientific journals?" (CJ)

That I do not know. The more appropriate question might be, "Would scientific journals have the liberalism to publish these findings?" I can say that work is being done, via experiements, by scientists, and their work is published. This information came to me from a philosophy professor. There is a scientist working on 'group consciousness' (i.e. telepathy)"

This casts a whole new light on your current level of knowledge of how scientific research works and what a scientific journal is.

You're obviously not in contact with many scientists so I'll explain

Journals are a means by which scientists communicate the results of research for the benefit and scrutiny/criticism of others in the field.

It is an essential self checking method against spurious or bad scientific claims.

An example you may have heard of in recent years is the claim by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons to have sparked fusion at room temperature by passing electric current through a bath of water in which ordinary hydrogen is replaced by deuterium, a heavier isotope.

When this research was made public through the journals, many other groups of scientists attempted to reproduce the results without success, and the work of Fleischmann and Pons is now regarded as a textbook example of badly researched work.

Telepathic communication of any sort, were it to be scientifically verified would be a discovery of earth shattering importance.

I would therefore expect any research which described verifiable successful tests for this phenomenon to have been published and for something so important so have reached the attention of the wider scientific community.

So far however, I only see it in the half-baked fantasy land of pseudoscience.

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On the same principle the existence of poltergeists and other phenomena appears to have no testable evidence.

Your Father Herbert J. Thruston's "Ghosts and Poltergeists", for example, "a detailed look at reports from the Middle Ages" however labouriously written can be based only on hearsay - from the middle ages- you can't begin to say that's reliable. Come on - they were burning women as witches for using herbal cures as recently as 400 years ago.

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"Thirdly, it surely is not a post hoc argument to say "it was a poltergeist" when you hear voices, see shadows, have stones thrown at you, and the like."

Sorry, but it is.

An unexplained event proves nothing but that the event was unexplained.

The fact that you don't know what caused it gives no more support to it having been caused by a poltergeist than by the tooth fairy, or any (more likely) natural cause.

It's just unexplained. Story ended.

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"the blunt evidence of centuries of documentation, testimony, photographs and other physical evidence"

Let's see some of that.

Support your claims.

You made a claim about the work of Robert T Carroll and refused to substantiate it because, I suspect, that's beyond your ability.

If you make ridiculous claims you need to be able to produce the evidence to back it up.

Assurances that "evidence exists" without actually producing it don't hold any sway with me.

It suggests that you're talking bollocks.

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""Scientists have proved"

That is an interesting sentence..... etc etc..... If it looks like duck, and walks like a duck..."

What a lot of absolute flim flam. "No-one knows exactly what....blah blah blah"

I said: "If you say there is evidence - show me the evidence.

Show me the reports, the investigative techniques used, the data produced and how it was analysed.

I bet if you go looking for that, the best you'll find is language along the lines of "Scientists have proved" without any specific reference to which "scientists" or how they managed to prove whatever it was."

The critical bit here is.... "the reports, the investigative techniques used, the data produced and how it was analysed".

You're producing no evidence.

Come on let's see it.

Never mind trying to cloud the issue with verbal crap like "It depends what you mean by proof".

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Finally.

"Why do you refuse the paranormal so quickly?"

I've been looking at this stuff for better than 35 years, I've met witches, reflexologists, psychics, UFOlogists, religious nuts, holocaust denialists, you name it.
I've never found acceptable evidence for any of it.
I've never seen a paranormal claim that stands up to close scrutiny.

My heroes: (that you're likely to have heard of)

Carl Sagan
Stephen J Gould
Richard Dawkins
James Randi
Ali Bongo
Penn & Teller

Scientists and conjurers, the best combination of minds you can get for exposing the fraud of the paranormal.