Wow. You can copy/paste. Nice skill, even though its a practice that is in violation of the site rules.
http://www.sciforums.com/showthread.php?t=20340
But aside from that, there are some flaws with
Dean Radin's The Conscious Universe, and not just with the parts you posted, but I'll stick to your rule-breaking post.
ellion said:
In a 1995 book saturated with piercing skepticism, the late Carl Sagan of Cornell University [...] Then, in one paragraph amongst 450 pages, we find an astonishing admission:
At the time of writing there are three claims in the ESP field which, in my opinion, deserve serious study: (1) that by thought alone humans can (barely) affect random number generators in computers; (2) that people under mild sensory deprivation can receive thoughts or images "projected" at them; and (3) that young children sometimes report the details of a previous life, which upon checking turn out to be accurate and which they could not have known about in any other way than reincarnation.
Sagan did indeed say the above (1996, p. 302). But Radin conveniently leaves out the very next line: "I pick these claims not because I think they're likely to be valid (I don't), but as examples of contentions that
might be true. The last three have at least some, although still dubious, experimental support. Of course I could be wrong."
ellion said:
Other signs of shifting opinions are cropping up with increasing frequency in the scientific literature. Starting in the 1980s, well-known scientific journals like Foundations of Physics, American Psychologist, and Statistical Science published articles favorably reviewing the scientific evidence for psychic phenomena. The Proceedings of the IEEE, the flagship journal of the Institute for Electronic and Electrical Engineers, has published major debates on psi research. Invited articles have appeared in the prestigious journal, Brain and Behavioral Sciences. A favorable article on telepathy research appeared in 1994 in Psychological Bulletin, one of the top-ranked journals in academic psychology. And an article presenting a theoretical model for precognition appeared in 1994 in Physical Review, a prominent physics journal.
Radin's list above reads like the bibliography for the infamous
Does Psi Exist? meta-analysis published in
Psychological Bulletin (Bem & Honorton 1994). Except he got the journal "Brain and Behavioral Sciences" wrong. It should have read,
Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Indeed, Milton and Wiseman (1999) "present a meta-analysis of 30 ganzfeld ESP studies from 7 independent laboratories adhering to the same stringent methodological guidelines that Bem and Honorton followed. The studies failed to confirm his main effect of participants scoring above chance on the ESP task..." Milton and Wiseman concluded that the "ganzfeld technique does not at present offer a replicable method for producing ESP in the laboratory." In short, it was shown to be bunk at worst, inconclusive at best.
There is nothing in science that shows empirically that "psi" exists. Nor is there any sort of theory as to what would cause "psi" to work if it did exist. By theory, I am not talking in the colloquial sense where a "speculation" equals a "theory." I'm referring to a set of one or more hypotheses that have been tested.
ellion said:
Surprisingly, the other principal reviewer, skeptic Ray Hyman, agreed: "The statistical departures from chance appear to be too large and consistent to attribute to statistical flukes of any sort…. I tend to agree with Professor Utts that real effects are occurring in these experiments. Something other than chance departures from the null hypothesis has occurred in these experiments."
When you read quote like this and their is an ellipsis, the three dots in red above, it means the quoting author left something out. What Radin left out was this,
"Although I cannot dismiss the possibility that these rejections of the null hypothesis might reflect limitations in the statistical model as an approximation of the experimental situation (Hyman, 1996)."
Radin does a good job of quote-mining where he takes bits and pieces of what people say out of context and presents them the way he'd like fellow believers in the 'psi' silliness to read them. I only picked apart the few quotes that I recognized from other sources I know. Radin's apparently full of it and, like others who promote the 'psi' silliness, he appears desparate to find an appeal to whatever authorities he can cite.
References:
Bem, Daryl J., Honorton, Charles (1994). Does Psi Exist? Replicable Evidence for an Anomalous Process of Information Transfer.
Psychological Bulletin, 115(1).
Hyman, R. (1996) Evaluation of Program on Anomalous Mental Phenomena.
Journal of Parapsychology, 59(4), 321-352.
Milton, J. and R.Wiseman (1999). Does psi exist? Lack of replication of an anomalous process of information transfer.
Psychological Bulletin, 125(4), 387-391.
Sagan, Carl (1996).
A Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. New York: Ballatine Books.
