Rupert Sheldrake's Theories Examined: Morphic Resonance, Gene Beliefs, Psychic pets, etc.

By: Joël v.d. Reijden | Date: February 8, 2017

Contents

1.	Intro
2.	Appearances
3.	Liberal CIA background: Rockefeller, Ford, Esalen, IONS, etc.
4.	Genome-based disease prediction
5..	Collective species memory I: rat experiments
6.	Collective species memory II: Blue Tit phenomenon
8..	Instinct and the hawk-goose experiments
9.	Instinct and epigenetics
10.	Psychic pets: Jaytee the dog
11.	Psychic pets: My own psychic cockatiel
12.	Conclusions

Intro

This page is a subsection of ISGP's article Cult of National Security Trolls: Art Bell and Coast to Coast AM. As that article details, shows like Coast to Coast AM promote virtually nothing but very organized and systematic disinformation.

This article contains relevant information and sources on Rupert Sheldrake. Coast to Coast AM guests closest in nature to Sheldrake would be Edgar Mitchell, Uri Geller, Deepak Chopra and Amit Goswami.

Appearances

Coast to Coast AM: April 12, 2003; December 2, 2003; September 5, 2004; February 15, 2007; January 19, 2012; September 9, 2012; November 11, 2014.

Joe Rogan Experience: September 9, 2014.

Liberal CIA background: Rockefeller, Ford, Esalen, IONS, etc.

• Rupert Sheldrake is a professor affiliated with Cambridge University. First developed his morphic resonance theory (and its subsequent morphogenetics) in 1973 - then still in private - and spent the years between 1974 and 1978 working in India for the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICISAT), which was and largely still is controlled by "liberal CIA" pillars the Rockefeller Foundation and Ford Foundation. In India he studied transcendental meditation and Indian philosophy.
  
  
  • August 2005, ICRISAT.org, 'The Rockefeller Foundation and ICRISAT': "The International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) is a non-profit, non-political organization ... supported by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) [Rockefeller and Ford Foundation project]. Established in 1972, ICRISAT... The Rockefeller Foundation has been associated with ICRISAT since its genesis. Early consultations about establishing a center such as ICRISAT were held under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation, and ICRISAT's first 8,961 accessions of crop germplasm in 1974 came from those assembled by the Rockefeller Foundation... Across the years the Rockefeller Foundation has funded several ICRISAT projects..."
  
  
  • ICRISAT.org, 'Farming Systems Principles': "The International Crop Circle Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) is a nonprofit scientific educational institute receiving support from donors through the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research. Donors to ICRISAT include [many] governments [and] The Ford Foundation, The Leverhulme Trust, The Population Council [a Rockefeller project], The Rockefeller Foundation, The World Bank, and the United Nations Development Programme..."
  
  
• Post-2000, Rupert Sheldrake served on the Global Council for Spirituality and Deep Ecology of the hyper-obscure but very high-level World Commission for Global Consciousness and Spirituality. The World Commission, which existed from August 1998 until at least 2011, consisted of an overall council and 17 sub-councils, including ones on "Global Citizenship" and "Planetary Security". It was not just stacked with elites as the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, Al Gore, Mikhail Gorbachev and the Jordanian royals, but also feautured Coast to Coast AM spiritual gurus Deepak Chopra, Rupert Sheldrake, Fred Alan Wolf and Andrew Weil. Many of the names have been involved in earlier-mentioned obscure globalist, spiritualist United Nations-affiliated groups. Hillary Clinton's spiritual guru, Jean Houston, was among the council members. So was the "chemtrail congressman" Dennis Kucinich. And so were Bono of U2, top "liberal CIA" asset Robert Redford and Michael Douglas.


• After he came back to Britain, Sheldrake became a prominent promotor of morphic resonance and related paranormal theories, all of them linked to the elitist Society for Psychical Research and the affiliated Rhine Research Center for Parapsychology in the United States (with its close ties to C2C AM). It looks as if in some cases Sheldrake is on to something, but many of his arguments and provided examples lack credibility. For example, he has a tendency to bring up McDougall's rat experiments (1920s-1930s; Rhine/SPR-affiliated), the Blue Tits stealing milk cream phenomenon (1920s-1960s sensation mainly; some SPR-affiliation), and the Hawk/Goose experiments (1930s; conflicting results; carried out by a devoted Nazi). All of these are quite questionable, while at the same time evidence of a Lamarckian/epigentic inheritance is actually growing. But Sheldrake is putting less emphasis on this. His extreme skepticism and defeatism regarding gene research is also suspect for a highly trained biologist. All this is described in detail in this segment.


• Many of the general points Sheldrake is making about science are very good, but he comes up mighty short when it comes to details. He's more of a philosopher than a scientist in many respects.


• Coast to Coast AM biography: "Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist and author. He studied natural sciences at Cambridge and philosophy at Harvard, where he was a Frank Knox Fellow. He took a Ph.D. in biochemistry at Cambridge in 1967 and was a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, where he was Director of Studies in biochemistry and cell biology until 1973. As a Research Fellow of the Royal Society, he carried out research at Cambridge on the development of plants and the aging of cells. In addition to his numerous books, he is the author of more than fifty papers in scientific journals. His experiments into unusual and unexplained perceptiveness in humans make a compelling case that intuition, precognition, and telepathy are not paranormal, but are, in fact, normal functions drawn from our biological past."


• Edge Foundation, Rupert Sheldrake: biologist and author' (accessed: July 15, 2015): "Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.D. is a biologist and author of more than 80 papers in scientific journals and ten books, including A New Science of Life (new edition, February 2009). He lives in London. He is Director of the Perrott-Warrick Project for research on unexplained abilities of animals and humans, funded from Trinity College, Cambridge. ... He did research on rainforest plants at the University of Malaya, and was Principal Plant Physiologist at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) in Hyderabad, India. ... With Matthew Fox he co-authored Natural Grace, and with Ralph Abraham and Terence McKenna [C2C AM] The Evolutionary Mind. He has published many articles in newspapers and magazines, including New Scientist, The Spectator, and The Guardian, where he had a regular monthly column."
  
  
  • Sheldrake is pretty much the only non-mainstream scientist at the Edge Foundation and who has attended its annual Billionaire's Dinner.


• Sheldrake and Graham Hancock are the only ones who had their TED talks suppressed. Granted, apart from their questionable works, both stood out like a sore thumb between all the mainstream scientists and other public figures and certainly Graham Hancock - a huge con artist on ancient civiliations - had no business being there. Sheldrake's speech did make very good points about the close-minded view of science for the most part. Then again, so has Hancock often done, only to proceed filling his audience with utter and complete nonsense. Ironically, Sheldrake is criticizing Richard Dawkins, a top dog in the professional rent-a-skeptic network who was invited as well to give a TED talk and who is one of several leading clients of the Edge Foundation.


• Rupert Sheldrake has been a fellow of Edgar Mitchell's Rockefeller-linked Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS): noetic.org/about/board.cfm (accessed: June 12, 2010): "BOARD OF DIRECTORS ... Edgar D. Mitchell - Founder. ... INTERNATIONAL ADVISORY BOARD: ... Deepak Chopra. Amit Goswami... Michael Murphy. Dean Ornish. ... Maurice Strong. Most Reverend Desmond Tutu. IONS FELLOWS: ... Van Jones. James O'Dea. Rupert Sheldrake. Charles Tart. .... GUIDING DIRECTORS: .... Willis W. Harman, President Emeritus, 1975-1996." Still is anno August 2014.


• Rupert Sheldrake has sat on the advisory board of the Rhine Research Center for Parapsychology, founded in 1927 by J.B. Rhine and Dr. William McDougall (of the rats/morphogenetic experiments Sheldrake has been promoting). rhine.org/who-we-are/staff/advisors.html (accessed: November 2011): "Daryl J. Bem, Ph.D. ... Lloyd Auerbach [C2C AM] ... Dale E. Graff, M.S. [C2C AM] ... Joseph W. McMoneagle [C2C AM] ... Michael Schmicker [C2C AM] ... Jeffrey Mishlove, Ph.D. [C2C AM] ... Vernon M. Neppe, M.D., Ph.D. [C2C AM] ... Stephan A. Schwartz [C2C AM] ... Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.D. [C2C AM] ... Dr. Charles Tart [C2C AM] ..." Other Coast to Coast AM guests involved in the Rhine Research Center include or have included Dianne Arcangel, Sally Rhine Feather, Tobias McGriff, Ed Ozosky, and David Rountree.


• September 16, 2014, Rupert Sheldrake on the Joe Rogan Experience, 2:16:30: "Telepathy tests and intuition. Daryl Bem's [Rhine Center advisory board] experiments are very simple. It's called Feeling the Future. And it's this phenomenon that Dean Radin at the Institute of Noetic Sciences [IONS] has done a lot of research on, where it turns out that we can respond a few seconds before an emotionally arousing event - our body starts preparing for it before it happens..."


• September 16, 2014, Rupert Sheldrake on the Joe Rogan Experience, 64:00: "I'm actually a practicing Christian. I'm an Anglican. I never meet creationists in England. I've never heard anyone deny [evolution]. The Church of England is somewhere half way between protestant and Catholic. ... The priests can marry. ... Bishops can be married. ... If you go to an Anglican service, it's very much like a Roman Catholic service, except that we have married priests, women bishops and women priests as well. Outrageous from a Catholic point of view. The Church of England never had the sort of extreme protestant doctrine like southern baptists and so on. ... Anglicans, on the whole, had no problem with evolution. They still don't.
  I've just been doing a workshop last weekend at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur which I was co-leading with the bishop of California whose cathedral is Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. ... We were discussing the kinds of things we were discussing. He was completely open to all this. It was absolutely no problem discussing this with an Anglican/Episcopalian bishop. It's a very far cry from what many people's image of Christians is opposing evolution. The general view that many Christians have - and I'm one - is that the evolution of nature, if there is a power in nature, that it may be God-given in the first place. But what God did is endow nature with a power to create new forms of life, that there is a kind of intelligent creativity in nature. ... Why on earth can't God create through evolution? ...
  Yes, [the fundamentalist Christians] do have followers in Britain, but they take their lead entirely from America. And they've got a new batch of converts of their point of view in the Islamic world. Creationism inspired by American creationism is big in Turkey and other Arab countries. But it is a peculiarly American phenomenon. It's a very, very interesting history [of Reagan recruiting the religious extremists].
  For most foreigners American politics is completely impossible to understand. It's impossible to understand how people can be so polarized and so extreme in their views. ... But what this book made clear, and what was for me was a huge revelation, is how all of this is rooted in the American Civil War. And there is a sense in some people's minds that the Civil War is still going on. It's just that the sides have switched. In the Civil War the south was Democrat, the slave-owning south... And the Republicans were the liberals who wanted to free the slaves. ... Now it has gone the other way around. The Democrats are now the liberals and the Republicans have become the more right-wing forces."


• September 16, 2014, Rupert Sheldrake on the Joe Rogan Experience, 25:00, 74:00, 100:00: "I came up with this [idea of morphogenetic fields] in 1973. ... [As a kid] I used to put [pigeons] in a box and cycle as far as I could on my bicycle and release them and then cycle home. And they always got home before I did, however far I took them. So this completely intrigued me. I thought we are never going to figure this out by grinding up their livers [in a laboratory] or looking at their genes. So I began to doubt the mechanistic world view.
  Then [in my early 30s] I encountered psychedelics and that was a huge change. I mean, nothing in my scientific education prepared me for the mind opening effects of LSD. This was in the 70s, the early 70s. ... I knew about the anatomy of the brain and nerve impulses, but these visionary experiences that psychedelics opened up showed that there was far more to the mind, and indeed far more to reality, than this very, very limited model.
  Then I got interested in meditation, because I thought it would be good to explore the mind without drugs. I'm not anti-psychedelic at all, but it would be good to have different methods, not just drugs. Then I took up transcendental meditation and yoga.
  Then I got a job in India. I lived in India for seven years. And when I lived in India I was really into yoga and meditation. ... I was working in an agricultural institute [financed by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundation], the main international institute in India, trying to improve crops for poor farmers. ...
  I couldn't agree more about DMT and the opening up that it can give. I had the great advantage of taking it for the first time with Terence McKenna..."

Genome-based disease prediction

• September 16, 2014, Rupert Sheldrake on the Joe Rogan Experience, 34:00: "The gap between the 5% and the 80%, the 75% that is not explained by the genes, is called the missing heritability problem.
  And it turned out that the same is true of most diseases. There are a few diseases where a defective gene gives a defective protein and you get a clear predictive value. Cystic fibrosis is one of them. Sickle cell anemia is another. So there are a few rare genetic diseases where this method works very well. But for most diseases, breast cancer, cardiac problems, the predictive value of the genome turned out to be only 5 to 10%.
  And all these companies were springing up that would offer to sequence people's genomes and predict their diseases. And the last one, 23andMe, was put out of business by the FDA just a few months ago because their advertizing was misleading. You cannot predict with more than about 10% accuracy the likelihood that you will get a particular disease on the basis of the genome except from these rare genetic disorders. ...
  Nothing like the bonanza of profits that people were expecting. There was a report by the Harvard Business School on this a few years ago, on the biotech business, and they said that no one has ever invented such a massive money losing scheme in the history of humanity. So I think that was based on a false assumption of what genes do, you see. ... The genes just code for protein. ...
  There are certain things where genome sequencing is still valuable and used. If you want to find out what your racial background is, where did our ancestors come from, it's really good for that. ..."
  
  
  • 23andMe was put out of business because research is still evolving every day, not all genetic markers/circumstances were taken into account, and the fact that most people have trouble interpreting the data. Considering Joe Rogan Experience guest, Dr. Rhonda Patrick, is a fan of 23andMe, there's little doubt the company did provide interesting results. Patrick also indicated that it can be very tough to interpretate the data and offers tools on her website to just do that.
  
  
  • It might well be that Sheldrake is misrepresenting the fact here that "About 5–10% of cases are due to genes inherited from a person's parents, including BRCA1 and BRCA2 among others." Based on mainstream information: About 12% of all women develop breast cancer during their lifetime. However, 40-50% of women with a BRCA1 mutation develop breast cancer by age 70 and 35% to 46% will develop ovarian cancer. In case of a BRCA2 mutation these numbers are 40-57% for breast cancer and 13-23% for ovarian cancer. Obviously lifestyle has an influence here, but these are statistics of the population as a whole.
  
  
  • Personally, I followed a tumor biology course at Erasmus University, a leading cancer research institute, in 2012 for a number of additional college points. There was a huge emphasis on understanding DNA and with the primary focus being on several typical examples, such as breast and colon cancer (and Sickel Cell disease), indicating that at this point only a relatively small number of diseases can be predicted purely based on gene mutations. Still it was clear that certain genetic mutations put one at greatly increased risk of developing these diseases. Quotes from my own notes on colonic cancer:
    
    
    • "FAP (Familial Adenomatous Polyposis) So far, only one gene has been discovered that leads to FAP: the APC gene, located on human chromosome 5. However, over 300 different mutations have been identified in this APC gene. Individuals with this syndrome develop many polyps in their colon. People who inherit mutations in this gene have a nearly 100 percent chance of developing colon cancer by age 40."
    
    
    • "HNPCC (Hereditary Non-Polyposis Colon Cancer) also called Lynch Syndrome Individuals with an HNPCC gene mutation have an estimated 80 percent lifetime risk of developing colon or rectal cancer. However, these cancers account for only three to five percent of all colorectal cancers. So far, five HNPCC genes have been discovered."
    
    
  • While Sheldrake does have a point, he goes way overboard here. Gene research is evolving quickly and ultimately all cancers are simply cells mutating out of control due to genetic defects. His defeatist attitude on this issue makes little sense. It seems Sheldrake's thinking is heavily inspired by the April 2, 2012 New York Times article entitled 'Study Says DNA's Power to Predict Illness Is Limited', which simply appears to have been a cheap sensasionalist article based on isolated, shoddy research. There's been a lot of criticism on this article. The counter-article below is just one example.
  
  
  • April 4, 2012, Nature News Blog, 'DNA has limits, but so does study questioning its value, geneticists say': "Scientists are irked over a paper claiming, as The New York Times reported on Monday, that "DNA's power to predict illness is limited." "Yes," geneticists have replied. "What else is new?" Geneticists don't dispute the idea that genes aren't the only factor that determines whether we get sick; many of them agree with that point. The problem, geneticists say, is not that the study, published on 2 April in Science Translational Medicine, arrived at a false conclusion, but that it arrived at an old, familiar one via questionable methods and is now being portrayed by the media as a new discovery that undermines the value of genetics. Here are the main criticisms of the new study and the resulting press coverage:
    - 1. This study critiques the power of genomic medicine but does not contain any genome data [to prove its point]. ...
    - 2.This study is beating a dead horse. Many other studies have already found that genes alone don't predict a person's risk for developing most diseases very well. They've also specifically questioned the value of commercial genetic tests that promise to reveal users' risk for various illnesses. The new study doesn't acknowledge any of the previous studies that have already arrived at the same answer and have done a better job of it, geneticists say (see point 3). ...
    - 3. The mathematical model used in the study is unrealistic. Geneticists have developed a slew of mathematical models that try to predict how likely a person is to develop various diseases. Scientists debate how well these models work, but the models are largely based on how diseases actually behave in the real world. The Vogelstein–Velculescu model is not, say statisticians. ...
    - 4. The study doesn't correct for errors that can affect twin studies. The study assumes that genetics is the sole factor that determines whether two twins develop the same disease. But twins also grow up in a common environment, and the study doesn't account for this, as the authors admit. ...
    - 5. The media coverage of the study could weaken support for genetic research. Geneticists have lobbed some pretty heavy artillery at the Science Translational Medicine study, even though it claims to affirm what they already know. That's because the new study has received more press coverage than your run-of-the-mill statistical genetics paper, and geneticists are concerned that the coverage has overblown the study's conclusions in ways that could harm public support for science. "I don't see the harm in telling the public yet again that there is no such thing as genetic determinism," says Leonid Kruglyak a geneticist at Princeton University in New Jersey. "But I worry about the message being distorted to mean that genes have no value, or that genetic research is not worthwhile." ... "Let's fast-forward a year or two, when we've sequenced a million or two million people in whole-genome sequencing studies," says Eric Topol, a cardiologist at Scripps Health in La Jolla, California, and author of The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How The Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care. "Then let's see whether or not the predictive capacity is limited, or limited for certain conditions but not others.""

Collective species memory I: rat experiments

• September 16, 2014, Rupert Sheldrake on the Joe Rogan Experience, 10:20: "[Morphic resonance] is the idea of memory in nature. The idea that the whole universe has a kind of memory. These so-called laws of nature are more like habits. Each individual and his species draws on a collective memory and contributes to it. It works on the basis of similarity. Any pattern of activity that is similar to a later pattern of activity in a self-organizing system influences it across space and time. So what it means in effect is that when you train rats to learn a new trick in Los Angeles then rats in New York City, Sidney and London will learn the same thing quicker straight away.
  There's actually evidence that this surprising effect happens. If you crystallize a new chemical that has never existed before, then after you've made it in one place it should get easier to crystallize all over the world. So it's really a theory of habit and memory. It enables new patterns of learning to spread quicker than they might otherwise do. And it means that it should get easier to learn things that other people have already learned."


• September 16, 2014, Rupert Sheldrake on the Joe Rogan Experience, 11:45: "Yes [this concept of rats learning over distances across generations]. It wasn't done to test morphic resonance, which is still very controversial. It was done to test something else. It was done years ago, before the second world war. A professor at Harvard called William McDougall, wanted to find out if rats could learn quicker what their parents had learned. So he trained these rats to escape from a water maze. They had to swim. If they went out the wrong exit, they got an electric shock. And if they got out the right exit... they just escaped from the maze. ...
  The first generation [of rats] took about 250 trials before they caught on what was happening. The next generation was about 180 trials. The next generation about 150. They got better and better. And he taught at first that this was because there was something being passed on to the children maybe through modifying the genes or something like that. ... That was kind of a taboo in 20th century science. And so, people questioned his work. But because he was at Harvard and he was a famous professor, they couldn't just dismiss it. He showed a huge effect.
  So people tried repeating his work in the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and Melbourne, Australia. And they found out that their rats started more or less where the Harvard rats had left off. And in Melbourne they did an experiment that was particularly interesting. They went on getting better, the ones that were descended from the trained parents in each generation. But they found out that all rats of that breed, even if their parents had never been trained, were getting better too. So whatever it was, it wasn't something having to do with modifying the genes or what people would now call epigenetics. There was something else, much more mysterious going on. And since no one knew what it was, it was just ignored and forgotten."
  
  
  • Biography of William McDougall: Fellow of the Royal Society. William James Chair of psychology at Harvard University 1920-1927. Professor at Duke University since 1927, where he quickly became involved with J.B. Rhine in parapsychology research. Rhine partly aided McDougall in his famous rat experiments (Rhine, J.B. & McDougall, W. (1933). Third report on a Lamarckian experiment. Brit. J. Psychol. 34, 213-35). Founder with J.B. Rhine of Duke University's Parapsychology Unit in 1935. The Parapsychology Unit later became known as the Rhine Research Center for Parapsychology. President Society for Psychical Research in 1920 and the American Society for Psychical Research in 1921. Instrumental in establishing parapsychology as a university discipline in the US in the early 1930s.
    
    February 4, 1939, Nature magazine, 'McDougall's Experiments on the Inheritance of Acquired Habits', pp. 188-191: "In a series of papers [in the British Journal of Pyschology] extending over a period from 1926 until 1938, Prof. William McDougall brought together evidence which led him to suppose that the hypothesis of [Jean Baptiste] Lamarck concerning the inheritability of acquired characteristics is substantially correct."
  
  
  • The Melbourne, Australia rat experiment Sheldrake is talking about: September 1954, Journal of Experimental Biology, F. H. Drummond, O. W. Tiegs, M. M. Gunson, and the late W. E. Agar, Zoology Department, University of Melbourne, 'Fourth (Final) Report on a Test of McDougall's Lamarckian Experiment on the Training of Rats', pp. 307-321: "This is the final report of an experiment of 20 years' duration, in which we have repeated, in its essentials, the well-known experiment of William McDougall purporting to reveal a Lamarckian inheritance of the effects of training on rats. The test is one involving light discrimination, and McDougall recorded a steady improvement in the rate of learning on a succession of 32 generations; but he [McDougall] omitted to check the results against a properly conducted control. Our experiment confirms McDougall to the extent that we too have obtained long duration trends of improvement in learning-rate (Figs. 2, 3); but we find that the effect is not sustained, and that it is, moreover, shown also by a control experiment, using animals of untrained ancestry. This forbids a Lamarckian interpretation. Statistical analysis of the data indicates that the 'condition' of the rat markedly affects its speed of learning, and that progressive changes in learning-rate, over a succession of generations, are in reality correlated with the health of the laboratory colony, which is subject to periods of decline and recovery."
    
    
    
    
  
  
  • According to Sheldrake, the following graph comes from McDougall in 1938, revealing much higher numbers for what seems to have been virtually the same experiment:
    
    
    
    While "mean" is not the exact same thing as "average", it is close - and at first glance it appears that Sheldrake's claim that the mice in Melbourne started off where McDougal's experiments ended is not entirely untrue. Equally important, it appears that the University of Melbourne researchers very closely mimicked the original experiments of McDougall:
    
    1935, Journal of Experimental Biology, W.E. Agar, F.H. Drummond et al., Zoology Department, University of Melbourne, 'A First Report on a Test of McDougall's Lamarckian Experiment on the Training of Rats': "Our tank is of the same general type as that described and figured by McDougall in his last two reports. It measures about 50 x 48 cm. ...
    The experiment is so well known that it is only necessary to recall its nature very briefly. The rats are placed in a tank containing water, from which they can escape by either of two sloping gangways leading to a platform above the waterlevel. In each trial, one of the two gangways is brightly illuminated by an electric light behind it, and the rat has to learn to escape always by the other (less brightly illuminated) exit, the incentive to do so being provided by the fact that it receives an electric shock every time it climbs the illuminated gangway. Following McDougall, we will refer to these as the bright and dim gangways. ...
    We have adopted McDougall's criterion of learning—namely, the performance of 12 consecutive runs correctly, that is to say, to the dim gangway. ...
    We are aware of one other attempt to repeat the experiment—that of Crew (1932) at the University of Edinburgh. ...
    The alternating current from the mains is employed as in our abandoned experiment, but this time at its full 230 volts; the amperage, however, is reduced to 1.2 milliamps. Crew uses the same voltage, and 2 milliamps., but does not aim at constancy of effect, for he uses a resistance which can be thrown in to reduce the shock for a weak rat. Our shock has never caused any injury to the rats. They have not learnt so quickly as Crew's, no doubt owing to the lower amperage of our shocks. It is hard to compare the rate of learning of our rats with that of McDougall's, since most of our rats seem to learn more quickly than most of McDougall's, but our slowest ones are slower than his. ...
    Like McDougall and Crew we warm the water in the tank in cold weather. We also dry young rats in a warm oven before returning them to the cages."
    
    Bizarrely, the researchers at the University of Melbourne never detail the numbers McDougall got with his rat experiments in any of their four papers about their experiments trying to verify McDougall's work. The only thing mentioned - 1935, the first report - is: "Most of our rats seem to learn more quickly than most of McDougall's, but our slowest ones are slower than his. ... In McDougall's 17th generation, out of 11 rats the best made only 9 errors, the worst 147; in the 23rd generation, out of 26 rats the best made 3 and the worst 71 errors; in the 31st generation 2 out of the 38 rats made 3 errors apiece, and 1 made 100." The Melbourne researchers also never explain why their own initial results of the first 8-10 generations were much higher than the average of the last 40 generations.
    
    Still, what can be said for certain is that McDougall's original experiment is simply not good enough all by itself:
    
    
    • He never kept controls, which is the obvious thing to do in a scientific experiment involving Lamarckian inheritance: you have offspring that you run through the tests generation after generation and you have offspring which you partially test for control, but of which you only breed the untested stock generation after generation.
    
    
    • In the early stages McDougall was still experimenting with the time period after which to give slow rats additional training.
    
    
    • In the early stages McDougall was varying the strength of the applied shock a little. The higher the shock, the quicker the rats tend to learn.
    
    
    • From generation 9 and on McDougall made another change of some significance, at this point we also see a sharp drop in the number of error, which may or may not be coincidental. 1935, W.E. Agar et al., University of Melbourne, 'A First Report on a Test of McDougall's Lamarckian Eperiment on the Training of Rats': "The procedure was changed during the 9th generation. Before that point he did not alternate the light and shock between the right and left gangways, but had these permanently on the left. He found that the strong right or left bias on the part of individual rats made it impossible to attach decisive importance to the results obtained up to that point (I, 279). Our judgment of his experiment is therefore to be based on generations 13-34,"
    
    
    • McDougall didn't always keep the best records. For example, he didn't keep records on the health of each stock, which later researchers suspected caused great variation in the results. Especially pneumonia often ran rampent in lab rats.
    
    In the end I personally am not satisfied with either MacDougall's or the University of Melbourne's experiments on Lamarckian inheritance. Both show major drops in the number of errors made by the rats at the start of the experiments, but these are not really explained apart from theories about morphic fields or, on the other hand, the health of the stock. More experiments should definitely have been carried out, preferably experiments which motivate rats to learn something without subjecting them to sometimes hundreds of painful electric shocks (sometimes killing or paralyzing them).
    
    Clearly Sheldrake argues too much in favor of McDougall's work without addressing some of the criticism. One would expect that his Rhine Center or Society for Psychical Research has come up with plenty of stronger evidence than McDougall (or the Blue Tit story for that matter) in the past century, but, looking how Sheldrake uses McDougall as one of the centerpieces in his morphic resonance / collective memory theory, apparently the center hasn't. The experiments in question might be food for thought (or not), but we need so much more.
    

Collective species memory II: Blue Tit phenomenon

• September 16, 2014, Rupert Sheldrake on the Joe Rogan Experience, 15:00: "So in the 1920s they had cardboard tops on these [milk] bottles. And someone noticed in Southhampton that the cream at the top of their bottle had disappeared. The top had been torn open and the cream had disappeared. And when they watched they saw that every morning these Blue Tits in Southhampton had figured out how to tear off this cardboard strip and get free cream every morning. ...
  Then it turned up many, many miles away in Britain. Then it turned up somewhere else. Blue Tits don't fly very far [note: 15 miles is quite normal]. They're home-loving birds and they don't migrate. So scientists got interested and they set up a network all over Britain of people to observe this habit and they got reports. It was coordinated from Cambridge University. And they mapped the spread of the habit. And it became clear that it was spreading faster and faster. And it was being independently invented in other parts of Britain, so much so that the professor of biology at Oxford, Sir Alester Hardy [note: president Society for Psychical Research], suggested that it must be happening by telepathy, that it was spreading to quickly.
  And the most interesting records are from Holland. This started happening in Holland as well. During the war Holland was occupied by the Germans and milk deliveries stopped. They didn't start again until 1948. Blue Tits only live three or four years, so there would be no Blue Tits after the war who remembered the golden age of free cream. So when milk deliveries began again in Holland, they started drinking the cream almost straight away all over Holland.
  So I would say this is a kind of collective memory that spread by morphic resonance and was remembered by morphic resonance. And that's another example of this going on in the real world."
  
  
  • As noted, like McDougall, Sir Alester Hardy was president of the Society for Psychical Research. In both cases Sheldrake declined to mention this relevant information. Mainstream theory on this phenomenon is that Blue Tits have the ability to transmit behavior culturally, i.e., they are one of the few animals which are able to rather quickly mimick behavior. Not a whole lot of in depth information is available on this phenomenon, but one should be aware that Blue Tits apparently can migrate about 15 miles, that they sometimes live to 7-9 years (while 1.5-3 years is average), and that the Netherlands is about 8 times smaller than Great Britain. In absence of more detailed (available) research on a phenomenon that existed from the 1920s to the 1990s, one would think that Sheldrake would have come across much more impressive and indisputable examples.

Instinct and the hawk-goose experiments

• September 16, 2014, Rupert Sheldrake on the Joe Rogan Experience, 55:00: "I mean, it's well known in animals that you can have instinctive fear. And it makes sense for animals. You probably know those experiments they do with day old chicks or ducklings. You have them out in an enclosure, outdoors, and then they do these experiments. They have these cardboard cut outs with the silhouettes of birds and you pull them across [the sky] on wires. And if you pull across things with the silhouette of a hawk, these ducklings just freeze. You know, the fear response is to just freeze. Whereas if you pull across that looks like the silhouette of a pigeon or [other innocent bird] they don't. So they have an inherited fear of things that could, in fact, be dangerous."


• Hawk/Goose Effect, first observed in 1937 experiments carried out by the German Dr. Konrad Lorenz and Dutch Dr. Nikolaas Tinbergen. Lorenz used to be a devout Nazi and eugenicist who was eventually captured as a Nazi medic by the Soviets on the eastern front. Tinbergen and Lorenz did not agree on the results of their 1937 experiments. As the paper below demonstrates, after a century of experimentation there's still no certainty about the viability of the Hawk/Goose Effect.


• 2011, Journal of Comparitive Psychology of the American Psychological Association, vol. 125, no. 2, pp. 121-133, Wolfgang Schleidt (University of Vienna), Michael D. Schalter and Humberto Moura-Neto, 'The Hawk/Goose Story: The Classical Ethological Experiments of Lorenz and Tinbergen': "We present a historical account of the story behind the famous hawk/goose experiments of Lorenz and Tinbergen in a wider context of cognitive ethology. We discuss their significance ...
  The question as to how birds are able to distinguish between life-threatening raptors and harmless flying creatures, or irrelevant objects crossing the sky, had been debated for some time, and Friedrich Goethe apparently was the first to fly cardboard silhouettes of raptors, harmless birds, and geometric shapes over experimentally naive chicks (Western capercaillie Tetrao urogallus, age 51 days; Goethe, 1937).
  According to Lorenz (1939, p. 94), Oscar Heinroth had observed that domestic chickens are more alarmed by short-necked, long-tailed birds than by long-necked ones: "Many birds in the Berlin zoo reacted by escape to sailing swifts in the first days after the latter's arrival in spring" (Tinbergen, 1951, pp. 30 –31).
  Thus, inspired by Heinroth's hypothesis that a short neck and long tail are salient features of raptors, Lorenz and Tinbergen used a reversible model (see Figure 1): wings with a short protrusion on one end and a long one on the other. Thus, depending on the direction of movement, it could be seen as either a flying raptor or a goose.
  However, the precise shape of the silhouette of the reversible "hawk/goose dummy" used in the original 1937 experiments by Lorenz and Tinbergen remains a mystery. Lorenz never published a figure of the "hawk/goose dummy," and Tinbergen depicted three different shapes in his 1939, 1948a, and 1948b papers (Figure 3a– d). The figure in Tinbergen 1948b (our Figure c) carried in its caption the acknowledgment "after Kra¨tzig, 1940," indicating that this was not his own design, and, since Kra¨tzig did his experiments in September of 1938 (Kra¨tzig, 1940, p. 154) it was probably not the exact shape used in the 1937 experiments. ...
  The results of the 1937 experiments in Altenberg varied with species, prior experience of the individuals tested, and shape of the models. Tinbergen saw Heinroth's short-neck hypothesis confirmed: "Some ducklings, which were reared by man and never had any experience with birds of prey, showed intense flight reactions to many different shaped models, such as circles and triangles. Other species displayed their 'predator-reactions' (crouching, running for shelter, threatening) to every birdlike form moving along the sky, provided it had a short neck!" (Tinbergen, 1939, p. 23).
  Lorenz, also in 1939, gave a more detailed report of these experiments. He discussed especially the importance of "slow relative speed" of the model for eliciting a typical antipredator response, that is, "fixating, alarm calling and marching off to cover," and emphasized that the shape of the models was irrelevant for all species tested except for turkeys:
  "While the form of the model is indifferent, or at any rate does not have a statistically reliable effect on greylag geese and ducklings (for technical reasons we were unable to experiment with adult handraised ducks), the contrary could be proven in young turkeys. These experiments were based on Heinroth's observation that domestic chickens are more alarmed by short-necked, long-tailed birds than by long-necked ones. Our model had a symmetrical pair of wings and, on the longitudinal axis, a short protrusion on one end, and a long one on the other, functioning as its head and tail respectively. The young turkeys actually reacted much more vigorously when the model was propelled with the short end forward. This was well quantifiable in the number of alarm calls uttered." (Lorenz, 1939, pp. 93–94, translation1 cited from Lorenz, 1957, p. 256).
  Tinbergen and Lorenz never reconciled their different views of the results of the hawk/goose experiments they had performed together, most importantly the effectiveness of the shape of the models, and, especially, of the hawk/goose model. Thus, when they started using the results in their subsequent publications, not only did a difference in emphasis emerge, but also a striking contradiction: While Lorenz reported that only in turkeys is the short neck a salient feature of the flight response (e.g., Lorenz, 1939), Tinbergen claimed that "The reactions of young gallinaceous birds, ducks, and geese to a flying bird of prey are released by the sign-stimulus 'short neck' among others." (Tinbergen, 1951, p. 77). As Tinbergen's 1951 book "The Study of Instinct" became the bible of classical ethology, his sweeping statement turned into an undisputed truth for believers. That "truth" persisted. ...
  In summary, the results of the 1961 "Hawk/Goose Project" were in good agreement with those Lorenz had reported, including the response of his turkeys to the hawk version of the hawk/goose dummy. They did not support Heinroth's short-neck hypothesis or Tinbergen's generalization. ...
  However, because Tinbergen's "Animal Behavior" appeared as a volume in Life Nature Library, a popular series of hardbound books published by Time-Life, his "Study of Instinct" (Oxford University Press) remained the most influential textbook on ethology, and since it was reprinted without updating for many years, his erroneous 1951 version of the 1937 experiments continued to be accepted by many as a striking example of an IRM, responding to a complex configuration. ...
  Here, we present a few cases illustrating the wide disparity of results. Melzack, Penick, and Beckett (1959) tested ducklings with a rather large hawk/goose model, and found a stronger response to the hawk model in only one of their 24 tests. McNiven (1960) also tested ducklings and found no difference in response. Green, Green, and Carr (1966) reported that ducklings "were more active in the presence of the silhouette of a hawk than that of a goose. However, the Ss [faulthy OCR] were equally responsive to a triangle moving either base-forward or apex-forward" (p. 185). The former result supports Tinbergen's 1939 claim, and the latter disproves Schneirla's 1959 hypothesis that a different response to the two directions of the hawk/goose silhouette was produced by rapid versus gradual retinal changes.
  Parenthetically, Schneirla, a vocal critic of ethology, tried unsuccessfully to explain the hawk/goose effect by his approach/withdrawal principle (Schneirla, 1965); for an excellent discussion of this issue see Burghardt (1973).
  In a follow-up study, Green, Carr, and Green (1968) tested two sets of ducklings with the hawk/goose silhouette and additional versions without neck or without tail and found, once again, that the ducklings were more active when presented with the silhouette of the hawk. The models lacking neck or tail and moved in either direction had the same effect—lower response—as the goose.
  In two doctoral dissertations (unpublished), M. Green (1968) and R. Green (1968) used heart rate as an indicator of fear and found a significantly greater increase in response to the hawk model.
  Helmut Mueller (an expert in raptor biology) tested a variety of behavioral indicators of fear with conflicting results (personal communication) until he monitored the heart rate of his subjects (ducklings: Mueller & Parker, 1980; chicken chicks: Moore & Mueller, 1982). In contrast to the Greens' findings a significant difference in the heart rate increase was observed only in response to the goose model. However, heart rate variance was greater in response to the hawk model, and, "therefore," it was concluded that "variance in heart rate is an excellent measure of emotional response to a stimulus" (Mueller & Parker, 1980, p. 111).
  This interpretation is not beyond dispute. For example, in an extensive study of free-ranging greylag geese in their natural environment (Wascher, Scheiber, & Kotrschal, 2008), the increase in heart rate was the most useful indicator of emotionality, and an increase in variance usually coincided with an increase in rate (Wascher, personal communication). Thus, the increase in variance in response to the hawk model, and an increase in mean heart rate in response to the goose model, observed by Mueller and Parker, 1980, are contradictory.
  The most recent attempt to substantiate the report of Tinbergen's claim "that goslings respond more to moving hawk silhouettes than to moving goose shapes" was reported by Canty and Gould (1995). Once again ducklings were tested instead of goslings, and the excessive apparent size of the models,   9° (!), was more suitable for investigating collision avoidance than predator detection. Because of the enormous size of their models, as compared to those used by Lorenz, Tinbergen, and Schleidt, their results cannot be compared in any meaningful way.
  For the same reason, a discussion of the results of Rogers, Zucca, and Vallortigara (2004) and those of Palleroni, Hauser, and Marler (2005), who used models up to a   20°!, resulting in a high looming effect during presentation, exceeds the scope of this paper (see Figure 7, and compare with Figure 6). Of the few relevant investigations in recent years, only two papers (Evans & Marler, 1991; Evans & Marler, 1992) report the use of models in the order of magnitude of those used in the seminal investigations by Lorenz and Tinbergen. These papers yielded very interesting results concerning the role of bystanders in evoking the alarm calls elicited by predator models, but did not address the hawk/goose issue.
  We conclude that even though some results suggest that experimentally naïve ducklings may respond differently to the two versions of the hawk/goose silhouette, the effects are not striking. Moreover, we cannot exclude the possibility that these differences were due to selective reporting of trials..."

Instinct and epigenetics

Lamarckian inheritance, today called epigenetics, is actually making a revival, with growing evidence that some traits or bodily functions can be transmitted to the next generation in a manner that is still not entirely clear. This area of research is distinct from Sheldrake's theory of morphogenetics, which involves a psychic field that influences an entire species:

• Nature magazine, November 2002, Volume 10, Number 11, Pages 669-671, 'Time to take epigenetic inheritance seriously': "There has been a distinct reluctance to take the possibility of human epigenetic inheritance seriously, despite experimental evidence in mammals.[3],[4],[5],[6],[7] ... Part of the reluctance to embrace the idea of epigenetic inheritance may be a mistrust of any hypothesis with a Lamarkian flavour, but the main reason has been the lack of compelling human observations and a plausible molecular mechanism that could be investigated experimentally. ... It seems that the Swedish studies have uncovered a nutrition-linked sperm-mediated transgenerational effect. Whilst one striking result relates to the grandfather's food availability, epigenetic transmission from just father to child would be sufficient to set up a cascade of metabolic responses down the generations. Independent replication is needed, but these observations should trigger entirely new lines of enquiry and at a time when we are getting an experimental handle on imprint re-programming. ...
  [3] Campbell JH, Perkins P. Transgenerational effects of drug and hormone treatments in mammals: a review of observations and ideas. Prog Brain Res 1988; 73: 535-553.
  4 Boucher BJ, Ewen SW, Stowers JM. Betel nut (Areca catechu) consumption and the induction of glucose intolerance in adult CD1 mice and in their F1 and F2 offspring. Diabetologia 1994; 37: 49-55.
  5 Roemer I, Reik W, Dean W et al. Epigenetic inheritance of specific changes in gene expression in the mouse. Curr Biol 1997; 7: 277-280. MEDLINE
  6 Morgan HD, Sutherland HG, Martin DI et al. Epigenetic inheritance at the agouti locus in the mouse. Nat Genet 1999; 23: 314-318. Article MEDLINE
  7 Wolff GL, Kodell RL, Moore SR et al. Maternal epigenetics and methyl supplements affect agouti gene expression in Avy/a mice. FASEB J 1998; 12: 949-957. MEDLINE"


• November 15, 2013, Virginia Hughes for National Geographic: Phenomena: Only Human, 'Mice Inherit the Fears of Their Fathers': "In one highly publicized example, researchers in New York studied several dozen women who were pregnant on September 11, 2001, and had been in the vicinity of the terrorist attacks. Some of these women developed post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and this group shows lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol in their saliva than do those who did not develop PTSD. But here's the rub: At 9 months old, the babies of the women with PTSD have significantly lower cortisol levels than babies of healthy mothers.
  In earlier work, the same researchers had reported low cortisol levels in adult children of Holocaust survivors with PTSD. And in yet another study, Kerry Ressler's group at Emory University showed that the so-called startle response" to a sudden stimulus — a marker of anxiety — is more pronounced in kids whose mothers were physically abused as children then in those whose mothers were not abused. I could go on. But how, exactly, does a parent's stress leave such a deep impression on its progeny? Part of it is nurture. A parent's sadness and stress naturally affects how they interact with other people, including their children. The Holocaust study, in fact, found that the survivors with PTSD tended to emotionally abuse or neglect their children. And we know from some remarkable experiments in rats that parental care affects the offspring's genes: Rat pups that get a lot of licking and grooming from their mothers show distinct changes in their epigenome, the chemical markers that attach to DNA and can turn genes on and off. Neglected pups, in contrast, don't show these epigenetic tweaks. Now a fascinating new study reveals that it's not just nurture. Traumatic experiences can actually work themselves into the germ line. When a male mouse becomes afraid of a specific smell, this fear is somehow transmitted into his sperm, the study found. His pups will also be afraid of the odor, and will pass that fear down to their pups. Parents transfer information to their offspring, and they do so even before the offspring are conceived," said Brian Dias, a postdoctoral fellow in Ressler's lab, at an engaging talk about this unpublished data on Tuesday at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego. And why, evolutionarily, would a parent pass down such specific information? So that when the offspring, or descending generations, encounter that environment later in life, they'll know how to behave appropriately," Dias said. The researchers made the mice afraid of certain odors by pairing them with a mild shock to the foot. In a study published a few years ago, Ressler had shown that this type of fear learning is specific: Mice trained to fear one particular smell show an increased startle to that odor but not others. What's more, this fear learning changes the organization of neurons in the animal's nose, leading to more cells that are sensitive to that particular smell. Dias trained mice to fear acetophenone — which, according to this chemist, smells like orange blossom with a bit of artificial cherry" — over three days, then waited 10 days and allowed the animals to mate. The offspring (known as the F1 generation) show an increased startle to acetophenone (with no shock) even though they have never encountered the smell before. And their reaction is specific: They do not startle to a different odor, propanol (which smells like alcohol). What's more, the researchers found the same thing in the F1 generation's offspring (known as F2). The scientists also looked at the F1 and F2 animals' brains. When the grandparent generation is trained to fear acetophenone, the F1 and F2 generations have more M71 neurons" in their noses, Dias said. These cells contain a receptor that detects acetophenone. Their brains also have larger M71 glomeruli," a region of the olfactory bulb that responds to this smell. Like father like son, we're getting some ancestral information," Dias said. But how is that occurring?" His team performed an in vitro fertilization (IVF) experiment in which they trained animals to fear acetophenone and then 10 days later harvested their sperm. They sent the sperm to another lab across campus where it was used to artificially inseminate female mice. Then the researchers looked at the brains of the offspring. What is striking is that the neuroanatomical results still persist after IVF," Dias said. There's something in the sperm." I've been to a lot of scientific talks. The excitement around this one was notable, with many scientists whispering about it in the room and more loudly buzzing in the hallways outside. But I know what you're wondering. It was the first question that Dias received from the audience after the talk: Do you have any idea of how this information being stored in the brain is being transmitted to the gonads?" the questioner asked. The short answer is that the researchers don't have any idea, though they've thought about several possible explanations. Apparently a study in cats and pigeons showed that after smelling an odor, the odorant receptor molecules can get into the blood stream, and other studies have reported odorant receptors on sperm. So maybe the odor molecules get into the bloodstream and make their way to sperm. Another possibility is that microRNAs — tiny RNA molecules involved in gene expression — get into the bloodstream and deliver odor information to sperm. For now, though, Dias said, those are two science-fiction hypotheses.""


• November 15, 2013, Virginia Hughes for National Geographic: Phenomena: Only Human, 'Mice Inherit the Fears of Their Fathers' (reply): "This reminded me of Jean-Jacques Remy's work on olfactory imprinting in the roundworm C. elegans. He found the worms are more attracted to odors experienced during development and that this enhancement could be inherited for over 40 generations. Others have found that small RNAs are essential for multigenerational inheritance of resistance to viral infections in C. elegans. Fascinating stuff!"


• November 15, 2013, Virginia Hughes for National Geographic: Phenomena: Only Human, 'Mice Inherit the Fears of Their Fathers' (reply Darold A. Treffert, M.D.): "I have been involved in research on how savants know things they never learned" (see http://www.savantsyndrome.com) Something I call genetic memory..There is plenty of room on DNA for transfer of huge amounts of knowledge", not just instincts. Fascinating 'grist for the mill' for my work with genetic memory."


• November 15, 2013, Virginia Hughes for National Geographic: Phenomena: Only Human, 'Mice Inherit the Fears of Their Fathers' (reply): " Just from reading the title, I had a gut feeling this had something to do with the epigenome. Surprising it gets mention in the article but the scientists don't consider it as a hypothesis. It seems to me there has been a lot of evidence indicating that the epigenome works as an ancestral memory and tweaks hormonal triggers to better adapt to the last few generations' conditions. Even before this study, I had really been wondering where instinctual fears come from, like those exhibited in domestic cockatiels that had never seen snakes when they encounter something that looks like one. Basically, they will panic seemingly out of nowhere, even if they've never seen a living snake in their lives."


• November 15, 2013, Virginia Hughes for National Geographic: Phenomena: Only Human, 'Mice Inherit the Fears of Their Fathers' (reply): " My cats exhibited an astounding behavior–my partner brought a snakeskin into the house to show me. It got put down. One by one, as the cats found it, they began behaving as if there were a deadly predator in the house–and universally they began to avoid the floor and walk around the house on top of available furniture, the backs of couches, jumping to tables, etc. Their tails would jerk as if they were preternaturally on edge. Finally after observing this for a few days, we took pity on them and put the snakeskin outside, and life returned to normal! I don't believe a single one of them ever encountered a snake in real life. Where did the reaction come from? "


• September 16, 2014, Rupert Sheldrake on the Joe Rogan Experience, 42:00: "It's purely anecdotal evidence. I have young daughters. They wrestle around together. They play in the bed and laugh and joke. And I've been doing jiu jitsu since the 1990s. And my daughters assume jiu jitsu positions. I've seen them do it. Before I even taught them. I taught them now, but when they were little, like 3 and 4-years-old, my youngest would do an over-under control. She would grab her back and grip a certain way you teach people to do. And she would throw her legs over. It's called taking the back. It's a standard position in jiu jitsu, but it's not a normal position for people. But she would automatically go for it and pull my older daughter on top of her and take her back. And it was the craziest thing to watch as a martial arts commentator, a someone who understands the correct way of doing positions. I'd watch her do it and I was like, she knows what she is doing. I don't think she knows why she is doing, but she assumed a position that I had done countless times. Thousands of times in my life. It automatically came to her. And I'm like, that has to be somehow or another in her code. Somehow it has gone from my body to her. ... One is knee to the belly to the mount. ... She does that instinctively and it's not an instinctive move, for most kids. ... And then there's also when I taught them stuff, they pick things up like they already knew 'em. I used to teach martial arts, so I've taught quite a few people. ..."

Psychic pets: Jaytee the dog

As Sheldrake details in his article Richard Wiseman's claim to have debunked ''the psychic pet phenomenon" on his website Sheldrake.org, in 1994 Sheldrake first published his results on a psychic experiment he carried out with a dog named Jaytee. The experiment involved the dog owner leaving the dog behind in her apartment and returning home at irregular intervals, with a camera registering how many seconds per 10 minute intervals the dog spent at the window, waiting for its owner to come home. The data is intriguing because it shows that the dog spent much more time at the window as the owner was returning home and even more so right before arriving:

As soon as Sheldrake had published his results, journalists rushed to the official rent-a-skeptic network to debunk the results. The person to take on this task was Richard Wiseman, who carried out a set of four experiments in 1995, two in June and and two in December. His results:

While the results look exactly similar to those obtained by Sheldrake, Wiseman nevertheless left Sheldrake "astonished" when he went to the World Skeptics Congress in 1996 and did his best to debunk the data. According to Sheldrake, "Jaytee was at the window an average of 4% of the time during the main period of Pam's absence, and 78% of the time [he says 55% in his 2000 paper] when she was on the way home. This difference was statistically significant." Wiseman, on the other hand, argued that "Jaytee had failed his tests because he had gone to the window before Pam set off to come home." That most certainly sounds like a typical and rather hilarious logical fallacy introduced by a skeptic who has his back against the wall, but let's face it, due to numerous other claims of Sheldrake, not to mention his connections, he cannot be considered a reliable source of information without outside confirmation. It's my personal experience that national security trolls and skeptics never-ever try to take on a real phenomenon, so this most certainly would be a major exception.

Psychic pets: My own psychic cockatiel

As I already made clear, I didn't study the above test results of Wiseman or Sheldrake on Jaytee the dog in enormous detail, which is generally necessary to rule out any manipulation. But I do have a few experiences of my own to share regarding this phenomenon.

For starters, the dog of my parents, a German Shepherd, doesn't seem to be the slightest bit psychic - and I've been looking for it and observing her. When I occasionally watch the dog when my parents are gone for a day or so, she doesn't respond in any way until she hears the front door open. I can also sneak up on her in every possible way. While there may be differences between breeds and even dogs of the same breed, this one most definitely flunked every test I ever put her through.

Now, on the other hand, when I lived at home we had a cockatiel that lived to the age of 28 or so. I always took it for granted, but looking back, the bird appeared to be completely, 100% reliably psychic. At home I could do whatever the heck I wanted in full view of the main window, because the cockatiel would always let out one partiular screech when my mother was about 50 meters / 55 yards away from the front door. He would actually stay all puffed up and sleepy until she actually walked in to the living room, but there always would be this one, unusual screech 30 seconds before the key would enter the front door lock.

It really was so reliable that when friends asked, ''Won't your mother be mad when she walks in right now?'' I'd always say the same thing: ''Don't worry, the bird will warn us. When he makes the single *pèèèèp* sound, we have about 30 seconds before she appears in front of *that* window.'' If I walked upstairs while stuff would be on the living room table I didn't want my mother to see, I wouldn't bother removing it, but left the living room door open, so I'd hear the bird's screech. The bird's "warning beacon" was 100% reliable, no matter what the season, the weather, the type of shoes (noise), or the wind direction (smell).

The bird couldn't see my mother until she stepped into the living room, at which point he would finally unpuff and ask for attention. Apart from that it's not even remotely credible to suggest he could hear her walking outside through very thick reinforced concrete walls and double pane windows that isolated sound - from a relatively busy two lane road with a tram in the middle - extremely well. Cars, cyclists, trams and other pedestrians would come by continually. Ironically, the bird never-ever responded when my mother sat in the tram that rushed by the window before she got out and walked back to the house. He only did it consistently when she was about 50 meters / 55 yards out, walking to the front door.

In similar fashion, my grandmother always remarked how the bird would know if I was about to arrive (after being gone on vacation for 3 weeks) when I was about 50 meters away, whether I'd be walking, on a bicycle, or in my car. The bird would always get hyper-excited at this point. Maybe it's sound, maybe it's electromagnetics, but it might just as well be chi and/or some kind of energy field that the bird was tapping into. The idea that it can smell you seems silly. It's too consistent for that, with too much concrete, glass and doors in the way.

The real problem seems to be that simply no proper research has been done on this subject, while it appears to be such an unbelievably easy phenomenon to demonstrate. Then again, I looked all over the internet for information on psychic cockatiels. Couldn't find anything. That's about as weird as the phenomenon I observed myself.

Conclusions

Rupert Sheldrake's biography has been particularly complex, because, although he has all the familiar establishment ties, he developed his own unique theories and conducted his own experiments. Therefore it took quite some time to look into all the different areas and develop a degree of worthwhile opinion on them. Just because he has appeared on Coast to Coast AM, doesn't mean he couldn't have been an exception to the steady stream of national security trolls visiting this program.

However, looking at all his different claims, I see a familiar pattern emerge. Sheldrake consistently and in a rather dogmatic manner gives attention to theories and evidence that are dated, inconclusive, and manipulative. His general ideas are intriguing, but his narrative falls apart at the details. For the moment, I only remain intrigued by his psychic pet work and I hope to God it doesn't fall apart as well when I ever look deeper into it.

Keep in mind, I'm not saying that the subjects he discusses are necessary untrue. All I'm saying is that many of the observations and conclusions drawn are vastly overstated and that Sheldrake should have spent much more time separating the wheat from the chaff by doing more research (journalistic and academic) and conducting his own experiments. It would also be nice if he would encourage people to conduct their own experiences at home. I mean, his two papers I read on the allegedly psychic dog Jaytee don't even list the breed of dog (a Terrier of some sort). That's a little sloppy to say the least. And he most certainly should demand a higher standard of proof or evidence when discussing many of his favorite subjects.

Obviously, by looking at his connections, I assume all the lack of "meat" in his work has been by design. I'm glad though that I finally found an excuse to discuss my psychic cockatiel experiences. Go buy yourself a cockatiel and test it out for yourself.