Below is an article forwarded to me by its author, the noted biologist and evolutionary thinker, Rupert Sheldrake. It's about an encounter with the equally noted biologist and evolutionary thinker, Richard Dawkins. The subject isn't atheism, Dawkins' last hobby horse, but reason and science. Under the guise of an interview for a television series, Sheldrake found himself sandbagged by Dawkins' personal polemics (an experience more than one of us has had when called upon to represent views contrary to Dawkins, only to find them distorted and mocked once the film has been edited, and without a chance for rebuttal, of course).
The story speaks for itself. I'd just like to point out the unsavory side of defending science, which Dawkins so potently stands for. Science isn't a war of personalities and opinions. It's a place for objectivity and open-mindedness -- or should be. No human enterprise is morally perfect, yet it's especially distasteful for a scientist to employ polemics in place of reason. Dawkins feels so sure of his absolute rightness -- in the face of opponents whose minds are at least the equal of his -- that he sees no reason to play fair. The result, as Sheldrake relates it, was grossly prejudiced.
Richard Dawkins Comes to Call
by
Rupert Sheldrake
Richard Dawkins is a man with a mission - the eradication of religion and superstition, and their total replacement with science and reason. Channel 4 has repeatedly provided him with a pulpit. His recent two-part polemic, called Enemies of Reason, was a sequel to last year's diatribe against religion, The Root of All Evil?
Soon before Enemies of Reason was filmed, the production company, IWC Media, told me that Richard Dawkins wanted to visit me to discuss my research on unexplained abilities of people and animals. He believes that science should be based on reason and evidence. So do I. But I also believe it is important to start from people's experiences, rather then dismissing what they say as superstitious. For example, many dog owners claim that their animals know when a member of the household is coming home; the dogs go and wait at a door or window while the returning person is still miles away. Is this just a matter of routine, or of dogs hearing car engines at a great distance? In controlled experiments in which the animals' behaviour was filmed continuously, I found that some dogs still seemed to know when their owners were returning at unusual times, in unfamiliar vehicles, and when no one at home knew when they would arrive.
I was reluctant to take part in this programme because I expected that it would be as one-sided as Dawkins' previous series. But the production team's representative assured me that they were actually interested in facts, and that " this documentary, at Channel 4's insistence, will be an entirely more balanced affair than The Root of All Evil was." She added, "We are very keen for it to be a discussion between two scientists, about scientific modes of enquiry". So I agreed to meet Richard and we fixed a date.
I was still not sure what to expect. Was he going to be dogmatic, with a mental firewall that blocked out any evidence that went against his beliefs? Or would he be open-minded, and fun to talk to?
The Director asked us to stand facing each other; we were filmed with a hand-held camera. Richard began by saying that he thought we probably agreed about many things, "But what worries me about you is that you are prepared to believe almost anything. Science should be based on the minimum number of beliefs."
I agreed that we had a lot in common, "But what worries me about you is that you come across as dogmatic, giving people a bad impression of science, and putting them off."
He then said that in a romantic spirit he himself would like to believe in telepathy, but there just wasn't any evidence for it. He dismissed all research on the subject out of hand, without going into any details. He compared the lack of acceptance of telepathy by scientists such as himself with the way in which the echo-location system had been discovered in bats, followed by its rapid acceptance within the scientific community in the 1940s. In fact, as I later discovered, Lazzaro Spallanzani had shown in 1793 that bats rely on hearing to find their way around, but sceptical opponents dismissed his experiments as flawed, and helped set back research for over a century. However, Richard recognized that telepathy posed a more radical challenge than echo-location. He said that if it really occurred, it would "turn the laws of physics upside down," and added, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
"This depends on what you regard as extraordinary", I replied. "The majority of the population say they have experienced telepathy, especially in connection with telephone calls. In that sense, telepathy is ordinary. The claim that most people are deluded about their own experience is extraordinary. Where is the extraordinary evidence for that?"
He could not produce any evidence at all, apart from generic arguments about the fallibility of human judgement. He also took it for granted that people want to believe in "the paranormal" because of wishful thinking.
We then agreed that controlled experiments were necessary. I said that this is why I had actually been doing such experiments, including tests to find out if people really could tell who was calling them on the telephone when the caller was selected at random. The results were far above the chance level. The previous week, I had sent Richard copies of some of my papers, published in peer-reviewed scientific journals, so that he could look at some of the data before we met.
At this stage Richard looked uneasy and said, "I don't want to discuss evidence". "Why not?" I asked. He replied, "There isn't time. It's too complicated. And that's not what this programme is about." The camera stopped.
The Director, Russell Barnes, confirmed that he too was not interested in evidence. The film he was making was another Dawkins polemic.
I said to Russell, "If you're treating telepathy as an irrational belief, surely evidence about whether it exists or not is essential for the discussion. If telepathy occurs, it's not irrational to believe in it. I thought that's what we were going to talk about. I made it clear from the outset that I wasn't interested in taking part in another low grade debunking exercise."
Richard said, "It's not a low grade debunking exercise; it's a high grade debunking exercise."
I said that in that case there had been a serious misunderstanding, because I had been assured that this was to be a balanced scientific discussion about evidence. Russell Barnes asked to see the emails I had received from his assistant. He read them with obvious dismay, and said the assurances she had given me were wrong. The team packed up and left.
Richard Dawkins has long proclaimed his conviction that "The paranormal is bunk. Those who try to sell it to us are fakes and charlatans". Enemies of Reason was intended to popularize this belief. But does his crusade really promote "the public understanding of science," of which he is the professor at Oxford? Should science be a vehicle of dogma and prejudice, a kind of fundamentalist belief-system? Or should it be based on open-minded enquiry into the unknown?
Dr Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist and the current Perrott-Warrick Scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge. His web site is: http://www.sheldrake.org
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