Rupert Sheldrake - The Science Delusion BANNED TED TALK

[viscount aero]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKHUaNAxsTg

Published on Mar 15, 2013

Re-uploaded as TED have decided to censor Rupert and remove this video from the TEDx youtube channel. Follow this link for TED's statement on the matter and Dr. Sheldrake's response: http://blog.ted.com/2013/03/14/open-f...

If anyone would like to prepare a transcript or caption file in any language so non-English speakers or the deaf and hard of hearing can enjoy this talk, please do so and I will be happy to upload it. Just PM me. Or the video is embedded on the Amara project website, so you can add subtitles there at: http://tinyurl.com/bwexn5q

RUPERT SHELDRAKE, Ph.D. (born 28 June 1942) is a biologist and author of more than 80 scientific papers and ten books. A former Research Fellow of the Royal Society, he studied natural sciences at Cambridge University, where he was a Scholar of Clare College, took a double first class honours degree and was awarded the University Botany Prize. He then studied philosophy and history of science at Harvard University, where he was a Frank Knox Fellow, before returning to Cambridge, where he took a Ph.D. in biochemistry. He was a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, where he was Director of Studies in biochemistry and cell biology. As the Rosenheim Research Fellow of the Royal Society, he carried out research on the development of plants and the ageing of cells in the Department of Biochemistry at Cambridge University.

While at Cambridge, together with Philip Rubery, he discovered the mechanism of polar auxin transport, the process by which the plant hormone auxin is carried from the shoots towards the roots.

From 1968 to 1969, based in the Botany Department of the University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, he studied rain forest plants. From 1974 to 1985 he was Principal Plant Physiologist and Consultant Physiologist at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) in Hyderabad, India, where he helped develop new cropping systems now widely used by farmers. While in India, he also lived for a year and a half at the ashram of Fr Bede Griffiths in Tamil Nadu, where he wrote his first book, A New Science of Life.

From 2005-2010 he was the Director of the Perrott-Warrick Project funded from Trinity College,Cambridge. He is a Fellow of Schumacher College , in Dartington, Devon, a Fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences near San Francisco, and a Visiting Professor at the Graduate Institute in Connecticut.

He lives in London with his wife Jill Purce http://www.healingvoice.com and two sons.

He has appeared in many TV programs in Britain and overseas, and was one of the participants (along with Stephen Jay Gould, Daniel Dennett, Oliver Sacks, Freeman Dyson and Stephen Toulmin) in a TV series called A Glorious Accident, shown on PBS channels throughout the US. He has often taken part in BBC and other radio programmes. He has written for newspapers such as the Guardian, where he had a regular monthly column, The Times, Sunday Telegraph, Daily Mirror, Daily Mail, Sunday Times, Times Educational Supplement, Times Higher Education Supplement and Times Literary Supplement, and has contributed to a variety of magazines, including New Scientist, Resurgence, the Ecologist and the Spectator.

Books by Rupert Sheldrake:
A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Formative Causation (1981). New edition 2009 (in the US published as Morphic Resonance)
The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature (1988)
The Rebirth of Nature: The Greening of Science and God (1992)
Seven Experiments that Could Change the World: A Do-It-Yourself Guide to Revolutionary Science (1994) (Winner of the Book of the Year Award from the British Institute for Social Inventions)
Dogs that Know When Their Owners are Coming Home, and Other Unexplained Powers of Animals (1999) (Winner of the Book of the Year Award from the British Scientific and Medical Network)
The Sense of Being Stared At, And Other Aspects of the Extended Mind (2003)

With Ralph Abraham and Terence McKenna:
Trialogues at the Edge of the West (1992), republished as Chaos, Creativity and Cosmic Consciousness (2001)
The Evolutionary Mind (1998)

With Matthew Fox:
Natural Grace: Dialogues on Science and Spirituality (1996)
The Physics of Angels: Exploring the Realm Where Science and Spirit Meet (1996)

http://www.sheldrake.org/

[JeffreyW]

Here is a summary of the controversy.

http://sebastian.penraeth.com/post/4611 ... uppressing

Gentlemen like this need to be given attention. The establishment is full of dogma and bitterness towards new ideas. Sheldrake has his morphogenic fields (which I think are very, very interesting), and I have my own theory of stellar metamorphosis.

I can learn how the establishment treats even their own members who have appreciable qualifications and credentials. Disagreeing with the party lines, no matter how possible, gets you the label "pseudoscientist".

In a strange way, I think pseudoscientist is becoming more of a credential in itself of understanding how corrupt the establishment really is and how they treat new ideas. I guess we could call it a "PSci" degree. In order to get one you have to have a college degree and have other degree holders consider your idea to be "trash". Here, that is what they did to me, I'm an official "pseudoscientist".

http://qdl.scs-inc.us/?top=9927-10277-7870

[allynh]

Scary stuff here.

The group attacking Sheldrake has organized to attack anything that these "Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia" think is pseudoscience.

The EU Team needs to keep an eye on what is happening.

The Wikipedia Battle for Rupert Sheldrake’s Biography
http://weilerpsiblog.wordpress.com/2013 ... biography/

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;

King Henry V

William Shakespeare

As dreary as the task was, I delved into Rupert Sheldrake’s bio on Wikipedia and started examining the sources for just one statement from this totally over the top biased paragraph with six accusations and 18 citations:

Sheldrake’s morphic resonance hypothesis is widely rejected within the scientific community;[8][9][10][11][12] it has been labelled pseudoscience[11][13][14][15][16] and magical thinking.[13][17] Critics cite a lack of evidence to support the hypothesis[18][19][20][21] and its inconsistency with established scientific theories.[11][22]

I worked on citations 8 through 12. It’s possibly true morphic resonance is “widely rejected”, but far more likely that morphic resonance is widely ignored. On Wikipedia however, you need valid secondary sources for your statements. So I checked them out. Of the five sources: two were book reviews, one link didn’t work and the other two contained just one sentence dealing with the above statement. Of those two, one was by Martin Gardner from a book published in 1988. He was also a member of CSICOP, so his opinion was hardly representative of the mainstream, but it was also, just one sentence. The last was an article favorable to Sheldrake and again, it was just one sentence.

The sourcing for this statement, in other words, was terrible. Dutifully, I wrote this up on the Wikipedia Rupert Sheldrake Bio talk page. (Under my own name.) One more small bit done in order to move his biography from a horribly biased, possibly libelous wreck to a more neutral point of view.

Boring, right? Why am I doing this? Well, partially this is more fallout from the TED controversy, which put Rupert in the news . . . again. On June 20th of this year, after the controversy had died down, Rupert sent out one of his newsletters. In it was a small blurb:

Robert McLuhan has recently drawn attention to the phenomenon of guerrilla skeptics, who devote a great deal of time and energy to modifying Wikipedia entries so that they reflect a skeptical point of view about psychic phenomena, and try to portray research on these subjects as pseudoscience. His blog on the subject is here:
Guerrilla Skeptics

The Guerrilla Skeptics apparently did not take kindly to being outed. Since June, they have gone on the attack to seriously change Rupert’s Bio. On June 14th, he had a relatively stable and neutral biography, which is documented from June 14th. Compare this to the pretty current September 28th version. The changes are quite drastic and unfavorable to Sheldrake.

——-

Wikipedia matters because of the sheer numbers of visitors it draws. The term Parapsychology has about 300,000 views a year and Rupert Sheldrake’s biography Wikipedia page has about 180,000 views a year. His Wikipedia profile in fact, is second only to his own site if you google his name. Sheldrake’s Wikipedia problem is a bit unusual because he appears to be the subject of a coordinated attack by an ideologue organization. (Here’s a long video of them describing their process.) Most of the people who have problems with Wikipedia are trying to get some bit of information corrected on a subject of their expertise. Hilarity often ensues.

A Nobel Prize winning physicist and a senior editor of a science magazine tried to get an article about Energy Catalyst fixed, and failed. Professor Timothy Messer-Kruse tried to get an article about the Haymarket riots, his area of expertise, corrected, using the Library of Congress as a source and failed as well. Economist David Henderson was not trusted to know his own birthday.

These types of problems occur because anybody can edit Wikipedia. In order for all of these people to edit this encyclopedia, Wikipedia has a rule that only secondary sources are allowed because primary sources need to be interpreted. It’s more complicated than that, but what happens is that this opens the door for all sorts of gaming of Wikipedia by less than objective editors. Especially in regards to controversial topics and people, there are often a number of conflicting opinions to choose from and it requires a bit of subject knowledge to sort them out. If you’re an ideologue however, you merely choose the opinions that you agree with and ignore everything else while dismissing contrary sources as being biased. That’s what’s happening on Rupert Sheldrake’s Wikipedia page.

This is not an isolated problem. The great weakness of Wikipedia is its excessive number of ideologues and their desire for control. In 2003, Anthropogenic Global Warming Theory was subjected to near total control by a single editor who created or rewrote 5,428 unique Wikipedia articles, obtained Website Administrator status and removed 500 articles and banned over 2,000 Wikipedia editors. This continued until September of 2009 when his privileges were finally revoked. In one case a user named Qworty attempted to purge Wikipedia of all references to the occult and modern paganism by making as many as 13,000 edits.

The outing of Qworty, who turned out to be author Robert Clark Young, was done by Wikipedia watchdog organization, Wikipediocracy. Writer Andrew Leonard, who pursued this story for Salon shared this compelling story:

“The reason I am doing this,” said Andreas Kolbe, one of the Wikipedocracy members who shared his research with me, “is that I want the public to know just what goes on under the surface of Wikipedia and how the site plays dice with people’s reputations by allowing anonymous editing of biographies of living persons. As someone who joined the project with a fair amount of enthusiasm for its mission more than seven years ago, I have found the realities of how Wikipedia is written irresponsible and deeply disturbing, and given the site’s status as a top-10 website, I believe the public needs to understand just what is going on in Wikipedia day after day.”

Pretty much all the “fringe” topics are subject to control by a large number of ideologues working together. They call themselves skeptics, but they are really just true believers of a different sort. They have a long history of ideologue behavior, -particularly towards the paranormal- that goes back to the 1900′s. They were organized long before Wikipedia was created and quickly moved onto the Internet when it became widely used. The Guerrilla Skeptics organization is merely an extension of what skeptics were already doing: working to control information in a way that is favorable to their ideology.

These ideologues are reactionaries. They typically don’t promote their own viewpoint so much as attack viewpoints that they disagree with.

—–

I am not the only person editing (the talk section of) that Wikipedia page for a neutral point of view. It is a very busy Wikipedia page at the moment, at least behind the scenes. Wikipedia editors are supposed to work together to iron out their differences, but in reality, the discussions have a very clear cut us vs. them delineation with no real compromising going on. The issue of how the page should look will surely come down to a fight.

At issue is the all important Wikipedia Neutral Point of View, or NPOV if you’re into the vast array of Wikipedia acronyms. Another important aspect of this conflict is that it is over the biography of a living person. (BLP) This affords Sheldrake some rights that an ordinary Wikipedia article doesn’t have. Wikipedia has faced several lawsuits because of slanderous articles over the years and this has in turn made the neutral point of view for biographies of living people a high priority. But getting there is still an uphill battle.

Here’s where it gets tricky: the skeptics use a tactic known as “undue weight.” Labeling something as fringe, which has been done to a wide variety of topics on Wikipedia allows skeptics to give extra weight to their point of view because by their reasoning, there are way more people that oppose these ideas than support them. This brings to mind the Orwellian phrase: “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.” And they’ve got legitimate second sources because they found some articles with a sentence or two that said something in favor of their argument.

Another way that skeptics weight things in their favor is to deny non mainstream sources that they don’t agree with while accepting equally non mainstream skeptical sources they do agree with. Quackwatch, a skeptical site run by Stephen Barrett, who has the distinction of having been declared “Biased, and unworthy of credibility.” by the US court system, in a published appeals court decision (NCAHF v King Bio),is supposedly a good source, but Natural News is not.

They’re not above attempts at intimidation either. On the Sheldrake bio talk page, I had referred to CSICOP as a radical atheist pressure group. Then I got this personal message:

Hi, I would recommend looking at WP:IMPERSONATE. The worst case of ignoring it is that a random administrator could temporarily block you, which wouldn’t be so bad, just inconvenient until you get it unblocked. This is just FYI; it doesn’t matter to me who anyone is. vzaak (talk) 06:42, 29 September 2013 (UTC) …

… There’s no downside in taking precautions when it comes to identity; “CSICOP, a known radical atheist pressure group” could be construed as an attempt to make the real Craig Weiler look bad. vzaak (talk) 10:47, 29 September 2013 (UTC)

… You can be blocked at any time, for no reason other than your account name. You could have been blocked ten seconds after you created your account. Making heated arguments simply draws more attention; it doesn’t actually matter what the arguments are about. Murphy’s Law says that a block would come at the worse possible time — say, in the middle of some argument — which might indeed look like a conspiracy. But it would only be Wikipedia’s WP:IMPERSONATE policy aiming to protect people. vzaak (talk) 22:37, 29 September 2013 (UTC)

That was truly bizarre. It brings to mind a Wikipedia mafia: “Nice name you got there. It would be a shame if anything should happen to it.” Surely someone would do a google search of my name first? The whole first page makes it pretty clear that I’m the real Craig Weiler.

I don’t know why they bother. I’m not a significant contributor to the page, I’m just too busy with other things, but someone who has been working hard to correct the article who goes by the name “The Tumbleman” has said that he/she plans a major edit. It should be interesting and I’ll keep everyone posted as to how it goes.

This is from Sheldrake

Wikipedia Under Threat
http://sciencesetfree.tumblr.com/post/6 ... der-threat

Wikipedia Under Threat

Wikipedia is a wonderful invention. But precisely because it’s so trusted and convenient, people with their own agendas keep trying to take it over. Editing wars are common. According to researchers at Oxford University, the most controversial subjects worldwide include Israel and God.

This is not surprising. Everyone knows that there are opposing views on politics and religion, and many people recognise a biased account when they see it. But in the realm of science, things are different. Most people have no scientific expertise and believe that science is objective. Their trust is now being abused systematically by a highly motivated group of activists called Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia.

Scepticism is a normal, healthy attitude of doubt. Unfortunately it can also be used as a weapon to attack opponents. In scientific and medical contexts, organized skepticism is a crusade to propagate scientific materialism. (In Britain, skeptical organizations use the American spelling, with a k.) Most materialists believe that the mind is nothing more than the physical activity of the brain, psychic phenomena are illusory, and complementary and alternative medical systems are fraudulent, or at best produce placebo effects. Most materialists are also atheists: if science can, in principle, explain everything, there is no need for God. Belief in God is a hangover from a pre-scientific age. God is nothing but an idea in human minds and hence in human brains. Several advocacy organizations promote this materialist ideology in the media and in educational institutions. The largest and best funded is the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI), which publishes The Skeptical Inquirer magazine. The Guerrilla Skeptics have carried the crusading zeal of organized skepticism into the realm of Wikipedia, and use it as a soapbox to propagate their beliefs.

There is a conflict at the heart of science between the spirit of free enquiry and the materialist worldview. I gave a talk this subject at a TEDx event in London earlier this year, in which I discussed the ten dogmas of modern science. I showed that by turning the dogmas into questions they can be examined critically in the light of the findings of science itself. For example, the assumption that the total amount of matter and energy is always the same becomes “Is the total amount of matter and energy always the same?” Most physicists now think that the universe contains vast amount of dark matter and dark energy, whose nature is literally obscure, constituting 96 percent of the universe. Regular matter and energy are only about 4 percent of reality. Is the total amount of dark matter always the same? No one knows. Some physicists think that the total amount of dark energy increases as the universe expands. Proponents of a hypothetical form of dark energy called quintessence specifically suggest that it produces different amounts of energy over time.

My talk was removed from the TEDx web site after furious protests from militant skeptics, who accused me of propagating pseudoscience. This sparked off a controversy that went viral on the internet, documented here. Most participants in online discussions were very disappointed that TED had been frightened into submission, and TED themselves retracted the accusations against me.

This summer, soon after the TED controversy, a commando squad of skeptics captured the Wikipedia page about me. They have occupied and controlled it ever since, rewriting my biography with as much negative bias as possible, to the point of defamation. At the beginning of the “Talk” page, on which editorial changes are discussed, they have posted a warning to editors who do not share their biases: “A common objection made by new arrivals is that the article presents Sheldrake’s work in an unsympathetic light and that criticism of it is too extensive or violates Wikipedia’s Neutral Point of View policy.” Several new arrivals have indeed attempted to restore a more balanced picture, but have had a bewildering variety of rules thrown at them, and warned that they will be banned if they persist in opposing the skeptics. Craig Weiler gives some telling examples in his newly posted blog called “The Wikipedia battle for Rupert Sheldrake’s biography”. Fortunately, a few editors arguing for a more neutral point of view have not yet been bullied into silence. An editing war is raging as you read this.

The Guerrilla Skeptics are well trained, highly motivated, have an ideological agenda, and operate in teams, contrary to Wikipedia rules. The mastermind behind this organization is Susan Gerbik. She explains how her teams work in a training video. She now has over 90 guerrillas operating in 17 different languages. The teams are coordinated through secret Facebook pages. They check the credentials of new recruits to avoid infiltration. Their aim is to “control information”, and Ms Gerbik glories in the power that she and her warriors wield. They have already seized control of many Wikipedia pages, deleted entries on subjects they disapprove of, and boosted the biographies of atheists.

As the Guerrilla Skeptics have demonstrated, Wikipedia can easily be subverted by determined groups of activists, despite its well-intentioned policies and mediation procedures. Perhaps one solution would be for experienced editors to visit the talk pages of sites where editing wars are taking place, rather like UN Peacekeeping Forces, and try to re-establish a neutral point of view. But this would not help in cases where there are no editors to oppose the Guerrilla Skeptics, or where they have been silenced.

If nothing is done, Wikipedia will lose its credibility, and its financial backers will withdraw their support. I hope the noble aims of Wikipedia will prevail.

October 5th
6 notes

Here is the web site for Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia:

Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia
http://guerrillaskepticismonwikipedia.blogspot.co.uk/

[viscount aero]

Thank you for that good bit of information. I read it all. Indeed, most scientifically savvy people who do not believe everything they read, namely from the mainstream, have known that Wikipedia is the New World Order of information sources. It is no place to go to get an unbiased and scientific viewpoint. It is sickening nonetheless.

When many people start posting links to Wiki articles that is immediately a red flag.