Talk:Rupert Sheldrake/Archive 11

This is an archive of past discussions about Rupert Sheldrake. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

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Academic credentials

There seems to be a long-running low level battle over Sheldrake's academic credentials. It's all about wording, but it would be good to get agreement at some basic level. Sheldrake gained a PhD in biochemistry, did post-doctoral research at Cambridge and was a research fellow at Clare College. That is a respectable, but not brilliant academic career. He wasn't a university lecturer, or in American terms an assistant professor, and wasn't tenured or on a tenure track. So he isn't in the same league as Roger Penrose, David Bohm or Hans-Peter Dürr for example. There have been attempts to cherry-pick quotes about "outstanding scientist" or down-play his credentials because he dropped out of academia. So Respectable but not Brilliant. Try to keep a balance. Dingo1729 (talk) 18:29, 25 October 2013 (UTC)

I don't understand. As an engineer, I interfaced with research and industrial scientists that were brilliant. There is much to the saying that those who can, do, and the rest teach, so being academic is not a valid measure of notability in my view. In fact, Sheldrake is one of the most respected scientists in the study of frontier subjects. Few in the study of subtle energy phenomena have been able to think so far beyond the current wisdoms of academia.

If editors here are both offended by his hypotheses and unimpressed by his credentials, then it is no wonder the article is biased. Do not think of him as an academic ... to most of us, the measure of a scientist is what he or she does and not what they teach in some university.

It is also a good idea to note my comment about how well he is respected. This article can be a catalyst for a very strong anti-Wikipedia pushback. So please, if it cannot be respectful, at least make the article a little more neutral.Tom Butler (talk) 18:55, 25 October 2013 (UTC)

Dingo1729 (talk · contribs) makes a very good point; and then it's blown totally out of the water by Tom Butler (talk · contribs)'s inanity. Please let's not get into an argument about credentials because everyone apart from Sheldrake's fans can see that he had an academic career that didn't last long enough for him to get to professor level. Barney the barney barney (talk) 19:09, 25 October 2013 (UTC)

Be careful Barney! Measuring his worth by his academic standing is part of the bias we are talking about. I am sorry you are so focused on making him look like a fool to see that. I am going to restore the tag. My nest stop is an admin complain. Tom Butler (talk) 19:22, 25 October 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. I was merely echoing Dingo1729 (talk · contribs)'s point. Sheldrake's career while it lasted was OK. He doesn't meet the criteria in WP:PROF, and cannot therefore be compared to those who do, because he didn't gain enough seniority. He went freelance, as it were. The only bias, btw, is calling him "the most respected frontier scientist". There is in the article several sources from academics that indicate specific problems with Sheldrake's proposals. You are also reminded of WP:ARB/PS. Barney the barney barney (talk) 19:40, 25 October 2013 (UTC)

Dingo1729, I agree his academic career is Respectable not Brilliant... albeit for a post-doc at a top-ten-in-the-world university! That is a very small set of people. But yes, he is way outclassed by Penrose, of course. The reason I bring up Penrose is because both are from U.Cambridge, both are PhD, both have published popular books about their own personal subquantum theories which are admittedly controversial, and yet the BLP of Penrose is quite fair to my eyes, whereas the BLP of Sheldrake is blatantly unfair, labelling him a parapsychologist and incorrectly therefore stripping him of his credentials, which belong in the first sentence, per my reasoning in the section above. As for the he-was-not-a-professor thing, was Sheldrake the equivalent of the american's Research Assistant, i.e. the focus was all on lab work and writing papers? Then the relevant criteria is not whether he taught undergrads, but how many peer-reviewed papers he published. Does somebody have a count? However, at one point I gained the impression that Sheldrake did perform teaching-duties, and was some kind of professor, at least some of his time in grad-school or post-grad-school or whatever... did he never act as a Teaching Assistant, in charge of classroom tutorials for some section of a larger class (taught by a full tenured prof), and grade papers and tests and such? I'm not really familiar with U.Cambridge procedures, and nobody seemed to have the answers to my earlier question about when exactly Sheldrake was a post-doc, and so on. Thanks. p.s. was he fellow at Clare, too? or was that a typo and you meant Harvard? 74.192.84.101 (talk) 20:55, 25 October 2013 (UTC)

Sheldrake's bio [[1]] says he was a fellow of Clare College, and I have no reason to disbelieve him, though he would probably be a junior research fellow at that stage of his career. He might have been like a research assistant some of the time he was doing his PhD, but he would choose his own research post-doctorate. Cambridge does small-group tutorials (which they call supervisions). 1,2,3 or 4 students to a supervisor. Supervisors may be anyone from junior graduate students to distinguished professors. This is all organized by "directors of studies" and Sheldrake was a director of studies; almost certainly he was also a supervisor (T.A. equivalent?), but I haven't seen any mention of it. There's no grading of papers or tests; everything depends on final exams. Dingo1729 (talk) 21:41, 25 October 2013 (UTC)

The link you mention might be valid for some WP:ABOUTSELF stuff, but anything related to academic-credentials would need an independent WP:RS of course, so everything after this point is ^{[citation needed]}. Below are the claims, numbered for ease of discussion. Thanks for the explanation of UCambridge, appreciated. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 23:41, 25 October 2013 (UTC)

Revised the list with some dates and sources. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 05:04, 30 October 2013 (UTC)

became an atheist at age 13 circa 1955-or-1956 via boarding school[2]

got a job at 17 circa 1959-or-1960 in the pharmacology research lab of Parke-Davis in London, just before UCambridge

Cambridge University student at 17-or-maybe-18 in 1959-or-1960 , undergrad science scholarship

Frank Knox Fellow at Harvard in 1963, taking a year off from UCambridge, read Kuhn [3]

UCambridge PhD in biochem began 1964 and awarded YYYY, started a teaching-position in 1967 which officially lasted through 1974 (six years more in the teaching-job to achieve lectureship)[4]

UMalaya BotanyDept 1968-1969, as a Rosenheim Research Fellow (scholarship-slash-grant) of the Royal Society (still officially in UCambridge Biochem), spent two months in India enroute[5]

started practicing meditation in 1969 [6]

Principal Plant Physiologist slash Consulting Physiologist at ICRISAT in Hyderabad, 1974-1985, which contradicts the wiki-article's claim of 1978...

prolly 1974-1978 principal

and 1979-1985 consulting, the change in title due to taking the 18 months to write the 1981 book.

Dir. of Perrott-Warrick Project, funded from Trinity College in Cambridge, 2005-2010. (David-in-DC wrote a sentence about this which sounds NPOV to me, pointing out the cash was money from an earmarked bequest.)

80 scientific papers (does not say how many in mainstream peer-reviewed scientific journals),

"where [as a student at Cambridge U methinks?] he was a Scholar of Clare College",

awarded the [Cambridge] University Botany Prize^[when?],

Fellow of Clare^[when?] and Dir.Studies in biochem^[when?] & cellbio^[when?],

There is also something about "took a double first class honours degree" which is inscrutable to my ears... hs degree, undergrad, grad, phd, something else entirely, care to translate?

Also mentions these, which I've never heard of before: Fellow^[when?] of Inst. of Noetic Sciences in CA,

Visiting Prof^[when?] & Academic Dir.^[when?] of Holistic Thinking Program at the Graduate Inst. in CT aka LearnDotEdu. (Maybe the 'professor' that I was remembering reading here somewhere on the talkpage is from that CT position -- which although I've never heard of it does have .edu indicating *some* level of reasonable respectability -- rather than from his days as a TA-slash-SupervisorWhileDirectorOfStudies.)

Any way you slice it, the man had a 20-year career as a mainstream scientist/biologist/physiologist/biochemist/cellbiologist/etc, enough to retire if he was a marine, and all those war-medals, err sorry, fellowships (if confirmed by WP:RS) would cause me to upgrade him from Respectable to something like Highly Respectable, depending on how many of the 80 papers that he says he published were between 1960 and 1980. That's not even counting his five-year Trinity College grant, his LearnDotEdu professorship, his invited lectures at a couple dozen major universities since 2008, and the rest of his post-1980 academic credentials. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 23:41, 25 October 2013 (UTC)

Tom, do not threaten editors you will complain to an admin. Work it out civilly. Be WP:NICE, this is not a WP:BATTLEGROUND. Now, on the article, if you want to say that Sheldrake is one of the most respected scientists in the study of frontier subjects, you have to cite a reliable source. That is exactly the sort of thing that Dingo1729 is cautioning us about. Getting a biochem Phd from U.Cambridge is very impressive, but that does not automatically translate into "Best.Scientist.Evah." Citation needed. As for your meta-reasoning, that in your opinion academic-creds shouldn't matter... in some things they do, in some things they don't. The morph theory is a theory of physics, and academic-creds are what separates the galileo-with-a-blog from the Roger Penrose. Sheldrake is nowhere near Penrose in physics credentials, and Penrose is not as good as Sheldrake in biochem credentials, but both of them are wayyyy beyond the random blogger handwaving about quantum electrodynamics. Which, as I keep pointing out, is fundamentally why Sheldrake is here on wikipedia. His academic career was not breathtakingly brilliant... if he had solved the mechanism of plant morphology, then believe me, he would be a *very* famous biologist, on the tier right below Darwin probably. Instead, Sheldrake failed to be breathtakingly brilliant using traditional biochem, and instead hypothesized that there must be some not-yet-experimentally-detected mechanism which will someday explain plant morphology, and gained notability (and not a little notoriety) by publishing popular books about such ideas. Penrose by contrast *was* a brilliant mathematical physicist, on the tier right below Einstein and Hawking and so on, in my book... but if Penrose had managed the uber-breathtaking brilliance to discover the mechanism of consciousness, he would be considerably more famous than Einstein, and you and I would not need to be spending time improving wikipedia -- because wikipedia would be sentient, and improving herself, at computer speeds. In some ways I'm sorry Penrose failed, but in other ways, not so sorry. :-) Be that as it may, you may need a cold shower, so that you can look on Sheldrake with some objectivity, or at least, provide some reliable sources saying that he really is Best.Scientist.Evah. Wikipedia does not care about popularity, unless that popularity is documented in reliable sources, as you know. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 20:55, 25 October 2013 (UTC)

Barney, you are making a personal attack when you call somebody else "inane". Stop. Just disagree civilly, and point out flaws in the argument. May I also sweetly and innocently inquire as to what you intended by your stern reminder of ArbCom? Surely you would not be threatening to ban someone you disagree with; even if they did it first, two wrongs do not make three lefts. As for your claim that Sheldrake 'had' an academic career (implying it is now over and he is no longer a scientist), and your later comment that "while it lasted" his career was okay... by which I assume you mean, okay-for-a-UCambridge-PhD-biochemist-with-a-harvard-fellowship ... perhaps like Tom you also need a nice cold shower? I agree that Sheldrake does not meet WP:PROF, but as has been pointed out to you several times before, that is a notability-criteria for article creation. Sheldrake is *both* someone with okay-for-a-UCambridge-PhD-biochemist-with-a-harvard-fellowship scientific credentials, and simultaneously someone who is WP:N as a controversial author/lecturer. Do you disagree, and if so, please paste in the specific policy-sentence which says we must not call Sheldrake a scientist in the first sentence, merely because his current notability does not derive solely from his scientific career. We also mention that Sheldrake has a wife, but surely *that* is not why he has an article in wikipedia, see WP:MARRIEDTOSOMEONENOTSUFFICIENT. Do you suggest we delete the wife, as not WP:NOTEWORTHY, and delete the scientist portion of the first sentence, as not WP:NOTEWORTHY? That is not what WP:PROF says. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 20:55, 25 October 2013 (UTC)

Good advice 74.192.84.101. Even so, at some point, it might be helpful for a more formal settlement on the interpretation of the WP:ARB/PS line: "18) Alternative theoretical formulations which have a following within the scientific community are not pseudoscience, but part of the scientific process." [7]. When I was around that discussion and the Fringe Science and Paranormal arbitrations, my sense was that the admins had were trying to find a way to deal with this kind of article in a more neutral way. There was also a more "conditional" allowance acceptable for what are acceptable sources while here, it is mainstream or nothing. We can settle that here if the contentious sniping is set aside and people stop stonewalling efforts to build a consensus. Tom Butler (talk) 22:47, 25 October 2013 (UTC)

Tom, BE WP:NICE. :-) If you really want to encourage people to work together, accusing Vague Other Parties of being guilty of stonewalling/sniping/etc is Not The Way To Do It.... the cold shower *is* the way, I swear, I have a reliable source proving cold showers increase objectivity, I will post it RealSoonNow. Plus, please call me 74, which is a lot easier to type, not to mention read. The line#18 from arbcom is talking about alternative-mainstream-formulations, not about Sheldrake's work. Like the Penrose stuff about subquantum consciousness, which Penrose fully admits is speculative, the Sheldrake stuff about subquantum morphological-signalling is speculative. Neither one has evidence, accepted by mainstream scientists... heck, the reason that both Sheldrake and Penrose went for the subquantum is that they *tried* using mainstream science, but failed. No, no, Sheldrake and Penrose (at least their subquantum work as opposed to Penrose's mainstream 4-D mathematics work and Sheldrake's mainstream bio-uptake work) are 100% positively WP:FRINGE. I'm willing to bet even Sheldrake does not claim morphogenetics is fully proven cold hard fact -- that is why he wants to loosen up the dogmatic-folks-in-science, so that he can shake loose funding to investigate the subquantum, right? We simply cannot know whether Sheldrake is right or wrong, until we have *discovered* the actual mechanism of plant morphology, which is billions or trillions of dollars of R&D from now. Anyways, maybe there is evidence from top-notch sources, but in my mind Sheldrake's speculative science requires those top-notch sources, for good reason. The Institute Of Parapsychology (made up name... maybe there is a real one... no offense intended if so) is inherently not a reliable source, on whether Sheldrake's ideas hold promise, and deserve more funding... because a big chunk of the funding would go to them! That is the reason that wikipedia policy demands *extremely* high-quality sources, for justification of positive evidence that speculative claims might be true. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 00:04, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

You said: "Sheldrake is *both* someone with okay-for-a-UCambridge-PhD-biochemist-with-a-harvard-fellowship scientific credentials, and simultaneously someone who is WP:N as a controversial author/lecturer." if I understand your statement correctly, I agree that a simple statement of education and then a focus on his non-academic activities is appropriate. If it can be left that way, I think that part of the article would be fair and stable. Tom Butler (talk) 22:47, 25 October 2013 (UTC)

Well, see the section above, which is discussing exactly what I propose the first sentence should say, namely this -- Sheldrake (1942-) is an English biochemist^[1]-and-now-parapsychologist^[2], notable as a controversial^[3] author/lecturer. How do you like them apples, to use the old saying? Right now the first sentence implies he has *no* academic credentials, which is flat wrong, and misleading. David suggested that psychical researcher might be more NPOV that parapsychologist, but I think the former term is too esoteric and readers won't know what it means, so I'm more in favor of the latter, which is sourced, and is reasonably clear even if still a bit misleading. We can clear up exactly what *sort* of parapsychology Sheldrake does in the second paragraph of the lead, where morpho stuff is NPOV-described. Third paragraph is criticism of morpho stuff, necessary per WP:FRINGE, and more fairly, per WP:SUPERCONTROVERSIAL. I'm suggesting a brief fourth paragraph about wife & kids, which right now are in their own single-sentence-section. Anyhoo, see above, and reply above please... TheRedPenOfDoom is trying to keep sanity, by keeping to one topic per section, which is a very good idea. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 00:04, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

74.192.84.101, your hot shower comments are not helpful either. You also make assumptions about a field you clearly know nothing about. Editing based on those assumptions only confounds the problem. I think the fact that this article has been in contention for so long supports my view that consensus has not been achieved. I have seen editors try, but always there are a few, such as the one you just praised, who is quick with a deflecting wisecrack. I expect that, looking at it from either the skeptical or the proponent perspective, the other side appears to be WP:STONEWALL; however, I feel that there has been more effort to compromise from the proponent side. Tom Butler (talk) 17:12, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

Please call me 74, it's easier for all concerned. Sorry about the cold-shower-brings-objectivity commentary not being helpful; it was intended to be helpful, by trying to lessen the adversarial who-can-call-the-admin-first back and forth between you and Barney, and definitely not intended as an attempt to drive one or both of you away. Your contention that the pro-Sheldrake folks have been more compromising than the anti-Sheldrake folks is quite true: the current basket-case state of the article is heavily skewed towards the anti-Sheldrake POV, no doubt about it, definitely a biased BLP article. But the larger problem is the *idea* that the article should be used as a political football, and that unsatisfying-to-both-sides compromises are the only way, and in general that Sheldrake-related content should be treated as a WP:BATTLEGROUND and as a place to WP:RGW.

That confrontational environment was clear the moment I came to this talkpage, and Barney told me to take my frivolous moaning and leave. He did the same thing the VeryScaryMary, but secretly, on her talkpage, threatening her with ArbCom and implying she was a pro-fringe, when all she really was doing was pointing out the blatantly obvious non-neutrality of this article, backed up by perfectly reliable sources. But the pro-Sheldrake folks like yourself do not have the high moral ground, because you let Barney bait you, and then threaten to sic an admin on him... that is stooping to the battleground level. Give him enough WP:ROPE. As for RedPen, I do praise them, they have not stooped to personal attacks. They do seem prone to making wisecracks, but so am I. Sarcasm and humor are tricky to get right on the talkpage, which is mere text, but sometimes a little poking-fun can go a long way. Other times it can backfire, especially in a battleground-assume-bad-faith-environment. I do not believe at all that the RedPenOfDoom was trying to drive VeryScaryMary away... they were just trying to lighten up a serious discussion, and put their opinion in, and it turned out badly, but that was not really their fault. People make mistakes; don't be too hard on them. And don't hold battleground grudges -- the RedPen's idea that we should stop making new sections to rehash the same old thing is a good one (as long as folks will follow through and answer questions... I made the new section for my first-sentence-proposal because nobody was answering me at all... albeit prolly because unable to penetrate my previous wall-of-text verbosity).

As for VeryScaryMary, seeing immediate sarcasm from the RedPenOfDoom, then the innocent request by Roxy that she read this talkpage and all the talkpage archives, then my volumnious WP:WALLOFTEXT including somewhat-tangential responses, but most hurtful first of all reading Barney's WP:CRUSH on her talkpage, she fled in terror, saying she would rather die than stick around on this twenty-five-page-long battlepage, and that everyone here was acting terribly. That is undoubtedly true, no citation needed. This talkpage is awful. And, although I'm attempting to improve the situation, you are correct when you say that I'm not being helpful either, in actual practice: I did not manage to keep VeryScaryMary from being driven away, and I while I did manage to extract some helpful comments from yourself (thanks!) and also some helpful comments and a well-done rewrite from Ringo1729, you both are now pretty convinced that this talkpage is an utter waste of time, and not helpful, and that you have better things to do, elsewhere, just as VeryScaryMary decided. Which is perfectly true! We all have better, more productive editing we could be doing.

But if we all give up and leave, then the article will stay just the basket-case is is now, totally skewed in a great many places to the Barney-approved Consensus-Despite-Being-POV. That's not acceptable by wikipedia policies, and not acceptable to me personally. All that being said -- verbosity is my weakness as some here have gently pointed out -- there is nothing wrong with Barney's desire to keep wikipedia a reliable source of truth, and to make sure that we describe Sheldrake's theories as speculative, and demand extremely reliable sources according to WP:FRINGE. I want them to keep doing just that. But tendentious editing, refusing to answer simple questions, and trying to drive new arrivals away is not WP:NICE, and while we can debate the relative merits of WP:BLP versus WP:FRINGE in terms of their applicability to the article, Barney has crossed the pillars, both four and two, in pursuit of the eeevvviillll Doktor Sheldrakenstein who must never be recognized as having impeccable academic scientific credentials by *any* reasonable standard. The bulk of the NPOV sources uniformly call Sheldrake a biologist and an author, or more rarely, an author and a biochemist. Of course, Sheldrake's facebook page uses WP:PEACOCK and says he is a renowned author/scientist, but that's not going to fly in wikipedia unless reliable third-party sources also so say. Still, refusal to say 'scientist' or 'biochemist' or somesuch thing in the opening sentence is not just unfair, and untrue, it's a POV violation. Fortunately, the latter of those three things *is* a policy-violation here in the wikiverse.

Thus, at the end of the day (to the extent that wikipedia has such a thing), in the reasonably near future... albeit it looks like we are still many days away, if not weeks... I can confidently predict that the Sheldrake article will become considerably more NPOV... and maybe get some copy-editing and some grammar cleanup and some of the other simpler stuff it is definitely needing. But to get there, we have to break the back of the WP:BATTLEGROUND mentality.

For my part, I do not want you to leave, and ... although my reply to you is of course a wall-of-text like always ... I am doing my best not to drive you away, by wasting your time. If you do decide to come back, take heart, policy is largely on your side -- in most cases the lopsided battleground-compromises that the pro-Sheldrake folks have offered, earlier chronologically, will soon be repaid by the majority of the upcoming changes (which I'm going to see implemented) all being decidedly pro-Sheldrake! That's what happens when the other side does not play fair. Thanks for reading, and thanks for improving wikipedia. With that, I have to go take a cold shower. :-) Be back later. — 74.192.84.101 (talk) 19:22, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

The lead is too long. Here's a better one. It covers the bases and is fair to Sheldrake. Put the pseudoscience criticism in later sections. Don't hype the biologist title. Read the Parapsychology Association definition of parapsychology and admit that morphic resonance isn't parapsychology. Type less and think more. I've got better things to do with my time. Goodbye.

Alfred Rupert Sheldrake (born 28 June 1942) is an English author, lecturer and proponent of an alternative scientific world-view{cite Roszac review in NS} which he has named morphic resonance. His ideas were developed from his research in biochemistry at Cambridge University{cite something mentioning credentials}. He has conducted several experiments, the results of which he believes support his theories but his conclusions are not accepted by mainstream scientists. However he has support among parapsychologists {cite supporting references} and the lay public, balanced by vociferous opposition from skeptics{cite skeptics}.

Dingo1729 (talk) 04:00, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

100% support this proposal, but fear that many editors here don't really care about whether the reader has to crawl through crap to get to the relevant information they are looking for, so wouldn't be surprised if this is seen as far too impartial and objective. So I like it - what do others think? Tento2 (talk) 11:16, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

Support Dingo1729's proposal. Do not be too hard on editors who make readers crawl through crap--not everyone is skilled in exposition of complicated subjects. Do not be at all hard on 74--he is verbose but clear, helpful, and always on-topic. Lou Sander (talk) 12:58, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

Support with two modification. First, insertion of biochemist (or biologist -- don't care which) into the first sentence. Leaving it out is non-neutral, a lie of omission, and we have plenty of reliable sources showing it to be the case, from last year and from decades ago. Do not much care if the ordering is "biochemist and author/lecturer" or instead the flipped version "author/lecturer and biochemist" but think that the fragment about 'proponent of alternative scientific worldview' is more connected to his second career as a popular/infamous/renowned/controversial/whateverPOVadjectiveYouPrefer author, therefore lean towards "biochemist and author/lecturer" as being more chronological and also more clear. Second, insertion of "published N books about his theories and" just in front of the 'conducted several experiments' part in third sentence, because Sheldrake's primary claim to wikipedia Notability is his books, not his papers/experiments/teaching/lectures/etc, all of which stem from the money made selling books. p.s. Value of N depends on whether we count co-authoring and/or new editions. If it turns out exact N is controversial, then I drop my second modification entirely for now, so as not to let the ever-so-slightly-more-perfect be the enemy of the already-very-good. p.p.s. Excellent rewrite, thank you very kindly. Will work on terseness. :-) Hope you return, sorry for my part in your leaving, you will be missed. Thanks for improving wikipedia. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 19:22, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

I think description as an author on [suitable wording for fringe subjects [thus indicating his primary reason for notability]] who formerly worked in academia (i.e. was employed by academic institutions) as biochemist, plant physiologist is entirely correct [giving additional background information]. This is essentially what we have at the moment. Dingo1729 (talk · contribs)'s suggestion isn't too unreasonable but it (a) fails to summarise the article and (b) it flip-flops too much between "pro" and "anti" sources, and (c) it gives far too much attribution to WP:FRINGE sources. Barney the barney barney (talk) 19:47, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

We could use the phrase that Sheldrake is an author who "qualified as a biochemist", the past tense leaving the reader to make their own assumptions. --Iantresman (talk) 20:24, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

Disagree -- you do not say the marine with the grey hair and the chest covered with medals *used* to be a marine. You do not say that Sinatra *used* to be a singer, to swipe somebody else's quote. The guy is a scientist, and calling him something POV like parapsychologist (which I was under the false impression that normal/typical sources *besides* wikipedia and the few cites wikipedia gives) is flat incorrect and misleading. VeryScaryMary has provided plenty of sources for this usage, and even the simplest googling proves her point. Plus, the whole key to why Sheldrake is seen as a threat to science is that he is a scientist. Leaving that out is cheating the reader, and the truth, not to mention violating pillar two (let alone four). 74.192.84.101 (talk) 04:47, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

He is NOT a "proponent of an alternative scientific world-view" and mis-labeling him as such in the lead sentence is a non-starter.WP:NPOV / WP:VALID his is a pseudo-scientific world view. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 07:54, 27 October 2013 (UTC)

Yes, TRPOD, We shouldn't be using the word "scientific" - (or for that matter "pseudoscientific", anti-scientific, etc) without qualification because that would imply endorsement of a particular view of his activities. Barney the barney barney (talk) 17:42, 27 October 2013 (UTC)

TRPoD, we agree using the bare-word use of 'scientific' to describe Sheldrake's phytomorphology/physics/consciousness/similar theories *would* be incorrect. (And of course, ditto for his theology, or his philosophy of science, or his philosophy of mind, or his other 'humanties' stuff.) But this is distinct from whether he the person is a scientist; do not conflate the two things. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 04:47, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

A proposed amendment, in the hope of simplifying the lede and addressing the concerns expressed above (haven't built in refs here, but they are already available on the main page):

Alfred Rupert Sheldrake (born 28 June 1942) is an English author, lecturer and proponent of morphic resonance: the notion that "memory is inherent in nature" and that "natural systems, such as termite colonies, or pigeons, or orchid plants, or insulin molecules, inherit a collective memory from all previous things of their kind.". His ideas were developed from his doctorate and subsequent research in biochemistry and cell biology at Cambridge University.

Sheldrake has questioned several of the foundations of modern science, arguing that science has become a series of dogmas rather than an open-minded approach to investigating phenomena. His critics express concern that his books and public appearances attract popular attention in a way that has a negative impact on the public's understanding of science. He has conducted several experiments, the results of which he believes support his theories although his conclusions are not accepted by mainstream scientists. He is seen as a controversial figure, who has gained support among parapsychologists and the lay public, balanced by vociferous opposition from skeptics.

Everything else, as far as I can see, is adding little except meat for arguments. Tento2 (talk) 14:51, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

Actually that isn't bad. It works for me if you get rid of the phrase "and the lay public, balanced by vociferous opposition from skeptics." and just put a full stop after parapsychologists. --Roxy the dog (resonate) 15:10, 28 October 2013 (UTC)}

The last part of the last sentence is a little wordy. How about we turn it around a little so that the final paragraph reads:

Although Sheldrake has gained support among parapsychologists, he is seen as a controversial figure for having questioned several of the foundations of modern science and arguing that science has become a series of dogmas rather than an open-minded approach to investigating phenomena. His critics express concern that his books and public appearances attract popular attention in a way that has a negative impact on the public's understanding of science. Although he has conducted several experiments, the results of which he believes support his theories, his conclusions have been disputed and rejected by mainstream scientists.

In regard to refs for these comments, lede remarks shouldn't actually be supported by refs, because the lede is supposed to highlight information that is already explained and referenced within the main body of the article. This is another reason why the lede needs to be brief and build its content on points that are well established, free of dispute, and supported by reliable references. It should be our own, agreed-upon, editorial summary, and anything that opens up controversy needs to come out.Tento2 (talk) 16:04, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

This is getting close. I think the first paragraph should somehow say that Sheldrake is (pretty much) the only proponent of Morphic Resonance, and that it has been examined and refuted by mainstream people. The experiments are a different matter, as is his questioning of some foundational principles of science. I think that the "controversial figure" stuff belongs right up front in the first paragraph--an important aspect of his notability is the controversy that surrounds him. Lou Sander (talk) 16:50, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

How about this for the first paragraph:

Alfred Rupert Sheldrake (born 28 June 1942) is a controversial English author, lecturer and proponent of morphic resonance: the notion that "memory is inherent in nature" and that "natural systems, such as termite colonies, or pigeons, or orchid plants, or insulin molecules, inherit a collective memory from all previous things of their kind." This idea originated during his doctoral studies and subsequent research in biochemistry and cell biology at Cambridge University, and has been developed over many years since. The concept of Morphic Resonance has been examined and forcefully rejected by numerous mainstream scientists; it has received little support outside Sheldrake's immediate circle.

In accordance with the ideas expressed by Tento2 above, I probably wouldn't include citations. Neither would I object to leaving them in. Lou Sander (talk) 17:43, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

Is there are problem with the introduction that Ian suggested up-the-page? If there is, would you please tell me why? The first references to Mr Sheldrakes job title and qualifications are all from the same website, (new scientist) and are all very old:( I really would like to understand why there is such a problem with getting to change less than 20 words? Why does there need to be the word 'controversial' in the intro? Tento, do you view him as that controversial? How many of the editors here have actually read his books, or seen him talk or know much about the man himself? And what's so wrong about what he writes about/researches? PLUS why are people discussing the page on here, when they're banned from editing? Surely if you get an editing ban, then your views are null-and-void? According to Wikipedia:Banning_policy#Conduct_towards_banned_editors banned editors aren't supposed to have anything more to do with an article. I would like to help edit this page/subject. I would like Mr Sheldrake's job title and description to be correct. I would like when members of the public visit this page, that they find not only correct information but also more NPOV Mr Sheldrake is NOT the only person to investigate morphic resonance (i quoted other scientists who have above) and where are all these people that are in dispute with what he's written/researched? MOST people (that's ordinary people not scientists) are intrigued with his research...and are you aware that this talk page is now being written about http://www.realitysandwich.com/wikipedia_battle_rupert_sheldrakes_biography Veryscarymary (talk) 19:00, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

Why are you so rude to Sheldrake, Mary? I've asked you politely a couple of times to refer to him not as 'Mr' if you have to use a title, but as 'Dr'. You will note that none of us here use Mr, we either call him Dr. or just 'Sheldrake'. Neither are disrespectful.

About 'banned' editors. There are no banned editors still writing here, the ones who have been banned can't write here. If you are referring to IP editors, they aren't banned, they just choose not to create accounts here, and so are disadvantaged when there are restrictions imposed, due normally to vandalism by, well by vandals. Before making wild statements about things you should get to understand what is going on first.

I find it interesting that you pointed out Craig Weiller's post as an example of people writing about this page off-wiki. That seems to be a copy of his poorly researched blog post. Very inaccurate, as you know, having read this talk page. What amuses me that as a 'Psychic' he ought to know how this whole thing ends anyway.

I also wanted to try to explain to you what we are here for as wikipedians, trying to produce an encyclopaedia. We are charged to tell it like it is, within the rules as set out for us by the community. It is pretty clear that you don't understand what this means when it comes to fringe ideas, such as Dr. Sheldrakes. It's like homeopathy or astrology - our articles describe them for the nonsense that they are, with no basis in reality, without being unduly rude or disparaging. (Not an easy task) It is right that they are described as such, because they are fringe topics, whose tenets and beliefs are nonsensical. Sheldrakes ideas are like the sugar pills of homeopathy or the star charts of astrology - they have no basis in fact. We have a duty to describe that. --Roxy the dog (resonate) 01:16, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

Roxy, you are not being very WP:NICE, now settle down, do you want your biscuit? There are a billion words here, Mary has no need to read them all, especially since most are not worth reading, mine included. She has her facts perfectly clear: nearly every single source calls sheldrake a scientist/biologist/biochemist/cellBiologist/phytologist/plantPhysiologist ... because that is what he is after all ... only wikipedia strips him of that credential, and clearly it is for a very POV purpose... to make his theories discredited, by discrediting him. But he is a scientist, with highly respectable credentials, and wikipedians cannot cherrypick to suit POV. You ar wrong when you say Wikipedians Are Charged To Tell It Like It Is, quite wrong. We are charged to tell it like *sources* say it is, to maintain NPOV, and not to mis-use wikipedia to WP:RGW. As for the astrology star-charts, they are reasonably accurate, as long as you don't mind adjusting manually for a couple thousand years of precession. You think astrology-Jupiter is plotted incorrectly compared to real-Jupiter? Astrology, like alchemy, or for that matter like the early use of opiates in medicine, is a type of largely-discredited form of proto-science precursors, mixing some good with some bad. Saying they have no basis in fact is POV, and historically incorrect. Which, since this talkpage is already filled beyond the brim, I'll be happy to discuss further on my user-talkpage, if you care to, but not here. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 04:40, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

Hi there Mary, glad to see you were not driven away. :-) Using the word 'controversial' is WP:EDITORIALIZING unless we have a source... the best I could come up with was UsaToday, which is *not* a very convincing one (since yellow journalism sells newspapers). Even *they* called him a biologist, however. Pretty much all the sources do, except one or two. Anyhoo, we'll get this non-neutrality fixed up at some point. Barney wants sheldrake to be a non-scientist, which is wrong, but TRPoD just wants morphic-fields to be (properly) pointed out as speculative/etc, and is just confusing that goal with the goal of describing sheldrake-the-person (as distinct from morphic-fields-the-view). Mary, can I please suggest that you create a section, and offer us what you would have the lede say, exactly? That might help.

Amended proposal

OK, I see us getting close, I'd like to open up a new sub thread with this conflation of Tento's two versions and some tweaks of my own. My tweaks are noted with strikethroughs or in bold. While I understand Mary's question about why it's necessary to amend Tento's first proposal, I think it loses gravity with Tento having put forward an alternative in response to others' comments, including at least one quacked with harmonious resonance from the other side of the great skeptic/BLP divide.

Alfred Rupert Sheldrake (born 28 June 1942) is an English author, lecturer and proponent of morphic resonance: the notion that "memory is inherent in nature" and that "natural systems, such as termite colonies, or pigeons, or orchid plants, or insulin molecules, inherit a collective memory from all previous things of their kind.". ~~His ideas were~~ He developed the idea of morphic resonance during his doctoral studies and, after receiving his Ph.D., from his ~~doctorate and,~~ subsequent research in biochemistry and cell biology at Cambridge University.

Although Sheldrake has gained support among parapsychologists, he is seen by most of his scientific peers as a ~~controversial~~ figure of controversy for having questioned several of the foundations of modern science and arguing that science has become a series of dogmas rather than an open-minded approach to investigating phenomena. His critics express concern that his books and public appearances attract popular attention in a way that has a negative impact on the public's understanding of science. Although he has conducted several experiments, the results of which he believes support his theories, his conclusions have been disputed and rejected ~~by mainstream scientists~~ in the scientific literature.

Also, I think we'd do better to leave the refs in. David in DC (talk) 22:10, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

I think it's important to include "controversial" in the first sentence. He IS controversial--look at all the stuff about him here and in the references.

I also think that "The concept of Morphic Resonance has been examined and forcefully rejected by numerous mainstream scientists; it has received little support outside Sheldrake's immediate circle." is an accurate description, and might satisfy those who demand that his work be placed in its proper relationship to the mainstream.

The parapsychology stuff mainly pertains to Dogs that Know and Sense of Being Stared at, not to Morphic Resonance. The challenging dogmas stuff sort of stands on its own. Lou Sander (talk) 23:07, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

He got the idea of morphic resonance in Cambridge, but he didn't develop it until after he left for India, as the "Origin and philosophy" section explains. Questioning the foundations of modern science is largely from his 2012 book -- that's not the point around which Sheldrake has drawn controversy for 32 years. It's a disservice to remove all indication of why Sheldrake's ideas are not accepted by the scientific community. That makes scientists actually seem dogmatic, as Sheldrake claims.

The current lead in the article is substantially muted from weeks past; David did the first round of muting and I did a bit more a couple weeks ago. Really, I see little problem with it. I wish the physics part was smoother, or that there was some alternative for addressing the "series of dogmas", other than citing Lawton's "woolly credulousness" of course.

The above proposal does have one idea worth considering: removing the parapsychologist title. I would agree to that. vzaak (talk) 02:18, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

David, same objection#1 as usual. Needs to say 'biochemist' or if you prefer 'biologist' in the first sentence. ...an English biochemist, author/lecturer, and proponent of... or ...an English author/lecturer, biologist, and proponent of... Do you disagree 'scientist' is correct? 74.192.84.101 (talk) 04:26, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

David, same objection#2 as usual. Sheldrake is most famous as an author. Needs to insert "...that his N books since 1981..." to give an indication of how long & successful his authoring-career has been. Disagree? 74.192.84.101 (talk) 04:26, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

David, new&interesting objection :-) ...you mention his phd, and his U.Cambridge research, but cut out all the fellowships (including the stint at Harvard which was the key to his later Kuhnian attacks on the way science's funding-infrastructure works). We can leave that stuff until later, if you think it does not belong in the lede, but I agree with Lou that the dogma-stuff slash science-funding-stuff slash question-advocacy stuff stands alone, and prolly ought be mentioned alone. Maybe also the books on spirituality. Maybe add a sentence somewhere? "Besides his proposals in biochemistry and physics, Sheldrake has long advocated that the way science is conducted, funded, and questioned should be changed, and became a Ksomething Fellow at Harvard for a year to study the history of science; FamousScientist has accused Sheldrake of improperly questioning the foundations of science." Can likely be slimmed-n-trimmed. In your current version, you say that the dogma-stuff is why sheldrake is controversial, but that's just recent, and thus not the whole truth: the telepathy-like nature of morphic resonance is the original (and still main... TEDx notwithstanding) source of controversy among mainstream scientists. p.s. Minor slim: ...has conducted several experiments, but the results have been disputed and rejected... 74.192.84.101 (talk) 04:26, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

He is controversial mostly because of Morphic. The other stuff gets much less criticism. It consists of 1) writing parapsychology books (Pets, Staring), 2) thoughtfully challenging some dogmas of science (Set Free). That Morphic is controversial is an important aspect of his notability. Lou Sander (talk) 05:09, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

I'm basically OK with that but not sure about the last sentence - preferred it as it was - but could live with this. We don't need to say 'biochemist' or 'biologist' in the first sentence - it is covered by the fact that we've mentioned his "doctorate and subsequent research in biochemistry and cell biology at Cambridge University"; (credit the reader with the intelligence to realise that means he has credentials in those subjects, and build more info in the main body if necessary - don't strive to push any point beyond the briefest account necessary in the lede). It is patently clear that Sheldrake is a controversial figure but we don't need to put the word 'controversial' into the first sentence or first part of the lede. Anything that gets mentioned within a brief lede is sufficiently highlighted. We also don't need to imply that his ideas are nonsense or garbage - we should impartially report the reasons for his notability, not build in any assumptions of our own. We will have a much better chance of reaching sensible consensus on many points if all editors avoid expecting content that represents their own ideal, and agree to content that is based on verifiable information and eliminates the worst points of contention. Tento2 (talk) 09:55, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

TLDR_version. ~1956-1970ish, Sheldrake=atheist. 1960-1985, Sheldrake=mainstreamScientist. ~1971-2013, Sheldrake=hasManyIdeasSomeAboutAngelsOrTelepathyLikeOrWhatever. ~1970ish-1978, Sheldrake=meditationSufiHindiEasternismEtc. ~1977-2013, Sheldrake=generallyChristianAndAtSomePointSpecificallyAnglican. 1988-2012, Sheldrake=authorWithMultipleBooks. Article not complete without all these. But the keys are sheldrake=scientist, sheldrake=author, and sheldrake=controversialIdeas. Scientist-cred is *why* books sell like hotcakes. Author-revenue *funds* continuing experiments/talks/papers/etc. Controversy *promotes* the man & ideas ("no news is bad news"). Controversy over ideas does not, cannot, and ought not obliterate The Facts... even if many wikipedia editors, and many mainstream scientists, dislike the ideas, and therefore -- whether consciously or unconsciously -- want to discredit the man, as a way of discrediting his controversial ideas. (Obvious thing is to split the article in twain... but the same people that conflate contextualizing sheldrake's ideas as minority views, with using wikipedia to synthesize a debunking of sheldrake's ideas via cherrypicking, with using wikipedia to defame the man, are also against splitting the article to have one about the author who is a biologist and author with controversial ideas, and one about the controversial ideas... so we continue our WP:BATTLEGROUND.

TooLongButPleaseReadAnyhooIfMyTldrDidNotGiveYouClearUnderstandingOfTheFacts

Agree with tento that 'controversial' is WP:EDITORIALIZING and we should use actual quotes, like Sokal's, to describe the controversy, not label the controversy. Agree with Lou that morph-stuff is much of it, hence my expansion of David's prose, which said controversy was about dogma-stuff... but Sheldrake is controversial because of both (the TEDx stuff is aaallll about dogma-stuff for instance). The morph-stuff was controversial since before 1973, when he went to commercial R&D (because all his peers in academia began shunning him if we believe what Sheldrake says). After 1981, that was more controversy. But after the 2nd book is when controversy really got cooking over morph-stuff, because it became apparent sheldrake was a Seruiz Threht: he had the ideas in the early seventies, but not the funding, and his academic career was torpedoed *by* the ideas, and by the lockdown of the funding-infrastructure. But by 1988, Sheldrake had his *own* funding, popular books.

*That* is the real reason mainstream scientists criticize him for 'mis-educating the public about true-scotsman-science'... they do not want his ideas funded, by the NSF, or by the book-buying public, or by ANYBODY. Along the same lines, I posit that is why several editors here think it is okay to pretend Sheldrake is a former/trainedAs/whileItLasted biochemist... because it is hard to admit the guy did not merely take a night-course in biology from some junior college... but spent 21 years in post-undergrad work at top schools with fellowships galore... mainly since his ideas nowadays, The Famous Notable Ideas that give him his spot on wikipedia, are so difficult to swallow. Hint: he had all those same ideas since he read Goethe-the-botanist back in 1971-or-whatever! He was a scientist then, and publishing a book of speculations about science does not somehow make him not-a-scientist now. Scientist is the truth, no doubt about it, with highly respectable credentials; if he weren't, there would be no article. The book-buying public *respects* scientists, even if they do not understand science, and Sheldrake's ideas are speculative/frontier/fuzzy enough that they can be interpreted to say all kinds of stuff.

The article must say scientist right up front, if we want to satisfy NPOV, not to mention WP:The_Truth. That's why sheldrake's ideas gained traction, because the book-buying public wants ideas that are backed up by highly respectable scientific credentials. It needs to say sold N books starting in 1981 and the latest in 2012, because that says he didn't just publish a book or two, but in fact made a whole second career (21 in science thru 1985 and 32 as an author since 1981). The author-revenues continued the funding for his ideas cooked up when he was in mainstream academia, so this career#2 is *also* key for this BLP article to actually explain the subject thereof.

Tento2, if you made it this far, I am certainly not "striv[ing] to push any point beyond the briefest account necessary in the lede". The briefest account is to call the man a biologist and an author of N books. (Compare those seven words to the tortured alternatives on offer... or in the 'real' article right now.) Those seven words are also the true account. As well as the NPOV account.

We must not confuse idea#1 with idea#2, namely that morpho-stuff is speculative questionable science at best (maybe with the exception of phytomorphology but methinks not since the phyto-portion depends on the subquantum portion), and at least *some* parts of the morph-stuff are pseudo/fringe/bizarre. Idea#1 is that sheldrake is a biologist with highly respectable credentials, with a double-decade just-another-working-scientist career... and also three decades as an author, using that money to fund his own continuing experiments/lectures/papers/etc. Just because some morph-stuff is Not Mainstream Science... does not obliterate the facts, including the fact sheldrake is flat-out a scientist. All the sources say so, across *four decades*, except two or three cherrypicked sources. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 13:59, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

keep it simple

why can't the lede contain all the basics? date of birth? job title and qualification...and leave all the other stuff for the next sentences? Veryscarymary (talk) 21:16, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

Hello Mary... the answer is, unfortunately, that this article is a basket-case, and the lede omits facts or uses misleading facts (see the 'NPOV tag again' section at the bottom for the current attempt to fix the first sentence), because the article -- and of course the associated talkpage along with it -- has become a WP:BATTLEGROUND since the TEDx talk. If you read enough of this horrendously long talkpage (apologies for my significant role in creating that length!), you will see there are some pro-factions, some anti-factions, and some folks that are striving to achieve NPOV, and end the WP:BATTLEGROUND in favor of WP:NICE. You are very welcome to stick around and assist, but I must advise you that I expect this will take several days, if not weeks, of high-volume talkpage effort. Furthermore, tempers are still hot, and many people have been blocked/banned/topic'd with little warning due to Discretionary Admin Powers, so if you do decide to stick, please DO NOT get dragged down into the mud; take a break if you need a breather, and WP:AGF. But hey, on the other hand, maybe I'm a pessimist, and we'll get it all wrapped up into a clean NPOV package by the weekend. Hope springs eternal! Thanks for improving wikipedia. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 02:18, 30 October 2013 (UTC)

the WP:LEAD must cover a summary of the contents of the article, representing all major aspects of the subject in appropriate proportion as they are covered in the reliable sources. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 02:44, 30 October 2013 (UTC)

Yes? We're just discussing the first sentence here. Second sentence respectable academic credentials, third sentence N books since 1981. Paragraph two, morpho-in-a-nutshell. Paragraph three, mainstream criticism of morpho. Paragraph four, sheldrake on philosophy-of-science, spirituality, and miscellaneous topics. I have my own suggestion along these lines. But as Mary is pointing out, and as I am pointing out, we cannot get out of the first sentence, because people are conflating sheldrake-has-some-idea-that-maddox-dubbed-pseudosci, with the completely distinct idea that sheldrake-must-no-longer-be-called-biologist. p.s. And speaking of getting stuck... how about my quote on Sufism getting into the personal life section, since I'm restricted from doing so myself? Or if you disagree with it, please say why. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 03:37, 30 October 2013 (UTC)

suggestion

I like Ian's suggestion, but my editing skills won't let me do the referencing thing properly Alfred Rupert Sheldrake (born 28 June 1942)[1] is a British biologist[25][26][27] who now researches,[28] writes and lectures[29] in the field of parapsychology[30][31] and the philosphy of science,[32] that have been the subject of controversy.[33][34] --Iantresman (talk) 09:53, 24 October 2013 (UTC)
so I've just copied and pasted it again.
What seriously are the objections to the above? Why can't we have a lede that is 20 words, short and sweet like "Ben Michael Goldacre, MRCPsych (born 1974) is a British physician, academic and science writer. As of 2012 he is a Wellcome research fellow in epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.[2] "
It's 20 words long, has year of birth, qualification, job title....etc....and that controversial stuff can happen later down the article as I still maintain this man is living and the present lede is running into libel.. Veryscarymary (talk) 21:14, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

Here is the cut-n-paste of what Iantresman wrote ... Mary, if you want to preserve ref-stuff, instead of copying the text straight from the browser, click the edit-button on the section, and then copy the wikitext. (You can click edit on *this* section, to see the difference when pasted... I also used the blockquote trick to keep Iantresman's stuff separated from my own sentences. HTH.)

Thank you:) xx Veryscarymary (talk) 21:49, 30 October 2013 (UTC)

Alfred Rupert Sheldrake (born 28 June 1942)^[1] is a British biologist[8][9][10] who now researches,[11] writes and lectures[12] in the field of parapsychology[13][14] and the philosphy of science,[15] that have been the subject of controversy.[16][17]

I would prefer to say "biologist and author" right at the start, since that formulation is more common than 'writer' in the bulk of sources, and since most of Sheldrake's WP:N is due to his books. Also, per WP:EDITORIALIZING, I would rather use brief quotes from Sokal ('bizarre... speculative... no evidence') and Maddox ('an exercise in pseudo-science') which indicate Sheldrake's popularity with mainstream scientists, from harsh-but-fair all the way to the-pope-would-burn-his-books. Agree with TRPoD on the correct way to handle the Roszak review, but doubt it needs to be in the lead, since the Sokal-when-serious and Maddox-when-offended quotes are mainstream, and Roszak's initial enthusiasm was later recanted. p.s. For some reason that is unclear to me, English-not-British. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 02:42, 30 October 2013 (UTC)

Good idea, but he's STILL A SCIENTIST, even if other scientists don't like/understand or want to be friends with him...!! but that's beginning to sound better...we DO need to have the first line correct before anyone does anything else with any other part of his biog!! xx Veryscarymary (talk) 21:48, 30 October 2013 (UTC)

Just because I want another section to rehash content that is being rehashed in four or more other sections on this page.

There are not enough sections on this page where people can rehash the same comments being discussed in four other sections.

So if your issue is only being talked about in 3 or few other sections, you should bring it here as well because that will obviously help to use up all the remaining pixels in the universe. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 19:58, 25 October 2013 (UTC)

As you wish.... ctrl+a ctrl+c ctrl+v .... there, a complete copy of everything, mirrored here... wait, what's this? Oh, there's a section at the bottom asking for a rehash... well, okay... ctrl+a ctrl+c ctrl+v .... there, a complete copy of everything, mirrored here... wait, what's ________ERROR_83_MAX_RECURSION_DEPTH_EXCEEDED_STACK_OVERFLOW. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 21:07, 25 October 2013 (UTC)

TRPoD, or somebody interested in fleshing out the spirituality-section slash new-age-connection, can you please search for 'sufi' on this talkpage. I can always open up a new section, but there *was* a discussion of sheldrake's religious views already, so I put it there. But nobody has responded, and the page is still locked-down so I cannot fix the problem myself. Danke. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 04:51, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

Example of unbalanced writing

In a book section, six lines are devoted to the BLP subject's book, while eleven lines are devoted to a single critical article about it. Lou Sander (talk) 01:04, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

Lou, this is not a specific enough example of non-neutrality. Line-count is irrelevant. "Neutrality assigns weight to viewpoints in proportion to their prominence." Wikipedia is not about giving equal time to all viewpoints, it is about giving proper WP:WEIGHT where deserved, as demonstrated by the bulk of the WP:RS. Here is the key snippet, relevant to discussion of Sheldrake's books: "...even plausible but currently unaccepted theories should not be legitimized through comparison [as if equal] to accepted academic scholarship. We do not take a stand on these issues as encyclopedia writers, for or against; we merely... describe them in their proper context with respect to established scholarship and the beliefs of the greater world." From WP:GEVAL. Clearly *some* anti-morphic sentences are required, because morphic theory is speculative until a preponderance of experimental evidence in WP:RS says otherwise.

Maintaining WP:NPOV means we have to describe morphic stuff "in proper context... of the greater world". That said, of course, this is an article about Sheldrake, and about Sheldrake's views (unless and until the article is split), so there should be no WP:COATRACK garbage, of going off on a tangent which has little to do with Sheldrake, his book, the views in his book, the wider field of related theories, a professor I once had, their bicycle, bicycles in general, the invention of the wheel....

We ought to describe the contents of the book, neutrally, mention that some things the book says do not jive with the current mainstream beliefs of the greater world, and briefly and neutrally specify exactly how, then go on to the next book.

Are some of the 6 pro-lines misleading, sans context, badly sourced, repetitive, unclear, vague, or otherwise flawed? Point out exactly how.

Are some of the 9 antilines misleading, sans context, badly sourced, repetitive, unclear, vague, or otherwise flawed? Point out exactly how.

Better yet, do what Ringo1729 did, and suggest a rewrite that cuts out the fat, and sticks to the essentials which are neutral in tone and fully-sourced. HTH. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 19:44, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

Your whole premise of "unbalanced" is wrong to begin with WP:VALID He is presenting ideas that the mainstream academic world treats as FRINGE and therefore, in proper balance, we present as FRINGE . -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 21:59, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

WP:DUE is the appropriate policy section we are obliged to adhere to: "In articles specifically relating to a minority viewpoint, such views may receive more attention and space. However, these pages should still make appropriate reference to the majority viewpoint".

WP:VALID is for general articles (on what it calls "mainstream scholarship"), where we don't give minority views undue weight or validity in such an article. Otherwise every article specifically about a minority view, would improperly devote much of its space to a majority view, when WP:DUE correctly tells us that we need only "make appropriate reference to the majority viewpoint". --Iantresman (talk) 22:15, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

you must be reading a different VALID than me. Mine says: " we merely omit (Conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, speculative history, or even plausible but currently unaccepted theories) where including them would unduly legitimize them," well, no in this case the article is about "the Conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, speculative history, or even plausible but currently unaccepted theories" but we " describe them in their proper context with respect to established scholarship and the beliefs of the greater world."-- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 22:36, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

I agree, insofar as WP:VALID applies to general articles on mainstream scholarship. It would not be appropriate in an article on, for example, Political party to includes details of the Nazi Party, Monster Raving Loony Party or Australian Sex Party, because they are either unacceptable, minority, legitimate, or nonsense, and we wouldn't want to give any of them undue weight, publicity, legitimacy, or veracity. But it doesn't stop us from having a detailed article on each one, that doesn't violate WP:NPOV. --Iantresman (talk) 23:47, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

Certainly the book section should cover the book, and there is no obvious problem with the single reference in that part of the section, or with the way it is written. Certainly the book section can and should say that morphic is seen as pseudoscience or whatever. There is no obvious problem with the 10-12 references in the part that says that, or with the way that part is written. But about twice as much space is devoted to the 3/4-page review as is devoted to the 200-page book. Maybe I'm the only one here who sees something wrong, or unbalanced, or overdone, or out of whack with that. Maybe I'm the only one who has taken a course in English composition. Lou Sander (talk) 00:50, 27 October 2013 (UTC)

So why not make your composition teacher proud -- pick a particular sentence, and suggest a particular rewrite. Or if you feel frisky, suggest a rewrite for the whole section, maintaining NPOV. But it sounds like you're saying the sentences there are *fine* but that you'd like more sentences about the contents of the book... if so, *write* an additional sentence, or split-and-expand and existing sentence, and offer it to us. Line counts are not helping me here. The motto of the state of Missouri is 'show me'. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 00:47, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

Apart from anything this one review was (1) written by a prominent figure (Sir John Maddox FRS), (2) was quite controversial at the time, leading to several letters to Nature including one from Brian Josephson, (3) has had commentary written about it [18], and fourthly Maddox makes several insights into the nature of Sheldrake's work, including the pseudoscience, magical thinking, unfalsifiability and impracticality and uselessness of experiments that Sheldrake proposed. Even Sheldrake's publishers repeat part of the review on their cover. Barney the barney barney (talk) 17:55, 27 October 2013 (UTC)

"Insights", not in my opinion, Maddox's opinion, certainly, and I think it is sufficiently notable to include. --Iantresman (talk) 18:11, 27 October 2013 (UTC)

So, are you suggesting a specific edit, Iantresman? What exactly? Please elaborate. (And yes, just one review is fine, as long as it is a reliable source, which presents the mainstream-view, as opposed to the minority-view held by Sheldrake.) 74.192.84.101 (talk) 00:47, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

TRPoD, having reviewed the WP:FRINGE stuff Yet Again, plenty of times I'm still drawing a blank here. Sheldrake's got a bunch of theories, some in phytomorphology, some in physics, some in philosophy of mind, some in philosophy of science, some in spirituality, and probably some I've never heard of. In the first case, he's in his primary field, and his credentials carry plenty of weight. In the last case, he's in a totally non-scientific field, and his opinions carry as much weight as anybody's opinions. The middle areas, where he delves into physics and consciousness and such, are the most sticky. The way the WP:FRINGE guidelines are written, I get contradictory info, but it seems like Sheldrake's phyto-theories have to be QuestionableScience (not good enough to be AlternateMinorityViewScience), and his spirituality-stuff like the Angels-book with Fox have to be WP:ABOUTSELF which can be commented on w.r.t. whether the Anglican theologists agree, but not whether *science* agrees, since they aren't scientific views at all. So there is a mainstream-science-view-of-phytomorphology which is contrasted with Sheldrake's QueSci, and a mainstream-christian-view-of-Episcopalianism, which can be constrasted with Sheldrake's AltMinorityTheology. As for his philosophy-of-mind stuff, I'd be tempted to put that into QuestionableScience but WP:RS might convince me otherwise, and *some* of his physics-views should be categorized as WP:FRINGE which is to say GenerallyPseudoscience... but even there, Sokal was pretty guarded, talking about no-evidence-whatsoever, which is different from total-quack-obviously-pseudoscience. When you say we have to apply WP:FRINGE to Sheldrake, please be more specific... his personal life is clearly not WP:FRINGE, and that includes his spirituality-stuff as AltMinorityView one would think. His views on scientific fields are not mainstream, or even alt-minority prolly, but seem to be more in the questionable-science-group than in the generally-pseudo-sci-group, or the obvious-pseudo-sci-group. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 00:47, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

Illegitimate reversals

An editor who calls himself TheRedPenofDoom has reversed two of my edits and rationalized both with false information. The first edit was an addition to the section on Seven Experiments and Dogs That Know. I wrote, "In a subsequent interview, after noting that his experiment generated the same pattern of data as Sheldrake's, Wiseman conceded that 'there may well be something going on' and that more experiments were needed to settle the matter." RPD deleted the passage with the claim that it was an "absolute misrepresentation of the statement and context it was made in." Here's the original statement, which can be accessed at http://www.skeptiko.com/11-dr-richard-wiseman-on-rupert-sheldrakes-dogsthatknow/:

Alex Tsakiris: You know, I wonder if there’s any way to go back and re-analyze some of the work that you and Rupert did with the J.T. experiments? I mean, there’s still the videos, there’s still the data. He’s still out there suggesting that when you take your data and you plot it with his criteria, it’s a replication of his work. Is there some way to take that data and take a fresh look at it and see if it really is robust in that way? And it really can be – and it’s one experiment, I mean, let’s get that clear, too…

Dr. Richard Wiseman: Yes.

Alex Tsakiris: …it’s not going to overturn the foundations of science. It’s just one experiment, but…

Dr. Richard Wiseman: Well, yeah, I mean, I suspect it’s quite problematic because it depends how the data is collected, so I don’t think there’s any debate, but the patterning in my studies are the same as the patterning in Rupert’s studies. That’s not up for grabs. That’s fine. It’s how it’s interpreted.

So without sort of boring your listeners too much, if you’re going to do an experiment with a psychic dog, you want to know that the return times of your owner are random, because if they’re non-random, then the dog may be picking up on the patterning that when the owner goes out at a certain time of day, they tend to be gone for an hour, another time two hours, it may be the clothing the owner’s wearing or the signals the owner unconsciously gives off. All that’s information to the animal, so you want random return times.

Then the other problem is, that as the owner stays away from home for longer and longer, the dog will naturally go to the window for longer and longer. And so you need to have trials where you have short, medium and long return times. Now Rupert has that sort of data, but as far as I know, I haven’t got enough random trials that are long, medium, and short to make an absolute certain case that yes, indeed, the dog was picking up something. So I say by looking at his data, that yeah there may well be something going on.

They don’t look to me quite as methodology [sic] rigorous as you would need in order to be able to make that decision firmly in one direction or another. I would sort of tick the “more experiments needed” box, under slightly more rigorous conditions.

I've placed in bold the three relevant statements made by Wiseman. Clearly there's no misrepresentation.

The second edit was an addition to the section on The Sense of Being Stared At. I wrote, "A meta-analysis of 60 related experiments concluded that there was statistical evidence of 'a genuine, independently repeatable effect.'" The source was an article in the peer reviewed Journal of Consciousness Studies. RPD reversed the edit with the claim that JCS is not a reliable source. Since when is an internationally known and respected peer reviewed journal not reliable? Is any source reliable? Before reversing my edit, RPD should have cited a reliable source for his outlandish claim.

If RPD fails to justify his reversals here, the edits will be reinstated.

I should add that both edits originated with Blacksqr. Unlike RPD, whose purpose here seems to be to bias the article to the negative, Blacksqr is making an honest attempt to restore neutral POV. Alfonzo Green (talk) 19:57, 27 October 2013 (UTC)

Looking at the quotes you supplied, taking what you have highlighted out of context, cherry picking, to support your edit, is not cricket. Wiseman didn't conclude what you said he concluded. Clearly. --Roxy the dog (resonate) 20:44, 27 October 2013 (UTC)

Wiseman concedes nothing. In the context of the conversation, he is still firmly adamant that he found zero evidence of psychic dogs and his scientific review of Sheldrakes does not find the evidence of psychic dogs that Sheldrake claims. What he is saying is that when you look at the information without knowing all of the background details and in a non-rigorous non-scientific view, yes there are things that might look like patterns, but you cannot make any actual scientific claims from that perspective. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 21:29, 27 October 2013 (UTC)

Not even close. What he's saying is that when he replicated Sheldrake's experiment, he generated the same pattern of data. He got exactly the same results Sheldrake got, but he's interpreting those results differently. This is why he calls for more experiments. By generating more data "in slightly more rigorous conditions," he hopes to rule out faulty interpretations. He says nothing whatever about getting the wrong idea from looking at the data in a non-rigorous or unscientific way. This is pure confabulation on your part and evidence of anti-Sheldrake bias. It's this sort of bias that has placed the article in violation of neutral POV. That said, I agree the "concedes" can be replaced with a less loaded term. Alfonzo Green (talk) 18:46, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

~~you can shout all you want but~~ you conveniently stopped quoting before "I think as is so much of his work, it’s very easy to look at it and go, yeah, a priori, that looks like there’s a cased something there, but things need to be done with a little bit more rigor and in this instance, that hasn’t happened." and you started quoting after "So I think we were actually looking at two different questions, which is where some of the confusion is. Now we could have been, I guess, trying to work together to look at that large body of data that Rupert had collected and sort of picked that apart and said, well, is that really strong evidence and so on. I have done that many, many times over the years with many different claims. In this particular instance, I’m not that impressed with the data that Rupert’s collected. I think it’s really interesting, I think there are some methodological problems with it," -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 19:23, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

Wiseman does emphasize that subsequent experimentation needs to be more rigorous, and this should be included in the article. Alfonzo Green (talk) 20:09, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

Wiseman does emphasize that SHELDRAKE's subsequent experimentation needs to be more rigorous. "I think as is so much of his work, it’s very easy to look at it and go, yeah, a priori, that looks like there’s a cased something there, but things need to be done with a little bit more rigor". -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 21:16, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

I have taken the reliableness to Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard#Rupert_Sheldrake_-_Journal_of_Consciousness_Studies, linked back to your comments here. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 21:24, 27 October 2013 (UTC)

Roxy, please explain how my summary distorts Wiseman's statement. Without specifics, you're wasting our time. Alfonzo Green (talk) 21:30, 27 October 2013 (UTC)

Looks like a pretty clear case of WP:COMPETENCE issues leading to WP:POV pushing. This is fairly typical of Sheldrake's fans who want to whitewash the article as much as possible. I would say the only one wasting time is Alfonzo Green (talk · contribs) but Sheldrake's other fans here are as well. Barney the barney barney (talk) 21:33, 27 October 2013 (UTC)

Alfonzo, I have nothing to add to the comments I have already made, and those further comments in this section made since. --Roxy the dog (resonate) 21:42, 27 October 2013 (UTC)

Sheldrake doesn't have any fans that I see here. There are people who want to see a good article written from a neutral point of view. There are others who see this group as Sheldrake "fans," and call them names, waste their time, and on and on. These folks also seem to see themselves as Righteous Defenders of Science. None of it is good for Wikipedia. Lou Sander (talk) 21:58, 27 October 2013 (UTC)

no, there are people who refuse to acknowledge that WP:NPOV does NOT mean that all point of view are treated as equally WP:VALID. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 22:32, 27 October 2013 (UTC)

@Barney the barney barney Please WP:AGF, and don't accuse other editors of POV pushing without providing diffs per WP:WIAPA "Serious accusations require serious evidence". Labelling editors as "Sheldrake fans" is speculative and not constructive.

@TRPoD No-one is suggesting that we treat sources as equal, but WP:VALID is not valid here, it applies to general articles. WP:DUE is the appropriate policy for articles devoted to minority views. Only someone with a poor grasp of the English language would need to exclude sources, rather than "weight" them appropriately with the simply use of the appropriate adjective and context.--Iantresman (talk) 22:55, 27 October 2013 (UTC)

Ian: Seriously? The real problem here is that Sheldrake's theories are WP:BALLS. The fact that he uses obscure academic language in the process makes it hard for anybody who is not a specialist in the area to spot the nonsense. It's a Bogdanov situation. TRPoD is basically right, the question is how to ensure that Wikipedia is right without heading off into the long grass of extreme skepticism (Sheldrake is a crank blah blah) or the fanboi edits that have bedevilled the page for a while. Nobody needs this to end up at ArbCom, so how about using your experience of Wikipedia to ensure that the article reflects Sheldrake's views accurately, and leave others to work on the mainstream opinion which I guess you don't entirely share. Guy (Help!) 23:37, 27 October 2013 (UTC)

While I agree that one problem here is that Sheldrake's theories are indeed bollocks, another is "the long grass of extreme skepticism." (Brilliant phrase that.) But to give you an idea of how far into that long grass we've gone on this article, it might help to review the long, long bit of contention we've had in the editing of this page over whether it's permissible to call Sheldrake's conceptions "theories" at all. At various times in the article's recent history, "theory/theories" and "hypothesis/hypotheses" have been banished, with straight-faced arguments advanced that they must be called notion(s), idea(s) or "concepts".

Even now, if anyone dares to edit in a mention that Sheldrake is a biologist, they are summarily reverted with edit summaries and talk page comments ridiculing the notion. We're told he's an ex-biologist. Or he left science years ago. Or biologists do science and that Sheldrake hasn't done science for 20 years. That's the reson for the peculiar compromise in the first paragraph in the lead. "Parapsychologist" belongs in the initial sentence of this BLP, it's been successfully argued, based pretty much on WP:BALLS. The second sentence is permitted to say where he worked in the past as a biologist, but not that he's still a biologist, in the present tense or the present tense. Pretty shabby treatment for a living person, even if he's a living fringe theorist.

Please use your BLP glasses as well as your FRINGE-fighting ones. If you see fit, please help with that lead, getting biologist into the first sentence for a living person whose Ph.D. has not been revoked. Please also see if you think hypotheses and or theories can be permitted to be called by that names, even if these theories or hypotheses are clearly erroneous or even disproven. Honest-to-goodness, some of the folks here trying to keep us out of the "long grass" are not fanbois or believers in morphic resonance. Surely I'm not. But I am very much invested in BLP. I think it's paramount. That doesn't mean whatewashing anyones balls. But it does mean treating Sheldrake, as a living person, more gently than his theories. David in DC (talk) 02:12, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

@Guy (1) There is no excuse for incivility, nor admins turning a blind eye. (2) I am not aware of any editor here, who wants to exclude criticism of Sheldrake's work. My net contributions to the article include quotes supporting the mainstream view that Sheldrake's work is considered pseudoscience. Indeed, I don't think that any of my edits have been removed. However, we complete fail WP:BLP and fall into what your call "extreme skepticism" when we don't even mention, for example, that Sheldrake has a double first from Cambridge,[19][20] that he has a doctorate in biochemistry from Cambridge,[21] These are incontrovertible facts which you would expect to find in a biography of person. --Iantresman (talk) 11:18, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

Iantresman: I agree with you on all the above points. Lou Sander (talk) 13:29, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

@Guy No way does WP:BALLS or Bogdanov situation apply. Sheldrake's hypothesis of morphic resonance originated as a way of explaining development from the egg, i.e. ontogeny. The idea is that developmental information, rather than being encoded in genes, is accessed by the embryo as a result of its similarity to previous embryos. Implicit in this view is that memory is not limited to stored information as in a book or a hard drive but reflects a general property of nature applicable to any organic process. Thus crystallization of a particular chemical compound, for instance, is likely to follow the pattern laid down by previous crystallizations of the same compound. Like Newton's theory of gravity, which Leibniz erroneously interpreted as a kind of magic, Sheldrake denies the exclusive role of contact mechanics and posits, in addition, a role for action at a distance. The difference is that natural memory via morphic resonance entails action at a distance over time, whereas gravity (particularly in Einstein's reformulation) entails action at a distance over space. Despite the response of the biological community, there's nothing inherently unscientific in any of this. Nor does Sheldrake use obscure academic language to cloak weakness in this hypothesis. This accusation seems to have been plucked from thin air. Alfonzo Green (talk) 19:57, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

WP:BALLS. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 20:14, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

Repeating an already refuted point does not advance the discussion. Alfonzo Green (talk) 20:22, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

I was not repeating Guys calling out Sheldrakes hokum. I was calling Complete Bullocks on the so called refutation. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 20:25, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

Is there a WP:BALLSWITHKNOBSON? Oh. --Roxy the dog (resonate) 20:55, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

There is no dispute, if you have reliable sources stating that Sheldrake's work is balls, then we say so. I myself added the Maddox quote regarding Sheldrake's work being pseudo-science.[22] Likewise, if we scientists who are sympathetic or supportive of Sheldrake's work, we say so, and we can do so without given them undue weight, legitimacy and veracity, with the simple tool available to all editors, the English language. --Iantresman (talk) 23:35, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

This is such a non-issue -- Wiseman thinks, with many scientists, that Sheldrake's experiments are flawed. The quote is just out of context: "there may well be something going on" means that Wiseman believes something's going on with the experiment itself. I explained this earlier, and gave the same quote Rpod did. vzaak (talk) 01:29, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

Your interpretation is so obviously wrong as to constitute evidence of anti-Sheldrake bias. Look again at Wiseman's quote: "Then the other problem is, that as the owner stays away from home for longer and longer, the dog will naturally go to the window for longer and longer. And so you need to have trials where you have short, medium and long return times. Now Rupert has that sort of data, but as far as I know, I haven’t got enough random trials that are long, medium, and short to make an absolute certain case that yes, indeed, the dog was picking up something. So I say by looking at his data, that yeah there may well be something going on." He's saying his own data was insufficient to show that the "the dog was picking up something" but that Sheldrake's data indicates "there may well be something going on." There is no ambiguity whatsoever in Wiseman's statement. So far no editor has provided any reason why the material should not be reinstated. The only useful suggestion I've received so far is to change "conceded" with a less loaded term such as "stated." Alfonzo Green (talk) 21:15, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

Yes, removing the context makes it appear as though Wiseman may suspect that dogs are telepathic. That is essentially what your edit does. In context, however, among the disconfirmatory clues are: "I think as is so much of his work, it’s very easy to look at it and go, yeah, a priori, that looks like there’s a cased something there, but things need to be done with a little bit more rigor and in this instance, that hasn’t happened." vzaak (talk) 21:58, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

Hello, Alfonzo -- I tend to agree with folks here who say Wiseman does *not* support Sheldrake's conclusions, and in particular, that the something-going-on quote is talking about methodological *flaws* in the Sheldrake trials. So the quote you are citing cannot be used to say that Wiseman supports Sheldrake's conclusions, or even, supports additional research into the matter, cause that's not what Wiseman meant. Having never heard of the Wiseman stuff, I had to look it up, and ran across this master's thesis from Imperial College London, re-published by permission over here,[23] which studied the sociological and philosophy-of-science aspects of Sheldrake's trials and tribulations, taking a neutral stance on the truth or falsity of Sheldrake's theories about science.

In particular, it says the data-patterns from both the 200 Sheldrake trials in 1994/1995 and the 4 Wiseman trials in 1995 matched, but Wiseman never acknowledged that publically, either when Wiseman first published (he analyzed one way which did not show the match at the time), or later, when Sheldrake performed a re-analysis of Wiseman's dataset that showed the match. Finally in 2007, Wiseman *did* admit the patterns matched, according to the dissertation on some radio show if memory serves (maybe your bolded quotes above), but even now Wiseman still maintains that the underlying factor is a methodological problem, and that interpretation of the data-sets need not invoke any morphic stuff whatsoever.

While we see that Wiseman says 'more experiments needed' what he means is more experiments to overcome the methodological errors and prove more rigorously that Nothing Is Going On. That is all Wiseman's saying. As for the article at the moment, it just says that "Wiseman concluded" which is true flat-out in his original paper... if we can find a suitably WP:RS quote where Wiseman admits the re-analyzed patterns match, NPOV would suggest that a new sentence-or-fragment should be added, stating that based on later meta-analysis, Wiseman stood by his negative-confirmation conclusion, but on methodological grounds now, rather than flat-out. HTH.

p.s. Sorry about the high-stress high-volume talkpage! We're working on making it WP:NICE again soon, but right now it is a WP:BATTLEGROUND. Please stick around, if you have the time; but nobody will blame you if you do not. Anyways, thanks for the focus on clear sources, it is helpful. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 01:11, 30 October 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the reference to the Stevens paper. I've seen it before but lost track of it.

You note that you agree with the folks who say Wiseman does *not* support Sheldrake's conclusions. That's great. I happen to be one of those folks myself. I'm pretty sure everybody here understands that Wiseman disagrees with Sheldrake. The disputed quote in no way implies support for Sheldrake's conclusions. Wiseman does, however, support additional research into the matter. We know this because that's exactly what he says, and he says it because he wants additional research to refute Sheldrake's claim that the dog in question, Jaytee, can sense when his owner is returning home. The trouble is that Sheldrake's data, as Wiseman states, seems to indicate that "something was going on," i.e. that "the dog was picking up something."

I think we've gone around on this long enough to see that there are no serious objections to restoring the quote, though modified so as to be perfectly clear that Wiseman believes further research will refute Sheldrake's central claim. Alfonzo Green (talk) 23:57, 30 October 2013 (UTC)

Well, okay, then we're basically on the same page. Some of your language was confusing to me above; prolly just a grammar-parsing-error on my end. However, you're still phrasing some things in this paragraph, that led me above (and ditto for TRPoD as well) that still don't sound quite right. We cannot really say that Wiseman 'supports' additional research... Wiseman is saying that his 4 trials, which had the same pattern as Sheldrake's 200 trials, are subject to interpretation. Wiseman says confounding factors aka methodological errors are the interpretation. Sheldrake says telepathy-slash-morphic is the interpretation. Wiseman believes a priori that Sheldrake is dead wrong, so when Wiseman says 'additional research' what he means is: Not Convinced. (Do we have a better source than skepticoDotWhatever where Wiseman goes on record that the re-analyzed patterns do statistically match?)

Wiseman's position is that, if the hypothesis of telepathy *is* to be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, there would have to be more research performed, with more rigor, with stricter control of confounding variables, and with many many short/medium/long trials. Wiseman, a priori, expects that such research would be a total fail... i.e. would prove zero telepathy actually happened. In other words, Wiseman admits the statistical pattern matches, but still insists Sheldrake interprets it Dead Wrong, and that it still gives Zero Support For Telepathy -- and wikipedia cannot imply Wiseman says differently, even though (if we have a reliable source) we can point out that Wiseman suffers from severe WP:COI, and give the facts of how it was a decade before finally Wiseman fessed up about the patterns. But it is wrong to say this.

"Wiseman supports more experiments... [because] the dog was picking up something [telepathicaly]".

Which, even if you intended otherwise, is exactly what your quotes imply, which is why people are saying you're cherrypicking... just like Wiseman vs Sheldrake, it is all in the interpretation! :-) Here is what Wiseman is actually saying, methinks:

"Wiseman insists *Sheldrake* has the whole burden to perform many many many many more experiments with far greater depth and breadth and rigor and expense before Wiseman will ever be convinced of anything... despite finally admitting the data-patterns match Wiseman still insists Sheldrake is dead wrong, shifting from asserting pure pseudoscience to asserting somewhat-non-specific methodological errors, mainly that 'the dog [during the methodologically-flawed experiments by Wiseman and also the methodologically-flawed experiments by Sheldrake] was picking up something [non-telepathically which caused the patterns to be misleadingly interpreted]'. Wiseman thus says Sheldrake is interpreting the data-patterns incorrectly, to wishfully see 'something [telepathic] was going on' ... when in fact Wiseman interprets the data-patterns to say 'something [methodologically-flawed] was going on'.

End-quoth. That entire sentence above is very POV, plus horrid grammar, and no good for the article, which should have just the facts, and even more strictly, only those facts we can reliably source. We have an WP:RS-fact that Wiseman said, in 1995 or so, that Wiseman's 4 trials disproved Sheldrake's 200. If we want to add another sentence we need sources, and a neutral tone with just the facts.

"As of 2007, Wiseman said the data-patterns of his 4 trials actually match the data-patterns of Sheldrake's 200 trials, but Wiseman still says this proves nothing, and says methodological flaws in the 4 trials and the 200 trials are responsible for the data-patterns, remaining firmly unconvinced that any telepathy-like phenomena was detected in any way, and further insisting such a strong claim requires vastly more research than 204 flawed trials of the mid-1990s, for mainstream scientists to be convinced Sheldrake has shown anything beyond ability to reliably generated flawed data via flawed experimental techniques."

Well, okay *that* sentence is no good either, but we're getting closer. Putting this one into terse form will prolly not be my job. :-) Hope this helps clarify what is going on, however. Thanks. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 14:13, 31 October 2013 (UTC)

I've added the following sentence to Dogs That Know: "In a subsequent interview, Wiseman stated that his experiment generated the same pattern of data as Sheldrake's and that more experiments were needed to definitively overturn Sheldrake's conclusion that Jaytee had a psychic link with its owner." Before reverting this edit, please explain here why you think this misrepresents Wiseman. Alfonzo Green (talk) 18:23, 31 October 2013 (UTC)

Well, it didn't take long for Barney the barney barney to reverse my edit. In his reversal he states, "you have been previously warned about misrepresenting sources, and you're probably breaking 3RR now as well." Okay, Barney the barney barney, why don't you explain how my edit misrepresents Wiseman's position? Keep in mind that NPOV requires "complete information." Alfonzo Green (talk) 18:33, 31 October 2013 (UTC)

Despite failing to explain how my edit misrepresents Wiseman, Barney the barney barney went to the Administrators Noticeboard and filed a bogus edit warring complaint, which is located here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:AN3#User:Alfonzo_Green_reported_by_User:Barney_the_barney_barney_.28Result:_Warned.29. Though my edit in no way misrepresents Wiseman, perhaps it could be improved, along the lines suggested by 74.192.84.101, by noting that Wiseman wanted subsequent testing to be more rigorous. Here's my proposed edit as of now: "Later, in a 2007 interview, Wiseman stated that his experiment generated the same pattern of data as Sheldrake's and that subsequent more rigorous experiments were needed to definitively overturn Sheldrake's conclusion that Jaytee had a psychic link with its owner." Without indicating that Wiseman's experiment replicated Sheldrake's data, we fail to provide complete information and therefore violate NPOV. Please discuss this change here. Alfonzo Green (talk) 19:19, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

The edit still selectively quotes Wiseman in a way that it is contrary to his position in the interview. He says that he and Sheldrake were "addressing two different questions" and "testing two different claims". And among other things Wiseman says: "I'm not that impressed with the data that Rupert's collected", "I think there are some methodological problems with it", "don't look to me quite as methodology rigorous as you would need", "things need to be done with a little bit more rigor and in this instance, that hasn't happened".

The edit also contains editorializing. There's nothing to overturn, much less "definitively overturn". Wiseman doesn't think highly of Sheldrake's experiments, nor does the scientific community in general.

This discussion is needless because the source is a self-published blog, which would disqualify it in any case. (In your citation you first gave a link to an unrelated Radin article, then changed it to a Wikipedia link; I don't know what's going on there.) The blog promotes energy healing, talking with spirits, alien contact, the whole bit. And there have been accusations of tampering, e.g.[24]. It is quite far from the WP standard for reliable sources. vzaak (talk) 14:33, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for your response. Wiseman appears to be trying to fudge the issue with his statement that he and Sheldrake were testing different claims. The fact is, he tried to refute Sheldrake's claim that the dog Jaytee was aware of its owner's intent to return home, and he failed in that endeavor. That Wiseman claims not to be impressed with Sheldrake's data doesn't change the fact that he replicated it in his own experiment, a fact he conveniently omitted from his published paper, only admitting to it after Sheldrake called him out on it. Wiseman made his concession - - and that's exactly what it was - - in a public interview with the owner of a website. Other topics covered in that website are irrelevant. There's no editorializing here. Wiseman sought to overturn Sheldrake's conclusion of a telepathic bond between pet and owner. Alfonzo Green (talk) 18:47, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

You have drawn all sorts of inferences here, which frankly seem conspiratorial to me. Wiseman's response paper should provide sufficient context. The blog is not a reliable source anyway (WP:USERG), sorry. vzaak (talk) 19:38, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

Wiseman's paper failed to mention that he replicated Sheldrake's results. He only admitted to it later in an interview. The words quoted in that interview are Wiseman's own, so the general reliability of the blog is not at issue. As it stands now, the section on Dogs That Know provides incomplete information resulting in bias against Sheldrake. The reader is told only that Wiseman repeated the experiment and found that the evidence did not support telepathy. This gives the impression that Wiseman generated different data than Sheldrake. Left out is the crucial fact that Wiseman generated the same data as Sheldrake and only interpreted it differently. Unlike in his disingenuous paper, in the interview Wiseman is absolutely clear that it's a question of differing interpretations, not differing data. That needs to be in the section. Otherwise it violates NPOV. Alfonzo Green (talk) 19:03, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

Alfonzo, it *is* correct (per WP:The_Truth) that Wiseman admitted in 2007 that the re-analyzed data-patterns of the four Wiseman trials, match the 200 Sheldrake trials. It's not too significant, in the long run, for science, nor for morphogenetics; the significance of the Wiseman phenomena is more relevant to Sheldrake's 2012 book on philosophy of science... the process of science, on the bleeding edges, tends^[2] to be poisonous. What is significant -- to me personally rather than to wikipedia -- is that Wiseman's original paper, which claimed that Sheldrake had proven nothing, because Wiseman's work refuted Sheldrake, and turned out to be wrong-headed. Eventually, a decade later, even Wiseman admitted that his work did not refute Sheldrake, but still stuck to his *second* conclusion, namely, that Sheldrake had proven nothing. Which *can* be written in a neutral tone, and you did. But what about WP:PROVEIT?

the sentence on wiseman's change-of-mind sans change-of-heart, and the four sources that could justify getting it into mainspace

Here is your quote: "Later, in a 2007 interview, Wiseman stated that his experiment generated the same pattern of data as Sheldrake's and that subsequent more rigorous experiments were needed to definitively overturn Sheldrake's conclusion that ~~Jaytee~~ dogs can have a psychic link with their owners." That is fine, but we would have to add, "As of the 2007 interview Wiseman still says the 204 trials in the 1990s prove nothing, citing methodological concerns (rather than the outright refutation of his 1990s paper)." I struck out Jaytee, because the earlier sentence assumes *that* dog was still alive, as of 2007.

Which I think everybody agrees is pretty neutral, and does not misrepresent Wiseman. But I'm against putting the sentences in the article. The problem boils down to WP:RS. Wikipedia has to reflect the sources, and I don't think the skeptico interview is independent enough; they have a lot of pro-COI. But... there are only a couple ways that we can get those factual sentences into wikipedia: either a reliable source, or an official quote from Wiseman *about* himself.

the master's thesis from Imperial College. WP:SCHOLARSHIP. Would have to be either published in a printed-on-paper non-vanity-press book, or, would have to be cited multiple times in mainstream academic literature. In this case the cites would be sociological journals or maybe philosophy-of-science journals ... but I don't think the cites exist.

the podcast and interview with skeptico ... which I'm under the impression is not reliable enough to satisfy WP:RS. Is that wrong? You cannot say that *they* might not be reliable, and then turn around and say that their quote of *Wiseman* is reliable. See #4, we need Wiseman publishing something in his own words, or see #3, we need a non-blog as the source.

Some other source, newspaper or somesuch, stating the fact -- not necessarily as quoted by Wiseman but as mentioned factually by *somebody* that is a journalist or mainstream scientist, then verified by the fact-checking-process of the reliable source in question. Don't think such a thing exists (yet), but if it did, would definitely be good enough.

An official quote from Wiseman, in an official blog of his own, or a self-published paper of his own; under WP:ABOUTSELF, since this is about Wiseman's re-interpretation of his own work, it *would* be good enough as a WP:RS for this particular quote.

I just don't think we have any of those. Someday, there will probably be a quote, that Wiseman's four trials show the same pattern. But, frankly speaking, it's just four trials. It won't sway the critics of morphic fields. Anybody that looks into the subject can see Wiseman did the four trials as a cheap-n-easy way to overturn Sheldrake's work, and per the 2007 interview, failed.

So at the end of the day, we're stuck waiting for some WP:RS to fact-check the Wiseman interview-quote is correct. Plus... on balance I think the facts, while they might make *Wiseman* look not-so-good (proving he has a lot of anti-COI), adding those 4 measly trials is not gonna sway the balance of the *article* much. But hey, remember WP:DEADLINE; sooner or later, a usable WP:RS will show up... or more likely, somebody else will do the ten-thousand-super-rigorous trials, and cite the old Wiseman vs Sheldrake controversy, in *their* bibliography.

p.s. You *can* always ask at the Reliable Sources noticeboard whether skeptico's interview-quotes with Wiseman are reliable *as* quotes, untampered with, which has *some* shot because it was a recorded-audio-interview, if memory serves. But it seems like a long shot to me; rumor has it that links to youtube videos are routinely disallowed, especially when BLP policy is involved, and the audio is from skeptico and the text is from skeptico (those primary sources are entirely what the master's thesis rests on... and even that thesis is *also* webhosted at skeptico). It seems too borderline-COI, at the moment. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 12:49, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

The reliability of Skeptiko is not at issue because the words in the Skeptiko interview are Wiseman's own. We have Wiseman both in transcript and on tape making the statements I attribute to him. Therefore the accuracy of the attribution cannot reasonably be questioned. Alfonzo Green (talk) 20:43, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

Thank you:) I'm actually not going anywhere, I said that up above somewhere, I just would prefer the lede to be correct, with his correct job title then you can argue all you like further down his page:) Veryscarymary (talk) 21:53, 30 October 2013 (UTC)

What is his job, Mary? --Roxy the dog (resonate) 21:59, 30 October 2013 (UTC)

She likes the way Iantresman worded it -- biologist/researcher/writer/lecturer/parapsychologist/philospher/figureOfControversy. See here. Talk:Rupert_Sheldrake#suggestion 74.192.84.101 (talk) 14:13, 31 October 2013 (UTC)

Conservation of energy/perpetual motion

Please review this edit. The previous sentence says he's for questioning what he calls dogma. COE and perpetual motion are among the dogmas he advocates questioning. The change from "advocates questioning" to "also questions" is an example of what Guy, in the section just above this one, calls "the long grass of extreme skepticism" . It's enough to recount what his critics say accurately. It's too much to go beyond that. Please consider reverting. David in DC (talk) 11:15, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

The material in question talks about the "fact" of conservation of energy. It is more usual to refer to it as a "law" or a "principle". The material formerly included a few words about why Sheldrake questions it, but they were removed without explanation. I don't have a big problem with saying that S. "questions" rather than "advocates questioning", but the latter seems more correct. I do have a problem with characterizing COE as something it is not. Lou Sander (talk) 13:20, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

Quite, no scientist would talk about physics "facts" in this context. I am reminded of radioactivity being considered in violation of the conservation of energy, because mass-energy wasn't fully understood at the time, and perhaps the original proponents were mercilessly criticised for "violating" COE "facts". --Iantresman (talk) 18:12, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

Sheldrake is talking about Dark Energy and Dark Matter. His question is whether the conservation-of-energy law (which only includes non-dark-energy) applies at the scale of the universe, and is one of those speculations-about-things-which-science-may-someday-answer. See also Sheldrake's speculation about the subquantum nature of consciousness. Now, as a biochemist, his speculations about dark energy is reaching outside the area of his expertise... but not outside the realm of science. His speculation about consciousness is more in the biology-chemistry field, obviously, but his use of the subquantum as the meat of his speculation does push it into the physics field once again. Can somebody provide a ref-cite where Sheldrake is talking about perpetual motion, rather than just a brief mention of it?

My understanding is that his ideas (or maybe just brief aside) about perpetual motion are not really related to his ideas about *energy* (which would prolly more truthfully be called his *questions* about energy), but rather are related to his ideas about how-science-funding-infrastructure-ought-to-be-revolutionized. From what I can grok, Sheldrake's suggestion is that instead of banning papers about perpetual motion -- or of course telepathy-like stuff -- that instead it is more productive to 'fund' them as X Prize-type challenges. In other words, whoever discovers a perpetual motion machine, which outputs more energy than it takes in, as proven by a board of 100 mainstream scientists selected by the NSF who study said research for a year, the NSF will award the inventor one billion dollars. Short of that, no funding. So, if it turns out perpetual motion is possible, and mainstream science has been wrong however many decades-or-centuries-or-whatever, then the NSF is out a billion, but hey, we get infinite energy, so good deal. On the other hand, it costs the NSF nothing, if it really is impossible, and might help channel voluntary private funds into supercolliders and dark energy research and such, so it's either a draw or a minor win.

Anyways, at least for COE, think I agree with David that Sheldrake advocates questioning it, and in particular, advocates questioning whether COE applies to dark energy or not. He's not personally interested in pursuing that research, is this correct? He's just trying to loosen up the funding-infrastructure, so that he (and others in the future) can pursue the stuff he does want to research. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 00:19, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

The conservation of energy and the impossibility of perpetual motion are facts. That's all there is to it. They are just about as factual as almost anything you care to say. They are also foundational principles, but when Sheldrake questions them he is questioning facts. He even owns up to this. The arguments being made above are trying to give an out for this uncomfortable situation, but I don't see how this is possible. jps (talk) 18:12, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

Yes, that is correct, mainstream science views them as unassailable facts, and thus wikipedia (being a mirror of what mainstream reliable sources say) must reflect them as such; we don't even say "the impossibility of perpetual motion is a fact" because we can say more tersely "perpetual motion... is impossible in practice", right? Right. (I was surprised to see the 'in practice' qualifier... but then, I thought about computer simulations of perpetual motion in a frictionless universe, or theoretical models, or whatnot.) So nobody here disagrees about what wikipedia ought say, scientifically speaking.

My contention here is that Sheldrake is holding a minority-view-position in the philosophy-of-science, which says that treating *anything* as unassailable, is a mistake. He suggests that experiments in dark energy are hindered (theoretically/philosophically speaking) by an inability to question the law of COE, and suggests further that funding for ideas (including unassailably unscientific ones... as long as dark energy turns out identical to known energy that is... things like perpetual motion) is better done on a winner-take-all X prize basis, rather than the current basis where bureaucratic gatekeepers in university politics (deans) or in federal politics (NSF) are the ones holding the purse-strings, and the ones deciding what is and what is not science. Anyhoo, as for giving Sheldrake 'an out' to say something without getting hammered to a pulp... I guess I am arguing for that... because mainstream-scientists are the wrong hammer, to be using on a philosophy-position that Sheldrake holds.

He's got a book about Angels, and spirituality, and such. Should we hold his theology to the same scientific standard we hold his physics theory? Methinks clearly the answer is no-friggin-way. The philosophical stance, and political stance, that Sheldrake has on how research ought to be funded is *not* the same thing as him doing such research. He is interested in phytomorphology, and interested in consciousness, and does research in such areas. He's not claiming to have built a perpetual motion machine, or that anybody ever may... he's just saying, we'll get better ROI from our science-funding infrastructure, if we stop relying on gatekeepers, who hold the purse-strings and define what is unassailable and what is not, and instead try something else.

Probably, Sheldrake has views on politics, too... and should they ever become notable, I would hope that we wikipedians don't insist *those* ideas about politics be mainstream-scientific in the same way we would insist some new theory about co-evolution, for instance.

Anyhoo, I don't disagree we should present the facts, and point out where Sheldrake is disagreeing with the facts... if he *is*. In this specific case, he is clearly not, rather, he's philosophizing about them, and whether there *should* be things we treat as facts. Mainstream scientists disagree... as do *some* but not all mainstream philosophers (Ayn Rand fans would probably put Sheldrake on their blacklist... but many postmodernists would count him as the allied forces, right?). Point being, the mainstream *philosophers* are the ones we should be citing here, so that readers don't get confused about the clear distinction between Sheldrake's theories about science and Sheldrake's theories about philosophy-n-politics-of-science ... although of course it also behooves us to point out that COE is generally considered unassailable among mainstream scientists, once again, so that readers do not get confused. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 00:20, 30 October 2013 (UTC)

Sheldrake questions several of the foundations of modern science, arguing that science has become a series of dogmas	Outside of his theories about physics and biochemistry, Sheldrake has put forth philosophical arguments about how science ought to be funded and pursued, calling mainstream science "a series of dogmas".^{[citation needed]}
rather than an open-minded approach to investigating phenomena.	These investigations first began when Sheldrake was a Knox Fellow at Harvard in 197x^[when?] studying {{Thomas Kuhn}}, and most recently were continued in his 2012 book Science Set Free.
He questions ~~foundations of physics such as~~ such facts as conservation of energy	Sheldrake advocates^{[citation needed]} that to investigate phenomena such as dark energy, scientists need to be able to question such foundational facts as the Law of conservation of energy. (For contrast, see also various baryogenesis theories which predict a temporary violation of the experimentally observed conservation of baryon number, shortly after the big bang, to explain the rarity of antimatter now.)
and the impossibility of perpetual motion devices.[1]	Furthermore, Sheldrake argues that funding any such hypothetical investigations into dark energy ought not be controlled by political gatekeepers who define what is and what is not science, suggesting that instead of mainstream scientists asserting the unassailable impossibility of practical perpetual motion devices based on theoretical grounds, a better method would be to offer an X prize for creation of such a device.
(omit any mention of other philosophers)	FamousPhilosopherFoo has criticized Sheldrake's position as being "$baz". According to mainstream science, in practice perpetual motion is impossible, because conservation of energy has never been experimentally violated, and is theoretically shown to be inviolable.
(insert quote about how some WP:RS criticize Sheldrake's position as self-serving and/or Bad 4 De Childrens)	(insert same quote about how some WP:RS criticize Sheldrake's position as self-serving and/or Bad 4 De Childrens)

Not actually sure inviolable is a word? Anyhoo, obviously this is not a suggested rewrite, because it needs slimming and cites, and prolly a grammar-check. But I hope it gets across the point I'm trying to make: Sheldrake does not question conservation of energy, but he *wants* people to be able to. Of course, the subtext being, if some research on perpetual motion is funded, then the decision as to whether or not telepathy-and-morphogenetic-research will be funded is a no-brainer. :-) &nbsp HTH. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 02:05, 30 October 2013 (UTC)

I think I agree that his motivation for wanting to "allow" the questioning of the conservation of energy is his desire to increase his own visibility, but the essential thrust, then, is that Sheldrake sees nothing wrong with contradicting certain facts, and so that's basically what we ought to write. To say he does not "question" these facts is, I think, splitting hairs. If Sheldrake doesn't question these facts then it should be easy to find a source where he says so unequivocally because the sources I'm reading are easily supporting the opposite contention. jps (talk) 21:26, 30 October 2013 (UTC)

Well, before we get to what we want to write, please first enlighten me then -- which sources are you reading, that say Sheldrake really does question COE as part of his science-theory-role, rather than as advocate such thing as part of his philosopher-about-stuff role? I've seen him say something like 'COE is not as well-supported in biological creatures as in conventional mechanical physics experiments' or something along those lines... but it's a far cry from saying 'COE is more full of holes than swiss cheese', right? If we can get quotes, that show us what Sheldrake *does* think, especially if he says so unequivocally, then all the better. But the only stuff I've seen is him philosophizing. The stuff in the TEDx talk was related to this, right? The whole new book thing. What source, and what page, gives you the impression you have? Thanks 74.192.84.101 (talk) 05:27, 31 October 2013 (UTC)

I see no sources that distinguish between different roles for Sheldrake. If Sheldrake really said, "COE is not as well-supported in biological creatures as in conventional mechanical physics experiments", then I would be interested to read that as well. I'm not sure how to tell the difference between when Sheldrake is philosophizing and he is reporting his interpretations of empirical evidence. If you know of a source that can explain how do to this, please show it to me too. jps (talk) 17:59, 31 October 2013 (UTC)

((I'm trying to find where I remembered the energy-experiments-in-bio-systems thing from... no luck yet.)) As to your other questions, well, we agree there are plenty of sources that say he does work in biology, in physics-like-areas, in parapsychology, in philosophy of science, in philosophy of mind, and so on, right? Some of them are posted here on this talkpage, in the endless is-sheldrake-a-true-scotsman-scientist-or-not threads. As for distinguishing which field sheldrake is talking about, it's not hard. Here is a 1999 interview-snippet.[25]

one-paragraph example where Sheldrake is all over the map, three-paragraph example swapping between science-theories and philosophy-of-science-metatheories

"Interviewer: Does that mean that the causal arrow is only in one direction, from the larger to the lower parts and levels? Or would the causal relationship be in both directions?" Sheldrake: It’s in both directions. The whole contains these parts and is obviously influenced by them. So it’s a two-way causal relationship. ((the prior sentences are pure philosophy)) In some ways, this theory of mine fits with a variety of holistic views, like Arthur Koestler’s notion of holons. ((pure spirituality)) In some ways it fits with quantum physics. It’s closer to quantum physics than anything else. ((speaking as a scientist maybe... but I'd lean more towards speaking about philosophy of science)) When I discussed these fields with David Bohm, ((*now* definitely speaking as a scientist)) he had very little problem in seeing that there was a need for a concept such as this in biology. He would then tackle them in terms of implicate orders or quantum potentials. ((scientist)) He had two or three different approaches to these fields. ((scientist)) But I would think that these fields are closer in respect to quantum field theory than anything else in physics. ((fuzzy again... scientist or maybe philosophy-of-science))

"Interviewer: What is the nature of the reality of morphic fields? What really constitutes a morphic field as such?"

Sheldrake: Well, it’s a difficult question even for the known fields of physics. If you say, "What constitutes a gravitational field as such? Or an electromagnetic field as such? Or a quantum field as such?" you run into big problems. Because we have our descriptions of fields, and in the case of those fields we have mathematical models of the fields which enable you to make predictions. But what is the field in itself? Well, this is something physics hasn’t answered, because the attempt to find a unified field theory, for example, super-string theory, is an attempt to find a yet more fundamental field in terms of which these other fields can be explained by the rolling up of spatial dimensions. ((analysis: this paragraph is a mix of philosophy-of-science metatheorizing and physics-commentary-by-rupert-the-biologist. In particular, there is no spirituality-stuff here, and no biology-stuff here, right? notes will be terse shorthand for other paragraphs.))

Then you could say, well, what does the super-string field consist of in itself? The closest one could come is to some kind of pattern in space or space-time. When Einstein was asked, "What do the fields consist of? Are they made of matter?" He answered no, matter is made of fields and energy. Maxwell’s attempt to say what the fields consist of was to make a mechanical model of them in terms of subtle matter, the ether. But Einstein regarded ether as superfluous. That left the fields as a free-floating ontological status. The fields just are. They have their own kind of reality. But what is it? That’s an unsolved question. ((pure philosophy-of-science slash history-of-science... sheldrake is *not* taking any position on the ether here as a scientist -- he's just talking about metatheories))

When we come to the nature of morphic fields, it’s not going to be easier to answer what they consist of. The question is in the known field of physics, what decades of research and thousands of skilled and highly intelligent people have worked in this area, and they still don’t know what they are in themselves. So I would say that regarding morphic fields, one can say something about their properties. They’re probabilistic in the way they work, they’re within and around the systems they organize. They have attractors in them. You can model many of their properties in terms of attractors, things which draw the system towards a particular form or goal or end state or end cycle or end structure. The morphic resonance is non-local in the sense that I’m suggesting that some of their systems come in from another one’s cross-space or turn. The fields organize systems in a nested hierarchical way, the field of molecules into the fields of the atoms. The fields of the atoms include those of subatomic particles, and so on. The field of the society includes the organisms, those include organs, those include tissues. It’s a nested hierarchy of organization of nature, which all holistic world views recognize. Insofar as each whole is more than the sum of the parts and is organized, I’d suggest, by morphic field, then the fields themselves have this hierarchical organization. ((there is a whiff of philosophy-of-science here, but this is Sheldrake speaking as a biologist-and-crossover-physicist, about his own scientific theories))

I've never heard of "Koestler’s notion of holons" but it seems pretty clear that to describe the *mainstream* views of that field we'd ask a philosopher/theologian, not a scientist. As for "morphic fields" which are a generalization aka superset of biology-specific-morphogenetic-fields, we would describe the *mainstream* views of that field by quoting physicsts/biologists, not spirtuality-experts. In terms of the Sheldrake article right now, the perpetual-motion stuff seems to be pretty clearly taking quotes out of context, and pretending Sheldrake does perpetual motion experiments, and Sheldrake advocates perpetual motion machines, and Sheldrake disbelieves in conservation of non-dark energy, *as* a scientist. Which I think is wrong and misleading, and needs to be fixed. On the other hand, maybe I just haven't seen the Sheldrake-quotes where he says exactly those things: "In my perpetual motion machine..." Do we have a quote like that? If we don't then the article is bogus right now.

Look at the example-paragraph where Sheldrake is talking about Maxwellian ether, in the snippets above. We don't take that paragraph, and write up a sentence for mainspace like this: "In a 1999 interview, Sheldrake advocated that physicists should reconsider Maxwellian ether, pointing out that Einstein disagreed the ether was necessary, and reading between the lines, strongly implying Sheldrake thinks that Einstein was a total moron." Misleading crap, right? Sheldrake could care less about the ether, he was using it as a historical example for philosophizing about the process of science.

Methinks we're making the same sort of category-error with the perpetual-motion-stuff... Sheldrake sees it as a pointed comment on how to fund the process of science, aka it is pure philosophy-of-science (or maybe politics-of-science). But the article is pretending Sheldrake sees perpetual motion as a scientific field, whereas the facts are that Sheldrake just wants budding young scientists to be able to investigate dark energy... and of course, old scientists to get funding for telepathy-like research. HTH, and I'll see where I stuck my COE notes, they're lost in the ether at the moment. :-) — 74.192.84.101 (talk) 13:45, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

I grok your commentary, but I don't think we can make these points in the article because, frankly, it requires a level of interpretation beyond what is permitted by WP:NOR. As far as I can tell, Sheldrake takes no issue with contradicting basic facts of science. That he does this for rhetorical (or, as you put it, philosophical) reasons rather than having some alternative empirical claim is not a judgment that can be made on the basis of a plain reading of the sources, as you seem to admit yourself. Though reading between the lines does give some insight into Sheldrake's rationale for being provocative with regards to these two fundamental facts relating to reality, I don't think we can allow extra interpretive work to be included here.

jps (talk) 16:02, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

We can easily provide a description of Sheldrake's point of view, if we don't provide subjective interpretation. For example, Sheldrake never refers to "facts of science", so the issue regarding their contradiction is moot. He does question whether "the laws of nature are fixed"[26], and even you can think of some that have been violated for whatever reasons. He questions whether "The so-called physical constants are supposed to be changeless"[27] and again, Sheldrake is not the only person to consider this.[28][29][30] For the record, I have no idea whether Sheldrake is right or wrong, but I do know that he has brought up the subject. --Iantresman (talk) 17:32, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

As I've said on my talkpage, I understand the perspective that one might not want to mention his rhetorical disputes with the conservation of energy or impossibility of perpetual motion, but if we are going to mention them we have to describe those points for the facts that they are. jps (talk) 19:36, 8 November 2013 (UTC)

Sokal

The Sokal sentence has morphed into something weird.

The Sokal hoax revolves around a joke paper. The article must unambiguously specify that this is a joke paper. Sokal didn't write a paper that some claim to be a joke while others dispute its jokiness. The Wikipedia article Sokal hoax does not put "hoax" in quotes. It is a hoax. Placing "preposterous essay" in quotes falsely implies that it is just someone's opinion that the thing was fake, giving an aura of possible legitimacy to it.
The phrase "preposterous essay" is not even in the source.
Why does the google link give a search for "pepperoni"? This is either a meta-joke on top of the Sokal joke, or a sign that one shouldn't edit Wikipedia on an empty stomach!
Of what use are the two additional references? I don't understand this. We need but one reference to establish the context of the hoax.
Please use the {{cite}} templates when adding references.
The sentence in question introduces the term "morphic field", which is undefined in the article. The article could define it, but until it does, saying "ideas are cited prominently" or some such should be sufficient, no? "Cited prominently" doesn't mean literal citations, which are never prominent.
The Sokal article doesn't mention "morphic field"; the term is "morphogenetic field". Using this term in the article would carry even more complexity because the article would necessarily have to distinguish it from morphogenetic field, a term biologists use for something different. Again, maybe that could be explained somewhere in the article, but not in the Sokal sentence. At least in the short term, avoiding "morphogenetic field" is the simplest path.

vzaak (talk) 00:58, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

Ummm, the phrase "preposterous essay" is in the George Will column republished in the book I've linked to. He also calls it "hilarious" and, in general, does a great job of explaining just how much of a joke it was.

Pepperoni is in the search string because the word appears on the page we want. It appears only once in the book, on exactly the right page. It's not a meta joke. It's a precision citation device. Sorry for the confusion. I'd have no objection to changing the graf entirely. But I was aiming only for one small thing. If the word preposterous was to remain, I firmly believed (and believe) it should not be in wikipedia's voice. So I went looking for who called it preposterous. I found out it was George Will. So I cited it to him. David in DC (talk) 01:25, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

But Wikipedia calls it a hoax without quotes. This is not a point of contention. Wikipedia can say hoaxes are hoaxes, and doesn't need to attribute its hoaxiness to a particular author's words. The source given establishes the hoax beyond doubt. It's a fact that it's a hoax, and WP should assert facts. Would "joke paper" be better? Is it just the tone?

The phrase "preposterous essay" is not in the source.

To cite a particular page, use the link icon in Google Books. I usually remove the cruft before and after &pg=PA123, except for '?id=...' of course, like this: http://books.google.com/books?id=QkcuQFBXLFQC&pg=PA86 . vzaak (talk) 01:40, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

I don't have a Bacon-Erdos number, but I claim a Sokal number of 2 !!--Roxy the dog (resonate) 02:01, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

That's nothin'. Hammerin' Hank Aaron had an Erdos number of 1. See Paul_Erdős#Erd.C5.91s_numberDavid in DC (talk) 02:08, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

How's this? I've used the words "hilarious hoax", "preposterous" and parody, taken directly from the source. I've changed the wikilink to Sokol affair, avoiding a redirect. I've used the phrase "faux scientific paper" instead of "joke paper". I've used a google search string that omits pepporoni and substitutes "hilarious hoax" and "preposterous". If you like your way better, I won't be offended, either one takes us to exactly the same place. Mine just puts the yellow highlighting on the words actually being quoted.

I've also rearranged things. The order is no longer chronological, but it's not far off; sticking Sokol beiween Bohm and Durr had me humming the old Sesame Street tune "One of these things is not like the other.David in DC (talk) 02:03, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

Looks good to me. That's really I wanted -- to designate it as being in a different category than the others. Now, can we remove those two extra references? Why were they added? vzaak (talk) 02:22, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

Dunno. I didn't add them. If you think they provide nothing, go ahead and delete. However, I'm chary of leaving a George Will editorial, even one that includes significant reportage, as a sole source. I'd suggest sorting through the others (I count three, rather than two) and deleting the least helpful. David in DC (talk) 02:36, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

TRPoD is the one who added the 'morphic field' language recently, attempting to appease my complaints. They were not appeased, but nobody else managed to penetrate my wall-of-text. The extra two refs were also added. Page nums were *not* added, at any point. Actual quotes from Sokal being *serious* about his take on Sheldrake's work are also missing. This is the key point: merely being in the sokal hoax-paper is not sufficient to indicate the person cited or their work mentioned is bogus. Wikipedia implies the opposite, which is POV, and misleading, and flat untrue. The section-title is also POV, since it implies Sheldrake is not a scientist.

SubSectionTitle: Academic Career. BodyText: (same as what is already in that section now -- up through the 1990s where this is inserted.) In 1996,[1][2][3] Sheldrake's 1981 and 1991 works on his morphic field theory, along with a preposterous admixture of famous scientists like Einstein with famous post-modernists like Derrida, was prominently featured in the third section of Alan Sokal's purposely-falsified hoax-paper. The hoax-paper was written explicitly[citation needed] as an experiment to criticize sloppy science, in particular post-modernist sans-peer-review social science. Years later,^[when?] in a book detailing the hoax, Sokal gave the following serious explanation of his actual position^[3] as a physicist: "Sheldrake's theory of 'morphogenetic fields', though popular in New Age circles, hardly qualifies as 'in general sound'."

For contrast:

SubSectionTitle: Interactions with notable scientists (unlike sheldrake the we-refuse-to-call-a-scientist-nyah-nyah). In a different vein, Sheldrake's work featured prominently in a faux scientific paper written by Alan Sokal, submitted to Social Text and published there in 1996 as if it represented true scientific research.[73] Writing about what has come to be known as the Sokal affair, George Will called the parody a "hilarious hoax" and "preposterous".[74]

If somebody wishes to have a sentence, or a sentence fragment, about *why* Sheldrake was picked for the hoax-article, that 'why' must be sourced, with page-num. Simply saying, Sheldrake's in there, is meaningless... because you can replace Sheldrake with Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Kuhn, Durr, Derrida, Irgavay, and so on. HTH. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 04:13, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

If you have an appetite for endless scanning of references, try THIS, which is one from the Sokal hoax article. In it, Sokal says "Throughout the article, I employ scientific and mathematical concepts in ways that few scientists or mathematicians could possibly take seriously. For example, I suggest that the "morphogenetic field" -- a bizarre New Age idea due to Rupert Sheldrake -- constitutes a cutting-edge theory of quantum gravity. This connection is pure invention; even Sheldrake makes no such claim." The guy was spoofing the stupid journal editors, and used S. and many others as part of his spoof. Of course, the "bizarre New Age idea" stuff can be used by Wikipedia editors to demean S., bring the New Age stuff up, etc. Maybe people could just concentrate on writing a fair BLP, rather than mining the Internet for negative references and schlepping them into the article. Lou Sander (talk) 04:45, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

Lou, we can use the part that says "bizarre New Age idea" as something that Sokal actually seriously thinks about morpho-stuff. But we cannot say "Sheldrake in Sokal-hoax-paper therefore Sheldrake is pure invention" because that is not what Sokal said. The sentences you quote, except for the four words I mention, are Sokal describing how the hoax-paper mixes up and screws up concepts everywhere, including specifically the claim MorphoGenetic==QuantumGravity. Sokal does not believe it. Sheldrake does not believe it. Your own quote says Sokal knows Sheldrake does not believe it. If we want to mention Sokal's opinion on Sheldrake's morphogenetics, which is valid because Sokal is a famous physicist and morph-stuff spans physics+biochem, fine. But it has to be Sokal's serious opinion! By definition, the contents of the hoax-paper ARE NOT serious, and merely being cited therein is meaningless (Einstein/Irgavay/etc). Am I making sense? 74.192.84.101 (talk) 12:38, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

Yes, you make perfect sense. One wonders why the Sokal stuff is in the article at all, let alone in its present misleading format. And how many references, both distorted and not, do we need to show that "The concept of Morphic Resonance has been examined and forcefully rejected by numerous mainstream scientists; it has received little support outside Sheldrake's immediate circle"? Lou Sander (talk) 13:17, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

I originally wondered why the Sokal sentence was in the article at all (hence my "pov screw-up" section), but after plenty of discussion, there *are* sources that explain Sokal's serious position on morph-stuff, and because Sokal is a famous physicist, and because morpho-stuff delves into physics, Sokal's serious view on morpho-stuff belongs in the article. And his serious view is, that sheldrake's ideas are bizarre, new-age (later qualified to popular among new-age-folks ... which *is* an important correction that e.g. User:SqueakBox was confused about coming in to the talkpage). Sokal's other views on the physics-related ideas used in the morpho-stuff is that there is no evidence for it (as of 2001 or whenever Sokal wrote that), and that the morpho-stuff is nowhere near being generally sound, and that it is very speculative. This is harsh, but fair. Nobody has evidence for subquantum. Sheldrake's stuff *is* very speculative. But nowhere does Sokal say that Sheldrake is not a scientist (he always calls him a biologist or biochemist or similar). Nowhere does Sokal say that Sheldrake's work is fringe, or pseudoscience... although calling it bizarre comes pretty close. :-) Anyways, as the article is written now, just like when I complained, it uses the *hoax*-paper to explain Sokal's views on morpho-stuff, which is just totally broken. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 14:08, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

Okay, the article is now much more neutral, but my core complaint remains.

The subsection title is 'interactions with other scientists' now, which is much better. Here is the Sokal stuff, also much better:

"Although he did not contribute to it, Sheldrake's work featured in a hoax article written by Alan Sokal. The paper was submitted to Social Text and published there in 1996 as if it represented true scientific research, an event which became known as the Sokal hoax.[86]"

My core complaint is, simply being in the Sokal paper implies nothing. We can replace "Sheldrake" in the sentence above with "Einstein" and it stays true. Being in the hoax-paper, by itself, is not important.

What *is* important is *why* you are in the hoax-paper. Einstein was in there to give camoflage to the crazy-talk. We know exactly what Sokal's *serious* position on Sheldrake's work, which is relevant to the mainspace article. But instead of giving some serious quotes from Sokal, about why he picked Sheldrake (we may not have this?), and especially about what Sokal's position as a physicist is on the status of morphic stuff as a theory (we *have* this stuff)... instead we only talk about the hoax-paper, which is totally misleading, because most readers will assume that simply being *in* the hoax-paper is inherently bad... which is just not true. I have a suggested rewrite, with Sokal-being-serious-quotes, but before we go that far, I'd like to make sure folks understand my beef here. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 14:02, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

^ McGrath, K. A. (1999). World of biology. Gale.
^ KLMN channel 74, evening newscast, 1997-06-05, interview with notable humanoid, retrieved from an alternate dimension November 2013, okay I admit it this whole sentence is WP:SYNTH, but that is my point, the reasonably-NPOV sentences we've ended up with on Wiseman are not yet backed up by WP:RS, even though they are true.
^ Fantastic Nonsense , pg262 , in the subsection called Quantum Gravity

[1] McGrath, K. A. (1999). World of biology. Gale.

[2] KLMN channel 74, evening newscast, 1997-06-05, interview with notable humanoid, retrieved from an alternate dimension November 2013, okay I admit it this whole sentence is WP:SYNTH, but that is my point, the reasonably-NPOV sentences we've ended up with on Wiseman are not yet backed up by WP:RS, even though they are true.

[3] Fantastic Nonsense , pg262 , in the subsection called Quantum Gravity

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