Evolution and paranormal things

I would like to propose a new thread/topic.As difficult as it would be for things like flight feathers, whalebone, or marine sonar to evolve, there is a class of things which would be significantly more difficult, and these are things which are typically classified as "paranormal".In at least one group of instances i.e. the work of Rupert Sheldrake, some of these phenomena have been studied more rigorously than in the past, using good experimental design and statistical methodology. Granted Sheldrake is public enemy #1 to the CSICOP crowd, his methods are unassailable and his credentials are simply better than those of anybody connected to CSICOP.There are other instances of such things in the news these days as well. The question becomes, how would any of these "paranormal" capabilities "evolve"?

I don't have any particular reason to believe or disbelieve in reincarnation. Nonetheless, something which appears for all the world to be a certifiable case of reincarnation has come up in the news (ABC) recently:http://abcnews.go.com/...time/US/reincarnation_040415-1.htmlNow, whether or not you'd argue that this was or wasn't reincarnation, SOMETHING appears to be happening here. Possibilities would seem to include:

• A large scale and complex fraud, which does not sound likely given what you read. There does not appear to be any obvious motive for it (fraud usually involves profit motives).
• The kid actually has been reincarnated.
• The kid, somehow or other, his mind acting like a radio antenna, has picked up some sort of a signal still floating around at large in the universe, leftover from WW-II.
  

Now, I wouldn't want to HAVE to bet it but, if I had to, my money would be on item 3. Nonetheless, either of the two choices other than fraud would seem to contradict the model of reality which we receive from guys like Darwin, Nietzsche, Marx, Engels et. al, i.e. that there is matter and energy in the universe and **** rolls downhill, and everything we see around us is some manifestation of those two concepts.The question is, how would this kid's ability to do something like that "evolve", and for what purpose?

Like I say, there are at least two possible explanations other than fraud, and it's not clear that the second such explanation is damaging to Christianity.The question is, what would something like that do for evolution(ism)?

>It would have been very easy to test the theory but notice that conveniently, his memories are starting to fade.Who wants to remember getting shot down....

Many if not most paranormal things would fall under the general category of what Julian Jaynes termed "bicameral phenomena". My own take on bicameral phenomena is that they were bound up with static electrical phenomena, which were simply more common in the ancient world than they are now:http://www.bearfabrique.org/babel.htmlAnd that these kinds of phenomena which are rare now, used to be common. There is reason to believe that the human mind was originally hardwired for a kind of communications capability about as far above our present electronic communications world, as that is above smoke signals.Again, the question is, how does that sort of thing "evolve"?

>>But the underlying issue, is so far NO ONE has been able to show that ANY paranormal things exist.Not in the sense of saying 'Here is a paranormal thing, right before your very eyes and, as you can plainly see on this handy dandy Cenco scale, it weights 13.2778 pounds.Nonetheless there are other ways of demonstrating that something exists which are totally valid. The science of statistics as we understand it was developed mainly in our ag-econ (landgrant) schools for the purpose of discerning what effect if any various crop treatments might have on certain crops and that is also something which, despite being totally real, cannot be measured or weighed on scales.In particular, Sheldrake's use of statistical methodology is entirely sound and, when he tells you that there is a 99.999% certainty that some particular "paranormal" thing is real, he's not making it up.

>Is there ANY evidence that static electric phenomena were once common?That is the main focus of a couple of small works by Al DeGrazia and Hugh Crossthwaite, which are available free of charge:DeGrazia

Before worrying about evolution, which of the three choices would you go with, if for some reason you had to bet $100 as to what the case of the kid who appears to have flown F4s off the Natoma Bay at Iwo Jima actually amounted to? The choices are fraud, actual reincarnation, or picking up some sort of a signal which is just out there somehow or other.

I wouldn't want to have to bet this one. If I had to, I'd rule out fraud and delusion based on what Im reading since I don't see a motive for it and I have a hard time picturing a two-year-old picking up the level of detail in question from the history channel.I don't have any reason to believe or disbelieve the idea of reincarnation. Nonetheless, I would GUESS, and this is a pure guess, that it would be rare if it ever did happen, and it would happen because somebody had led a bad life in some way, and the spirit world had basically determined that he needed some more time down here before they could deal with him. That does not appear to be the case in the case of the young airman in question.And so, if I had to bet it, my money would be on the third possibility, i.e. that there are still a few stray signals left floating around from WW-II, and the kid somehow or other picked up on them.Things like wings and flight feathers are sufficiently difficult to describe an evolutionary path for despite our understanding precisely how they work. Something so complicated that we don't even have a clue as to how it works, you would think, would be substantially more difficult to try make evolutionary claims for.Now, you might claim that telapathy was at least partly understood given the works of Julian Jaynes. But picking up a signal leftover from WW-II??How does that work?

A clear example of this is in Evolutionary Electronics by Adrian Thompson at the University of Sussex. He used evolutionary principles to evolve hardware that worked, but defined comprehension. From his thesis, here is a description of a circuit developed by this means. My emphasis in bold.

If that is supposed to answer anything here, it's totally unclear to me as to how. There are a number of questions inherent in even trying to figure out what is going on in the case of the kid and the F4, which would include (minimally):

• How is this information being passed around the universe? Radio waves, or what exactly?
• How does any signal like that linger in limbo for 60 years? Radio waves certainly do not linger; if you don't pick them up right now, they're gone.
• What in human physiology could serve as a receiver for any sort of wave or field transmission. Radio receivers are usually made of metal, and it's hard to picture how flesh and bone could serve that or any similar purpose.
  

Again, once we have answers for all of those questions, then we would need to know how those answers would evolve. Just chanting that "mutations and natural selection did it as usual" doesn't really cut it. Real evolutionists and evolutionary biologists at least try to concoct schemes and/or believable scenarios via which various features in living creatures might have evolved. You'd need a believable scenario for how such capabilities might evolve, starting from some point at which predacessors did not have such capabilities. I mean, it has to be a safe bet that amoebas do not have such talents, and evolutionists claim we all ultimately arose from one-celled forbears.One thing I notice in the story is the kid knowing about the problem with F4s and tires. I mean, you don't even get that on the history channel or Victory at Sea; you'd almost have to have been there to get that, so many years after F4s stopped flying.I'm no complete expert but I read a lot of history and I'd never even heard that one previously. The F4 Corsair was originally intended to be the Navy's primary carrier fighter during WW-II and it turned into one of those plans in life which works out too well. It was meant as a dual role plane, air superiority and close support, and had a huge engine and propeller and bent wings to allow wheels to clear the huge propeller, and could carry huge ordinance loads and fly as fast as any piston-engined plane in WW-II. Coming back minus the huge ordinance loads and drop tanks, it was very light and had a marked tencency to hop on carrier landings, which was a REAL bad thing to have happening.The navy ended up using the F6 Hellcat for its primary carrier plane and the corsairs were mainly used by marines from island bases since hopping on landings on an island airstrip was not a serious problem. When the Japanese started using kamikazis, the navy wanted the fastest things they had on the carriers for protection and they brought the corsairs back, and simply dealt with the bad landings. Many of the bad carrier landing scenes you see on Victory at Sea and what not are Corsairs.

http://www.sheldrake.org/nkisi/I was at a Kronia convention, a sort of a renegade science conference in the summer of 2001, at which Rupert Sheldrake was one of the speakers.Sheldrake is fairly well known. He's a former director of studies for cellular biology at Cambridge University who grew weary of standard academic life and set out to investigate things normally termed "paranormal", using good experimental design and statistical methodology. He has several books which you can find easily and is occasionally seen on cable television shows involving such topics as dogs which know when their owner is coming home.Amongst the things Sheldrake spoke of was the little grey parrot Nkisi. Sheldrake told us he gets thousands of people coming up to him with animal stories every year, and that this one was the prize of them all, a story so incredible that he was, at least at that point, afraid to tell people about it. In connection with animal communication projects at one of the universities in NY, a woman was in the process of raising an African grey parrot (the brightest of parrots) as a child, and not as a bird, and had basically taught the bird to speak English. She claimed that she had no sooner taught this bird to speak English, more or less, than it became obvious that the bird was psychic to some extent. She would be thinking about doing something, and the bird would say "No, that's a bad idea, I wouldn't do that" or some such, and she was starting to get freaked by it.What Sheldrake did, as you can read from the site linked above, is to set up a blind experiment which showed to a very high level of statistical significance, that the bird actually does have such capabilities.My own believe is that such capabilities, to the extent that they still exist at all in our present world, are haphazard and catch as catch can, and that nobody could use such a thing for a general system of communication in our world. If you could, then I'd expect the bird to have gotten all 80 of the cases right. You or I, of course, would most likely not get any of them.

A typical example of the sort of evolutionary scenario I'm talking about would be as follows:

Certain kinds of light-bodied dinosaurs developed feathers which they used for insulation and protection from the elements, and then the climate turned hot for a long period of time. A certain number of these creatures mutated in such a way as to have something or other resembling flight feathers on their arms, and they began to notice that they could use their arms with the proto-flight feathers as fans, i.e. that they could keep cool by moving their arms and fanning themselves. After a number of generations of this, some of these creatures noticed that, if they moved their arms rapidly while running, they were being lifted off the ground slightly by the air currente generated. And so on and so on until you have flying birds.

Now, Assuming that Nkisi, the little grey parrot is actually reading his trainor's mind, and given the thoroughness of Sheldrake's methodology I see practically no chance that this is not the case, or given the example of the dogs which know when their owners turn for home, or the kid who knows what sort of problems an F4 has at age two,
and assuming you could come up with some way of describing how such things work, the question would become, can you come up with some halfway plausible scenario for explaining how such a thing might develop, what organs are involved, and what purpose those organs served while they were in developmental stages.It seems obvious to me that this would be extraordinarily difficult.

Like I mentioned in a post above, there seem to be three choices as to what the case of the kid and the F4 involves, i.e. fraud, actual reincarnation, or the kid having picked up a signal of some sort, somewhat the way that the prophets claimed to have. I like the third choice better than the other two.

The question of "what organs" is not one for the evolutionists. That is your problem, to address how the phenomenon works in the present. Without that, we don't have enough information to judge whether a sequence of intermediates is plausible or not. In fact, all models to explain the origins of the phenomenon are at something of a loss...

Did you ever get a look at the web page which I mentioned, and which I mentioned on t.o at least once, i.e.http://www.bearfabrique.org/babel.htmlIt would appear that the question of what organs might be involved in paranormal things has at least one answer in at least some of the instances, i.e. the right-brain analog to the Wernecke (speech) area which Jaynes mentioned. Now, whether or not the kind of thing Jaynes speaks of could serve to pick up a signal which had been bouncing around in the universe for 60 years after Iwo Jima is another question. That I do not have an answer for.

I'm not refusing to consider anything. I mentioned the three options which seemed likely to me. I would include the idea of something being misinterpreted or misunderstood in item three which I mentioned and bias in item 1 i.e. fraud.Again fraud strikes me as unlikely when you have a young child coming up with details which you don't even find in history books and actual reincarnation strikes me as unlikely for a number of other reasons.