Read Online Beyond Coincidence by Martin Plimmer - Free Book Online Page B

what we are looking at.”
    Words such as “telepathy” are taboo in classical science, yet Sheldrake points out that similar invisible influences—radio waves, for example—are well known to it. With the exception of light, the average person has only a dim perception of most of the elements in the electromagnetic spectrum, yet scientists routinely detect X rays, gamma rays, radio and microwaves and read them for the information they communicate about astral events in distant space.
    On a more mundane level Sheldrake has been examining apparent precognitive powers in animals. How do animals seem to know when their owner is about to arrive home? He claims his experiments show there may be a telepathic element in this. In China, Sheldrake says, it is widely accepted that animals behave nervously prior to earthquakes. Chinese seismologists have asked members of the public to report the unusual behavior of rats, fish, birds, dogs, and horses. As a consequence, says Sheldrake, they are the only seismologists in the world to have accurately predicted earthquakes (though they failed to predict the 1976 Tangshan earthquake in northern China, which killed almost a quarter of a million people). “No one knows how animals do it,” Sheldrake says, “whether it’s tremors, gasses, or something more mysterious like precognition. It’s not just coincidence.”
    Sheldrake thinks some coincidences can be explained by his theory of morphic resonance, which postulates telepathic-type connections between organisms, and fields of collective memory within species. Ideas are simply “in the air” and if you are tuned to the right station you will pick them up.
    To illustrate how this works among animal species, Sheldrake quotes the example of a group of laboratory mice in London that were taught to improve their maze-running skills. Almost immediately, untutored mice in a similar maze in a Paris lab were reported to have achieved the same navigational feat. Another example concerns a monkey on a South Pacific island that discovered potatoes tasted better if it washed them in the sea before eating them. Shortly after this behavior was observed, it was reported that monkeys throughout the archipelago had begun washing potatoes, too.
    â€œDescartes believed the only kind of mind was the conscious mind,” says Sheldrake. “Then Freud reinvented the unconscious. Then Jung said it’s not just a personal unconscious but a collective unconscious. Morphic resonance shows us that our very souls are connected with those of others and bound up with the world around us.”
    Sheldrake has been criticized by mainstream scientists for his New Agey fixations. Robert Todd Carroll, a professor of philosophy who edits the Skeptic’s Dictionary Web site, calls Sheldrake a metaphysician rather than a scientist, casts doubt on the rigor of his experiments and accuses him of confirmation bias (the tendency to report only evidence that coincides with the researcher’s pet theory). The South Pacific monkey story, says Carroll, is anecdotal and unreliable.
    Sheldrake does not walk his astral plane alone, however. Nor does he walk where no scientist has gone before. In fact, the path is already well trodden by mavericks like the Austrian biologist Paul Kammerer and the psychologist Carl Jung, who suspected there might be more to apparently coincidental events than meets the eye and were prepared to put their reputations on the line by publishing their theories.
    In the early 1900s Paul Kammerer kept journals in which he faithfully recorded every coincidence he experienced, from the incredible to the downright mundane. Kammerer was interested in the fact that coincidences tended to cluster in groups. In 1919 he introduced The Law of Seriality, in which he conjectured that these clusters were evidence of some deeper force at work that we do not see. Coincidence clusters were like ripples on the surface