Evolution and paranormal things

I'm open to the potential existence of paranormal abilities, just so you know. Though they've hardly been demonstrtated to any degree of certainty, to my view.Nonetheless, if they evolved, then they did so through natural selection and random mutation. It's difficult indeed to believe that you can't imagine some kind of survival benefit to paranormal abilities, so I don't see what the problem is.If you want to argue that they're somehow irreducably complex, though, I don't see how you could even begin to do that without a fully-fledged explanation of the paranormal mechanism.

I endorse this. Let's take it as read that there are paranormal abilities as indicated in the example. Why is this a problem for evolution?Cheers -- Sylas

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.

so far, from the article and the information given, it is all in the parents and friends imagination.You have to also include the possibility that while not fraud, it is simply poorly interpreted data.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

If the kid saw it on the History Channel or a movie or something, does that count as fraud?

None of the above; it's a false trichotomy. I'd prefer to reserve judgement... but since you set it up as a bet, I'd put my money on delusion or overactive imagination inflating events without necessarily an explicit attempt to deceive or be fraudulent.But I don't really have the basis to make a firm judgement on the matter; and I can't see how the bet could ever be resolved, especially given that the child's reported past life memories are fading.Still, this is off-topic. The question was... how could paranormal abilities evolve? I'm more than happy to assume for the sake of the thread that paranormal abilities exist.I can see reasons for debating whether or not paranormal abilities exist; but I can't see how their existence would present any particular difficulty for evolution.Cheers -- Sylas

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?

Actually, evolution is very good at making very complex things for which we can't tell how they 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. So as to your question, it misses the point. There is plenty about human biology that defies comprehension as to how it works; this in itself is a normal consequence of evolutionary development.The question relevant for this thread is... why is there any special problem for evolution associated with the paranormal?Cheers -- SylasThis message has been edited by Sylas, 05-04-2004 10:54 PM

I asked if we would likely be able to recognize a transitional at the time. In particular, I was thinking of an evolutionary change that might not show either phsically or in the records. For example, a new way of thinking, or another sense.So such things certainly could happen through evolution, but might well go unnoticed until far into the future. At that time someone might be sitting around as we are asking much the same questions.It would seem that it would be nearly impossible to say, looking backwards, when the transition ever occured, but only that it did happen.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

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.

It shows that just because a thing is complex or we don't know how it works, is no basis for saying that it must be a problem for evolution.You are the one saying that there is something about the paranormal that means evolution is not a plausible way for it to arise. But you cannot reasonably defend that concrete claim until you know more about how the phenomenon works.I make no claim at all for knowing anything much about the phenomenon at all. I don't know how it works, or what it requires to work, and I'm not even sure whether it actually exists at all. More detail and confirmed information is needed before we can have meaningful hypotheses on any of these things.It is a logical fallacy to say that because I don't know how it works, then this means it is evidence against evolution. You are the one who has to know more about how it works before you can make claims about what processes are plausible or implausible as a way of producing it.Cheers -- Sylas

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.

I'll ignore the defects in your attempt to describe what an evolutionary scenario looks like; other than to note for the record that the proposed example of an evolutionary explanation for flight is a crude parody encompassing some bad misconceptions. Your point is clear, however; we need plausible intermediates.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. This is not a criticism of any specifically proposed origin, be it design or chance or evolution or something else; it just means we don't know enough about the phenomenon to say much about whether it is evidence for, or against, some model for origins.All we can go on, so far, is a rather badly deliniated instance of a child who (apparently) possesses knowledge and insight obtained (somehow) from an adult in the past (maybe).Assuming for the sake of argument that the phenomenon is real, the possibility for adaptive advantages to the child able to tap into such insights should be very clear; and they also would appear to scale appropriately. A very minor intuition able to take advantage of experience of others could be very useful. Perhaps the detection of these insights is something we all have, to a limited extent.Perhaps that "sixth sense" or crawling skin that crops up at unexpected times is a consequence of sharing information from some other life in the past which is alerted by a dangerous situation in which we find ourselves. Perhaps even that had predecessors in the intuitions we have about others, whether they be trustworthy or dangerous. Perhaps such intuition can be tilted into a more appropriate direction by the capacity to tap into information from otherwhen. And perhaps that had predecessors in a psychic connection between living individuals; with a capacity to leave that connection lying around while we are absent, or even after our death, has an evolutionary beneficial effect through increased survival of our tribe or family, who are best positioned to take benefit.But this is all sheer speculation. It will remains so, until you figure out more about this phenomenon and how it works. Only then will you a basis for holding it up against any model for the origin of the phenomenon.As things stands, there is nothing that seems a special problem for evolution. Assuming the phenomenon exists, evolution should be able to work with it just fine.Cheers -- Sylas

For the Christian, the influence of the Holy Spirit would certainly fall under the paranormal. Explain the promptings you experience - and that also of evil influence, call it the devil if you wish. Hold still for the 'feeling' when the 'voice' (for lack of a better word) appears in your head. Not everyone knows that 'voice'.
As for reincarnation? yadayada! There is nothing of that nature found in the scriptures, but loads of warnings against deceptive teachings (wizards who peep) and digging into mysteries that lead to destruction, the negative side of Paranormal. Ergo, Saul, first king of Israel and his witch of endor. Unholy experience for that silly man, who knew better. Be careful where you go, Christian.