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SCIENTIST
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F
Engineering professor Robert
Jahn laid his career on the
line to test the power of
PSYCHIC POWERS
WHAT ARE THE ODDS?
the mind over machines. He
thinks he's onto something.
John McCrone reports
IN THE lobby of the Flamingo Hilton, Las
Vegas,
slot machines-one armed
bandits-stretch in serried ranks to the
far horizon. Hanging over the machines
nearest the entrance stands a sign stating:
"97.4-the hottest slot percentage in
town". With characteristic American
bluntness, the Flamingo's management
tell customers that the machines have
been adjusted to cream off "only" 2.6
cents of every dollar they spend.
This promise of steady, if unspec-
tacular, loss is supposed to draw in the
punters from the gritty heat of the Las
Vegas strip. And attract them it does. So
impatient are they to shed their money
at the guaranteed rate that they feed
adjacent machines with both hands,
shovelling in coins and barely waiting for
the clacking reels to come to rest.
If ever proof were needed against the
existence of telepathy, psychokinesis,
precognition or any other form of psychic
power, the gambling halls of Las Vegas
seem to provide the perfect place to find
it. The odds on every game of chance-
from the slot machines and crap games to
the blackjack and roulette tables-have
been fine-tuned to fractions of a per cent.
Judging by the faces masked in concen-
tration, it can hardly be said that the
gamblers are not exerting every psychic
effort to win. And yet still the cash flows
into the pockets of the casino owners in
an even, predictable stream.
Despite such everyday evidence, people
continue to believe in the power of the
mind. Public opinion polls commonly
find that as many as a quarter of the
population are convinced that they per-
sonally have experienced premonitions or
moments of telepathic understanding.
Belief in the psychic seems impossible to
shake. But what if someone could design
the perfect laboratory test? A test that
could settle the matter once and for all,
either revealing believers to be dupes or
forcing sceptics finally to start taking
mental powers seriously? The dream of
such an experiment has led parapsychol-
ogy-the science of psychic research-to
experiments which mirror the very
games of chance which have made the
gambling industry so profitable.
Roll of a dice
Under tightly-controlled conditions, sub-
jects try to influence the outcome of a
random event such as the roll of a dice,
the radioactive decay of an atom, the
diffraction pattern of a beam of light, the
fall of a cascade of polystyrene balls, or
the "direction" taken by electrical noise.
What is more, some parapsychologists
claim to be seeing an anomalous effect.
They are reporting a deviation from
chance which is vanishingly small-just
a tenth of a per cent-but when meas-
ured over millions of trials, this faint
effect multiplies into a hugely significant
distortion of the apparent odds.
The results of these trials have pro-
vided inspiration for some apparently
wacky research into the possibility of
"thought-controlled" household appli-
ances. Dean Radin, a researcher at the
University of Nevada, in Las Vegas says:
"It may be a small difference, but if we
can find a way of amplifying it, we
could build thought-controlled switches.
Perhaps in fifty years we will be using
psychokinesis to open our garage doors
or change channels on our TVs." If the
research grapevine is to be believed, a
laboratory in one of the world's biggest
electronics companies already has a team
thinking about these futuristic gadgets.
But before we get carried away by
visions of an effortless, thought-driven
world, what is the scientific status of
micro-psychokinesis-supposed ability of
the mind to influence small events.
Psychic experiments with random
systems date back to at least the 1930s.
But most of the early research relied on
dice or mechanical devices which, because
of slight imperfections of manufacture,
could never be truly random, and which
were also rather susceptible to fraud.
Reviews of this work showed that the
tighter the controls, the less likely an
experimenter was to report an effect.
In the 1970s, Helmut Schmidt of the
Mind Science Foundation in San Antonio
made a major advance with the introduc-
tion of experiments that used a Geiger
counter to measure radioactive decay.
The testers were asked to speed up or
slow down the rate of decay as displayed
on the Geiger counter without touching
the instrument or the radioactive source.
Then in the 1980s, Robert Jahn, an
engineering professor
at
Princeton
University, New Jersey, began studies
using the random white noise generated
by an electrical diode.
Demolition job
Jahn's work is currently the most
respected of PK studies because of its scale
and technical sophistication-although as
was made plain when Jahn featured in a
recent BBC2 TV series, Heretic, his move
into parapsychology has horrified Prince-
ton's authorities. When Jahn, a rocket
propulsion specialist, went public with his
research in 1986, he was demoted from
dean of the engineering faculty to an
associate professorship and left in no a
Photography: John Millar
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34

'If ever proof were needed against the existence of
telepathy, psychokinesis, precognition or any other form
of psychic power, the gambling halls of Las Vegas
seem to provide the perfect place to find it

1
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doubt that he would have been booted
right off campus if it were possible.
Even in the safety of his Princeton
Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR)
laboratory funded by the McDonnell
Foundation and the Fetzer Institute, in
the basement of the engineering depart-
ment, Jahn has had to face a barrage of
criticism from former colleagues and
other sceptics. Some dismissed his results
as being caused by faulty laboratory
equipment, others have even suggested
that they could be the result of fraud.
There is also a constant demand for Jahn
to clearly define the mechanism that
converts thought to action.
Despite this rough treatment by fellow
academics, Jahn-like most parapsy-
chologists-is surprisingly open and
helpful when questioned about his re-
search. His first remark is that common-
sense examples such as gambling are not
a particularly good argument against
paranormal powers. Jahn points out
that in group situations, such as race
courses and roulette games, many
people would be willing different
outcomes and these are likely to
cancel each other out. Then, of
course, there are the management's
wishes to consider.
Another confounding factor, he
believes, is the possibility of "psi-
"missing" where some people might
consistently get the opposite of
what they try to will. Finally, the
size of the effect being claimed-
just a tenth of a per cent-is so
small that it could easily be built
into the odds on gambling devices
like slot machines.
Tossing a coin
Jahn has also gone out of his way to
counter criticisms of his scientific
technique by running all his experi-
ments under the controlled condi-
tions of the laboratory. His basic
experiment, which he has been
running for 14 years, is simple. He
built a random event generator-
roughly, the electronic equivalent of
tossing a coin. A thousand times a
second, the white noise produced by
a diode is sampled and its phase
will produce either a positive or a
negative value. On average, there should
be an equal split. Jahn gets people to sit
in front of the generator and will it to
produce either more "heads" or "tails".
The subjects-or operators, as Jahn
calls them-can see how well they are
doing from a cumulative line rising or
falling on a computer screen.
The most common criticism of this kind
of experiment is that either the machine
is probably not truly random in perform-
ance or that the recording of the results
leaves too much scope for mistakes and
even plain fraud. Jahn has gone to great
lengths to counter these possibilities.
The design of the random event gen-
erator does not seem to be in question.
Measured over many days and millions of
readings, its output has been perfectly
well-behaved-even to the point where it
throws up the occasional "excursion" into
apparently significant deviations from
chance. If left to run long enough, a
properly random system should some-
times stray quite a way from the mean,
and Jahn's generator produced the
expected number of such excursions
during its calibration trials.
The generator also has safeguards
against tampering. Subjects are normally
left alone during trials and sceptics have
'Jahn has also gone
out of his way to
counter criticisms
of his scientific
technique by running
all his experiments
under the controlled
3
conditions of
the laboratory'
K
suggested that its output could be
affected by something as crude as it
being given a kick, to more subtle effects
like waving a magnet near it or even just
leaning towards the machine and creat-
ing some sort of weak capacitance effect
from the static on a subject's clothing.
To guard against such possibilities,
Jahn has fitted the generator with vari-
ous warning bells and temperature
gauges. But more importantly, the sam-
pling method does not rely on the raw
output of the noise diode. Instead, the
definition of what counts as a head or tail
is alternated with each trial, so a positive
signal will be counted as a head on one
trial, but a tail the next. This added twist
would cancel out any inherent bias that
the equipment might develop during
the course of an experiment. Switching
the polarity criteria a thousand times a
second would also seem to rule out
any deliberate, or even inadvertent,
tampering by subjects.
Controlling conditions
And as yet another precaution, the per-
formance of subjects is measured against
three conditions: subjects must move the
line up for half the time; down for half
the time; and, as a control, they must sit
by the box, leaving it to perform on
its own. Jahn says it is difficult to
think what kind of equipment failure
or environmental interference could
change its direction as the subject
has to switch between each of the
three conditions.
The control over recording data
seem equally stringent. One com-
plaint against many earlier parapsy-
chology experiments was that
subjects could begin and end trials
as they wanted. By recording trials
that seemed to be going in the
desired direction, and aborting
sessions once they began to produce
a downward turn using the excuse
of having a headache or suddenly
feeling uninspired, subjects could
manipulate an experiment to create
a result. But Jahn guarded against
such perils by specifying the number
of trials to be completed in advance
and insisting that all results be
recorded in the final database. In
addition, the initiation of each ses-
sion and the logging of results was
controlled by computer software.
Not only were results automatically
dumped onto tape, but the compu-
ter printed out a separate paper
record and subjects wrote up their
scores in the laboratory's logbook.
With an apparently watertight design,
Jahn reported his first major batch
of results in 1986 after completing a
quarter of a million experimental trials (a
trial consisting of 200 "coin-flips" in each
of the three conditions). This was already
several hundred times more data
than collected by any other micro-PK
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researcher. But Jahn and the small team
he assembled kept on going, and by last
year Jahn had reached 14 million trials
using over 100 different subjects.
In brief, the results he has found are
tiny but highly significant. The size of the
effect is about 0.1 per cent, meaning that
for every thousand electronic tosses, the
random event generator is producing
about one more head or tail than
it should by chance alone. How-
ever, while microscopic, the effect
is so constant that there is only a 1
in 5000 chance that Jahn's results
are a statistical fluke rather than
some kind of anomaly.
So it seems like game, set and
match to the parapsychologists. An
experiment which was designed to
meet all the standard criticisms of
psychic research has come up with
a steady, robust result. Certainly
Jahn's work appears to have put
sceptics, such as James Alcock
of York University, Ontario, and
Ray Hyman of the University of
Oregon-both members of the
self-appointed
policing
body,
the Committee for the Scientific
Investigation of Claims of the
Paranormal (CSICOP)-on the
defensive. Yet a closer look at the
detail of Jahn's findings still raises
some worrying questions.
Since reporting his early results
in 1986, Jahn has extended the
scope of his experiments. What he
has found is that the anomalous
effect appears astonishingly insen-
sitive to changing circumstances.
The size of the effect, for example,
remains much the same when instead of
testing the influence of subjects on a
physical process-the random thermal
movement of electrons across a transistor
junction, for example-Jahn asks them
to disturb the output of a psuedo-random
source. The pseudo-random number
generator is just a repetitive mathemati-
cal calculation, so it would seem that the
mind is as good at influencing arithmetic
as real events.
The size of the effect also appeared
constant when Jahn tested subjects with
a random mechanical cascade. This
device is a pinball machine, looking
rather like a giant version of the popular
Japanese arcade game, pachenko, in
which 9000 polystyrene balls are
dropped through a grid of nylon pegs,
bouncing and skittering to collect in bins
at the bottom. In an unbiased system, the
balls should end up with a classic
Gaussian bell-shaped distribution. But
Jahn claims that when subjects sat in
front of this three-metre-high "macro-PK"
device, they were able to produce slight
deviations to the side.
More implausibly still, the effects on all
three systems seemed impervious to dis-
tance and time. Over the past few years,
Jahn has reported the results of large-
scale trials in which 30 people attempted
'Attention has
focused on the fact
that one of the
experimental
subjects-is almost
single-handedly
responsible for the
significant results of
the studies'
to influence the devices from as far away
as Kenya, New Zealand, England and
Russia. Each subject would sit down for
an hour at an agreed time and try to
alter output according to a prearranged
pattern. The distance a subject was from
the experiment seemed to have no affect
on the end result.
In another batch of trials using the
same people, Jahn asked them to make
their efforts up to several days before or
after the running of the machine. If any-
thing, says Jahn, the effect was slightly
stronger under such extreme conditions.
Jahn is not perturbed by such a pattern
of results. He says that on the face of it,
if psychic powers exist, they should be
strongest when subjects are closest to the
equipment. Also it seems likely that
feedback on success rates and the kind of
device being used should have an effect.
But Jahn believes that micro-PK is
misnamed because what is actually
happening is not a mental interference
with a physical event but something
much more subtle-a distortion of
the laws of statistics themselves. Jahn
thinks that subjects somehow distort the
"probability envelope" of an outcome.
How they are supposed to do so is far
from clear. Jahn has written about how
such a view ties in with a quantum me-
chanical view of consciousness in
Margins of Reality, coauthored with
Brenda Dunne, who manages the
laboratory. Jahn argues that, like
quantum systems, consciousness
appears to have both a "particle" and
a "wave" aspect. Consciousness is at
its most concrete and particle-like
when involved in ordinary rational
thought, but becomes fluid and
wave-like when thinking is creative
and holistic. Jahn cites the wave
aspect of quantum systems which
allows the systems occasionally to
penetrate physical barriers-a phe-
nomenon familiar to microelectronics
engineers who have seen this effect
with quantum tunnelling in which
particles can be made to "leap"
across insulated junctions. So, by
analogy, the mind might be able to
reach beyond the brain and have
a faint resonant influence on the
surrounding world.
Mumbo jumbo
Sceptics, however, treat such talk as
mumbo jumbo. They point out that,
for a start, statistics are something
that emerge from the behaviour of
random processes, not something
that creates them. Instead, sceptics
see the surprising insensitivity of the
claimed PK effect as being rather fishy.
Suspicions have hardened as sceptics
have looked more closely at the fine
detail of Jahn's results. Attention has
focused on the fact that one of the
experimental subjects-believed to be a
member of the PEAR laboratory staff-is
almost single-handedly responsible for
the significant results of the studies.
This was noted as long ago as 1985 by
a fellow parapsychologist, John Palmer of
Durham University, North Carolina, who
wrote a report on Jahn's work for the US
Army. One subject-known as operator
10-was by far the best performer, and
this trend has continued. On the most
recently available figures, operator 10
has been involved in only 15 per cent of
the 14 million trials but contributed a
full half of the total "successes". If this
person's figures are taken out of the
data pool, scoring in the "low intention"
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The luck of the draw
WHILE successful parapsychol-
ogy experiments grab attention,
failures to find a result rarely
get any press. But one recent
experiment-modelled closely
on Robert Jahn's micro-PK
studies-is worth mentioning.
Stan Jeffers, a physicist at
York
University,
Ontario,
says his curiosity was piqued
when he stumbled upon an
old report of Jahn's research.
He says Jahn's methodology
sounded impressively solid,
which inspired him to mount
his own parapsychological re-
search. Soon he discovered that
CSICOP member, James Alcock,
worked at the same university,
and this helped when producing
a strong experimental design.
Jeffers's idea was to test
people's ability to bend a beam
of light and so distort the
interference pattern created as
it passed through a diffraction
slit. Jeffers says the experiment
was a straight optical equiva-
lent of Jahn's polystyrene ball
cascade, except that because he
used photons, subjects were
dealing with "zillions" of events
per second and so he expected
any effect to show up quickly.
After testing over 80 people
-including
self-proclaimed
psychics-Jeffers found only
chance results.
Jahn himself admits that he
expected Jeffers's experiment
to work and was puzzled when
it did not. Jahn has since lent
Jeffers one of his new mini-
ature random noise generators
and Jeffers is planning further
investigations.
condition falls to chance while "high
intention" scoring drops close to the
.05 probability boundary considered
weakly significant in scientific results.
Sceptics like Alcock and Hyman say
naturally it is a serious concern that staff
at PEAR have been acting as guinea pigs
in their own experiments. But it becomes
positively alarming if one of the staff-
with intimate knowledge of the data
recording and processing procedures-is
making such a huge contribution to the
"successful" results.
Adding fuel to the controversy, sceptics
have pointed to the strange behaviour of
the baseline condition results. Theoreti-
cally, the baseline condition should show
the same gently wandering pattern as
the calibration trials which separately
validated the generator's performance,
with occasional excursions into areas of
apparent significance. Instead, the base-
line result has stuck unnaturally close to
a zero deviation from chance.
In noting these results, Jahn himself
has remarked that what makes the situa-
tion even odder is that when the baseline
statistics and the high and low scores
are all added together, the result is a
well-behaved Gaussian distribution. It is
almost as if the extra hits found in the
high and low scores had been taken from
what would otherwise have been outliers
of the baseline condition.
Alcock says this is exactly the sort of
pattern that might be expected if some
sort of data sorting had been going on.
Given an effect size of just one in a
thousand, it would not take much to
distort Jahn's results.
·Little of this speculation has been
discussed openly by CSICOP mem-
bers-to do so would be virtually to
accuse Jahn's laboratory of fraud, and
sceptics admit they have no proof of
that. Alcock also stresses that Jahn is
widely respected and such alterations
need not be deliberate, they could
happen as the result of honest mix-ups.
Jahn, however, says he is well aware
there has been a whispering campaign
and he welcomes the chance to put the
record straight. With candour, Jahn
says no experimental design can ever
rule out fraud. But he believes that the
recording procedures at PEAR are unu-
sually tight and any fiddling with results
would have to be systematic because it
would have to include the laboratory's
computer database, the print-outs and
subjects' entries in the logbook. Jahn
adds that sceptics have had a long-
standing invitation to check his work
first-hand and the few that have dropped
by seem to have left relatively impressed.
Into the unknown
Jahn admits that operator 10-whom he
insists must remain anonymous-has
been responsible for a large proportion of
the significant findings. But he makes
two points. First, at least four or five
other of the 100 subjects show a more
powerful effect than operator 10. What is
different is that they have been involved
in far fewer trials. Jahn says if these
better performers had been able to do as
many runs as operator 10-and if the
strength of their effects persisted-then
operator 10's results would have dropped
away into the background.
His second point is that when the
contributions of all the operators are
plotted, they form a smooth continuum.
Just as there are a few high performers
like operator 10 at one end of the
spectrum, so there are an equal number
'Sceptics invited
to check his work
first-hand seem to
have left relatively
impressed'
of poor performers-even psi-missers-
at the other end who drag the overall
numbers down. With over 100 subjects,
statistically speaking there would have to
be a few high-end scorers like operator
10, so no sinister conclusions should be
drawn from that fact alone.
As to the "too perfect" baseline, Jahn
says this fits in neatly with his argument
that what subjects are doing is bending
statistics rather than having a direct
influence on physical events. It seems
that, in the short term, subjects can pull
the scoring in one direction. But this
has to be balanced by a shortfall in later
extreme scores.
However, in the end, says Jahn,
sceptics will always be able to dismiss
positive results from a parapsychology
experiment. Suspicions of fraud, faulty
machinery or plain mistaken recording of
data can never be completely countered.
Jahn says the only way forward is to have
the same experiment replicated by other
laboratories. This is why he has recently
built a cheap, solid-state version of his
random event generator and over the
past year he has been farming them out
to other interested investigators.
Yet even replications may not be the
answer, given the strength of entrenched
views. Hardened sceptics are just as likely
to find reasons to suspect a successful
replication. And, of course, the same
doubts work the other way. If a
scientist produces negative results (see
Box), then the parapsychologists may
be the ones to start talking about
incompetence and faulty procedures.
Recent experience suggests there
may never be a simple, conclusive test
of the existence of psychic powers.
However, Jahn's work does seem to
narrow the boundaries somewhat, for if
such abilities exists, then their effects
appear microscopically small. They also
seem quite bizarrely resistant to the
constraints of time, place and logic.
Knowing what science is not looking
for, at least is knowing something.
John McCrone is a science writer specialising
in psychology and technology.
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Observer noise
The study of parapsychology
is disturbing because it
challenges some of the
fundamental principles of the
scientific method. In the case
of the thought experiments
described in your article
"Psychic powers: what are the
odds?" (26 November), the
independence of the
experimenter from the
experiment is at issue.
The separation of the
observer from the observed
is of course nowhere absolute.
At the quantum level the limit
is defined by the Heisenberg
uncertainty principle, and
by the philosophical
speculations of the
Copenhagen school.
A different type of
interaction operates in the
"softer" social and medical
sciences. An anthropologist,
for example, cannot study a
cultural group without
influencing, and being
influenced by, that culture.
One day we may have a social-
scientific uncertainty principle
to define this effect.
In considering the attempts
to prove psychokinesis such as
Robert Jahn is doing, one can
speculate that the observable .
CW
COFFEE
TIME
0
PSYCHO
KINESIS
EXPERIMENT
$60
effect may never exceed
experimental noise.
Conceptually, if such
phenomena are real they
could be influenced not only
by the individual actually
involved in the experiment but
by all interested parties who
are thinking about it at the
time: the designer of the
experiment and all the friends
who wish him or her success.
On the other hand, sceptics
who conduct the identical
experiment could equally
displace the outcome in
the opposite direction.
Parapsychology may
therefore always be impossible
to prove. This argument is not
new. The efficacy of miracles
has been debated for
centuries, and proof of their
validity has long relied on the
presence or absence of "faith".
Another point: if psycho-
kinesis does exist it must
be weak or the (honest)
influence of strong-willed
scientists on the outcome
of their work would by now
be evident, rather than lost
in a background of
experimental noise.
Graham Hagens
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
*
*
*
John McCrone's otherwise
well-written article contains
one factual error that should
perhaps be corrected, namely
that when "Jahn . . . went
public with his research in
1986, he was demoted from
dean of the engineering
faculty to an associate
professorship and left in no
doubt that he would have
been booted right off campus
if it were possible".
In point of fact, we had been
publishing and speaking
publicly about our research for
several years prior to 1986,
during which period I served
both as Dean of the School
of Engineering and Applied
Science, and as Professor
of Aerospace Sciences, as
is the Princeton custom.
While it is true that a
number of my faculty and
administrative colleagues
had expressed reservations
about the work, no explicit
threats to my retaining either
position were ever directly
voiced to me.
My decision not to seek
reappointment as Dean in
1986, after fifteen years in that
chair, was based on a number
of personal and professional
considerations, including my
desire to devote more effort to
my two research programmes.
At that time, I simply returned
to a full-time role as (full)
professor in my home
department of mechanical and
aerospace engineering, which
position I retain today.
No "demotion" was
explicitly or implicitly
involved; to the contrary,
this return has proven
professionally and personally
advantageous to me.
Robert Jahn
Princeton University
New Jersey
Battery blues
The limitations imposed on
the electric car by the present
battery technology (as
described in "All charged
up and nowhere to go", 3
December), could be overcome
if a more systemic approach
were to be made to the design
of the car and its energy
supply system. Instead of
making the batteries an
integral part of the car and
recharging them on board, it
would seem more sensible to
make them easily replaceable
on filling station forecourts.
Payment would be for the net
electric charge received.
Suitable battery handling
equipment could make battery
replacement as speedy as
refilling a fuel tank.
Recharging could be confined
to off-peak times and could be
carried out more safely and
cheaply at filling stations than
at home. Battery exchange
could be made at unmanned
sites, all round the clock;
something not really practical
with liquid or gaseous fuels.
To obtain the full economic
benefits of scale in the early
years of electric car
technology, the design of
batteries should be modular
and suitable for all makes and
sizes of vehicles, and
compatible with handling
equipment in all forecourts.
No significant "green" effect
will result if, as suggested in
the article, only rich customers
will be able to afford to buy
electric vehicles. Governments
and local authorities trying to
popularise the use of electric
vehicles could do so by
bearing the capital cost of the
batteries, by leasing them to
vehicle owners, and by
supporting the development of
battery exchange sites
throughout the country.
Priming the market pump
in order to reach the critical
sales levels needed for really
low cost vehicle production
should be needed for only a
few years.
Fenton Robb
Eyemouth, Berwickshire
Double whammy
As a retired BT engineer with
over 40 years experience of
street works, to me the most
disturbing aspect of the
damage to trees by TV cabling
is that in many cases the
excavations are unnecessary
(Forum, 3 December).
TREES ?
WE GIVE YOU
VIDEO WHEN
YOU SIGN
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CABLES
TV
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Cw
BT has had for decades in
most suburban areas an
extensive underground duct
system with plenty of space for
additional cable-but, as
Barry Fox points out in the
same issue (Technology), BT is
not allowed to compete.
Since, as Cyril Bracegirdle
says, the cable companies are
mainly American owned, this
puts the British public on the
receiving end of the double
whammy of unnecessary
environmental damage and
seeing the profits from it float
over the Atlantic.
G. E. Haines
Woodbridge, Suffolk
British opt-out
In brief reply to Bruce Reed's
comments (Letters, 10
December) on my letter of
12 November, even when a
British contribution to the
European Union budget in
respect of research and
development is included, the
government's spending on
R&D is now less, in real terms,
than in 1984/5 by about
£1 billion per annum-and
still falling (Forward Look
1994, HMSO).
Bruce Reed is right to draw
attention to the British
Treasury's insistence, unique in
the EU, that a proportion of
the EU funds returned to
Britain for support of R&D
should be counted against-
and so reduce-Departmental
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NEW SCIENTIST
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LETTERS
Well done, parties
Fred Pearce's assessment of
the first Conference of the
Parties (CoP) to the
Convention on Biological
Diversity (CBD) (This Week,
17 December) was altogether
too gloomy. The political
process, far from being
paralysed, may be outpacing
the necessary scientific
cooperation.
In the 30 months since
the Earth Summit 103
nations have ratified the
convention. No other treaty
on biological resources has
progressed so fast.
Over 30 nations have been
preparing biodiversity country
studies and, surprisingly, a
handful of nations (including
Britain) have already
published action plans.
CW
DIVERSI
FLOURISHING!
Over two dozen more are
in preparation, and this is
before the draft UN
Environment Programme
(UNEP) guidelines have
been distributed.
The CoP's subsidiary body
on scientific, technical and
technological advice (SBSTTA)
is the think-tank for the CBD.
It needs to work fast, but the
key question is whether it will
really be scientific and
technical. The Mexico meeting
of experts last February was
too political. SBSTTA must
be allowed to identify the
scientific backdrop to
reporting and priority-setting.
.
This clearing house for
scientific and technical
cooperation will pump life-
blood into the convention.
The Nassau decision to put off
for a year rather than spend
millions on computers for the
secretariat was prudent. Key
questions include how to
structure the clearing house,
and how to introduce the
north's information and
technical resources.
The CBD is a comprehensive
instrument covering all species
and ecosystems. The work
plan may have deferred on
forests to the Commission
on Sustainable Development
(CSD), but gave welcome
emphasis to marine and
coastal work.
The CoP meets again in just
12 months. We must use that
time to support and steer the
process cooperatively, not
blow it off course or down
narrow channels.
Mark Collins
World Conservation
Monitoring Centre
Cambridge
*
*
*
As the leader of the British
delegation to the meeting, I
would like to set the record
straight on several issues.
First, the decisions which the
parties are criticised for
putting off are ones which
they never intended to take at
Nassau, namely the location of
the secretariat and the need
for and modalities of a
biosafety protocol.
Secondly, Pearce failed to
mention any of the important
decisions that were taken,
such as those on the spending
guidelines to the Global
Environment Facility, the
agreement of the medium-
term work programme
for the convention and the
designation of UNEP as
host of the secretariat.
Thirdly, while it is true that
decisions on how to tackle
forests will be taken in the
light of next year's CSD
meeting, it is certainly not true
that the CSD process is being
coordinated by Canada and
Malaysia. Theirs is only one of
several initiatives feeding into
the CSD and working towards
building a consensus on
forestry, including one of our
own in partnership with India.
Finally, while few countries,
apart from Britain, have
produced formal national
plans, many countries are in
the process of doing so.
Conservation and
sustainable use of biodiversity
is a long-term process which
does not start with the
convention. Nor can the
convention be expected to halt
the decline of species in its
tracks. But the fact that 104
countries have ratified a
convention which has come
into force remarkably quickly
by the standard of major
international treaties is one
which should give us hope
in the fight to reverse the
trend of species loss.
Peter Unwin
Department of the Environment
London
Future leaks
John McCrone discusses the
experiments on possible
human influence on random
systems performed by Robert
Jahn at Princeton University
("Psychic powers: what are the
odds?", 26 November, and
Letters, 7 January). While it is
instructive to examine one
laboratory's claim in isolation,
evidence for the existence of a
valid anomaly cannot rest on a
single group's effort.
In the case of a putative
interaction between the
cognitive intent of an
individual and a hardware
random-number generator,
there is a substantial database
of laboratories that have
collectively conducted over
600 replications of the basic
experiment. D. I. Radin and R.
D. Nelson conducted a careful
meta-analysis of this database
and concluded that there is
prima facie evidence for an
anomaly that cannot be
accounted for by selective
reporting, methodological
flaws or selected subjects
(Foundations of Physics, Vol 19
No 12, 1989).
In McCrone's article, he
remarks on the possibility of
data selection. We, too, have
noticed that the sum of data
for high, low and no aims
yields a mean chance
expectation distribution. An
additional clue to what may be
happening is that Jahn's Z
score statistic does not
increase with the number of
bits sampled in each trial. If
the effects were due to a shift
in the probability of each bit
away from 0.5, the Z score on
each trial should increase as
the square root of the number
of bits sampled.
Assuming that Radin and
Nelson's meta-analysis is
correct, we provide a different
explanation for Jahn's and
other results. We propose
that subjects are statistical
opportunists and initiate a trial
to capture a locally deviant
sub-sequence from an
otherwise unperturbed
physical system. This model
explains why the high, low
and control samples add to
mean chance expectation,
since they comprise sub-
samples of an unbiased
distribution. Furthermore,
with a given ability to select
sub-sequences meeting the
trial aim, the Z scores of the
samples will be independent of
the number of bits sampled:
just what the data show.
How are subjects able to
"select" when to initiate a
trial? We suspect that there
may be a statistical "leakage"
of information about the
upcoming sequence from the
future. This information allows
the subjects slightly, but
systematically, to bias their
decisions (for example, when
to initiate trials) to more
favourable outcomes.
C. Honerton and D. C. Ferrari
analysed all the so-called
precognition experiments from
1935 to 1987. Their analysis
included 309 separate studies
reported by 62 investigators.
Approximately two million
individual trials were
contributed by more than
50 000 subjects. After a careful
flaw analysis and a correction
for selective reporting, they
found a statistically robust
but tiny effect (Journal of
Parapsychology, Vol 53, 1989).
We find this database as
compelling as any we have
seen in the social sciences.
With strong independent
evidence for the kind of
information leakage needed to
explain Jahn and others' data
in terms of anomalous
selection, we view all these
experiments into anomalies
as pointing to a single
underlying mechanism of
information transfer.
McCrone is concerned about
the fact that most of the
"successful" data appear to be
contributed by a single subject,
operator 10. If one is trying to
understand the mechanism of
a phenomenon, as opposed to
studying its distribution in the
population, then one should
study talented individuals. If
one wanted to study violin
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51

.playing and sampled
Jascha Heif Approved For Release 2000/08/08 : CIA:RDP96-00789R003200250001-9
.
writers of this letter, summing
the results one would
conclude that violin playing
was impossible.
James Spottiswoode and
Edwin May
The Cognitive Sciences
Laboratory
Palo Alto, California
Watered down
No doubt Caroline Pond is
correct (Review, 26 November)
when she writes "many
reputable scientists remain
unconvinced" by the aquatic
ape theory (AAT); but can
someone cite for me a
summary of her "large body of
evidence that refutes it"?
The AAT arises from (is
consistent with) a large
suite of facts about human
anatomy, physiology, and
molecular biology. Each attack
upon AAT that I know
proceeds along a narrow front,
offering an alternative
explanation for just one fact
of the suite and, often,
ignoring any fact embarrassing
to AAT's older rival, the
savanna theory (ST).
Pond herself, in the only
organised exchange for and
against AAT: The Aquatic Ape:
Fact or Fiction? (Roede et al,
eds., Souvenir Press, 1991).
Pond deals with the
"subcutaneous" fat deposits
that extend across much of
the human body. She shows
how these deposits correspond
with smaller deposits of fat in
other primates.
She offers nothing, however,
to explain the "baby fat" that
holds the skin of a newborn
human infant taut, like a
marine mammal's and in
contrast with the slack skin of
an ape neonate. A human
baby floats easily, contentedly,
right side up. Its fat layer has
developed during its last few
weeks in the womb. It's as if
the chimpanzee's 8-month
pregnancy has been extended
by a month to allow time for
baby fat to accumulate.
The extra month places a
heavy burden upon the human
mother. In comparison with
the chimp female, she must be
equipped to furnish her fetus
with something like 50 per
cent greater flow of calorific
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explanation how this extra
burden on the mother, or how
our species's subcutaneous fat,
could be advantageous on
Africa's savanna.
Opponents of AAT have not
assembled a consistent body of
anatomical and physiological
facts in support of the ST,
which arose from, and appears
still to rest upon, just one
geographical circumstance: the
large number of hominid
fossils from East Africa's Rift
Valley. The discovery of A.
ramidus, lying in an ancient
tropical forest, is a big
embarrassment for ST and a
small one for AAT: although A.
ramidus, unlike other hominid
fossils older than two million
years, seems not to have been
found near an ancient lake or
river, even so, its discovery
brings hominid fossils closer to
where our story began, at the
intersection of the Rift Valley
and the Red Sea.
Arthur Squires
Virginia Polytechnic Institute
and State University
Blacksburg, US
All for me
As a parent and grandparent
I can assure James Ward
(Letters, 24-31 December) that
the "anthropic principle" has
nothing to do with physics and
everything to do with
psychology-the desire of
every child to think of itself as
at the centre of the Universe.
Its theme is the Me! Me!
Mel principle. God (or
"something") made the Big
Bang the way it was simply in
order that I, wonder of
wonders, could eventually
come into existence. On
philosophical, let alone
scientific, grounds this
supreme arrogance is not the
behaviour of grown-up people.
Thirty-six per cent of the
British population have learnt
to live without religion and
that proportion is increasing.
This change to a non-mystic
and more scientific outlook
does not support Ward's
contention that we need
quasi-religious, anthropic
beliefs to prevent "a caste
system of scientists and lay
people, with no possibility of
communication between
them". Prepare to duck as
more and more of the
public caste their Pampers to
the wind.
Peter Rowland
Dulwich, London
John Galbraith's new screw
with triangular hole may well
be too late (Technology, 3
December and Letters, 24/31
December). In Canada there is
already in hardware shops a
screw with a square hole
CAN'T
GET OUT OF BED .
IT'S THESE
AMERICAN SPIRAL
NAILS
which must share many of the
advantages, and screwdrivers
with a tapering square end to
fit it are available.
I can confirm that the
tapering fit does provide a
very secure grip, and of course
there is no danger of slipping
out of the slot, as one does
with conventionally slotted
heads, or raising a sharp
splinter of metal to injure the
next handler.
There does seem to be a
communication gap across the
Atlantic: another excellent
North American idea virtually
unobtainable in Britain is the
spirally fluted ordinary nail (I
know the hardened version
can be bought here) which
gives, at a guess, ten times
the grip of an English wire
nail. I always restock when
I visit Canada.
D. Bard
London
Monopolised
I refer to Andrei Linde's
idea that our Universe exists
inside a single magnetic
monopole produced in the
first split-second of creation
(New Scientist, Science,
12 November and Letters,
17 December).
The answer is a resounding
"no". Linde may be one of the
founding fathers of the
inflation model of cosmology,
but he is, like most theorists,
out there in left field, ignoring
the experimental evidence for
magnetic monopoles.
Moreover, these inflation
models are based on SU(5),
which incorrectly predicts
the monopole catalysis of
proton decay.
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