Lewis Wolpert was Professor of Biology at University College, London, and served for five years as Chairman of COPUS, the British Committee for the Public Understanding of Science. He was a faithful standby for the media for more than 20 years as a denouncer of ideas that he suspected were tainted with mysticism or the paranormal.

In 2001, in a programme about some of my telepathy experiments on the Discovery Channel, he proclaimed, “There is no evidence for any person, animal, or thing being telepathic.” The director of the documentary offered to show him a video of my experiments so that he could see the evidence for himself, but he was not interested. He preferred to make his skeptical claim without looking at the facts.

In January 2004, Wolpert and I took part in a public debate on telepathy at the Royal Society of Arts in London, with a high court judge in the chair. We were each given 30 minutes to present our cases. Wolpert spoke first and said that research on telepathy was “pathological science,” and added, “An open mind is a very bad thing – everything falls out.” He asserted that “the whole issue is about evidence,” and concluded after a mere 15 minutes that “There is zero evidence to support the idea that thoughts can be transmitted from a person to an animal, from an animal to a person, from a person to a person, or from an animal to an animal.”

I then summarized evidence for telepathy from thousands of scientific tests and showed a video of recent experiments, but Wolpert averted his eyes from the screen. He did not want to know. According to a report on the debate in Nature, “few members of the audience seemed to be swayed by his [Wolpert’s] arguments…. Many in the audience… variously accused Wolpert of ‘not knowing the evidence’ and being ‘unscientific’.”

For anyone who wants to hear both sides for themselves, the debate is online in streaming audio, as is the transcript.

 
Excerpted From:

Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home
Rupert Sheldrake. Broadway Books; Fully Updated and Revised:
April 26, 2011.

 
Back on his feet and apparently fully recovered from the knockout he suffered at the Royal Society of Arts debate on telepathy in January 2004, Professor Lewis Wolpert, F.R.S., returns to his crusade against ‘paranormal beliefs’ in chapter 9 of new book Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast (Faber and Faber, 2006), portentously subtitled The Evolutionary Origins of Belief.

Does this mean that we are in for a cogently argued and evidence-based inquiry into why people believe in things considered impossible by those who have not studied them?

Sadly, no. Wolpert’s prose is indeed, as claimed by a critic quoted on the back cover, ‘clear, direct and euphonious’. Yet other adjectives insistently come to mind: disingenuous, tendentious and even downright mendacious, as on the second page of the Introduction:

“I do not believe in paranormal phenomena, such as communication with the dead, telepathy, mind reading, ghosts, spirits, psi, psychokinesis, levitation – the evidence is just not there.”

The evidence is of course there as Wolpert knows very well though he tries to get off this hook by patronisingly labelling it ‘apparent evidence’ (p.155). He even mentions some of the best of it of recent times – the 1994 paper in the Psychological Bulletin – though without bothering to give us the title or author’s name. (For the serious student, these are Replicable evidence for an anomalous process of information transfer by Darryl J. Bem and Charles Honorton). However, ‘those who have examined the report closely have conceded that the necessary evidence is flawed’.

We are not told who these experts are, but Wolpert was presumably not referring to his fellow sceptic Ray Hyman, who has made a commendably thorough study of Honorton’s Ganzfeld work (which Wolpert clearly hasn’t), concluding that the methodology was sound and the results could not be explained away easily, at least not by him. The only psi researchers mentioned in this 21-page chapter are Richard Wiseman and James Randi. The list of references includes no less than four papers by Wiseman, none by a member of the Parapsychological Association, and none from any of the six leading peer-reviewed parapsychology journals.

Instead, much space is devoted to everything from witchcraft, the Cottingley fairies, the fantasies of Erich von Däniken and the Rev. Jim Jones of Guyana mass suicide fame to the Indian rope trick and whatever it was that fell to earth near Roswell in 1947. No space at all is given to any of the eminent scientists, including several Fellows of the Royal Society and Nobel laureates, who have been piling up the evidence for psi since the 1860s and are still doing so.

By way of compensation, at least one of the more enduring mysteries of life is solved at last – how does Uri Geller make disabled watches start? It seems (p.158) that he has ‘cured’ many stopped watches simply by putting ‘energy’ into them by holding them in his hand. The reason is that in many cases a watch has stopped because it is jammed with dust and oil; holding it in his hand warms it up and frees it to work again.

Gosh! Can it be that simple? Never mind the other cases. ‘Many of our beliefs,’ Wolpert confesses in a refreshing outburst of candour, ‘are not based on evidence that we have examined.’ (p.140). And he concludes this chapter of disinformation by admitting what we had already noticed, that ‘we are quite casual about evaluating evidence that goes against beliefs we hold strongly.’ He speaks, euphoniously indeed, for himself.

 
This was one of the sayings of Confucius discussed in a series of 5-minute BBC Radio 4 programmes, the speaker on this occasion (28 February 2006) being Professor Lewis Wolpert, famous for his little joke about brains falling out of open minds.

He didn’t agree with the great Chinese philosopher whose Analects are as relevant today as they were 2500 years ago. “How the hell do you know when you know?”, Wolpert wanted to know. He pointed out that “people have very strong beliefs about all sorts of things, and they say that they know there is telepathy, they know that they can make contact with the dead, they know that all sorts of alternative medicine treatments work, but how do they really know?” He added that “it’s quite common to have totally false knowledge”, implying that any knowledge of the subjects mentioned above must be false.

Evidently he had forgotten the ringing endorsement he gave some years ago to St. John’s Wort, which seems to have helped him overcome a much publicised bout of depression and is now recognised as an effective treatment for minor attacks of that affliction, as conceded recently by Exeter University Professor Edzard Ernst, who tests these things properly.

The only way to acquire genuine knowledge, Wolpert revealed, is “by doing science, by doing experiments, by looking at the evidence”, as scores of researchers have been doing with telepathy for at least 120 years. (For a concise summary, see Dean Radin’s The Conscious Universe). As for contacting the dead, readers of Linda Williamson’s excellent new book Ghosts and Earthbound Spirits may conclude that this can not only be done but is being done all the time, not only by rescue-circle mediums but also by pioneer psychiatrists like Dr. Alan Sanderson. (See Spirit Release Foundation for details).

Wolpert does not always practise what he preaches. Those who attended the sold-out debate on telepathy at the Royal Society of Arts in January 2004 were given an impressive display of not looking at the evidence. As his fellow debater Rupert Sheldrake was showing his video clip of N’kisi, the African Grey parrot from New York giving as convincing a display of telepathy as we are ever likely to get, Wolpert, seated at the table with his back to the screen, did not even turn round as the videotape of the event clearly shows. Having opened the debate by declaring that there wasn’t any evidence for telepathy, he apparently could not bear to be confronted with some. How the hell does he know what he claims to know if he doesn’t study the evidence? By his own definition, not very good science. Will we still be paying homage to the wisdom of Wolpert in the year 4500?

 
Back on his feet and apparently fully recovered from the knockout he suffered at the Royal Society of Arts debate on telepathy in January 2004, Professor Lewis Wolpert returns to his crusade against ‘paranormal beliefs’ in his new book Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast (Faber & Faber 2006), portentously subtitled The Evolutionary Origins of Belief.

Wolpert’s prose is indeed, as claimed by a critic quoted on the back cover, ‘clear, direct and euphonious’, yet other adjectives come to mind such as disingenuous, tendentious, or downright mendacious, as for example on the second page of the Introduction:

“I do not believe in paranormal phenomena, such as communication with the dead, telepathy, mind reading, ghosts, spirits, psi, psychokinesis, levitation – the evidence is just not there.”

It is of course there, as Wolpert knows perfectly well since he actually mentions some of the best of it – the 1994 paper in the Psychological Bulletin – though without bothering to give either the title or the authors. (For the serious critic, these are Does psi exist? Replicable evidence for an anomalous process of information transfer by Daryl Bem and Charles Honorton). Wolpert then alleges that ‘those who have examined the report closely have conceded that the necessary evidence is flawed’. This is one of the standard copouts, guaranteed to get the skeptic off any hook. However good any evidence is, an anonymous skeptic will be found who claims it to be ‘flawed’.

Here, Wolpert collides head-on with his fellow skeptic Ray Hyman, who did what Wolpert has never done when he made a very thorough examination of the work of Honorton and others, concluding that the methodology was sound and the results could not be easily explained away, at least not by him.

The only psi researchers Wolpert mentions by name are James Randi and Richard Wiseman. The list of references includes four papers by Wiseman but not a single one by a member of the Parapsychological Association or from any of the five leading peer-reviewed parapsychology journals. Much space, however, is devoted to the Cottingley fairies, the whatever-it-was that crashed near Roswell in 1947, the fantasies of Erich von Däniken and Rev. Jim Jones, and the Indian Rope Trick. No space at all is devoted to the many eminent scientists, including several Fellows of the Royal Society and a handful of Nobel laureates who have been piling up the evidence for at least some of the things Wolpert alleges not to exist for well over a century.

‘Many of our beliefs,’ Wolpert concedes in a refreshing outburst of candour, ‘are not based on evidence that we have examined’ and ‘we are quite casual about evaluating evidence that goes against beliefs we hold strongly.’

Indeed!

Lewis Wolpert is Professor of Biology as Applied to Medicine at University College, London. He served for five years as Chairman of COPUS, the Committee for the Public Understanding of Science.

Wolpert has been a faithful standby for the media for more than 20 years as a denouncer of ideas that he suspects are tainted with mysticism or the paranormal. On the other hand, in the context of genetic engineering, he is a fervent believer in free enquiry. “I regard it as ethically unacceptable and impractical to censor any aspect of trying to understand the nature of our world.” (Nobel Website, June 29, 2000).

In 1994, as a member of the BBC Science Consultative Committee, he tried to stop BBC Television from making a six part series on scientific “heretics”, as he revealed in the Sunday Times (July 3, 1994). “This is an absurd series. The whole way these programmes are being presented just fills me with rage. It’s a grotesque distortion. It’s disgusting. It’s just sensational anti-science, and anti-science is the rationalization for ignorance”. Wolpert’s most memorable aphorism was “Open minds are empty minds”.

In 2001, in a programme about a series of controlled telepathy experiments on the Discovery Channel, broadcast in the US on August 31, 2001, he proclaimed that “There is no evidence for any person, animal, or thing being telepathic”. He did not examine the evidence, presented in the same programme, about which he was being interviewed. He is an old-style dogmatic skeptic, and seems entirely unaware of numerous scientific studies that seem to show that that telepathy actually exists.

In January 2004 he took part in a public debate on telepathy with Rupert Sheldrake at the Royal Society of Arts in London, with a high court judge in the chair. According to a report on the debate in the scientific journal Nature, “few members of the audience seemed to be swayed by his [Wolpert’s] arguments…. Many in the audience… variously accused Wolpert of ‘not knowing the evidence’ and being ‘unscientific’.” You can hear the debate online by clicking here, read the text here, or read the Nature report (Debate online, RSA text, Report from Nature).

Lewis Wolpert’s Website

Photo credit: Lewis Wolpert