No evidence of telepathy, psychokinesis, precognition, etc. have presented themselves in any measurable capacity. I seriously doubt they exist, and the research is spotty and filled with fraud, equivocations and general sloppiness. It's hard to have much hope for a field if investigation that's been aggressively researched for over a century has provided such an unconvincing handful of info'.
Yeah, Cacey is not particularly convincing, but I also don't find the PEAR research to have acheived much either. I won't go into the boring details over the alleged .1% success rate- suffice it to say that it's extremely controversial. Here's a link to PEAR:
The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) - The Skeptic's Dictionary - Skepdic.com
Yes, it is The Skeptic's Dictionary so it's obviously critical of PSI research, but it does have some good links that explain the research in detail.
The New Scientist had an interesting parapsychology special in 13 March 2004, which I found makes for extremely interesting reading for those interested in the field, regardless of their opinions, and does take a balanced view. I will post an interesting excerpt from the article "Opposites Detract" (p39):
So, you think you are rational, dispassionate and swayed only by hard evidence? Then try this little test. Last September two teams of respected scientists unveiled the outcome of research to prove the effectiveness of two very different agents. One team reported a powerful effect, much larger than expected by chance alone; the other could only muster an indifferent result with borderline significance. Which of these do you find the more convincing proof?
Most of us would view this as a no-brainer, and cite the first. But you probably sense a trap and would like to know more before deciding.
The weak result came from an international team of medical scientists studying a new drug aimed at reducing the chances of recurrent heart attacks. They found that the odds of another heart attack fell by just a few per cent, barely better than the reduction expected by chance alone. The far stronger finding came from a team at the Koestler Parapsychology Unit ant the University of Edinburgh, UK, and seems to support the existence of extrasensory perception (ESP).
The article also includes an interesting graph that shows the statistical differences between trials of a drug called streptokinase over the first ten trials (a blood clot dissolving drug quite widely used now) and ganzfield experiments, which showed the ganzfield experiments to have far greater significance when pooled.
I'm sorry about posting such a large text excerpt (I do it quite seldomly) but I find it quite illustrative of the problems that parapsychology faces as a branch of science, or pseudoscience (depending on one's perspective). It particularly illustrates our bias against something that appears to contradict our understanding of nature and science.
The 0.1% success rate that PEAR obtained initially sounds like a dud, but getting the same results by chance has a probability of approximately 0.00007. It's something that does warrant further investigation, and has been, with less than stellar results, I will concede.
I don't think that psychic powers have a large influence on the world that we live in. If it did, we would have heard more about it, the laboratory results would be far more conclusive than what they are now, and people that are psychic would be winning large sums of money at the racetrack each weekend. The people paraded out to support this smack of charlatism to me, fail under close scrutiny, and do more to harm support to parapsychology than to help it. But I do think that something is there worth examination and attention.
Sorry for the overly long post.
