'Crossed the Lines into Pseudoscience:' Banned TED Talk: The Science Delusion

Apparently this video was removed from TED’s main account, and their YouTube account.

Rupert Sheldrake [speaking in the video], an English biochemist, and Graham Hancock, a journalist, were censored by TED; Graham’s similar video was removed from the Youtube channel as well.

“They dared question the Scientistic Orthodoxy, and for that they have been publicly castigated and defamed,” writes Youtube user KosmicTom, who uploaded the video after it was removed. “Follow this link for TED’s dubious statement on the matter (and the many comments appropriately critical of TED’s rationale).”

This video is solely hosted on the blog post where the statement is, too. The video, along with Hancocks, are unable to be shared or embedded.

“According to our science board, Rupert Sheldrake bases his arguement on several major factual errors, which undermane the arguements of [the] talk,” writes a TED staff member on the blog post. One example is that he “suggests that scientists reject the notion that animals have consciousness, despite the fact that it’s generally accepted that animals have some form of consciousness.”

Further, TED disputes Sheldrake’s “claim to have ‘evidence’ of morphic resonance in crystal formation and rat behavior. The research has never appeared in a peer reviewed journal, despite attempts by other scientists eager to replicate the work.”

As for the decision to remove the videos from the YouTube channels, it’s not censorship, says TED staff. 

“We’re not censoring the talks. Instead, we’re placing them here, where they can be framed to highlight both their provacative ideas and the factual problems with their arguements.” The videos “appear to have crossed the lines into pseudoscience.”

Rupert Sheldrake responded to the accusations:

“This discussion is taking place because the militant atheist bloggers Jerry Coyne and P.Z. Myers denounced me, and attacked TED for giving my talk a platform. I was invited to give my talk as part of a TEDx event in Whitechapel, London, called ‘Challenging Existing Paradigms.’ That’s where the problem lies: my talk explicitly challenges the materialist belief system. It summarized some of the main themes of my recent book Science Set Free (in the UK called The Science Delusion). Unfortunately, the TED administrators have publically aligned themselves with the old paradigm of materialism, which has dominated science since the late nineteenth century.”

He responds specifically to the three accusations leveled against him. Here’s his response to the animal consciousness bit.

“I characterized the materialist dogma as follows: ‘Matter is unconscious: the whole universe is made up of unconscious matter. There’s no consciousness in stars in galaxies, in planets, in animals, in plants and there ought not to be any in us either, if this theory’s true. So a lot of the philosophy of mind over the last 100 years has been trying to prove that we are not really conscious at all.’ Certainly some biologists, including myself, accept that animals are conscious. In August, 2012, a group of scientists came out with an endorsement of animal consciousness in ‘The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness.’ As Discovery News reported, ‘While it might not sound like much for scientists to declare that many nonhuman animals possess conscious states, it’s the open acknowledgement that’s the big news here.’

But materialist philosophers and scientists are still in the majority, and they argue that consciousness does nothing – it is either an illusion or an ‘epiphenomenon’ of brain activity. It might as well not exist in animals – or even in humans. That is why in the philosophy of mind, the very existence of consciousness is often called ‘the hard problem.’”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

And to the accusation that he had claimed that there’s evidence of morphic resonence in crystal formation and rat behavior.

“I said, ‘There is in fact good evidence that new compounds get easier to crystallize all around the world’” For example, turanose, a kind of sugar, was considered to be a liquid for decades, until it first crystallized in the 1920s. Thereafter it formed crystals everywhere. (Woodard and McCrone Journal of Applied Crystallography (1975). 8, 342). The American chemist C. P. Saylor, remarked it was as though “the seeds of crystallization, as dust, were carried upon the winds from end to end of the earth” (quoted by Woodard and McCrone).

The research on rat behavior I referred to was carried out at Harvard and the Universities of Melbourne and Edinburgh and was published in peer-reviewed journals, including the British Journal of Psychology and the Journal of Experimental Biology. For a fuller account and detailed references see Chapter 11 of my book Morphic Resonance (in the US) / A New Science of Life (in the UK). The relevant passage is online here: http://sciencesetfree.tumblr.com/

The TED Scientific Board refers to ”attempts by other scientists eager to replicate the work” on morphic resonance. I would be happy to work with these eager scientists if the Scientific Board can reveal who they are.

This is a good opportunity to correct an oversimplification in my talk. In relation to the dogma that mechanistic medicine is the only kind that really works, I said, ‘that’s why governments only fund mechanistic medicine and ignore complementary and alternative therapies.’ This is true of most governments, but the US is a notable exception. The US National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine receives about $130 million a year, about 0.4% of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) total annual budget of $31 billion.

Obviously I could not spell out all the details of my arguments in an 18-minute talk, but TED’s claims that it contains ‘serious factual errors,’ ‘many misleading statements’ and that it crosses the line into ‘pseudoscience’ are defamatory and false.”

To see Hancock’s talk, and his response to accusations against him, go here.