TED Community » Matthew Clapp

Comments

• TEDCred score: +5.00 TEDCred reflects your contribution to the TED community.

• +1

  A reply on Conversation: The debate about Rupert Sheldrake's talk

  Apr 1 2013: Russell, I couldn't find an abstract for your paper, Information transmission in remote viewing experiments, on the Nature website (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v284/n5752/pdf/284191a0.pdf). I hadn't heard of your work until this event was cancelled but it looks fascinating. Your work was published in Nature, paid for by the CIA, and we have you to thank for safe commercial flying due to lasers you developed to detect windshear and air turbulence. Those are serious scientific credentials. Just because TED does not agree with your conclusions is not a reason for prior restraint.
  
  This also happened a few weeks ago when the TEDx talks by Rupert Sheldrake and Graham Hancock were removed from the TED YouTube channel. There has been a very lively debate on this topic. Like you, Rupert Sheldrake was published in Nature, made important contributions to science, and is now also being labeled as non-scientific by an anonymous scientific committee at TED. I've always been a big fan of TED and I guess I was naive to believe that this is really all about the free exchange of ideas.
  
  Hopefully, new people will learn about your work as a result of the controversy. I hear that the West Hollywood show will go on. That's great news! I will look for the event on YouTube. Best, Matthew
• +10

  A reply on Conversation: The debate about Rupert Sheldrake's talk

  Mar 22 2013: I think people forget that Rupert was a director of cell biology at Cambridge, a member of the Royal Society, and published in the journal Nature. I wouldn't want to debate him either. ;-)
• +14

  A comment on Conversation: The debate about Rupert Sheldrake's talk

  Mar 22 2013: I doubt TED will be hosting any debates but Rupert has already debated a few of these issues with a pretty tough crowd: Stephen Jay Gould, Daniel Dennett, Oliver Sacks, Freeman Dyson, and Stephen Toulmin: http://www.nautis.com/2007/06/how-do-pigeons-home/
  
  There is also a 90 minute interview with Sheldrake from the same series here: http://www.nautis.com/2009/08/glorious-accident-interview-with-rupert-sheldrake/.
• +1

  A reply on Conversation: The debate about Rupert Sheldrake's talk

  Mar 22 2013: Thanks for putting this together. I will pass this along to Rupert.

• A reply on Conversation: The debate about Rupert Sheldrake's talk

  Mar 21 2013: Thanks for pointing to this. I had not heard of it. Very cool.
• +12

  A comment on Conversation: The debate about Rupert Sheldrake's talk

  Mar 21 2013: I'm sure many of you have seen the newly posted "letter to the TEDx community on TEDx and bad science" (http://bit.ly/14dbyE0). Good science is defined by TED as essentially respectability and academic conformity. This would ban most parapsychology and alternative medical research at a stroke. This criteria would also have disqualified Albert Einstein, who in his great creative year of 1905 was working as a patent clerk in Zurich and his work would have failed these tests:
  
  It is based on theories that are discussed and argued for by many experts in the field
  It is backed up by experiments that have generated enough data to convince other experts of its legitimacy
  Its proponents are secure enough to accept areas of doubt and need for further investigation
  It does not fly in the face of the broad existing body of scientific knowledge
  The proposed speaker works for a university and/or has a PhD or other bona fide high level scientific qualification
  
  This is hard to believe, really. It's the opposite the free market of ideas. In business, capital markets are based on innovation and radically different thinking - in fact, it's always the new, new thing that pushes the market forward. What TED has outlined is not a recipe for innovative thinking - this is a recipe for dogma and status quo. Playing it safe does not work for long in business and I doubt it will work out well here either.
  
  I've been a big TED fan since the Wurman days. This whole chain of event and the reaction by TED leadership has left me completely baffled.
• +2

  A reply on Conversation: The debate about Rupert Sheldrake's talk

  Mar 20 2013: Guido, Sheldrake has a decent track record. I remember in the early 80's reading A New Science of Life he called attention to one of the central dogmas of genetics at the time, namely that DNA was "read-only" and that the only avenue for change was mutation. He argued for a neo-Lamarkianism. At that time inheriting acquired characteristics was still linked to vitalism. Today, epigenetics is a thriving discipline albeit one that took a long time to get off the ground.
  
  I think this is an example where an idea (mutation as the only driver of change) was just accepted. After the Human Gemone Project was complete it became clear that DNA was doing much more than coding for proteins. There were too few genes to explain all of our questions in biology.
• +1

  A comment on Conversation: The debate about Rupert Sheldrake's talk

  Mar 19 2013: John Maddox says of Rupert Sheldrake's work, "It's unnecessary to introduce magic into the explanation from physical and biological phenomenon when in fact there is every likelihood that the continuation of research as it is now practiced will indeed fill all the gaps that Sheldrake draws attention to."
  
  http://youtu.be/aRjQmZLT8bI
• +9

  A comment on Conversation: The debate about Rupert Sheldrake's talk

  Mar 19 2013: The debate started on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO4-9l8IWFQ). Those comments disappeared when the video was removed. Then the debate moved to a page that Emily McManus created (http://t.co/NvnpqcG5rZ). The conversation then moved to the "Open for discussion: Graham Hancock and Rupert Sheldrake from TEDxWhitechapel" page on ted.com (http://bit.ly/1192f3p). Then, moved to the "Graham Hancock and Rupert Sheldrake, a fresh take" page (http://bit.ly/YPXCeq). Now, we are on yet another page.
  
  There have been at least 2,000 comments on this topic so far despite this. Really thoughtful dialogue is now spread out across multiple pages (some no longer accessible). Now, Shedrake's response is on a different page. There didn't need to be yet another page for debate. The debate is documented in the previous 2,000 + comments. Each fork in the road is diluting the discussion, not enhancing it.