Slashdot Mirror
Journal Article On Precognition Sparks Outrage
thomst writes "The New York Times has an article (cookies and free subscription required) about the protests generated by The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology's decision to accept for publication later this year an article (PDF format) on precognition (the Times erroneously calls it ESP). Complaints center around the peer reviewers, none of whom is an expert in statistical analysis."
I predicted this would happen.
The author of the article should have seen this coming really ..
on precognition (the Times erroneously calls it ESP).
Why is that erroneous? Precognition and premonition are two facets of Extrasensory Perception. From its wikipedia article:
Extrasensory perception (ESP) involves reception of information not gained through the recognized physical senses but sensed with the mind. The term was coined by Sir Richard Burton,[citation needed] and adopted by Duke University psychologist J. B. Rhine to denote psychic abilities such as telepathy and clairvoyance, and their trans-temporal operation as precognition or retrocognition.
So if you were dealing with anything of the above or anything external to our normal senses, I think that qualifies as ESP and calling it ESP. Sure that acronym has a lot of baggage but from the study itself:
... this is an experiment that tests for ESP (Extrasensory Perception).
That's what the tests subjects were told and I don't think the article is erroneous.
My work here is dung.
Didn't see that one coming.
For those who haven't seen it, here's a pretty sharp takedown of this paper, as well as some notes on statistical significance in social sciences in general: www.ruudwetzels.com/articles/Wagenmakersetal_subm.pdf
Although the moon is smaller than the earth, it is farther away.
I haven't yet had a chance to read the paper fully (it's 50 or so pages), but if they are actually that confident in their evidence that precognition has been found, the James Randi Foundation has a million dollars waiting for them.
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof." - Marcello Truzzi
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
I don't know...just a bunch of squiggly lines?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
but i saw this coming
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
All of the people qualified to have this argument already had it yesterday.
I already read it.
There are many types of ESP, covering different aspects of life. Each is differentiated by a letter.
For example, the 14th type of ESP covers sports. It is called ESPN.
I predict this article will spark a bunch of kvetching about having to register and obligatory links to bugmenot like sites. Do I win?
Monstar L
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
Basically, a physicist made up some BS and got it published in a journal called Social Text about postmodern cultural studies. He then came out later and revealed the hoax, embarrassing the reviewers and the journal. Lack of intellectual rigour seemed to be the target. This time, it seems to be more specifically aimed at the lack of understanding of statistics in certain subjects.
...just sayin!
They should have known.
no, I don't have a sig
This was covered some time ago in New Scientist http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20827873.100-parapsychology-lessons-from-the-fringe.html
I've been to grad school, and much of the research being done out there in many disciplines, especially in the social sciences (but even the real sciences as well), is a lot of rubbish anyways, and having a statistical expert or a statistically driven paper only serves the purpose of legitimizing the invalidity of the rubbish. Professors publish papers as part of their job description, and the more papers a university publishes, the more funding it gets. Universities have become businesses pumping out lots of garbage to make lots of cash, just like normal American businesses have become: 1) produce garbage, 2) take people's money. Why do you think tuition goes up 5-10% every year? Follow the money trail.
I'm a Ph.D. candidate in EE, and I'm sometimes invited to review papers for IEEE journals.
I always read the paper carefully at least 3 times, read the important parts of references that are new to me, check all the math and sometimes even reproduce some simpler simulations.
Most reviewers aren't this careful. They either don't have the time or don't have the expertise to find some flaws. Keep in mind that reviewers aren't paid, and are anonymous. Also, the best reviewers are the best researchers, who are usually busy with their own projects.
I often find serious flaws that my fellow reviewers completely overlook. Fortunately in these cases, the editors have always used my reviews to override the other two (the review decision is not a majority vote). Given the quality of the reviewers out there, some papers are accepted simply because the editor invited 3 incompetent reviewers, which is not very unusual. And we're talking about IEEE journals, which should be the best in the field.
So in practice, peer review is only a weak pre-screening process that often rejects good papers and accepts bad work. Science progresses because once something is published, other people attempt to reproduce it. If the idea works, then it's incorporated into other work and becomes famous. Otherwise, people just ignore it.
maybe you are.
Harness your unique abilities and take advantage of the many Federal benefits available for psychic citizens.
Would you like to know more ?
lose != loose
The word precognition should fall into the same kind of internal contradiction as the word almighty, at least for the future events on which you can change affect whether it happens or not. To predict the future is ok, but really knowing the future should violate some physics rules as going faster than the speed of light.
Why not? The world is more interesting believing in shit like this.. same with aliens and ghost and the after life, god and jesus.. The world is just more colorful if you lose logic and adopt a ideology that anything we know may be wrong, and anything we dont know can certainly be possible. Most people are so trapped in the confines of logic and science that the magical or the fantastic are ludacris concepts that are best kept in comic books. For those of us able to step outside this ignorant box the world is a much more varied place full of wonder and mystery even more than science itself can offer a explanation to. Electrical activity shows we only use a small percentage of our brain at any given time and there are regions of the brain that medical science has no idea what they are for. It is not so far fetched to believe that the logical rules of this world cannot be bent or even broken. We are just to stubborn to let go of the linear and hard-angled concepts, the rules that allow us to explain and categorize everything in our life.. See the future, move objects with your mind, call on reseves of extraordinary strength in dire circumstances.. countless, countless claims of these fantastic feats are all over the internet and in papers and span generations and every country... so I guess everyone is a liar?
When you dislike the human race as much as I do, Karma:Bad is inevitable lol.
When I 10 years old, there was a commercial that said that if you roll a 6-sided die 60 times and you correctly guessed the results more than 10 times you were precognitive. Well I guess correctly 11 times, so there are your scientific results. Now I move into my new career as a stock market analyst.
Most people I encounter even have trouble with "postcognition". Yea, I'm looking at you Sarah Palin!
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
Make an article with a "forbidden word" or a "forbidden topic" or even something a little bit different from something "that everybody knows" (e.g. gastric ulcera) and it's immediately wrong.
Remember guys, next time a crackpot says "oh but they laughed at Einstein as well", IT'S YOUR FAULT
how long until
http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/01/02/1244210/Why-Published-Research-Findings-Are-Often-False If you read this piece it talks about a "decline effect." Basically research that gets published has positive results to report and conforms to established opinion. However, further study shows that the effects aren't as strong as before. It talks about research showing pre-cognition before, but later be disproven. I think it's just fine to publish work in journals on pre-cognition, if the work was done in a scientific way. The only reason not to is because it doesn't conform to established opinion. If it's a false positive, it'll not be replicated and we'll forget about it. If it stands the test of time then we'll realize that there is pre-cognition of some sort but a mundane explanation will be found. After all, your brain is a sort of pre-cognition machine. I have a pretty good idea of what is going to happen in my life today. Don't you?
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
Is this a dupe? I'd swear I had read this article before.
Alex, I'll take keybindings not used by Emacs for $400....
As a few days ago: http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/01/02/1244210/Why-Published-Research-Findings-Are-Often-False
Don't expect to see me on the other side...
Why do so many e-publications insist on killing themselves?
When I was a PhD student at one of the top 3 psychology programs, I made it a hobby to study the statistics used in psych papers that made it into Science and Nature. Without fail, each was a huge mess, well below any reasonable standard of science, let alone honesty.
If JPSP is going to accept poor methodology, it might as well accept this paper. Otherwise it's using the prior probability of the conclusion as a proxy for actual statistical analysis. The paper posted by 246o1 essentially points out that once the prior is taken into account, the evidence in the paper is extremely weak. That's a good point, but it's valid for nearly all psychological papers, so instead of making an ad hoc point here, why not raise the standards of evidence to include explicitly modeling the prior?
Somewhat amusingly, the papers that make it into the highest level journals (e.g. Science and Nature) are those that make the most surprising claims (babies have an innate sense of morality?!) and hence those advocating hypotheses with lower prior probability. So essentially the evidence for the claims in the more prestigious journals is weaker.
Maybe this is a hack. They say he has a sense of humor.... think of this... he did design his studies well, at least the ones that I have read about. The effects of this "time leaking" are fairly small. Perhaps the entire point...is to make a point about statistics.
Added bonus? Put the ESP issue to bed. Him doing this, and specifically doing it so publicly and getting it passed peer review and publication, ENSURES that these studies are going to be replicated by numerous people, for the next several years. That, in and of itself, could produce enough evidence against ESP to really put the issue to bed :)
Say what you want about his paper, the effects reported are as large as many "well accepted" study results. Which may be the scariest part of all.
That said, I am no ESP believer (that may be obvious) but, some of the statements that are made against it are ridiculous too. "Why aren't people winning the lottory with their perfect precognition". The effects he is talking about here are on the order of a few percentage points better than random... which is more than the house advantage at many casino games (assuming optimal play)
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Why settle for just 1M? Play the lottery for a few weeks and you don't even have to bother writing an article to be rich.
So I realize a lot of people aren't going to read the article but here's the meaty parts for you statistics snobs (and really, the Bayes folks are going to be all over this one):
Across all 100 sessions, participants correctly identified the future position of the erotic pictures significantly more frequently than the 50% hit rate expected by chance: 53.1%, t(99) = 2.51, p = .01, d = 0.25.3 In contrast, their hit rate on the nonerotic pictures did not differ significantly from chance: 49.8%, t(99) = -0.15, p = .56. This was true across all types of nonerotic pictures: neutral pictures, 49.6%; negative pictures, 51.3%; positive pictures, 49.4%; and romantic but nonerotic pictures, 50.2%. (All t values < 1.) The difference between erotic and nonerotic trials was itself significant, tdiff(99) = 1.85, p = .031, d = 0.19.
There's a lot more about eliminating random number generators (by using this little guy) leading to prediction as well as running more tests where they are asked to pick a preference of two identical images. The most interesting part is that these results seemed to hinge on pornography. The individuals only exhibited this "precognition or premonition" when they were picking erotic images or rewarded with erotic images (albeit from the International Affective Picture System).
The skeptic in me is very pleased and excited about this part of the paper:
Accordingly, the experiments have been designed to be as simple and transparent as possible, drawing participants from the general population, requiring no instrumentation beyond a desktop computer, taking fewer than 30 minutes per session, and requiring statistical analyses no more complex than a t test across sessions or participants.
Grad students across the country: get to work!
:-)
But you would have to have the lottery involve some sort of erotic pictures containing the known numbers in order for this edge to be garnered. Which would be impossible unless the lotteries changed how they worked. Maybe play blackjack with a set of playboy cards?
My work here is dung.
Across all 100 sessions, participants correctly identified the future position of the erotic pictures significantly more frequently than the 50% hit rate expected by chance: 53.1%
It's pretty easy to come up with significant results in this field: Just do a sufficiently large number of experiments, and you will inevitably come across some significant results. This works for any definition of significance, though of course it's easier for low standards.
They don't NEED to be a statistical analysis expert if they already know what the results are going to be ... in advance.
Disclaimer: I have not read the original paper.
This is really not a big surprise. The researcher has probably run many, many experiments. Many of them doubtless turned up nothing. But, by chance alone, an experiment has a 5% chance of showing an effect with 95% confidence -- that's what p < .05 means. It's like rolling a natural 20. If he's run, say, 100 experiments over the years, he should have something around 5 rather convincing results to show for his efforts.
Next, hundreds of other researchers request his materials and run the same experiments and... shock! A bunch of them show the exact same effect! Now, not only has one research lab demonstrated evidence for ESP, but the study has been successfully replicated by researchers around the world!
All of this, of course, is just by chance.
And really, you see this all the time in other fields (at least, in the fields I work in). It's just very vey very very very easy to convince yourself that the reason your earlier experiments didn't work out was that you made a mistake, and the reason this one did was that you did everything perfectly.
A few years ago, there was an excellent essay in PLOS One Why Most Published Research Findings Are False about these (and more insidious) effects. Should be required reading for scientists.
The headline SO should have been:
Journal Article On Precognition Sparks Outrage BEFORE IT'S PUBLISHED.
That is all. I expect more out of an editor.
-knewter
I read this paper more than a month ago after finding it on the firehose http://slashdot.org/submission/1389056/Is-this-evidence-that-we-can-see-the-future
It's a shame the same people don't apply their enormous wits to Climate Science, especially if the complaint is a lack of statistics expertise in the review process. Please mod me troll. Thanks.
We all knew this would be the outcome, right?
That's what she said
Your mom saw this coming (points to self)
Yeah but did you see this coming?! (Makes punching and/or aggressive body sway movement)
Exactly. One out of every twenty "statistically significant" effects (P value =.05) is due to random chance.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Strip the "http://www.nytimes.com/glogin?URI=" part from the link, and voila, you can pee(r) through the registerwall.
I saw this coming, but no one listened.
Mass Hysteria, Dogs and Cats living together, etc.
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
They should have seen that coming.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Like retrocognition - the ability to perceive that something has already happened.
Maybe someone can correct me, here.
I suspect (strongly) that if you have a 3% edge over everyone else, you'll still lose at the lottery. I think the odds in the lottery are so badly kiltered against you that even a real, solid 3% edge would leave you a loser.
That's NOT true of any casino games. Take 3% to a casino and you'd leave a millionaire in short order. (No, wait. Actually you'd get bounced in short order and barred from the casino.)
I'm sure it's old news to most of us, but the un-encrusted URL buried in there (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/06/science/06esp.html) doesn't require a cookies, or a free login, if you use something like RefControl for Firefox, and tell www.nytimes.com that news.google.com sent you.
"Given the pace of technology, I propose we leave math to the machines and go play outside." -- Calvin
I wonder if there is a correlation between posters who defend ESP and posters who post without first reading the article.
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
The guy could have simply predicted if his theory would be proven correct using ESP!
"Informative"? http://www.timecube.com/
funny story, that site is actually blocked by our firewall, filed under "racism and hate"...
It's a compelling model that addresses a lot of tricky questions very neatly.
For instance, if you combine this with many-worlds theory, you can eliminate the paradox of free will - that is, when I make a decision, what internal process prompted me to make that decision? And what prompted that? And so on.
If you think of the universe as a static object that at every instant in time (or "the fourth dimension," if you prefer) branches off into multiple possible realities, then you can think of yourself as having made every possible decision, but being able to remember only one, because the state of your brain in this particular branch of the decision tree is only consistent with one past.
It works the same way as the anthropic principle. Why is the universe perfect for supporting life? Because if it wasn't, you wouldn't have asked. Why did I make that particular decision? Because you're thinking about the decision from the perspective of a universe in which that particular decision was made. This also explains why consciousness appears to have a special place in quantum collapse. It's really an illusion, and there is no "collapse" - you have just chosen a particular viewpoint that is only consistent with one specific observation.
Problem is, this hypothesis may be nondisprovable.
Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.
Agreed, if I flip a coin only 100 times, it would be common to not have an exact 50/50 ratio of heads to tails. It's when you take the number of times you flip a coin higher and higher that you see a trend towards 0.5p
Hopefuls see 53% and say that since it's not 50%, so there's proof of "ESP". Skeptics see that it's close to 50% and imagine that it would get closer as the number of trials increased, so there's no proof.
Unfortunately, neither side will be able to convince the other.
On a topological statistical equivalency...
Last week I was explaining to my wife why it was her cousin always did so well at the casino. It’s not that she’s “a positive person, which attracts success in gambling” or any other warm-fuzzy explanation. Consider that over a long run of gambling, someone will have probabilistic periods of “good runs” and “bad runs”; likewise, among multiple people statistics dictate that there will be some who have a lifetime of “bad runs” and some who “have all the luck”. By sheer stupid chance, the cousin in question is getting a “lucky streak” – for now.
Dragging this back to the subject...
If you run a group of people thru ESP testing, you’ll find a few who “outperform” the others. Those who don’t are dismissed, while those who do are hailed as psychics. It is, indeed, just dumb luck. A few will, according to standard probabilistic statistics, by plain chance happen to make correct guesses, and do so in a long enough run to make it look convincing. The longer the run, the greater the imputed powers hailed; once the run of “good luck” ends, a lame excuse is imputed and the “psychic” forgotten.
Couple the random good run with the human ability to cognitively perceive and process more information than is consciously recognized, and one appears to exceed the mere threshold of statistical significance. Compound a lucky run of good guesses with subconscious card-counting or other subtle cues indicating the reality of what is being guessed at, and the person is dubbed a psychic. Awareness + dumb luck != magic.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
If we have learnt anything from history, it's that we don't learn from history
or something like that.
I have a good idea as to what this really is. It's not magical or mystical. I think the human brain takes the information it has at hand, and makes an inference as to what will happen based on what the available info says may happen. Sometimes it's correct, and it's called ESP. Other times it's wrong and hopefully it wasn't a life or death situation.
Right at the end of the first page of this paper: "casino's make profit."
*facepalm* Should I keep reading?
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
You don't have any basis for making these statements at all. Bem is a respected researcher with an impeccable publication list stretching back decades. You have absolutely no clue whether all instances of precognitive phenomena are just "dumb luck". That's just a statement you're making that reflects your own belief. At least Bem has the integrity and openness of mind to look into the subject.
We will never be able to prove ESP until we understand the brain better. And even then, science has it's limitations. I mean, if this exists, it seems this is one of the last things we will prove with the scientific method. So... I know it's not the complaint pointed out by cmdrtaco, but I think it's worth saying that this type of research is worthy and provocative, even in a scientific realm. If ESP was 100% it would easily be proven by that one person who has that ability. Clearly it's not. It may be 51, and not statistically stable, and even harder to measure in a controlled/contrived experiment.
Link to the paper: http://dbem.ws/FeelingFuture.pdf
Link to rebuttal: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1018886/Bem6.pdf
Essentially the rebuttal fails because it ignores the possibility. If an experiment developed from a theory returns an unexpected or null result the theory can be dismissed. In absence of an actual null result the theory must be maintained.
The author of the rebuttal does make some excellent points about the statistical analysis of the psi experiments, however, a quick analysis by myself of the data leads me to believe that neither the study nor the rebuttal make a convincing case either for or against.
Time travel is relative. In other words an object is always moving forward in time relative to itself even when it is moving backwards in time relative to a different object. If an object, or energy, was incapable of traveling forwards in time relative to itself and backwards through time relative to a different object, or energy, you would pretty much need to pitch Einstein and modern theoretical physics.
Time travel is theoretically possible so pre-cognition must be theoretically possible.
Free will, science and probably even all consciousness requires precognition. I'll let Daniel Dennett explain:
http://www.closertotruth.com/video-profile/What-is-Free-Will-Daniel-C-Dennett-Part-1-of-2-/1340
The mechanism for pheromones was unknown until recently. Just because Science doesn't currently know how it works doesn't mean that it doesn't exist anyways.
In the end, you build a consensus by presenting enough evidence that no one can argue with.
What's interesting about the ESP experiments are how the experimenters' beliefs influence the experiment. If someone in the room believes that ESP ain't possible, the experiment won't work nearly as well as if the participants are neutral or supportive of the proposition.
This makes it impossible to build a consensus. Those who "don't believe" precognition of any sort is possible do not experience it in their day-to-day lives, whereas those who do experience it regularly.
Most people's future-seeing abilities usually take place in the dream state. Scoffers tend to forget their dreams, and are very good at ignoring their 'gut feelings'. A few months back I had a dream about someone getting a cat. Immediately upon awakening I knew who it was, but then promptly forgot. A week or two later my new girlfriend told me about having a "profound change in her life" over the weekend. Here's the diary I posted:
People who are interested in precognition would do well to get Ingo Swann's Your Nostradamus Factor. Here's the opening paragraphs:
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
As an FYI, there was US government classified work done for about 20 years at SRI, starting in the 1970s, with evidence of "remote viewing" published in Proceeding of the IEEE and Nature, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Targ
No one should be surprised that a paper in a social psychology journal lacks statistical validity. Social psychologists are not usually quantitatively inclined. Sure there may be exceptions, but fluff like this is often the rule, and it only gets noticed when the conclusion is of interest to the public.
He once inserted random mutations into his code, just so he could have the experience of debugging.
I looked at the paper. I don't believe the conclusions. But they seem to present all the necessary data so that you can do your own statistical analyses, and they offer to give you the software.
I don't see any reason for people to get "outraged" over this. Publication in a peer reviewed journal is not a guarantee of correctness (in fact, probably the majority of peer reviewed publications contain significant errors), it merely means that the paper meets basic scientific standards in terms of approach and analysis.
If there is an error in the methodology or results, then people should respond by publishing a paper pointing those out. That way, everybody can benefit from the discussion. So, that's where all those people who are "outraged" should channel their energy.
Where are the comments on the apparent psychic porn detection abilities of student experimental subjects?
(from the article: A software program randomly posted a picture behind one curtain or the other — but only after the participant made a choice. Still, the participants beat chance, by 53 percent to 50 percent, at least when the photos being posted were erotic ones.)
I designed a study to test precognition and psychic ability, could people read my mind in the future before i knew what i would be thinking? It was quite an elaborate test to set up, and I wouldn't know if their predictions were correct until later on. My findings determined that many people (much higher than what we would expect) were indeed able to read my mind before i knew what I was going to be thinking. We found that this ability was heightened around mid-morning. Many of the predictions were shockingly similar, and, unlike many alleged "predictions," were very specific. Of course, with the nature of the study, I was unaware of the results until around noon while correlating the data i began thinking, as was predicted, that it was time for lunch and I was rather hungry.
"The New York Times has an article (cookies and free subscription required) ..."
I just got my cookie jar and what is this free subscription you are talking of?
"I find your lack of faith disturbing" -One who frequently broke the laws of Time and Space
Such a triviality aside, it's actually a good paper.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Wow, this is awesome! I never got first post before! The only thing that could ruin this is if everyone develops precognition and sees the next five or so hours of posts before mine!
Remember that climat-ology is not climate science. Their statistical hypotheses assume not only that it is appropriate to think about in particularly narrow ways, but that they understand the meanings of those narrowings. If their modeling techniques are truly independent of the surrounding rhetoric, someone would be able to profitably adapt such techniques to generate substantial changes at local levels by poking anthropogenic carbon _as well as by poking some of the other variables that would be identified in the course of building a good model_. If the models cannot be decomposed in that manner, the extraordinary claim that a particular unified model of a massively complex dynamical system is sufficiently accurate and predictive had better be backed by extraordinary evidence before we risk the entire show on a field test.
(Also, looking for simple mechanistic relationships in precognition and climate phenomena seems incredibly daft since we have good reason to suspect that they would be non-linear systems.)
What truly matters is whether the data supports the thesis, and whether independent experiments confirm the first one. If yes, then the thesis was correct. If not, then it was incorrect. That's all.
I clicked on this article just to make that very comment. Thank you.
Funny, being an expert in statistical analysis doesn't seem to be a requirement in the study of AGW.
But, AGW and Precognition require about the same level of scientific rigor, so I guess it all evens out in the end after all.
I think they did the right thing.
If they hadn't published, that would be selective suppression of data, which would distort the statistics of future metastudies in the field....
Suppression of negative results is quite a problem already in some fields.
The important thing is they provided enough detail of the results and a well designed study for others to analyse the data how they find appropriate in context.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6S9OidmNZM
A brain scan shows activity which seems to pre-empt a conscious decision by up to 6 seconds, which sparks some interesting ideas. Firstly, it's proof of ESP. The machine is detecting a process of thought undetectable by normal human senses. Ironic that a machine can do it, reliably and repeatedly, before any so-called psychic can. Go machine.
How and where do we actually "decide" certain things? The brain certainly initiates a lot - reflexes, emotional responses - before we can "decide" to have them. So how much of what we feel and do is "free will"? Or, does free will really reside way beyond the slim spectrum of what we perceive as "conscious thought"?
Also ironic (or perhaps not) is that a scientific experiment like this raises these interesting metaphysical questions.
This paper (in submission; written by a statistics expert) explains why this 'evidence' does not prove a success in precognition research, but instead demonstrates a problem in psychology statistical analyses: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1018886/Bem6.pdf disclaimer: though I'm not on the paper I am affiliated with the author.
Let's put the genes back in Genesis.