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Politics : Should God be replaced?
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To: LLCF who wrote (24188)6/30/2006 2:22:53 PM
From: TigerPaw  Read Replies (3) of 28931
 
Scientific experiments in the non-linear domain are very difficult.

Formative causation shouldn't be hard to test.

You could, for example, teach some rats to run a certain maze. Record how long a representative sample takes to learn the maze. Have another reasearcher somewhere else teach rats to run the same maze and record the times. The second group should learn the maze faster if formative causation is accurate.

Sheldrake doesn't do these kind of simple and obvious experiments. He does bizzare things like teach some people a song in their own language and others a nonsense song, and then try to infer that the song that made sense was easier to learn because of formative causation and not because the singer could understand what the heck he was singing about.

TP
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