The following is from Michael Shermer's e-skeptic list. I send it
because the subject of the "psychic parrot" recently came up on TIPS.
Jeff
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E-SKEPTIC MAGAZINE FOR FEBRUARY 14, 2001
Copyright 2001 Skeptic magazine, Skeptics Society, Michael Shermer
Permission to print or distribute without permission.
For further information go to www.skeptic.com
PSYCHIC PARROT
I just filmed a short interview for Wednesday morning (February 15) on
ABC's Good Morning America on N'Kisi, the psychic parrot, a Congo
African gray parrot who Cambridge University biologist Rupert Sheldrake
says is additional evidence for his theory of morphic resonance, a sort
of "force" that pervades the cosmos and allows everything to "remember."
N'Kisi's owner, Aimee Morgana of Manhattan, read Sheldrake's latest
book, "Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home and Other
Unexplained Powers of Animals," and sent him videos of her amazing
Parrot. N'Kisi, she claims, has a vocabulary of 560 words, which the
parrot repeats with such frequency that occasionally the very thoughts
that Morgana has, by chance match the words being parroted by the
parrot. Of course, that's not how Morgana or Sheldrake see it, so they
ran an experiment in which N'Kisi got 32 correct hits out of 123 trials,
which, Sheldrake says, is a one in a billion probability of happening by
chance; ergo, the parrot is psychic.
I pointed out that N'Kisi missed 91 times, which doesn't sound all that
impressive to me, not to mention the protocol for determining what
constitutes a hit was rather fuzzy. For example, Morgana was looking at
a photograph of a couple embracing, and N'Kisi allegedly says "Can I
give you a hug?" THAT was counted as a hit. Of course, we are not told
how often N'Kisi blurts out that particular phrase, or other phrases for
that matter, nor how many different photos were used by which Sheldrake
arrived at his billion to one odds calculation. One reporter who visited
N'Kisi had recently lost her cat. When she met the parrot, it apparently
blurted out "Remember the cat?" Of course, we are not told what else the
parrot said, or what else the reporter was thinking that day.
In other words, the sum of the coincidences equals certainty. Plus, this
all sounds like a case of "remember the hits, forget the misses." In
science we have to consider the misses as well as the hits. As Frank
Sulloways likes to say, "anecdotes do not make a science."
Check it out Wednesday morning, February 15, on ABC's Good Morning
America, possibly the first hour they said.
--
Jeffry P. Ricker, Ph.D. Office Phone: (480) 423-6213
9000 E. Chaparral Rd. FAX Number: (480) 423-6298
Psychology Department [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Scottsdale Community College
Scottsdale, AZ 85256-2626
"Science must begin with myths and with the criticism of myths"
Karl Popper
Listowner: Psychologists Educating Students to Think Skeptically (PESTS)
http://www.sc.maricopa.edu/sbscience/pests/index.html
