… Dave Lull sent this along yesterday. It doesn't seem to available online yet, so I reproduce it in full. Shame on TED.
News Release from Rupert Sheldrake Online
www.sheldrake.org
India, March 15 2013
I am currently travelling in India with my wife Jill, and enjoying a few days of heat (currently 95 degrees F) before returning to snow-clad England. We recently visited a wonderful town on the Narmada River called Maheshwar, full of Shiva shrines, and a major pilgrimage centre.
Meanwhile a big controversy has erupted about my Whitechapel, London TEDx talk on The Science Delusion/Science Set Free. TEDx is a franchise system from the American media corporation TED, whose slogan is "ideas worth spreading". The video of my talk was posted online about a month ago, and all went well until last week, when two militant atheist bloggers in the US, Jerry Coyne and P.Z. Myers, denounced it and urged TED to remove it from their web site. The TED editors responded by calling for an online consultation, which can be read here.
Online Consultation
Fortunately, most people argued in favour of a free, open discussion of the issues I was raising, and opposed any censorship by TED. Nevertheless, two days ago, TED officials ordered the London organizers to remove the video from the internet; when they did not do so, TED removed it themselves. It has now resurfaced on a number of independent sites - here is one:
Independent Video
TED has now relegated my talk to an obscure corner of their website, with a statement by an anonymous "Scientific Board" claiming it contains serious scientific errors. I have replied to their points and have asked them to post my reply immediately below the statement by the Scientific Board. Their new ploy has not made the problem go away. There are now hundreds of posts in the discussion forum, almost all condemning their behaviour. The situation has become so serious that TED's founder and head, Chris Anderson, has now had to enter the fray and take part in the online discussion. At the same time as they removed my TEDx talk, they also removed one by Graham Hancock, to whom Jerry Coyne has also objected. You can read the lively, ongoing discussion here:
Ongoing Discussion
The last in my series of three podcasts with Mark Vernon is entitled "Is materialism inherently atheistic?" and is now online here:
Podcast Audio
A British research scientist, Joe Hannon, has kindly offered to moderate a new email-based discussion group called the Formative Causation Research Forum (FCRF). He has himself recently written a paper on morphogenetic fields for a leading biology journal. When he and I discussed this idea recently, we decided that it would be best to keep this forum fairly small, and to limit membership to those with a detailed interest in research on the nature, repetition and evolution of forms in biology, chemistry and behaviour. If you are interested in taking part please email Joe direct, letting him know something about your background and interests. His address is joehannon7@gmail.com
My son Cosmo gave a musical performance as part of the same TEDx event in which I spoke, which is now online here:
Cosmo at TEDx
Cosmo, his botanist brother Merlin and I are due to give a workshop together in Hollyhock, Cortes Island, British Columbia from July 31-August 4, called "Plants, Minds and Resonances". Details here:
Hollyhock Workshop
I am giving several talks in Britain and Germany in April and May, and the details are given on my schedule.
Rupert Sheldrake
Hi Frank,
ReplyDeleteThanks for this. This is what I just posted at Facebook, with the YouTube link displaying:
This TEDx talk, by Rupert Sheldrake, has been banned by TED.
Frank Wilson has a detailed explanation, with links here: http://booksinq.blogspot.com/2013/03/ted-caves.html
So far, I have only gone one link into the development of the proce...ss behind the censoring here at TED: http://www.ted.com/conversations/16894/rupert_sheldrake_s_tedx_talk.html
In that link, Emily McManus of two point behind the censoring:
2. Factual error. (As an example, Sheldrake says that governments do not fund research into complementary medicine. Here are the US figures on NIH investment in complementary and alternative medicine 2009-2010: http://nccam.nih.gov/about/budget/institute-center.htm )
And yet, from listening to the video, Sheldrake does not say "that governments do not fund research into complementary medicine." He says they ignore them. You can fund some when it is the essential stance to ignore, especially if this is systemic, as civil rights activists well know.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k325JFNfEg4&feature=youtu.be
This gets strange, as if TED has been corrupted.
ReplyDeleteThe basis of their censoring actions--which they now say is not censoring, because they have now returned the discussion to a blog area, where people can discuss the initial censorship, foiled through pirated copies of the talks all over the web--the basis of the ban from its mian web site, and that ban stands, is on advisement from their Science Board. TED has a Science Board, they say.
Days have passed and, so far, TED has refused to identify who is on this Science Board. Are they scientists? Are they philosphers with adherents to identifiable isms? Is that ism mindless, zombie physicalism? This is the can of worms that TED is refusing to open.
This just got posted into the thread on my Facebook page by someone named Pi:
ReplyDeleteBANNED TEDx TALKS: Real Truth, Science, Consciousness, etc.