[Eli Fennell]

I should add, the problem of evolutionary task mismatch in animals has been explored within the conventional behavioral research fields, as well, and been found to be extremely important. As an example, you’ll often hear it said that lab rodents, if given three switches, one of which dispenses food, one water, and one a highly addictive drug (say, an addictive opioid), they will become so addicted and so enamored that they wiil keep pushing the drug button until they either die from the drug or from failing to eat or drink enough even though food and water are literally the push of a nearby switch away. It is said to have substantial ramifications for understanding addiction and recovery in humans. Well, this is true… if the lab rodents are tested under classical animal laboratory conditions, i.e. the kind of dry, sterile environment most people think of when you say the words “Research Lab”. BUT… other researchers, using an evolutionarily informed framework, investigated the hypothesis that these results are heavily driven by an evolutionary mismatch, whereby the only objects of interest and engagement in their environment are those three switches.

To test this, they gave the rodents the same testing condition, but in an artificial environment designed to resemble their evolutionarily natural environment (what is called the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness), they were significantly, and I mean overwhelmingly, less likely to develop addiction, display addictive behaviors, or die as a direct or indirect result of drug use. Moreover, they took rodents tested in the classical lab conditions, moved them into this simulated EEA, and there were rapid and remarkable rates of recovery and decline in death due to the use of the drug. Some animals did still become addicts, and some died due to the drugs, but far fewer, and the addicts tended to be less extreme and more moderated in feeding their addictions as well as satiating their more basic needs for food, water, stimulation, intraspecies interaction, etc…. So, while this does indeed have ramifications for understanding human addiction, what it points to is the exacerbating effects of modern civilization on this, especially given the enhancement over time of our drugs such as refinements in alcohol brewing or selective breeding of plants like the Poppy Plant or the Tobacco Plant to make the addictive components more potent. It also points to treatments for addiction that involve embedding patients within a more evolutionarily natural context for recovery.

Point being, animal testing in general is problematic when it isn’t evolutionarily informed. It may only be telling us about the specific responses to unnatural (with respect to the recurrent survival challenges for which the creature has adapted over its evolutionary history) testing conditions, just as the behavior of captive animals often only tells us the behavior of the captive animals and not how they would behave io the wild.

[Eli Fennell]

Hi Mark,

Let me start by saying, I agree that Parapsychologists should avoid invasive and abusive AnPsi research. Unless we can point to an absolutelu huge benefit, like potentially curing cancer (and which needs to be more than just a hypothetical), as a very likely benefit of such research, the ethical bar should be virtually insurmountable.

As far as the “source problem”, I think that’s only a problem because so many of us are still thinking in terms of sources and targets, an essentially Newtonian way of thinking about the phenomenon, instead of in more advanced and contemporary terms of nonlocal systems in which information, and perhaps sometimes mass and energy, are exchanged among the parts of a system in which the exchange is probably always in every direction instead of from a “source” to a “target” in a local causational manner.

The other thing to consider is that not every research question about AnPsi need be based on whether the animal or human is the source of Psi or even whether can actually speak of sources and targets. Consider Sheldrake’s research on dogs predicting when their masters will come home: even if the human is the source, dogs are a domesticated companion species, and thus any observed effects still tell us something valuable about the role of Psi in the relationship between our two species, and it is likely that even if we are the source, that we would have selectively bred them (at times perhaps consciously and deliberately) to be better recipients of our Psi influence. Thus, the dog studies by Sheldrake speak to a phenomenon reported by real dog owners, and regardless of the source it still tells us something useful and ecologically valid.

[Eli Fennell]

I’d love to give mine another go at some point. Doing it right before the Conference, there wasn’t much turnout.

[Eli Fennell]

Another thing I’d add, which I have been evangelizing for a while, is that if the goal of much AnPsi research is based on the assumption that animals can also be a source of Psi, then the most important key that has been missing is an EVOLUTIONARILY INFORMED FRAMEWORK. Much of the Psi testing of animals involved tests that lacked evolutionary ecological validity by expecting the animal to “use Psi” (let’s think of it that way for sake of simplicity, though I suspect it is less “using Psi” like an ability and more like an adaptive RELATIONSHIP to Psi phenomenonology) under conditions that don’t even vaguely resemble the sort of survival challenges that they have evolved adaptations for. When you put animals, or humans, in conditions that are radically mismatched to the survival challenges they evolved adaptations for, it is quite common that this “mismatch” either cannot be solved at all by their evolved adaptations, or in some cases the adaptive mechanism even becomes maladaptive.

As an example, the cockroach study is often cited as an experimenter effect due to an ad hoc and post hoc “explanation” that one of the researchers hated cockroaches and this is why they “Psi missed” when placed on an electrical surface of which different parts would randomly become electrified or not. That, to me, is a Parapsychological “just so story”, and went from a semi-serious/semi-joking suggestion to now being treated as virtual Doctrine. But as someone who uses evolutionary frameworks to understand the evolution of mind and behavior, I look at that and what I see are human researchers expecting cockroach Psi to adaptively respond to something that doesn’t resemble any survival challenge that the creature recurrently faced over its evolutionary history. When, in its natural environment, does something directly analogous to “randomly electrified plate” actaully happen to it? Perhaps on rare occassions (e.g. when a volcano is dropping hot ash onto the land around it), but not RECURRENTLY, and we don’t evolutionarily adapt to non-recurrent survival challenges. It would actually surprise me if a cockroach COULD adaptively use its Psi in such an unnatural scenario, and I would actually expect a maladaptive response, and I suspect with further research we would find that cockroach Psi operates adaptively (for the most part) in response to conditions that resemble the survival challenges it evolved to adaptively solve, and maladaptively when there is a mismatch between the task and their evolved adaptations. Such an evolutionarily informed framework, while not completely solving the “source problem”, could make alternative explanations of humans as the sole source of the effect less tenable and parsimonious by showing that Psi behaves adaptively within each species when tested under evolutionarily valid conditions… or it help could strengthen the opposite argument, that we are unique Psi agents in the same way we uniquely possess language which no other lifeform on Earth does.

By way of analogy, someone at a recent PA meeting said something to the effect of, “Just because you think the Medium should be able to process Psi information while suspended upside-down, blindfolded, underwater, in a straight jacket, and with their arms chained behind their backs does not mean it actually makes sense as a way of testing it.” Likewise, just because you think a cockroach should be able to adaptively avoid the electrified parts of the plate, does not mean this makes evolutionary sense as a way of testing them.