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The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science
Wilson, Robert Anton
CHAPTER THREE
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I regard this work as mostly a contribution to the sociology or sociobiology of panic and stampede behavior among domesticated primates, or—more politely—resistance to bizarre information.
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I think the anxiety is—if we allow “ESP” into the category of the thinkable or possible, who knows what other “spooky” stuff might ride in on its tail?
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Similarly, with Velikovsky: let in Noah’s flood, and the next thing you know the Holy Ghost and the virgin birth might be back.
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In fact, in the argument between Mr. Hofstadter and Dr. Truzzi previously quoted (Metamagical Themas, p. Ill), Hofstadter states that Velikovsky “claimed his views reconciled science and the Bible.” For all I know. Dr. Velikovsky did claim that, some time or other, but it is irrelevant to judgment about his claims for a variety of reasons:
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- Newton also thought his model reconciled science and the Bible. Many others have had similar notions. The value of a model depends on its scientific utility, not on whether its spokespersons think it supports or contradicts the Bible.
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- Those who think a scientific theory supports the Bible may be right or wrong; those who think a scientific theory contradicts the Bible may also be right or wrong. That is a tangled branch of scriptural exegesis and has nothing to do with the scientific validity of the theory itself.
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- Many readers of Velikovsky, whom I have met, are not aware that he said, or is thought to have said, that his views support the Bible. These readers, who are not notably stupid, have rather an opposite impression. They think Velikovsky “supports” not the Bible but the general idea that some myths of all peoples are based on historical events. In other words, this group of readers did not get the message “The Bible is true” but the rather different message, “Some myths contain some truth.” This is hardly unthinkable; since the excavation of Troy, Homer is now recognized as containing some truth—sombunall.
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- Bible Fundamentalists are as enraged at Velikovsky as the New Fundamentalists. His comet model explains (or tries to explain) events (or alleged events) which they prefer to explain with the “God” model. And, indeed, if we accept the “comet” model, we don’t really need the “God” model in this case. An idea that creates equal fury in two opposed groups of Fundamentalists can only be considered propaganda for one of those groups by those members of the other group who are so Fundamentalistic that their prejudice totally obliterates ordinary reasoning in them.
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- To proceed from “Something like Noah’s flood once happened” to “The whole Bible is true” is not very logical, and I can’t find anything like it in any book of Velikovsky’s that I’ve read; and it would be just as logical, and just as illogical, to proceed from “Something like the Polynesian flood story once happened” to “The whole Polynesian mythology is true,” and Velikovsky does not say that either as far as I have read him.
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cuss-words like “pseudo-science,“
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The only answer I can see is that no speculation is obnoxious to an open mind but all new and challenging speculations are obnoxious to Fundamentalists.
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What I do care about is the threat to my own free speech—and yours—posed by the mentalities that tried so hard and so long to suppress Dr. Velikovsky’s right to think and to publish.
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don’t doubt that there “are” hallucinations, or things that can most usefully be modelled by the theory of hallucination, even dual hallucination and mass hallucination, but, once this is granted, why be selective with such labels? One witness sees a caterpillar turn into a butterfly—hallucination. Two witnesses see it—dual hallucination. Many, many witnesses—mass hallucination.
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If the Old Inquisition had been as semantically agile as the New Inquisition: Galileo sees spots on the sun—hallucination. Two more observers see the spots—dual hallucination. Many, many observers—mass hallucination.
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I don’t see how science could grow if we did not occasionally admit that things which contradict old theories may be significant and may require new theories. Everything inconvenient cannot be dismissed as “hallucination.”
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I am merely trying to show that, in the present primitive condition of this backward planet, we are still governed by imprinting and conditioning—that all of us, like Mr. Gardner and Mr. Randi, find it literally impossible to think, even for a nanosecond, about certain ideas—that you and I think we are more tolerant than Mr. Randi or Mr. Gardner until we confront that which is strictly intolerable for us—
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It is accepted by all schools of philosophy that the world presents only appearances to us. Facts are deduced from the appearances, according to the various factions, by PR (pure reason) or by a combination of PR and SD (sense data) in tandem, or by PR and SD aided and abetted by creative intuition, but in any case, they are deduced, not given. Hume and Nietzsche seem to be alone in claiming that what is called a “fact” is just another appearance which somebody has decided to believe is a fact.
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No: it did not turn into a human. But, then, I am not trying to do anything else in this book except hold up a mirror to that part of human psychology in which anxiety increases perceptibly (or is replaced by anger) when we even approach the line at which Taboo might be broken. I am trying to show that every emic reality or mind-construct is a way of segregating appearances, so that those which fit our personal reality-tunnel can be accepted as “real” facts and those which do not fit are quickly discarded as “only” appearances.
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Try this multiple choice test:
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Test
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All appearances seem to be facts, at first, to those to whom they appear. If they are bizarre, if they don’t fit our reality-tunnel, and if they go away quickly, we are happy to dismiss them as “only” appearances, or as misperceptions. If they keep coming back, we wonder about our sanity, or we eventually accept them as “facts.” As Norbert Wiener once said, the brain operates on Lewis Carroll’s principle, “What I tell you three times is true.” Redundance is the great persuader. A fact allegedly exists; a non-fact allegedly doesn’t exist. But existence is something we can never know all about. It is a term in metaphysics, not in operational science.
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It is awkward to think that bacilli and other small organisms did not exist until we invented microscopes to see them, or that other galaxies did not exist until, in the 1920s, we invented telescopes powerful enough to detect them. Similarly, the past does not exist any longer for us, in ordinary perception, but it exists—and so does the future—in the geometry of Minkowski’s space-time continuum.
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Bucky Fuller has another pedantic suggestion we might consider at this point. Since “existence” appears to be either meaningless (scientifically indeterminate forever) or some kind of Game Rule in disguise, we should not talk about it at all, if we want to make sense. What we can talk about sensibly, Fuller says, is the tuned-in and the not-tuned-in. The microscopic world was not non-existent but not-tuned-in before we had microscopes. The beauty seen by a painter is not exactly non-existent for a money-oriented businessman but is not-tuned-in by him, because it is not relevant to his reality-tunnel. What I perceive at a moment is not necessarily real or existent, for others, but merely what I am tuning-in at that moment. It may be my favorite day-dream.
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If we talk always and only about the tuned-in and the non-tuned-in, we will make statements that are operationally and scientifically meaningful, although limited by our space-time coordinates. When we talk about existence and non-existence, on the other hand, we make statements that can never be totally confirmed and perhaps can never be totally refuted, which means we are making operationally meaningless statements.
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It is not impossible, however uncongenial the thought may be to the Citadel, that many “unscientific” reality-tunnels, explored by, say, painters, or poets, or musicians, or novelists, or “mystics,” may be not non-existent but merely not-tuned-in by those who have not practiced for many years in tuning-in painterly or poetic or musical or novelistic or “mystical” brain circuits.
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440 UFO-related automobile accidents are studied. There were two features in common among all these cases: Strange lights were seen in the sky. And the motors of the cars mysteriously malfunctioned. I will accept the lights as appearances, and as a neo-Humean I will even accept the motor failures as appearances in Hume’s sense, but I suggest that any “Scientific Materialist” who accepts both motor failures and associated car accidents as appearances has gone a long way down the road toward the Buddhist doctrine of maya, which regards all data as appearances. At such a point, I fail to see much distinction at all between such a materialism and the most esoteric varieties of Oriental mysticism.
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The human mind is ingenious enough to prove or disprove any proposition, to its own satisfaction, if not to the conviction of those who lack the Faith to believe it.
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But I wonder why the whole subject is under such heavy Taboo and why so many of the New Fundamentalists not only reject the spaceship idea but reject the data as well and heap ridicule on anybody who reports such events.
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I have personally met 17 UFO witnesses. I didn’t seek them out—it just happens I travel a lot and lecture a lot and thus meet a lot of people. All 17 told me they had not reported their sightings to the government or the press. When asked why, all 17 said they were afraid of being called crazy.
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So: I wonder—if the Center for UFO Studies found 440 cases of UFOs related to auto accidents, how many more such cases are there in which the witnesses were simply too prudent to talk about what they saw?
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And if people in many cases are afraid to talk of what they have experienced, is it really wicked satire to say there is an Inquisitorial spirit abroad in the world today?
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The Irish proverb quoted at the beginning—“If you see a two-headed pig, keep your mouth shut”—contains profound pragmatic wisdom. Maybe most people are shrewd enough to understand that, and the reports that get into books like this are a small, very small, cross-section of the Chaos that is actually going on around us.
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In any case, I do not see a need for the spaceship idea, but I do see a need to think about such matters instead of mechanically affixing whatever label is most consistent with our reality-tunnel.
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It seems that when any model becomes an Idol its advocates begin to act like priests and inquisitors.
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The UFOs were tuned-in by Dr. Vallee. By destroying the records, the administrator made sure they were not-tuned-in for future researchers in that observatory. Did that make them non-existent?
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At this point, I recall a feature that once appeared in a San Francisco newspaper. Six people at random, on the street, were asked “Do you believe in UFOs?” Four said yes, and two said no. But if one read the answers carefully, as I did, it was obvious that none of them were replying to the question. They were replying to a different question—namely, “Do you believe in extraterrestrial spaceships?” But a UFO is not an extraterrestrial spaceship. It is an etic event in space-time which some humans file in their reality-tunnels as a “spaceship”—and other humans file as “mass hallucination”—
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Dr. Vallee, incidentally, regards Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) as still unidentified. He merely suggests that we should think about them open-mindedly, as I am trying to do. That is also the opinion of Dr. Hynek, of the Center for UFO Studies, whom I have mentioned earlier. Such agnosticism may make sense to some of us but it is profoundly unsatisfactory to those Idolators of all faiths who already know what UFOs are.
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And yet the Fundamentalists are right, too, in their own way. If we already know all the laws of the universe, 100 alleged exceptions, just like one alleged exception, can be and should be dismissed as hoax or hallucination or misperception or some cuss-word that also means “it never happened.” But only if we already know all the laws of the universe. If perhaps we tend toward conceit and arrogance as a species and easily fall prey to thinking we know more than we do, in fact, know, then maybe we should try to keep an open mind.
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23 September 1929 New York Sun—another appearance of something identified as an alligator was tuned-in near Wolcott, New York. A witness named Ralph Miles is quoted. And when I tell the story that way I remember, alas, that space-time events do not come before us flaunting labels that say “FACT” or “APPEARANCE”—that we make that judgment, every second, and thus create our emic or existential reality—and that this is not just true of lesser mortals like you and me but of the High Priests themselves, maybe even including the High Priests of the New Inquisition
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Such data is so rare, some will say, that it is not worth any intellectual analysis. But Charles Fort argued, at length, that such data is not uncommon at all; it is merely repressed by the same mechanisms of avoidance that Freud analyzed, the mechanisms that allow e.g. Roman Catholics and Marxists to “forget” things inconvenient to their emic realities.
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We are certainly dealing with classic Freudian repression, bordering on hysteria, in some of our cases. The burning of Dr. Reich’s books. The distortion of astrological statistics by CSICOP. The conspiracy to prevent the publication of Velikovsky’s works. The destruction of Dr. Vallee’s UFO’s records by his superior at the observatory. Rational men and women do not do such things; only repression in the clinical sense—or acute anxiety—drives people to behave in that way.
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Try an experiment that I have often performed. Go to a party, tell people you are a writer, and say you are writing a book on “paranormal” or anomalistic events. Ask if the people present have ever had any such experiences. Unless there is a Fundamentalist Materialist present to forcibly repress the relaxed conversational mood by hostile mockery and sarcasm, the most ordinary people will tell the most astounding tales.
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From which I deduce that maybe these things are quite common after all, as Fort said, and the Fundamentalists will deduce, oppositely, that ordinary people do not know what the hell is going on around them unless the priests—pardon me, the experts—tell them what is really going on.
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But try the experiment anyway, and see what stories you collect, and draw your own conclusions.
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These were regarded as “unexplained” because no airplanes were lost at the time and no airplane wreckage was found. Some will again heretically think of alien spaceships. I think simply that something unexplained happened—and that no upholder of the current model has, in the intervening 62 years, attempted to explain it. They have ignored it or forgotten it. One might almost be Freudian enough to suggest again that they have repressed it.
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All of these appearances in space-time occurred in one twelve-month period. Isn’t it curious that, even after all the Relativism and Agnosticism we’ve been shamelessly wallowing in, all of us (including the author) still retain certain strong hunches (or prejudices) about which of them were only “appearances” and which were “real facts”?
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And, incidentally—We’ve already pointed out, in Chapter One, that “matter” was originally a synergetic or holistic concept, including the observer, and not a reified or thingified Substance outside us—it meant, originally, that which we experience in making a measurement, remember?—and, in this connection, what do you suppose “fact” meant originally? The Latin root, facere equals that which has been made. You can still see this holistic/ interactive idea in such derivatives as factory and manufacture.
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Dr. David Bohm notes in this connection (Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Ark Paperbacks, London, 1983, p. 142): Thus in a certain sense we “make” the fact. That is to say, beginning with immediate perception of an actual situation, we develop the fact by giving it further order, form and structure (we code it into our emic reality—R.A.W.) … In classical physics, the fact was “made” in terms of the order of planetary orbits … In general relativity, the fact was “made” in terms of the order of Reimannian geometry … In quantum theory, the fact was “made” in terms of the order of energy levels, quantum numbers, symmetry groups, etc.
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It is passing strange that linguistic history brings us to the same view of matter and fact as is held in quantum mechanics—namely, that they are not separate “things” apart from us, but are holistic/ transactions involving us. (It is even stranger that this is the view also of Buddhism.)
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In any case, we are back to the second-plateau skepticism of Hume and Nietzsche. Facts are not presented to us, waving signs saying “We are the facts.” We make facts by organizing appearances into reality-tunnels that suit our present needs, our problems-to-be-solved, our fears and fantasies, and our prejudices.
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And just as the Fundamentalist Materialist classifies as “fact” that which fits its model, and dismisses as “mere appearance” that which does not fit, so, too the Fundamentalist Thomist mechanically accepts what fits the Thomist model and mechanically rejects what does not fit
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And I repeat that we might all become startlingly sane, or at least much less stupid, if we tried, even occasionally, to look dispassionately and without prejudice at precisely those events which do not seem to fit our own favorite reality-tunnel or tunnels.
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Nietzsche said once that we are all greater artists than we realize, but fundamentalists are too timid to think of themselves as great artists. They take no credit for what they have invented; they assume they have no part in the creation and maintenance of the Idols they worship. Like the paranoid—very much like the paranoid, in fact—they devise baroque and ingenious Systems, and define them as “Given.” They then carefully edit all impressions to conform to the System. There is no vanity, no vanity at all, in people who are so intensely creative and so unwilling to recognize their own cleverness.
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Prince Peter Kroptokin, who was a trained naturalist and geographer before embarking on his more celebrated career as a Philosophical Anarchist, wrote a whole book proposing a non-Darwinian theory of evolution, called Mutual Aid as a Factor in Evolution. It stresses the survival-advantages of cooperation and argues that Darwin, influenced by Capitalist ideology, had outrageously over-stressed the role of competition.
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Dr. James Lovelock’s “Gaia hypothesis,” which treats the Earth as an intelligent being, or a self-regulating computer,
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Even Lamarck, the most frequently “refuted” of non-Darwinian evolutionists—he posited the inheritance of acquired characteristics and thus allowed a kind of emergent intelligence
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Dr. Gregory Bateson, generally considered one of the greatest American anthropologists, presents a kind of neo-Lamarckian evolutionary theory in his Mind and Nature, using cybernetic metaphors to explain teleological behaviors that are extremely awkward to explain in purely Darwinian terms, and leading to the thought of Earth as a goal-seeking organism.
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biologists have just rejected the “life force” on Occamite grounds as an “unnecessary hypothesis.” But that which seems unnecessary at one time and in one context may appear necessary later, in a wider context of further knowledge*;
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- Neo-Lamarckian ideas infest psychology—e.g. Freud’s “racial memory,” Jung’s “collective unconscious,” Grof’s “phylogenetic unconscious,” Leary’s “neurogenetic circuit of the brain.” This is not because psychologists are necessarily less scientific than biologists, but because they encounter a different class of data. Specifically, all these neo-Lamarckian models are based on cases of patients, or experimental subjects, who seem to “remember” events in past history or earlier stages of evolution. As we shall see, Sheldrake’s model explains such data without positing Lamarck’s notion that the “memory” is carried by the genes.
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Meanwhile, the Philosophy Department doesn’t know Bergson is unnecessary, and he is still studied there—along with Nietzsche, who rejected Darwinian mechanism as a “principle of least possible effort and greatest possible blunder” and stressed life’s unnecessary and “exuberant” fecundity in a quite Bergsonian manner.
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It is a sociological curiosity that the Darwinian theory alone is the model that best suits the blood-and-guts reality-tunnel of the Military-Industrial Empire that employs the Citadel. That’s another coincidence, no doubt.
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In short, to claim that all these theories have been proven false appears more like a propagandistic assertion than a neutral factual observation. The issue is still open, except in the minds of those who wish it were not open.
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And I wonder how many readers of this book, convinced that only Darwin has seen biology bare, could offer a detailed criticism of Kropotkin and de Chardin and Bergson and Bateson and Nietzsche and Smuts and Driesch, proving in specifics that all but Darwin were factually wrong?
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Or do most of us tend to lazily believe that, only because we have been told, so often and so authoritatively, that the case is now closed?
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Orthodoxies of all sorts are maintained by partly the intolerance I have been documenting and partly by—simple lack of curiosity. Heresy is not-tuned-in, if one already has certitude.
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I, myself, have not gotten around to reading Driesch or Snuts; but I have read Bergson and Nietzsche and de Chardin and Kropotkin. I do not think any of them prove Darwin wrong, but I do not think Darwin’s case has been proven right, either. The Darwinians simply have more missionary zeal and have made so much noise that most people do not even know that there are as many alternative evolutionary theories as there are alternative explanations of “the” “mind” in psychology and neurology.
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Dr. Sheldrake’s Heresy is that there are non-local fields in nature—somewhat like Dr. Reich’s verboten orgone field but even more like the non-local fields in modern physics, which we will discuss in the next chapter. Dr. Sheldrake calls his fields “morphogenetic fields” and claims they allow certain kinds of transmission of information between organisms that are similar, so that, say, a rat in Australia might “know” not by material transmission but by “morphic resonance” something learned earlier by a rat in Massachusetts.
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In fact, this theory was suggested to Sheldrake partly by a celebrated set of anomalous experiments in animal psychology in which just such an effect seems to have happened. Details can be found in Sheldrake’s A New Science of Life, Blond & Briggs, London, 1981, pp. 186-191.
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Briefly: Dr. William McDougall of Harvard University, in the 1920s, began a long-range test of the extent to which intelligence in rats was hereditary. He measured intelligence, in this case, by the ability to solve water-mazes. “Smart” rats, defined as those who solved the maze quickly, were bred with other “smart” rats and the slow learners were also bred with other “smart” rats and the slow learners were also bred with slow learners. 22 generations later, instead of only the “smart” rats getting smarter, all the rats were proportionally smarter, in the dimension of maze-solving. Even those rats bred from slow learners were solving the mazes nearly ten times faster than their ancestors. There is no explanation for this in orthodox genetics.
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McDougall’s experiment was later duplicated in both Scotland and Australia, with even more disconcerting results. By then even the first generation of rats was solving the maze faster than McDougall’s last-generation fastest learners.
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February 1984 New Age magazine (Boston)—Interview with Dr. Sheldrake. He cites two attempts, since his book was published, to verify or refute his theory. One was sponsored by New Scientist (London) and the other by Brain/ Mind Bulletin (Los Angeles). Both seem to confirm him. He does not claim he is vindicated. He merely says the results are encouraging and should inspire further research.
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In the New Scientist experiment people in various parts of the world were given one minute to find the hidden faces in an abstract drawing. Averages were then taken. Later, the solution was broadcast on BBC-TV when about a million viewers were expected to be looking. Then, elsewhere, in places where BBC-TV was not received, immediately after the broadcast, the tests were given again. Those who found the hidden faces in a minute were a higher percentage—by 76 percent—than before.
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Dr. Sheldrake estimated—and New Scientist accepted his estimate—that the odds were 100 to one against getting this result by chance.
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It seems that non-local fields might have carried the information to the people who hadn’t received it by television.
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In the Brain/ Mind Bulletin test, various groups were asked to memorize three rhymes. One was a traditional Japanese nursery rhyme, the second was by a modern Japanese poet, and the third was gibberish. As the non-local field theory predicts, the traditional rhyme, having been learned by millions of Japanese children over the centuries, was memorized more quickly than the two alternatives.
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And if the alleged evidence for alleged “ESP” is not all spurious—if it was not concocted, every bit of it, by malign and deranged GSs and MSs deliberately or half-consciously “cooking” their data just to annoy the materialists—if there is “one just man in a hundred” among the parapsychological heretics, and they are not all liars—this so-called “ESP” is just one flavor of the non-local information field Sheldrake posits.
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Jung, or course, prefers to regard it as synchronicity—his own label for an alleged resonance in nature, or between nature and its various parts, including us—a resonance which creates seeming “coincidences” so startling that most of us, fundamentalists excluded, sense deeply that they require an explanation.
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Dunne himself, who had the dream, preferred the label of “precognition.” He had not read Prof. Bunge’s pontifical announcement that precognition is forbidden by “basic physical laws”—i.e. by those personal prejudices which Bunge fervently believes are laws
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and so he devised his own mathematical theory by which precognition is consistent with physical laws. Dunne’s theory is in his books, An Experiment with Time and The Serial Universe, and is elegant enough to have favorably impressed the astronomer, Sir Arthur Eddington, who said that it did not contradict any of the basic physical laws he knew and was worthy of consideration.
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But this dream could also be a case of Sheldrake’s non-local field, if all the animals in and around the crater were sensing the mounting turbulence and starting to move away from it.
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Or the seeming connection between Dunne’s dream and the subsequent tragedy could be just coincidence, after all.
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Or—Dunne’s dream and sombunall of our other Weird Tales might be explained next week or in fifty years by Kerflooey’s Proof in topological geometry or von Hanfkopf’s Law in general systems theory.
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I don’t know. But I suspect that dogmatism is a bit premature.
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Some of the most interesting evidence for a neo-Lamarckian or quasi-Sheldrakean model came from psychedelic drug research in the 1960s, as mentioned in a footnote. It is extremely curious that “memories” of past human lives and even of pre-human states of evolution were frequently reported by LSD subjects. This happened so often, indeed, that it led Dr. Leary in Boston to posit a “neurogenetic circuit” and Dr. Grof, independently in Czechoslovakia to posit a “phylogenetic unconscious.” Both researchers recognized that this contradicts Darwin, but reported their conclusions anyway
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Since biologists seem to have good evidence that such “memory” cannot be carried by the genes, then these cases are either more “hallucination” and “incompetent research” or else they fit snugly into Sheldrake’s non-local field theory.
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Some heretics might like to see more research, to clarify the matter. Such research is illegal. Since about 1965 or 1966, in various countries, there have been laws prohibiting other psychologists from experimenting in this area. This is because such research is regarded as “dangerous”—by governments who, oddly, do not think nuclear testing is at all dangerous.
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It is Dr. Leary’s model that psychedelics create shock and stress which break down old imprints and conditioning. He says that, in “normal” consciousness we are imprinted and conditioned to tune in only to (1) bio-survival needs, (2) emotional games that give us status, (3) conditioned Game Rules of our culture and (4) sexual gratification, and to remain not-tuned-in to other, potentially-available signals.
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We thus stay in one reality-tunnel all our lives. By breaking our imprints, he suggests, psychedelics allow us to tune in to other reality-tunnels, including the “neurogenetic” or “phylogenetic” or “morphogenetic” field-or-circuit in which such pre-birth “memories” are stored.
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Dr. Leary, like Dr. Reich, went to prison.* And now other researchers are forbidden by law to check or test his models.
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- Dr. Leary was convicted of possession of one cannabis cigarette. He claimed he was framed by the arresting officer. Be that as it may, he was sentenced to 37 years imprisonment, even though the normal sentence for that crime at the time in that state was six months imprisonment. The judge also described Leary’s ideas as “dangerous,” which is why the Swiss government later accepted Leary as a political refugee. After being re-captured, Leary served five and a half years, and now prudently devotes himself to designing computer software.
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Meanwhile, meditation is still legal, even if the Fundamentalists will ridicule you for trying it. In intense meditation, under strict yogic rules, one undergoes a stress created by social and sensory deprivation. This stress may also break imprints.
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Most intense meditators eventually “remember” past lives,” and guided by the metaphors of India, decide that such memories are best described in the reincarnation model.
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This is an odd effect of the New Inquisition: Where scientists are legally or otherwise coerced away from certain areas of investigation, people do not all uniformly stop having experiences that such investigation might scientifically explain; people merely resort, by default, to pre-scientific models to explain the experiences.
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Archetypes, by Anthony Stevens, Quill, New York, 1983, page 48: It has been shown in many tests that new-born chicks, before any chance of learning from older birds, will exhibit alarm when a cut-out shaped like a hawk is flown above them. The cut-out, usually of cardboard, does not smell like a hawk; the chicks are reacting to the image of a hawk.
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In 1939, the ornithologist David Lack tried a related experiment with finches captured in the Galapagos Islands, where there have been no predator birds for hundreds of thousands of years.
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(Darwin used the large variety of different species of finches on the Galapagos as an example of Natural Selection, by the way.)
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Lack captured over 30 finches from 4 different Galapagos species and sent them to a friend in California. The birds showed the alarm reflex, and tried to crouch and hide, when a hawk or falcon flew above them.
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This “image” and associated fear had continued for hundreds of thousands of years in an environment where it was unnecessary.
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Jung’s “collective unconscious,” which is supposed to contain such images stored for aeons, is often rejected as unscientific, but the finches didn’t know that, I guess. They had the information “hawk-image means danger,” somehow.
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This seems more Lamarckian than Darwinian, to me, and it even sounds, possibly, like the activity of Sheldrake’s non-local field. If such acquired information cannot be transmitted genetically, and Lamarck is wrong, then the information was transmitted by some other means, and Sheldrake at least offers a model which might explain such transmission.
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Fundamentalism—whether it invokes Gods or Laws—is a way of reassuring the nervous, of soothing and pacifying. This was the role of the priests in a Theological Age. Since Science cannot provide certainty, for the nervous of our age the New Fundamentalists invent certitudes and attribute them to science.
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Fundamentalists may be hostile to Freud and Jung not because Freudian and Jungian models are “unscientific” or “prescientific”—everybody knows we must “make do” with such models until a scientific psychology (or neurology) arises—but because Freud and Jung boldly call attention to such fears and repressions.