 It's story time children. Two friends are walking in the woods together. Let's call them TF and TC. TC spots this odd structure and becomes very excited. A fairy ring, a fairy ring, he exclaims, TF is skeptical. TC points out the geometric precision of the circle, clear signs of intelligent intent. A designer made this, and the only logical explanation is some kind of magical being This is clearly the work of fairies, he says. Now TF is a scientist, and he suspects that fairies make a very poor explanation for circular arrangements of mushrooms. But he's also a skeptic, which means he suspends judgment until evidence can be produced. He asks TC, what evidence is there that fairies exist? TC responds, this fairy circle is evidence. No natural explanation exists for it. It's clearly the product of intelligence. Therefore, fairies exist, and they make fairy circles. TF sees a flaw in this thinking. By what mechanism do the fairies make the mushrooms grow in this pattern, he asks? Magic, replies TC. Fairies are known for their magical control over nature. Can we replicate that in a controlled setting? asks TF. Of course not silly. It's magic. You can't control magic, replies TC. TF is perplexed. You're using a fairies of the gap explanation, he points out. There might be other explanations that would better fit the evidence, and provide a testable mechanism. TC responds, a bit grumply. Yeah, but you don't need to know the mechanism to accept that the fairy ring is unexplainable by natural forces. Therefore some fairy-like being made the fairy ring, but it's clearly the product of intelligence. Nature doesn't produce such structures. TF remains unconvinced. When he gets home, he does his research on fairy circles. He reads about how fungal mycelia spread outward, sprouting the fruiting structure of the mushroom at their periphery. Armed with this explanation, TF takes a shovel and locates the mycelium in the center of every fairy ring he comes across. He colonizes a little patch of dirt in a sealed container with some fungus and watches over several months as the fairy ring forms. He's discovered an empirical mechanism, as well as a model that is both predictive and explanatory, and all without resorting to a supernatural cause. This does not mean that fairies don't exist. It doesn't mean that fairies can't create circles of mushrooms. It does mean that we don't need fairies to explain fairy circles. Natural forces are sufficient to explain them. That's all a scientist needs to know. That's the end of storytime. Now for the lesson. There's a progression of understanding in science. TC noticed an anomaly. That's something we don't presently have an explanation for. The problem was that he filled in the gap in our knowledge was something he made up. He later switched back and said that it didn't matter what was in the gap. We just know that our present knowledge isn't sufficient. Therefore something was at work that was unknowable or unlike anything we've encountered before. Did it help his understanding to jump to that conclusion or did it actually lead him to a dead end? I think the latter. Perhaps TC set up camp there in the woods with a high-speed camera and special infrared lighting, hoping to catch a glimpse of a fairy at work. Should we fault him for that? Not really. He's testing a hypothesis. But it's not a rationally-based hypothesis. It's science, yes, but not very good science. It lacks a credible mechanism. I imagine after some time he will find some very interesting anomalies on his film of the fairy circle. Perhaps he'll detect a blur or strange reflection or a glowing spot. It might turn out to be easily explainable by other causes, but maybe it won't. Maybe he'll eventually decide that all these anomalies point in a single direction, the existence of fairies. He will be absolutely convinced because of all the anomalies detected by his scientific study. Hopefully by now everyone is starting to spot the analogy. Substitute for fairies any field of paranormal or supernatural-based research. Some of you were no doubt thinking of intelligent design creationism, and it absolutely applies. But it also applies to paranormal research of all kinds. Ghosts, cryptozoology, ESP, remote viewing, and alien visitation. They may use modern scientific instruments, t-tests, and anovis, and they may be conducted by real scientists. But they fail the basic requirement of plausible mechanism. It's not really hypothesis testing. It's anomaly observing. They are no closer to understanding the forces at work than when they started. Take, for example, the Gansfeld experiments, which purport to test the effectiveness of telepathy. A person sits in an isolation chamber with half a ping-pong ball over their eyes and headphones on their ears. A friend, just outside the chamber, watches provocative images on a TV, and the person in the isolation chamber must correctly identify what the image is from a series of four images. There have been over the years some very interesting results from this series of experiments, repeated at sites around the world. It's a mainstay of parapsychological research. Some experiments show anomalous results, especially older experiments before a series of reforms fix certain design flaws. In some studies, the person identifies the correct image about 32% of the time, rather than the predicted 25% by random chance. What do we make of the extra 7%? Here's where we separate the scientists from the fairy chasers. A scientist would say, what an interesting anomaly. We should try to find a credible mechanism. A fairy chaser says that this is proof of telepathy, and we should try to find applications for this newly discovered power. This kind of thinking is called psi of the gaps. There's an assumption that any unexplainable phenomenon is therefore attributable to remarkable paranormal mind powers. These mind powers violate the known laws of physics. So the parapsychologists are using scientific methods, scientific tests, valid statistics, but they manage to miss the fundamental problem with their research. It lacks a credible mechanism. They've even gone so far as to use functional MRI to study brain regions, but no matter how much they analyze the receiver or sender of the signal, unless the signal itself is testable, why add it to the model? Does positing an invisible undetectable force increase our ability to explain the anomaly? Why psi? Why not invisible undetectable fairies whispering in our ears, or time-traveling photons, or virtually any other conceivable mechanism? For comparison with this kind of anomaly-based hypothesis, let's take the discovery of DNA as the source of heredity. Some of you are thinking of Watson and Crick, but no, that was DNA's structure. This work comes earlier. We start with Mindel and his piece. We knew that heredity in plants followed a two-character system that was highly predictable. We observed the interesting anomaly, but unfortunately he was not able to take it any further. In 1928, Griffith found that when he he killed a pathogenic bacteria, then mixed the resulting lysate with non-pathogenic bacteria of the same type, the pathogenicity was transferred by what he called the transforming principle. This established that heredity can be transmitted by dead organisms. Again, we have an anomaly, but slightly more information. Next came Avery McLeod and McCarty in 1944. They repeated Griffith's experiment, but this time they treated the lysate with a DNA's, an enzyme that destroys DNA. This blocked the transforming principle from transferring pathogenicity to the non-pathogenic bacteria. Now we have very strong positive evidence that DNA is associated with heredity. Next comes Hershey and Chase, 1950. They labeled the virus of bacteria with radioisotopes. They labeled the proteins with sulfur-35 and the DNA with phosphorus-32. The viruses were known to transfer their genome to the bacteria, making those bacteria capable of producing more virus. If the transforming principle was protein, the bacteria would contain the S-35, if DNA, P-32. The energies of those two isotopes are distinctive. The experiment revealed that DNA was the material of heredity. All that remained was to discover the structure and interaction of DNA to explain how it was capable of transmitting the hereditary information. That's where Watson and Crick finally entered the picture, making their celebrated discovery in 1953. Now maybe someday, the mechanism of telepathy will be discovered using the same type of experimental design as DNA. Maybe some quantum phenomenon will be discovered at the macro level, or a wave that passes through the little dimensions between atoms. But until that time, Psi is an anomaly, not an explanation. I, for one, dread the day we can harness the power of the mind to affect changes at a distance. Knowing the history of how humans use their new inventions, I suspect that it will be the beginning of a dark era for humanity. On the other hand, I've always wondered what my dog is thinking when he starts barking at the ceiling. Perhaps I'll finally find out. Fairies, perhaps? Thanks for watching.