Hi Linda

The terms "evolutionism," "evogoggles," "evo age," etc do nothing for me. They are meaningless terms and so only weaken the arguments put IMHO. Woo Woo is used in a very specific way, though maybe I have to spell out just exactly how in more detail. The term very specifically means, at least as I understand and use it, taking scientific sounding words and stringing them together in such a way as to make an unscientific idea sound scientific. Sheldrake used the words field to describe something that had virtually no field like characteristics but the term field is one that the public knows to be scientific. Morphic fields are anything but fields, fields do not hold information, they do not operate on information yet Sheldrake talks as if this is something that fields can do to make his idea sound plausibly scientific. No known field has ever behaved anything like the way Sheldrake suggests his morphic field does. He’s spinning scientific sounding words into a story that makes his idea sound scientific. He appears to be doing so to help make it sound convincing to his readers yet he would, quite rightly, be thrown out of any reputable science journal if he did the same in a paper.

Spinning scientific sounding words together to convince people your ideas are well founded is the basis of the term woo woo IMHO. Do you know of a more apt term for it? Or can you show me how a morphic field is actually a field in any sense of that word?

True believers again is not meant in a derogatory way though it does describe a trait in some people that many would see as negative. But if they behave in that way, that they truly believe things in face of contrary evidence what other term would you use? Maybe I could just call them wilfully deluded but is that really a nicer term for this trait? Should I just ignore what they are doing and change the subject?

So in short I’m happy to use other terms if you can provide less confronting terms of equivalent meaning. Can you think of terms that convey these meanings that are more PC?

All the best Linda

Russell