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scav comments on Parapsychology: the control group for science - Less Wrong
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Here's a closer look: to accept psi, you would have to reject evolutionary biology.
It would be such a humungous advantage to communicate telepathically, see the future or remote locations, or manipulate the physical world by thinking, that there's no way evolution wouldn't have optimised the f* out of it by now.
We don't wonder whether birds have wings, or whether dogs have a sense of smell. That we can wonder whether we might have psychic powers means we DON'T, to a very high probability indeed.
Just because an ability would be useful doesn't mean that evolution could (or would, if reaching that ability required several intermediate steps with very low fitness advantages) optimize it without limit.
The ability to digest literally everything we put in our mouths would be useful as well, but the fact that we don't have that doesn't mean we need to reject evolution.
Voted up for making me think harder.
I'm not talking about an ability (like digesting cellulose) which would be really advantageous but we don't have and would require a lot of unlikely steps. The non-null hypothesis of human psychic powers is that we do already have them and ancient humans did too. Yet we don't seem to have evolved psychic abilities that are even detectable by now.
Compare: the abilies to cope with milk and beer in our diet have been evolving in humans since the invention of dairy farming and brewing (a few thousand years ago?) There is large population variation in these digestive abilities after that short time.
Would the selection pressure in favour of telepathy be that much less than for drinking beer?
The problem here is that you're assuming a) psychic abilities would have some degree of heritability, instead of being random accidents that aren't passed on genetically, and b) that psychic abilities can vary in degree, so that there could be selection pressure to make them larger, instead of being binary.
Also consider that psychic abilities in small amounts could have detrimental effects on fitness: for instance, they could make you more sensitive to bad moods, more temperamental, or even insane.
Beer consumption has all sorts of implications for social interaction and waterborne disease, and in some environments, there are no close substitutes. Digestive efficiency is a major factor in survival, one way or another; not being able to cope with the food and drink you've got can kill you, and synthesizing a lot of tricky enzymes you don't need (or, equivalently, hosting intestinal flora which aren't pulling their weight) can also kill you.
Telepathy, on the other hand, doesn't seem to involve enough of the body to have significant metabolic effects one way or another, and is unreliable and vague even for the best performers. What life-or-death/reproduce-or-don't outcomes would it be exerting selection pressure through?
The ability to find someone willing to reproduce with you? Or a heightened ability to persuade someone to do so? Earlier warning of malicious intent from a potential murderer?
Small statistical effects accumulate over evolutionary timescales. Ifr telepathy is unreliable and vague, but is more reliable than chance and less vague than making stuff up, it will be selected for, even if the effects of telepathy are very difficult to detect on an individual scale.
Cellphones are advantageous too - yet their evolution seems to be currently in progress. That should be enough to indicate why this line of argument fails.