Reddit mentions of The ESP Enigma: The Scientific Case for Psychic Phenomena

Simple answer: because it wasn't necessary to get all of us where we were today - alive and existing.

For the same reason that we can't fly or obtain oxygen directly from water. We never evolved it, and our ancestral line was still able to reproduce until today.

We didn't evolve the mechanisms to consciously control our white blood cells, because the way our immune system works now has been fine enough to ensure the survival of all the ancestors of every single human that walks the earth today.

People were "designed" by the sieve that is natural selection. It's possible that sometime in the past, a random mutation in a single human could granted him the ability to consciously control their immune system (unlikely, but possible) but this mutation did not grant him a large enough advantage over others to GREATLY alter how many viable offspring he left behind.

You can argue that it's hella useful. Sure. If I had the ability to fly, life would be much fucking easier. If my gonads were arranged differently, maybe I would have an easier, safer time with childbirth, but that is not how natural selection works. There is no conscious force intentionally DESIGNING animals to be badass/awesome. It's just simple physics. Those who die before they reproduce, die. Those who don't, may leave behind more who also possibly might not die before they reproduce.

Sure it may be useful today, but in the past, we've never had to consciously control our immune system. Our ancestors survived long enough to reproduce, and this survival was aided by the immune system they had then, which was functional enough to leave behind the offspring that they did.


Although if you want to go deeper, I read recently in a [book]http://www.amazon.com/ESP-Enigma-Scientific-Psychic-Phenomena/dp/0802716067) a chapter on psychokinesis, which is defined by "psychic influence upon an object, process, or system." Quoted from the book: "..most of the scientific evidence for [psychokinesis] has been supportive of more subtle phenomena, such as changing the rate at which bacteria multiply in a laboratory dish or the outcome of a coin toss...conscious intention appears to be...influential."
The chapter then went on to describe "research studies on the efficacy of prayer for cancer and other illnesses."
Sure it can be placebo, though there have been blind studies done where neither the doctors, the researchers, nor the patients knows they are part of a subset being prayed for, etc. I don't need to tell you all the things it could've been, because this is reddit where everyone's a skeptic, but I find it extremely interesting to read about. It's relevant to your post because it regards mental influence on health.

If you are interested, here are some works mentioned in that chapter.
"Experiments in Mental Suggestion" by Leonid Vasiliev - His research was sophisticated for his time (1963). He used Faraday cages and other devices to screen out electromagnetic radiation, and distanced the people doing the mental suggestion from their subjects for sometimes up to over a thousand miles. His team still reported changes in breathing, sleeping, awakening states, motor acts, and skin conductance measured in the subjects as a possible result of distant mental suggestion.

"Distant Mental Influence" by William Braud, PhD. - Some of his studies included having an influencer try to change a subject's skin conductivity (which is affected by how much sweat the subject produces. Emotional arousal increases sweating.) The success rate was 40%, whereas the success rate expected for chance alone was 5%, in 13 experiments that contained 10-40 sessions.

There has also been research done at Princeton, called PEAR (Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research) link here. They had subjects try to influence random number generators. These RNGs functioned based on radioactive emission decay, which is believed to be random by scientists. You can look it up.

These experiments led to the Global Consciousness Project, which also involved changing the random distribution curves for RNGs. - Dean Radin, "Exploring relationships between random physical events and mass human attention: Asking for whom the bell tolls," Journal of Scientific Exploration 16, 4 (2002);533-48.

Other relevant studies on the effects of human intention on nonhuman living systems (like single celled organisms) that you can probably find on google:
N. Richmond, "Two series of PK tests on paramecia," Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 36(1952): 577-87

C. B. Nash, "Psychokinetic control of bacterial growth," Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 51 (1982): 217-331