Rupert Sheldrake: Difference between revisions

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Alfred Rupert Sheldrake (born 28 June 1942)^[2] is an English author, lecturer and parapsychologist.^[3][4][5] From 1967 to 1973 he was a biochemist and cell biologist at the University of Cambridge, after which he was principal plant physiologist at International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics until 1978.^[6] Since then, his work has largely centred on what he calls "morphic resonance", his idea that "memory is inherent in nature" and that "natural systems, such as termite colonies, or pigeons, or orchid plants, or insulin molecules, inherit a collective memory from all previous things of their kind."^[7] Sheldrake argues that morphic resonance is also responsible for "telepathy-type interconnections between organisms".^[8] As such, his advocacy of the idea encompasses subjects such as animal and plant development and behaviour as well as various parapsychological claims involving memory, telepathy, perception and cognition.^[7][9]

Sheldrake questions several of the foundations of modern science, arguing that science has become a series of dogmas rather than an open-minded approach to investigating phenomena. He advocates for questioning basic facts of physics^[10] such as the conservation of energy and the impossibility of perpetual motion devices.^[11]

Scientists who have specifically examined the idea of morphic resonance have called it pseudoscience, citing a lack of evidence supporting the concept and its inconsistency with established scientific theories. Some critics express concern that his books and public appearances attract popular attention in a way that has a negative impact on the public's understanding of science.^[a]

Sheldrake was born in Newark-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire,^[1] to Doris (née Tebbutt)^[26] and Reginald Alfred Sheldrake (1903–1970) on 28 June 1942.^[27][28] Reginald Sheldrake graduated from Nottingham University with a degree in pharmacy.^[29] He was an amateur naturalist and microscopist who encouraged his son's interest in plants and animals.^[8]

Rupert Sheldrake studied at Worksop College, a Church of England boarding school,^[1] and Clare College, Cambridge (with a year at Harvard University). At Cambridge he obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree and continued there to earn a PhD in biochemistry for his work in plant development and plant hormones.^[8]

Sheldrake began his post-doctoral studies in biochemistry and cell biology at Clare College, assisted by funding through a Royal Society research fellowship.^[30] He conducted studies about auxin, a phytohormone which plays a role in plant vascular cell differentiation,^[31] and published a number of papers related to the topic.^[32][33] By Sheldrake's account, he ended this line of study when he concluded that "the system is circular, it does not explain how [differentiation is] established to start with. After nine years of intensive study, it became clear to me that biochemistry would not solve the problem of why things have the basic shape they do."^[31] Of morphic resonance he says,

The idea came to me in a moment of insight and was extremely exciting. It interested some of my colleagues at Clare College – philosophers, linguists, and classicists were quite open-minded. But the idea of mysterious telepathy-type interconnections between organisms and of collective memories within species didn't go down too well with my colleagues in the science labs. Not that they were aggressively hostile; they just made fun of it. Whenever I said something like, "I've just got to go and make a telephone call," they said, "Ha, ha, why bother? Do it by morphic resonance!"^[8]

He resigned his position at Clare College and went to work on the physiology of tropical crops in Hyderabad, India as principal plant physiologist at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) from 1974 to 1978, retaining an affiliation with the institute as a consultant physiologist until 1985.^[6][8] There he published a number of papers on crop physiology^[34] and co-authored a book on the anatomy of the pigeonpea.^[35] For a year and a half he lived in the ashram of Bede Griffiths where he wrote A New Science of Life which was published in 1981.^[8]

Since 2004^[36] Sheldrake has been a visiting professor at the Graduate Institute in Bethany, Connecticut,^[30] where he was also academic director of the Holistic Learning and Thinking Program until 2012.^[37] From September 2005 until 2010, Sheldrake was a Senior Researcher in psychical research, funded by a bequest (the Perrott-Warrick Fund) administered by Trinity College, Cambridge.^[38]

Sheldrake is the author of several books. He has coauthored with Ralph Abraham, Terence McKenna and Matthew Fox. Reviews have been both positive and negative, with some reviews being extremely negative regarding the scientific content of his books. In 2009, Adam Rutherford, a deputy editor of Nature suggested that Sheldrake's books were best "ignored" by scientific journals to deny Sheldrake "oxygen of publicity" and accused him of avoiding the peer-review process expected for science.^[22]

Sheldrake's A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance was published in 1981. In it he proposed that through "morphic resonance" various perceived phenomena, particularly biological ones, become more probable the more often they occur, and therefore biological growth and behaviour become guided into patterns laid down by previous similar events. As a result, he suggested, newly acquired behaviours can be passed down to future generations − a biological proposition akin to Lamarckian inheritance. He generalised this approach to assert that it explains many aspects of science, from evolution to laws of nature; in Sheldrake's formulation, laws of nature are merely mutable habits, evolving and changing since the Big Bang.^[39]

In September 1981, Nature published an editorial about A New Science of Life entitled "A book for burning?"^[17] Written by John Maddox, the journal's senior editor, the editorial said

...Sheldrake's book is a splendid illustration of the widespread public misconception of what science is about. In reality, Sheldrake's argument is in no sense a scientific argument but is an exercise in pseudo-science... Many readers will be left with the impression that Sheldrake has succeeded in finding a place for magic within scientific discussion – and this, indeed, may have been a part of the objective of writing such a book.^[17]

The Maddox editorial ultimately rejected the idea that the book should be burned. Nonetheless, the title of the piece garnered widespread publicity.^[22][40] In a subsequent issue, Nature published several letters expressing disapproval of the editorial,^{[41][42][43][44]} including one from physicist B. D. Josephson who criticised Maddox for "a failure to admit even the possibility that genuine physical facts may exist which lie outside the scope of current scientific descriptions."^[41] In 2009 an editor for Nature said that Maddox's reference to book burning backfired.^[22] Still, since the publication of A New Science of Life Sheldrake's idea of morphic resonance continues to be widely regarded as pseudoscience.^{[14][16][18][19]}

In 2009 a revised and expanded edition of A New Science of Life was published in the United States under the title Morphic Resonance: The Nature of Formative Causation.^[9]

In his next book, The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature (1988), Sheldrake expanded on his morphic resonance hypothesis and marshalled experimental evidence which he said supported the hypothesis.^[7] The book was reviewed favourably in New Scientist by historian Theodore Roszak who called it "engaging, provocative" and "a tour de force". When the book was re-issued in 2011 with these quotes on the front cover, New Scientist remarked, "Back then, Roszak gave Sheldrake the benefit of the doubt", and added that if New Scientist were to review the re-issue, the book's publisher "wouldn't be mining it for promotional purposes."^[45]

Sheldrake's morphic resonance hypothesis is discredited by numerous critics on many grounds. These grounds include the lack of evidence for the hypothesis^{[21][22][23][24]} and the inconsistency of the hypothesis with established scientific theories.^[16][25] Morphic resonance is also seen as lacking scientific credibility for being overly vague^[17][18] and unfalsifiable.^[17][23] Further, Sheldrake's experimental methods have been criticised for being poorly designed and subject to experimenter bias,^[25][46][47] and his analyses of results have also drawn criticism.^[18][48]

In 1994 Sheldrake proposed a list of Seven Experiments That Could Change the World. He encouraged lay people to contribute to scientific research and argued that scientific experiments similar to his own could be conducted on a shoestring budget.^[49] This included the seed of Sheldrake's next book, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home (1999), which covered his research into purported telepathy between humans and animals, particularly dogs. Sheldrake suggests that such interspecies telepathy is a real phenomenon and that morphic resonance is responsible for it.^[50]

Prior to the publication of Dogs That Know, Richard Wiseman independently conducted an experimental study with one of the dogs mentioned in the book and concluded that the evidence gathered did not support telepathy.^[48][51]

In 2003 Sheldrake published The Sense of Being Stared At which explored telepathy, precognition, and the "psychic staring effect". It included an experiment where blindfolded subjects guessed whether persons were staring at them or at another target. He reported that in thousands of trials, around 60 percent of subjects reported being stared at when being stared at; around 50 percent (even chance) of subjects reported being stared at when they were not being stared at. Sheldrake attributes this effect to morphic resonance.^[52] Several independent experimenters were unable to duplicate these results, with some citing design flaws in Sheldrake's experiments.^[23][46][53]

The Science Delusion, published on 1 January 2012 in the UK and in the US on 4 September 2012 as Science Set Free: 10 Paths to New Discovery, summarises much of Sheldrake's previous work and encapsulates it into a broader critique of philosophical materialism,^[11] with the title apparently mimicking that of The God Delusion by one of his critics, Richard Dawkins. In an interview with Fortean Times, Sheldrake denied that Dawkins' book was the inspiration for his own, saying, "The title was at the insistence of my publishers, and the book will be re-titled in the USA as Science Set Free... Dawkins is a passionate believer in materialist dogma, but the book is not a response to him".^[54]

Sheldrake proposes a number of questions as the theme of each chapter which seek to elaborate on his central premise that science is predicated on the belief that the nature of reality is fully understood, with only minor details needing to be filled in. This "delusion" is what Sheldrake argues has turned science into a series of dogmas grounded in philosophical materialism rather than an open-minded approach to investigating phenomena. He argues that there are many powerful taboos that circumscribe what scientists can legitimately direct their attention towards.^[11] The mainstream view of modern science is that it proceeds by methodological naturalism and does not require philosophical materialism.^[55]

Sheldrake questions conservation of energy; he calls it a "standard scientific dogma", says that perpetual motion devices and inedia should be investigated as possible phenomena, and claims that "the evidence for energy conservation in living organisms is weak". He argues in favour of alternative medicine and psychic phenomena, saying that their recognition as being legitimate is impeded by a "scientific priesthood" with an "authoritarian mentality". Citing his earlier "psychic staring effect" experiments and other reasons, he claims that minds are not confined to brains and remarks that "liberating minds from confinement in heads is like being released from prison." He suggests that DNA is insufficient to explain inheritance, and that inheritance of form and behaviour is mediated through morphic resonance. He also promotes morphic resonance in broader fashion as an explanation for other phenomena such as memory.^[11]

Reviews in broadsheet newspapers were generally positive: Philosopher Mary Midgley writing in The Guardian welcomed it as "a new mind-body paradigm" to address "the unlucky fact that our current form of mechanistic materialism rests on muddled, outdated notions of matter".^[56] Writer and former Anglican priest Mark Vernon also positively reviewed the book,^[57] as did Colin Tudge in The Independent.^[58] In another review, Deepak Chopra commended Sheldrake for wanting "to end the breach between science and religion".^[59] Philosopher Martin Cohen in The Times Higher Educational Supplement wrote that "Sheldrake pokes enough holes in such certainties [of orthodox science] to make this work a valuable contribution, not only to philosophical debates but also to scientific ones, too", although Cohen did note that Sheldrake "goes a bit too far here and there".^[60]

Other reviews were less favourable. New Scientist's deputy editor Graham Lawton characterised Science Set Free as "woolly credulousness" and chided Sheldrake for "uncritically embracing all kinds of fringe ideas".^[61] A review in Philosophy Now called the book "disturbingly eccentric", combining "a disorderly collage of scientific fact and opinion with an intrusive yet disjunctive metaphysical programme".^[62]

Sheldrake has received popular coverage through newspapers, radio, television and speaking engagements.

An experiment involving measuring the time for subjects to recognise hidden images, with morphic resonance being posited to aid in recognition, was conducted in 1984 by the BBC popular science programme Tomorrow's World.^[9] In the outcome of the experiment, one set of data yielded positive results and another set yielded negative results.^[63]

Sheldrake was the subject of an episode of Heretics of Science, a six-part documentary series broadcast on BBC 2 in 1994.^[64] On this episode, John Maddox discussed "A book for burning?", his 1981 Nature editorial review of Sheldrake's book, A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance. Maddox said that morphic resonance "is not a scientific theory. Sheldrake is putting forward magic instead of science, and that can be condemned with exactly the language that the popes used to condemn Galileo, and for the same reasons: it is heresy."^[63] The broadcast displayed, repeatedly, footage of book burning, sometimes accompanied by audio of a crowd chanting "heretic".^[63] Biologist Steven Rose criticised the broadcast for focusing on Maddox's rhetoric as if it was "all that mattered". "There wasn't much sense of the scientific or metascientific issues at stake", Rose said.^[65]

In 2006, Sheldrake spoke at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science about experimental results on telepathy replicated by "a 1980s girl band", drawing criticism from Peter Atkins, Lord Winston, and Richard Wiseman. The Royal Society also reacted to the event saying, "Modern science is based on a rigorous evidence-based process involving experiment and observation. The results and interpretations should always be exposed to robust peer review."^[66]

In April 2008, Sheldrake was stabbed by a man during a lecture in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The man told a reporter that he thought Sheldrake had been using him as a "guinea pig" in telepathic mind control experiments for over five years.^[67] Sheldrake suffered a wound to the leg and has since recovered.^[67][68]

In January 2013, Sheldrake gave a TEDx lecture at TEDxWhitechapel in East London roughly summarising ideas from his book, The Science Delusion. In his talk, Sheldrake claimed that modern science rests on ten dogmas which "fall apart" upon examination and promoted his hypothesis of morphic resonance. According to a statement issued by TED staff, TED's scientific advisors "questioned whether his list is a fair description of scientific assumptions" and believed that "there is little evidence for some of Sheldrake's more radical claims, such as his theory of morphic resonance". The advisors recommended that the talk "should not be distributed without being framed with caution". The video of the talk was moved from the TEDx YouTube channel to the TED blog accompanied by the framing language called for by the advisors. The move and framing prompted accusations of censorship, to which TED responded by saying the accusations were "simply not true" and that Sheldrake's talk was "up on our website".^[69][70]

The attention Sheldrake receives has raised concerns that it adversely affects the public understanding of science.^{[5][17][18][22]} Scientists have accused Sheldrake of self-promotion,^[17][18][22] with one commenting, "for the inventors of such hypotheses the rewards include a degree of instant fame which is harder to achieve by the humdrum pursuit of more conventional science."^[18]

In 1982 Sheldrake and David Bohm published a dialogue in which they compared Sheldrake's ideas to Bohm's implicate order.^[71] In 1996 Sheldrake' morphic field featured prominently in Alan Sokal's preposterous paper which became known as the Sokal hoax.^[72][73][74] In 1997 Physicist Hans-Peter Dürr speculated about Sheldrake's work in relation to modern physics.^[75]

Sheldrake and developmental biologist Lewis Wolpert have made a scientific wager about the importance of DNA in the developing organism. Wolpert bet Sheldrake "a case of fine port" that "By 1 May 2029, given the genome of a fertilised egg of an animal or plant, we will be able to predict in at least one case all the details of the organism that develops from it, including any abnormalities." Sheldrake denies that DNA contains a recipe for morphological development. The Royal Society will be asked to determine the winner if the result is not obvious.^[76]

Among his early influences Sheldrake cites The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn. Sheldrake says the book led him to view contemporary scientific understanding of life as a paradigm, which he called "the mechanistic theory of life". Reading Kuhn's work, Sheldrake says, fixed his focus on how scientific paradigms can change.^[8]

Although there are similarities between morphic resonance and Hinduism's akashic records,^[77] Sheldrake says he first conceived of the idea while at Cambridge, before his travel to India where he would later develop it. He attributes the origin of his morphic resonance idea to two influences: his studies of the holistic tradition in biology, and French philosopher Henri Bergson's book Matter and Memory. He says he took Bergson's concept of memories not being materially embedded in the brain and generalised it to morphic resonance, where memories are not only immaterial but also under the influence of the collective past memories of similar organisms. While his colleagues at Cambridge were not receptive to the idea, Sheldrake found the opposite to be true in India. He recounts his Indian colleagues saying, "There's nothing new in this, it was all known millennia ago to the ancient rishis." Sheldrake thus characterises morphic resonance as a convergence between Western and Eastern thought, having originated in the West and developed in the East.^[7][78]

Sheldrake has also noted similarities between morphic resonance and Carl Jung's collective unconscious with regard to collective memories being shared across individuals and to the coalescing of particular behaviours through repetition, described by Jung as archetypes.^[7] However where Jung had assumed a physical explanation for the collective unconscious, Sheldrake rejects any such explanation involving what he terms "mechanistic biology".^[9]

Sheldrake has been described as a New Age author^[79][80] and is popular among many in the New Age movement who view him as lending scientific credibility to their beliefs,^[81][63] however Sheldrake does not necessarily endorse certain New Age interpretations of his ideas.^[81]

Sheldrake is married to Jill Purce, and they have two sons.^[30]

He has a Methodist background, identified himself as an atheist for a time and found himself drawn back to Christianity during his time in India; the biography on his website now identifies him as Anglican.^[1]

• A New Science of Life: the hypothesis of formative causation, Los Angeles, CA: J.P. Tarcher, 1981 (second edition 1985, third edition 2009). ISBN 978-1-84831-042-1.
• The Presence of the Past: morphic resonance and the habits of nature, New York, NY: Times Books, 1988. ISBN 0-8129-1666-2.
• The Rebirth of Nature: the greening of science and God, New York, NY: Bantam Books, 1991. ISBN 0-553-07105-X.
• Seven Experiments That Could Change the World: a do-it-yourself guide to revolutionary science, New York, NY: Riverhead Books, 1995. ISBN 1-57322-014-0.
• Dogs that Know When Their Owners are Coming Home: and other unexplained powers of animals, New York, NY: Crown, 1999 (second edition 2011). ISBN 978-0-307-88596-8.
• The Sense of Being Stared At: and other aspects of the extended mind, New York, NY: Crown Publishers, 2003. ISBN 0-609-60807-X.
• The Science Delusion: Freeing the spirit of enquiry, London: Coronet, 2012. ISBN 978-1-4447-2795-1.
• Science Set Free: 10 Paths to New Discovery. Deepak Chopra, 2012. ISBN 978-0770436704.

With Ralph Abraham and Terence McKenna:

• Trialogues at the Edge of the West: chaos, creativity, and the resacralisation of the world, Santa Fe, NM: Bear & Co. Pub., 1992. ISBN 0-939680-97-1.
• The Evolutionary Mind: trialogues at the edge of the unthinkable, Santa Cruz, CA: Dakota Books, 1997. ISBN 0-9632861-1-0.
• Chaos, Creativity and Cosmic Consciousness, Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 2001. ISBN 0-89281-977-4.
• The Evolutionary Mind: conversations on science, imagination & spirit, Rhinebeck, NY: Monkfish Book Pub. Co., 2005. ISBN 0-9749359-7-2.

With Matthew Fox:

• Natural Grace: dialogues on creation, darkness, and the soul in spirituality and science, New York, NY: Doubleday, 1996. ISBN 0-385-48356-2.
• The Physics of Angels: exploring the realm where science and spirit meet, San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996. ISBN 0-06-062864-2.

• Fritjof Capra
• Epigenetics
• Hundredth monkey effect
• Noosphere
• Bodo Sperling
• Synchronicity
• Lyall Watson

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