Rupert Sheldrake

Rupert Sheldrake
Rupert Sheldrake in 2008 at a conference in Tucson, Arizona
Born	(1942-06-28) 28 June 1942 Newark-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire
Nationality	British
Education	PhD (biochemistry), University of Cambridge Frank Knox fellow (philosophy and history of science), Harvard University M.A. (natural sciences), Clare College, Cambridge
Occupation	Researcher, author, critic
Employer	The Perrott-Warrick Fund (2005–2010)
Website	www.sheldrake.org

Dr. Rupert Sheldrake (born 28 June 1942) is an English biologist and author. He is known for his work on plant hormones, crop physiology, and for having proposed a non-standard account of morphogenesis and for his research into parapsychology. His books and papers stem from his hypothesis of morphic resonance, and cover topics such as animal and plant development and behaviour, memory, telepathy, perception and cognition in general.

Sheldrake's publications include A New Science of Life (1981), Seven Experiments That Could Change the World (1994), Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home (1999), The Sense of Being Stared At (2003), and The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry, called Science Set Free in the US (2012).

Biography

Early life and education

Sheldrake was born in Newark-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire to Doris (née Tebbutt) and Reginald Alfred Sheldrake (b. 1903), a family of Methodists. His father graduated from Nottingham University with a degree in pharmacy, was also an amateur naturalist and microscopist, and encouraged his son's interest in plants and animals.

Sheldrake attended Worksop College, an Anglican boarding-school, and specialized in science. He obtained a scholarship to study Biology at Clare College, Cambridge. He specialized in biochemistry, graduated with double-first-class honours, and won the University Botany Prize. He won a Frank Knox fellowship to study philosophy and history at Harvard University at around the time Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) was published, which he writes informed his view on the extent to which the mechanistic theory of life is just a paradigm. He returned to Cambridge, where he obtained his Ph.D. in biochemistry.

Career

Sheldrake became a Fellow of Clare College, where he was Director of Studies in Biochemistry and Cell biology, and a Research Fellow of the Royal Society.

As a biochemist, Sheldrake researched the role of auxin, a plant hormone, in the cellular differentiation of a plant's vascular system. With his colleague Philip Rubery, he worked out the cellular mechanism of Polar auxin transport, on which much subsequent research on plant polarity has been based. He also studied the nature of ageing, and published a wide-ranging paper in Nature on the ageing, growth and death of cells. He ended this line of study when he concluded, "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." He then worked on the physiology of tropical crops in Hyderabad, India, as Principal Plant Physiologist at ICRISAT, the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics from 1975 to 1985. For a year and a half he lived in the ashram of Bede Griffiths, where he wrote his first book, A New Science of Life.

More recently, drawing on the work of French philosopher Henri Bergson, Sheldrake has proposed that memory is inherent to all organically formed structures and systems. Where Bergson denied that personal memories and habits are stored in brain tissue, Sheldrake goes a step further by arguing that bodily forms and instincts, while expressed through genes, do not have their primary origin in them. Instead, his hypothesis states, the organism develops under the influence of previous similar organisms, by a mechanism he has dubbed morphic resonance.

Since 2003, Sheldrake has been a visiting Professor at The Graduate Institute in Bethany, Connecticut, where he was also Academic Director of the Holistic Learning and Thinking Program from 2003 to 2012. From September 2005 until 2010, Sheldrake was the Perrott-Warrick Senior Researcher in psychical research, appointed by Trinity College, Cambridge.

In April 2008, Sheldrake was stabbed in the leg during a lecture at the La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was presenting as part of the tenth annual International Conference on Science and Consciousness. Sheldrake has since recovered. The assailant, Japanese-born laborer Kazuki Hirano, had come to New Mexico from Japan to ask Sheldrake to block the voices he was hearing. He stabbed Sheldrake because he thought that Sheldrake was controlling his mind. Hirano was charged with attempted murder, and convicted of aggravated battery with a deadly weapon while mentally ill. He was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, and jailed for three years in New Mexico. After serving his sentence he was deported to Japan.

Sheldrake has a Methodist background but after a spell as an atheist found himself being drawn back to Christianity when in India, and is now an Anglican.

Sheldrake has made appearances in popular media, both on radio and on television. He was one of the subjects of a six-part documentary series called Heretic, broadcast on BBC 2 in 1994. On 18 May 2009, he appeared on The Museum of Curiosity on BBC Radio 4.

Sheldrake has entered into a scientific wager with fellow biologist Lewis Wolpert on the importance of DNA in the developing organism. Wolpert bet Sheldrake "a case of fine port, Quinta do Vesuvio 2005" that by the First of 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 blueprint of morphological development. If the outcome is not obvious, the British Royal Society will be asked to determine the winner.

Research

Plant and Cell Biology

At Cambridge, Sheldrake first worked on the production of the plant hormone Auxin. He found that auxin is produced by dying cells, especially in germinating seeds and in differentiating Xylem cells, which die as they differentiate, an example of programmed cell death, or Apoptosis or programmed cell death. His work on polar auxin transport culminated in the discovery, together with Philip Rubery, of the cellular mechanism of polar auxin transport. The auxin efflux carrier, which Rubery and Sheldrake correctly predicted would be found at the basal or root-ward ends of cells, has subsequently been identified as one of a family of so-called PIN proteins.

As Principal Plant Physiologist at ICRISAT in Hyderabad, India, Sheldrake worked on the legume crops Chickpea and Pigeonpea, on which he published 17 papers as well as a monograph on the Anatomy of the Pigeonpea. He helped develop new cropping systems, some of which have been widely adopted in both India and China.

Morphic field

"Morphic field" is a term introduced by Sheldrake. He proposes that there is a field within and around a "morphic unit" which organizes its characteristic structure and pattern of activity. According to Sheldrake, the "morphic field" underlies the formation and behaviour of "holons" and "morphic units", and can be set up by the repetition of similar acts or thoughts. The hypothesis is that a particular form belonging to a certain group, which has already established its (collective) "morphic field", will tune into that "morphic field". The particular form will read the collective information through the process of "morphic resonance", using it to guide its own development. This development of the particular form will then provide, again through "morphic resonance", a feedback to the "morphic field" of that group, thus strengthening it with its own experience, resulting in new information being added (i.e. stored in the database). Sheldrake regards the "morphic fields" as a universal database for both organic (genetic) and abstract (mental) forms.

That a mode of transmission of shared informational patterns and archetypes might exist did gain some tacit acceptance when it was proposed as the theory of the collective unconscious by renowned psychiatrist Carl Jung. According to Sheldrake, the theory of "morphic fields" might provide an explanation for Jung's concept as well. Also, he agrees that the concept of akashic records, a term from the Vedas representing the "library" of all the experiences and memories of human minds (souls) through their physical lifetime, can be related to "morphic fields", since one's past (an akashic record) is a mental form, consisting of thoughts as simpler mental forms (all processed by the same mind), and a group of similar or related mental forms also have their associated (collective) "morphic field". (Sheldrake's view on memory-traces is that they are non-local, and not located in the brain.)

Morphic resonance

Sheldrake views the universe as a swarm of matter waves (elementary particles, atoms and molecules), spiralling down the gradient of their synergetic (energetically favourable) constructive interference. When two matter waves become connected by mutual constructive interference (quantum entanglement, rapport), they intuit or grok each other. Intuition interconnects matter waves instantaneously, regardless of the distance:

I think that we—humankind—are connected to everybody we think of and to all the places we are attached to through our extended minds. Our minds are vast, far-reaching, and spatially extended networks of connections in space and time—networks of immense scope in which the brains inside our heads are but a portion…

The greater the degree of similarity, the greater the constructive interference, leading to habituation or persistence of particular forms. So, the existence of a morphic field makes the existence of a new similar form easier.

Sheldrake suggests that matter waves' synergetic (energetically favourable) constructive interference is the mechanism by which simpler ensembles of matter waves self-organize into more complex ones, and that this model provides the true explanation for the process of evolution.

Morphogenetic field

For the concept in developmental biology, see Morphogenetic field.

The spacetime continuum undergoes gravitoelectrical treeing under the influence of its gravitoelectric field (God), which is the gradient of matter waves' synergetic (energetically favourable) constructive interference (quantum entanglement, rapport).

Eventually, the continuum's matter waves form a single superorganism known as the World Tree or Christmas Tree:
"Christ has a cosmic body that extends throughout the universe."
—Chardin, Pierre Teilhard de ♦ Cosmic Life 1916
"Through the incarnation, God descended into Nature in order to super-animate and take it back to him."
—Chardin, Pierre Teilhard de ♦ Mysticism of Science 1939
The continuum's gravitational involution into a dendritic drainage system directly follows from Bernoulli's principle, according to which, the continuum's matter will descend to the minimum total potential energy when it has converged into a narrow flux tube and translationally accelerated to the speed of light.
The magnetic field is rotational, while the electric field is translational. This is why electromagnetic matter waves' translational acceleration to the speed of light ephemeralizes them by decreasing their magnetic (particle-like, material) component, while increasing their electric (wave-like, spiritual) component. At the speed of light, spirit will be equipotent with matter—it will be possible to psychokinetically materialize thoughts and dematerialize material objects.
As the continuum's matter waves translationally accelerate down the dendritic gradient of their constructive interference, the density of their flux drops due to Bernoulli's principle. This is why the planet Earth, embedded in the spearhead of the dendritic flux, where the translational speed is maximal and the degree of spiritualization is highest (which implies that life exists on the planet Earth only, and that the most spiritualized man—Christ—is the attractor and the eventual psychokinetic ruler of the whole cosmos), is surrounded by a giant rarefied region.

Morphogenetic fields, playing a causal role in morphogenesis, are defined by Sheldrake as a subset of morphic fields:

The term [morphic fields] is more general in its meaning than morphogenetic fields, and includes other kinds of organizing fields in addition to those of morphogenesis; the organizing fields of animal and human behaviour, of social and cultural systems, and of mental activity can all be regarded as morphic fields which contain an inherent memory.

— Sheldrake, Rupert ♦ The Presence of the Past

In 1988, Guido Ebner and Heinz Schürch of Ciba-Geigy AG developed a revolutionary method of influencing the morphogenesis of fish by exposing fertilized fish eggs to an electrostatic field (without a flow of current).

The electric nature of morphogenetic fields was experimentally confirmed in the year 2011 by Dany Adams, a developmental biologist at Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts. It turned out that a morphogenetic field is the common electric field of an organism's DNA molecules. When the electric potential within a tadpole reaches a critical magnitude, the hitherto dielectric tadpole undergoes a partial electrical breakdown, which establishes a persistent pattern of constructive interference (quantum entanglement, rapport) between the DNA molecules of the tadpole's head and thus creates the face of a frog.

The development of an organism's central nervous system is a cascade of such partial electrical breakdowns, known as electrical treeing. A partial electrical breakdown imprints the DNA molecules, establishing a more efficient and novel (an electrical breakdown of the air is accompanied by the fresh-air smell of ozone) pattern of their mutual constructive interference, but, at the same time, decreases the intracellular voltages and thus inhibits the intracellular transport of ions and molecules. Immediately after a partial electrical breakdown, which is, essentially, a self-inflicted Taser shock, the organism relaxes and falls asleep—the imprinted cells become more disjunct and the newly established pattern of their mutual constructive interference remains subliminal, latent. During the subsequent awake period, the cells adapt to the decreased intracellular voltages by becoming dehydrated and shrinking in size (a similar dependence is observed in the involution of CPUs—a decrease in a CPU's voltage necessitates a decrease in the CPU's size), so that the intercellular connectedness becomes restored in accordance with the newly imprinted pattern. Thus, the electrical treeing is a tripartite process—a partial electrical breakdown imprints a new pattern but is followed by a period of the new pattern's latency (sleep), which, in its turn, is followed by the new pattern's revelation during the subsequent awake period.

An increase in the electric interconnectedness of cells improves the intercellular transport of ions and molecules, but impairs their intracellular transport (due to a concomitant decrease in the intracellular voltage). This is why, after a brief surge in the efficiency of sharing, the individual cells discover that they have less stuff to share. Until the age of 24 years, the synergetic effect of the growth in intercellular connectedness outpaces the concomitant decline in the vitality of individual cells, so the total vitality of a human organism increases and the organism grows. After the age of 24 years, the impact of further increase in intercellular connectedness on the organism's total vitality is negative and causes the organism's ageing.

In an electromagnetic matter wave, the magnetic component is actual (rotational, particle-like, real, phenomenal, material), while the electric component is potential (translational, wave-like, virtual, noumenal, spiritual):

From Maxwell equations (6.20) it follows that the electric field is potential: E(r) = −gradφ(r).

—Soviet Physics, Uspekhi v. 40, issues 1–6, American Institute of Physics, 1997, p. 39

Therefore, the common electric field of an ensemble of matter waves is the ensemble's wavefunction, noumenon or spirit. It is the gradient of the matter waves' synergetic (energetically favourable) constructive interference.

However, Sheldrake rightly notes that, since the morphic field governing a colony of thermites is not blockable by a metal plate, it cannot be electric. Therefore, the morphic field between the thermites is gravitoelectric, while the morphogenetic field inside a thermite's organism is electric. The electric field is a higher-intensity variety of the gravitoelectric field.

The gravitoelectric field (God) is also known as the quantum potential. Its morphic influence does not depend on the field's intensity and is purely analog (continuous, nonanalysable, perceivable solely by intuition):

The basically new features of the quantum theory come mainly from the new properties of the quantum potential. Of these, one of the most important is that this potential is related to the Schroedinger wavefunction in a way that it does not depend on the intensity of the waves but only on the form. This implies that the Schroedinger wave does not act like, for example, a water wave on a floating object to push the particle mechanically with a force proportional to its intensity. Rather, a better analogy would be to a ship on automatic pilot guided by radar waves. The ship with its automatic pilot is a self-active system, but the form of its activity is determined by the information content concerning its environment carried by the radar waves. This latter is independent of the intensity of these waves (as long as they can be received by the equipment available) but depends only on their form, which in turn reflects the form of the environment. <...> Even at distances so great that the wave intensity is small, the trajectory of the particle can strongly reflect distant features of the environment. <...> At first sight, it seems that such a non-local connection, that can produce a kind of instantaneous contact of distant particles, would violate the theory of relativity, which requires that no signal can be transmitted faster than light. It is possible to show, however, that the quantum potential cannot be used to carry a signal, i.e., that it could not constitute a well-ordered series of impulses that could transmit a well-defined meaning.

—Bohm, David ♦ A new theory of the relationship of mind and matter The Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, v. 80, 1986

Telepathy

Sheldrake's research into telepathy between humans and animals, particularly dogs, was the main subject of his 1999 book Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home (see below).

In 2003 Sheldrake published research on human telepathy in an experiment where subjects guessed which of four people was going to telephone or send an email. Sheldrake reported that the subject guesses the person correctly about 40% of the time instead of the expected 25% (p=.05).

Sheldrake's work was the theme of a plenary session titled "Anomalies of Consciousness" of the 2008 Toward a Science of Consciousness conference, where he presented his work on telepathy in animals and humans, followed by three critiques of his work on the sense of being stared at.

Books

A New Science of Life

In his first book, A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance, Sheldrake proposed that 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, newly acquired behaviors are subject to inheritance by subsequent generations – a form of Lamarckism. He suggested that this underlies many aspects of science, from evolution to laws of nature. Indeed, he suggested that the laws of nature are mutable habits that have evolved since the Big Bang.

Sheldrake's primary focus in this book is morphogenesis, which includes both embryonic cell differentiation and the development of the embryo as a whole. In chapter 2, "Three Theories of Morphogenesis," Sheldrake states that there are three historical approaches to morphogenesis: materialism (August Weismann), vitalism (Hans Driesch), and organicism (Alfred North Whitehead). Sheldrake describes his own hypothesis as fitting within the third tradition, which rejects a vitalistic principle exclusive to life but also denies that a strictly materialistic explanation will ever account for the holistic nature of organic forms. The next three chapters address form as a general topic, the traditional concept of morphogenetic fields, and the possibility that past forms directly influence current organic activity. He introduces his main idea in chapter 6, "Formative Causation and Morphogenesis" and devotes the remaining chapters to subsidiary topics such as inheritance, behavior, instinct and learning, and so on.

The book was discussed in a variety of scientific and religious publications, receiving mixed reviews. Then in September 1981, Nature published an editorial written by John Maddox, the journal's senior editor, entitled "A book for burning?" In it, Maddox said:

Sheldrake's argument 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.

Maddox's comments raised what Anthony Freeman called "a storm of controversy". The New Scientist inquired whether Nature had abandoned the scientific method for "trial by editorial". Maddox did not act concerned by the criticism his comments received, and according to Freeman, the "furore that grew out of the assault in Nature put an end to [Sheldrake's] academic career and made him persona non grata in the scientific community." In a 1994 BBC documentary on Sheldrake's theory, Maddox elaborated on his views:

Sheldrake's is not a scientific theory. Sheldrake is putting forward magic instead of science, and that can be condemned, in exactly the language that the Pope used to condemn Galileo, and for the same reasons: it is heresy.

The Presence of the Past

The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature (1988) puts forward morphic resonance, one aspect of the "formative causation" hypothesis Sheldrake introduced in A New Science of Life, and presents evidence for it.

Sheldrake writes, "Since these past organisms are similar to each other rather than identical, when a subsequent organism comes under their collective influence, its morphogenetic fields are not sharply defined, but consist of a composite of previous similar forms. This process is analogous to composite photography, in which 'average' pictures are produced by superimposing a number of similar images. Morphogenetic fields are 'probability structures,' in which the influence of the most common past types combines to increase the probability that such types will occur again."

In support of his hypothesis, Sheldrake cites replications of William McDougall's experiment with rats in a water maze and Mae-Wan Ho's replication of CH Waddington's experiment with fruit flies, as well as several psychology experiments involving human learning. Sheldrake contends that a number of biological anomalies are resolved by morphic resonance, including personal memory (which he contends would otherwise require the existence of an elaborate information-storage mechanism in the brain), atavism and parallel evolution. He argues that the existence of organizing fields – with or without inherent memory – would explain phenomena ranging from coordinated behavior among social insects, flocks of birds and schools of fish to the regeneration of severed limbs by salamanders or a sense of phantom limbs among amputees, as the organizing field of a limb would remain even after the limb itself had been lost.

Seven Experiments That Could Change the World

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.

Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home

Seven Experiments included the seed of Sheldrake's next book, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home. This covered his research into telepathy between humans and animals, particularly dogs. As the title indicates, Sheldrake carried out experiments aiming to show that dogs can tell when their owners are coming home, a phenomenon frequently reported by dog-owners. By videoing the dogs' behaviour, and making their owners come home at unpredictable times, he concluded that the dogs know when the owner has decided to set off home, and will go and wait by the door. This occurs even if the owner doesn't actually arrive home (having been contacted en route and told not to). Sheldrake's experiments were also intended to rule out other frequently-cited explanations, such as the dog being able to hear the owner's car much further away than humans can.

The book also summarized other experiments and reports of telepathy involving animals, such as an experiment on an African grey parrot that had apparently learned enough English words that it could describe photographs its owner was looking at in another room.

The Sense of Being Stared At

In 2003, Sheldrake published The Sense of Being Stared At on the psychic staring effect, including an experiment where blindfolded subjects guessed whether persons were staring at them or at another target. He reported that, in tens of thousands of trials, 60% of subjects reported being stared at when being stared at; 50% of subjects reported being stared at when they were not being stared at. According to Sheldrake, this suggested a weak sense of being stared at but no sense of not being stared at. He also claimed that these experiments were widely repeated, in schools in Connecticut and Toronto and a science museum in Amsterdam, with consistent results.

The Science Delusion / Science Set Free

The Science Delusion, published on 1 January 2012 in the U.K. and in the U.S. on 4 September 2012, as Science Set Free: 10 Paths to New Discovery, summarises much of his previous work and encapsulates it into a broader critique of modern materialism, with the title apparently mimicking that of The God Delusion by one of Sheldrake's critics, Richard Dawkins. (In an interview with Fortean Times, Sheldrake denied that Dawkins' book was the inspiration for his own. "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 far less important outside Britain (...) Dawkins is a passionate believer in materialist dogma, but the book is not a response to him - although I do object to his dumbed-down representation of science.") 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, rather than a genuinely open-minded approach to investigating phenomena; he argues that there are many powerful taboos that circumscribe what scientists can legitimately direct their attention towards.

Reception

Sheldrake's work has little support in the mainstream scientific community. Members of the scientific community consider Sheldrake's claims to be currently unfalsifiable and therefore outside the scope of scientific experiment. The "morphic field" concept is believed by many to fall into the realm of pseudoscience.

Some within the parapsychological community have supported the theories of Sheldrake as they believe it may explain the phenomena of extrasensory perception. Paranormal writers and parapsychologists such as Arthur Koestler, Brian Inglis and John L. Randall have supported the work of Sheldrake.

Sheldrake's ideas have resonated with the general public and some physicists such as David Bohm. The idea that fields may influence cells has even received cautious support from biologists Janis Roze and Sue Ann Miller. However, Sheldrake's work has met with a hostile reception from other scientists. Neurophysiologist and consciousness researcher Christof Koch, for example, has stated that discussing Sheldrake's ideas is a "waste of time," given the absence of hard, physical evidence and Sheldrake's lack of understanding of modern neurobiology. Henry Bauer compared Sheldrake's ideas to Wilhelm Reich's claims of orgone energies. In his Skeptic's Dictionary, Robert Todd Carroll stated, in an article highly critical of Sheldrake's theory of morphic resonance, that "although Sheldrake commands some respect as a scientist because of his education and degree, he has clearly abandoned conventional science in favor of magical thinking."

Germano Resconi and Masoud Nikravesh are sympathetic to Sheldrake's ideas, and base their concept of morphic computing directly upon Sheldrake's morphic fields and morphogenetic fields, but acknowledge that "Morphic fields and its subset morphogenetic fields have been at the center of controversy for many years in mainstream science and the hypothesis is not accepted by some scientists who consider it a pseudoscience."

Some quantum physicists have supported Sheldrake's hypothesis. The late David Bohm suggested that Sheldrake's hypothesis was in keeping with his own ideas on what he terms "implicate" and "explicate" order. Hans-Peter Dürr has called for further discussion of Sheldrake's hypothesis, describing it as one of the first to reconcile 20th-century breakthroughs in physics, which emphasize fields and the indivisible nature of matter, with biology, which he says for the most part remains rooted in 19th-century Newtonian concepts of particles and separateness. Others, like biologist Michael Klymkowsky, disagree, contending that "[w]e live in a macroscopic world. Quantum effects are essentially irrelevant". For more details on this topic, see quantum biology.

The concept has attracted speculation from neurolinguistic programming, as an explanation for action at a distance. Sheldrake's book The Presence of the Past: A Field Theory of Life was positively reviewed by the physicist Amit Goswami.

Scientific reception

Morphic resonance predicts that memories of one generation are automatically passed on to the next generation, though unconsciously, or to other conspecifics. A neuroscientist and memory expert, Steven Rose, has been critical of this view. A major reason for the criticism is that Rose does not feel there to be any anomalous phenomena which require the theory of morphic resonance as an explanation. Rose suggested an experiment to resolve the matter. In Rose's opinion the resulting study(see below), done in collaboration with Sheldrake, disproved morphic resonance, but Sheldrake has challenged this.

Sheldrake's ideas have often met with a hostile reception from some scientists, including accusations that he is engaged in pseudoscience, and at least two respected scientists who have sought to discuss his work, thoroughgoing metaphysical naturalists Lewis Wolpert and Richard Dawkins, reportedly refused to even examine his evidence—a fact cited as illustrating the allegedly dogmatic nature of mainstream science alluded to in Sheldrake's book The Science Delusion.

Testing formative causation

In 1990 neurobiologist Steven Rose experimented jointly with Sheldrake to test the hypothesis of morphic resonance. The experiment involved training day-old chicks to react negatively to a small yellow light when the light was followed 30 min later by an injection which caused temporary illness. Chicks become strongly averse to pecking the stimulus again. Sheldrake predicted that successive batches of day-old chicks would progressively become more averse to pecking the light for the first time, because morphic resonance would cause them to "remember" the experience of previous generations of chicks. Rose predicted that no such effect would be observed.

Rose wrote that he and several scientists who reviewed the data were convinced that there was no evidence of morphic resonance. Sheldrake, however, said that the proportion of test chicks taking longer than 10 sec for the first peck, compared with control chicks, gradually increased in successive batches and believed therefore that the experiment supported his theory.

In a separate paper, Rose responded that there were several confounding details of the experiment which skewed the results, such as the experimenter improving his skills with practice over the course of the experiment. Rose said there was no trend for an increase in the latency, in fact a slight decrease, thus disconfirming Sheldrake's prediction. In an independent analysis of the data, biologist Patrick Bateson agreed with Rose that the results ran counter to the prediction of morphic resonance.

Sheldrake responded that Rose's analysis omitted a significant portion of the data, thus skewing the results. Sheldrake contended that repeating Rose's analysis with the full set of data shows that the trends in aversion were in fact significantly different and morphic resonance was confirmed, not disconfirmed. Rose and other researchers in the field, however, rejected this interpretation of the results.

Tests of the staring effect

David Marks and John Colwell, writing in the Skeptical Inquirer (2000), criticized the experimental procedures Sheldrake had developed for tests designed to demonstrate the existence of the staring effect. Apart from the fact that Sheldrake had encouraged the involvement of lay members of the public in research of the effect, Marks and Colwell suggested that the sequences used in tests followed the same patterning that people who guess and gamble like to follow. These guessing patterns have relatively few long runs and many alternations. The non-randomness of test sequences could thus lead to implicit or explicit pattern learning when feedback is provided. When the patterns being guessed mirror naturally occurring guessing patterns, the results could go above or below chance levels even without feedback. Thus significant results could occur purely from non-random guessing. Non-randomization is one of seven flaws in parapsychological research identified by Marks.

Michael Shermer wrote in Scientific American (2005) that there were a number of objections to Sheldrake's experiments on the sense of being stared at, reiterating Marks' and Colwell's points about non-randomization and the use of unsupervised laypeople, and adding confirmation bias and experimenter bias to the list of potential problems; he concluded that Sheldrake's claim was unfalsifiable.

Sheldrake (2004, 2005) responded to the criticisms by stating that the experiments had been widely replicated; the results from an independent meta-analysis by parapsychology researcher Dean Radin, which had excluded all data from unsupervised tests, were shown to be highly significant; and the Marks-Colwell suggestion of non-randomization had been refuted by thousands of trials with different randomization methods, including coin-tossing, yielding positive and highly statistically significant results, whatever the randomization method.

2006 British Association controversy

In September 2006, Sheldrake and Peter Fenwick (a near-death experience researcher) were invited by the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BA) to speak at an event at the University of East Anglia, which resulted in criticism from Lord Winston, Peter Atkins, Richard Wiseman and the Royal Society.

The editors of The Times took a different view in an editorial entitled "It goes without saying that telepathy works". BBC Radio 5 brought together Sheldrake and Atkins to discuss Atkin's claim that "There is absolutely no reason to suppose that telepathy is anything more than a charlatan's fantasy." Atkins admitted that he had not studied any of the evidence and felt no need to do so. The controversy was summarized in an article in The Science Reporter by the science writer Ted Nield.

2013 TEDx Controversy

In January 2013, Sheldrake gave a talk on The Science Delusion at TEDx Whitechapel in London, at an event called Visions for Transition: Challenging Existing Paradigms. Soon afterwards, this talk was put online on the TEDx platform. In March, after Sheldrake TEDx talk had received more than 35,000 views, TED was denounced as a "vehicle for pseudoscience" by Jerry Coyne in a blog called "TED talks completely discredited". TED was also denounced by another blogger, P.Z. Myers, and soon afterwards the TED organization removed Sheldrake talk, along with a talk by Graham Hancock, from the TEDx platform. Instead they put them on a blog together with a statement from the anonymous TED Science Board. Sheldrake replied, refuting the Science Board's claims, and TED then deleted the Science Board's statement. In the comments section of this blog, many people criticized TED for censorship, and supported Sheldrake and Hancock. TED then opened a new blog called "The debate about Rupert Sheldrake's talk" and again most comments were in favour of Sheldrake and against TED's actions, by a ratio of about 10 to 1. Altogether there were more than 5,000 comments about Sheldrake's talk on the TED blogs, more than any other TED talk. In April, Deepak Chopra, Stuart Hameroff, Mena Kafatos, Rudolf Tanzi and Neil Theise wrote an open letter to TED in the Huffington Post, criticizing their decision as a response to "angry, noisy bloggers who promote militant atheism". The curator of TED, Chris Anderson, responded, arguing that TED had not censored Sheldrake and Hancock's talks, but left them online so they could be debated. Chopra, together with 19 scientists and consciousness researchers responded to Anderson, emphasising the importance of new research in consciousness studies and the need for TED to move beyond the narrow views of its Science Board. Meanwhile, Sheldrake's TEDx talk has been posted on many other web sites.

Personal life

Rupert is married to Jill Purce, and they have two sons, the biologist Merlin Sheldrake and the musician Cosmo Sheldrake.

Books

• 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.

With Ralph Abraham and Terence McKenna:

• Trialogues at the Edge of the West: chaos, creativity, and the resacralization 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 (priest):

• 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.

See also

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

External links

• Official website
• Sheldrake, Rupert ♦ The Variability of Fundamental Constants
• On Overlapping Morphic Fields An interview with Dr Sheldrake