Rupert Sheldrake

Dr. Rupert Sheldrake (born 1942) is a British biologist and author. He developed the idea of "morphogenetic fields", and has researched and written on topics such as animal and plant development and behaviour, telepathy, perception and metaphysics. He has a popular public following, particularly because of his books aimed at the general reader, but his ideas are controversial (being at odds with conventional scientific theories) and are considered by many mainstream scientists to be pseudoscientific. L'Imposture Scientifique en Dix Lecons | issue=5830}}

Biography

Sheldrake grew up in Newark, Nottinghamshire, in the midlands of the United Kingdom. He later studied for a degree in biochemistry at the University of Cambridge, from where he graduated with a First Class degree.

Sheldrake held a fellowship and taught biology at Cambridge University (Clare College, where he also studied natural sciences as an undergraduate and doctoral student), and was a Research Fellow of the Royal Society. He later went to Hyderabad, India, where he made contributions to crop physiology. He now lives in Hampstead, London. His wife, Jill Purce, is a music therapist and singing teacher.

In September 2005, Sheldrake was appointed to the Perrott-Warwick Scholarship for psychical research and parapsychology by Trinity College, Cambridge.

New Science of Life

In 1981, Sheldrake trailed his hypothesis of formative causation in an article in New Scientist magazine. The piece was provocatively headlined: "Scientific proof that science has got it all wrong". An editorial introduction admitted that, to modern science, an idea such as Sheldrake’s was "completely scatty", but justified its publication on the grounds that first, "Sheldrake is an excellent scientist; the proper, imaginative kind that in an earlier age discovered continents and mirrored the world in sonnets," and secondly, "the science in his ideas is good. … This does not mean that it is right but that it is testable".

His best known book, A New Science of Life, was published a week after the New Scientist article. He put forward the hypothesis of formative causation (the theory of morphic fields), which proposes that phenomena — particularly biological ones — become more probable the more often they occur, and therefore that biological growth and behaviour are guided into patterns laid down by previous similar organisms. He suggests that this underlies many aspects of science, from evolution to laws of nature. Indeed, he writes that the laws of nature are better thought of as mutable habits that have evolved since the Big Bang.

Over the next few months, Sheldrake’s ideas were subjected to much discussion in journals and newspapers, and his book was reviewed in a variety of scientific and religious publications. Attitudes were generally negative. Then, in September 1981, the scientific journal Nature carried an editorial by the journal’s senior editor, John Maddox, entitled "A book for burning?". It reviewed and panned Rupert Sheldrake’s then recently-published book.

The editorial did not say the book ought to be burned (indeed, at one point it said the exact opposite), but it was highly critical of his work, as were subsequent reviews of his books in the magazine.

Later work

In more recent work Sheldrake has developed his ideas further and also conducted experiments (documented in subsequent books) on phenomena which he believes could be explained by morphic fields.

For example, Sheldrake began working in the 1990s on the alleged telepathic powers of animals, which he thinks could be explained by morphic resonance between two brains. Sheldrake has argued that certain animals (particularly dogs) can sense when their owners are coming home unexpectedly - a phenomenon widely reported by pet owners, and which Sheldrake has conducted experiments on.

In recent years he has also researched human telepathy; in these experiments, a subject must guess which of four people is about to telephone or send an email. According to the published results of these experiments, instead of being right 25% of the time (as expected by chance), the subject guesses the person correctly about 45% of the time.^*

Sheldrake has also researched the homing ability of dogs and pigeons, which again he believes could be related to morphic fields.

Popularization

Sheldrake's Seven Experiments That Could Change the World, published in 1994, encourages lay people to contribute to scientific research, and argues that scientific experiments similar to his own can be conducted on a shoestring budget.

Experiments of this kind designed by Sheldrake have included some conducted by BBC TV's popular science programme Tomorrow's World, plus investigations into the "sense of being stared at" involving thousands of schoolchildren in several countries.

The public can also take part in experiments on Sheldrake's web site.