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The Science Delusion
Audible Audiobook – UnabridgedRupert Sheldrake (Author, Narrator), David Timson (Narrator), Jane Collingwood (Narrator), & 1 more
4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 663 ratings
The science delusion is the belief that science already understands the nature of reality. The fundamental questions are answered, leaving only the details to be filled in.
In this book, Dr Rupert Sheldrake, one of the world's most innovative scientists, shows that science is being constructed by assumptions that have hardened into dogmas. The sciences would be better off without them: freer, more interesting, and more fun.
According to the dogmas of science, all reality is material or physical.
The world is a machine, made up of dead matter. Nature is purposeless. Consciousness is nothing but the physical activity of the brain. Free will is an illusion. God exists only as an idea in human minds; imprisoned within our skulls. But should science be a belief-system, or a method of enquiry?
Sheldrake shows that the materialist ideology is moribund; under its sway, increasingly expensive research is reaping diminishing returns.
In the sceptical spirit of true science, Sheldrake turns the 10 fundamental dogmas of materialism into exciting questions, and shows how all of them open up startling new possibilities.
The Science Delusion will radically change your view of what is possible. And give you new hope for the world.
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12 hours and 51 minutes
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Rupert Sheldrake
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Product details
Listening Length 12 hours and 51 minutes
Author Rupert Sheldrake
Narrator Rupert Sheldrake, David Timson, Jane Collingwood
Audible.com.au Release Date 12 July 2012
Publisher Hodder & Stoughton
Program Type Audiobook
Version Unabridged
Language English
ASIN B00NX62JVG
Best Sellers Rank 22,779 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals)
51 in Religion & Psychology
71 in Science & Religion
150 in Religious Studies (Audible Books & Originals)
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4.6 out of 5 stars
4.6 out of 5
663 global ratings
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Top reviews
Top reviews from Australia
William Pierce
5.0 out of 5 stars Towards Open-mindednessReviewed in Australia on 7 June 2018
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A truly great and original book. Sheldrake manages to combine the most lucid and logical thinking with an open-minded acceptance of the the paranormal while at the same time proposing practical suggestions to test and verify the paranormal incidents.
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A. Neville
5.0 out of 5 stars What an important book!Reviewed in Australia on 15 January 2021
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A truly fantastic book! I was highlighting quote after quote.
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Paul Scott
4.0 out of 5 stars A refreshing and challenging view of scienceReviewed in Australia on 23 April 2014
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A very enjoyable book with refreshing thinking. Even if you don't agree with some of his ideas, the questions that his book poses to the unwritten assumptions of mainstream thinking, are well worth asking. He also gives examples of scientific method vs the politics of science.
For me it has made the world seem more interesting and mysterious, and encourages me to use my own critical judgement on stuff like science news and current teachings.
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Davros Designer
5.0 out of 5 stars Evidence?Reviewed in Australia on 26 March 2015
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I like this work because it identifies the similarities between Religion and Science as practices performed by individuals more concerned with financing their careers as ego-based Authorities, than the quality of evidence for the understanding they are meant to represent.
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Pamerasan
5.0 out of 5 stars Paradigm shiftReviewed in Australia on 18 September 2020
Insightful introduction to an expanded world view. Love this book and all the work of this scientist, his work truly demonstrating the understanding of Thomas Kuhn when paradigmatic change and greater understandings emerge! The constraints of materialism fails contemporary understandings of quantum reality.
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Susan Bell
3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting but somewhat tediousReviewed in Australia on 22 February 2015
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I agree with many points made by Sheldrake in that scientists can be inflexible in taking alternative theories into account. However, Sheldrake's prose is sometimes tedious and I found myself drifting off during many long-winded passages. However, it is worth reading for Sheldrake does make many astute observations and offers suggestions as to how science can move forward.
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Nila
5.0 out of 5 stars Ein Buch von sheldrakeReviewed in Germany on 30 December 2023
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Das ist etwas schwer zu verstehen jedoch ein faszinierendes Buch
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rohit pandey
5.0 out of 5 stars Must read for modern science nutsReviewed in India on 15 April 2023
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Must read, complex concepts are discussed lucidly.
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Edwin
5.0 out of 5 stars The Dogmas of Science RevealedReviewed in Canada on 25 November 2020
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I first came across Rupert Sheldrake when, as a youngster, I read Hans Christian Andersen's tale "The Emperor's New Clothes". Sheldrake was the little child who yelled out "But he hasn't got anything on!". I now see that the little child has grown up and he's no less restrained in his yelling out.
3 people found this helpfulReport
Newton César
5.0 out of 5 stars Muito bomReviewed in Brazil on 19 July 2017
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Recomendo. Vale a pena a leitura. Boa argumentação, ideias diferentes, insights interessantes. E o desenvolvimento foi muito bem feito pelo autor.
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John
5.0 out of 5 stars Superb book, thoroughly enjoyed it.Reviewed in Spain on 10 November 2015
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Mr. Sheldrake sums up in a very concise, logical way all that is wrong with modern "Scientism". I love science and am appaled how it has become entrenched in a series of materialistic, reductionist dogmas that have nothing to do with the true concept of an open, questioning attitude towards life's unsolved misteries. Mr. Sheldrake "nails it" point after point, showing how there is no real objective investigation into things we don't understand. It's all driven by greed or outdated 17th century dogmas.
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Interview
Rupert Sheldrake: the 'heretic' at odds with scientific dogma
This article is more than 12 years old
Tim Adams
Rupert Sheldrake has researched telepathy in dogs, crystals and Chinese medicine in his quest to explore phenomena that science finds hard to explain
Tim Adams
Sun 5 Feb 2012 11.04 AEDT
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It is not often, in liberal north London, that you come face to face with a heretic, but Rupert Sheldrake has worn that mantle, pretty cheerfully, for 30 years now. Sitting in his book-lined study, overlooking Hampstead Heath, he appears a highly unlikely candidate for apostasy; he seems more like the Cambridge biochemistry don he once was, one of the brightest Darwinians of his generation, winner of the university botany prize, researcher at the Royal Society, Harvard scholar and fellow of Clare College.
All that, though, was before he was cast out into the wilderness. Sheldrake's untouchable status was conferred one morning in 1981 when, a couple of months after the publication of his first book, A New Science of Life, he woke up to read an editorial in the journal Nature, which announced to all right-thinking men and women that his was a "book for burning" and that Sheldrake was to be "condemned in exactly the language that the pope used to condemn Galileo, and for the same reason. It is heresy".
For a pariah, Sheldrake is particularly affable. But still, looking back at that moment, he still betrays a certain sense of shock. "It was," he says, "exactly like a papal excommunication. From that moment on, I became a very dangerous person to know for scientists." That opinion has hardened over the years, as Sheldrake has continued to operate at the margins of his discipline, looking for phenomena that "conventional, materialist science" cannot explain and arguing for a more open-minded approach to scientific inquiry.
His new book, The Science Delusion, is a summation of this thinking, an attempt to address what he sees as the limitations and hubris of contemporary scientific thought. In particular, he takes aim at the "scientific dogmatism" that sets itself up as gospel. The chapters take some of the stonier commandments of contemporary science and make them into questions: "Are the laws of nature fixed?"; "Is matter unconscious?"; "Is nature purposeless?" "Are minds confined to brains?"
Sheldrake is a brilliant polemicist if nothing else and he skilfully marshals all the current thinking that undermines these tenets – from apparent telepathy in animals, to crystals having to "learn" how to grow, to some of the more fantastical notions of theoretical physics. On the morning I meet him, his book is sitting near the top of the science bestseller list on Amazon. It has also, unlike most of his previous work – Seven Experiments That Could Change the World, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home – been generally reviewed respectfully. Perhaps it is something in the air.
One of the habits in nature that Sheldrake is interested in is polarity, and if he has a natural nemesis then it is Richard Dawkins, arch materialist and former professor of public understanding of science at Oxford. The title of his book seems to take direct aim at Dawkins's The God Delusion. Was that, I wonder, his express intention in writing it?
"Slightly," he suggests. But the title was really his publisher's idea. "It is dealing with a much bigger issue. But Richard Dawkins is a symptom of the dogmatism of science. He crystallises that approach in the public mind, so to that extent, yes, it is a pointed title."
Sheldrake is the same age as Dawkins – 70 this year – and though their careers began in an almost identical biochemical place, they could hardly have ended up further apart. If Sheldrake's ideas could be boiled down to a sentence, you might borrow one from Hamlet: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Richard, than are dreamt of in your philosophy…"
"What we have in common," Sheldrake says, "is that we are both certain that evolution is the central feature of nature. But I would say his theory of evolution stops at biology. When it comes to cosmology, for example, he has little to say. I would take the evolutionary principle there, too. I think that the 'laws of nature' are also prone to evolve; I think they are more like habits than laws. Much of what we are beginning to understand is that they clearly have evolved differently in different parts of the universe."
Sheldrake talks a good deal of the fact that, as all good Brian Cox viewers know, 83% of the universe is now thought to be "dark matter" and subject to "dark energy" forces that "nothing in our science can begin to explain".
Despite this, he suggests, scientists are prone to "the recurrent fantasy of omniscience". The science delusion, in these terms, consists in the faith that we already understand the nature of reality, in principle, and that all that is left to do is to fill in the details. "In this book, I am just trying to blow the whistle on that attitude which I think is bad for science," he says. In America, the book is called Science Set Free, which he thinks is probably a better title. "They were aware that if they called it The Science Delusion it would be seen as a rightwing tract that was anti-evolution and anti-climate change. And I want no part of that."
The evolution of Rupert Sheldrake, would, you guess, be a worthwhile scientific study in itself, but one for which you might struggle to attract funding. Like all heretics worth their salt, he started out in good faith, a true believer, but he has been beset by increasing doubt ever since.
"I went through the standard scientific atheist phase when I was about 14," he says, with a grin. "I bought into that package deal of science equals atheism. I was the only boy at my high Anglican boarding school who refused to get confirmed. When I was a teenager, I was a bit like Dawkins is today, you know: 'If Adam and Eve were created by God, why do they have navels?' That kind of thing."
Over a period, he found the materialist view of the universe – that matter was all that life consisted of, that human beings were in Dawkins's term "lumbering robots" – did not accord with his own experience of it. Sheldrake was a gifted musician and "electrical changes in the cortex didn't seem able to fully explain Bach". Likewise: "To describe the overwhelming life of a tropical forest just in terms of inert biochemistry and DNA didn't seem to give a very full picture of the world."
The other thing that troubled him about scientific orthodoxy might be condensed into a single word: pigeons. As a boy in Newark-on-Trent, Sheldrake had kept animals – a dog, a jackdaw and some homing pigeons. He would place these pigeons in a cardboard box and cycle all morning with them and then release them to marvel how they would always beat him home. Newark happened to be a hub of pigeon racing. "Every weekend in the season, people would bring piles and piles of wicker baskets containing their birds; my father would take me there and the porters would let me help release the pigeons. Hundreds would fly up and circle round, then you would see them form into little groups and head off around Britain, back home. Pigeon fanciers were mostly plain working men, but they were fascinated by this mystery, which they did not understand."
They were not alone. When Sheldrake won his scholarship to Cambridge several years later, he asked various scientists how they thought this happened. The scientists talked about the sun's position and an internal clock and scent traces, but what "they weren't prepared to say was that it was a total mystery". That refusal, and others like it, troubled Sheldrake. "There is a lot of science that you can't directly experience," he says, "but to concentrate on quantum physics when we couldn't begin to explain homing pigeons seemed to me," he suggests, "a great distortion."
For a decade or so, Sheldrake kept some of these thoughts to himself, but as his career developed his doubts about the idea that "conventional, materialist" science would one day explain everything seemed increasingly wrong-headed. He took a job working at the University of Malaya on ferns and rubber trees and to get there travelled for some months through India and Sri Lanka. It was 1968 and India was a very interesting place to be. "I met people, highly intelligent people, who had a completely different world view from anything to which I had been exposed."
Returning to Cambridge, Sheldrake became interested in a notion of biology and heredity that shared close affinities with Carl Jung's ideas of a collective unconscious, a shared species memory. He was profoundly influenced by a book called Matter and Memory by the philosopher Henri Bergson. "When I discovered Bergson's idea that memory is not stored in the brain but that it is a relation in time, not in space, I realised that there might potentially be a memory principle in nature that would solve the problem I was wrestling with."
In 1974, Sheldrake returned to south-east Asia and took a job at an agricultural institute near Hyderabad developing new varieties and cropping systems in chickpeas. "By day, I was working on these practical things," he recalls, "but in the evening I was reading a lot about crystallography and the philosophy of form." He had become friendly with an eccentric woman called Helen Spurway, widow of JBS Haldane, the great British biologist. She lived in a remote full of animals, with a tame jackal and wasps' nests in the living room; Haldane's library was being eaten by termites; Sheldrake felt right at home.
"At around the same time," he recalls, "I had some exposure to psychedelics, and that opened me up to the idea that consciousness was much richer than anything my physiology lecturers had ever described. Then I came across transcendental meditation, which seemed to give some access to that without drugs." Alongside that, to his surprise, Sheldrake began to realise that there was "a lot more in my makeup that was 'Christian' than I cared to admit. I started praying and going to church."
Did he pray with a sense of its efficacy?
"Well," he says, "I still say the Lord's Prayer every day. It covers a lot of ground in our relation to the world. 'Thy will be done', that sense that we are part of a larger process that is unfolding that we do not comprehend." By the time Sheldrake went to live at the ashram of the exiled Christian holy man, Father Bede Griffiths, he had been confirmed in the Church of South India and was the organist of St George's, Hyderabad. It was at about that time, "living in a palm-fringed hut under a banyan tree", that Sheldrake decided to set out his decade's worth of thinking about memory being a function of time, not matter, shared by all living things, that he called "morphogenetics".
Was he aware that the book would be incendiary?
"Well," he says, "I wrote it to try to find a broader framework for biology. A more holistic one, proposing the argument that the laws of nature were also evolving in time."
For the first three months after it was published, the speculative book got a generally favourable reception. But then the "book for burning" editorial was written in Nature, by its editor, Sir John Maddox, and Sheldrake's new life began, as a discredited scientist and bestselling author.
Far from refuting his ideas in the face of this broadside, Sheldrake went on the offensive. His research since then has concentrated almost entirely on the kinds of phenomena that science dismisses out of hand "but which people are generally fascinated by and made to feel stupid about". He has a long-running experiment that collects data about how dogs "know" when their owners are coming home; another is concerned with the apparently strong deviations from chance in human ability to predict when they are being stared at from a distance. He retains an interest in subjects as diverse as the mysteries of crystal formation, the efficacy of Chinese medicine, the forces that trigger migrations of birds and animals over vast distances, and the nature of consciousness.
None of these pursuits has enhanced his standing in the professional scientific community. Sheldrake is unrepentant. He cites Darwin as an example. "If you look at his books, almost all the data there come from amateur naturalists, practical breeders, gardeners. TH Huxley, meanwhile, 'his bulldog', was very much against amateurs, largely because many of them were vicars and he was very anti-religious. He wanted to marginalise anyone who saw science and faith as compatible and mutually reaffirming."
Though he remains at best a contentious figure, and to some an irredeemable charlatan, Sheldrake sees some evidence that this old opposition is breaking down, that doubt and wonder might be returning to science.
"I think one of the reasons why my book has – so far – been well received is that times are changing," he suggests. "A lot of our old certainties, not least neoliberal capitalism, have been turned on their head. The atheist revival movement of Dawkins and Hitchens and Dennett is for many people just too narrow and dogmatic. I think it is a uniquely open moment..."
His hope is that there will be a "coming out" moment in science. "It's like gays in the 1950s," he suggests. "I think if people in the realm of science and medicine came out and talked about the limitations of purely mechanistic and reductive approaches it would be much more fun…"
The imminence of Sheldrake's three score years and ten has made questions of mortality and consciousness seem a little more pressing to him. He almost came face to face with his morphic energies in 2008; speaking at a consciousness conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico, he was attacked with a knife by a Japanese paranoid schizophrenic. He suffered a huge wound in his thigh, which just missed his femoral artery. "Apparently," he says, "he was aiming at my heart and stumbled at the last moment. It certainly made death a bit more present."
Given his speculative nature, I wonder what he imagined, as his life flashed before him, would happen next?
"I've always thought death would be like dreaming," he says, "but without the possibility of waking up. And in those dreams, as in our dreams in life, everyone will get what they want to some degree. For the atheists convinced everything will go blank, maybe it will." He trusts in a more colourful future for himself. After Sheldrake shows me out, I walk to work across the heath, imagining how his dream eternity might work out: hammering out The Goldberg Variations on his Hyderabad organ, while the jungle grows around him, wondering all the time how he got here.
===
The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry
Rupert Sheldrake
4.07
1,781 ratings244 reviews
The science delusion is the belief that science already understands the nature of reality. The fundamental questions are answered, leaving only the details to be filled in. In this book, Dr Rupert Sheldrake, one of the world's most innovative scientists, shows that science is being constricted by assumptions that have hardened into dogmas. The 'scientific worldview' has become a belief system. All reality is material or physical. The world is a machine, made up of dead matter. Nature is purposeless. Consciousness is nothing but the physical activity of the brain. Free will is an illusion. God exists only as an idea in human minds, imprisoned within our skulls. Sheldrake examines these dogmas scientifically, and shows persuasively that science would be better off without them: freer, more interesting, and more fun.
In The God Delusion Richard Dawkins used science to bash God, but here Rupert Sheldrake shows that Dawkins' understanding of what science can do is old-fashioned and itself a delusion.
GenresSciencePhilosophyNonfictionPsychologySpiritualityHistoryReligion
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392 pages, Hardcover
First published December 6, 2012
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Rupert Sheldrake104 books607 followers
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Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist and author of more than 80 scientific papers and ten books. A former Research Fellow of the Royal Society, he studied natural sciences at Cambridge University, where he was a Scholar of Clare College, took a double first class honours degree and was awarded the University Botany Prize. He then studied philosophy and history of science at Harvard University, where he was a Frank Knox Fellow, before returning to Cambridge, where he took a Ph.D. in biochemistry. He was a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, where he was Director of Studies in biochemistry and cell biology. As the Rosenheim Research Fellow of the Royal Society, he carried out research on the development of plants and the ageing of cells in the Department of Biochemistry at Cambridge University.
Recently, drawing on the work of French philosopher Henri Bergson, he developed the theory of morphic resonance, which makes use of the older notion of morphogenetic fields. He has researched and written on topics such as animal and plant development and behaviour, telepathy, perception and metaphysics.
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4.07
1,781 ratings244 reviews
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Brian Clegg
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January 6, 2012
Half of what's in this quite chunky tome is excellent - the trouble is that I suspect the other bits, which aren't so good, will put off those that really should be reading it.
The fundamental message Rupert Sheldrake is trying to get across is that science typically operates in a very blinkered, limited way. And he's right. He shows very convincingly the way that time and again scientists refuse to look at anything outside of a very limited set of possibilities, not because there is good evidence that these particular avenues should be ignored, but simply because of kneejerk reactions and belief systems.
Of course science can't examine every silly idea, fruitcake theory and dead-end observation, but the closed-mindedness of many scientists is quite extraordinary, and certainly not scientific. And in bringing this out, Sheldrake has a lot to offer in this book. He examines a whole range of assumptions that are generally made in science and never questioned - and this is a brilliant thing. We're talking basic things like universal constants staying constant, energy being conserved, whether consciousness is purely a product of the matter in the brain and so on. I'm not saying these are assumptions are necessarily wrong, but it's too easy to get into the habit of thinking that they shouldn't be questioned. We quickly forget that they are assumptions.
Sheldrake also shows powerfully how some professional skeptics simply have no interest in looking into claims for anything outside of our current scientific understanding (telepathy, for example). He cites a wonderful example where he was brought into a TV programme with Richard Dawkins. He did this on the assurance that this would would involve the discussion of the evidence for and against telepathy. 'I suggested that we actually discuss the evidence,' says Sheldrake. '[Dawkins] looked uneasy and said "I don't want to discuss evidence."... The director confirmed that he too was not interested in evidence.' Debunking without evidence isn't science, it is little more than name calling, and assuming it's true, Richard Dawkins ought to be ashamed.
Another great example is pointing out how little science, outside of medicine (and parapsychology) makes use of blind experiments. It has been demonstrated time and again that if experimenters have an expected outcome, they will influence the results of the experiment. A good example was an experiment using rats in a maze. The experimenters were split into two, one set given highly intelligent rats, the other given slow rats. Not surprisingly, the intelligent rats completed the mazes very significantly faster. Only they were both the same type of rats. The only difference was the experimenters' expectations. When physicists undertake an experiment (the hunt for a Higgs boson, say), they are not usually open minded, they are looking for a specific outcome. It's rather scary to think just how much they may be biasing the experimental outcome (and what's published - at least 90 percent of data isn't) towards the results they expect.
So there's good stuff in here that everyone working in science, or thinking about science, ought to consider. But then there's the downside. We've all got friends who are obsessed with their hobbies. And whatever you are talking about, they will bring in their pet topic. So you might be discussing the banking crisis and your friend who is a bus enthusiast pipes up, 'Yes, and it's amazing what an effect it has had on bus timetables.' Reading a Rupert Sheldrake book, you are always thinking, 'Please don't do it, Rupert. Don't mention it, Rupert. Please!' But inevitably along comes morphic resonance and morphic fields.
The thing is, Sheldrake is a legitimate scientist who came up with an idea that has been largely ignored or ridiculed. Morphic resonance (apart from sounding far too much like a weapon the Borg would use) is actually not a bad idea and deserves further investigation. But as soon as you bring your pet unsupported scientific theories into a book it degrades the rest of it. Morphic fields might illustrate well the kind of problem with assumptions and conventions that Sheldrake is trying to highlight, but because they are so speculative, they simply get in the way. He should have left them out.
Similarly there is quite a lot here that will put the backs up of many readers. Material that seems supportive of anything from homeopathy to the concept of chi (qi) in ancient Chinese medicine. The trouble here is that Sheldrake seems to be confusing two things. It is perfectly possible that there are phenomena like telepathy that exist (at least in perception) but aren't well explained by current scientific theories. But this doesn't mean that you should give any support to totally fictional theories that have no basis in observation and what we do know about science. We may well need new ideas, new mechanisms - but not hauling out hoary old ideas that are long past their sell-by date. He should have trimmed this guff out, which would not in any way have weakened the main thrust of the book.
Overall, then, a valuable and powerful message, but one that is almost certainly going to be lost to those who most need to hear of it because of the unfortunate trappings that have also been included.
Review first published on www.popularscience.co.uk and reproduced with permission.
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Robert Lomas
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January 11, 2012
Dr Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist with a distinguished track record as fellow of Clare College Cambridge where he served as Director of Studies in cell biology before heading up the Perrott-Warwick Project to investigate human abilities at Trinity College, Cambridge. He has published over 80 peer reviewed scientific papers and ten books. He studied natural sciences at Cambridge University where he got a double first in botany and biology. He then spent a year a Harvard studying the history and philosophy of Science before returning to Cambridge to take a Phd in biochemistry. His scientific credentials are sound, which makes the questions he poses in The Science Delusion worth considering. Having studied the science of living things for all of his academic life he has noticed that there is an interaction between consciousness and the structure of reality which fits uncomfortably alongside the reductionist assumptions of neo-darwinist school of materialist biologists, led by Prof Richard Dawkins. The neo-Darwinists believe that life is simply a complex, but accidental, automation. It consists of chemical and physical interactions between purposeless particles and self-awareness is nothing more than a post hoc rationalization of predetermined outcomes ruled only by chance. The main thrust of their thesis is that life is a pointless and purposeless accident.
As a physicist I have long known that my intent when devising a quantum experiment can have a considerable impact on the results I observe, even to the extent of creating a past for an experimental particle which had a multiple range of possible histories until I decided to observe it. I am also aware that I can force instantaneous action on quantum entangled particles over vast distances in total defiance of the relativistic speed limit of light. As Sheldrake points out there is not one scientific approach to understanding the nature of the universe, there are three. For the very large we have Relativity, for the very small we have Quantum Mechanics and for the human sized we have Newtonian Mechanics, and these three systems do not agree. Once we get down to the level of single atoms and sub-atomic particles then quantum probabilities take over, but the moment we string together wires four atoms wide and 1 atom deep then the rules of Newtonian objects (Ohms Law) applies and the system become determinist.
The problem Shedrake identifies for the neo-Darwinist school have is that they are seeped in Newtonian thinking and fail to notice the role of the conscious observer in relativity and quantum mechanics. As a result they have created what is in effect an atheistic religion with its own dogmas and creeds. Sheldrake sees the issues of conscious purpose which arise when trying to reconcile the three viewpoints of science and in this book poses ten probing questions to address the boundaries between these conflicting areas of scientific knowledge. These range from asking life is simply a complex, mechanism of dead matter, through whether memories are storied and retrieved from in quantum fields (he names these fields as morphic fields), rather than as material traces in brain matter to sweeping questions such as are the laws of nature fixed or do they evolve by interactions with conscious observation. The book is a carefully argued investigation of the main articles of faith of the neo-Darwinist materialist religion and musters considerable evidence to suggest that their view is nowhere near a full explanation of universe. He also puts forward a series of challenging questions which offer ways of testing these the currently accepted assumptions about hidden mysteries of nature and science in order to open up understanding of the greater mystery of the function of consciousness. He closes his discussion with these powerful words.
"The realization that the sciences do not know the fundamental answers leads to humility rather than arrogance and openness rather then dogmatism. Much remains to be discovered and rediscovered, including wisdom."
Although he is addressing issues at the forefront of modern physics Sheldrake is eminently readable and clear in his writing. A most enjoyable book which will challenge you to think again about the nature if conscious life.
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Bruce
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June 17, 2012
This needs to be two separate reviews. One for past readers of Sheldrake, and one for newbies.
Newbies, you get three things here: *The historical background and philosophical/metaphysical background of contemporary scientific ideas. *A collection of areas of scientific thought which have EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE which challenge widely held assumptions. *Alternative theories which might explain the challenging evidence.
Some people make the mistake of dismissing the first two aspects of the book because they do not like the sound of the alternative theories. This is a demonstration of the primary complaint by Sheldrake that the materialist assumptions underpinning much of modern science are dogmatic, ideological, and unscientific. But if you have already made up your mind, don't bother reading the book.
For past readers of Sheldrake, you may have a similar experience to my own, which was to find much of the material to be a repeat of previous writings, with less detail than the originals because of the broader scope of this book.
However, I did find the discussion of reverse-time causation to be rather fresh and thought provoking, and if you have not read the updated editions of Sheldrake's work he has been producing in the last few years, then there will be some data that will be new to you.
non-fiction outsider-science
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Perry Clark
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January 22, 2013
Sheldrake has produced here a take on the limitations of science that inhere in a materialist approach to the world and the subject. It is very much the sort of thing one might expect from an author with a strong science background who also has Deepak Chopra on his shelf next to Darwin. In fact, I suspect that his volumes of Darwin have much more dust than do his more iconoclastic authors. I declined to continue reading after chapter 3 (of 12), as I was convinced by the preface, introduction, and the first three chapters that I had more than caught the gist of his work. But rather than describe it, let me illustrate by presenting, without comment, a portion of my notes taken as I read. Brackets indicate my notations. All quotation marks indicate quotations of the work.
Begin:
Chapter 2 "Is the total amount of matter and energy the same?"
[page 73 to 74 The author discusses Helmholtz and his difficulties with establishing the conservation of energy in a biological system, that being frogs.]
[page 77 onward: The author discusses inedia, Latin for fasting. This is discussed in the context of people undergoing prolonged fasts, often for years, with no apparent deleterious effects.]
Pages 77 "Although most people do not realize it, there is a shocking possibility that living organisms draw upon forms of energy over and above those recognized by standard physics and chemistry."
Page 77 [the author appears to consider credible, or at least not incredible, the story of an Indian woman who had gone without food for more than 40 years. He gives similar credence to other, similar stories, with most coming from the Indian subcontinent.]
Page 79 [The author reports that there are some well-documented cases wherein girls have lived for years without eating. References not given.]
Chapter 3 "Are the laws of nature fixed?"
[The author takes it as an assumption not an empirical observation that the laws of nature are fixed.]
Page 84 "But in an evolutionary cosmos, does the theory of fixed laws make sense? Were all the laws of nature already present at the moment of the Big Bang, like a cosmic Napoleonic code? If everything else evolves, why don't the laws of nature evolve along with nature?"
Page 84 "First, the very idea of a law of nature is anthropocentric. Only humans have laws."
84 [the author refers to the assumptions of the founders science. ". . . they thought of God as a kind of cosmic emperor who's writ ran everywhere, and his omnipotence acted as a cosmic law enforcement agency. The laws of nature were eternal ideas in the mind of a mathematical God."]
Page 84 "But for materialists there is no God and no transcendent mind in which these laws can be sustained.… Why are they universal, immutable and omnipotent, and why do they transcend space and time?"
Page 85 "In this chapter, I suggest an alternative to eternal laws: evolving habits. The regularities of nature do not depend on an eternal mind-like realm beyond space and time, but on a kind of memory inherent in nature."
Page 86 to page 87. [The author discusses Plato and the Platonic forms in the context of establishment of the idea of universal, and eternal. He also discusses the significance of the Greek words nous and logos. He notes the acquisition and use of logos by Christianity, the term having broad meaning in the ancient Mediterranean, including "mind, recent, intellect, organizing principle, word, speech, thought, wisdom, and meaning." He links John's use of logos in his Gospel to that of Philo of Alexandria, who "used logos to mean an intermediary divine being bridge the gap between God and the material world."]
End.
If this sort of thing is your cup of tea, then, well, enjoy. I found it tiresome by the end of chapter three, though interspersed amongst the chaff one finds the occasional grain of useful thought. It's not that the topics aren't interesting, but that he repeatedly stretches into some of the murkier fringes without need, apparently in an attempt to bring gravitas and depth to the book. Instead, it should be a shorter work. Though, I will admit, too slender a tome is not likely to sell well nor persuade those that expect a work of greater length.
science-history theology-and-science
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Christy
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February 11, 2013
Essential, for me, anyway: a scientist who outs reductive materialism in the sciences as an ideology, rather than a testable hypothesis, and suggests ways to test it. I was raised an atheist, and continue to feel that organized religion is basically superstition used as a form of social control. But as issues of ecology and the survival of natural systems began to seem more crucial to me, I began to wonder, is it really possible for people to fight with all their strength to "save" something that they don't believe is alive in the same way they believe themselves to be alive? That they don't really believe is as essential to their survival as their own body? If matter at the smallest level is dead, and the cosmos at the grandest scale is dead, and only humans are conscious, and that consciousness is reducible to a set of chemical and electrical impulses that could be replicated by a machine, so its vividness is basically an illusion, well, what meaning does "alive" have in a world like that? Not much. But many of us accept those hypotheses even though they contradict our own experience of ourselves and our world.
So I needed a scientist to say, there may be a way out of this trap, and you don't need to abandon science and retreat into some kind of untestable, irrational fantasy world in order to find it. And I'm extremely grateful. It's given me more hope than anything I can remember reading.
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Paul Kieniewicz
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March 24, 2012
Upon finishing “The Science Delusion”, I’m left wondering why scientists are so unpopular. In the present US presidential campaign, the viable Republican candidates all run on an anti-science platform. (Don’t believe in evolution; don’t believe in global warming). Opinion polls also indicate a public skeptical of science. In the UK, public confidence in scientists isn’t particularly high either. A scientific endorsement of GM crops doesn't carry very far. According to recent polls, a majority of British don't believe in global warming. At first I thought that this is the Cassandra Effect. Cassandra, a prophetess known for her doom-and-gloom predictions was universally despised and disbelieved because no one liked her prophecies. Granted, right-wing think tanks like Heartland have done a hatchet job on climate science, but I feel that it doesn't explain the public mistrust of science. After reading “The Science Delusion” I suggest a different reason for scientists' unpopularity: the post-enlightenment scientific philosophy doesn't jive with our personal experience.
For the past hundred years scientific thought has been dominated by a materialistic mindset. Sheldrake lists ten “assumptions” that underlie it.
Nature is only mechanical
The laws of nature are fixed for all time
Matter is unconscious
Nature is purposeless
All biological inheritance is material (genetic)
Our memories are stored as material traces in the brain
Our minds are confined to our brain
Para-psychological phenomena are illusory.
The only kind of medicine that works is allopathic
Science and scientists are objective.
Materialism dominates science departments at all universities worldwide. When you study a degree in physics, biology, biochemisty or ecology, the above assumptions are drummed into you as the only rational approach to understanding nature. The problem is that where it comes to our subjective experience, the materialistic view doesn’t fit.
Does nature have a purpose? Does evolution have a purpose? TV nature shows such as Planet Earth appear to demonstrate an “eat or be eaten” view. We learn who eats whom, and who copulates with whom. Apparently there's no purpose other than survival. But on a personal level, I feel that my life has a purpose other than my survival. It’s something that’s part of me whether working, relating to others, writing or just sitting alone. I’m much more than a minnow in the ocean about to be munched on . And, I can choose what to think, what to create and what to do.
Materialism suggests that free will is an illusion. We’re programmed by our genes and our conditioning. The genetic program exists only to propagate itself via our progeny. (“The Selfish Gene” Richard Dawkins). Our motivation is fundamentally selfish. Altruistic gestures are nothing but selfish gestures in disguise. While Dawkins goes on to rationalise this assertion, our subjective experience runs counter to it. His message doesn't make us feel good about ourselves. When we show kindness to people unknown to us, it may be because we feel like doing it; because we feel compassion. A reward whether here or in Heaven is irrelevant. And we don’t want a cold scientist pouring scorn on us. Nor do we want to hear that “We’re all programmed robots.” A bit insulting isn’t it?
How important are our genes in determining our traits and our progeny? Sheldrake presents the promises of genetics, following the publication of the human genome, as "the emperor with no clothes". The human genome is surprisingly simple, with only 23,000 genes. A sea urchin is more complicated with 26,000. Rice has about 38,000. We're still unable to find the genes that make a person tall or short. Geneticists assure us that given more research all will be revealed. Sheldrake placed a wager with a prominent geneticist that after another 20 years research, genetics still won't explain the basic forms of organisms.
Are our minds confined to our brains as materialistic scientists assert? The seat of our consciousness curiously appears to lack locality. We can just as easily project it outside our body. When I look at a tree, without analyzing or thinking about it, when there’s only me and the tree, where is consciousness? Somewhere between the “I” and the tree, or in both places. Certainly not inside my head, regardless of what the lab rats say. I’m not alone in my perception. A Pueblo Indian Shaman once told C.G. Jung that the heart is the seat of thought. Only crazy people think in their heads. Regardless of neurological evidence, I'm not aware that my head is thinking. Are you?
The sword of Damocles that could demolish the materialistic edifice in a stroke is the reality of para-psychological phenomena. I suspect it’s why so much effort is devoted by various groups such as the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, to debunk any such claims, deny funding for research and exclude the phenomena from serious scientific debate. Yet many people have first hand experience with reading each other’s mind, knowing when someone is staring at them, premonitions, contact with someone who has passed away, near death experiences, or known successful water dowsers. We don’t like people to tell us that we’re deluded about those things, or crazy.
For many years Sheldrake proposed that there’s more to matter than dead matter. That beyond material objects there extends a field that determines the form of the object and its purpose. This morphogenic field, as he names it, may be the container for the mind, and our memories. The brain is the receiving instrument, a little like a TV set. The brain doesn’t give rise to thoughts any more than the TV set produces “The Simpsons”. Damage to the TV affects its ability to transmit a program without distortion. It’s an intriguing hypothesis that may explain our human experience much better than materialistic science, but it’s still in its infancy.
Whether or not one accepts the morphogenic field hypothesis, Sheldrake makes a compelling argument that the materialistic position rests on a set of unverified assumptions. The non-scientist who watches a nature program, or listens to scientists pontificate, that we're nothing but our genes and gray matter, may feel with some justification that it isn't so. That there must be more to us than strictly material activity.
Until the current materialistic position shifts, people will continue to mistrust scientific pronouncements on a variety of issues including global warming, nuclear power safety, GM crops or health immunization. Such mistrust is dangerous as it leads to wasted opportunities to address pressing problems. Right now there's a gap between what the science says and what we believe. Bridging that gap may not be easy but it's critical if we are to address our global problems. Otherwise our children's children will be saddled with our dubious legacy.
mind-expanding
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Dan
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March 31, 2013
If this book proves nothing else (and it doesn't) it proves that Andy Kaufman is alive and well, and pulling off his greatest prank so far: baffling deep thinkers everywhere by publishing gibberish under the guise of "philosophy". I almost expected to find "had you going there for a while, didn't I?" printed on the final page. This book IS a bad joke, and I can't imagine who could take this string of flawed arguments seriously.
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Peter
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July 21, 2013
He should go back and do some more science instead. logic, philosophy not his forte. He starts off on the wrong foot with ten straw men and then claims success when he ( sometimes successfully) shoots them down. This book is annoyingly difficult to read, the writing is accessible enough but digging for the occasional nuggets ( some are really good) in a mountain of fluff is hard work. Some of his comments are really good but way too often he is away with the fairies. His morphogenesis idea is just crap.
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Sophia
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February 26, 2020
I confess I had fun reading this book. It filled me with shock, indignation and incredulity. I enjoyed the intellectual challenge of reading a book against the institution of science, and trying to defend science against both legit and absurd claims. My attitude going in was “ok, let’s see what you got”, and my attitude throughout ranged from “that’s fair” to “He’s f*cking crazy...”. When I described passages to my boyfriend, he would just ask “are you sure he’s not just a troll?”
Who should read this book? Almost no one. The author does not offer a reasonable alternative to mainstream science, all of his most legitimate criticisms of science is well treated in other books, where it is not juxtaposed with tinfoil hat theories (slight, but only slight, exaggeration). Even scientists looking for healthy criticism to their own dogmas should look elsewhere (recently read Lost in Math, which is a good criticism of physics for example). The main value of this book, to me personally, is just the awe inspiring contradiction of someone who can understand a good chunk of science, and also thoroughly believe psychic phenomenon, and just watch as he bends over backwards and into a pretzel trying to fill the holes of science with his crazy. It’s pretty amazing how he tries to explain standard psychic things (mind reading, alternative medicine, chakra) with science speak. He even has a chapter about common bad practices in science; without really realizing how tarnished his own field of pseudoscience really is.
The book has an interesting structure. Every chapter deals with an issue, first explaining how mainstream science tries to explain things, then how it tries to explain something unsuccessfully (like consciousness or the origin of the universe) revealing internal contradictions, and then providing an alternative explanation that is self evidently superior, usually coming down to “morphic resonance”. Then it ends with “questions to materialists” which I quite enjoyed answering, and a little summary which I never read.
Before going into what was wrong in this book, I’d like to start with what was right. The author did a surprisingly good job of explaining mainstream science; not always right but when you are covering EVERY field, there’s no way to be 100% accurate (although often where he was wrong was exactly where his critical reasoning failed). He also really did identify some serious problems in our current understanding of things; we have no idea how consciousness works for example. Also, if nothing else, his alternative hypotheses are actually often testable, which isn’t always the case with pseudoscience.
It’s also important to specify that not all of his theories are detached from reality, or at least current standard science. His idea that memories are a form of “resonance” of past brain activations is really just a more poetic way of saying what neuroscientists believe to be how memory works. I’m not quite sure why he hasn’t noticed this.
As for what was wrong: his own alternative ideas. A) Sometimes they were wrong in ways that you could just measure, but often times he was B) wrong because of the framework within which he operated. This makes for an interesting way of being wrong, because he’s not technically wrong anymore, but he’s just no longer accurate. C) He was sometimes so wrong but not dealing with clearly defined parameters, so less easy to test. Often though, you could just think things through to realize how wrong they were. D) sometimes he just became incoherent, but I won’t deal with that, I couldn’t say for sure if it was him or me.
Regarding A, this was the most surprising part. He has various academic degrees, more importantly actual experience in experimental science, and yet he would give an explanation that is easily disproven. There was one particular instance that fell squarely in the scope of my competences: neuroscience. A famous study by Libet had participants look at a clock face with just a seconds hand, and whenever they felt like it, they had to push a button, and tell the experimenter at what angle the clock dial was at when they made the decision. This then allowed the researchers to see that the moment participants thought they made the decision was actually over a second after their EEG had started to activate in preparation. Most of the world took this to mean that decisions are made subconsciously, and what we perceive as our conscious mind is not really the most “up to date” version of what our brain has decided. Some believe that it’s a sign that consciousness has no use at all. But Sheldrake here has a different idea. He thinks that this marks evidence that the MIND CAN AFFECT THE PAST! Basically the mind’s causality can work backwards in time! Woooo! The funny thing about that is, we can prove it’s wrong. Just have a participant make choices based on a stimulus you provide, and try and predict the choice before the stimulus has been shown! There are a lot of ways to salvage the role of consciousness in the original Libet experiment without resorting to unraveling the main principle of causality.
B) Science is about trying to find relationships in nature and ourselves that allow us enough understanding to predict what will happen, or at least what could happen. We know that we are severely limited by the cognitive capacity of our brains, an organ not designed for science, and by our sensory organs. So we create models to simplify things just enough to make sense out of them, and science is a quest to create more and more useful models that match reality as best it can. A simple case in point: you can define space with Euclidean coordinates, thinking of everything as a flat plane; but it takes a different kind of spherical geometry to actually launch rockets into space, because that’s a slightly better representation of space, especially at that scale.
Likewise, we could interpret all matter as fire, earth, water, air and ether, either warm or cold, like Aristotle. But that’s not quite as informative as having atoms arranged as elements, with different phases of matter based on temperature and pressure. And likewise following Sheldrake, we could just interpret everything as having a “purpose”, with planets having the purpose to maintain their orbit, crystals having the purpose to crystallize, and trees have the purpose of growing; but this is not quite as informative as saying “purpose” is a human concept like “justice”, that reflects how we as individuals have goals and a desire for meaning, and animals can have a very similar mental state, like the purpose of building a nest; but trees don’t have a purpose, they have growth, and that growth is determined by an interaction of genes and the environment, which is different from how crystals grow which is based on just environment. Sheldrake wants to explain everything in terms of morphic resonance, and how there’s some sort of collective memory and collective goal for a given species or category of object in nature, but a framework that has everything have purpose is just not useful to explain substantially different phenomenon.
C) Most of Sheldrake’s misconceptions would have been clarified with just a bit more imagination on his part. This is actually true of most conspiracy theorists, fringe science, and religion. Instead of trying to interpret everything that exists according to your theory, try looking at your theory and see what it would predict, and then see if that exists in the real world, if not, how much do you have to modify your theory until it’s explained away? A well defined theory can be dismantled quickly like this. A clear cut example is one of the first chapters, in which the author tries to argue that its possible for some individuals to go years without eating because they can tap into some other energy field that physics has not yet discovered or properly investigated in the context of physiology. Aside from there being no molecular/cellular explanation as to how this could happen, you have to look at the larger ramifications of a whole new energy source. There should be WAY more “impossible” events, life in unexpected places, plants surviving in the darkness, etc. not because the phenomenon has to be common per se, but from the sheer magnitude of life on earth; if there’s even a 0.1% increase in energy entering a biological ecosystem, it shows! Case in point, he thinks it’s more reasonable that people who claim to never eat are tapping into an energy field than the alternative, that most are being dishonest, others have amazing metabolisms, and some could be getting energy from mundane sources, like not clean water. But instead of trying to investigate 1 in a billion cases of obscure Indian gurus, why not first explain why millions of people die from starvation at all? Sure they may not all have found a way to access this energy source, but that requires proper explanation as to why some do and some don’t. And why aren’t these gurus teaching all the hungry people how to do it? And there he reaches the point of ill defined hypotheses; when you don’t have a mechanism to explain these exceptions, you’re free to invent all sorts of post hoc reasons why most of humanity and animals starve without food.
The broader point is that most of these mystic explanations would have much larger consequences than just tiny fringe exceptions. The saying is that big claims require big evidence, this is what it’s referring to; you can’t change fundamental principles based on few unusual cases when doing so would necessarily drastically change everything else, in ways we just don’t observe. This is how scientists have hypothesized dark matter and dark energy; it’s not explaining tiny unexpected measurements like a single planet’s speed, it explains massive effects, that are everywhere in the universe, just not at a scale we usually have access to, which is why it’s still mostly unknown. So science has a special place in its heart for mystery forces that we don’t usually observe, it would have loved for there to be additional invisible fields through which it’s possible for living organisms to survive without nutrition, but things on the scale affecting humans are necessarily waaay more obvious than distant dark matter or tiny quantum physics, and we should have seen it by now, systematically.
He also does poor science. He has a whole self righteous section on blindedness, and how most fields don’t do blind testing in more than 10% of publications, except somewhat medical science at 30%. This I am really confident is false, because I would estimate that 90% of the papers I’ve read in psychology and neuroscience used blinded methods, and most peer reviewed journals demand it. So I don’t know what he did wrong to get such a wrong sample of papers, but a good starting point is that his “meta-analysis” only included 1500 papers. To put that into context, there are around 7 million scientists in the world right now, each expected to publish at least 1 article per year. The fraction of papers he looked at is so small it’s suspicious. Sure he did this in the 90s where you had to do meta analyses by hand, but that doesn’t make the results any more reliable.
I didn’t dedicate the time to evaluate all of the examples, anecdotes and studies he cites that “prove” his crazy theories, but the ones I did look at, and the above example, gave me the overall impression that he just does not have a good grasp of statistics, which is a failing of the whole pseudoscience “field”.
There’s so much more to be said, but I don’t think it’s really worth my time.
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Helio
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October 21, 2020
This was a hodge podge of items, many that were covered in previous books. New (for me) were tales of people not eating (and not defecating nor urinating) and living fine lives and the speed of light (measurements) showing a drop of 20 km/sec between the years 1928-1945. "Some scientists suggested that the data pointed to cyclical variations in the velocity of light."
What I really liked was his suggestion that 1% of research money should go toward things the public would like to see investigated.
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Jeff Suwak
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June 8, 2015
This is a book thinking people ought to read. It made me realize how much of my worldview, which I confidently (arrogantly?) thought was based on solid reason and a basic grasp of science, was really just dogma that I couldn't defend against Sheldrake's examinations.
It doesn't really matter, in my opinion, whether one ultimately comes out doubting their previous views and considering new ones, or if they reinforce the old and make it stronger; either way, this book will challenge people's perceptions of the universe, science, scientists, and themselves.
It really is that powerful and worthwhile of a read.
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Joseph
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May 27, 2015
In the words of John Greenbank, it is "a preposterous confection. It may unsettle some general readers and turn others away from science, but for the scientifically-initiated it is simply incoherent." (https://philosophynow.org/issues/93/T...)
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Joel
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March 22, 2023
On the basis of his observations and confrontations with enigmas, in the early phases of his career as a biochemist & botanist, Rupert Sheldrake sought answers "outside the box". Today’s researchers stand on the shoulders of giants of science. Yet, much like other areas of human life, conviction or theory along the progression of any scientific field can rigidify into dogma. In this intriguing book, Sheldrake points out numerous instances of what amounts to an unfortunate conformism, and suggests possible approaches by which present-day researchers might steer themselves out of ruts that he believes constrain the directions of much research.
Himself a scientific innovator, Sheldrake is one among numerous researchers now pressing for a new fundamental “paradigm” (an updated worldview to underlie new theories). Sheldrake has become prominent as an articulate and even-tempered man who, for decades, has been publishing the results of his experiments. He was born in England in 1942, the son of a pharmacist/amateur-botanist father, and from early boyhood he was stirred by a passion for living things. His advanced education was the study of biology and biochemistry at Cambridge. Among his mentors were Francis Crick, co-winner of a Nobel Prize for convincingly modeling the double-helix DNA molecule, and Sydney Brenner, also a Nobel Prize winning biologist. At Cambridge Sheldrake earned a PhD in biochemistry, his special interest being plant hormones and their roles in plant development.
He acknowledges he absorbed the materialistic/atheistic quasi-religion that he initially believed to be part of the package of the “scientist” identity. That orientation still dominates modern science. Yet Sheldrake’s research observations, during both his schooling and his first years as a biochemist and botanist, led to his mind being opened by provoking him to seek explanations, even if heretical. His widening search was immensely aided by his diligent study of the history of science as well as the history of Western philosophy. Sheldrake clearly applauds the advances in the sciences. He firmly believes in the empirical method: the careful observation of fact, and the experimental mode. But he’s willing to take stands against pre-formed opinions in various areas of science, and gives expression to an anti-dogmatic (and also anti-obstinate) attitude. There is, he writes “a general problem in scientific research. Results that agree with expectations are readily accepted, while those that do not are dismissed as flawed.” And while he freely acknowledges some experiments do yield misleading results because the experimental designs or procedures are actually flawed, he feels obligated to conclude: “the sciences have lost much of their vigor, vitality and curiosity. Dogmatic ideology, fear-based conformity, and institutional inertia are inhibiting scientific creativity.”
As Bertrand Russell, at age 50, said publicly in 1922, "Every man of science whose outlook is truly scientific is ready to admit that what passes for scientific knowledge at the moment is sure to require correction with the progress of discovery".
Sheldrake devotes a probing and engaging chapter to each of ten core beliefs that he says most scientists today take for granted. Assumption #1: Everything is essentially mechanical. (People are machines, “lumbering robots, in Richard Dawkins’s vivid phrase,” with brains that are like genetically programmed computers.) #2. All matter is unconscious. (Even human consciousness is viewed as a kind of illusion produced by the material activities of brains.) #3. The total amount of matter and energy is always the same (with the exception of the Big Bang, when all the matter and energy of the universe ‘suddenly appeared’). #4. The laws of nature are fixed. They are the same today as they were at the beginning, and they will stay the same forever. #5. Nature is purposeless, and evolution has no goal or direction. #6. All biological inheritance is material, carried in the genetic material (DNA) and in other material structures. #7. Minds are completely inside heads and are nothing but the activities of brains. #8. Memories are stored as material traces in brains and therefore are wiped out at death. #9. Unexplained phenomena such as telepathy are simply illusory. #10. Conventional “mechanistic” medicine is the only kind that really works. Sheldrake is bold enough to find each of these beliefs suspect.
In one chapter, he says, “Although a growing body of evidence from psychic research and parapsychology suggests that telepathy, precognition and other psychic phenomena are real, materialists still believe they are impossible and that psychical research is inherently pseudoscientific.” Besides access to the 140 years-worth of archived, detailed information from controlled psychic experimentation (and close observations ‘in the field’), Sheldrake has, himself, collected extensive experimental and anecdotal information about telepathy, precognition, and other psychic phenomena. He argues that several sorts of psychic phenomena are “not “extraordinary… they are common.”
Sheldrake, often entertainingly, describes the methodology and outcomes of some compelling experimental research. He points out that with some forms of extra-sensory perception, results of controlled experiments are superior when there is a close social bond, such as a friendship or a parent/child relationship shared by the subjects.
“Telepathy” refers to picking up feelings, needs or thoughts at a distance. Controlled experiments provide one vein of evidence of the occurrence. But in addition to such research, Sheldrake relates that “when Laurens van der Post [the distinguished journalist and educator] was living with Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert, in southern Africa, he found that they seemed to be in telepathic contact on a regular basis” — an assertion that Sheldrake illustrates by including cogent bits from the original account.
Then there is “precognition” (foreknowledge of an event). Sheldrake devised and carried out some remarkable research into this, which he recounts in some detail. He doesn’t limit such foreknowledge to humans, as he offers examples suggesting dogs and other animals sometimes display it.
But in setting the stage before delving into the topic of parapsychological research, Sheldrake explicates a couple of underpinnings on which his questings and contentions rest: concepts intrinsic to 21st-century physics, and, in addition, his own notion of “morphic resonance” (memory or habit inherent in all nature). He briefly traces historical advances in physics, from the 17th-century ideas of the renowned Sir Isaac Newton (generally considered “classical physics”) through the discovery of subatomic particles (between 1897 and 1932), and then through the era of Albert Einstein and colleagues, who asserted that matter was convertible to energy, with vivid proof of it forthcoming by the early 1940s. Meanwhile, starting in the 1920s, quantum-physics theory portrayed those constituent subatomic particles as “vibratory patterns of activity within fields … like photons of light, [subatomic particles] behave both as waves and as particles.”
As Sheldrake submits, instead of the assumption that everything in the cosmos occurs by random chance, his morphic resonance hypothesis proposes an influence that balances and regulates the continual change or creativity that is obvious in the cosmos at every level. In a sense morphic resonance is a conservative or shaping tendency, by virtue of being a memory principle. And the principle of morphic resonance, he explains, operates akin to invisible fields, the rough analogy being a magnetic field. Sheldrake applies his idea to chemical molecules, to biological inheritance, animal memory, human learning, minds and brains, and to patterns apparent in animal societies, in human societies and cultures, and more.
(I'll mention that some of the real-life experiences that Sheldrake believes his hypotheses may help to explain are mentioned in Katja Vartiainen's review of this book.)
Before reading the book, I’d already become familiar with Sheldrake’s general ideas and some of the verification from experimentation. I suppose I don’t I accept every detail or every hypothesis, but my life has taught me that his overall sense of direction is valid. Hence I enjoyed this and I found it good, stimulating reading that challenges ten facets of the dominant paradigm — a book intended to at very least nudge us readers toward open-mindedness.
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Nuno R.
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April 4, 2015
This is an important contribution to science. And if you (without reading it) are willing to dismiss it as pseudo-science, you might want to check what it is that made you trigger that automatic defense mode. And this is exactelly the point. The bigger context for this, today, is the one that got us into, for instance, such things as the terrible rise of modern creationism, that has millions and millions of dollars invested so that a child can be raised into an adult without ever being "exposed" to the theory of evolution. The creationists have been able to produce segregation (their own schools and colleges) and now want more and more to ban evolution from all schools, on the grounds that it offends their religious beliefs. On the other hand, we have militan secularism, atheist groups that opose this and religion at large. This creates trenches. And trenches have the effect of simplifying reality. If you look out the trench and you see someone out, you assume it's an enemy. Two reasonable things that are repeated online as mantras, "where's the evidence?" and "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" show how so many people lack what a scientific mind would have in abundance: curiosity. Because those questions appear many times after someone pointing out where the evidence is. And instead of argumentation, refutation and serious scientific discussion, there is just an emulation of what Dawkins and Harris have been doing, debunking bogus claims of people no one should seriously listen to. Richard Dawkins himself invited Sheldrake to a debunking TV show and did not bother to read his papers.
For me too, it was hard to get into this book. It took me the first third to really be captivated by it. Because I came to it with suspicion. What I found was an interesting travel in the recent history of science, from the perspective of its philosophy. Sheldrake traces our current scientific worldview, the materialistic, mechanistic notion we now have, which was not always the accepted one. And he goes back to the historic periodes where vitalism was oposing materialism and other periods where science established itself or changed, and allows us to see how the method of inquiry that science gave us is fundamentally one thing and the materialistic doctrine (or any other) is another thing.
Rupert Sheldrake identifies 10 dogmas that he believes the current scientific materialistic worldview has cristalized and accepted as unchallenged. And turns them into questions, exploring authors (both marginal and very well accepted ones) and regions of science that question those "dogmas". The chapters have many references to other authors and many scientific periods and discoveries, so this book can be a door to further inquiry. He is a well known researcher of psychic phenomena. And psychic phenomena being impossible this is precisely one the the dogmas he presents, and one of the most interesting cases that divides the scientific community. The ones that identify themselves as "skeptics" (in reference to psychic phenomena) and will repeatedly deny any possibility of such phenomena use expressions as "paranormal", "supernatural", "magic". They are not interested in the scientific explanation, because they preventively deny any possibility by classifying it in the realms of "another world", therefore, impossible, hocus pocus. On the other hand, people like Rupert Sheldrake, investigate, and are interested in finding the actual processes involved. The premises are different, and so are the worldviews.
In physics, I wonder why that is not the case. (And math cannot be the only reason). Until the Higgs Boson was confirmed, some believed it existed, some did not, some were waiting for the confirmation because they had no opinion, and some believed we would never find out. But the ones that did not bother to try to find the particle did not say that the ones that did were doing pseudo-science. Some, I don't know, might have been critic of the over funding, maybe. But they still give credit to the science behind it. However paradoxical, they still thought that trying to find a particle that some scientists believed would never be found was a scientific endeavour.
What Rupert Sheldrake shows is that it is the materialistic worldview, and mechanistic science, specifically the idea that the human body is a machine that makes it impossible to think about such things as telepathy. How can a machine transmit thought? Human thoughts are just processes happening inside human brains and there is nothing more to it. Actually, there has always been scientists (even mathmaticians, like Alfred North Whitehead) with other views. Telepathy might not exist. Maybe toughts do no transmit (that notion of transmission is a cultural one, from radio days). But things that do look and feel like telepathy (feeling/perception at a distance), how can they be explained? Or do we, suddenly dismiss a huge part of our personal experience? Only a worldview that claims we our machines, to be studied like lifeless components (materialism) and not like living organisms (vitalism) can dismiss completely everything we feel - and study us as a machine, through our components.
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Kathleen Brugger
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January 2, 2014
Most people think science is free from bias and fashion. This is not true. If a scientist does not work within the current paradigms they don't get tenure or get published. In this book Sheldrake takes on ten of the core beliefs that shape science's biases, including "nothing but physical matter exists," "nature has no purpose," and "all matter is unconscious."
Sheldrake is a scientist and attacks these beliefs from a scientific perspective. The only problem is the evidence he uses, the experiments he draws on, are few and largely conducted by him. Of course, Sheldrake's premise states that almost no one will do these experiments because they are outside the dominant scientific paradigm. But when I googled his "morphic resonance" concept, the posts were all about Sheldrake. Surely if there was strong evidence to back his claims someone would have had the guts to speak up. I find myself a little on edge about trusting him completely.
But on the whole I think this is a very useful book that exposes some of the hidden assumptions that influence the modern view of the world.
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Osman
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February 25, 2016
In a word: bullshit
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Evan Morris
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June 8, 2013
An excellent, thoughtful work that scientists should get a great benefit from. Sheldrake, himself a scientist of good repute, here reminds scientists what the fundamental nature of scientific inquiry is, and restates the limits of scientific knowledge, which many scientists have either forgotten or are too uneducated about their own disciplines to have ever learned in the first place.
I am highly amused by the vitriol directed at this book by the self-proclaimed defenders of science. Such people do not know what science is and I would be quite surprised if any of them could do any sort of science, beyond the trivial, at all. Real scientists are not afraid of questions. Real scientists are willing to test their assumptions. Real scientists question dogma. Real scientists are interested in the truth for its own sake, even if the truth causes them to reconsider fundamental ideas that they cherish. Rupert Sheldrake is a real scientist. This book is written in the spirit of real science. Those who are angered or offended by it are mere hangers-on at the science party, essentially religious dupes who have simply attached their ignorance to the myth of 'science' so that they can sneer at other people, without themselves having any capacity to refute a single one of Sheldrake's calm, rational arguments.
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