Rupert Sheldrake
Alfred Rupert Sheldrake is an English author and parapsychology researcher. He proposed the concept of morphic resonance, a conjecture that lacks mainstream acceptance and has been widely criticized as pseudoscience. He has worked as a biochemist at Cambridge University, a Harvard scholar, a researcher at the Royal Society, and a plant physiologist for ICRISAT in India.
Other work by Sheldrake encompasses paranormal subjects such as precognition, empirical research into telepathy, and the psychic staring effect. He has been described as a New Age author.
Sheldrake's morphic resonance posits that "memory is inherent in nature" and that "natural systems ... inherit a collective memory from all previous things of their kind." Sheldrake proposes that it is also responsible for "telepathy-type interconnections between organisms." His advocacy of the idea offers idiosyncratic explanations of standard subjects in biology such as development, inheritance, and memory.
Critics cite a lack of evidence for morphic resonance and inconsistencies between its tenets and data from genetics, embryology, neuroscience, and biochemistry. They also express concern that popular attention paid to Sheldrake's books and public appearances undermines the public's understanding of science.
Early life and education
Sheldrake was born on 28 June 1942, in Newark-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire, to Reginald Sheldrake and Doris. His father was a University of Nottingham-educated pharmacist who ran a chemist's shop on the same road as his parents' wallpaper shop. Sheldrake credits his father with supporting his interests in zoology and botany.Although his parents were Methodists, they sent him to Worksop College, an Anglican boarding school. Sheldrake has said:
I went through the standard scientific atheist phase when I was about 14... 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.
In the nine-month period before starting college, Sheldrake worked at the Parke-Davis pharmacology research lab in London, an experience he described as formative due to the required destruction of lab animals, which he found deeply unsettling. At Clare College, Cambridge, Sheldrake studied biology and biochemistry. In 1964, he was awarded a fellowship to study the philosophy and history of science at Harvard University. After a year at Harvard, he returned to Cambridge, where he earned a PhD in biochemistry in 1968 for his work in plant development and plant hormones.
Career
After obtaining his PhD, Sheldrake became a fellow of Clare College, working in biochemistry and cell biology with funding from the Royal Society Rosenheim Research Fellowship. He investigated auxins, a class of plant hormone that plays a role in plant vascular cell differentiation. Sheldrake and Philip Rubery developed the chemiosmotic model of polar auxin transport.Sheldrake has said that he ended this line of research when he concluded:
From 1968 to 1969, Sheldrake worked at the University of Malaya.
Having an interest in Indian philosophy, Hinduism and transcendental meditation, Sheldrake resigned his position at Clare and went to work on the physiology of tropical crops in Hyderabad, India, as principal plant physiologist at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics from 1974 to 1978. There he published on crop physiology and co-authored a book on the anatomy of the pigeonpea.
Sheldrake left ICRISAT to focus on writing A New Science of Life, during which time he spent a year and a half in the Saccidananda Ashram of Bede Griffiths, a Benedictine monk active in interfaith dialogue with Hinduism. Published in 1981, the book outlines his concept of morphic resonance, of which he has said:
After writing A New Science of Life, he continued at ICRISAT as a part-time consultant physiologist until 1985.
Sheldrake published his second book, The Presence of the Past, in 1988. In the 1990s and 2000s, he continued to publish books, which included several joint discussions with Ralph Abraham, a mathematician, and Terence McKenna, an ethnobotanist and philosopher. Sheldrake also collaborated with Matthew Fox, a priest and theologian, on two books in 1996.
Sheldrake was one of six subjects, along with Oliver Sacks, Daniel Dennett, Stephen Jay Gould, Freeman Dyson, Stephen Toulmin, who were covered in 1993 by the Dutch filmmaker Wim Kayzer in A Glorious Accident, a documentary series that posed a series of questions about consciousness and culminated in a roundtable discussion between the participants. The film was shown on Dutch public broadcasting system VPRO in 1993, followed by United States PBS member station WNET in 1994. The book A Glorious Accident: Understanding Our Place in the Cosmic Puzzle was produced from the transcripts of the program and published in both Dutch and English.
Since 2004, 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 until 2012. From September 2005 until 2010, Sheldrake was director of the Perrott–Warrick Project for psychical research for research on unexplained human and animal abilities, funded from Trinity College, Cambridge. As of 2014, he was a fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences in California and a fellow of Schumacher College in Devon, England. Since 2014, he has been a fellow of the Temenos Academy, London.
In 2017, Sheldrake published a dialog with science writer and skeptic Michael Shermer titled Arguing Science: A Dialogue on the Future of Science and Spirit. In 2023, at the How The Light Gets In festival of philosophy in Hay-on-Wye, UK, Sheldrake debated Shermer. In 2023, Sheldrake debated the existence of consciousness outside of brains at the University Aula in Bergen, Norway, alongside anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann and neuroscientist Anil Seth.
Sheldrake has outlined his spiritual practices in two books: Science and Spiritual Practices and Ways to Go Beyond and Why They Work.
Selected books
Reviews of Sheldrake's books have at times been extremely negative about their scientific content, but some have been positive. In 2009, Adam Rutherford, geneticist and deputy editor of Nature, criticised Sheldrake's books for containing research that was not subjected to the peer-review process expected for science, and suggested that his books were best "ignored."''A New Science of Life'' (1981)
Sheldrake's A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance proposes that through morphic resonance, various perceived phenomena, particularly biological ones, become more probable the more often they occur, and that biological growth and behaviour thus become guided into patterns laid down by previous similar events. As a result, he suggests, newly acquired behaviours can be passed down to future generations—a biological proposition akin to the Lamarckian inheritance theory. He generalises this approach to assert that it explains many aspects of science, from evolution to the laws of nature, which, in Sheldrake's formulation, are merely mutable habits that have been evolving and changing since the Big Bang.John Davy wrote in The Observer that the implications of A New Science of Life were "fascinating and far-reaching, and would turn upside down a lot of orthodox science," and that they would "merit attention if some of its predictions are supported by experiment."
In subsequent books, Sheldrake continued to promote morphic resonance.
The morphic resonance hypothesis is rejected by numerous critics on many grounds, and has been labelled pseudoscience and magical thinking. These grounds include the lack of evidence for it and its inconsistency with established scientific theories. The idea of morphic resonance is also seen as lacking scientific credibility because it is overly vague and unfalsifiable. Sheldrake's experimental methods have been criticised for being poorly designed and subject to experimenter bias. His analyses of results have also drawn criticism.
Alex Gomez-Marin denies that Sheldrake's basic idea is unfalsifiable, but no conclusive experiments have been performed since mainstream scientists do not wish to get involved in such experiments.
''The Presence of the Past'' (1988)
In The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature, Sheldrake expands on his morphic resonance hypothesis and marshals experimental evidence that he says supports it. The book was reviewed favourably in New Scientist by historian Theodore Roszak, who called it "engaging, provocative" and "a tour de force." When it was reissued in 2011 with those quotes on the front cover, New Scientist remarked, "Back then, Roszak gave Sheldrake the benefit of the doubt. Today, attitudes have hardened and Sheldrake is seen as standing firmly on the wilder shores of science," adding that if New Scientist were to review the reissue, the book's publisher "wouldn't be mining it for promotional purposes."In a 1988 review of the book in The Times, David E. H. Jones criticised the hypothesis as magical thinking and pseudoscience, saying that morphic resonance "is so vast and formless that it could easily be made to explain anything, or to dodge round any opposing argument... Sheldrake has sadly aligned himself with those fantasists who, from the depths of their armchairs, dream up whole new grandiose theories of space and time to revolutionize all science, drape their woolly generalizations over every phenomenon they can think of, and then start looking round for whatever scraps of evidence that seem to them to be in their favour." Jones argued that without confirmatory experimental evidence, "the whole unwieldy and redundant structure of theory falls to Occam's Razor."