Rupert Sheldrake facts for kids

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Quick facts for kids Rupert Sheldrake
Sheldrake in 2008
Born	(1942-06-28) 28 June 1942 (age 82) Newark-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire, England
Nationality	British
Education	Clare College, Cambridge (MA) Harvard University University of Cambridge (PhD)
Occupation	Researcher, author, critic
Employer	The Perrott-Warrick Fund (2005–2010)

Alfred Rupert Sheldrake (born 28 June 1942) 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
Career
Selected books
Origin and philosophy of morphic resonance
Personal life
See also

Early life and education

Sheldrake was born on 28 June 1942, in Newark-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire, to Reginald Alfred Sheldrake and Doris (née Tebbutt). 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 (an amateur naturalist and microscopist) 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 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:

The system is circular. It does not explain how [differentiation is] established to start with. After nine years of intensive study, it became clear to me that biochemistry would not solve the problem of why things have the basic shape they do.

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 (ICRISAT) 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:

The idea came to me in a moment of insight and was extremely exciting. It interested some of my colleagues at Clare College—philosophers, linguists, and classicists were quite open-minded. But the idea of mysterious telepathy-type interconnections between organisms and of collective memories within species didn't go down too well with my colleagues in the science labs. Not that they were aggressively hostile; they just made fun of it.

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 mystic. 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.

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 the 2010s, Sheldrake outlined his spiritual practices in two books: Science and Spiritual Practices (2017) and Ways to Go Beyond and Why They Work (2019).

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 (1981) proposed 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 suggested, newly-acquired behaviours can be passed down to future generations − a biological proposition akin to the Lamarckian inheritance theory. He generalised 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.

The Presence of the Past (1988)

In The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature (1988), Sheldrake expanded on his morphic resonance hypothesis and marshalled experimental evidence which he said supported the hypothesis. The book was reviewed favourably in New Scientist by historian Theodore Roszak, who called it "engaging, provocative" and "a tour de force." When the book was re-issued in 2011 with 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 re-issue, the book's publisher "wouldn't be mining it for promotional purposes."

David Jones, reviewing the book in The Times, 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 [Sheldrake's] theory falls to Occam's Razor."

The Rebirth of Nature (1991)

Published in 1991, Sheldrake's The Rebirth of Nature: The Greening of Science and God addressed the subject of New Age consciousness and related topics. A column in The Guardian said that the book "seeks to restore the pre-Enlightenment notion that nature is 'alive'," quoting Sheldrake as saying that "indeterminism, spontaneity and creativity have re-emerged throughout the natural world" and that "mystic, animistic and religious ways of thinking can no longer be kept at bay." The book was reviewed by James Lovelock in Nature, who argued that "the theory of formative causation makes testable predictions," noting that "nothing has yet been reported which would divert the mainstream of science. ... Even if it is nonsense ... recognizing the need for fruitful errors, I do not regard the book as dangerous."

Seven Experiments That Could Change the World (1994)

In 1994, Sheldrake proposed a list of Seven Experiments That Could Change the World, subtitled "A do-it-yourself guide to revolutionary science." He encouraged lay people to conduct research and argued that experiments similar to his own could be conducted with limited expense.

Music critic of The Sunday Times Mark Edwards reviewed the book positively, arguing that Sheldrake "challenges the complacent certainty of scientists," and that his ideas "sounded ridiculous ... as long as your thinking is constrained by the current scientific orthodoxy."

David Sharp, writing in The Lancet, said that the experiments testing paranormal phenomena carried the "risk of positive publication bias," and that the scientific community "would have to think again if some of these suggestions were convincingly confirmed." Sharp encouraged readers (medical professionals) to "at least read Sheldrake, even try one of his experiments – but pay very close attention to your methods section." Sharp doubted whether "a bunch of enthusiastic amateurs [was] going to persuade sceptics," and noted that "orthodox science will need a lot of convincing."

Science journalist Nigel Hawkes, writing in The Times, said that Sheldrake was "trying to bridge the gap between phenomenalism and science," and suggested that dogs could appear to have psychic abilities when they were actually relying on more conventional senses. He concluded by saying, "whether scientists will be willing to take [Sheldrake] seriously is ... [a question] that need not concern most readers. While I do not think this book will change the world, it will cause plenty of harmless fun."

Dogs That Know When Their Owners are Coming Home (1999)

Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, published in 1999, covered his research into proposed telepathy between humans and animals, particularly dogs. Sheldrake suggests that such interspecies telepathy is a real phenomenon and that morphic fields are responsible for it.

The book is in three sections, on telepathy, on sense of direction, including animal migration and the homing of pigeons, and on animal precognition, including premonitions of earthquakes and tsunamis. Sheldrake examined more than 1,000 case histories of dogs and cats that seemed to anticipate their owners' return by waiting at a door or window, sometimes for half an hour or more ahead of their return. He did a long series of experiments with a dog called Jaytee, in which the dog was filmed continuously during its owner's absence. In 100 filmed tests, on average the dog spent far more time at the window when its owner was on her way home than when she was not. During the main period of her absence, before she started her return journey, the dog was at the window for an average of 24 seconds per 10-minute period (4% of the time), whereas when she was on her way home, during the first ten minutes of her homeward journey, from more than five miles away, the dog was at the window for an average of five minutes 30 seconds (55% of the time). Sheldrake interpreted the result as highly significant statistically. Sheldrake performed 12 further tests, in which the dog's owner travelled home in a taxi or other unfamiliar vehicle at randomly selected times communicated to her by telephone, to rule out the possibility that the dog was reacting to familiar car sounds or routines. Sheldrake also carried out similar experiments with another dog, Kane, describing the results as similarly positive and significant.

Before the publication of Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, Sheldrake invited Richard Wiseman, Matthew Smith, and Julie Milton to conduct an independent experimental study with the dog Jaytee. They concluded that their evidence did not support telepathy as an explanation for the dog's behaviour, and proposed possible alternative explanations for Sheldrake's conclusions, involving artefacts, bias resulting from experimental design, and post hoc analysis of unpublished data. The group observed that Sheldrake's observed patterns could easily arise if a dog were simply to do very little for a while, before visiting a window with increasing frequency the longer that its owner was absent, and that such behaviour would make sense for a dog awaiting its owner's return. Under this behaviour, the final measurement period, ending with the owner's return, would always contain the most time spent at the window. Sheldrake argued that the actual data in his own and in Wiseman's tests did not bear this out, and that the dog went to wait at the window sooner when his owner was returning from a short absence, and later after a long absence, with no tendency for Jaytee to go to the window early in the way that he did for shorter absences.

Reviewing the book, Susan Blackmore criticised Sheldrake for comparing the 12 tests of random duration – which were all less than an hour in duration – to the initial tests where the dog may have been responding to patterns in the owner's journeys. Blackmore interpreted the results of the randomised tests as starting with a period where the dog "settles down and does not bother to go to the window," and then showing that the longer the owner was away, the more the dog went to look.

The Sense of Being Stared At (2003)

Sheldrake's The Sense of Being Stared At explores telepathy, precognition, and the "psychic staring effect." It reported on an experiment Sheldrake conducted where blindfolded subjects guessed whether persons were staring at them or at another target. Sheldrake reported subjects exhibiting a weak sense of being stared at, but no sense of not being stared at, and attributed the results to morphic resonance. Sheldrake reported a hit rate of 53.1%, describing two subjects as "nearly always right, scoring way above chance levels."

Several independent experimenters were unable to find evidence beyond statistical randomness that people could tell they were being stared at, with some saying that there were design flaws in Sheldrake's experiments, such as using test sequences with "relatively few long runs and many alternations" instead of truly randomised patterns. In 2005, Michael Shermer expressed concern over confirmation bias and experimenter bias in the tests, and concluded that Sheldrake's claim was unfalsifiable.

The Science Delusion (Science Set Free) (2012)

The Science Delusion, published in the US as Science Set Free: 10 Paths to New Discovery, summarises much of Sheldrake's previous work and encapsulates it into a broader critique of philosophical materialism, with the title apparently mimicking that of The God Delusion by one of his critics, Richard Dawkins.

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

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

Reviews were mixed. Anti-reductionist philosopher Mary Midgley writing in The Guardian welcomed it as "a new mind-body paradigm" to address what she thought was "the unlucky fact that our current form of mechanistic materialism rests on muddled, outdated notions of matter." Philosopher Martin Cohen, a famous critic of esotericism in science, wrote in The Times Higher Educational Supplement that "[t]here is a lot to be said for debunking orthodox science's pretensions to be on the verge of fitting the last grain of information into its towering edifice of universal knowledge" while also noting that Sheldrake "goes a bit too far here and there, as in promoting his morphic resonance theory."

Bryan Appleyard writing in The Sunday Times commented that Sheldrake was "at his most incisive" when making a "broad critique of contemporary science" and "scientism," but on Sheldrake's "own scientific theories" Appleyard noted that "morphic resonance is widely derided and narrowly supported. Most of the experimental evidence is contested, though Sheldrake argues there are 'statistically significant' results." Appleyard called it "highly speculative" and was unsure "whether it makes sense or not."

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

Science and Spiritual Practices (2017)

Adam Ford, reviewing the book for the Church Times, says that Sheldrake "takes issue with the new atheism of many scientists, which arises out of a mechanical and materialist view of the universe," arguing that "consciousness and the Spirit are the true fundamental realities of everything."

Ways to Go Beyond and Why They Work (2019)

Reviews for the book were mixed. In The Daily Telegraph, journalist Steven Poole called Sheldrake's writing "very engaging" and said his defense of prayer worked "sometimes, but not always" and was "not really good enough". Veterinary surgeon and barrister Charles A. Foster, writing in Literary Review, called the book "a very mixed bag" but also "funny, wise, [and] full of whimsical weirdness".

Writing in the Times Literary Supplement, anthropologist Jonathan Benthall called the book "an affable, erudite manual to show how life need not be boring", and Sheldrake's arguments "soft at the edges, sometimes presenting his hypotheses as facts".

Origin and philosophy of morphic resonance

Among his early influences Sheldrake cites The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) by Thomas Kuhn. He has said the book led him to view contemporary scientific understanding of life as simply a paradigm, which he called "the mechanistic theory of life." Reading Kuhn's work, Sheldrake says, focused his mind on how scientific paradigms can change.

Sheldrake says that although there are similarities between morphic resonance and Hinduism's akashic records, he first conceived of the idea while at Cambridge, before his travel to India, where he later developed it. He attributes the origin of his idea to two influences: his studies of the holistic tradition in biology, and French philosopher Henri Bergson's 1896 book Matter and Memory. He says he took Bergson's concept of memories not being materially embedded in the brain and generalised it to morphic resonance, where memories are not only immaterial but also under the influence of the collective memories of similar organisms. While his colleagues at Cambridge were not receptive to the idea, Sheldrake found the opposite to be true in India. He recounts his Indian colleagues saying, "There's nothing new in this, it was all known millennia ago to the ancient rishis." Sheldrake thus characterises morphic resonance as a convergence between Western and Eastern thought, yet found by himself first in Western philosophy.

Sheldrake has also noted similarities between morphic resonance and Carl Jung's collective unconscious, with regard to collective memories being shared across individuals and the coalescing of particular behaviours through repetition, which Jung called archetypes. But whereas Jung assumed that archetypal forms were transmitted through physical inheritance, Sheldrake attributes collective memories to morphic resonance, and rejects any explanation of them involving what he terms "mechanistic biology."

Lewis Wolpert, one of Sheldrake's critics, has described morphic resonance as an updated Drieschian vitalism.

Personal life

Sheldrake is married to therapist, voice teacher and author Jill Purce. They have two sons, biologist Merlin Sheldrake and musician Cosmo Sheldrake.

Sheldrake is a practicing Anglican. He has said that he studied with a Sufi teacher and practiced Sufism while he was in India. Sheldrake reported "being drawn back to a Christian path" during his time in India.