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The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry
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 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 skeptical spirit of true science, Sheldrake turns the ten 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.
401 pages, Kindle Edition
First published December 6, 2012
515 people are currently reading
6456 people want to read
About the author
Rupert Sheldrake
64 books694 followersRupert 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.
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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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.
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.
January 10, 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.
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.
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.
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.
February 10, 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.
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.
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.
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.
January 21, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
March 30, 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.
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.
What I really liked was his suggestion that 1% of research money should go toward things the public would like to see investigated.
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.
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.
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...)
March 21, 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.
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.
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.
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.
January 1, 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.
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.
February 25, 2016
In a word: bullshit
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.
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.
November 12, 2018
"The realisation that the sciences do not know the fundamental answers leads to humility rather than arrogance, and openness rather than dogmatism." Rupert Sheldrake
I enjoyed this book, particularly taking aim at characters like Dawkins who have an unjustified superciliousness from their interpretation of life that has been misunderstood on the most fundamental of levels. One of the most interesting aspects of the book is examination of blind tests and the self-fulfilling prophecy of blinkered research, if we don't maintain objectivity and follow the evidence we shall forever be lead up the garden path. That being said, there is little to substantiate morphic resonance or some of the other ideas contained in this book, they remain of interest but need more thorough research, as the author advocates.
This is essential reading, as it's always tempting to think you know more than you do and materialism has a siren-like pull. It is good to reassess the ground you cover and provoke thought, which this book does deftly.
I enjoyed this book, particularly taking aim at characters like Dawkins who have an unjustified superciliousness from their interpretation of life that has been misunderstood on the most fundamental of levels. One of the most interesting aspects of the book is examination of blind tests and the self-fulfilling prophecy of blinkered research, if we don't maintain objectivity and follow the evidence we shall forever be lead up the garden path. That being said, there is little to substantiate morphic resonance or some of the other ideas contained in this book, they remain of interest but need more thorough research, as the author advocates.
This is essential reading, as it's always tempting to think you know more than you do and materialism has a siren-like pull. It is good to reassess the ground you cover and provoke thought, which this book does deftly.
August 29, 2015
Man, what a mixed bag - I really want to give this 2.5 stars. There's some good material in here and I recommend the penultimate chapter on the messiness of scientific research and publication. If only Sheldrake had been able to concentrate on discussing the problems with rigid doctrinaire scientific materialism, this would have been an interesting and provocative read. But partway into almost every chapter he finds an excuse to start pushing his own pet theory, morphic resonance, which is unconvincing, distracting and ultimately undermines his main arguments. I understand that Sheldrake is on a lifelong mission to persuade the world to embrace his theory, but this book would be far better if he'd been able to set that mission aside and focus instead on the bigger question of whether scientific materialism is justified by evidence, or is merely a set of beliefs. If you can look past the silly bits, there's plenty of food for thought here, but for many readers, that's quite a big if.
December 25, 2016
Some scientists don't take Sheldrake seriously, but broad-minded scientists do. He challenges several scientific dogmas and orthodoxies that deserve to be examined.
Chapter titles indicate the topics he undertakes to explore and question: Is Nature Mechanical? Is the total Amount of Matter and Energy Always the Same? Are the Laws of Nature Fixed? Is Matter Unconscious? Is Nature Purposeless? Is All Biological Inheritance Material? Are Minds Confined to Brains?
The subtitle is apropos: freeing the spirit of enquiry. In today's world when materialism and physicalism is the pervasive thought underpinning our lives, seeing science from a different angle does give permission to question the gods of technology and medicine. Bravo Sheldrake!
Chapter titles indicate the topics he undertakes to explore and question: Is Nature Mechanical? Is the total Amount of Matter and Energy Always the Same? Are the Laws of Nature Fixed? Is Matter Unconscious? Is Nature Purposeless? Is All Biological Inheritance Material? Are Minds Confined to Brains?
The subtitle is apropos: freeing the spirit of enquiry. In today's world when materialism and physicalism is the pervasive thought underpinning our lives, seeing science from a different angle does give permission to question the gods of technology and medicine. Bravo Sheldrake!
August 1, 2012
Years ago I was fascinated by Sheldrake's theories on morphic resonance, and my own concept of the world has been influenced by him. It seems to sit very comforably alongside teachings of the Buddha. When the author was in Brighton this week I was delighted to hear him speak about this new book, and to acquire a signed copy. It might take a while to plough through it. There is a lot to think about in this new offering of the Sheldrake view of the world.
May 24, 2016
I am sorry, but any book that proclaims to be about science, then tries to squeeze anecdotal "evidence" by me gets an instant failure. I only got as far as the third chapter before I called it quits on this author who makes unproved assumptions in his meandering prose on what he thinks is wrong with science. I did try to give him a chance, but I knew before the end of the first chapter that this book was going to be hard going for me to try to retain an open mind on.
October 16, 2017
This was so interesting! Recommended to anyone with an open mind and an interest in science. I want this book to change the culture and standards of science.
December 27, 2013
If there’s bias in scientific experiments, it’s usually put down to something subtle but essentially mundane - subconscious cues in the behaviour of experimenters being picked up by their subjects, for instance. In a characteristically radical claim, Rupert Sheldrake suggests we should be looking for much more exotic causes like “mind-over-matter effects or psychokinesis”.
The vast majority of scientists would scoff: we don’t need to worry about effects that seem more like magic than science.
In The Science Delusion, Sheldrake argues for such sweeping changes to the scientific world view that you may find yourself wondering whether it is some elaborate satire intended to highlight the dangers of conventional thinking. If you conclude (correctly) that he’s in earnest, you may wonder if he’s mad.
The chances of that seem small: Sheldrake is a Cambridge scientist with decades of work in plant biology behind him and a string of mainstream academic connections. He is also the author of more than 80 papers in conventional scientific journals. He may be a maverick but he’s not an outsider (unlike the home-based James Lovelock for instance).
The Science Delusion casts doubt on almost everything that conventional science takes for granted. And it is that ‘taking for granted’ that Sheldrake most objects to. He complains that what we now think of as scientific progress is limited to developments on a narrow front sanctioned by the closed minds of the scientific establishment. Research is only funded if it conforms to a series of ‘articles of faith’ – untested and rarely articulated assumptions which add up to nothing more ‘scientific’ than the dogmas of the Christian church in its heyday.
The body of Sheldrake’s book is devoted to questioning ten of these assumptions and pointing to experimental evidence which he believes debunks them.
So, for instance, his first chapter deals with the question ‘Is Nature Mechanical?’. In other words, ‘is there life in life?’ or can it be fully explained by the mechanisms of chemistry and physics, as science today assumes.
Sheldrake’s answer is that at every level of a hierarchy of being, from sub-atomic particles to molecules, to cells, to organs and organisms, and social systems, there are emergent properties that are ‘more than the sum of the parts’. The idea of life forms as machines, he says, is more a metaphor than a testable theory.
Sheldrake’s list of targets is impressive in its range as well as its detail: genes are “grossly over-rated” as the controllers of development; physical constants are not constant; minds can influence each other telepathically; memory will never be mapped in the brain; the promise of biotech industries has already been seen to be over-hyped; medicine is floundering as it tries to continue the progress it was making until a couple of decades ago.
The reader is challenged to decide how far to accept the author’s thesis. Easiest to go along with is the survey of the uncertainties behind scientific dogma and Sheldrake’s critique of the over-reliance on conventional thinking by a self-serving culture.
Then there are the intriguing experiments, including many of Sheldrake’s own: his apparently controlled test, for instance, that seems to prove the popular idea that before they pick up the receiver, people know more frequently than chance would predict, who is telephoning them.
Hardest to follow (in both senses of follow) is the author’s fully-fledged alternative theory that claims to plug the deficiencies of conventional thinking. It’s called morphic resonance: “similar patterns of activity resonate across time and space with subsequent patterns.” So crystals are more likely to form in a particular configuration if that configuration has been common in the past. He has data to support the claim. Human skills become easier if others have learn them before (see the rise in IQ scores over the years). And inherited behaviours that couldn’t be genetic would be explained by morphic resonance between generations.
There’s something disturbingly metaphysical about morphic resonance: the temporal properties of cause and effect become strangely inverted: instinctive behaviour or the growth potential of a plant work “by pulling towards a virtual future rather than pushing from an actual past.”
Sheldrake insists it’s a testable theory - unlike, he says, many of the current assumptions of science. And he’s not backward in the claims he makes for it. Take the way he’d like to give to morphic resononance, some of the jobs we currently attribute to genes. While the correlation between insect mutations and genetic changes is typically taken as a demonstration of the role of genes in ‘coding for’ the form of the organism they sit inside, Sheldrake see it differently. To him, genes are nothing more than the equivalent of the parts of a TV set in relation to a TV programme: their malfunction will certainly affect the ability of a TV set to play a programme properly. But that doesn’t mean they contain within them all that’s required to produce - or explain scientifically - the programme. The programme comes from outside the TV set through a whole different process. In the same way, then, an animal’s form and behaviour are indeed affected by genetic mutations “but this does not prove that form and behaviour are programmed in the genes.” Instead, “they are inherited by morphic resonance, an invisible influence on the organism from outside it.”
The TV analogy is a powerful illustration of the possible limitations of what can be deduced from mutations; and the positive suggestion of morphic resonance is nothing if not a brave attempt to move the debate forward.
Few scientists - whether through fear or genuine scepticism - have thrown in their lot with morphic resonance. But we need more thinkers who are prepared to try to figure out the big picture - to combine the findings of astronomy and sub-atomic physics with ordinary human experiences, the cultural and social history of science and religion and to articulate the assumptions that are so deeply ingrained in our thinking that we can’t easily recognise them.
To speak on these subjects from within the scientific and academic establishment is taboo, as Sheldrake sees it - and is the great achievement of his work. He insists on open-minded thinking and that the study of strange and exotic phenomena is the lifeblood of scientific enterprise. We should thank him for putting up with the raised eyebrows he meets on high table as he tries, almost single-handedly, to nudge the compass of the scientific oil tanker.
For non-scientists, the feeling that big mysteries are still being investigated is reassuring and seems to make sense. Can anyone seriously argue that existing theory doesn’t have problems explaining emergent properties - that reducing systems to their components is a complete explanation?
Rather than Sheldrake’s TV set metaphor, I’d go with something more mechanical: there’s a limit to how much the understanding of how a piano works can provide an account of music.
There’s a message of hope at the heart of Sheldrake’s case. We don’t have to try to explain everything with existing theories - especially when they require bending to breaking point to fit what we see around us. I had the same sense of excitement reading Kevin Kelly’s ‘What Technology Wants’. On a somewhat narrower canvas, Kelly argues that an idea of direction in evolution fits the evidence more convincingly than the conventions of Dawkins’ ‘blind watchmaker’.
Of course, the providing of hope isn’t the right measure of a scientific endeavour. But the sense of new ideas opening fresh possibilities for research and the chance to better integrate theory with observed reality must surely be welcome.
When you have read Sheldrake, you will find yourself coming across things that you can imagine him seizing on as fitting right into his world view - like the apparently “quiet scientific revolution” of epigenetics, the new field that explores the inheritance of characteristics based on experience: “what we eat, how much stress we undergo, and what toxins we're exposed to can all alter the genetic legacy we pass on to our children and even grandchildren.” Sheldrake has already described the phenomenon, and offered it as an example of morphic resonance.
The vast majority of scientists would scoff: we don’t need to worry about effects that seem more like magic than science.
In The Science Delusion, Sheldrake argues for such sweeping changes to the scientific world view that you may find yourself wondering whether it is some elaborate satire intended to highlight the dangers of conventional thinking. If you conclude (correctly) that he’s in earnest, you may wonder if he’s mad.
The chances of that seem small: Sheldrake is a Cambridge scientist with decades of work in plant biology behind him and a string of mainstream academic connections. He is also the author of more than 80 papers in conventional scientific journals. He may be a maverick but he’s not an outsider (unlike the home-based James Lovelock for instance).
The Science Delusion casts doubt on almost everything that conventional science takes for granted. And it is that ‘taking for granted’ that Sheldrake most objects to. He complains that what we now think of as scientific progress is limited to developments on a narrow front sanctioned by the closed minds of the scientific establishment. Research is only funded if it conforms to a series of ‘articles of faith’ – untested and rarely articulated assumptions which add up to nothing more ‘scientific’ than the dogmas of the Christian church in its heyday.
The body of Sheldrake’s book is devoted to questioning ten of these assumptions and pointing to experimental evidence which he believes debunks them.
So, for instance, his first chapter deals with the question ‘Is Nature Mechanical?’. In other words, ‘is there life in life?’ or can it be fully explained by the mechanisms of chemistry and physics, as science today assumes.
Sheldrake’s answer is that at every level of a hierarchy of being, from sub-atomic particles to molecules, to cells, to organs and organisms, and social systems, there are emergent properties that are ‘more than the sum of the parts’. The idea of life forms as machines, he says, is more a metaphor than a testable theory.
Sheldrake’s list of targets is impressive in its range as well as its detail: genes are “grossly over-rated” as the controllers of development; physical constants are not constant; minds can influence each other telepathically; memory will never be mapped in the brain; the promise of biotech industries has already been seen to be over-hyped; medicine is floundering as it tries to continue the progress it was making until a couple of decades ago.
The reader is challenged to decide how far to accept the author’s thesis. Easiest to go along with is the survey of the uncertainties behind scientific dogma and Sheldrake’s critique of the over-reliance on conventional thinking by a self-serving culture.
Then there are the intriguing experiments, including many of Sheldrake’s own: his apparently controlled test, for instance, that seems to prove the popular idea that before they pick up the receiver, people know more frequently than chance would predict, who is telephoning them.
Hardest to follow (in both senses of follow) is the author’s fully-fledged alternative theory that claims to plug the deficiencies of conventional thinking. It’s called morphic resonance: “similar patterns of activity resonate across time and space with subsequent patterns.” So crystals are more likely to form in a particular configuration if that configuration has been common in the past. He has data to support the claim. Human skills become easier if others have learn them before (see the rise in IQ scores over the years). And inherited behaviours that couldn’t be genetic would be explained by morphic resonance between generations.
There’s something disturbingly metaphysical about morphic resonance: the temporal properties of cause and effect become strangely inverted: instinctive behaviour or the growth potential of a plant work “by pulling towards a virtual future rather than pushing from an actual past.”
Sheldrake insists it’s a testable theory - unlike, he says, many of the current assumptions of science. And he’s not backward in the claims he makes for it. Take the way he’d like to give to morphic resononance, some of the jobs we currently attribute to genes. While the correlation between insect mutations and genetic changes is typically taken as a demonstration of the role of genes in ‘coding for’ the form of the organism they sit inside, Sheldrake see it differently. To him, genes are nothing more than the equivalent of the parts of a TV set in relation to a TV programme: their malfunction will certainly affect the ability of a TV set to play a programme properly. But that doesn’t mean they contain within them all that’s required to produce - or explain scientifically - the programme. The programme comes from outside the TV set through a whole different process. In the same way, then, an animal’s form and behaviour are indeed affected by genetic mutations “but this does not prove that form and behaviour are programmed in the genes.” Instead, “they are inherited by morphic resonance, an invisible influence on the organism from outside it.”
The TV analogy is a powerful illustration of the possible limitations of what can be deduced from mutations; and the positive suggestion of morphic resonance is nothing if not a brave attempt to move the debate forward.
Few scientists - whether through fear or genuine scepticism - have thrown in their lot with morphic resonance. But we need more thinkers who are prepared to try to figure out the big picture - to combine the findings of astronomy and sub-atomic physics with ordinary human experiences, the cultural and social history of science and religion and to articulate the assumptions that are so deeply ingrained in our thinking that we can’t easily recognise them.
To speak on these subjects from within the scientific and academic establishment is taboo, as Sheldrake sees it - and is the great achievement of his work. He insists on open-minded thinking and that the study of strange and exotic phenomena is the lifeblood of scientific enterprise. We should thank him for putting up with the raised eyebrows he meets on high table as he tries, almost single-handedly, to nudge the compass of the scientific oil tanker.
For non-scientists, the feeling that big mysteries are still being investigated is reassuring and seems to make sense. Can anyone seriously argue that existing theory doesn’t have problems explaining emergent properties - that reducing systems to their components is a complete explanation?
Rather than Sheldrake’s TV set metaphor, I’d go with something more mechanical: there’s a limit to how much the understanding of how a piano works can provide an account of music.
There’s a message of hope at the heart of Sheldrake’s case. We don’t have to try to explain everything with existing theories - especially when they require bending to breaking point to fit what we see around us. I had the same sense of excitement reading Kevin Kelly’s ‘What Technology Wants’. On a somewhat narrower canvas, Kelly argues that an idea of direction in evolution fits the evidence more convincingly than the conventions of Dawkins’ ‘blind watchmaker’.
Of course, the providing of hope isn’t the right measure of a scientific endeavour. But the sense of new ideas opening fresh possibilities for research and the chance to better integrate theory with observed reality must surely be welcome.
When you have read Sheldrake, you will find yourself coming across things that you can imagine him seizing on as fitting right into his world view - like the apparently “quiet scientific revolution” of epigenetics, the new field that explores the inheritance of characteristics based on experience: “what we eat, how much stress we undergo, and what toxins we're exposed to can all alter the genetic legacy we pass on to our children and even grandchildren.” Sheldrake has already described the phenomenon, and offered it as an example of morphic resonance.
May 7, 2024
I bought this book very recently, as it caught my eye and sounded interesting. For me, it felt like two different books. I found the first part rather difficult to read and stay focused on, despite having studied philosophy at university, many years ago. The earlier chapters about matter, energy and laws of nature were pretty hard going for bedtime reading, after long days of working. I pushed through though, and really enjoyed some of the later chapters on the brain, memories and psychic phenomena. I've given this 3 stars, as I'd say the first half was a 2 and the second half was a 4.
July 8, 2019
An eye opening exploration of the limitations of our scientists and current scientific establishment. Lots of great information and great questions to consider. I do think that the author could be more rigorous in his arguments in some places and it was a bit of a distraction from the solid foundation of his criticisms for him to spend as much time talking about his pet theory as he did. I found myself wish for a book like this to be written by a more analytical and synthetic personality willing to explore the space in greater depth drawing in more threads from countervailing ideas and theories.
But all in all it gave me a lot to think about, and to my awareness no one else has tackled this subject in a comprehensive way. If you know of anyone who has, please let me know!
But all in all it gave me a lot to think about, and to my awareness no one else has tackled this subject in a comprehensive way. If you know of anyone who has, please let me know!
November 10, 2020
Sheldrake writes so convincingly that even such a sceptic like me got convinced about for example animals' abilities to sense things. If I should take on my scholarly hat I would need to look at the tests themselves, but at least in the ways Sheldrake presents them, they seem valid. There are many double blind tests that show results that are very surprising, for example, that guessing who is calling does not follow the statistic of chance if the caller is someone one knows. It is also a damaging critique against reductionism and how science is done today. Well worth reading, if not simply for an alternative voice (that is reasonable, not simply populist).
May 15, 2014
This book was simply boooooring and uninspired. I finished the book have gained no greater understanding of anything. That is not to say that I had nothing to learn. It's just really hard to latch on to these concepts when the author/narrator make everything sound so bland. This guy really shouldn't be talking about science.
February 5, 2012
An important discussion of where scientific enquiry has been hampered by the politics of science. This book points out some of the fundamental misdirections that are generally accepted as scientific fact.
December 23, 2016
Overall a good read but generally the tone gets more and more strawmannish towards the end of each of the ten questions he sets out to explore.
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