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Rupert Sheldrake
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Rupert Sheldrake (born 28 June 1942) is a British former biochemist and plant physiologist who now researches and writes on parapsychology and other controversial subjects. His books and papers stem from his theory of morphic resonance, and cover topics such as animal and plant development and behaviour, memory, telepathy and perception.
Sheldrake's ideas have often met with a hostile reception from scientists, including accusations that he is engaged in pseudoscience, though according to reporter Brad Lemley his ideas seem to have been better received by the general public.
drake was born in Newark-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire and grew up there.
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Rupert Sheldrake (born 28 June 1942) is a British former biochemist and plant physiologist who now researches and writes on parapsychology and other controversial subjects. His books and papers stem from his theory of morphic resonance, and cover topics such as animal and plant development and behaviour, memory, telepathy and perception.
Sheldrake's ideas have often met with a hostile reception from scientists, including accusations that he is engaged in pseudoscience, though according to reporter Brad Lemley his ideas seem to have been better received by the general public.
Biography
Sheldrake was born in Newark-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire and grew up there. He was educated at Worksop College and then studied biochemistry at Clare College, Cambridge, graduating with a Double First-Class Honours degree. He was a Frank Knox fellow at Harvard, studying philosophy and history. He returned to Cambridge where he gained a PhD in biochemistry and was a Fellow at Clare College. He was a Research Fellow of the Royal Society and later went to Hyderabad, India where he was Principal Plant Physiologist at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics . For a year and a half he lived in the ashram of Bede Griffiths.
As a biochemist, Sheldrake researched the role of auxin, a plant hormone, in the differentiation of a plant's vascular system. He ended this line of study when he concluded, "The system is circular, it does not explain how [differentiation is] established to start with. After nine years of intensive study, it became clear to me that biochemistry would not solve the problem of why things have the basic shape they do." More recently, drawing on the work of French philosopher Henri Bergson, Sheldrake has proposed that memory is inherent to all organically formed structures and systems. Where Bergson denied that personal memories and habits are stored in brain tissue, Sheldrake goes a step further by arguing that bodily forms and instincts, while expressed through genes, do not have their primary origin in them. Instead, his hypothesis states, the organism develops under the influence of previous similar organisms, by a mechanism he has dubbed morphic resonance.
In September 2005, Sheldrake received the Perrott-Warrick Scholarship for psychical research and parapsychology, which is administered by Trinity College, Cambridge. As a result, he is the current Director of the Perrot-Warrick Project.
In April 2008, Sheldrake was stabbed in the leg during a lecture at the La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was presenting as part of the tenth annual International Conference on Science and Consciousness. Sheldrake has since recovered. The assailant, Japanese born laborer Kazuki Hirano, allegedly stabbed Sheldrake because he believed that Sheldrake was using mind control techniques on him. He had followed Sheldrake to New Mexico from England to purportedly ask him how to block mental telepathy when he stabbed him. Sheldrake fears that if he is released and extradited to Japan, he will continue to stalk him. Most of the medical community believes that Hirano is either psychotic or schizophrenic.
Sheldrake has a Methodist background but after a spell as an atheist found himself being drawn back to Christianity when in India, and is now an Anglican.
Works
A New Science of Life
In his first book, A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance, Sheldrake proposed that phenomena – particularly biological ones – become more probable the more often they occur, and therefore biological growth and behaviour become guided into patterns laid down by previous similar events – a form of Lamarckism. He suggested that this underlies many aspects of science, from evolution to laws of nature. Indeed, he suggested that the laws of nature are mutable habits that have evolved since the Big Bang.
The book was discussed in a variety of scientific and religious publications, receiving mixed reviews. Then in September 1981, Nature published an editorial written by John Maddox, the journal's senior editor, entitled "A book for burning?" In it, Maddox said:
Maddox's comments raised what Anthony Freeman called "a storm of controversy". In a subsequent issue, Nature published several letters which took issue with Maddox's position on Sheldrake, while the New Scientist inquired whether Nature had abandoned the scientific method for "trial by editorial".
Maddox was unrepentant, and according to Freeman, the "furore that grew out of the assault in Nature put an end to [Sheldrake's] academic career and made him persona non grata in the scientific community." In a 1994 BBC documentary on Sheldrake's theory, Maddox elaborated on his views:
The Presence of the Past
The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature (1988) puts forward morphic resonance, one aspect of the "formative causation" hypothesis Sheldrake introduced in A New Science of Life, and presents evidence for it.
Sheldrake writes, "Since these past organisms are similar to each other rather than identical, when a subsequent organism comes under their collective influence, its morphogenetic fields are not sharply defined, but consist of a composite of previous similar forms. This process is analogous to composite photography, in which 'average' pictures are produced by superimposing a number of similar images. Morphogenetic fields are 'probability structures,' in which the influence of the most common past types combines to increase the probability that such types will occur again."
In support of his hypothesis, Sheldrake cites replications of William McDougall's experiment with rats in a water maze and Mae-Wan Ho's replication of Conrad Hal Waddington's experiment with fruit flies, as well as several psychology experiments involving human learning (none of which have been replicated). Sheldrake contends that a number of biological anomalies are resolved by morphic resonance, including personal memory (which otherwise requires the existence of an elaborate information-storage mechanism in the brain), atavism and parallel evolution. He argues that the existence of organizing fields – with or without inherent memory – would explain phenomena ranging from coordinated behavior among social insects, flocks of birds and schools of fish to the regeneration of severed limbs by salamanders or a sense of phantom limbs among amputees, as the organizing field of a limb would remain even after the limb itself had been lost.
Seven Experiments That Could Change the World
In 1994 Sheldrake proposed a list of Seven Experiments That Could Change the World, which included, among other things, the seed of his study of Dogs that Know When Their Owners are Coming Home (1999). In Seven Experiments ... he encouraged lay people to contribute to scientific research, and argued that scientific experiments similar to his own could be conducted on a shoestring budget.
The Sense of Being Stared At
In 2003, Sheldrake published The Sense of Being Stared At on the psychic staring effect, including an experiment where blindfolded subjects guessed whether persons were staring at them or at another target. He reported that, in tens of thousands of trials, the scores were consistently above chance (60%) when the subject was being stared at, but only 50% (random chance) when the subject was not being stared at. This suggested a weak sense of being stared at but no sense of not being stared at. He also claimed that these experiments were widely repeated, in schools in Connecticut and Toronto and a science museum in Amsterdam, with consistent results.
Later work
In 2003 Sheldrake published research on human telepathy in an experiment where subjects guessed which of four people was going to telephone or send an email. Sheldrake reported that the subject guesses the person correctly about 40% of the time instead of the expected 25% (p=.05).
Sheldrake's work was the theme of a plenary session titled "Anomalies of Consciousness" of the 2008 Toward a Science of Consciousness conference. where he presented his work on telepathy in animals and humans, followed by three critiques of his work on the sense of being stared at. Sheldrake answered the points raised by the other presenters during the subsequent panel discussion.
Disputes concerning experimental results
Testing formative causation
In 1990 neurobiologist Steven Rose experimented jointly with Sheldrake to test the hypothesis of morphic resonance. The experiment involved training day-old chicks to react negatively to a small yellow light when the light was followed 30 min later by an injection which caused temporary illness. Chicks become strongly averse to pecking the stimulus again. Sheldrake predicted that successive batches of day-old chicks would progressively become more averse to pecking the light for the first time, because morphic resonance would cause them to "remember" the experience of previous generations of chicks. Rose predicted that no such effect would be observed.
Rose wrote that he and several scientists who reviewed the data were convinced that there was no evidence of morphic resonance. Sheldrake, however, said that the proportion of test chicks taking longer than 10 sec for the first peck, compared with control chicks, gradually increased in successive batches and believed therefore that the experiment supported his theory.
In a separate paper, Rose responded that there were several confounding details of the experiment which skewed the results, such as the experimenter improving his skills with practice over the course of the experiment. Rose said there was no trend for an increase in the latency, in fact a slight decrease, thus disconfirming Sheldrake's prediction. In an independent analysis of the data, biologist Patrick Bateson agreed with Rose that the results ran counter to the prediction of morphic resonance.
Sheldrake responded that Rose's analysis omitted a significant portion of the data, thus skewing the results. Sheldrake contended that repeating Rose's analysis with the full set of data shows that the trends in aversion were in fact significantly different and morphic resonance was confirmed, not disconfirmed. Rose and other researchers in the field, however, rejected this interpretation of the results.
Tests of the staring effect
David Marks and John Colwell, writing in the Skeptical Inquirer (2000), criticized the experimental procedures Sheldrake had developed for tests designed to demonstrate the existence of the staring effect. Apart from the fact that Sheldrake had encouraged the involvement of lay members of the public in research of the effect, Marks and Colwell suggested that the sequences used in tests followed the same patterning that people who guess and gamble like to follow. These guessing patterns have relatively few long runs and many alternations. The non-randomness of test sequences could thus lead to implicit or explicit pattern learning when feedback is provided. When the patterns being guessed mirror naturally occurring guessing patterns, the results could go above or below chance levels even without feedback. Thus significant results could occur purely from non-random guessing. Non-randomization is one of seven flaws in parapsychological research identified by Marks.
Michael Shermer wrote in Scientific American (2005) that there were a number of objections to Sheldrake's experiments on the sense of being stared at, reiterating Marks' and Colwell's points about non-randomization and the use of unsupervised laypeople, and adding confirmation bias and experimenter bias to the list of potential problems; he concluded that Sheldrake's claim was unfalsifiable.
Sheldrake (2004, 2005) responded to the criticisms by stating that the experiments had been widely replicated; the results from an independent meta-analysis, which had excluded all data from unsupervised tests, were shown to be highly significant; and the Marks-Colwell suggestion of non-randomization had been refuted by thousands of trials with different randomization methods, including coin-tossing, yielding positive and highly statistically significant results, whatever the randomization method.
Reception
While Sheldrake’s ideas have resonated with the general public and some physicists such as David Bohm, they have often met with a hostile reception from scientists. Neurophysiologist and consciousness researcher Christof Koch, for example, has stated that discussing Sheldrake's ideas is a "waste of time," given the absence of hard, physical evidence and Sheldrake's lack of understanding of modern neurobiology. Henry Bauer compared Sheldrake's ideas to Wilhelm Reich's generally discredited claims of orgone energies. In his Skeptic's Dictionary, Robert Todd Carroll stated, in an article highly critical of Sheldrake's theory of morphic resonance, that "although Sheldrake commands some respect as a scientist because of his education and degree, he has clearly abandoned conventional science in favor of magical thinking."
Germano Resconi and Masoud Nikravesh are sympathetic to Sheldrake's ideas, and base their concept of morphic computing directly upon Sheldrake's morphic fields and morphogenetic fields, but acknowledge that "Morphic fields and its subset morphogenetic fields have been at the center of controversy for many years in mainstream science and the hypothesis is not accepted by some scientists who consider it a pseudoscience."
Some quantum physicists have supported Sheldrake's hypothesis. The late David Bohm suggested that Sheldrake's hypothesis was in keeping with his own ideas on what he terms "implicate" and "explicate" order. Hans-Peter Dürr has called for further discussion of Sheldrake's hypothesis, describing it as one of the first to reconcile 20th-century breakthroughs in physics, which emphasize fields and the indivisible nature of matter, with biology, which he says for the most part remains rooted in 19th-century Newtonian concepts of particles and separateness. Others, like biologist Michael Klymkowsky, disagree, contending that "[w]e live in a macroscopic world. Quantum effects are essentially irrelevant". For more details on this topic, see quantum biology.
Bibliography
- A New Science of Life: the hypothesis of formative causation, Los Angeles, CA: J.P. Tarcher, 1981 (second edition 1985). ISBN 0874774594.
- The Presence of the Past: morphic resonance and the habits of nature, New York, NY: Times Books, 1988. ISBN 0812916662.
- The Rebirth of Nature: the greening of science and God, New York, NY: Bantam Books, 1991. ISBN 055307105X.
- Seven Experiments That Could Change the World: a do-it-yourself guide to revolutionary science, New York, NY: Riverhead Books, 1995. ISBN 1573220140.
- Dogs that Know When Their Owners are Coming Home: and other unexplained powers of animals, New York, NY: Crown, 1999. ISBN 0609600923.
- The Sense of Being Stared At: and other aspects of the extended mind, New York, NY: Crown Publishers, 2003. ISBN 060960807X.
With Ralph Abraham and Terence McKenna:
- Trialogues at the Edge of the West: chaos, creativity, and the resacralization of the world, Santa Fe, NM: Bear & Co. Pub., 1992. ISBN 0939680971.
- The Evolutionary Mind: trialogues at the edge of the unthinkable, Santa Cruz, CA: Dakota Books, 1997. ISBN 0963286110.
- Chaos, Creativity and Cosmic Consciousness, Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 2001. ISBN 0892819774.
- The Evolutionary Mind: conversations on science, imagination & spirit, Rhinebeck, NY: Monkfish Book Pub. Co., 2005. ISBN 0974935972.
With Matthew Fox (priest):
- Natural Grace: dialogues on creation, darkness, and the soul in spirituality and science, New York, NY: Doubleday, 1996. ISBN 0385483562.
- The Physics of Angels: exploring the realm where science and spirit meet, San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996. ISBN 0060628642.
See also
External links
- , the website of Rupert Sheldrake
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- from Skeptical Investigations
- by David Bowman, Salon.com November 1999
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- from CSICOP
- to the CSICOP critique
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– Google Tech Talk September 2, 2008 – The Extended Mind: Recent Experimental Evidence
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