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RUPERT SHELDRAKE INTERVIEW

Rupert Sheldrake, a Cambridge-trained biochemist and plant physiologist, is a prominent public intellectual critical of the authoritarianism and closed-mindedness that he finds increasingly typical of mainstream science.

Sheldrake is the author of numerous bestselling books, including A New Science of Life (1981), The Rebirth of Nature (1990), The Presence of the Past (1988), Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home (1999), The Sense of Being Stared At (2003), and, most recently, Science Set Free: 10 Paths to New Discovery (2012). This interview will focus especially on Science Set Free (titled The Science Delusion in the U.K.), which concentrates on the scientific enterprise as such and the obstacles to its proper pursuit.

Sheldrake has taken on the role of scientific “gadfly” in the proud tradition of Socrates, urging scientists to question received wisdom and to remove ideological blinders.

James Barham for TheBestSchools.org: Thank you very much for agreeing to this interview. Would you begin by giving us a quick sketch of your background? When and where were you born? What were your family’s circumstances? What was your religious upbringing, if any? And please describe your education and early career.

Rupert Sheldrake: I was born on June 28, 1942, in Newark-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire, in the English Midlands, and was brought up there. My family was devoutly Methodist. I went to a high church Anglican boarding school. I was for a while torn between these two very different traditions—one Protestant and the other Anglo-Catholic with incense and all the trappings of Catholicism.

From a very early age I was interested in plants and animals. My father was an amateur naturalist and pharmacist and he encouraged this interest. My mother put up with it. I kept lots of animals at home.

I knew from quite an early age that I wanted to do biology, and I specialized in science at school. Then I went to Cambridge, where I studied biology and biochemistry. However, as I proceeded in my studies, a great gulf opened between my original inspiration—namely, an interest in actual living organisms—and the kind of biology I was taught: orthodox, mechanistic biology, which essentially denies the life of organisms, but instead treats them as machines.

There seemed to be very little connection between the direct experience of animals and plants and the way I was learning about them, manipulating them, dissecting them into smaller and smaller bits, getting down to the molecular level, and seeing them as evolving by blind chance and the blind forces of natural selection.

I felt more and more that there was something wrong, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. No one else seemed to think there was anything wrong. Then a friend who was studying literature lent me a book on German philosophy containing an essay on the writings of Goethe, the poet and botanist.¹

I discovered that Goethe, at the beginning of the 19th century, had a vision of a different kind of science—a holistic science that integrated direct experience and understanding. It didn’t involve breaking everything down into pieces and denying the evidence of one’s senses. This discovery—the idea that there could be a different kind of natural science—filled me with great excitement. So invigorated was I by this prospect that I wanted to find out why science had become so mechanistic. I was fortunate to get a fellowship at Harvard, where I spent a year studying the history and philosophy of science. Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions² had recently come out, and it had a big influence on me, gave me a new perspective. It made me realize that the mechanistic theory of life was what Kuhn called a “paradigm”—a collectively held model of reality, a belief system. He showed that periods of revolutionary change involved the replacement of old scientific paradigms by new ones. If science had changed radically in the past, then perhaps it could change again in the future. I was very excited by that.

When I got back to Cambridge [England], I did a Ph.D. on how plants develop, particularly working on the hormones within plants. I went on with my research on plant development and became a research fellow of Clare College in Cambridge and also a research fellow of the Royal Society, which gave me tremendous freedom, for which I’m very grateful.

James Barham: Spirituality, mysticism, and Christianity have played a prominent role in your life. From your writings, one gets the sense that you are on a pilgrimage or quest. Could you elaborate on this aspect of your life? Was there a point in your life where you experienced what might be called a “religious conversion” (or perhaps several)?

Rupert Sheldrake: When I received a grant in 1968 from the Royal Society to go and study tropical plants in Malaysia, at the University of Malaya, I traveled through India on the way there. I found India a very exciting place to be, and as I traveled through that country I encountered gurus and ashrams and temples, which opened my eyes to a range of phenomena I was completely unfamiliar with.

When I got back to England I got interested in exploring consciousness, and I had various psychedelic experiences, which convinced me that the mind was vastly greater than anything I’d been told about in my scientific education. Then I got interested in transcendental meditation because I wanted to be able to explore consciousness without drugs. I was increasingly intrigued by India, by yoga, and by meditation, and in 1974 I had a chance to go and work in India as principal plant physiologist at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) in Hyderabad.

I was thrilled by the idea of immersing myself in this exotic and fascinating culture. While I was in India, I visited temples and ashrams and I attended discourses by gurus and holy men. I also took up Sufism, and had a Sufi teacher in Hyderabad, who was the grandfather of a friend of mine. He gave me a Sufi mantra, a wazifa, which for about a year I practiced in a Sufi form of meditation. But I didn’t want to become a Sufi because in India to become a Sufi, you have to be a Muslim first and foremost, and that would have been too much of a stretch.

Then, an original idea crossed my mind: What about the Christian tradition? I hadn’t given it a thought. I spoke to a Hindu guru, and he said, “All paths lead to God. You come from a Christian family so you should follow a Christian path.”

The more I thought about it, the more sense it made, and I began to pray with the Lord’s Prayer, and I started going to church at the Anglican Church, St. John’s, Secunderabad. After a while I was confirmed, at the age of 34, by an Indian bishop in the Church of South India (an ecumenical church formed by the coming together of Anglicans and Methodists). I felt very happy to be reconnected with the Christian tradition.

I still felt a huge tension between the Hindu wisdom, which I felt was so deep, and the Christian tradition that seemed a bit shallow on the spirituality side. I then discovered a wonderful teacher, Father Bede Griffiths, who had a Christian ashram in South India. He was an English Benedictine monk who had lived there for 25 years when I met him. His ashram combined many aspects of Indian culture with Christian tradition. I wrote my first book, A New Science of Life, in his ashram.

When I got back to England, after a long period in India, I had a wonderful time rediscovering the English tradition. I rediscovered sacred places—England is full of them, great cathedrals and churches—and I started going to my local parish church in Newark-on-Trent and to cathedrals, where there is marvelous singing. Instead of just seeing it as an aesthetic experience as I had done before, I now felt part of it and was very, very moved by it and felt privileged to be part of this tradition. So, since then it’s been my practice to go to church on Sundays whenever I can. I see the creeds first and foremost as statements of belief in God’s threefold nature. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity makes great sense to me. No doubt I differ from some people in my interpretation of the details. But probably even the most unbending literalists do not accept every part of it without some qualifications. For example, in the Apostle’s Creed when it says of Jesus Christ that “he sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty,” is he really sitting? And are God the Father and Jesus located in a particular place, a celestial throne-room? And does God the Father have right and left hands?

James Barham: To what extent do you think the maverick path you ended up taking was forced on you by the empirical data themselves, and to what extent was it contingent on your being exposed to alternative ways of thinking in India and elsewhere? In other words, do you think you would have become the Rupert Sheldrake of today without the experience of living and working in [at least two] radically different cultural environments?

Rupert Sheldrake: When I was 17, in the gap between leaving school and going to study at Cambridge, I worked as a temporary lab technician in a pharmaceutical laboratory because I wanted to get some research experience. What I didn’t know when I took the job was that it was a vivisection facility. Working there made me ask some deep questions about animals, animal suffering, scientific objectivity, and mechanistic attitudes to nature, which were put into practice on a daily basis in this laboratory, which was a kind of death camp for animals.

By the time I was studying biology as an undergraduate at Cambridge, I was already very doubtful about the reductionist and mechanist approach, which is why I welcomed the opportunity to study the history and philosophy of science at Harvard—to get a bigger perspective.

After Harvard, when I returned to Cambridge [England] in 1964 and was doing research on plant development, I became convinced the molecular and reductionist approach would never enable us to understand the development of form. I became interested in the morphogenetic field concept, first put forward in the 1920s.³ Although I traveled in India and lived in Malaysia, it was reading books on theoretical biology and philosophy—especially the philosophy of Henri Bergson in his book Matter and Memory⁴—that led to my developing the hypothesis of morphic resonance. This was in 1973, while I was still in Cambridge, before I went to live and work in India in agricultural research. I continued to develop these ideas, and India was a good place to do this. After all, in Hindu philosophy the idea of a kind of memory in nature is commonplace, as it is in Buddhist philosophy.

My idea of an inherent memory in nature through morphic resonance did not seem weird to most of my Indian colleagues and friends. India provided a friendly environment for writing my first book, A New Science of Life.⁵ But the basic ideas came from Western science and Western philosophy.

James Barham: In your new book, Science Set Free⁶, you speak of the “intellectual phase-locking”—that is, the “group think” or “herd mentality”—that clearly plagues mainstream science today. We were wondering whether this was mainly due to the hubris that comes from the unprecedented social prestige scientists now enjoy, or whether it might not be more a matter of the metaphysical commitment to materialism that has been deeply ingrained in the scientific community for the past 400 years.

In other words, is the intellectual phase-locking of scientists more about arrogance and turf-protecting? Or is it more about their being in the grip of a misguided ideology? Or both? Please elaborate.

Rupert Sheldrake: The materialist ideology promotes a high degree of conformity in scientific thinking because it is indeed ideological, and materialists are unforgiving towards heretical deviations from this belief system. Over the course of the 20th century, the atmosphere within biology became increasingly intolerant at the same time as physics opened up a wider range of possibilities. There are still great limitations on what professional physicists can think, but there is a toleration of alternative interpretations of quantum mechanics, divergent interpretations of cosmology, the question of whether there is one universe or many, and so on.

Another reason for the greater uniformity of thinking is the professionalization of science. In the 19th century, many of the most creative scientists were not professionals. For example, Charles Darwin was an amateur naturalist living on a private income, with no academic post or government grant. He was much freer as a result. Now, the vast majority of scientists rely on salaries and are far more aware of peer-group pressure. In fact, the peer-review system for jobs, grant applications, and publication of papers in journals means that peer pressure dominates their lives. In the nineteenth century, there were fewer constraints on creative and independent thinking.

James Barham: Like you, we at TBS are very much interested in doing what we can to help “extend the boundaries of what is not regarded as unthinkable,” as Thomas Nagel put it in his recent book, Mind and Cosmos⁷. The reasons are many, but the overriding one is the danger we believe scientism⁸ poses to human freedom and dignity, as well as to morality and limited self-government.

At the same time, we believe that the most obvious way to reform science is by demonstrating a better way forward that is recognizable as such to scientists themselves. In other words, give scientists a better way of doing science and let them vote with their feet.

Accordingly, we would like to devote a good part of this interview to pressing you on a number of scientific points, teasing apart what seem to us to be your most promising hypotheses and speculations, using your new book, Science Set Free, as a constant point of reference. So, here goes.

First, let’s discuss “morphic resonance,” which appears to be your most widely discussed contribution. Could you begin by giving our readers a thumbnail sketch of the theory?

Rupert Sheldrake: In brief, morphic resonance is the hypothesis that there is a kind of inherent memory in nature. In the most general terms, the “laws of nature” are more like habits. Within each species, each individual draws upon a collective memory and in turn contributes to it. My proposal is that this works on the basis of similarity: the similarity of three-dimensional vibratory patterns in self-organizing systems. Self-organizing systems include atoms, molecules, cells, organs, organisms, societies of organisms (like flocks of birds), solar systems, and galaxies. This definition excludes systems that do not organize themselves, like tables, chairs, and machines, which are put together according to external designs, to serve external purposes.

James Barham: In a recent interview, you wrote: “The idea that animals and plants are machines is really Dogma Number One.” To which we can only say: “Amen!” We, too, feel that it is in the arena of rethinking the fundamental nature of living systems—in “seeing past Darwin,” as we like to put it—that the fight to defend the human spirit against scientism can be most effectively joined. And that is one reason why we are so interested in your morphic resonance hypothesis.

We see the Darwinian, reductionist approach to teleology, or goal-directedness—a property that is manifest in all living systems—as lying at the intellectual root of scientism, and we see nonlinear dynamics as a very fruitful way of tackling the problem of teleology head-on, by plowing straight through the Darwinian roadblock.

Would you agree? Or does your interest in nonlinear dynamics lie in a different direction from ours?

Rupert Sheldrake: Dynamics is a branch of mathematical theory dealing with change, and a central concept in dynamics is that of the attractor. Instead of modelling what happens to a system by considering only the way it is pushed from behind, attractors in mathematical models provide an explanation in terms of a kind of pull from the future. The principal metaphor is that of a basin of attraction, like a large basin into which small balls are thrown. It would be very complicated to work out the trajectory of each individual ball starting from its initial velocity and angle at which it hit the basin; but a simpler way of modelling the system is to treat the bottom of the basin as an attractor: balls thrown in from any angle and at any speed will end up at the bottom of the basin.

In the 1950s, the British embryologist C.H. Waddington proposed that morphogenetic fields contained what he called “chreodes” (Greek for “necessary paths”) which channeled developing organs and embryos towards attractors, understood as the form of the mature organ or organism. He compared organs developing under the influence of these fields to balls rolling down valleys.

Later, more technical mathematical models of morphogenetic fields and dynamical attractors were developed by René Thom and others. “Strange” or “chaotic” attractors, as they are called, are just one kind of attractor in dynamical systems theory.

The attractors within morphic fields are more complex, and perhaps less “chaotic.” The word “morphic” comes from the Greek word morphē, meaning “form,” and expresses the idea that morphic attractors pull developing systems towards them, and that the form of the attractor depends on a kind of memory given by morphic resonance.

Thus, for example, an oak seedling is attracted towards the mature form of an oak tree through the morphic attractor in its morphogenetic field. These attractors act as ends or goals, and in that sense are teleological, where “teleology” is the subject of ends or goals or purposes (from the Greek word telos, meaning “end” or “goal”).

James Barham: Many would say that the whole point of the concept of a virtual, phase-space attractor is that it helps us conceive of teleological or goal-directed action in living systems in a way that does not require us to say that there is “backwards causation” of the future on the past. And yet you are not bashful about invoking backwards causation in your work. Why is that? Wouldn’t it be preferable to avoid backwards causation, if possible?

Rupert Sheldrake: Attractors attract. In that sense, they imply teleology or final causation, or the pull of ends or goals. So, there is a kind of virtual backwards causation from virtual ends or goals. If I decide to visit San Francisco in six months’ time, that acts as a kind of virtual attractor: I book my airline tickets and make my arrangements in accordance with this plan, directed towards a future which does not yet exist. I am not saying that all this is caused by my future stay in San Francisco, because all sorts of unforeseen circumstances could prevent my actually getting there. Nevertheless, I think in some situations there is a kind of backwards causation.

This is one of the reasons that I take research within parapsychology seriously. I think there is good evidence for precognitive dreams, and also for presentiment, whereby an emotional arousal can have a physiological arousing effect five or six seconds in advance. Perhaps the intellectual world would be a neater place if we disregarded this evidence; but it can’t be disregarded just because it does not fit into a particular theory of time and causation.

So, in summary, I think that ends or goals are given by virtual futures that pull organisms towards them, but sometimes there are influences from actual futures, rather like occasional memories of the future.

James Barham: Virtual attractors are purely mathematical concepts. The real question is: What type of physical field underlies the goal-directed behavior of living systems—including that of human beings—which then shows up as a closed, phase-space trajectory? Here, you speak of “morphic fields.” Fair enough. But what is a morphic field, exactly?

Rupert Sheldrake: Fields are most generally defined as regions of influence. A magnetic field is within a magnet and is also a region of magnetic influence around it. The earth’s gravitational field is within the earth and stretches out invisibly far beyond it keeping the moon in its orbit.

Morphic fields are within and around self-organizing systems and contain attractors towards which the system develops. When a system has reached its final form—for example, in an insulin molecule or a Paramecium cell—its morphic field helps to stabilize its form and restore it after disturbances.

It’s hard to say exactly what a morphic field is. There are mathematical theories, such as those of René Thom, but these are models in multi-dimensional phase space, which is a specialized mathematical concept utterly obscure to everyone except professional mathematicians.

So, does this tell us what the fields are? Not really. But what is the exact nature of an electromagnetic field? Electrical and magnetic fields were first proposed by Michael Faraday in the 1830s, and he was unsure as to their nature. He put forward two possibilities. First, that they consist of strains and patterns in subtle matter, called the “ether.” Or, second, they were modifications of “mere space.”

James Clerk Maxwell took up the ether hypothesis in the 1860s in his famous equations of electromagnetism, but Einstein dropped the idea of the ether and reverted to something closer to Faraday’s idea of fields as modifications of mere space. Gravitational fields are also patterns in space. The gravitational field is not in space-time, according to Einstein, it is space-time.

Modern superstring theory tries to account for the physical fields of nature in terms of a 10-or 11-dimensional proto-field, in which the extra dimensions “curl up” to give the fields of nature as we know them.

So, what, exactly, is any field?

James Barham: You accept that psi phenomena (telepathy, ESP, paranormal activity, etc.) are real. What convinces you of their reality? And why do skeptics like James Randi, who make it their livelihood debunking psi phenomena, remain so unconvinced?

According to Dean Radin, psi phenomena have extremely strong statistical backing (with significance levels better than one in a billion), and yet they are weak in the sense that they don’t permit anyone to beat the lottery or win consistently in Las Vegas. Do you agree?

Rupert Sheldrake: I think that phenomena like telepathy are real because they happen spontaneously in the course of normal life, and also they are supported by a great deal of experimental evidence. I have had many dealings with self-proclaimed skeptics and it has become obvious to me that their opposition to these phenomena is not based on a careful study of the evidence, but rather on materialist ideology, which says that minds are nothing but brains, and so if all mental activity is located inside the head, it cannot possibly have effects at a distance. Therefore, psychic phenomena like telepathy are impossible. And therefore all the evidence for them must be flawed or fraudulent, and people who believe in these things are subject to delusions.

In my various encounters with skeptics like Richard Dawkins, James Randi, Daniel Dennett, and Michael Shermer, I have found that they have no interest in looking at the evidence because they know in advance it must be false. In other words, their position is one of prejudice rather than open-minded scientific enquiry. In that sense, I think they are deeply anti-scientific.

Some of the phenomena studied under rather artificial conditions by parapsychologists show only fairly weak effects, but in the real world telepathy may operate much more reliably. For example, I have done studies on telepathy between mothers and their babies, and the mothers often know quite accurately when their baby needs them even when they are miles away. Similarly, many dogs and cats seem to know when their owners are coming home and wait for them at a door or window in a reliable and repeatable way.

I agree that psychic abilities may be much weaker when it comes to winning lotteries or beating the casino in Las Vegas, but these are not the kinds of situations in which psi is expressed in the real world. In my own research, I have concentrated on common, everyday psi phenomena that most people have personally experienced, like the sense of being stared at, pets knowing when their owners are coming home, telepathic bonds between mothers and children, and telephone telepathy (thinking of someone for no apparent reason who then calls).

James Barham: In Chapter 11 of Science Set Free, regarding the objectivity of science, you mention the very many ways in which scientists—who are, after all, only fallible human beings—may fall short of the ideal of objectivity. No one can quarrel with this. But then you make a pretty strong claim: “The supposed objectivity of the ‘hard sciences’ is an untested hypothesis.”

We would like to say in reply that science is a normative enterprise, meaning that it can be done well or badly. The norms or ideals that govern—or ought to govern—scientific practice were summarized by Robert K. Merton long ago: disinterestedness; organized skepticism; transparency; and universality; among others. To which, of course, must be added the ordinary, everyday virtues of diligence, honesty, fairness, and so forth.

The question, then, is this: Are the authoritarianism and closed-mindedness that are increasingly plaguing science today the result of the inherent subjectivity of all human knowledge? Or are they not rather the result of the progressive breakdown of the traditional Mertonian norms due to new temptations (power, greed, ideology, fashion, etc.) that have arisen due to Big Science, and which are posing an unprecedented challenge to the ordinary fallen human nature of scientists?

In other words, is science really irremediably subjective? Or is it being corrupted, which implies it has fallen away from the ideal of objectivity?

Rupert Sheldrake: I am all in favor of the scientific ideals enunciated by Robert Merton and by others. But in science, as in any other human endeavor, there is an enormous gap between the ideals and reality. For example, Christians would presumably all subscribe to a belief in the importance of loving kindness and forgiveness, and yet many Christians have taken part in wars that involve mass slaughter and great cruelty. Everyone can see that there is a gulf between ideals and reality in ordinary life, without rejecting the ideals. But in the sciences, there has been a remarkable degree of self-deception through scientists believing their own rhetoric about objectivity. I’m not suggesting that most scientists are behaving fraudulently or deceitfully. But it has become increasingly apparent in the past few years that much of established science is a house of cards. For instance, recently a high proportion—more than 80 percent—of the key papers in biomedical science have turned out not to be replicable.

The same has become apparent in the realms of psychology and other sciences, too. The main reason for this unreliability seems to be that scientists publish only a small proportion of their data, usually the proportion that shows the most impressive results, namely, results that agree with their hypothesis. As much as 80 percent of the data may not be published because it does not fit in with the experimenters’ expectations, or it does not make sense. This inevitably imparts a major bias to papers published in scientific journals.

For years, defenders of scientific orthodoxy have argued that the objectivity of science is guaranteed by replication and the peer-review process. But it has become glaringly obvious within the scientific world that this is not the case. First of all, scientists get very little credit for replicating other people’s results. Such research is regarded as unoriginal and is generally discouraged. And even if scientists do carry out replications of other people’s research, scientific journals will often refuse to publish them on the grounds they are not original. Journals also have a strong bias against publishing negative results.

Meanwhile, peer review is not necessarily a guarantee of quality. Moreover, it can militate against originality because peer reviewers, who operate anonymously, tend to defend the status quo. And many of them simply don’t have time to read very thoroughly the papers they are asked to review. Recently, in an experiment on peer reviewing, dozens of nonsense papers, generated by computers, were submitted to peer-reviewed journals and more than half of them were accepted!

A new mood of humility is apparent within the sciences, and the complacency that for decades has enabled scientists to imagine that just because they were scientists they were objective is melting away. Discussion of questionable research practices is going on throughout the scientific world at present, and hopefully will lead to better research procedures.

James Barham: You end your new book with the wonderful line: “Much remains to be discovered and rediscovered, including wisdom.” In your view, what is wisdom?

Rupert Sheldrake: Knowledge is about information, but wisdom is more about seeing patterns and the way in which things interact. It also involves taking a long-term perspective.

Unfortunately, in the modern world our perspectives are often very short-term, driven by daily news agendas, four- or five-year electoral cycles, and annual or quarterly profit reports. Investors in the stock market now make decisions on timescales of fractions of a second.

Wisdom involves looking at the bigger picture—taking a more holistic view—and it cannot easily be taught because in part it depends on experience, and often on intuition as well—a direct knowing that is not reducible to textbook facts or statistical procedures.

James Barham: Thank you very much for your time and your insights! Are there any final thoughts you would like to share with our readers? What changes in the scientific world would you like to see in the next five to 10 years? What is needed for these changes to be realized?

Rupert Sheldrake: As I argue in my book Science Set Free, I am convinced that the sciences are being imprisoned by the outmoded ideology of materialism. I show how each of the 10 dogmas of materialism can be turned into a question, treated as a scientific hypothesis, and evaluated scientifically. None of these dogmas turns out to be valid or persuasive. In every case, new questions open up, along with new possibilities for scientific research.

I would like to see these possibilities explored. There are already many open-minded scientists working within universities and other scientific institutions, but most of them are unable to follow unconventional lines of research because they’re afraid these would not be funded. I would like to see a plurality of sources for funding in science that enable different approaches to be explored. This is unlikely to happen through government funding agencies, which are dominated by the science establishment, but there are many private foundations that could fund alternative scientific and medical research and I hope that some of them will do so.

I also hope that non-materialist scientists will feel able to meet up with other like-minded professionals and work together to change the sciences from within. And I hope that these open questions will become more widely known to students at schools through the educational system. For anyone interested in these possibilities, I recommend a new website, OpenSciences.org, that is a portal for the post-materialist sciences.

I am delighted that TBS is exploring these issues and hope that students in schools colleges and universities will be able to have some influence over what they are taught through making their interests known and through not blindly accepting the dogmas that are presented to them. Students need to learn, but they should also have some influence over what they are taught.