Rupert Sheldrake — Fringe Scientist in the Spotlight
By: René Junge
Tags: Biology, Science, Evolution, Theory, Discussion

Rupert Sheldrake — Fringe Scientist in the Spotlight

Reviled by the scientific community and praised by his followers, Rupert Sheldrake launched a widely acclaimed book in 2012. It is A Reckoning with the Established Scientific Establishment René Junge Follow Dec 22, 2020 · 5 min read

Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash

At the time, a hot, public dispute broke out in Great Britain between the strictly science-believing and the holistically, partly esoterically thinking readers. To classify this dispute, this article gives an overview of who Rupert Sheldrake is and which theses he represents.

Since the theory of morphic resonance reaches into parapsychology areas and offers explanations for phenomena as, for example, telepathy, probably one or the other reader will not agree with the theses of Sheldrake. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile to deal with this controversially discussed topic.

I take beforehand that I do not believe in Sheldrake’s theses. However, since he demands a scientific discussion of his theories, he stands out, in my opinion, pleasantly from pure esotericists who reject the scientific method entirely.

With this article, I put his theses, therefore, to the public discussion.

Rupert Sheldrake — Life and Work. A summary

Rupert Sheldrake received his doctorate in biochemistry from Cambridge and also studied philosophy at Harvard. At Cambridge, he worked for some time as a research director in cell biology and biochemistry. So he has a solid scientific background. This distinguishes him from most pseudo-scientific esotericists.

We should keep this fact in mind when we now look a little closer at his work on the morphic resonance he postulates.

We make a jump to the year 1981, in which his first work, “A New Science of Life,” appeared. In it, it is about the theory of “form-giving causation.”

In short, it is about the fact that, in Sheldrake’s view, so-called “morphogenetic fields” are active in nature. These can be thought of as information fields analogous to scientifically recognized fields such as the electromagnetic field.

Just as a magnetic field acts on the alignment of iron filings, according to Sheldrake, the morphogenetic field, e.g., of a plant, acts on shaping the whole and its parts.

Thus, the morphogenetic field would be partly responsible for the fact that a particular flower always looks the way it does.

Sheldrake does not consider genetic information and its mutation alone to be sufficient to explain the evolution of an organism. Sheldrake discovers too many gaps in the current theory of evolution to accept it as all-explanatory.

The theory of evolution in its present form cannot yet provide a satisfying explanation of how such highly complex systems as the proteins, which are fundamental to life, could arise solely through random, natural selection.

From a purely statistical point of view, it is almost impossible for such structures to form spontaneously and randomly. This applies to each individual protein, but even more so to the simultaneous formation of many thousands of different proteins, which also interact in a functionally interdependent manner and thus make life possible in the first place.

According to all probability laws, therefore, there should be nothing living based on natural selection alone until today. Suppose in the distant past, however, such a protein mix should have arisen. In that case, it is still not explained why this one chance hit should have survived immediately and, above all, not how similar structures could have emerged again and again over a longer period of time.

Here Sheldrake’s idea of morphogenetic fields comes into play:

According to this theory, roughly speaking, everything has a morphogenetic field. In this field, the information about the respective system belonging to the field is stored. Furthermore, very similar morphogenetic fields are in resonance with each other. Similar fields are fields of the same shape.

This means that two people’s morphogenetic fields can resonate with each other, but the morphogenetic field of a person and a flower can hardly resonate.

Thus, resonance with earlier expressions of the same form occurs. Referring to the example with the proteins, this would mean that the complicated protein mix would have already produced a morphogenetic field with which the fields of future proteins could resonate.

Resonance means that systems that are in different states of oscillation align with each other when they interact. The already existing morphogenetic field would thus act as a shaping cause.

Thus the relatively complicated theory of Rupert Sheldrake is explained first in its essential features. A complete presentation of his work, which also includes his theory’s constant further development since 1981, would go beyond the scope here. For a more comprehensive introduction to Sherdrake’s world of thought, his homepage and the Wikipedia entry on Rupert Sheldrake are recommended at this point.

The debate in Great Britain after the publication of his book

With his book “Science Delusion,” Rupert Sheldrake started a broad public debate in Great Britain at that time.

The book is a reckoning with the traditional science establishment and accuses it of dogmatism and pseudo-religiousness. Furthermore, Sheldrake complains that the mainstream of science ignores his own research results for exactly these reasons.

His findings, confirmed in numerous experiments, that extrasensory abilities such as telepathy exist in humans and animals, are completely ignored to a large extent and without justification. Of course, his experiments confirm his findings only according to his opinion.

Thereby he can refer, among other things with some justification, that a check of his hypotheses is advocated at least by some renowned experts for quantum mechanics. So Sheldrake does not complain that his theories are not believed, but they are not dealt with using proven scientific means.

Now one can be divided about hypotheses which contain telepathy, the influence of the present from the future, and similar postulates. But in one point, Sheldrake is undoubtedly right: The established science does itself no favor by simply punishing offside theories with disregard instead of falsifying them in the experiment, i.e., to prove that they do not apply.

I want to leave a final judgment to Sheldrake’s theses to you at this point. Science lives from the fact that people think for themselves instead of merely taking over others’ opinions.

René Junge a published author writing on ILLUMINATION.

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