Rupert Sheldrake has researched telepathy in dogs, crystals and Chinese medicine in his quest to explore phenomena that science finds hard to explain
All that, though, was before he was cast out into the wilderness. Sheldrake’s untouchable status was conferred one morning in 1981 when, a couple of months after the publication of his first book, A New Science of Life, he woke up to read an editorial in the journal Nature, which announced to all right-thinking men and women that his was a “book for burning” and that Sheldrake was to be “condemned in exactly the language that the pope used to condemn Galileo, and for the same reason. It is heresy”.
For a pariah, Sheldrake is particularly affable. But still, looking back at that moment, he still betrays a certain sense of shock. “It was,” he says, “exactly like a papal excommunication. From that moment on, I became a very dangerous person to know for scientists.” That opinion has hardened over the years, as Sheldrake has continued to operate at the margins of his discipline, looking for phenomena that “conventional, materialist science” cannot explain and arguing for a more open-minded approach to scientific inquiry.
His new book, The Science Delusion, is a summation of this thinking, an attempt to address what he sees as the limitations and hubris of contemporary scientific thought. In particular, he takes aim at the “scientific dogmatism” that sets itself up as gospel. The chapters take some of the stonier commandments of contemporary science and make them into questions: “Are the laws of nature fixed?”; “Is matter unconscious?”; “Is nature purposeless?” “Are minds confined to brains?”
Sheldrake is a brilliant polemicist if nothing else and he skilfully marshals all the current thinking that undermines these tenets – from apparent telepathy in animals, to crystals having to “learn” how to grow, to some of the more fantastical notions of theoretical physics. On the morning I meet him, his book is sitting near the top of the science bestseller list on Amazon. It has also, unlike most of his previous work – Seven Experiments That Could Change the World, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home – been generally reviewed respectfully. Perhaps it is something in the air.
One of the habits in nature that Sheldrake is interested in is polarity, and if he has a natural nemesis then it is Richard Dawkins, arch materialist and former professor of public understanding of science at Oxford. The title of his book seems to take direct aim at Dawkins’s The God Delusion. Was that, I wonder, his express intention in writing it?
“Slightly,” he suggests. But the title was really his publisher’s idea. “It is dealing with a much bigger issue. But Richard Dawkins is a symptom of the dogmatism of science. He crystallises that approach in the public mind, so to that extent, yes, it is a pointed title.”
Sheldrake is the same age as Dawkins – 70 this year – and though their careers began in an almost identical biochemical place, they could hardly have ended up further apart. If Sheldrake’s ideas could be boiled down to a sentence, you might borrow one from Hamlet: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Richard, than are dreamt of in your philosophy…”
“What we have in common,” Sheldrake says, “is that we are both certain that evolution is the central feature of nature. But I would say his theory of evolution stops at biology. When it comes to cosmology, for example, he has little to say. I would take the evolutionary principle there, too. I think that the ‘laws of nature’ are also prone to evolve; I think they are more like habits than laws. Much of what we are beginning to understand is that they clearly have evolved differently in different parts of the universe.”
Sheldrake talks a good deal of the fact that, as all good Brian Cox viewers know, 83% of the universe is now thought to be “dark matter” and subject to “dark energy” forces that “nothing in our science can begin to explain”.
Despite this, he suggests, scientists are prone to “the recurrent fantasy of omniscience”. The science delusion, in these terms, consists in the faith that we already understand the nature of reality, in principle, and that all that is left to do is to fill in the details. “In this book, I am just trying to blow the whistle on that attitude which I think is bad for science,” he says. In America, the book is called Science Set Free, which he thinks is probably a better title. “They were aware that if they called it The Science Delusion it would be seen as a rightwing tract that was anti-evolution and anti-climate change. And I want no part of that.”
The evolution of Rupert Sheldrake, would, you guess, be a worthwhile scientific study in itself, but one for which you might struggle to attract funding. Like all heretics worth their salt, he started out in good faith, a true believer, but he has been beset by increasing doubt ever since.
“I went through the standard scientific atheist phase when I was about 14,” he says, with a grin. “I bought into that package deal of science equals atheism. I was the only boy at my high Anglican boarding school who refused to get confirmed. When I was a teenager, I was a bit like Dawkins is today, you know: ‘If Adam and Eve were created by God, why do they have navels?’ That kind of thing.”
Over a period, he found the materialist view of the universe – that matter was all that life consisted of, that human beings were in Dawkins’s term “lumbering robots” – did not accord with his own experience of it. Sheldrake was a gifted musician and “electrical changes in the cortex didn’t seem able to fully explain Bach”. Likewise: “To describe the overwhelming life of a tropical forest just in terms of inert biochemistry and DNA didn’t seem to give a very full picture of the world.”
The other thing that troubled him about scientific orthodoxy might be condensed into a single word: pigeons. As a boy in Newark-on-Trent, Sheldrake had kept animals – a dog, a jackdaw and some homing pigeons. He would place these pigeons in a cardboard box and cycle all morning with them and then release them to marvel how they would always beat him home. Newark happened to be a hub of pigeon racing. “Every weekend in the season, people would bring piles and piles of wicker baskets containing their birds; my father would take me there and the porters would let me help release the pigeons. Hundreds would fly up and circle round, then you would see them form into little groups and head off around Britain, back home. Pigeon fanciers were mostly plain working men, but they were fascinated by this mystery, which they did not understand.”
They were not alone. When Sheldrake won his scholarship to Cambridge several years later, he asked various scientists how they thought this happened. The scientists talked about the sun’s position and an internal clock and scent traces, but what “they weren’t prepared to say was that it was a total mystery”. That refusal, and others like it, troubled Sheldrake. “There is a lot of science that you can’t directly experience,” he says, “but to concentrate on quantum physics when we couldn’t begin to explain homing pigeons seemed to me,” he suggests, “a great distortion.”
For a decade or so, Sheldrake kept some of these thoughts to himself, but as his career developed his doubts about the idea that “conventional, materialist” science would one day explain everything seemed increasingly wrong-headed. He took a job working at the University of Malaya on ferns and rubber trees and to get there travelled for some months through India and Sri Lanka. It was 1968 and India was a very interesting place to be. “I met people, highly intelligent people, who had a completely different world view from anything to which I had been exposed.”
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