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Rupert Sheldrake: The delightful crackpot
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Nov. 23, 1999 |
And habits can be broken. Before we examine Sheldrake's theory, know that he was born in Newark-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire, in the English Midlands. He went to an
Anglican boarding school and then took biology at Cambridge, studying "life" by killing animals and then grinding them up to extract their
DNA. This was troubling. Rescue came when a friend turned him on to Goethe.
This old German's 18th century vision of "holistic science" appealed to
the young Brit very much. Sheldrake used Goethe to investigate how the lilies
of the field actually become lilies of the field.
Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming
Home: By Rupert Sheldrake Nonfiction 352 Pages
Sheldrake discovered that around 1920, three biologists -- Hans Spemann, Alexander Gurwitsch and Paul Weiss -- independently proposed that morphogenesis is organized by fields. (Albert Einstein extended this field concept to include the gravitational field that holds the universe together.) After Sheldrake took several extended trips to India, he developed his theory of "morphic resonance." He put forth the notion that morphic fields influence everything from plant growth to migration patterns to what C.G. Jung called the "collective unconscious." He wrote, "As time goes on, each type of organism forms a special kind of cumulative collective memory. The regularities of nature are therefore habitual. Things are as they are because they were as they were." He discovered data that backed him. For example, when mice in a research facility in London were taught to improve their maze-running skills, "unschooled" mice in a Paris lab began better navigating their mazes as well. On a South Pacific island, a gourmet monkey discovered that washing the dirt off his raw potato was healthy and made the spud taste better. On islands throughout the archipelago, monkeys simultaneously began washing their potatoes. This means the truism that ideas are "just in the air" has validity. "The whole point about morphic fields is that nature as we know it is probabilistic," Sheldrake says. "It could go one way or it could go another. Anything which influenced or imposed pattern upon chance could bring about a causative influence in nature not violating any law of physics." He then mentions how a flock of day-old chicks can imprint a random-movement robot and then will it to stop moving randomly. Indeed, he tells how a random noise generator ceased producing random noise during the five minutes the O.J. Simpson trial verdict was broadcast. If Sheldrake sounds like a crackpot, he is. But delightfully so. Mad scientists are a thing of the past. Sheldrake makes an off-the-cuff comment that he discovered from old radar records that the speed of light slowed during the 1940s. Then he points out that it was Francis Bacon who believed scientists should be the new priesthood. And that's how science has functioned ever since -- most of our modern priests are "busy doing genetic research for Monsanto." Indeed, the former editor of Nature, John Maddox -- "the 'pope of science,'" Sheldrake laughs -- called Sheldrake a "lapsed Jesuit attacking the church of science." Maddox advocated literally burning Sheldrake's books as heresy, yelling, "He deserves to be condemned for the exact same reasons the pope condemned Galileo." It figures that California became a haven for Sheldrake in the early 1990s. His views were embraced by Terence McKenna -- co-author of "The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching" -- a man who believes Mother Earth (aka Gaia) speaks to us through hallucinogenic mushrooms that came as spores from outer space. Privately, Sheldrake enjoyed partaking in a chemical trip or two himself, so he was sympathetic to McKenna's ravings. But publicly, the Brit always seemed stiff whenever the two shared a podium (or toadstool).
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