Thirty years ago Rupert Sheldrake, a quietly distinguished botanist, became something of a pariah in the scientific community with the publication of his book, A New Science of Life. In an extremely hostile review, the editor of the prestigious science journal, Nature, denounced his ideas on the causative formation of life as pseudo-science and the author as a heretic whose book was only fit for burning!
Since then Sheldrake has pursued something of a solitary furrow, developing his ideas on how nonphysical 'morphogenetic fields' can help to explain developmental processes in life. If this sounds so much hocus pocus bear in mind that people thought much the same when Michael Faraday proposed the idea of 'magnetic fields' to explain electrical influence at a distance. After all 'fields' are what cows graze in, aren't they?
At this point we begin to enter the rather murky world of words and concepts which underpin the whole scientific edifice. Scientists talk of 'charmed' particles, quarks and gluons (like the fantastical products of the imagination of James Joyce), of quantum 'weirdness' – 'wyrd' is a wonderful Old English word for the inexplicable, hidden force that guides our destiny. Sometimes ideas can pop into and out of existence rather like those little 'bosons': the idea of ether was popular for centuries as a kind of universal lubricant before being dismissed as fanciful last century; now it's back with another name, 'dark energy' that not only fills 70% of the universe but also a gap in our knowledge – it's merely a word for something we don't understand.
All of this is to suggest that for all its achievements, there is a great uncertainty and fluidity underpinning the scientific enterprise, which is sometimes (even often) overlooked in the context of specific issues.
Over the years Sheldrake has broadened his writings to confront these larger issues; The Science Delusion is his latest broadside against the dogmas which surround our understanding of science.
His core contention is that the paradigm of thought by which we understand the universe has changed from being a mechanistic model to one of a living organism, which is organised by fields of energy. This moves us on from the whole reductionist view of bits of inanimate 'stuff' interacting to a more gracious view of nature being animated by 'fields', which have taken the place of the old idea of 'soul' as an organising principle. Is this 'pseudo science' or simply a more spiritual view of science?
There is nothing inherently more irrational in this than the great irrational mystery that typifies our universe. If there has been a change over the last thirty years, it is in a greater willingness to recognise this; that areas of enquiry have opened up even greater areas of ignorance. For example Paul Davies (director of the tellingly named Beyond Centre for Fundamental Concepts in Science at Arizona State University) thinks that a 'proper understanding' of dark energy 'will probably require new physics', whilst astrophysicist John Barrow thinks our inherently anthropic limits of perspective will always prevent us from comprehending the symmetries that underlie the great forces of nature. So, perhaps, this time Sheldrake will get a more sympathetic hearing.
On a slightly more personal note, I had just finishing looking over an article on this latest book of Sheldrake's, to which I had referred in an article I was writing, and opened up my email to contact Dinah about it when, to my utter amazement, the first thing I saw was a message from Dinah asking if I would be interested in reviewing this book! Spooky? Weird? Call it what you like, such little incidents – that happen so often in daily life – make one think about the causality of what is happening out there: of what Sheldrake calls 'participatory knowing'.
When we now think of the ways in which the micro-subatomic world is seen to be inseparably linked to the macro universe – with seemingly bizarre experiments being carried out in the deepest mines to detect what is happening in deepest space – there is nothing inherently irrational in the suggestion that the most complex organism of all – our brain – should be able to detect, in its workings, a consciousness of this greater presence. Whatever you may think, this is a book to make us think, and not for burning!
Dominic Kirkham is an interested follower of SOF. He now works for a Home Improvement Agency providing services for older people.
Reviewed: The Science Delusion by Rupert Sheldrake, Coronet (London 2012), Hbk. 392 pages, £19.99.