Profiles in pseudoscience: Rupert Sheldrake

An unabashed purveyor of nonsense keeps getting invited to international conference on science and philosophy

Rupert Sheldrake in 2008, Wikimedia

“Sheldrake’s book [A New Science of Life] is a splendid illustration of the widespread public misconception of what science is about. In reality, Sheldrake’s argument is in no sense a scientific argument but an exercise in pseudo-science.” (John Maddox, then editor of Nature magazine)

A few months ago I once again too part in the “How the Light Gets In” festival, a gathering of philosophers, scientists, poets, and musicians, to celebrate human knowledge and understanding. It usually takes place in Hay-on-Wye (Wales), with a secondary event held in London.

I always very much look forward to give talks on topic such as “How to be a skeptic” and to participate as a panelist in discussions on topics such as “Getting Everything, Losing Everything” (about Zuckerberg-style virtual reality) and “The Good and the Evil” (on whether these moral categories make sense, or are useful).

Unfortunately, I’m never look forward to another regular feature of the HTLGI events: running into pseudoscience purveyor Rupert Sheldrake, who keeps being invited year after year by the organizers for perverse reasons that are beyond my understanding. I’m sure he will take this essay as yet more evidence that there is a worldwide conspiracy of scientists against him, because Sheldrake is not just the source of wide-ranging nonsense, he is also paranoid.

Don’t believe me? Years ago he became convinced that someone was after him on Wikipedia, constantly modifying the page devoted to his activities in nefarious ways. He even identified the culprits: a “commando squad of skeptics” known as “Guerrilla Skeptics on Wikipedia” (GSoW) and headed by one Susan Gerbic.

Now, the GSoW is a thing, and it is, indeed, Susan’s brainchild. As her own Wikipedia page states: “In 2010, Gerbic founded ‘Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia’ (GSoW), a group of editors who create and improve Wikipedia articles that reflect scientific skepticism. The New York Times Magazine reported in February 2019, in an interview with Gerbic, that GSoW had 144 editors who had worked on nearly 900 Wikipedia pages. Gerbic’s work with GSoW led to her becoming a consultant for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI), and in February 2018, they appointed her as a fellow.”

[Full disclosure: I am a fellow of CSI as well, and more or less regularly write for their magazine, Skeptical Inquirer.]

This sounds pretty dark, except for two things. First, Sheldrake’s claim is plain false. It was investigated by another skeptic, Tim Farley, who concluded: “[Sheldrake’s] central claim, that Guerrilla Skeptics are controlling [his] bio, is demonstrably false. It is a classic conspiracy theory. I asked Susan Gerbic directly, and she confirmed that Sheldrake’s bio was not on their current project list. But you don’t need Susan’s word, just search for the name ‘Sheldrake’ at the project blog and you find only a post about a related article, and no indication they had worked on Sheldrake’s bio. (Believe me, they’re not shy about showing off their work — it’s part of their outreach efforts).”

Second, even if GSoW had in fact edited Sheldrake’s page they would have acted precisely in accordance with Wikipedia’s own rules on fringe theories, which state, in part: “When discussing topics that reliable sources say are pseudoscientific or fringe theories, editors should be careful not to present the pseudoscientific fringe views alongside the scientific or academic consensus as though they are opposing but still equal views. While pseudoscience may in some cases be significant to an article, it should not obfuscate the description or prominence of the mainstream views.” Exactly.

Sheldrake began his career in a promising fashion, studying biology at Cambridge and later on getting a PhD in biochemistry. But he has abandoned science since the ’80s, preferring instead to push his fringe theory of “morphic resonance” (more on this in a moment) and mounting an all-out attack on “materialistic” science (also more on this below). Like many purveyors of pseudoscience, he suffers from Galileo syndrome, the belief that he is a lonely genius who sees further than anyone else, but whom the scientific establishment fights against in order to preserve the status quo.

He is not above exploiting people’s ignorance of the academic world in order to present himself in a better light. For instance, he claims to be a Research Fellow of the Royal Society, but was actually never elected to the prestigious organization. What he did get was a research fellowship from the Royal Society, a competitive award for young scientists at the beginning of their career. It’s definitely not the same thing.

Sheldrake also got funded by the Perrott-Warrick Project, which is well known for subsidizing “research” into parapsychology. He makes a big deal of the fact that the fund is administered by the prestigious Trinity College, but it turns out that Trinity’s involvement concerns only the financial part of the operation, which doesn’t imply any substantive scholarly endorsement. Indeed, Lord Rees — a former Master of Trinity — explicitly distanced his College from any of Sheldrake’s activities.

But let’s get to the substance of what Sheldrake has been claiming now for decades. Back in 1981 he published a book, A New Science of Life, which prompted a devastating review by John Maddox in Nature, part of which is quoted at the beginning of this article. That’s where Sheldrake proposes his notion of “morphic resonance,” an entirely new phenomenon that is meant to account for both known and still unexplained phenomena, from biological heredity to the alleged “fact” that when a rat learns to navigate a maze in a laboratory other rats, in other locations, mysteriously acquire the same knowledge.

The notion, as much as one can make any sense of it, is that the entire universe is actually a living thing (Sheldrake also endorses the idea of panpsychism) characterized by a “morphic field” that makes all these things (and many more thereof, including telepathy) possible through a kind of diffused memory.

Morphic fields are reminiscent of the Jungian (itself pseudoscientific) notion of archetypes, with the difference that Jung limited his particular bit of empirically unsubstantiated speculation to the human subconscious, while Sheldrake goes cosmic.

The idea of morphic resonance — like pretty much all of Sheldrake’s ideas — is also not at all original. To begin with, it closely resembles the long discredited concept of a vital force, or élan vital, proposed by French philosopher Henri Bergson in his 1907 book Creative Evolution, and actually tracking all the way back to first century BCE Stoic Posidonius of Apamea. I don’t know whether Sheldrake is aware of these forerunners, but he does acknowledge the influence of the neo-vitalist Hans Driesch and his philosophy of entelechy (a term originally coined by Aristotle).

Needless to say, but let’s state it clearly anyway, there is absolutely no evidence that life forces, morphogenetic fields, and related concepts have any correspondence with the real world. Accordingly, Sheldrake hasn’t been able to publish his ideas in real scientific journals. Which I’m sure he attributes, conveniently, to a worldwide conspiracy against him.

Then again, some of his claims have been subjected to test even when the pertinent evidence (and only part of the methodology) appeared only in Sheldrake’s own books. For example, psychologist Richard Wiseman has investigated multiple claims made by Sheldrake, and found them wanting. In a paper entitled “The Psychic Pet Phenomenon: A Reply to Rupert Sheldrake” Wiseman tried to replicate an experiment carried out by Sheldrake using a “psychic pet,” which turned out to be a dog named Jaytee. The claim was that Jaytee would hang around the porch of his owner’s house for longer periods whenever the owner was on his way home. Wiseman’s explanation of the alleged phenomenon is far more prosaic than dog telepathy: the data is consistent with a dog’s natural waiting behavior, and specifically with the tendency of the dog to prolong visits to the porch the longer the owner had been away. As Sam Woolfe puts it in a critical article on Sheldrake, “this is evidence of a dog anticipating the arrival of their owner, instead of knowing it through psychic abilities.” Physicist Freeman Dyson (quoted by John Greenbank in an article Philosophy Now) added:

“Recently Rupert Sheldrake did some interesting experiments on ESP in dogs. Dogs are much better than humans for such experiments. Dogs are dumb, they are not interested in the outcome of the experiment, and they do not cheat. Unfortunately Rupert Sheldrake is not a dog. He is human, and his essential role in his experiments makes his results questionable.”

Wiseman, in his near infinite patience and intellectual honesty, also checked another of Sheldrake’s bizarre ideas. In his book, The Sense of Being Stared At, Sheldrake claims that after tens of thousands of trials, 60% of the subjects reported a feeling of being stared at when they, in fact, were. This would be higher than the expected rate by chance, which is 50%. But Wiseman repeated the experiment and found no statistically significant deviation from the 50–50 rate. Naturally.

As an evolutionary biologist myself, I’m particularly incensed by Sheldrake’s rejection of fundamental theories and empirical discoveries in biology. He thinks we need morphic resonance, not genetic inheritance, to explain the phenomenon of heredity. His reason? Because current biology doesn’t explain everything. Welcome to real science, Rupert. Besides, the kind of phenomena he thinks are beyond the reach of standard biological research — like inheritance of non-genetic characteristics and certain developmental phenomena like regeneration of limbs in some animal species — are actually being gradually explained by new research on epigenetic inheritance and by the entire field of “evo-devo,” the evolution of development.

But of course it’s far more controversial, sells more books, and gets you invited to more public events, if you come up with your own untestable and extremely vague “theories” rather than do the hard work that real scientists actually carry out.

One of the big issues I have with Sheldrake’s nonsense is his belief that evolution by natural selection of structures such as the eye “does not explain the purposiveness of living organisms: it presupposes it” (p. 131 of The Science Delusion). No, it doesn’t. I can’t believe that we still have to have this discussion in the 21st century, but here we go again.

In philosophy of science we distinguish between teleology and teleonomy. Teleology is the notion — advanced originally by Aristotle and the Stoics — that there is purpose inherent in nature. So, to pick up on Sheldrake’s example, the eye must be the result of some kind of special force, either intelligent design or the intelligence of the universe, or whatever, because it is clearly for something, namely to see. This is the sort of reasoning that led to the famous analogy put forth by natural theologian William Paley:

“In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer I had before given, that for anything I knew, the watch might have always been there. … There must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed [the watch] for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use. … Every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater or more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation.” (William Paley, Natural Theology, 1802)

Now, as far as I know Sheldrake is not a supporter of intelligent design. But he is puzzled by the same kind of issues that puzzled Paley, and responds in a similar way: there simply must be more than meets the eye (pun intended) when it comes to explaining complex, purposeful, biological structures.

Except that this sort of reasoning was dealt a fatal two-punch blow by David Hume (in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 1748) and Charles Darwin (in On the Origin of Species, 1859). It is the Hume-Darwin paradigm that replaced teleology with teleonomy, which is the appearance of purpose in nature, a concept nicely explained in Richard Dawkins’ Climbing Mount Improbable. It was Darwin’s stroke of genius to realize that the process of natural selection could yield precisely the sort of complex, apparently purposeful structures that had enthralled Paley and still bother Sheldrake. Yes, the eyes of a living organism are not the same sort of things as stones, and their existence does require a different kind of explanation. But we do have such explanation, and the whole of evolutionary biology since 1859 has been devoted to providing a mountain of empirical evidence for it.

Yet Sheldrake prefers his imaginary morphic fields, about which reviewer John Greenbank says: “The proposal that morphic fields are ‘fields of probability, like quantum fields’ is simply meaningless.” Just check with any physicist who actually knows anything about quantum theory. Here Sheldrake descends to the level of what my colleague Jerry Coyne referred to, in an article in The New Republic, as Sheldrake’s American counterpart, Deepak Chopra who, sure enough, has written a defense of Sheldrake entitled “The rise and fall of militant skepticism.” Beware of the (low) quality of your allies.

Let us finally get back to Sheldrake’s The Science Delusion (2012). In it, he charges science with adhering to a whopping ten “dogmas,” from which he intends to set the whole scientific enterprise finally free. Woolfe helpfully lists the dogmas in a concise fashion:

1. Everything is essentially mechanical

2. All matter is unconscious

3. The total amount of matter and energy is always the same

4. The laws of nature are fixed

5. Nature is purposeless

6. All biological inheritance is material

7. Minds are inside heads and are nothing but the activity of brains

8. Memory is stored in material traces in the brain

9. Unexplained phenomena such as telepathy are illusory

10. Mechanistic medicine is the only one that really works

Right. Except that these aren’t dogmas, in the sense of unquestioned and unquestionable arbitrary assumptions. These are either provisional hypotheses or tentative conclusions of our inquiries so far into how the world works.

Science is an eminently practical enterprise, so it tends to keep whatever works and to throw out whatever doesn’t. Certainly the process is neither smooth nor perfect, because scientists are human beings, inevitably affected by their own ideological and personal biases. (So are purveyors of pseudoscience, needless to say.) But the scientific approach to understanding the world has been around for five (if you count from Galileo) or 25 (if you count from Pre-Socratics like Thales of Miletus) centuries. And for all the “alternative ways of knowing” that people like Sheldrake keep throwing up, it has been extremely successful and unparalleled. Meanwhile, none of the alleged alternatives has produced anything other than vague and untestable speculations. That’s why, in the end, I have to agree with Greenbank, who writes:

“The Science Delusion is disturbingly eccentric. Fluently superficial, it combines a disorderly collage of scientific fact and opinion with an intrusive yet disjunctive metaphysical program.” (Philosophy Now)

As for Sheldrake himself, he comes across as mild mannered, eccentric, superficially fluent, and the self-proclaimed victim of a vicious scientific establishment. And I am sure to run again into him at HTLGI. Unfortunately.