Sheldrake interview Sun Magazine

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1 Sheldrake interview Sun Magazine Rupert Sheldrake is fed up with the scientific mainstream for being dominated by dogma, and for so often being resistant to his theories, which present a challenge to entrenched ideas about genetics, heredity, and our place in the natural world. But, being stereotypically British, he doesn t express himself through verbal tirades or ad hominem attacks on his opponents. Instead, for four decades he has patiently written articles and published books on what he calls the extended mind of humans and other animals. He lectures extensively worldwide and oversees hundreds of experiments to test his theories. When he s called a crackpot or a new-age loony, he explains his experimental methods and how he came to develop his beliefs, which he s defended many times in debates with skeptics. (His public dialogues are among many items archived on his website, Sheldrake s latest book, Science Set Free, is a meticulously organized argument and summation of his body of work. In it he identifies the scientific dogmas he believes are holding back the pursuit of knowledge, distorting our understanding of reality, ruining our health, and preventing us from taking full advantage of our intellects, bodies, and spirits. A former research fellow of the Royal Society, Sheldrake studied natural sciences at Cambridge University, where he earned a PhD in biochemistry and was awarded the university s botany prize. He was a Frank Knox Fellow studying philosophy at Harvard University and became a fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, and director of studies in biochemistry and cell biology. From 1974 to 1985 he worked as a plant physiologist in Hyderabad, India, and he lived for a year and a half at the ashram of Father Bede Griffiths, where he wrote his first book, A New Science of Life. For many years he has been a fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences near San Francisco. I first became aware of Sheldrake in 1994, when PBS broadcast the Dutch television series A Glorious Accident, in which scientists and philosophers including Oliver Sacks, Freeman Dyson, and Stephen Jay Gould sparred over cosmology, physics, evolution, psychology, and the nature of consciousness. Sheldrake played the role of black sheep, challenging basic assumptions and posing questions he argued hadn t been adequately answered by mainstream science. He spoke about his theory of morphic resonance, which describes how fields of invisible but identifiable forces form a collective memory upon which all organisms draw and to which they contribute. Sheldrake lives in London with his wife, Jill Purce, an expert in meditation techniques and pioneer in the sound-healing movement. He has two sons: Merlin, a botanist; and Cosmo, a musician. I first met Sheldrake at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, where he participated in a conversation on Resonance, Ritual, and Return with his wife and Marc Handley Andrus, the Episcopal bishop of California. Sheldrake appeared completely at home in the church and spoke about how science and religion complement each other. He is the unusual scientist who also embraces spirituality, and the unusual philosopher who can back up his worldview with experimental data. 1

2 I interviewed Sheldrake a few days later at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, where he was leading a workshop. As we spoke in a cottage overlooking the Pacific Ocean, we occasionally had to raise our voices over the crashing of waves against the cliffs. He was serious and reserved, but there were moments when a glint in his eye or a smile on his lips signaled a more mischievous side. After all, he is a man who insists that the pursuit of science should be fun. Leviton: You were raised in an observant Methodist home in a small English town. Growing up, how did you see the relationship between religion and science? Sheldrake: My father was an herbalist, naturalist, and pharmacist, and he had an oldfashioned, natural-history approach to the world, which I liked very much. Our house was full of encyclopedias and books. I kept pets and collected plant samples. We also went to church every Sunday, and my grandfather was the church organist and choirmaster. So as a child I didn t experience a conflict between science and religion at all. When I went to boarding school at the age of thirteen, however, I got the message in the classroom that science was the way forward and religion the way back. I had a housemaster who gave me James Frazer s The Golden Bough and Robert Graves s The White Goddess to read. These books celebrated the mythology of traditional peoples but also taught that many of the themes of Christianity were rooted in pagan ideas. Frazer, especially, had an agenda to prove that Christianity was no better than the primitive religions that missionaries denounced as superstition. Along with Freud s works, these books convinced me that religion was a delusion. I became a convert to the materialist-atheist worldview but not an enthusiastic one, because there were still things it didn t explain, and it didn t always fit with my experience. Leviton: Tell me about your first laboratory job, between boarding school and college. Sheldrake: I got a science scholarship to Cambridge and left school young, at seventeen. I had nine months before college began and landed a job in London at Parke-Davis s pharmacology research lab, which turned out to be a vivisection facility. It was quite traumatic. I was cutting up animals, tormenting guinea pigs, assisting in operations on cats. It was a death camp for animals. Every animal who entered the place ended up dead. I was appalled. But I was told I shouldn t have emotions about it, that this was science and was for the good of humanity, and that these animals were only mechanisms anyway. Leviton: Were you told they didn t really feel anything? Sheldrake: No one went quite that far, but the message was that to worry about their feelings was just anthropomorphic projection or sentimentality and had no place in rational science. I found this attitude alienating. It made me think something had gone horribly wrong with the whole scientific enterprise. When I got to Cambridge, I was no longer 100 percent sure about the path I was taking. It seemed to me that science had split away from the direct experience of the world, which was what had attracted me to the field in the first place. 2

3 Leviton: Did these scientists consider humans to be on a different level than animals? They wouldn t have argued that people are just mechanisms, would they? Sheldrake: In theory science does portray humans as just machines, computers, lumbering robots in Richard Dawkins s phrase, with no free will. From this point of view our minds are merely the activities of our brains. On the other hand, most scientists subscribe to secular humanism, which says we should do everything we can to improve human welfare, stop suffering, and so on. So there s a conflict there. If you consider humans machines, then you should treat them the same way science treats animals, which is what the Nazi doctors did in the death camps; the same experiments long carried out on animals were applied to humans there. There s nothing in science that tells us humans are special and shouldn t be treated this way. That idea comes from secular humanism, which is a kind of quasi-religious faith. Leviton: Did you move toward botany because you didn t feel you would be hurting plants? Sheldrake: Yes, and I simply didn t want to kill animals anymore. In fact, I wasn t sure I wanted to study science anymore. In 1963 I took a year off at Cambridge to study the history and philosophy of science at Harvard. One of the books I read there was Thomas Kuhn s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which expressed the idea of paradigm changes. It had a big impact on me, because I realized that mechanistic biology wasn t something I had to accept. It was simply a model of reality that could be wrong or limited and might someday be replaced by another concept. That was exciting, to know that science could change. Leviton: You also spent time in India. What was that like? Sheldrake: Well, first I went back to Cambridge in 1964 to get a PhD in plant development. In 1968 I got a Royal Society scholarship to study tropical botany in Malaysia, and I spent two months in India on my way there. India back then was full of Western travelers, hippies, seekers visiting ashrams. Nothing in my education had prepared me for the culture. I stayed in a remote village with a friend of mine who was an anthropologist, way off the grid in the northern part of the country. I was immersed in a village life that probably hadn t changed for centuries. My friend and I were out one day near a mountain stream. Beside a waterfall was a cave, and in the cave was an orange-robed man who called out to my friend. I asked, Who s that? and my friend said he was the local holy man who lived in the cave and smoked his chillum. The holy man invited us over, and he offered me his clay pipe. My friend assured me it was fine, so I took a puff. It was incredibly strong cannabis. So the first time I smoked pot was with a holy man in the Himalayas. It wasn t like having one s first joint at a student party. When I got back from Malaysia in 1969, I was interested in altered states of consciousness, so I tried LSD. It revealed to me regions of the mind that no one had taught me about in my neurophysiology classes. I felt there was a huge gulf between the scientific explanation the nerve impulses, the ions across cell membranes, the mechanisms and the actual experience of expanded consciousness. It made me 3

4 wonder if I could achieve the same awareness without drugs. That s when I started meditating. From 1967 to 1974 I had a teaching position at Cambridge. It was a nice life, living in a seventeenth-century building with a wonderful garden. The pay was low, but I had almost no expenses. In the evening I would put on my academic gown, cross the courtyard, file into the dining hall, and sit at the high table with the other fellows of the college to eat food served by a butler in tails and drink delicious wine from the college cellars. After dinner we d retire to a paneled room for vintage port and Madeira. It was my job, as junior fellow, to pass around the silver snuffbox. It was a comfortable world, and I was perfectly happy there, but when my time of appointment came to an end, I had to decide if I would go for a university lectureship which would have meant another six years of teaching at Cambridge or do something different. I heard about a new international institute starting up in Hyderabad, India, so I applied for the job of principal plant physiologist and got it. The institute was doing agricultural research on the crops grown by the poorest farmers, mostly chickpeas and pigeon peas. The aim was to bring something like the green revolution to these farmers. I thought that was a worthy goal, and I loved doing practical work in the fields and learning about Indian culture. Leviton: Your theory of morphic resonance says that we are bound together, even though we appear separate. This feels different from most science, which tends to reduce and categorize things rather than connecting them. Sheldrake: Yes and no. One of the most impressive accomplishments in science is Newton s theory of gravitation, which describes how everything in the universe is invisibly connected to everything else: the ultimate holistic vision. My morphic-resonance idea didn t come to me in some drug-fueled vision; it arose because of my work with the development of plants. I was pondering how leaves and flowers take their different forms. At first I looked at plant hormones, to see if they played a role. I made some important discoveries, but hormones didn t explain why an apple is different from a leaf or a flower any more than cement explains why buildings are different shapes. This is a core question: How do things take their forms? Whether we re talking about a plant, an animal, an atom, or a galaxy, they all seem to organize themselves spontaneously. Unlike machines, which are assembled by humans, they have no external manufacturer putting them together piece by piece; they just grow. That s where the concept of morphogenetic fields comes in. The word morphic is from the Greek word for form, and a morphic field is a field of pattern, order, and structure that not only organizes living matter but also what we call inanimate matter. I thought there must be these invisible fields, like gravitational or magnetic fields, that shaped and formed the different parts of the plants. Obviously the shapes were inherited, but I didn t see how genes could be responsible. All cells come from other cells, and all cells inherit fields of organization. Genes are part of this organization. They play an essential role, but they do not explain the 4

5 organization itself. Genetically speaking, fruit flies, worms, fish, and mammals are very similar. They share the same Hox genes, which help determine how embryos develop into full-grown creatures with arms and legs or antennae and wings. These genes are like switches. But the switches are almost the same in fruit flies, mice, and humans. So these genes by themselves cannot determine form, or else fruit flies would not look too different from us. I suggest that morphogenetic fields work by imposing patterns on otherwise random or indeterminate activity. Morphogenetic fields are not fixed forever, but evolve. The fields of Afghan hounds and poodles have become different from those of their common ancestors, wolves. How are these fields inherited? I propose that they are transmitted from past members of the species through a kind of nonlocal resonance, which I call morphic resonance. So there is no need to suppose that all the laws of nature sprang into being fully formed at the moment of the big bang, like a kind of Napoleonic Code, or that they exist in a metaphysical realm beyond time and space. I believe morphic fields underlie our mental activity and our perceptions. The morphic fields of social groups connect group members, even when they are many miles apart, and provide channels of communication through which organisms can stay in touch at a distance. When I was first thinking about these concepts, I was reading Remembrance of Things Past, by Marcel Proust, a fantastic novel about memory. A friend of mine said Proust had gotten a lot of his ideas from Henri Bergson, so I read Bergson s book Matter and Memory, and to my astonishment it contained the key to understanding the nature of memory in general. Bergson theorized that memory is not stored in the brain, as is commonly assumed, but instead depends upon a direct link across time between the past and the present. This was a new and exciting thought for me. I discussed it with my colleagues at the high table at Cambridge, and many of the philosophers and historians were excited as well. But when I discussed it with my colleagues in the biochemistry department, I found far less interest. In fact, there was open hostility to the idea of a shared memory in nature. Leviton: Can you explain further why you ve ruled out genetic coding? Sheldrake: If the information were carried only in the genes, then all the cells of the body would be programmed identically, because they contain the same genes. The cells of your arms and legs are genetically identical to those of your bones, cartilage, and tissues. If the genes are the same, then the development of some cells into arms and others into legs must depend on nongenetic influences. In my work I describe a nested hierarchy of morphogenetic units that coordinate the fields of limbs, muscles, and so forth. There s a lot about us that genetics can t explain. In studies, identical twins separated at birth show remarkable similarities. Perhaps both develop a strong interest in stockcar racing and art. There are no stock-car- and art-loving genes. The researchers who launched the Human Genome Project expected to find that we have a hundred thousand genes, but the final tally is more like twenty-three thousand. A fruit fly has seventeen thousand genes. A sea urchin has twenty-six thousand. Rice 5

6 has thirty-eight thousand genes! Humans are more mechanically complicated than rice, so why don t we have more genes? Scientists have identified about fifty human genes associated with height, but research shows that together those fifty genes account for only about 5 percent of a person s height. Most of the heritability is missing, and that s a big problem for genetic theories of how the body works. My theories offer a better solution to the missing heritability problem. Geneticists say, Give us another ten years, and we ll have it all figured out. We just need more computing power and gene sequencing. That s all. I have a wager with developmental biologist Lewis Wolpert: if by May 1, 2029, he can t predict all the details of an organism based on the genome of a fertilized egg, he loses. Leviton: If, as you say, memory does not reside in the brain, then where is it? And can it survive the death of the individual to whom it belongs? Sheldrake: Where? is the wrong question. Memory is a relationship in time, not in space. The idea that a memory has to be somewhere when it s not being remembered is a theoretical inference, not an observation of reality. When I met you this morning, I recognized you from yesterday. There s no photographic representation of you in my brain. I just recognize you. What I suggest is that memory depends on a direct relationship across time between past experiences and present ones. The brain is more like a television receiver. The television doesn t store all the images and programs you watch on it; it tunes in to them invisibly. It may sound radical, but this idea was put forward not only by Bergson but also by philosophers Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein. They all challenged the notion that a memory has to be somewhere in the brain. The whole of the past is potentially present everywhere, and we access it on the basis of similarity. I think we re tuning in not only to our own past experiences but to the memories of millions of people who are now dead a collective memory. It s similar to psychologist Carl Jung s concept of a collective unconscious or Hinduism s akashic records, which store all knowledge on another plane of existence. Yes, there s the potential for the memory to survive the death of the brain. Whether there s survival of an individual s memory, my theory doesn t predict one way or the other. It leaves the question open, whereas the conventional theory is that, once the brain decays at death, all memories are wiped out. Leviton: You ve cited experiments in which researchers taught rats at Harvard how to run a maze, and rats in Britain seemed to draw on that knowledge. You ve also found evidence that people who wait to work on Tuesday s crossword on Wednesday can solve it more easily, theoretically because thousands of others already have. Are you saying that we re all tied together by a shared consciousness? Sheldrake: It doesn t have to be conscious; it could be unconscious or the result of habit. But, yes, we all have access to a collective memory, and we all contribute to it. Morphic resonance works on the basis of similarity: we are roughly similar to many people, but we are most similar to ourselves in the past. That s why, consciously, we 6

7 have our own memories. But if a group of people learn something new, there is good evidence that others who are similar are able to learn it quicker. In one of the longest series of experiments in the history of psychology, conducted first at Harvard and then at Edinburgh and Melbourne Universities, rats were trained to run a new maze, and the behavior of their descendants was examined to see if maze-running ability was conveyed through the genes. On average, subsequent generations got better and better. But it turned out that the control rats, whose parents had never been trained, showed the same improvement as rats descended from the trained parents. So the ability was not passed on through the genes. A flock of birds can turn at the same time because they share a morphic field. They re not all just looking at the next bird and deciding what to do; research has shown that their reactions are too quick for that. It s the same with schools of fish, packs of wolves, and groups of people. And my theory says that morphic fields can evolve. Once upon a time there were no bicycles. Then they were invented, and people learned to ride them. With millions of people now riding bikes, a morphic field for bike riding has arisen, and it is cumulatively easier for new riders to pick up the skill. Leviton: And we have more resonance with members of our family and people we re close to? Sheldrake: Yes, because we have more similarity with them, either through shared experience or hereditary relatedness. Many mothers report that they can tell when their babies need them, even when mother and child are physically separated. Nursing mothers have a milk-letdown reflex that occurs when they hear their baby cry: a release of oxytocin causes the breasts to prepare to feed the baby. I ve done detailed studies on breast-feeding mothers in London and found that they experience milk letdown even when they re miles away from their crying baby. This is not just a matter of synchronized rhythms. It s easy to see why natural selection might have favored this ability: mothers who can sense a child s needs are going to help their offspring survive. Leviton: You ve written about the ten dogmas you say are holding back scientific inquiry. Which dogmas are doing the most damage? Sheldrake: They all hold science back in their own ways. The idea that animals and plants are machines is really Dogma Number One. My 1994 book, The Rebirth of Nature, was an attempt to show that it s better to talk about the natural world in terms of organisms than machinery. The dogma that the laws of nature are fixed is the one I ran into when I came up with the theory of morphic resonance, because the theory implies that the so-called laws are more like habits that can change. We ve already talked about the dogmatic idea that all inheritance is genetic. Genes have turned out to be overrated as predictors of disease and other traits. The hundreds of billions of dollars invested in the Human Genome Project have delivered much less 7

8 than we were promised, but almost nobody wants to hear that message. The scientific community reacted to the theory of morphic resonance not by saying that it was wrong, or illogical, or in conflict with the facts it said it was unnecessary, that it would be just another ten or twenty years before everything would be explained in terms of genes and molecules and neurotransmitters. The dogmatic belief that the mind is limited to the brain is severely impeding discoveries in psychology and consciousness studies. The vast majority of funding in neuroscience is dedicated to doing more brain scans. I think that s a waste of effort, because the brain doesn t do most of the things science says it does. We ve never found physical evidence of a memory inside our brains, and scientists have spent decades looking. Neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield claimed to stimulate memories by putting electrodes in the brain, but even if we could evoke memories through brain stimulation, it still wouldn t prove that the memories are stored there. Are the programs we see on TV stored in the remote control? Probably the dogma that affects people the most in their everyday lives is the one that says mechanistic medicine surgery and drugs is the only kind that works. The National Institutes of Health spends more than $30 billion a year on research, and almost all that money goes into mechanistic medicine. Other forms of therapy, some of which work well, are ignored or dismissed as having a placebo effect. But a lot of medical results are due to a placebo effect! That alone tells us that expectation and belief play a huge role in healing. Leviton: The bedrock of all scientific dogmas seems to be the idea that if you can t measure it, it can be ignored. Sheldrake: I don t say that exactly, because, after all, morphic resonance can be measured. Psychic phenomena like telepathy can be measured. For example, I ve researched telephone telepathy: the sense of knowing who s going to call. Many scientists say these phenomena are coincidences or can t possibly exist, but these same scientists often accept that there are multiple universes, for which there s not one shred of evidence. Leviton: There s no experiment that can test string theory s proposition of millions of universes? Sheldrake: No. About 80 percent of theoretical physicists are engaged in stringtheory research, and some of them find this untestability quite disturbing. Lee Smolin, author of The Trouble with Physics, thinks the field has gotten lost in webs of theoretical speculation. Everything I m proposing can be measured. My theory makes predictions and tests them. Cosmologists postulate quadrillions of universes they ve never observed. 8