The Science Delusion by Rupert Sheldrake - review

We must find a new way of understanding human beings

Mary Midgley

The Guardian, Friday 27 January 2012 09.00 GMT

Dogs: do they really know when you're coming home? Photograph: Laurie and Charles/Getty Images

The unlucky fact that our current form of mechanistic materialism rests on muddled, outdated notions of

matter isn't often mentioned today. It's a mess that can be ignored for everyday scientific purposes, but for

our wider thinking it is getting very destructive. We can't approach important mind-body topics such as

consciousness or the origins of life while we still treat matter in 17th-century style as if it were dead, inert

stuff, incapable of producing life. And we certainly can't go on pretending to believe that our own

experience – the source of all our thought – is just an illusion, which it would have to be if that dead, alien

stuff were indeed the only reality.

The Science Delusion

by Rupert Sheldrake

We need a new mind-

body paradigm, a map

that acknowledges the

many kinds of things

there are in the world

and the continuity of

evolution. We must

somehow find different,

more realistic ways of

understanding human beings – and indeed other

animals – as the active wholes that they are, rather

than pretending to see them as meaningless

consignments of chemicals.

Rupert Sheldrake, who has long called for this

development, spells out this need forcibly in his

new book. He shows how materialism has gradually

hardened into a kind of anti-Christian faith, an

ideology rather than a scientific principle, claiming

authority to dictate theories and to veto inquiries on

topics that don't suit it, such as unorthodox

medicine, let alone religion. He shows how

completely alien this static materialism is to modern

physics, where matter is dynamic. And, to mark the

strange dilemmas that this perverse fashion poses

for us, he ends each chapter with some very

intriguing "Questions for Materialists", questions

such as "Have you been programmed to believe in materialism?", "If there are no purposes in nature,

how can you have purposes yourself?", "How do

you explain the placebo response?" and so on.

In short, he shows just how unworkable the

assumptions behind today's fashionable habits have

become. The "science delusion" of his title is the

current popular confidence in certain fixed

assumptions – the exaltation of today's science, not

as the busy, constantly changing workshop that it

actually is but as a final, infallible oracle preaching

a crude kind of materialism.

In trying to replace it he needs, of course, to suggest

alternative assumptions. But here the craft of

paradigm-building has chronic difficulties. Our

ancestors only finally stopped relying on the

familiar astrological patterns when they had grown

accustomed to machine-imagery instead – first

becoming fascinated by the clatter of clockwork and

later by the ceaseless buzz of computers, so that

they eventually felt sure that they were getting new

knowledge. Similarly, if we are told today that a

mouse is a survival-machine, or that it has been

programmed to act as it does, we may well feel that

we have been given a substantial explanation, when

all we have really got is one more optional

imaginative vision – "you can try looking at it this

way".

That is surely the right way to take new suggestions

– not as rival theories competing with current ones

but as extra angles, signposts towards wider aspects

of the truth. Sheldrake's proposal that we should

think of natural regularities as habits rather than as

laws is not just an arbitrary fantasy. It is a new

analogy, brought in to correct what he sees as a

chronic exaggeration of regularity in current

science. He shows how carefully research

conventions are tailored to smooth out the data,

obscuring wide variations by averaging many

results, and, in general, how readily scientists accept

results that fit in with their conception of eternal

laws.

He points out too, that the analogy between natural

regularities and habit is not actually new. Several

distinctly non-negligible thinkers – CS Peirce,

Nietzsche, William James, AN Whitehead – have

already suggested it because they saw the huge

difference between the kind of regularity that is

found among living things and the kind that is

expected of a clock or a calcium atom.

Whether or no we want to follow Sheldrake's

further speculations on topics such as morphic

resonance, his insistence on the need to attend to

possible wider ways of thinking is surely right. And

he has been applying it lately in fields that might get

him an even wider public. He has been making

claims about two forms of perception that are

widely reported to work but which mechanists hold

to be impossible: a person's sense of being looked at

by somebody behind them, and the power of

animals – dogs, say – to anticipate their owners'

return. Do these things really happen?

Sheldrake handles his enquiries soberly. People and

animals do, it seems, quite often perform these

unexpected feats, and some of them regularly

perform them much better than others, which is

perhaps not surprising. He simply concludes that we

need to think much harder about such things.

Orthodox mechanistic believers might have been

expected to say what they think is wrong with this

research. In fact, not only have scientists mostly

ignored it but, more interestingly still, two professed

champions of scientific impartiality, Lewis Wolpert

and Richard Dawkins, who did undertake to discuss

it, reportedly refused to look at the evidence (see

two pages in this book). This might indeed be a

good example of what Sheldrake means by the

"science delusion".