Rupert Sheldrake is an English biologist and author, born in Newark-on-Trent in 1942, best known for his hypothesis of morphic resonance. He studied natural sciences at Cambridge and philosophy at Harvard, took a PhD in biochemistry at Cambridge, and later worked as a plant physiologist in India, where he wrote his first book, A New Science of Life.
Brian Rose has interviewed Sheldrake four times on London Real between 2012 and 2019. They have talked about his book The Science Delusion, collective memory in nature, telepathy in people and animals, his years in India, his friend Terence McKenna, and his two books on the science of spiritual practices.
Each interview is listed below in order.
The Science Delusion (2012). His first and most influential London Real interview, setting out what he sees as the dogmas of modern science. For his more recent work on meditation, prayer and other practices, watch Ways To Go Beyond (2019).
Sheldrake proposes that there is a kind of memory in nature, so that organisms inherit habits from earlier members of their species. He argues this could explain how forms and behaviours develop.
In his 2012 and 2014 interviews he argued that modern science rests on unexamined assumptions, such as the idea that nature is purely mechanical and that the mind is confined to the brain, and that these hold research back.
He has studied things like dogs that seem to know when their owners are coming home and the sense of being stared at. He approaches them as a biologist.
In 2018 and 2019 he talked about practices such as meditation, gratitude, pilgrimage and time in nature, and argued that research shows real benefits to wellbeing, whatever your beliefs.
Rupert Sheldrake is an English biologist and author, born in 1942, best known for his hypothesis of morphic resonance. He trained at Cambridge and Harvard and has written books including A New Science of Life and The Science Delusion.
Morphic resonance is Sheldrake’s hypothesis that nature has a kind of collective memory, so that living things inherit habits of form and behaviour from earlier members of their kind.
He talked about The Science Delusion, morphic resonance, telepathy in people and animals, his years in India, his friendship with Terence McKenna and the science of spiritual practices such as meditation.
Start with The Science Delusion from 2012, his first London Real interview. Watch Ways To Go Beyond from 2019 for his later work on spiritual practices.
Four times between 2012 and 2019: The Science Delusion, The Science Delusion Redux, Science and Spiritual Practices, and Ways To Go Beyond.
The Science Delusion, published in 2012, argues that ten assumptions of modern science, such as the idea that nature is mechanical, have hardened into dogmas. In the US it was published as Science Set Free.
Official site: sheldrake.org
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