Thoughts on science from Rupert Sheldrake, biologist and author of Science Set Free.
RSS FeedSacred Song, and Where to Find it 3 March 2016
From Resurgence & Ecologist, Jan/Feb 2016, page 56
I was an atheist when I was an undergraduate at Cambridge and for several years afterwards, yet I still went to choral evensong because I found it so inspiring and uplifting. Whatever your religious fai...
The Replicability Crisis in Science 12 January 2016
Nature, September 1, 2015. Reproduced by courtesy of Nature Publishing Group. The world of science is in the midst of unprecedented soul-searching at present. The credibility of science rests on the widespread assumption that results are replicable, and that high...
Epigenetics and Soviet Biology 29 May 2014
One of the biggest controversies in twentieth-century biology was about the inheritance of acquired characteristics, the ability of animals and plants to inherit adaptations acquired by their ancestors. For example, if a dog was terrified of butchers because he had b...
Family Orchards 10 October 2013
Resurgence & Ecologist 2013
by Rupert SheldrakeWhen I was growing up in Nottinghamshire, I was fortunate to have not just one but two secret gardens. The first was from my earliest years. Near the centre of...
Wikipedia Under Threat 5 October 2013
Wikipedia is a wonderful invention. But precisely because it's so trusted and convenient, people with their own agendas keep trying to take it over. Editing wars are common. According to researchers at Oxford University, the most controversial subjects worldwide in...
Setting Science Free from Materialism 7 July 2013
Thinking of Someone and Then Meeting Unexpectedly 30 June 2013
In the course of my research on the unexplained human abilities, more than 150 people have told me about an experience that I had never before seen discussed. To their surprise, they thought about a friend or acquaintance for no particular reason, and then shortly...
The Active Voice 9 June 2013
The simplest and cheapest of all reforms within institutional science is to switch from the passive to the active voice in writing about science. Many people have already made this change, but some teachers in schools and universities do not realise that they and the...
Rat Learning and Morphic Resonance 7 April 2013
In mechanistic biology, a sharp distinction is drawn between innate and learned behaviour: the former is assumed to be 'genetically programmed' or 'coded' in the DNA, while the latter is supposed to res...
How the Universal Gravitational Constant Varies 21 January 2013
Physics is based on the assumption that certain fundamental features of nature are constant. Some constants are considered to be more fundamental than others, including the velocity of light c and the Universal Gravitational Constant, known to physicists as Big G. Un...
The New Scientific Revolution 14 December 2012
Before 2012 slips away it's worth remembering that this is the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Thomas Kuhn's hugely influential book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which was itself revol...
Liberating Science from Pervading Materialism 31 January 2012
Architectural Review, Jan 31 2012
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Today’s architectural practice is profoundly shaped by dogma that has dominated science since the late 19th Century and yet this influence remains largely unquestioned within the pro...
The Crop Circle Making Competition 9 September 2010
Resembling some vast extra-terrestrial printed circuit board, competition entries viewed from a helicopter. Some idea of the immense scale involved may be had by spotting the man on the ground, midway up the left of frame. The feeble effort by circle sceptic, arch-rationa... Answers to the Edge Annual Question 30 August 2009
Every year, the New York literary agent John Brockman asks a big question of leading scientists, writers and futurists, garnering a variety of thoughtful answers which Andrian Kreye described as "One of the most stimulating pieces of (...
Public understanding of science: Rupert Sheldrake's letter about Richard Dawkins' chair 9 September 2008
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Oxford Magazine, Fifth week, Trinity Term, 2008
SIR,
Jerome Ravetz's article Publics, understandings and science (Oxford Magazine, week 0, Trinity Term,) raises important points about the future of the Simonyi Ch...
