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 56I 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 faith, or lack of it,
...The Replicability Crisis in Science 12 January 2016
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 standards are maintained by anonymous peer review. These pillars of belief are crumbling. In S ...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 been mistreate ...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 include Israel an ...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 afterward met t ...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 their students a ...Rat Learning and Morphic Resonance 7 April 2013
This is extracted from Chapter 11 of Rupert Sheldrake's book Morphic Resonance (in the US) and A New Science of Life (in the UK) In mechanistic biology, a sharp distinction is drawn between innate and learned behaviour: the former is assumed to be 'genetically programmed' ...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. Unlike the cons ...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 revolutionary, and has sold more than a million copies worldwide. Almost ever ...
