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Science Set Free: 10 Paths to New Discovery, by Rupert Sheldrake
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The bestselling author of Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home offers an intriguing new assessment of modern day science that will radically change the way we view what is possible.
In�Science Set Free (originally published to acclaim�in the UK as The Science Delusion), Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, one of the world's most innovative scientists, shows the ways in which science is being constricted by assumptions that have, over the years, hardened into dogmas. Such dogmas are not only limiting, but�dangerous for the future of humanity.
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According to these principles, all of reality is material or physical; the world is a machine, made up of inanimate matter; nature is purposeless; consciousness is nothing but the physical activity of the brain; free will is an illusion; God exists only as an idea in human minds, imprisoned within our skulls.
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But should science be a belief-system, or a method of enquiry? Sheldrake shows that the materialist ideology is moribund; under its sway, increasingly expensive research is reaping diminishing returns while societies around the world are paying the price.
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In the skeptical spirit of true science, Sheldrake turns the ten fundamental dogmas of materialism into exciting questions, and shows how all of them open up startling new possibilities for discovery.
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Science Set Free�will radically change your view of what is real and what is possible.
From the Hardcover edition.
- Sales Rank: #35447 in Books
- Published on: 2013-09-03
- Released on: 2013-09-03
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .90" w x 5.20" l, .70 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 400 pages
Review
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"Science is ready to evolve beyond materialism and dogma.�Rupert Sheldrake is a pioneer who is paving the way for the future of the sciences." �
—Deepak Chopra, M.D., author of War of the Worldviews
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“This provocative and engaging book will make you question basic assumptions of Western science. �I agree with Rupert Sheldrake that, among other problems, those assumptions hinder medical progress because they severely limit our understanding of health and illness. I will recommend Science Set Free to my colleagues, students, patients, and friends.”
—Andrew Weil, M.D., author of�Spontaneous Happiness
“Rupert Sheldrake may be to the 21st century what Charles Darwin was to the 19th: �someone who sent science spinning in wonderfully new and fertile directions. �The only thing that is certain in science is that it will change. �In SCIENCE SET FREE, Sheldrake gives us an inspiring picture of what these changes are likely to be."
—Larry Dossey, M.D. author of�Reinventing Medicine
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�“Science is often portrayed as a paragon of intellectual freedom. It's a quaint idea, but it's not true. Some key concepts in science have hardened into unshakeable, unquestioned dogma. Science Set Free�exposes ten of the key dogmas of modern times. If even one is slightly off, then the scientific world is in for a shock, and the aftershocks will have huge impacts on technology, medicine, and religion. Rupert Sheldrake skillfully examines each dogma and argues, with evidence, that all ten dogmas are wrong. After reading this book I am persuaded that he's right. If you agree that science must be freed from the shackles of antiquated beliefs, then read this book. If you don't agree, then read it twice.”
—Dean Radin, Ph.D., author of�The Conscious Universe
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“This is a terrific, engrossing book that throws open the shutters to reveal our world to be so much more intriguing and profound than could ever have been supposed.”
—James Le Fanu, author of The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine
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“Certainly we need to accept the limitations of much current dogma and keep our minds as open as we reasonably can. Sheldrake may help us do so through this well-written, challenging, and always interesting book.”
—Sir Crispin Tickell, Financial Times
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“Rupert Sheldrake does science, humanity and the world at large a considerable favor.”
—Colin Tudge, Ph.D., Independent
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“A fascinating, humane, and refreshing book that any layman can enjoy. . . . Dr. Sheldrake wants to bring energy and excitement back into science . . . He has already done more than any other scientist alive to broaden the appeal of the discipline, and readers should get their teeth into the important and astounding book.”
—Jason Goodwin, Country Life
About the Author
DR. RUPERT SHELDRAKE is a biologist and author of more than 80 technical papers and ten books, including A New Science of Life and Dogs That Know When Their Owners Come Home. He was a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, where he was Director of Studies in cell biology, and also was a Research Fellow of the Royal Society. From 2005-2010, he was the Director of the Perrott-Warrick Project for research on unexplained human abilities, funded from Trinity College, Cambridge. He is currently a Fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences in California, and a Visiting Professor at the Graduate Institute in Connecticut. He is married, has two sons, and lives in London. His web site is www.sheldrake.org.
Excerpt. � Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
Is Nature Mechanical?
Many people who have not studied science are baffled by scientists’ insistence that animals and plants are machines, and that humans are robots too, controlled by computer-like brains with genetically programmed software. It seems more natural to assume that we are living organisms, and so are animals and plants. Organisms are self-organizing; they form and maintain themselves, and have their own ends or goals. Machines, by contrast, are designed by an external mind; their parts are put together by external machine-makers and they have no purposes or ends of their own.
The starting point for modern science was the rejection of the older, organic view of the universe. The machine metaphor became central to scientific thinking, with very far-reaching consequences. In one way it was immensely liberating. New ways of thinking became possible that encouraged the invention of machines and the evolution of technology. In this chapter, I trace the history of this idea, and show what happens when we question it.
Before the seventeenth century, almost everyone took for granted that the universe was like an organism, and so was the earth. In classical, medieval and Renaissance Europe, nature was alive. Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), for example, made this idea explicit: “We can say that the earth has a vegetative soul, and that its flesh is the land, its bones are the structure of the rocks . . . its breathing and its pulse are the ebb and flow of the sea.” William Gilbert (1540–1603), a pioneer of the science of magnetism, was explicit in his organic philosophy of nature: “We consider that the whole universe is animated, and that all the globes, all the stars, and also the noble earth have been governed since the beginning by their own appointed souls and have the motives of self-conservation.”
Even Nicholas Copernicus, whose revolutionary theory of the movement of the heavens, published in 1543, placed the sun at the center rather than the earth was no mechanist. His reasons for making this change were mystical as well as scientific. He thought a central position dignified the sun:
Not unfittingly do some call it the light of the world, others the soul, still others the governor. Tremigistus calls it the visible God: Sophocles’ Electra, the All-seer. And in fact does the sun, seated on his royal throne, guide his family of planets as they circle around him
Copernicus’s revolution in cosmology was a powerful stimulus for the subsequent development of physics. But the shift to the mechanical theory of nature that began after 1600 was much more radical.
For centuries, there had already been mechanical models of some aspects of nature. For example, in Wells Cathedral, in the west of England, there is a still-functioning astronomical clock installed more than six hundred years ago. The clock’s face shows the sun and moon revolving around the earth, against a background of stars. The movement of the sun indicates the time of day, and the inner circle of the clock depicts the moon, rotating once a month. To the delight of visitors, every quarter of an hour, models of jousting knights rush round chasing each other, while a model of a man bangs bells with his heels.
Astronomical clocks were first made in China and in the Arab world, and powered by water. Their construction began in Europe around 1300, but with a new kind of mechanism, operated by weights and escapements. All these early clocks took for granted that the earth was at the center of the universe. They were useful models for telling the time and for predicting the phases of the moon; but no one thought that the universe was really like a clockwork mechanism.
A change from the metaphor of the organism to the metaphor of the machine produced science as we know it: mechanical models of the universe were taken to represent the way the world actually worked. The movements of stars and planets were governed by impersonal mechanical principles, not by souls or spirits with their own lives and purposes.
In 1605, Johannes Kepler summarized his program as follows: “My aim is to show that the celestial machine is to be likened not to a divine organism but rather to clockwork . . . Moreover I show how this physical conception is to be presented through calculation and geometry.”4 Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) agreed that “inexorable, immutable” mathematical laws ruled everything.
The clock analogy was particularly persuasive because clocks work in a self-contained way. They are not pushing or pulling other objects. Likewise the universe performs its work by the regularity of its motions, and is the ultimate time-telling system. Mechanical clocks had a further metaphorical advantage: they were a good example of knowledge through construction, or knowing by doing. Someone who could construct a machine could reconstruct it. Mechanical knowledge was power.
The prestige of mechanistic science did not come primarily from its philosophical underpinnings but from its practical successes, especially in physics. Mathematical modelling typically involves extreme abstraction and simplification, which is easiest to realize with man-made machines or objects. Mathematical mechanics is impressively useful in dealing with relatively simple problems, such as the trajectories of cannonballs or rockets.
One paradigmatic example is billiard-ball physics, which gives a clear account of impacts and collisions of idealized billiard balls in a frictionless environment. Not only is the mathematics simplified, but billiard balls themselves are a very simplified system. The balls are made as round as possible and the table as flat as possible, and there are uniform rubber cushions at the sides of the table, unlike any natural environment. Think of a rock falling down a mountainside for comparison. Moreover, in the real world, billiard balls collide and bounce off each other in games, but the rules of the game and the skills and motives of the players are outside the scope of physics. The mathematical analysis of the balls’ behavior is an extreme abstraction.
From living organisms to biological machines
The vision of mechanical nature developed amid devastating religious wars in seventeenth-century Europe. Mathematical physics was attractive partly because it seemed to provide a way of transcending sectarian conflicts to reveal eternal truths. In their own eyes the pioneers of mechanistic science were finding a new way of understanding the relationship of nature to God, with humans adopting a God-like mathematical omniscience, rising above the limitations of human minds and bodies. As Galileo put it:
When God produces the world, he produces a thoroughly mathematical structure that obeys the laws of number, geometrical figure and quantitative function. Nature is an embodied mathematical system.
But there was a major problem. Most of our experience is not mathematical. We taste food, feel angry, enjoy the beauty of flowers, laugh at jokes. In order to assert the primacy of mathematics, Galileo and his successors had to distinguish between what they called “primary qualities,” which could be described mathematically, such as motion, size and weight, and “secondary qualities,” like color and smell, which were subjective. They took the real world to be objective, quantitative and mathematical. Personal experience in the lived world was subjective, the realm of opinion and illusion, outside the realm of science.
Ren� Descartes (1596–1650) was the principal proponent of the mechanical or mechanistic philosophy of nature. It first came to him in a vision on November 10, 1619, when he was “filled with enthusiasm and discovered the foundations of a marvellous science.” He saw the entire universe as a mathematical system, and later envisaged vast vortices of swirling subtle matter, the ether, carrying around the planets in their orbits.
Descartes took the mechanical metaphor much further than Kepler or Galileo by extending it into the realm of life. He was fascinated by the sophisticated machinery of his age, such as clocks, looms and pumps. As a youth he designed mechanical models to simulate animal activity, such as a pheasant pursued by a spaniel. Just as Kepler projected the image of man-made machinery onto the cosmos, Descartes projected it onto animals. They, too, were like clockwork.8 Activities like the beating of a dog’s heart, its digestion and breathing were programmed mechanisms. The same principles applied to human bodies.
Descartes cut up living dogs in order to study their hearts, and reported his observations as if his readers might want to replicate them: “If you slice off the pointed end of the heart of a live dog, and insert a finger into one of the cavities, you will feel unmistakably that every time the heart gets shorter it presses the finger, and every time it gets longer it stops pressing it.”
He backed up his arguments with a thought experiment: first he imagined man-made automata that imitated the movements of animals, and then argued that if they were made well enough they would be indistinguishable from real animals:
If any such machines had the organs and outward shapes of a monkey or of some other animal that lacks reason, we should have no way of knowing that they did not possess entirely the same nature as those animals.
With arguments like these, Descartes laid the foundations of mechanistic biology and medicine that are still orthodox today. However, the machine theory of life was less readily accepted in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries than the machine theory of the universe. Especially in England, the idea of animal-machines was considered eccentric. Descartes’ doctrine seemed to justify cruelty to animals, including vivisection, and it was said that the test of his followers was whether they would kick their dogs.
As the philosopher Daniel Dennett summarized it, “Descartes . . . held that animals were in fact just elaborate machines . . . It was only our non-mechanical, non-physical minds that make human beings (and only human beings) intelligent and conscious. This was actually a subtle view, most of which would readily be defended by zoologists today, but it was too revolutionary for Descartes’ contemporaries.”
We are so used to the machine theory of life that it is hard to appreciate what a radical break Descartes made. The prevailing theories of his time took for granted that living organisms were organisms, animate beings with their own souls. Souls gave organisms their purposes and powers of self-organization. From the Middle Ages right up into the seventeenth century, the prevailing theory of life taught in the universities of Europe followed the Greek philosopher Aristotle and his leading Christian interpreter, Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–74), according to whom the matter in plant or animal bodies was shaped by the organisms’ souls. For Aquinas, the soul was the form of the body. The soul acted like an invisible mold that shaped the plant or the animal as it grew and attracted it toward its mature form.
The souls of animals and plants were natural, not supernatural. According to classical Greek and medieval philosophy, and also in William Gilbert’s theory of magnetism, even magnets had souls. The soul within and around them gave them their powers of attraction and repulsion. When a magnet was heated and lost its magnetic properties, it was as if the soul had left it, just as the soul left an animal body when it died. We now talk in terms of magnetic fields. In most respects fields have replaced the souls of classical and medieval philosophy.
Before the mechanistic revolution, there were three levels of explanation: bodies, souls and spirits. Bodies and souls were part of nature. Spirits were non-material but interacted with embodied beings through their souls. The human spirit, or “rational soul,” according to Christian theology, was potentially open to the Spirit of God.
After the mechanistic revolution, there were only two levels of explanation: bodies and spirits. Three layers were reduced to two by removing souls from nature, leaving only the human “rational soul” or spirit. The abolition of souls also separated humanity from all other animals, which became inanimate machines. The “rational soul” of man was like an immaterial ghost in the machinery of the human body.
How could the rational soul possibly interact with the brain? Descartes speculated that their interaction occurred in the pineal gland. He thought of the soul as like a little man inside the pineal gland controlling the plumbing of the brain. He compared the nerves to water pipes, the cavities in the brain to storage tanks, the muscles to mechanical springs, and breathing to the movements of a clock. The organs of the body were like the automata in seventeenth-century water gardens, and the immaterial man within was like the fountain keeper:
External objects, which by their mere presence stimulate [the body’s] sense organs . . . are like visitors who enter the grottoes of these fountains and unwittingly cause the movements which take place before their eyes. For they cannot enter without stepping on certain tiles which are so arranged that if, for example, they approach a Diana who is bathing they will cause her to hide in the reeds. And finally, when a rational soul is present in this machine it will have its principal seat in the brain, and reside there like the fountain keeper who must be stationed at the tanks to which the fountain’s pipes return if he wants to produce, or prevent, or change their movements in some way.
The final step in the mechanistic revolution was to reduce two levels of explanation to one. Instead of a duality of matter and mind, there is only matter. This is the doctrine of materialism, which came to dominate scientific thinking in the second half of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, despite their nominal materialism, most scientists remained dualists, and continued to use dualistic metaphors.
The little man, or homunculus, inside the brain remained a common way of thinking about the relation of body and mind, but the metaphor moved with the times and adapted to new technologies. In the mid-twentieth century the homunculus was usually a telephone operator in the telephone exchange of the brain, and he saw projected images of the external world as if he were in a cinema, as in a book published in 1949 called The Secret of Life: The Human Machine and How It Works.21 In an exhibit in 2010 at the Natural History Museum in London called “How You Control Your Actions,” you looked through a Perspex window in the forehead of a model man. Inside was a cockpit with banks of dials and controls, and two empty seats, presumably for you, the pilot, and your co-pilot in the other hemisphere. The ghosts in the machine were implicit rather than explicit, but obviously this was no explanation at all because the little men inside brains would themselves have to have little men inside their brains, and so on in an infinite regress.
If thinking of little men and women inside brains seems too na�ve, then the brain itself is personified. Many popular articles and books on the nature of the mind say “the brain perceives,” or “the brain decides,” while at the same time arguing that the brain is just a machine, like a computer.22 For example, the atheist philosopher Anthony Grayling thinks that “brains secrete religious and superstitious belief” because they are “hardwired” to do so:
Most helpful customer reviews
136 of 142 people found the following review helpful.
10 reasons for reading this book
By Pete Sargasso
SCIENCE SET FREE is an excellent work, well worth the reading. Here are ten reasons why.
1. Good writing. The sine-qua-non of all good books... and the test is that once started it is hard to put down.
2. Personal. One can feel the engagement of the writer in the prose. He is there in light touches of humour: but more importantly, he is there in his conviction, in his willingness to share data and in his reporting of the way his work has been marginalized - not because it is wrong- but because it challenges some of the current assumptions of Science.
3. Coherent Structure. All the chapters follow the same pattern, and this gives the book a special kind of unity. Each chapter begins with a question followed by a historical analysis of how that question has been answered in different epochs, and leading to an up-to-date analysis of the available data.
4. Superb bibliography. Enough reading here for a lifetime.
5. Breaks new ground. No one can tell where research will lead, but an openness to fresh ideas is necessary for progress.
6. Educational. Whether one agrees with Sheldrake or not, SCIENCE SET FREE serves as an introduction to many areas of scientific research. Where the jargon of science is necessary to avoid confusion, he explains not only the meaning of a given term, but its etymology. That is a courtesy to the reader and greatly facilitates understanding.
7. Interdisciplinary. The text moves easily from scientific research to conclusions from ancient and modern philosophy. Also, it is not restricted to one science but ranges from physics to botany, to the experiences of shamans, to telepathy, and yes, to religion somewhat.... Hence we gain a comprehensive picture. The quest is for knowledge and understanding with an open mind, but with a humanitarian conscience to guide it.
8 Challenges the imagination.
9 Tackles subjects rarely tackled. Telepathy, precognition, etc.
10 Explores and explains Morphic resonance, an exciting hypothesis which may, in time, be conclusively proven.
Basically, Morphic Resonance argues that similar patterns of activity resonate across time and space with subsequent patterns. This hypothesis applies to all self-organizing systems, including atoms, molecules, crystals, cells, plants, animals, and animal societies. All draw on a collective memory and in turn contribute to it. Thus, when an orb web spider starts spinning its web, it follows the habits of countless ancestors, resonating with them directly across space and time. The more people who learn a new skill, the easier will it be for others to learn it because of morphic resonance.
What excited my attention regarding this is that it explained the way that rehearsals for a play can suddenly come alive. I have noticed this often. At a certain point, repetition becomes resonance, and the whole play/rehearsal moves forwards with greater coherence. Actors suddenly find they know their lines and the whole emotional tone lifts. When the experience is too fragmented this does not happen.
And of course, if Sheldrake's theory is correct, then the more people who begin to think and seek for morphic resonance, the more it should manifest.
157 of 167 people found the following review helpful.
Readable, fascinating and crucial
By Peter White
We all have assumptions that frame how and what we know; without them we couldn't think at all much less discover a cure for Alzheimer's. But assumptions can take on a life of their own and choke off the pursuit of knowledge; especially vulnerable are those who sit atop powerful hierarchies for long periods of time. The medieval Church required astronomers to assume that the earth was at the center of the solar system. Science overthrew such groundless imperatives but today seems unable to disenthrall itself from its own long and tautly held assumptions. In "Science Set Free," Rupert Sheldrake names ten of these assumptions and explains, without raising his voice, why science needs to have another look at each one.
His arguments make sense to me. For example, the first assumption Sheldrake takes on is the hypothesis of materialism: the idea that only matter and energy exist and that the cosmos is a machine with no original purpose and a bleak entropic future. Under this assumption, held as an unassailable dogma by science, existence is purposeless, consciousness is an illusion, we have no free will, and God is out of the question. These are not small issues.
"Science Set Free" takes us through the history of materialist theory, showing how it emerged in the Renaissance in a religious context, acquired self-confidence in the deism of the Enlightenment, and in the 19th and 20th centuries attained megalomania, leading to the notions of reality mentioned above. Sheldrake rejects materialism and depicts nature as an organic whole with boundless evolutionary potential. His arguments are based on the sound science in which he is grounded as a Cambridge and Harvard-trained biologist; but what I admire especially is that he is also a man of "scientia sacra," which reveres the poetry and beauty of life and knows that there is more to knowledge than measurement.
"Science Set Free" is readable, fascinating and, no matter what you believe, crucial.
97 of 106 people found the following review helpful.
Powerful challenge to the materialist worldview
By Robert McLuhan
For those of us who are suspicious of the claims of materialism it's astonishing, and also heartening, to hear a scientist agree that it's a hidebound ideology, dismiss the belief in determinism as a 'delusion' and call on the 'high priests' of science to abandon their 'fantasy of omniscience'.
This all sounds rather rhetorical, but this is as polemical as his language gets; the book certainly has little about religion. For the most part it's a dispassionate expose of materialism's failures, and a plea for scientists to open up to new thinking. Despite his reputation as a heretic, gained from his controversial theory of morphic resonance and his psychic research, Sheldrake has impeccable credentials as a biochemist - Cambridge, Harvard, ground-breaking research and a stint in India helping to develop high-yield crops - that demand respect.
Sheldrake identifies ten core beliefs that scientists take for granted: that people and animals are complex mechanisms rather than goal-driven organisms; that matter is unconscious and human consciousness an illusion; that the laws of nature are fixed; that nature is purposeless; that all biological inheritance is carried via material structures like genes, and so on. Each is the basis of a chapter, in which he draws attention to unresolved tensions, problems and dilemmas. Most scientists think these will eventually be ironed out. However Sheldrake argues they are symptoms of a deeper malaise, and that the failure of the materialist model to make good on its predictions will eventually lead to its demise.
A key idea for Sheldrake is the existence of information fields that act as a kind of universal memory. Once a form or activity has come into being it provides the blueprint for other similar effects, which may then multiply with ease. The classic example is the formation of crystals, for which Sheldrake has elsewhere provided evidence, but in principle he thinks it can apply to anything, from the development of organisms to the acquisition of new skills.
This has implications for cosmology, he believes. Far from being set in stone since the Big Bang, nature's laws should be considered as evolving habits that grow stronger through repetition; the universe is an ongoing creative process, of which human creativity is part. In biology the machine metaphors beloved of materialist thinkers are misleading, he insists. No machine starts from small beginnings, grows, forms new structures within itself and then reproduces itself. Yet plants and animals do this all the time and to many people - especially those like pet owners and gardeners who deal with them on a daily basis - it's 'blindingly obvious' that they are living organisms. For scientists to see them as machines propelled only by ordinary physics and chemistry is an act of faith.
Despite the excitement over gene science in the past two decades, and the $100 billion biotechnology boom that it fuelled, only a very limited genetic basis has been discovered for human disease, he points out. The genes associated with development have turned out to be almost identical in mice, humans, flies and reptiles, offering no insights as to why these forms differ so dramatically.
On the subject of consciousness Sheldrake points out that even materialists can't decide what causes it, which is why there are so many rival theories. He quotes Galen Strawson, himself a materialist, who is scathing about the way fellow philosophers are willing to deny the reality of their own experience - testament to the power of the materialist faith. He approves Strawson's interest in panspychism, the doctrine that all matter is invested with mental as well as physical aspects.
There is just one chapter on psychic research: this covers telepathy and precognition, with especial focus on animal telepathy. (The sense of being stared at is covered in a chapter on consciousness.) There is also a chapter on mechanistic medicine, in which he acknowledges its record of success, but questions whether it is the only kind that works.
This is a superb and timely book. My own academic research has convinced me that psychic phenomena genuinely occur, and that the rejection of it is driven largely by ideology and personal antipathy. That being the case, it's hard to conceive that the materialist model is the whole story. Most scientists will brush off Sheldrake's arguments as a persistence of discredited vitalism, but it may encourage some to be open about the more sympathetic views that Sheldrake claims they often express to him in private.
There's also a need for a book like this that's authoritative, wide ranging and accessible, and that challenges the materialist paradigm for the benefit of a wider audience. That applies especially to young people whose ideas have not yet been shaped by it, and their curiosity tamed and dulled as a result. It would be good to think that their generation may have a greater opportunity to question the prevailing dogmas and perhaps eventually forge a new science, one that describes more closely what humans observe and feel about their world.
(Robert McLuhan is author of Randi's Prize: What sceptics say about the paranormal, why they are wrong and why it matters)
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