The Science Delusion
By Steve Marshall
Millions of people around the world claim personal
experience of unexplained phenomena, which can be as simple as ‘knowing’ who is
calling them when the telephone rings. Mainstream science can provide no explanation
for this, other than dismissing it as mere delusion. Rupert Sheldrake, after
many years of investigating telepathy, the unexplained powers of animals and
human precognition, believes that he can. Sheldrake claims that his theory of
‘morphic resonance’ not only explains these widespread phenomena, it also shows
how simple organic forms can self-organise into more complex ones, as an
addition to Darwin’s process of Natural Selection. According to Sheldrake:
“The formation of
habits depends on a process called morphic resonance. Similar patterns of
activity resonate across space and time with subsequent patterns. This
hypothesis applies to all self-organising systems, including atoms, molecules,
crystals, cells, plants, animals and animal societies. All draw upon a
collective memory and in turn contribute to it. A growing crystal of copper
sulphate, for example, is in resonance with countless previous crystals of
copper sulphate, and follows the same habits of crystal organisation, the same
lattice structure. A growing oak seedling follows the habits of growth and
development of previous oaks. When an orb-web spider starts spinning its web,
it follows the habits of countless ancestors, resonating across space and time.
The more people who learn a new skill, such as snowboarding, the easier will it
be for others to learn it because of morphic resonance from previous
snowboarders.”
There is far more to morphic resonance than this, but I’m
not the one to explain, as I have to admit I don’t understand all of its many
aspects. Sheldrake believes that memories are not stored in the brain but
somewhere outside of it; the brain recalls them not as a hard drive does, by
playing back physically-stored electrical signals, but more like a television
that tunes into transmitted signals and decodes them as memories. It does this
by morphic resonance. Here, there are strong similarities with Carl Jung’s
theory of the collective unconscious and archetypes. Jung’s ideas were accepted
(if rather half-heartedly) by many scientists of his day; although Sheldrake
does get support from some of his peers, it tends to come privately. His
explorations into the liminal areas of science are particularly unpopular with
dogmatic sceptics, who regard the work as ‘pseudoscience’ and “outside the
scope of scientific experiment’.
