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Rupert Sheldrake... could he be on to something?

gg5000

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I've read only one book by Sheldrake and I've seen a few of his videos. My take (and I'm no expert on his body of work) is that he makes a good argument for telepathy and other similar phenomena being a natural, not paranormal way of communication that members of the same species have.

I'm not here to defend Sheldrake at all. Whether his methods to scientifically prove this point are valid or invalid, is beside the point. I don't think that he's got much of an intention with this other than selling books, bless his heart.

I am interested in the core belief that there are natural phenomena that we have yet to explain in scientific ways. After all, things like cancer and any number of other natural phenomena continue to evade solutions and clear understanding, even with the vast amounts of money, research and man-hours devoted to them scientifically.

Sometimes as skeptics some of us are too quick to dismiss things as untrue or foolish or coincidence, when we may not have the full picture. Now, we can usually spot a scammer very quickly given the claims they make for profit, taking advantage of the less aware. But that's not what I'm talking about.

I believe that as a real skeptic, one should be critical of the scientific institutions (not the method, of course) because after all, they are only people too, with political views, agendas, budgets, grants to keep, reputations to uphold within their circles, etc.
 
gg5000 said:
Sometimes as skeptics some of us are too quick to dismiss things as untrue or foolish or coincidence, when we may not have the full picture. Now, we can usually spot a scammer very quickly given the claims they make for profit, taking advantage of the less aware. But that's not what I'm talking about.
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How quick is "too quick"?
If dismissing as "untrue or foolish or coincidence", things for which there is no objective evidence is too quick, then guilty as charged.
 
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I think those criticised by skeptics can feel it was all too 'quick', but it's like arguing in threads on this forum for years on end - it's all the same old same old. Sheldrake is totally in the same zone.

The first question - is there a phenomena to begin enquiry into? Never mind the books and videos and talks and threads to describe it. Is it there at all?
 
If he turned out right he would rank up there with Galileo, Newton, Maxwell and Einstein. This would be a revolutionary discovery. So where are the papers dealing with studies that successfully repeat and take new directions from his experiments? Where is the flood of interest from scientists and corporations who could benefit from his conclusions were they right?
 
Yes. Sheldrake is onto the fact that one can dupe the credulous for profit.
 
I read the title and was just about to agree when I noticed the "to".
 
Forget all the psi stuff and consider his idea of morphic resonance. He tries to explain all manner of things with it. It's virtually unfalsifiable.

Take bird migration. Do we really need morphic resonance, or can we explain it with known and understood mechanisms?

How about fetal development? Do we need morphic resonance or are genes and their control mechanisms sufficient?

~~ Paul
 
I just did a search for him in pubmed. The results are not very favourable for him. He has had only a handful of papers published. This means two in 2009, one in 2005, one in 2004, one in 2000. Not sure how many were peer reviewed.
 
rjh01 said:
I just did a search for him in pubmed. The results are not very favourable for him. He has had only a handful of papers published. This means two in 2009, one in 2005, one in 2004, one in 2000. Not sure how many were peer reviewed.
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Another interesting measure might be how many times his papers have been referenced. Anyone know how to find that out?
 
And that's exactly the thing, Paul C. A. Sheldrake's idea of Morphic Resonance is very interesting, and indeed, like you say, tough to falsify. The homing of pigeons is an interesting example. Nobody TRULY knows exactly how pigeons are able to find their way home from hundreds of miles away. Sheldrake claims to have tested the homing of pigeons in a series of ways:

-Visual impairment: He covered their eyes and they would still home, even when they'd knock around against trees and light poles near their home.
-Aural impairment: He put wax in their ears and those pigeons made it home normally.
-Olfactory impairment: He severed their olfactory nerves and those pigeons came back at the normal rate.
-Magnetic disturbance: He strapped magnets to their bodies so that (one would believe) if the pigeons were using the earth's magnetism to locate their home, they would be hindered by the magnets in their bodies. But again, those birds came home at the standard rate of speed.
-In combinations: Sheldrake said he would do visual and magnetic, and other combinations of impairments to the pigeons, and again... they came home.

The thing I like the most about his explanation was that he said "I DON'T KNOW WHAT IT IS" [but that these findings seem to support his theory of morphic resonance].

Hard to argue with that.

Sheldrake is a very persuasive guy. The late Stephen J. Gould was a big fan of Sheldrake and would invite him to his lectures to argue his theories (Gould thought he was entirely wrong, but enjoyed the way he'd make a case for his findings). Again. I don't know anything about the veracity of those claims, or whether any satisfactorily written peer reviews exist about the experiments I mentioned. Therefore I cannot take a strong stand on this. I can tell you that if Gould was a fan because of the way Sheldrake can make a case for himself, he must at some level have some valid scientific arguments, otherwise Gould would not bother.The other side of this is that Sheldrake is very much against the scientific establishment, and that could be a reason for his lack of participation in the peer review process, etc.

Or he's just a sham. But that's why I'd like to discuss it here.
 
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I am interested in the core belief that there are natural phenomena that we have yet to explain in scientific ways. After all, things like cancer and any number of other natural phenomena continue to evade solutions and clear understanding, even with the vast amounts of money, research and man-hours devoted to them scientifically.
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I think you are confusing "explaining" and "solving." There are any number of cancers we can cure and even though we can't prevent/cure some others, we certainly know what causes them, where they come from and why.
 
Just having a quick look at a description of his book, he doesn't seem to take into account the ideas of self organisation and Alan Turing's mathematical models when it comes to discussing morphogenesis.

Sheldrake's primary focus in this book is morphogenesis, which includes both embryonic cell differentiation and the development of the embryo as a whole.[21] In chapter 2, "Three Theories of Morphogenesis," Sheldrake states that there are three historical approaches to morphogenesis: materialism (August Weismann), vitalism (Hans Driesch), and organicism (Alfred North Whitehead). Sheldrake describes his own hypothesis as fitting within the third tradition,[22] which rejects a vitalistic principle exclusive to life but also denies that a strictly materialistic explanation will ever account for the holistic nature of organic forms.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Sheldrake#Morphic_resonance

And as has been mentioned, non materialistic explanations are non falsifiable. If accepted they would be a blind alley at which point we give up trying to explain things - much like God of the gaps arguments would.
 
The question is, are only falsifiable explanations relevant to form?
Artists would disagree.
In order to conceptualize organisms, their growth and behavior it is appropriate to use
what we actually see as a starting point and more importantly an anchor to our further abstract wanderings into modelling, biochemistry and genetics.
It is after all the organism that interacts with the world.

Sheldrake is part of a long line of scientists/thinkers with this in mind (Goethe, Jan Smuts, D'arcy Thompson, Kurt Goldstein, Henri Bortoft, David Bohm, Craig Holdrege)
His ideas are useful from this point of view and I can understand Gould being a fan of shooting the breeze with Sheldrake. Personally I find his language boring.
I much prefer

Brian Godwin (http://www.amazon.com/How-Leopard-Changed-Its-Spots/dp/0691088098)

or the various writers on this website
http://www.natureinstitute.org/nature/index.htm

These writers are not trying to provide explanations as much as inspiration.
 
But this is not art we are discussing, !Kaggen. Art is not a way of knowing that leads us to make useful predictions about the world, like when and where the next eclipse will be or the likely location of a mineral resource.

The problem with a non falsifiable explanation is that its ability to accommodate every possible future observation means it also lacks any predictive utility. A good hypothesis or theory should tell us the way the world must be if it is true, it must exclude some things.

Karl Popper, the founder of falsification, gave this example:
I may illustrate this by two very different examples of human behavior: that of a man who pushes a child into the water with the intention of drowning it; and that of a man who sacrifices his life in an attempt to save the child. Each of these two cases can be explained with equal ease in Freudian and Adlerian terms. According to Freud the first man suffered from repression (say, of some component of his Oedipus complex), while the second man had achieved sublimation. According to Adler the first man suffered from feelings of inferiority (producing perhaps the need to prove to himself that he dared to commit some crime), and so did the second man (whose need was to prove to himself that he dared to rescue the child). I could not think of any human behavior which could not be interpreted in terms of either theory. It was precisely this fact—that they always fitted, that they were always confirmed—which in the eyes of their admirers constituted the strongest argument in favor of these theories. It began to dawn on me that this apparent strength was in fact their weakness.
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http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/popper_falsification.html

While this may give us a self-satisfied feeling of having explained something, how could such an idea be used to predict human behavior? It evidently could not.

Compare this kind of hypothesis, as Popper did, to a falsifiable one like Einsteins general relativity. General relativity made a bold prediction about the way starlight would be bent as it passed by the sun. Given suitably sensitive equipment this had to occur or it was back to the drawing board or dustbin for the idea. Because of this explanation's ability to tell us the way the world must be, it plays an important role in applications like GPS satellite technology.
 
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!Kaggen said:
Brian Godwin (http://www.amazon.com/How-Leopard-Changed-Its-Spots/dp/0691088098)
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I don't know much about how your following names relate but ideas about emergent complexity through self-organisation, like your linked book, are scientific and do make falsifiable predictions, as well as being amenable to mathematical and computer modeling. In my first post I mentioned my curiosity about Sheldrake's seeming omission of such ideas in his discussion of morphogenesis. This is based only on a cursory examination through Wiki so I could well be wrong. Do you have more information on this?

ETA: It looks like Godwin's book might be a bit "out there". From what I understand about the ideas of evolution and self organisation, they sit well together. Might give the book a read though.
 
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gg5000 said:
Sheldrake claims to have tested the homing of pigeons in a series of ways:
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If he does claim that, it's not on his webpage: http://www.sheldrake.org/Onlineexp/offline/pigeons/index.html

Here he refers vaguely to experiments done by others and makes suggestions for future experiments disproving conventional ideas.

Personally I'd want a review of the current understanding of homing instincts from someone other than Sheldrake before giving his ideas any credit.
 
bjornart said:
If he does claim that, it's not on his webpage: http://www.sheldrake.org/Onlineexp/offline/pigeons/index.html

Here he refers vaguely to experiments done by others and makes suggestions for future experiments disproving conventional ideas.

Personally I'd want a review of the current understanding of homing instincts from someone other than Sheldrake before giving his ideas any credit.
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This is relatively recent: http://jeb.biologists.org/content/209/15/2888.full
 
Sideroxylon said:
But this is not art we are discussing, !Kaggen. Art is not a way of knowing that leads us to make useful predictions about the world, like when and where the next eclipse will be or the likely location of a mineral resource.

The problem with a non falsifiable explanation is that its ability to accommodate every possible future observation means it also lacks any predictive utility. A good hypothesis or theory should tell us the way the world must be if it is true, it must exclude some things.

Karl Popper, the founder of falsification, gave this example:

http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/popper_falsification.html

While this may give us a self-satisfied feeling of having explained something, how could such an idea be used to predict human behavior? It evidently could not.

Compare this kind of hypothesis, as Popper did, to a falsifiable one like Einsteins general relativity. General relativity made a bold prediction about the way starlight would be bent as it passed by the sun. Given suitably sensitive equipment this had to occur or it was back to the drawing board or dustbin for the idea. Because of this explanation's ability to tell us the way the world must be, it plays an important role in applications like GPS satellite technology.
Click to expand...

Yes, I know all about Popper and falsification.

I disagree that imagination is not useful.

Imagining counterfactuals is very important in childhood development and could be argued as child psychologist Prof. Alison Gopnik (http://www.alisongopnik.com/) does that it is the foundation of the scientific method.

The observation skills that artists develop could be very useful for scientists especially those working in the field where noticing detail could easily result in huge savings in time and effort. Some of the most important contributors to our understanding of plant systematics have been amateur naturalists with a keen eye for drawing plants.

It is not an either or argument but a matter of using skill learnt from art training in science. In my experience the reverse could also be beneficial.
 
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