The Presence of the Past: A New Science of Life By Brian Simpson
As a biology and maths teacher, I have dipped into both of these books from time to time: Rupert Sheldrake, A New Science of Life, (1981), and The Presence of the Past, (1998). I recall A New Science of Life causing a stir among the stuffy, pompous academics at the time, with one review saying something along the lines, if my memory serves me well, that this is a book for “burning.” Who in science would want to allude to attitudes of the past that oozed intolerance?
Sheldrake’s book caused heart burn among the intellectuals because he set out to challenge the ruling materialist paradigm, centred around Neo-Darwinism, of random genetic mutations and natural selection explaining all. According to Sheldrake, this explains very little; of course, there is natural selection and genetic changes in populations, at a micro level, but the real challenge is to explain the origin and persistence of form, the morphology of things. Indeed, in some respects Neo-Darwinism already presupposes that forms exist, which are then selected, so the problem is ignored rather than addressed. Sheldrake goes into detail in both books to show that mechanism has clear limits, and that an alternative explanation is needed.
He proposes that there are real morphogenetic fields that have measurable physical effects. These fields, by what he calls morphic resonance, a resonance from the past forms, are responsible for the organisation of all systems, biological, chemical and physical. As explained in detail in The Presence of the Past, these field-structures come from past morphogenetic fields, affect existing systems, the hypothesis of formative causation.
Even back in 1981, Sheldrake presented evidence for the theory, namely that rats in a laboratory in, say, London, learnt to perform a task, similar types of rats elsewhere should also learn the task quicker. Over the years, Sheldrake performed various experiments test his theory, which were largely successful.
Yet, today, Sheldrake’s position is not discussed much, and it is business as usual in biology, Neo-Darwinism forever, or at least until the present regime of academics die off. In science, most paradigms are replaced in this way, rather than by rational persuasion. They say that the acceptance of special relativity is
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