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drdave@truthreallymatters.com

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This month’s essay (May, 2024) follows below . . .

 

 

 

The Fringes of Science

 

Rupert Sheldrake has come to know many scientists, some ruthlessly ambitious, others kind and generous, some narrow-minded, cowardly, others brave, visionary.  In short, scientists are people.  That’s my experience, too.  The practice of science includes competition for resources and for prestige, is constrained by peer-group pressures, often involves politics, and unfortunately is rife with temptations, just like any other high-stakes enterprise.

In science, as in other fields, the facts do not speak for themselves.  Prevailing scientific narratives depend on rhetorical skills, power structures, and alliances, in addition to experimental and theoretical competence.

Such realities form the background of Sheldrake’s exploration of scientific dogmas that he believes should be questioned and, perhaps, discarded, in his 2012 book Science Set Free:  10 Paths to New Discovery.  The book is a gutsy challenge to materialistic dogmas from a secular point of view . . . Sheldrake is not a Christian, and certainly not a creationist.

Some of his calls to open up new lines of research are intensely practical.  For example, studies of East African women show they can carry up to 20 percent of their body weight on the head – “for free” – without burning more energy compared with walking.  Also, they can carry 70 percent of their body weight using 50 percent less energy than a U.S. Army infantryman with a backpack.  It involves a special type of gait, but Sheldrake questions whether there might be more to it.  He also asks why this skill isn’t taught in every Western phys-ed class.  He suggests that since the skill is found in low-status 3^rd world cultures, it is disrespected in ours.

Sheldrake’s vital point is that a spirit of inquiry has been choked off by the delusions that science has answered all the vital questions short of particle and cosmological physics.  And that we cannot learn from those less educated in mainstream science.

Rupert Sheldrake is a cell biologist with a successful career at Cambridge University and as a research fellow of the Royal Society.  He’s been attracted to puzzles far beyond his own field, however, discovering problems that defy the materialist dogma that all reality is merely physical.  The dogmas that he challenges in his book include the following:  people and animals are just machines; human consciousness is an illusion of merely material activities within brains; nature is purposeless; telepathy does not exist; and memories are just material traces destroyed at death.

He  points out that materialism is a philosophical assumption.  It is not, indeed it cannot be demonstated by the scientific method.  (My synopsis of the scientific method:  Science employs techniques of counting, weighing, and measuring, observing results, creating hypotheses to organize and to explain phenomena, and designing experiments to validate some hypotheses at the expense of others.  Human creativity, decision-making, and judgment are always in play.)  Since human scientists must employ logic, mathematics, and judgment calls on experimental design, “goodness” of data, and validity of conclusions – which are all non-material – consciousness, personhood, and nonmaterial qualities permeate the existence of science.  Thus, ‘science,’ which is an immaterial concept using immaterial methods, clearly cannot ‘prove’ materialism.

Sheldrake cites the philosopher David Chalmers, who calls the very existence of subjective experience the “hard problem,” hard because it defies explanation via mechanisms.  An elementary example:  Even if we understand the physics and biochemistry of how eyes respond to red light, “the experience of redness is not accounted for.”  I’m partially color blind and it is quite evident to me and to my wife that I don’t see the Fall colors the same way she does.  How do I explain the difference in redness that I experience?  How can she explain to me what she sees so that I fully comprehend?  Such experiences are entirely internal.

Sheldrake notes that within the life sciences, molecular biologists have the preeminent status.  The molecules of life (DNA, proteins) are foundational to making life work.  Indeed, scientists cannot explain how life works unless they can understand it at that nanotechnological level.  Then they can “hand the baton to chemists and physicists, who will reduce the properties of molecules to those of atoms and subatomic particles.”  This is the way of materialistic reduction and the framework of evolutionary thinking.  How did it all get started?  Start with the Big Bang and elementary particles, and develop a story bottom-up to generate planets, life, and ecosystems.

Yet it is clear that life had to be designed top-down.  Living systems are the most complicated of all systems, far exceeding the human-designed systems of buildings, automobilies, supercomputers, and cities.  None of those systems make any sense if they must be explained by bottom-up processes.  (As I’ve written much about in the Creation vs. Evolution section of this web site.)

Sheldrake suggests that trying to explain organisms in terms of their chemical parts “is rather like trying to understand a computer by grinding it up and analyzing its component elements, such as copper, germanium, and silicon.”  Such a process will never reveal the circuit diagrams, nor its programs, and especially nothing of the purposes for which it was built.

Yet Sheldrake is an evolutionist, perhaps something of a pantheist.  He suggests that the Gaia hypothesis is a recognition of the earth as a living organism, as is perhaps the solar system and the rest of the universe.  But when he gets mystical in his writing, he seems to avoid specifics.

Rupert dabbles in cosmology in the chapter, “Is the total amount of matter and energy the same?”  He observes that in cosmological models, the density of dark energy in the expanding universe is assumed to be constant.  But since the universe is expanding, the total amount of energy would be increasing.  Such questions do not seem to be testable at present, though.

More down to earth, he cites Paul Webb’s studies in the late 1970s on energy balance in humans, measuring caloric intake, exercise, metabolism, etc.  Despite extraordinarily careful efforts, he could not account for an excess 27% in energy expenditure.  Did life have access to unmeasurable energy reserves?  Most would conclude that the measurements were simply not thorough enough.  But Sheldrake considers the question open enough to warrant more research.

He cites historical examples of religious mystics who lived for extended periods with no food, even years.  Much controversy surrounds such cases, but Sheldrake asks, “Are there new forms of energy that are not at present recognized by science?”  “If such a form of energy exists, how is it related to the principles of physics, including the zero-point field?”

In the chapter, “Are the laws of nature fixed?”, Sheldrake recounts the recent history of the variation in the determination of the gravitational constant, G.  Between 1973 and 2010 the experimentally determined values fluctuated by 1.1 percent.  This is a huge variation, considering the supposed precision of the measurements, which are typically registered to three, four, or even five decimal places.  Does G vary in time?  A group at MIT discovered a daily rhythm; if more research is done, perhaps other variations might be discovered.  “The variation of fundamental constants is now a matter of serious debate among physicists.”

Sheldrake controversially (perhaps wildly) proposes his own “hypothesis” for variations, patterns within cosmology, physics, and even biology and behavior.  He calls it “morphic resonance,” without ever explaining exactly what that means. The root word of “morphic” means form or structure, as “morphological” is used in biology.  Sheldrake explains, “Similar patterns of activity resonate across time and space” to affect what we see now.  There is a ‘memory’ in a morphic field that links past effects to the present.  This applies to “all self-organizing systems, including atoms, molecules, crystals, cells, plants, animals, and animal societies.”  (He’s quite bold to call all of those ‘self-organizing systems.’)

As an example, he mentions that a growing crystal of copper sulfate is in resonance with countless previous crystals, to facilitate the same growth pattern and lattice structure.  Similarly for a growing oak seed or the spinning of a web by an orb-weaving spider.  “It follows the habits of countless ancestors, resonating with them directly across space and time.”  Morphic resonance also applies to human learning, he suggests, for example in that the more people that learn how to snowboard, the easier it will be for others to pick up the skill.

Morphic fields, he asserts, shape the development of plants and animals, instincts and behavior, social group behavior, and are akin to quantum fields, probabilistically imposing patterns on what might seem to be random events.  Certainly evolutionary events would fall under the morphic resonance umbrella.

This seems to be simply mysticism, if not mumbo-jumbo, to avoid both the materialistic worldview and that of biblical creation and top-down design for the universe, planets, and life itself.

To his credit, Sheldrake attempts some specific examples of the effect.  Turanose, a sugar, known for decades as a liquid, was first crystallized in the 1920s after much difficulty.  Thereafter, it was synthesized readily all over the world.  The idea is that, under morphic resonance, once the process succeeded, a ‘memory’  resonated to other labs where the process succeeded much more easily.

A polymorph is an alternate form of a crystallized compound.  In the pharmaceutical industry polymorphs can be big problems.  For example, ampicillin was first crystallized as a monohydrate (one water molecule per ampicillin molecule).  But in the 1960s it began to crystallize in laboratories as a trihydrate, with a different form, and henceforth the monohydrate could not be made again.  This type of effect has happened on multiple occasions for different drugs.

Sheldrake concludes:  “The emergence of new polymorphs makes it clear that chemistry is not timeless.  It is historical and evolutionary, like biology.”

He tackles the materialist / dualist debates next.  Materialism is bankrupt because it denies consciousness.  Dualism (reality is both material and spiritual) doesn’t explain how one’s spirit interacts with matter.  As a Christian I can live without having to explain how my soul / spirit interacts with my brain, because it is obvious that it does.  All scientific instruments that measure voltage, current, force, weight, etc., clearly do not have the capacity to measure spiritual entities, but that simply speaks to the limits on science.  So be it.

After reviewing some of the debate’s history, Sheldrake figures only one way out – panpsychism – the idea that even atoms and molecules have a primitive kind of mentality / experience / consciousness.  The Greek word pan means everywhere, and psyche means soul or mind.  The more complex the object, the more sophisticated the consciousness.  This is an ancient idea, which shows up in pagan beliefs about souls infesting all aspects of the natural world, including Gaia for the Earth.

Sheldrake:  “Maybe all organisms, physical and biological, have experiences and feelings, including atoms, molecules, crystals, cells, tissues, organs, plants, animals, societies of organisms, ecosystems, planets, solar systems, and galaxies.”

He does not seem to propose any specific research to explore these issues, but it serves as a pillar of his worldview, so he can dance apart from both materialists and theists, creating his own perspectives and agendas.  It is amazing to what lengths intelligent people will go to avoid God.

Sheldrake then goes on to challenge materialism’s view that nature is purposeless.  Why not God and design, Rupert?  Anything but that!  He spins off the ideas of a mid-20^th century biologist, Conrad Waddington, who suggested that the incredibly complex processes of embryonic development might be explained by what amounts to form-shaping morphogenetic fields.  After all, how can you get from a fertilized egg to the spectacularly complex human form without some guiding magic?  He offers metaphors about attractors and gravity wells that objects fall into, and then topological models that might inform how biological structure is guided.  But it’s all hocus-pocus.  Mysterious “morphogenetic fields,” if they existed, would need their own explanation, indeed their own brilliant Creator to do the job of constructing full-grown creatures.  They would have to be both incredibly brilliant and incredibly complex themselves.

Sheldrake marvels at the protein folding problem – it takes about two minutes for a newly constructed protein molecule to fold inside the factory of the cell.  If the molecule had to experiment to find just the right folded pattern, it would take trillions of trillions of years.  In fact, researchers once predicted that knowing the amino acid sequence would enable them to predict the 3-D folded shape.  This has proven to be impossible.  So how does folding work?  Either there are mysterious morphogenetic guiding fields, or else the cell’s internal structures must be so brilliantly designed that you would require an Almighty God as the cell’s Engineer.  Guess which Sheldrake chooses?

Sheldrake does a wonderful job in dismantling atheistic materialism with his analysis, but he can’t seem to conceive the very possibility of God as Author of the creation.

Sheldrake’s mystical fields, I believe, find a kinship with Plato’s forms, which Sheldrake admits.  Real trees aspire to the tree form, real tables to the table form.  He does not believe in a conscious purpose for non-sentient objects and creatures.  But . . . “Both evolution and progress can be interpreted in terms of attractors, with influences working backward in time from future goals.”  Apparently, cause and effect often work backwards!

Sheldrake discusses the hubris associated with the first published draft of the human genome in the year 2000.   A Nature editor gushed, “Genomics will allow us to alter entire organisms to suit our needs and tastes . . . We will have extra limbs, if we want them, and maybe even wings to fly.”  But optimism waned quickly with the realization of the awesome gap between gene sequences and actual human beings.  I’ve discussed this in other essays, including those on Stephen Meyer’s books, on discoveries of the multi-dimensionality of the genome, plus epigenetic complexity that matches or exceeds that of the genome.

Interestingly, Sheldrake insists that the existence of morphic fields is testable, even with regard to behavioral effects.  If squirrels learn a new trick in one location, then squirrels elsewhere on Earth should be able to learn it more easily.  He cites his books A New Science of Life and The Presence of the Past, where he discusses such cases.

Sheldrake applies his morphic fields idea to memory.  Does the brain store specific memories in specific neurons?  Research on the physical basis of memory has miserably failed to find just where memories reside.  Experiments on rats, monkeys, and chimpanzees has shown, astonishingly, that learned memories can persist even after large amounts of brain tissue have been removed.  A conclusion has been voiced that “memory is both everywhere and nowhere in particular.”  This is all consistent with the Christian’s dualist view, though, that soul (mind) and brain are distinct, yet interact in ways beyond our ability to measure at present.

He cites the extraordinary case of a young man with an IQ of 126 and a college degree in mathematics who was afflicted since infancy with hydrocephalus (“water on the brain”).  His skull was lined with just a thin layer of brain cells about a millimeter thick; the rest was filled with fluid.  With about 5% of a normal brain mass, he functioned quite normally – above normal, in fact, since the average fellow does not possess a B.S. in math.

Sheldrake asks whether minds are confined to brains.  Since other fields (electric, magnetic) can extend far beyond their physical source, might not our consciousness?  Can we affect others just by looking at them?  In fact, this is testable.  Extensive surveys have found that many people have the experience of causing people to turn around by looking at them.  In Oriental martial arts, students have been trained to increase their sensitivity to someone looking at them from behind.  (“Feel the force, Luke!”)

Professionals (police, soldiers, surveillance specialists) report that people they are watching regularly react to covert surveillance.  A Marine Corps sniper discovered that some targets seemed to suddenly realize that he was watching them, even through telescopic sights at a great distance.

Carefully posed experimental tests have found the effect to be real with a high statistical significance.  The effect does not occur frequently, necessarily, but it does occur far more than chance would suggest.  It occurs when subjects and starers are separated by windows or one-way mirrors, and even when cameras are used with CCTV.

Sheldrake offers some wonderful stories on animal telepathy.  For example, his neighbor in Newark-on-Trent owned a cat who was very attached to her son, who was away on duty in the Merchant Navy.  One day he was able to get away on leave, but did not tell his mother, just deciding to surprise her.  Mom figured it out, though, when the cat sat on the front-door mat meowing for an hour before he arrived.  Mom was able to prepare dinner for him ahead of his arrival.  Sheldrake has a database with over a thousand accounts of dogs and over six hundred of cats who anticipated their owners’ returns.  He also cites data on animals anticipating natural disasters, including earthquakes and tsunamis.  Dogs in London during WW2 anticipated the explosions from V-2 rockets, even though they could not have heard the approach.  V-2s were supersonic.

Do dogs and cats have souls?  Yes.  Spirits to connect with God?  No.  But perhaps our souls can extend their influence through another dimension at times.  This is not inconsistent with a biblical view of reality.  (We don’t need morphic fields to explain it.)

Sheldrake also includes accounts of human telepathy.  With help from a midwife, he personally conducted a study of nine nursing mothers in London over a two-month period.  When separated from their babies, they often knew when their babies needed them, experiencing a breast-feeding response mediated by the hormone oxytocin.  This normally is initiated by hearing the baby cry, but some mothers respond ‘mysteriously,’ even when miles away.  Eliminating normal feeding rhythms and recording data on both mother and child, there were apparently telepathic connections that occurred, defying chance by odds of a billion to one.  The effect is real.

Sheldrake offers some evolutionary and morphic field mumbo-jumbo, but the effect is plausible enough from a soul / body duality designed by God.  Perhaps the effect is not as consistent as it might be because of the Fall.  Perhaps we were originally designed to make useful spiritual connections with each other, but sin and de-volution intervened.  Perhaps our restored resurrection bodies will have abilities we can only imagine.

I recommend Sheldrake’s book to you, but you should read it from within a biblical worldview.  In his conclusion, he notes:  “This naïve, old-fashioned reductionist faith bears no relation to the reality of the sciences.  Physiologists do not explain blood pressure in terms of subatomic particles but through the pumping activity of the heart . . . Linguists do not analyze languages in terms of the movements of . . . molecules in the air; . . . they study the patterns of words, grammars, and meanings . . .”, etc.

He goes on to cite physicist John Ziman who argues that at higher levels of complexity, all the way through human cultural institutions, “we find systems obeying entirely novel principles.  The behavior of such systems is not predictable from the properties of their constituents.”  Similarly, the majesty of the Taj Mahal cannot be gleaned from the properties of a block of marble.

The startling conclusion he misses in this analysis is that creation only makes sense in light of top-down design.  Ultimately, God designed the subatomic particles so that they could form atoms, molecules, cells, and organisms, not to mention stars and planets.  But we don’t live in a random sea of subatomic particles, nor a black hole swallowing all of them.  Clearly the structures of creation, from galactic clusters to ribosomes are purpose-built, tied to functions that ultimately serve consciousness, the consciousness of beings made in the image of God, namely us.  I pray that Rupert eventually figures that out.

He does a great job dismantling atheistic reductionistic materialism, but he misses the point of it all.  I do hope that he has success in exploring some of the mysteries he unfolds in the book.  I guarantee that as we learn more, that will only cause us to marvel at God’s creative genius.

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com