57 Facts About Rupert Sheldrake

Alfred Rupert Sheldrake was born on 28 June 1942 and is an English author and parapsychology researcher.

Rupert Sheldrake proposed the concept of morphic resonance, a conjecture that lacks mainstream acceptance and has been widely criticized as pseudoscience.

Rupert Sheldrake has worked as a biochemist at Cambridge University, a Harvard scholar, a researcher at the Royal Society, and a plant physiologist for ICRISAT in India.

Rupert Sheldrake has been described as a New Age author.

Rupert Sheldrake was born on 28 June 1942, in Newark-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire, to Reginald Rupert Sheldrake and Doris.

Rupert Sheldrake's father was a University of Nottingham-educated pharmacist who ran a chemist's shop on the same road as his parents' wallpaper shop.

Rupert Sheldrake investigated auxins, a class of plant hormone that plays a role in plant vascular cell differentiation.

Rupert Sheldrake has said that he ended this line of research when he concluded:.

From 1968 to 1969, Rupert Sheldrake worked at the University of Malaya.

Rupert Sheldrake left ICRISAT to focus on writing A New Science of Life, during which time he spent a year and a half in the Saccidananda Ashram of Bede Griffiths, a Benedictine monk active in interfaith dialogue with Hinduism.

Rupert Sheldrake published his second book, The Presence of the Past, in 1988.

Rupert Sheldrake collaborated with Matthew Fox, a priest and theologian, on two books in 1996.

Rupert Sheldrake was one of six subjects, along with Oliver Sacks, Daniel Dennett, Stephen Jay Gould, Freeman Dyson, Stephen Toulmin, who were covered in 1993 by the Dutch filmmaker Wim Kayzer in A Glorious Accident, a documentary series that posed a series of questions about consciousness and culminated in a roundtable discussion between the participants.

Since 2004, Rupert Sheldrake has been a visiting professor at the Graduate Institute in Bethany, Connecticut, where he was academic director of the Holistic Learning and Thinking Program until 2012.

In 2017, Rupert Sheldrake published a dialog with science writer and skeptic Michael Shermer titled Arguing Science: A Dialogue on the Future of Science and Spirit.

In 2023, Rupert Sheldrake debated the existence of consciousness outside of brains at the University Aula in Bergen, Norway, alongside anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann and neuroscientist Anil Seth.

Rupert Sheldrake has outlined his spiritual practices in two books: Science and Spiritual Practices and Ways to Go Beyond and Why They Work.

Reviews of Rupert Sheldrake's books have at times been extremely negative about their scientific content, but some have been positive.

Today, attitudes have hardened and Rupert Sheldrake is seen as standing firmly on the wilder shores of science," adding that if New Scientist were to review the reissue, the book's publisher "wouldn't be mining it for promotional purposes.

Science journalist Nigel Hawkes, writing in The Times, said that Rupert Sheldrake was "trying to bridge the gap between phenomenalism and science," and suggested that dogs could appear to have psychic abilities when they were actually relying on more conventional senses.

Rupert Sheldrake suggests that such interspecies telepathy is a real phenomenon and that morphic fields are responsible for it.

Rupert Sheldrake examined more than 1,000 case histories of dogs and cats that seemed to anticipate their owners' return by waiting at a door or window, sometimes for half an hour or more ahead of their return.

Rupert Sheldrake did a long series of experiments with a dog called Jaytee, in which the dog was filmed continuously during its owner's absence.

Rupert Sheldrake performed 12 more tests, in which the dog's owner travelled home in a taxi or other unfamiliar vehicle at randomly selected times communicated to her by telephone, to rule out the possibility that the dog was reacting to familiar car sounds or routines.

Rupert Sheldrake carried out similar experiments with another dog, Kane, describing the results as similarly positive and significant.

The group observed that Rupert Sheldrake's observed patterns could easily arise if a dog were simply to do very little for a while, before visiting a window with increasing frequency the longer its owner was absent, and that such behaviour would make sense for a dog awaiting its owner's return.

Rupert Sheldrake argued that the actual data in his own and in Wiseman's tests did not bear this out, and that the dog went to wait at the window sooner when his owner was returning from a short absence, and later after a long absence, with no tendency for Jaytee to go to the window early in the way that he did for shorter absences.

Rupert Sheldrake reported subjects exhibiting a weak sense of being stared at, but no sense of not being stared at, and attributed the results to morphic resonance.

In 2005, Michael Shermer expressed concern over confirmation bias and experimenter bias in the tests, and concluded that Rupert Sheldrake's claim was unfalsifiable.

Rupert Sheldrake argues that many powerful taboos circumscribe what scientists can legitimately direct their attention towards.

Rupert Sheldrake promotes morphic resonance in broader fashion as an explanation for other phenomena such as memory.

Rupert Sheldrake's ideas have been discussed in academic journals and books.

Rupert Sheldrake's work has received popular coverage through newspapers, radio, television and speaking engagements.

Rupert Sheldrake denies that DNA contains a recipe for morphological development.

Rupert Sheldrake's book is a splendid illustration of the widespread public misconception of what science is about.

In reality, Rupert Sheldrake's argument is in no sense a scientific argument but is an exercise in pseudo-science.

Maddox argued that Rupert Sheldrake's hypothesis was not testable or "falsifiable in Popper's sense," referring to the philosopher Karl Popper.

The publicists for Rupert Sheldrake's publishers were nevertheless delighted with the piece, using it to suggest that the Establishment was again up to its old trick of suppressing uncomfortable truths.

In 1990, Rupert Sheldrake and Rose agreed to and arranged a test of the morphic resonance hypothesis using chicks.

Rupert Sheldrake was the subject of an episode of Heretics of Science, a six-part documentary series broadcast on BBC2 in 1994.

Rupert Sheldrake is putting forward magic instead of science, and that can be condemned with exactly the language that the popes used to condemn Galileo, and for the same reasons: it is heresy.

Rupert Sheldrake debated with biologist Lewis Wolpert on the existence of telepathy in 2004 at the Royal Society of Arts in London.

Rupert Sheldrake argued for telepathy while Wolpert argued that telepathy fits Irving Langmuir's definition of pathological science and that the evidence for telepathy has not been persuasive.

In 2006, Rupert Sheldrake spoke at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science about experimental results on telepathy replicated by "a 1980s girl band," drawing criticism from Peter Atkins, Lord Winston, and Richard Wiseman.

The man told a reporter that he thought Rupert Sheldrake had been using him as a "guinea pig" in telepathic mind control experiments for over five years.

In January 2013, Rupert Sheldrake gave a TEDx lecture at TEDxWhitechapel in East London roughly summarising ideas from his book, The Science Delusion.

In November 2013, Rupert Sheldrake gave a lecture at the Oxford Union outlining his claims, made in The Science Delusion, that modern science has become constrained by dogma, particularly in physics.

Rupert Sheldrake's work was amongst those cited in a faux research paper written by Alan Sokal and submitted to Social Text.

Rupert Sheldrake has been described as a New Age author, but does not endorse certain New Age interpretations of his ideas.

Rupert Sheldrake says that although there are similarities between morphic resonance and Hinduism's akashic records, he first conceived of the idea while at Cambridge, before his travel to India, where he later developed it.

Rupert Sheldrake says he took Bergson's concept of memories not being materially embedded in the brain and generalised it to morphic resonance, where memories are not only immaterial but under the influence of the collective memories of similar organisms.

Rupert Sheldrake has noted similarities between morphic resonance and Carl Jung's collective unconscious, with regard to collective memories being shared across individuals and the coalescing of particular behaviours through repetition, which Jung called archetypes.

Lewis Wolpert, one of Rupert Sheldrake's critics, has described morphic resonance as an updated Drieschian vitalism.

Rupert Sheldrake is married to therapist, voice teacher and author Jill Purce.

Merlin Rupert Sheldrake is a mycologist and author of Entangled Life: How fungi make our worlds, change our minds and shape our futures.

Rupert Sheldrake has said that he studied with a Sufi teacher and practised Sufism while he was in India.

Rupert Sheldrake reported "being drawn back to a Christian path" during his time in India.