Rupert Sheldrake

Rupert Sheldrake (born 1942 in Newark-on-Trent) is a British biologist, parapsychology researcher and author. He is best known for morphic resonance, a conjecture that most scientists regard as pseudoscience. His standing rests less on experimental results than on the public debate his ideas have sparked about where science ends and belief begins.

Sheldrake read natural sciences at Cambridge and spent a year at Harvard studying the history of science. He took a doctorate in biochemistry, working on plant development and plant hormones known as auxins. He later worked in India as principal plant physiologist at a research institute focused on crops in semi-arid regions. A growing interest in Indian philosophy and meditation led him to step away from conventional academic research.

In 1981 he published A New Science of Life, arguing that natural systems inherit a kind of collective memory: the more often a pattern of behaviour or form occurs, the more likely it is to recur, even among organisms with no contact. The idea recalls the Lamarckian notion of inherited acquired traits. Critics have pointed to its vagueness, to repeated failures to reproduce his experiments, and to its tensions with findings in genetics, embryology and neuroscience.

The Presence of the Past (1988) expanded the hypothesis and presented experimental evidence he said supported it. From the 1990s he wrote on telepathy, the psychic staring effect and spiritual practice, and held academic posts and directed psychical research projects. His legacy is contested: some see him as an alternative to materialist science, while many researchers cite him as an example of popular writing running ahead of the evidence.