b. 1942 · A portrait
A Cambridge-trained biologist argues nature's patterns are shaped less by fixed laws than by inherited habit, carried through what he calls invisible 'morphic fields.' Mainstream biology hasn't adopted the idea.
The line above is how his claims were received — by the scientists whose job was to doubt them. It rises as a claim is tested and accepted, and the room brightens with it. It is not a verdict on truth: some accepted ideas are later overturned, and some rejected ones come back. A hollow point is a claim still open.
In A New Science of Life he proposed that self-organizing systems, from crystals to instincts, are shaped by 'morphic fields' carrying a collective memory — the more often a pattern occurs, the more easily it recurs elsewhere.
The editor of Nature, John Maddox, wrote in an editorial that the book was “the best candidate for burning there has been for many years,” arguing it failed as testable science, though he stopped short of recommending it actually be destroyed.
Psychologist Richard Wiseman and colleagues tried to replicate Sheldrake's dog-telepathy experiment with the same animal and published their results in the British Journal of Psychology, reporting patterns they said were explained by ordinary waiting behavior. Sheldrake disputed that reading of the same data.
A 2021 review marking the book's fortieth anniversary noted that the experimental implications of his ideas remain largely untested; mainstream biology still hasn't adopted morphic resonance, and he continues publishing new experiments he argues support it.