The Science Delusion & the Ten Dogmas

In 2012 Rupert Sheldrake turned his lifelong argument around to face science itself. The Science Delusion — published in the United States as Science Set Free — is not an attack on science but on what he calls its delusion: "the belief that science already understands the nature of reality in principle, leaving only the details to be filled in." His method is to take ten assumptions that he says have hardened, unnoticed, from working hypotheses into dogmas, and to turn each one back into a question.

The ten dogmas

Sheldrake's claim is that the following propositions form the "default worldview" of educated people the world over — and that not one of them is a proven fact:

1. Nature is mechanical — the universe and everything in it is essentially a machine.

2. The total amount of matter and energy is always the same.

3. The laws of nature are fixed — the same now as at the Big Bang, and forever.

4. Matter is unconscious — and consciousness an unexplained anomaly.

5. Nature is purposeless, and evolution has no direction.

6. All biological inheritance is material, carried in the genes.

7. Memories are stored as material traces in the brain.

8. Minds are confined to brains.

9. Psychic phenomena like telepathy are illusory.

10. Mechanistic medicine is the only kind that really works.

His aim is not to assert the opposite of each, but to point out that every one is an assumption — and that science would be freer, not weaker, if each became an open question again. The American title captures it: Science Set Free.

Three doors back to morphic resonance

Three of the ten are really Sheldrake's own theory wearing different hats. The fixity of the laws of nature (#3) is its cosmological face — the argument that the regularities of nature are evolved habits, set out in Laws of Nature as Habits. Memories as material traces (#7) is its neuroscience face — the proposal that the brain tunes in to its own past rather than storing it. And material inheritance (#6) is its biological face — that form and instinct are inherited by resonance as well as by genes. Dissolve these dogmas back into questions, he argues, and the hypothesis of Morphic Resonance & Formative Causation becomes thinkable again.

The banned talk

In 2013 Sheldrake gave a TEDx talk called "The Science Delusion." After it was posted, TED's anonymous science board objected — singling out his suggestion that the constants of nature might vary — and the talk was removed from the main TEDx channel. Sheldrake answered that the charges of "serious factual errors" were "defamatory and false," and objected that his accusers would not put their names to the claim. The removal achieved the opposite of what was intended: the "banned TED talk" reached an audience many times larger than it otherwise would have, and became, for Sheldrake and his readers, a live demonstration of the book's central thesis — that a set of unexamined assumptions polices the boundaries of what science is allowed to ask.

Argument in the open

Sheldrake treats disagreement as something to be staged, not avoided. He set out a book-length debate with the prominent skeptic Michael Shermer in Arguing Science (2016), has held extended and largely cordial exchanges with the idealist philosopher Bernardo Kastrup, and debated the biologist Lewis Wolpert on telepathy at the Royal Society of Arts in 2004. The wager throughout is the same one that runs through all his work: that these are empirical questions, and that the way to settle them is to look.

Sources & talks

The talk itself — removed by TED, and watched by millions since:

The Science Delusion — Rupert Sheldrake's Banned TEDx Talk (TEDxWhitechapel)YouTube

Primary sources: Rupert Sheldrake, The Science Delusion (UK, 2012) / Science Set Free: 10 Paths to New Discovery (US, 2012) · TED's own posts on the removal, "Open for discussion" and "The debate about Rupert Sheldrake's talk" · and Arguing Science: A Dialogue on the Future of Science and Spirit, with Michael Shermer (2016).