Customer Reviews

Seven experiments that could change the world

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Okay, I do not have much time to respond but I just had to voice some opposition to the single reader review this book has posted. Sure, the experiments outlined are a bit more involved than your run of the mill fourth grade level chemical mixing but they are that much more involved. Sheldrake does not provide many answers but the ones he does provide are exceptionally enlightening. He does something even more important though; he demonstrates that nobody out their in the scientific community really has all the answers they claim to. Steven Hawking may be really smart, but it is Sheldrake who future generations will recognize as the man of our time whose ideas were well beyong his time.

Rupert Sheldrake (born 1942) is an English biochemist and plant physiologist who has also written or co-written books such as A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance, The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home: Fully Updated and Revised, The Physics of Angels: Exploring the Realm Where Science and Spirit Meet. Natural Grace: Dialogues on creation, darkness, and the soul in spirituality and science, etc.

He wrote in the Preface to this 1995 book, "The idea of writing the present book arose ... (when) I was asked what I would do if I ... wanted to support interesting and productive research with limited resources. My answer was to draw up a list of simple, low-cost experiments that could change the world, and then to encourage this research program... I finally selected the seven in this book. So, this is not just a book, but a broad-based research program, with an open invitation to participate."

Here are some additional quotations from the book:

"Committed Skeptics tend to equate the mechanistic worldview with reason itself and are passionate in its defense. They are scientific fundamentalists." (Pg. 24)
"So although the prospects for this line of research (Kirlian Auras) are not too hopeful, it might be worth a few more tries." (Pg. 157)
"Organized groups of Skeptics, such as CSICOP... are always ready to challenge results that do not fit into the mechanistic worldview, and try their best to discredit them. Parapsychologists are so accumstomed to these critical responses that they are unusually aware of the pitfalls of experimenter effects and other sources of bias. But conventional science is not subject to a similar degree of skeptical scrutiny." (Pg. 172-173)
"Many scientists carry out experiments with strong expectations about the outcome, and with deep-rooted assumptions about what is and what is not possible. Can their expectations influence their results? The answer is yes." (Pg. 210)
"I cannot foresee the outcome of the experiments proposed here, but I think there is a good chance that at least some of them will yield very interesting results. I would not have written this book otherwise." (Pg. 244)

That the author is willing to entertain the possibility of something readily dismissed by the scientific establishment is neither uncommon nor a negative. That the author openly scorns the majority of solid evidence is favor of anecdotes, rumors and small studies of dubious quality is certainly a problem.
So your dog seems to have some sort of "sixth sense" that your partner is about to come home. Interesting. Let's study that. Our dog "knew" when I was coming home... until we got a new car, we think she might have heard our older car's transmission working on the hill at the bottom of our street. Sheldrake would embrace the first half as "data" and dismiss the later finding as "blind skepticism". That a perfectly reasonable explanation might exist should certainly be the first recourse, but our author prefers the "world changing" hypothesis that Rover had ESP.
Whether or not there is any real-world basis for psi is the topic and our author generally WANTS to believe it. My approach would involve:
- examining known phenomena (such as our dog's better-than-human hearing)
- finding them wanting (as would have been the case if she reacted to me coming home in the new car)
- examining other possible theories (did I get home around the same time each day? did my partner remember the apparent successes and forget the times Rover missed the boat?)
- then speculate
- then test the speculation...
The author STARTS with the speculation:
- assumes all apparently related phenomina will have ONE cause (Rover's behavior has the same source as Fifi and Fido's behavior)
- takes anecdotes as tests of the speculation
- finds individual cases that seem to challenge more conventional explanations (maybe finding Fido is deaf and therefore could not have heard a car's transmission and Fifi's owner came home at different times each day)
- assumes this destroys the conventional explanations (despite the possibility that Fido had a good sense of time AND Fifi had good hearing...)
- assumes the unsupported theory MUST be right.
Heck, we have as much evidence for my dog having ESP as we do for the CIA beaming information from sattelites into my dog's brain. Maybe fairies live in the bushes at the bottom of the hill and wisper the information to the Gnomes who send runners to tell Rover... Or the ghost of Rover's dead mother is telling her... Maybe aliens are deliberately corrupting our memories of Rover's behavior to convince us that science is all junk... Who knows?
Certainly not Sheldrake.

I picked up this volume because its title suggested that it would encourage hands-on science activities that are essential to good teaching and effective learning. Unfortunately, I discovered on reading it that the author combines a deep antagonism for the scientific "establishment" with credulity for numerous fringe ideas. The first experiment that he suggests tests the hypothesis that your pet uses psychic powers to tell when you'll be home for dinner! Sheldrake frequently presents anecdotes as "evidence". The "do it yourself" promise of the title is broken for the reader who doesn't intend to begin raising homing pidgeons or doesn't happen to work in a laboratory capable of measuring the physical constants (such as the speed of light) to nine significant figures. Far too few cautions about the pitfalls of psychic research are given (in chapters about the feeling of being stared at, or "feeling" the touch of a severed limb). Despite the nearly fatal flaws of the book, I liked a part of its message, that important science can still be done by amateurs. That's about the only aspect of this book that is commendable.

I thought that this book gave an intriguing insight into our world, and that it brings up topics that i would never have even thought about had i not read this book. 5 stars for Rupert Sheldrake. He has an unparalleled mind when it comes to evolutionary science

Neither a skeptic nor a believer in science, the author was searching for an opponent to box with -- more like friendly sparring. His theory of morphic resonance states that all matter and energy is governed or shaped by some sort of evolutionary habit or cumulative memory. If his perspective were broader he would fit in with David Bohm and other science mystics, but Rupert chose to fence himself in the "little science" surrounding pet dogs, homing pigeons, migrating birds, termite colonies, phantom limbs, evil eyes, and the placebo effect. Why Rupert thinks that clearcut experimental results in these areas of anecdotal, imaginative tall tales would support his morphic field theory, I haven't a clue. What is more likely is that these animals and insects have the hidden ability to detect Gaia's gravitational curved space (much like air and ship LORAN navigators read lines of position).

The author was forever hinting that chaos theory, Jung's collective unconscious or other ideas would someday reveal the whole story without telling what that would gain us (for instance, if we accepted that the fundamental constants were slightly variable). Although I would encourage new viewpoints such as morphic fields to shape the matter of the universe, I was left with the impression that this writer bit off way more than his dog could chew.

This is quietly on of the most influential books of the century. It is accelerating the rightfull and belated death of Scientism, the AMA, and the FDA.