The science delusion is the belief that science already understands the nature of reality in principle, leaving only the details to be filled in. This is a very widespread belief in our society; it is the belief system of people who say, "I don't believe in God, I believe in science." It is a belief system which has now been spread to the entire world.
» Why shouldn't the laws of nature themselves evolve? «
However,
there is a conflict at the heart of science between science as a method
of inquiry based on reason, evidence, hypothesis, and collective
investigation, and science as a belief system or a worldview.
Unfortunately, the worldview aspect of science has come to inhibit and
constrict the free inquiry which is the very lifeblood of the scientific
endeavor.
Since the late nineteenth century, science has been conducted under the aspect of a belief system or a worldview which is essentially that of materialism—philosophical materialism. The sciences are now wholly owned subsidiaries of the materialist worldview. Essentially, today, there are ten dogmas, which constitute the worldview of most educated people:
Dogma one: Nature is mechanical or machine-like. The universe is like a machine, animals and plants are like machines, and we are like machines. In fact, we are machines; we are "lumbering robots," in Richard Dawkins’ vivid phrase, with brains that are genetically programmed computers.
Dogma two: Matter is unconscious. The whole universe is made up of unconscious matter. There is no consciousness in stars, in galaxies, in planets, in animals, or in plants, and there ought not be in any of us either, if this theory is true. Consequently, a great deal of the philosophy of mind over the last hundred years has been trying to prove that we are not really conscious at all.
Dogma three: If matter is unconscious, then the laws of nature must be fixed. They are the same now as they were at the time of the Big Bang, and they will be the same forever. Not just the laws, but the constants of nature are fixed, which is why they are called constants.
Dogma four: The total amount of matter and energy is always the same. It never changes in total quantity, except at the moment of the Big Bang when it all sprang into existence from nowhere in a single instant.
Dogma five: Nature is purposeless. There are no purposes in all nature, and the evolutionary process has no purpose or direction.
Dogma six: Biological heredity is material. Everything you inherit is in your genes, or in epigenetic modifications of the genes, or in cytoplasmic inheritance. It is material.
Dogma seven: Memories are stored inside your brain as material traces. Somehow, everything you remember is in your brain in modified nerve endings or phosphorylated proteins; no one knows how it works, but nevertheless, almost everyone in the scientific world believes it must be in the brain.
Dogma eight: Your mind is inside your head. All your consciousness is the activity of your brain, and nothing more.
Dogma nine: Psychic phenomena like telepathy are impossible. Your thoughts and intentions cannot have any effect at a distance because your mind is inside your head. Therefore, all the apparent evidence for telepathy and other psychic phenomena is illusory. People believe these things happen, but it is just because they do not know enough about statistics, they are deceived by coincidences, or it is wishful thinking.
Dogma ten: Mechanistic medicine is the only kind that really works. That is why governments only fund research into mechanistic medicine and ignore complementary and alternative therapies. Those cannot possibly really work because they are not mechanistic. They may appear to work because people would have recovered anyway or because of the placebo effect, but the only kind that really works is mechanistic medicine.
This is the default worldview held by almost all educated people all over the world. It is the basis of the educational system, the national health service, the medical research council, and governments. But I think every one of these dogmas is very, very questionable, and when you look at them, they fall apart.
» Give us one free miracle, and we'll explain the rest. «
Let's first look at the idea that the laws of nature are fixed (Dogma three). This is a hangover from an older worldview prior to the 1960s, before the Big Bang theory came in. People thought the whole universe was eternal, governed by eternal mathematical laws. When the Big Bang theory was accepted, that assumption continued, even though the Big Bang revealed a universe that is radically evolutionary—about fourteen billion years old, growing, developing, and evolving. It has been growing and cooling, with more structures and patterns appearing within it, yet the idea remains that all the laws of nature were completely fixed at the moment of the Big Bang like a cosmic Napoleonic Code. As my friend Terence McKenna used to say, modern science is based upon the principle, "Give us one free miracle, and we'll explain the rest." The one free miracle is the appearance of all the matter and energy in the universe and all the laws that govern it, from nothing, in a single instant.
Well, in an evolutionary universe, why shouldn't the laws themselves evolve? After all, human laws do, and the idea of "laws of nature" is based on a metaphor with human laws. It is a very anthropocentric metaphor; only humans have laws—in fact, only civilized societies have laws. As C.S. Lewis once said, to say that a stone falls to earth because it is obeying a law makes it a man, and even a citizen. It is a metaphor we have become so used to that we have forgotten it is a metaphor. In an evolving universe, I think a much better idea is the idea of habits. I think the habits of nature evolve; the regularities of nature are essentially habitual. This was an idea put forward at the beginning of the twentieth century by the American philosopher C.S. Peirce; it is an idea which various other philosophers have entertained, and it is one which I myself have developed into a scientific hypothesis: the hypothesis of Morphic Resonance, which is the basis of these evolving habits.
» Everything depends on evolving habits, not on fixed laws. «
According to this hypothesis, everything in nature has a kind of collective memory; resonance occurs on the basis of similarity. As a young giraffe embryo grows in its mother’s womb, it tunes in to the morphic resonance of previous giraffes. It draws on that collective memory, grows like a giraffe, and behaves like a giraffe because it is drawing on this collective memory. It has to have the right genes to make the right proteins, but genes, in my view, are grossly overrated. They only account for the proteins that the organism can make, not the form, the shape, or the behavior. Every species has a kind of collective memory. Even crystals do. This theory predicts that if you make a new kind of crystal for the first time, it won't have an existing habit. But once it crystallizes, then the next time you make it, there will be an influence from the first crystals to the second ones, all over the world by morphic resonance; it will crystallize a bit easier. The third time, there will be an influence from the first and second crystals.
There is, in fact, good evidence that new compounds get easier to crystallize all around the world, just as this theory would predict. It also predicts that if you train animals to learn a new trick—for example, if rats learn a new trick in London—then all around the world, rats of the same breed should learn the same trick quicker just because the rats had learned it here. Surprisingly, there is already evidence that this actually happens. Anyway, that is my own hypothesis in a nutshell: morphic resonance. Everything depends on evolving habits, not on fixed laws.
» These dogmas have held back science for so long. «
I want to spend a few moments on the constants of nature, because these are, again, assumed to be constant. Things like the gravitational constant or the speed of light are called the fundamental constants. Are they really constant? When I got interested in this question, I tried to find out. They are given in physics handbooks, which list the existing fundamental constants and tell you their value. But I wanted to see if they had changed, so I obtained old volumes of physical handbooks. I went to the Patent Office library here in London—the only place I could find that old volumes. Normally, people throw them away when the new volumes come out. When I did this, I found that the speed of light dropped between 1928 and 1945 by about twenty kilometers per second. It is a huge drop, especially since they are given with errors of only tiny fractions of a decimal point. Yet, all over the world, it dropped, and researchers were all getting very similar values to each other with tiny errors. Then, in 1948, it went up again, and people started getting very similar values once more.
I was very intrigued by this and could not make sense of it, so I went to see the Head of Metrology at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington. Metrology is the science in which people measure constants. I asked him about this drop in the speed of light between 1928 and 1945. He said, "Oh dear, you've uncovered the most embarrassing episode in the history of our science." I asked, "Well, could the speed of light have actually dropped? That would have amazing implications if so." He replied, "No, no, of course it couldn't have actually dropped. It's a constant!" I said, "Oh, well then how do you explain the fact that everyone was finding it going much slower during that period? Is it because they were fudging their results to get what they thought other people should be getting, and the whole thing was just produced in the minds of physicists?" He said, "We don't like to use the word 'fudge'." I asked, "Well, so what do you prefer?" He said, "Well, we prefer to call it 'intellectual phase-locking'."
» Of course it couldn't have actually dropped. It's a constant! «
I then asked, "Well, if it was going on then, how can you be so sure it's not going on today? And that the present values produced are not by intellectual phase-locking?" He said, "Oh, we know that's not the case." I asked, "How do we know?" He replied, "Well, we've solved the problem." I asked how, and he said, "Well, we fixed the speed of light by definition in 1972." I said, "But it might still change." He replied, "Yes, but we'd never know it, because we've defined the meter in terms of the speed of light, so the units would change with it!" He looked very pleased about that; they had fixed that problem.
But then I asked, "Well, what about Big G?" The gravitational constant, known in the trade as "Big G," Newton's universal gravitational constant. That has varied by more than 1.3% in recent years, and it seems to vary from place to place and from time to time. He said, "Oh well, those are just errors. And unfortunately, there are quite big errors with Big G." I suggested, "Well, what if it's really changing? I mean, perhaps it is really changing." When I looked at how they do it, I found that they measure it in different labs, get different values on different days, and then they average them. Other labs around the world do the same, usually coming out with a rather different average. Then the International Committee of Metrology meets every ten years or so and averages the results from labs all around the world to come up with the value of Big G.
» This week, Big G was slightly up, the speed of light held steady. «
But what if G were actually fluctuating? What if the Earth, as it moves through the galactic environment, went through patches of dark matter or other environmental factors that could alter it? Maybe they all change together. What if these errors are going up and down together? For more than ten years, I have been trying to persuade metrologists to look at the raw data. In fact, I am now trying to persuade them to put it up online, on the internet, with the dates and the actual measurements, to see if they are correlated—to see if they are all up at one time and all down at another. If so, they might be fluctuating together, and that would tell us something very, very interesting. But no one has done this; they haven't done it because G is a constant, so there is no point looking for changes. Here is a very simple example of where a dogmatic assumption actually inhibits inquiry. I, myself, think that the constants may vary quite considerably, albeit within narrow limits. I think the day will come when scientific journals like Nature have a weekly report on the constants, like stock-market reports in the newspapers: "This week, Big G was slightly up, the charge on the electron was down, the speed of light held steady," and so on.
» What you are seeing is inside your mind, but not inside your head. «
That is one area where I think thinking dogmatically could open things up. One of the biggest areas, however, is the nature of the mind. This is the most unsolved problem; science simply cannot deal with the fact that we are conscious. It cannot deal with the fact that our thoughts do not seem to be inside our brains (Dogmas seven and eight). Our experiences do not all seem to be inside our brain. Your image of me now does not seem to be inside your brain, yet the official view is that there is a little Rupert somewhere inside your head, and everything else in this room is inside your head—your experience is inside your brain. I am suggesting, actually, that vision involves an outward projection of images; what you are seeing is inside your mind, but not inside your head. Our minds are extended beyond our brains in the simplest act of perception.
I think that we project out the images we are seeing, and these images touch what we are looking at (Dogma nine). If I look at you from behind, you don't know I'm there—or do you? Could I affect you? Could you feel my gaze? There is a great deal of evidence that people can. The sense of being stared at is an extremely common experience, and recent experimental evidence actually suggests it is real. Animals seem to have it too. I think it probably evolved in the context of predator-prey relationships. Prey animals that could feel the gaze of a predator would survive better than those that could not. This would lead to a whole new way of thinking about ecological relationships between predators and prey, and also about the extent of our minds. If we look at distant stars, I think our minds reach out, in a sense, to touch those stars and literally extend out over astronomical distances. They are not just inside our heads. Now, it may seem astonishing that this is a topic of debate in the twenty-first century. We know so little about our own minds that where our images are located is a hot topic of debate within consciousness studies right now.
» Our minds extend over astronomical distances. «
I do not have time to deal with any more of these dogmas, but every single one of them is questionable. If one questions them, new forms of research and new possibilities open up. I think as we question these dogmas that have held back science for so long, science will undergo a reflowering, a renaissance. I am a total believer in the importance of science; I have spent my whole life and my whole career as a research scientist. And I think that as we break out of these dogmas, the sciences will be regenerated.
Rupert Sheldrake (b. 1942) is a British biologist and author. He earned his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Cambridge and conducted research in plant physiology at institutions including the University of Cambridge and the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics in India. Sheldrake is known for proposing the theory of morphic resonance, which suggests that natural systems inherit a collective memory through morphic fields. A practicing Anglican, he has authored several books, including "A New Science of Life" (1981) and "The Science Delusion" (2012/2020), and continues to lecture and write on topics in science and philosophy.
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