Rupert Sheldrake - Reception

Reception

Sheldrake's work has little support in the mainstream scientific community. Members of the scientific community consider Sheldrake's claims to be currently unfalsifiable and therefore outside the scope of scientific experiment. The "morphic field" concept is believed by many to fall into the realm of pseudoscience.

Some within the parapsychological community have supported the theories of Sheldrake as they believe it may explain the phenomena of extrasensory perception. Paranormal writers and parapsychologists such as Arthur Koestler, Brian Inglis and John L. Randall have supported the work of Sheldrake.

Sheldrake's ideas have resonated with the general public and some physicists such as David Bohm. The idea that fields may influence cells has even received cautious support from biologists Janis Roze and Sue Ann Miller. However, Sheldrake's work has met with a hostile reception from other scientists. Neurophysiologist and consciousness researcher Christof Koch, for example, has stated that discussing Sheldrake's ideas is a "waste of time," given the absence of hard, physical evidence and Sheldrake's lack of understanding of modern neurobiology. Henry Bauer compared Sheldrake's ideas to Wilhelm Reich's generally discredited claims of orgone energies. In his Skeptic's Dictionary, Robert Todd Carroll stated, in an article highly critical of Sheldrake's theory of morphic resonance, that "although Sheldrake commands some respect as a scientist because of his education and degree, he has clearly abandoned conventional science in favor of magical thinking."

Germano Resconi and Masoud Nikravesh are sympathetic to Sheldrake's ideas, and base their concept of morphic computing directly upon Sheldrake's morphic fields and morphogenetic fields, but acknowledge that "Morphic fields and its subset morphogenetic fields have been at the center of controversy for many years in mainstream science and the hypothesis is not accepted by some scientists who consider it a pseudoscience."

Some quantum physicists have supported Sheldrake's hypothesis. The late David Bohm suggested that Sheldrake's hypothesis was in keeping with his own ideas on what he terms "implicate" and "explicate" order. Hans-Peter Dürr has called for further discussion of Sheldrake's hypothesis, describing it as one of the first to reconcile 20th-century breakthroughs in physics, which emphasize fields and the indivisible nature of matter, with biology, which he says for the most part remains rooted in 19th-century Newtonian concepts of particles and separateness. Others, like biologist Michael Klymkowsky, disagree, contending that "e live in a macroscopic world. Quantum effects are essentially irrelevant". For more details on this topic, see quantum biology.

The concept has attracted speculation from neurolinguistic programming, as an explanation for action at a distance. Sheldrake's book The Presence of the Past: A Field Theory of Life was positively reviewed by the physicist Amit Goswami.