He's a trained scientist. His arguments are conjectural but sound. He's far from a kook.
I've engaged with his ideas in depth, mostly because I find crackpot science interesting even if I don't buy it. There's nothing there. Morphic resonance is a non-theory. It's so vague as to easily be morphed to explain any counterargument, it's not falsifiable and it's not supported by any evidence other than the evidence he wilfully misinterprets as supporting his theory.
Sheldrake is very intelligent. But something happened to him in the late 60s that caused him to abandon his biochem research and go into increasingly kooky stuff.
This is not just a glib comment btw. I have some history with that kind of thing. When I was just small I discovered my mother's library, that happened to be full of New Age books that were popular with her and her friends as she was growing up, I guess: yoga, reiki, orientalism, astrology, Arthur Koestler, Wilhelm Reich, Aldus Huxley and Carlos Castaneda... I am a voracious reader, and I read them voraciously. I had the luxury of reading them in an age that was too young for the psychedelic drugs praised by some of them (Huxley and Castaneda, mainly, who were also the best writers of the bunch) and so managed to read them critically, I guess, and recognise their deep flaws [2]. I can imagine how hard it would have been to think critically if I had read those books under the influence of the kind of drugs people took in the '60s.
And later. Growing up I had a friend who would regularly smoke hash and sit down and read the bible. He was at least half mad. A dear friend, but half mad. Drugs aren't good for criticial thinking.
I think our man, Sheldrake, he fried his brain on drugs and that's how he can now think that the sun might be conscious, and that people can tell when someone's staring at them. I have another friend who smokes a lot of hash and is at least half mad and he's a big fan of Sheldrake. This friend is convinced that people can hear his thoughts. I think he believes he's telepathic and he is inadvertently projecting his thoughts into peoples' heads.
Sometimes I think of all the people I know who go about their lives with their heads full of beliefs that never need touch reality, and it weirds me out a bit. Think of how many people believe in gods, or in aliens, or in reincarnation. I cross paths with those people everyday, we occupy the same physical space, but they live in a different world that I can't see or feel. That a guy trained in biochemistry (and who probably was a bit too friendly with chemistry for his own good) has made a whole world model out of nothing more than his imagination is not a big surprise.
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[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1074-strange-memories-on-th...
[2] Take astrology, for instance. My mother had a 13-tome opus, with one tome on each sign, plus one for the general stuff. I read my own sign's tome first and I was inspired: everything in there described me so perfectly! Then I read the tome for another sign; and that, too, described me perfectly. So did the next, and the next. Soon I realised that the "perfect descriptions" of my personality were doing nothing more than flattering me, for having aspects to my personality that basically everyone has. They were just trying to get me hooked by telling me how cool I really am, because I'm an X sign.
Their flaw was that the guy who wrote them was an honest-to-god cult leader, who didn't mean the books as fantasy tales but as recruiting tools for his New Age cult. Ultimately, he indirectly caused the death of at least one of his closest followers, and possibly three more [1].
The first book was also basically an instance of academic fraud: "The teachings of Don Juan" was first published as a work of real anthropological research into the mystical practices of Yaqui Indians, but it had nothing to do with them and in any case it was not the result of field work as it was presented. In later books Castaneda clearly tries to retcon this by pointing out that Don Juan's tradition is unique and separate from Yaqui shamanic beliefs. One of his followers, Florinda Donner, also published a made-up anthropology book [2], btw.
After finding all this out it would be really hard for me to read the books today and enjoy them.
Maybe that's overreacting. I've been way more relaxed about the lives of other authors I read; like Lovecraft, for example. I was once called a fascist because I said that Starship Troopers is one of my favourite Sci Fi books. I ignored Heinlein's politics and I only read it as fiction and I still think it's clearly just fiction. The guy who called me a fascist, btw, is a Warhammer 40K player with a Grey Wolves army. Hmph.
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taisha_Abelar#Disappearance
Also the extra books helped me understand the whole, which I would have missed if I had only read one, so that makes the otherwise wasted money worth it.
Exactly! I think he is just lining his pockets on this stuff as all the many other pseudoscience and snake oil salesman before him.
[1] Like his kooky "dogs know when owners are coming home" experiment (https://www.sheldrake.org/books-by-rupert-sheldrake/dogs-tha...). Like somehow dogs getting increasingly agitated the longer their owners are away is fucking mysterious to him. Also, apparently dogs cannot hear or smell, tell time, or remember patterns of behavior...at all. Such a kook.
I don't have a satisfactory explanation, despite some rather interesting contributions from HN readers.
My comment in this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39861066
My original observation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33295560