Taking science out of labs
PRIYADARSSHINI SHARMA
|
We need to change the way people view science, says biologist Rupert Sheldrake.
|
Western science was shaped by the needs of industrial revolution ... Science excludes ordinary people.
Photo: Vipin Chandran
Radical views: Rupert Sheldrake.
RADICAL biologist Rupert Sheldrake is working to change the way people think about science. Participatory science, as the name suggests, involves millions of people to conduct experiments at home and contribute towards answering the intangible, but curiously strange, happenings like knowing when you are being stared at, receiving e-mails or phone calls from people you are thinking about.
The telephone telepathy test concluded that 80 per cent of the people had had this experience. "The average rate of success was 42 per cent, way above the chance level," said Sheldrake, adding that extreme materialist scientists say that telepathy does not exist. Nevertheless this research is being widely publicised in Britain and the U.S. where it has led to a split among the scientific fraternity. Sheldrake's detractors have condemned this research as being fantasy.
Collective memory
Sheldrake's theory of Morphic Resonance states that living beings draw from a collective memory pool outside the brain and this inherent memory in nature can be sourced by one and all across time and space. This, he says, is why mice learn to negotiate a maze quicker if mice elsewhere in the world have done so before and beyond. They simply tune into this memory pool quite like airwaves and mobile technology.
"In Western thought, nature is governed by eternal laws that never change. But in the 1960s the Big Bang theory stated that the universe is still evolving. Then why shouldn't the laws of nature also evolve? Instead of calling them laws, which are immutable, I call them habits, which is very anthropomorphic. To my Indian scientist friends, my research is acceptable, as Indian philosophy too believes in the idea of cosmic memory across time and space. But to the Western world this is very upsetting and radical," says the scientist, who is the current Perrick-Warwick Scholar in psychical research at Trinity College, Cambridge.
Sheldrake's research is based on the Hellenistic belief of a living universe. His views on science are far from the esoteric science being studied, researched and experimented in laboratories. "I think we need to change not only the content of science and what it is about but also the way science is done. Western science was shaped by the needs of industrial revolution, the needs to produce machines, so the image of scientists was of an elite priesthood. This spread across Europe and to India too. Science excludes ordinary people. A democratic society like ours, where computing power is available to everybody, creates a condition for a new way of doing science. Most scientists are conservative about the way they think about science itself," says Sheldrake, whose research involves ordinary people conducting experiments at home and through his website: www.sheldrake.org. His highly successful participatory online experiments have led Microsoft, Google and, recently, AOL to show interest in his work.
Participatory research
"Participatory research will become very big, very fast as this transformation will happen through the Internet," says Sheldrake, whose research goes beyond the limited, precise and numeric. His extensive work as a crop physiologist at the International Crops Research Institute for Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), Hyderabad, where he ran field trials, propelled him to devise ways to make illiterate farmers understand science. "Something that could happen outside the labs. My Indian colleagues who worked with very little money and were still doing good science inspired me. Most Indians think holistically and I am interested in holistic science." His empathy with Indian ways led him to reside at Fr. Bede Griffith's ashram in Tamil Nadu and pen A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance (1981). The Indian edition of his trilogy: A New Science of Life (1981), The Presence of the Past (1988) and The Rebirth of Nature (1992) was recently launched in Kochi by Stone Hill Foundation Publishing Pvt. Ltd.
But it is Sheldrake's Other Unexplained Powers of Animals (1999) that urges people to take heed of and report strange animal behaviour. This could serve as a timely warning against natural calamities like earthquakes and tsunamis. "Before the 2004 tsunami, there were reports of strange animal behaviour. I collect all this information and press cuttings. Most scientists won't look at this data because it is not conventional. But it interests me."
"If people report strange animal behaviour to a hotline-help line number, one can be prepared for a calamity. Till now unexplained animal behaviour has been an effective sign of changes in nature. It does not need advanced degree or rocket science," says Sheldrake who is successfully taking science out of the labs to homes.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Magazine
