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Rupert Sheldrake's controversial TED talk: The Break Down

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Rupert Sheldrake's controversial TED talk: The Break Down

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Rupert Sheldrake gave a talk at a TEDx conference which was taken down from the main TED site. This was met with outraged criticism and claims of censorship by internet over-reactors.

Here’s a look at what Sheldrake had to say, and my opinion as to why TED was right to not endorse his talk.

Sheldrake’s Talk.
http://blog.ted.com/2013/03/19/the-deba ... akes-talk/

:01
Science delusion is the idea that science already understands the nature of reality in principal, leaving only the details to be filled in.
There is an important distinction to make here. We have to make guesses about reality. Then we have to test these guesses against reality to see whether the guess we made was wrong. If our experiments say that the guess was off, then it was off and we have to try to fix the guess so that the consequences that can be figured out from the guess conform with reality. These guesses, if they prove to be accurate and agree with experiment are then pushed past the realm of what has been confirmed to what has not yet been confirmed.

We extend them past what has been proven into what we are not yet sure about. Why? To see if the guess applies! Then we do more experiments and see if the guess holds up. We work out the consequences to see what it would imply if our guess does hold in realms where it hasn’t been physically tested.

An example here is gravity. We can work out all the consequences of what should happen to an apple dropped from the hand, and one rolled down a ramp from the same height. We can work out how the planets should behave if our guess about gravity were right, and compare it to our observations. These calculated consequences agreed so thoroughly with observation that people gained great confidence in our theory of how gravity works. So much so that when problems cropped up we could use our confidence in our gravity guess to figure out new phenomena.

A great example of this is when we were figuring out how the moons of Jupiter ought to orbit the planet. It looked pretty consistent, but then a problem kept cropping up. Sometimes the planets were ahead of the predicted schedule, and sometimes behind. There was an 8 minute variation from prediction based on the guess and the observation.

But we had such confidence in our guess, due to the tremendous range of other phenomena that it agreed with with such accuracy, that we could infer the speed of light! The problem with the prediction was that it didn’t account for there being any lag between the light coming from the moon reaching observers here on earth. When the moons were 8 minutes ahead, Jupiter was closest to the earth. When they were behind, Jupiter was furthest from earth as both planets orbited the sun.

Figuring in the travel time of light, the prediction of the gravity theory worked out perfectly. Having nailed down one theory with confidence enabled us to detect something else about the universe. Light doesn’t travel instantaneously! It travels with a finite speed!

This confidence in gravity is also how we first detected Neptune. Not only did our theory let us predict how the sun interacts with the planets, but also how the planets interact with one another. And it looked to some theorists that the outer planets were being pulled on by another planet. But nobody had observed another planet. They did the calculations, determined what the observed variations in the orbits of the outer planets implied about where another planet would have to be to cause those variations, and told observers to look at such and such coordinates to find another planet. And they were right!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neptune_planet

When you get a good guess about how the world works, you push it until it absolutely breaks. Once a guess has been sufficiently demonstrated to be accurate you assume the guess applies until it is proven to be off. We haven’t been to proxima century, but it is reasonable to think that what keeps our feet to the ground, our moon in the sky, and our planets around our star is the same thing producing the same behavior in other stars. And through the whole galaxy. And in other galaxies, and between galaxies.

We can’t prove conclusively that it’s the case, but no observation has shown it to be wrong. There are some issues that crop up. Dark matter is a proposal to deal with a discrepancy in our predictions and our observations. There’s got to be something about gravity we don’t understand. Or about what produces gravity, or if there’s something out there that has an effect like gravity, but isn’t gravity. Whatever the issue is, “we can’t throw out something that works for nothing that doesn’t”. The theory of gravity accounts for nearly all the effects we’ve seen, and we can’t replace it with anything until that new thing also explains what gravity does, and then some of the things that gravity doesn’t explain.

Just pointing out that something is wrong can’t advance our success at guessing what will happen. The key is replacing something that you think is wrong with something else that works even better.

So does science make the claim that we fundamentally already know everything, and we’re just filling in the details? Not unless you consider “the details” to be 96% of the active forces observed in our universe. Because between them, Dark matter and Dark Energy take up the lion’s share of what has an influence in the long term stability of the galaxies. What we can say with high confidence, though, is that it isn’t like the 4 % we understand. And that’s a starting point. That’s the part we can leverage to discover other things. That’s the confidence in the theory of gravity that lets us determine that light has to travel.

The Dogmas that Rupert outlines.:
1:Nature is mechanical or machine-like.
Many of these dogmas fall into what I discussed above. You make a guess. Test it against reality. If the guess is accurately describing what you observe, you extend, or generalize the guess to other phenomena until the guess is broken by disagreeing with observations.

Observations have never shown us anything that is fundamentally in principal, unexplainable by a machine-like universe. That includes the four fundamental forces, and all their effects. Their effects, incidentally including you and I.

2:Matter is unconscious
At about 2:50 in the video.
No consciousness in stars planets galaxies animals and plants and there ought not be any in us either…The philosophy of mind has been to prove that we are not really conscious at all.
He’s got this mixed up a bit, and that seems like an attempt to seed disdain in the listener’s mind for his opponent’s position. In a machine-like universe consciousness is not a property of any basic unit. No atom is conscious.

Consciousness, like many of the things we deal with, is an emergent phenomena, arising through the simple interaction of simple objects in vast quantities, and vast time scales. These Simple things interacting by simple rules produce a wide variety of events and phenomena that seem very far removed from the most basic level of interactions. It may seem weird that consciousness is not a fundamental property of reality, but how much weirder is it to think that the concept of “solid” is an emergent property? Or invisible, and visible. Or weight. Or hot and cold? All of these are emergent properties that arise from the interaction of billions, and billions of tiny objects which do not fundamentally have any of these properties.

That isn’t to say that “solid” doesn’t exist. Or that there’s no such thing as “fuzzy”. Or that nothing is conscious. These things are all real, and I doubt there is any scientist who is claiming that because atoms don’t keep dream diaries humans cannot be conscious.

3:The laws and constants of nature are fixed.
Discussed in more detail in the next post.

4:The total amount of matter and energy is always the same.
I’m discussing these to the degree which I think he’s misrepresenting them. His point on this is more or less accepted scientific consensus to my knowledge, but that isn’t to say the matter is closed. It just means you’ll have to have something specific and predictive to add in order to change thinking on the matter.

So simply saying “I DON’t think the total amount of matter and energy is always the same.” Won’t get you into any peer review journals, nor a place in the annals of science. You’ve got to replace what works, and has predictive power (and few laws are as useful as the conservation laws) with something that explains why what we’ve been using for so long has been so damned accurate in predicting things for so long, but also explains something new that the old guess had wrong. And that’s hard to do.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein


5:Nature is purposeless

Purpose is a word that can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. I think most scientists would agree that there’s no intellectual PLAN being enacted by some cosmic consciousness called “nature”. But you might hear scientists discussing natural phenomena in terms of “the purpose of carnassal teeth is to sheer meat from bone” because that is what carnassal teeth have been evolved to do. Not by a consciousness with a plan, but by the effectiveness of that kind of tooth on the kind of prey an animal has been eating all through it’s evolution. To the extent that that tooth helps wolves eat deer, it’s purpose is to help wolves eat deer. But nobody, and nothing decided that was it’s purpose. The problem here is discussing evolution as though there were a motive to it.

6:Bilological heredity is material
Nothing has ever indicated otherwise. There are no mysteries which suggest that, fundamentally, it is impossible for any particular aspect biological evolution to take place if genes were responsible for the entire process. There are lots of things we don’t know about the evolution of creatures, and even the cellular machinery of some of these processes. But it’s a case of having so damned much to work on, rather than the problems are characteristically unsolvable based on a material inheritance.

7:Memories are stored inside your brain.
Correct.

8:Your mind is inside your head
It is.

9:Psychic phenomena are impossible
Not fundamentally. But people can’t do it.

Who, or what could? Think of it this way. The processes in your mind are chemical, and that means that ultimately they are electromagnetic. Disturbances in the electromagnetic field do travel great distance and at great speed. Nothing prevents the signals generated in your brain from being received at a distance from your skull. But on the other end you need a physical receiver to intercept, decode, and reconstruct those real electromagnetic signals emitted from your head back into a thought. No such organ exists in the human body, or any life form on earth. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Just that it doesn’t exist here.

And if there were aliens somewhere with telepathic powers they would have the morphology to prove it. Some vibrating part of the brain which amplified and transmitted the signals of the brain and another which was very sensitive to just such signals. But they still wouldn’t be able to read your mind because your signal would be weak, and they wouldn’t have evolved to decode it anyway.

10:Mechanistic medicine is the only kind that really works
Because our bodies are mechanistic. Our brains have a wide range of influence over our bodies and things like the placebo effect have great healing powers, but the placebo effect is also, ultimately, mechanical. Those alternate forms of medicine which work do so, also, through real interaction between the real components of the treatment, and the real components of the malady.
In the absence of God, I found Man.
-Guillermo Del Torro

Are you pushing your own short comings on us and safely hating them from a distance?

Is this the virtue of faith? To never change your mind: especially when you should?

Young Earth Creationists take offense at the idea that we have a common heritage with other animals. Why is being the descendant of a mud golem any better?
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Re: Rupert Sheldrake's controversial TED talk: The Break Down

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Thanks Johnson. I got the following group email from Graham Hancock with links to discussion of this TEDx event in London on “Challenging Existing Paradigms.”

I am interested in challenging existing paradigms, but I fear both Sheldrake and Hancock are not really presenting viable alternatives. Sheldrake especially has ideas that are highly implausible, so I don't accept Hancock's point on 'refutation'.
Graham Hancock wrote:A week today discussions at TED about their decision to limit access to talks by Graham Hancock and Rupert Sheldrake will cease and at that point TED will have effectively got away with a bizarre act of censorship without ever really having to account for its behaviour. A month from now the whole matter will be forgotten and TED will be able to move on as though nothing ever happened to disturb the wholesome image that it has cultivated so successfully.

After deleting the talks from their TEDxYoutube channel on 14 March (where they had jointly notched up 170,000 views) TED’s tactic has been to create a series of ever-receding “blog” pages where people are invited to discuss the talks. Hancock and Sheldrake have both declined to be involved since they have already refuted all the original allegations of “pseudo-science” that TED levelled as justification for the removal of the talks from the TEDx Youtube channel. TED’s allegations (now crossed out), and Hancock and Sheldrake’s refutations, as well as the talks themselves, can be seen here: http://blog.ted.com/2013/03/14/open-for ... sheldrake/


To move things forward Hancock and Sheldrake have both issued challenges to TED to engage them face to face in free and fair public debate, Hancock here: http://www.ted.com/conversations/17190/ ... l?c=630105 and Sheldrake here: http://www.ted.com/conversations/17189/ ... l?c=629643

If you’re concerned about what this issue means for freedom of speech, and for whether we will live in a society in the future that respects our right to make sovereign decisions about our own consciousness, then please take two minutes to register as a poster on those pages and demand that TED stop hiding behind smokescreens and respond to Hancock’s and Sheldrake’s challenges.
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Re: Rupert Sheldrake's controversial TED talk: The Break Down

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Sheldrake takes issue with:

The laws of nature are fixed.

This is not exactly right. At the big bang there was no such thing as electromagnetism and gravity. The four forces diverge early in the universe and separate out from each other, before which the laws of nature would not have applied. This at least is an example of the laws being different in at least one time. Could they be different elsewhere? Possible. It could be that we even know where to find a place where the laws no longer apply. Perhaps the laws break down in singularities because the laws really do not function inside a black hole? I don’t know that, but it looks like a candidate for further examination into where the laws of reality are not fixed.

But where we can see that they are the same, we assert it must be true. Why do we assert that? Because the evidence tells us that the laws are the same there as they are here! Observation of distant star systems and galaxies behave as we would expect if they were governed by the same laws that produce effects here where we live.
Give us one free miracle and we’ll explain all the rest
Science doesn’t ask for a miracle exemption. It is only right to acknowledge what we don’t know. Saying we don’t know where the big bang came from is not the same as asking for a miracle exemption. It’s simply a matter of reporting what the evidence suggests, that all matter and energy is diverging from everything else, and so was closer in the past, working out what the laws of nature have to say would happen in that instance, and explaining what we figured out from that data. Everything about cosmology points to there having been a moment where everything was in the same place in a singularity, dubbed the big bang.

“We don’t know what came before.” Is not the same as “God said let there be light”. One is an honest admission of ignorance, the other a lie about something you know you don’t know anything about in order to bluff to others that you have all knowledge.
7:07 why shouldn’t the laws evolve?
I don’t know of any real reason why they “shouldn’t” evolve, but there’s pretty good reason to think they haven’t, at least in anything that we’ve seen of the modern universe. If the gravitational constant had been varying over time, for instance, that has all kinds of consequences for the formation of galaxies, stars and planets.

If gravity were stronger main sequence stars might burn out too fast to foster life on a planet. If it were REALLY strong, it might defeat the electromagnetic connections that hold together atoms and produce chemistry, and there’d be nothing but globs of neutrons in the universe. If electromagnetism was different you might get stars producing elements way heavier than iron, maybe stars would produce plutonium in their cores.

If things had been different in the past we would see evidence of it. Elements heavier than iron in much greater abundance than could be accounted for by our current understanding of stellar nuclear synthesis. Erratic orbits which correspond to a changing gravitational constant.
7:37 habits
Sciencetific hypothesis of “morphic resonance”
Everything has a collective memory, resonance occurs on the basis of similarity.

This whole thing about collective resonance doesn’t resonate with me at all. So many things wrong with it. Genetics accounts for the developmental features of embryos. If it was resonance, why would infants not look like merely miniature versions of the adults? Why would the proportions change? Why would development be necessary at all? Why would this resonance be limited to the embryo, if genetics is not responsible for our morphology? Why don’t we continually reshape to be closer and closer to those that surround us? Why can’t you be taller by surrounding yourself with tall people? Why aren’t we all becoming insects, since there are by far billions and billions and billions more available templates of insects for us to resonate with than there are mammal shapes?
How does this happen.

Image

Image

Genetics can explain these things in detail. Genetics and evolution accounts for everything that can and cannot happen with breeding populations. If you want to replace genetics with something else it’s got to explain everything that genetics has got right and also not produce consequences that aren’t seen in the natural world.
8:46 crystals have a collective memory, like animals do.
There is “good evidence” that new compounds get easier to crystallize all around the world. And it predicts that if you train animals to learn a new trick then it will be easier for other animals of the same morphic resonance to learn it afterwards. Rats learning a trick in London will enable rats in America to learn the trick quicker, just because rats have learned it in London. 9:37 and there’s already evidence that this actually happens.
Quantum theory explains why crystals form, chemistry explain why crystals form. They predict what kind of shapes are possible, and exactly how those crystals will behave. We know the exact machinery which enables these formations and it has nothing to do with morphic resonance. It has to do with electron sharing. And not only does quantum theory explain why they are shaped the way they are, it explains their conductive or insulating properties. Whether they are radioactive. What color they will be. If they are transparent, or opaque. Hard and brittle, or soft and malleable.

It becomes easier to make new compounds once they’ve been created because of human culture. We write down what we’ve discovered, how to produce new materials, and what we can do with them, then show it to our colleagues. TA-DA! That includes how to train mice, how to make I-pods, or I-pod knock-offs, computer chips, ethanol, and solar panels.
The speed of light dropped 1928 and 1945, 1948 by 20 KMPS.
Asked head of metrology national physical laboratory in tedington.
11:30 were people fudging it? Are we still fudging it?
We fixed the speed of light by definition in 1972. It might change, but we’d never know it beause we’ve defined the meter in terms of the speed of light.
This is a misunderstanding of what C actually is.

First, the constants:
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science ... se#slide-1

Second, a thread I made talking about the speed of light.
http://www.booktalk.org/relativity-and- ... 12913.html
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_light
Increased accuracy of c and redefinition of the metre
See also: History of the metre
In the second half of the 20th century much progress was made in increasing the accuracy of measurements of the speed of light, first by cavity resonance techniques and later by laser interferometer techniques. In 1972, using the latter method and the 1960 definition of the metre in terms of a particular spectral line of krypton-86, a group at NBS in Boulder, Colorado determined the speed of light in vacuum to be c = 299,792,456.2±1.1 m/s. This was 100 times less uncertain than the previously accepted value. The remaining uncertainty was mainly related to the definition of the metre.[Note 8][105] Since similar experiments found comparable results for c, the 15th Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures (CGPM) in 1975 recommended using the value 299,792,458 m/s for the speed of light.[135]
In 1983 the 17th CGPM redefined the metre thus, "The metre is the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299 792 458 of a second."[81] As a result of this definition, the value of the speed of light in vacuum is exactly 299,792,458 m/s[136][137] and has become a defined constant in the SI system of units.[11] Improved experimental techniques do not affect the value of the speed of light in SI units, but instead allow for a more precise realization of the metre.[138][139]
And a meter is a different length for somebody traveling at high speed relative to an observer at rest. Relativity means time, distance and speed change depending on your reference frame, but they combine to make another quantity which is universal and all observers can agree upon.

You see, a second and a meter are arbitrary definitions. They are human constructs. C is a fundamental measure of reality. So lets phrase this another way. If you want to compare the strength of gravity to the strength of electromagnetism, you can’t say, a pound of this and a pound of that. You’ve picked the numbers, you’ve picked the measurements. You have to use something which the universe gives you in fundamental units. An electron is a fundamental unit. There’s nothing inside an electron and they are always the same. They have both electromagnetic and gravitational properties. Now you’ve got a pure unit to work with.

Well, a second and a meter are arbitrary measures we’ve placed on objects and events that appear in our general level of experience. Not too fast, and not too far for us to get a handle on.

Defining the meter in terms of the length of a wave emitted from krypton-86 is defining the meter in terms of a naturally occurring quantity, the wavelength. We’ve arbitrarily chosen WHICH wavelength because it was pretty close to our arbitrary choice in the length of the meter to start with, and then defining the meter as 1/299 792 458 of a light second is arbitrary as well. But it will give us a definite length because light always travels at the same speed.

If light changed how fast it went we wouldn’t know, that’s true, as long as we don’t look outside our reference frame. Why? Because light is how electrons interact with one another. One electron shoves another with a burst of light. Everything we perceive about reality is dependent on electrons shoving one another. So if it takes 1 unit of time for an electron to shove another, or it takes 10 units of time, we can never tell until the shove has been received by the other electron. Let me say, at least, we couldn’t tell from within our reference frame. This is time dilation, an effect that we would experience when we travel at relativistic speeds.

But we could detect a change in the speed of light through relativistic calculations and looking outside our reference frame. The GPS system uses relativistic equations to balance the time delay as light flies from satelite to satelite and back to your GPS receiver. If the relativistic equations weren’t used, your GPS would be off by 11 miles, and that would add up over time.

So, if our GPS systems start to lose track of us then we know that something is changing with C. But so far, so good.
13:35 they measure in different places on different days, get different values then average them.
14:40 calls to put data points on the measurement of G available for people to look at to see if there is any variance. No investigation because G is a constant…
G is difficult to measure.

It’s still being investigated. They probably aren’t responding to Rupert Sheldrake’s demands, or instructions, though… because he’s Rupert Sheldrake.
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_constant
History of measurement
The gravitational constant appears in Newton's law of universal gravitation, but it was not measured until seventy-one years after Newton's death by Henry Cavendish with his Cavendish experiment, performed in 1798 (Philosophical Transactions 1798). Cavendish measured G implicitly, using a torsion balance invented by the geologist Rev. John Michell. He used a horizontal torsion beam with lead balls whose inertia (in relation to the torsion constant) he could tell by timing the beam's oscillation. Their faint attraction to other balls placed alongside the beam was detectable by the deflection it caused. Cavendish's aim was not actually to measure the gravitational constant, but rather to measure the Earth's density relative to water, through the precise knowledge of the gravitational interaction. In retrospect, the density that Cavendish calculated implies a value for G of 6.754 × 10−11 m3 kg−1 s−2.[5]
The accuracy of the measured value of G has increased only modestly since the original Cavendish experiment. G is quite difficult to measure, as gravity is much weaker than other fundamental forces, and an experimental apparatus cannot be separated from the gravitational influence of other bodies. Furthermore, gravity has no established relation to other fundamental forces, so it does not appear possible to calculate it indirectly from other constants that can be measured more accurately, as is done in some other areas of physics. Published values of G have varied rather broadly, and some recent measurements of high precision are, in fact, mutually exclusive.[3][6]
In the January 5, 2007 issue of Science (page 74), the report "Atom Interferometer Measurement of the Newtonian Constant of Gravity" (J. B. Fixler, G. T. Foster, J. M. McGuirk, and M. A. Kasevich) describes a new measurement of the gravitational constant. According to the abstract: "Here, we report a value of G = 6.693 × 10−11 cubic meters per kilogram second squared, with a standard error of the mean of ±0.027 × 10−11 and a systematic error of ±0.021 × 10−11 cubic meters per kilogram second squared."[7]
15:32 nature of the mind
Science can’t deal with the fact that we’re conscious. Thoughts don’t seem to be inside our brain. What we see is inside our heads… he says vision is actually an outward projection. Our minds are extended beyond our brains in the simplest act of perception.
16:15 I think we project out the images that we are seeing. And the images touch what we are looking at. Explains that feeling when you “know somebody is watching you”. Prey who can “feel” when they are being stared at will survive better.
Then predators who don’t look at their prey should be extremely successful. Haha. There is no problem with consciousness in science. We study it all the time, and don’t have any difficulty imagining how it could arrive through mechanistic behavior.
When we look at the stars, we literally extend out to touch the stars and extend over astronomical distances.
No. Vision is very definitely not us projecting anything out of our eyes. There is no dispute on this subject at all. See: everything we know about the world vs the rambling of Rupert Sheldrake.
17:16 it may seem astonishing that this is a topic of debate in this century.
-because it is not.
Where our images are is a hot topic of debate
But not like Sheldrake implies. What we see is very definitely being processed in the brain. There are experiments which re-build what we are seeing based on the firing of neurons. As in, reading our minds electric activity and converting that back into the image that we see. Vision is definitely in the brain.

There is no support at all for Sheldrake’s idea that we project images from our eyes. An idea that was in question even hundreds of years BCE.
In the fifth century BC, Empedocles postulated that everything was composed of four elements; fire, air, earth and water. He believed that Aphrodite made the human eye out of the four elements and that she lit the fire in the eye which shone out from the eye making sight possible. If this were true, then one could see during the night just as well as during the day, so Empedocles postulated an interaction between rays from the eyes and rays from a source such as the sun.
In about 300 BC, Euclid wrote Optica, in which he studied the properties of light. Euclid postulated that light travelled in straight lines and he described the laws of reflection and studied them mathematically. He questioned that sight is the result of a beam from the eye, for he asks how one sees the stars immediately, if one closes one's eyes, then opens them at night. Of course if the beam from the eye travels infinitely fast this is not a problem.
In 55 BC, Lucretius, a Roman who carried on the ideas of earlier Greek atomists, wrote:
"The light & heat of the sun; these are composed of minute atoms which, when they are shoved off, lose no time in shooting right across the interspace of air in the direction imparted by the shove." – On the nature of the Universe
Despite being similar to later particle theories, Lucretius's views were not generally accepted.
Ptolemy (c. 2nd century) wrote about the refraction of light in his book Optics.[
It was one of the earliest, and least right, ideas man ever had about how vision works.
17:48 I’ve spent my whole life as a research scientist
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Sheldrake
Sheldrake became a Fellow of Clare College, where he was Director of Studies in Biochemistry and Cell biology, and a Research Fellow of the Royal Society. From 1974 to 1985 he worked in Hyderabad in India as Principal Plant Physiologist at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics. For a year and a half he lived in the ashram of Bede Griffiths, where he wrote his first book, A New Science of Life.[7][8]
As a biochemist, Sheldrake researched the role of auxin, a plant hormone, in the cellular differentiation of a plant's vascular system. He ended this line of study when he concluded, "The system is circular, it does not explain how [differentiation is] established to start with. After nine years of intensive study, it became clear to me that biochemistry would not solve the problem of why things have the basic shape they do."[9] More recently, drawing on the work of French philosopher Henri Bergson, Sheldrake has proposed that memory is inherent to all organically formed structures and systems. Where Bergson denied that personal memories and habits are stored in brain tissue, Sheldrake goes a step further by arguing that bodily forms and instincts, while expressed through genes, do not have their primary origin in them. Instead, his hypothesis states, the organism develops under the influence of previous similar organisms, by a mechanism he has dubbed morphic resonance.[10]
From September 2005 until 2010, Sheldrake received the Perrott-Warrick Scholarship[11][12] for psychical research and parapsychology, which is administered by Trinity College, Cambridge.[8][13] Sheldrake then took his current position as Academic Director for the Learning and Thinking Program at The Graduate Institute in Bethany, Connecticut.[14]
So, “my whole life as a research scientist” might be a bit of a stretch. Looks like he was a biologist until he couldn’t crack the auxin problem he was studying, then said, “it’s all psychic stuff”.

http://www.sheldrake.org/B&R/booksuk/
So science filled!

The Graduate institute.
http://www.learn.edu/
Learning by Degree
Unlike other institutions of graduate study, our Master’s Degree programs do not constitute deficit learning. Our students don’t come here lacking in knowledge or skill, seeking to have that deficit removed or diminished. Rather, our programs manifest experiential learning. Students come here to have their motivation, interests, passions, and aptitudes enabled, encouraged, and nurtured. They drive our programs and provide their substance. Informed by the experiences of their lives, they discover the liberation of learning by following their natures and their leanings. They learn by inquiry, as determined by their individual intellectual curiosities and propensities.
• Conscious Evolution Explores the nature of human growth, the process of self-transformation, and the ways in which growth, change, and discovery influence the way of the world. The program emphasizes the awakening of consciousness to higher levels of awareness and, so, development. Through broadly eclectic study, dialogical self-exploration, experiential activities, and engagement in the emerging frontiers of science and spirituality, students examine the present purpose and meaning of their lives in the context of a changing world, while building the foundation from which to discover and empower their souls’ purpose.
In the absence of God, I found Man.
-Guillermo Del Torro

Are you pushing your own short comings on us and safely hating them from a distance?

Is this the virtue of faith? To never change your mind: especially when you should?

Young Earth Creationists take offense at the idea that we have a common heritage with other animals. Why is being the descendant of a mud golem any better?
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Re: Rupert Sheldrake's controversial TED talk: The Break Down

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Just reading through some old threads.

I liked this one.

Bump.
In the absence of God, I found Man.
-Guillermo Del Torro

Are you pushing your own short comings on us and safely hating them from a distance?

Is this the virtue of faith? To never change your mind: especially when you should?

Young Earth Creationists take offense at the idea that we have a common heritage with other animals. Why is being the descendant of a mud golem any better?
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Re: Rupert Sheldrake's controversial TED talk: The Break Down

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It would be fun to have some discussions about some of the latest TED Talks.
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Re: Rupert Sheldrake's controversial TED talk: The Break Down

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Meanwhile, there's now corruption plague within science.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/bmj-fiona ... -1.3541769
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Re: Rupert Sheldrake's controversial TED talk: The Break Down

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Kind of interesting. Sheldrake can go on expanding his consciousness, TED can go on insisting on evidence, and we have a win-win.

Just a couple of comments.

First, I thought it was postulated with some confidence that expansion of the universe is accelerating (after decelerating in the early billions of years). This is not the same as the laws of nature changing, but it could be "external" (some cosmological field fluctuating, or whatever) until we can give it an "internal" source (such as an influence of dark energy which differs according to density, or whatever).

Second, my experience with economics suggests that an intelligent nutjob is a valuable thing. By raising questions that no one has thought to raise, they actually can make valuable contributions, despite their nutjobbery. Doesn't mean we have to give them awards, or even a seat on panel discussions, but it is probably a good idea to find a few questioning individuals who are not bonkers and give them the job of evaluating the questions raised.
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