The Science Delusion: What Happens When Science Stops Asking Questions

This is the first of three connected pieces. The second looks at what dogs know. The third asks you to judge a piece of footage for yourself.

A talk that got taken down

On 12 January 2013, a biologist named Rupert Sheldrake gave an eighteen-minute talk at TEDx Whitechapel in London. The theme of the evening was challenging existing paradigms.

He challenged them. TED took the video off its channel, moved it to a corner of their website, and attached a warning label.

At the moment it was removed, the video had roughly 35,000 views. Re-uploaded copies have since been watched more than eight and a half million times, and volunteers have subtitled it into twenty-eight languages. It is, by a distance, the most successful thing TED ever tried to suppress.

Watch it before you read the rest. Eighteen minutes.

Who is making the argument

This matters, because the easiest way to dismiss an uncomfortable idea is to dismiss the person carrying it.

Rupert Sheldrake read natural sciences at Cambridge, took a double first, and won the University Botany Prize. He was a Fellow of Clare College and Director of Studies in Cell Biology. He was a Research Fellow of the Royal Society. He was Principal Plant Physiologist at an international crops research institute, where he did real, citable work on how plants move hormones through their tissue. He has published around ninety technical papers.

Whatever else he is, he is not a man who never learned the method.

The distinction the whole thing turns on

Sheldrake's argument is not that science is wrong. It is that we have quietly allowed two different things to wear the same name.

The first is science as a method: observe, hypothesise, test, revise, and hold every conclusion loosely enough that new evidence can take it away from you. That method is the best tool our species has ever built for finding out what is true.

The second is science as a worldview: a set of background assumptions about the nature of reality that are so deeply held they are no longer noticed, let alone tested. Sheldrake's claim is that the second has been smuggled in under the authority of the first.

His move is not to declare these false. It is to point out that they are assumptions, not findings, and to ask what happens if we turn each of them from a statement into a question. Are the laws of nature fixed, or might they be more like habits? Is memory a physical trace, or has a century of looking for that trace come up remarkably empty? Is the mind confined to the skull, or is that a philosophical inheritance we have stopped examining?

The line I keep coming back to

I do not say that to insult anyone. I say it because history is unambiguous about what happens next. When an institution decides that certain questions may not be asked, the questions do not stop being real. They simply stop being asked by people with careers to protect — which means they get asked badly, by people with nothing to lose, on the fringes, where there is no one competent to correct them.

The irony of the TED episode is exactly this. Removing the talk did not settle the argument. It multiplied the audience by two hundred and fifty, and it handed Sheldrake the strongest evidence for his thesis that anyone could have given him.

Now the other side, because it deserves one

I would be doing the same thing I am complaining about if I only gave you Sheldrake's case.

His central positive proposal, morphic resonance — the idea that nature has a kind of collective memory, so that patterns which have happened before happen more readily again — has been around since 1981. In more than forty years it has not produced the independently replicated results that would move it from hypothesis to accepted theory. That is not a small objection. It is the objection.

And there is a fair version of the critics' position that is worth stating properly: science advances by being hard to convince. The filter that keeps out the crank is the same filter that keeps out the misunderstood genius, and a discipline that let every heterodox claim through would drown. The question is not whether there should be a filter. It is whether the filter should operate by argument or by removal.

On that narrower question, I think TED handled it badly — and most people who watched the talk agreed, including a great many who had never heard of morphic resonance and did not care for it.

Questions worth sitting with

I teach English. What I actually do for a living is hand people a topic and get out of the way. So:

• Can you tell the difference, in yourself, between something you know and something you assume? How would you check?
• Is there a difference between saying "there is no evidence for this" and saying "this is impossible"? Which one is a scientific statement?
• If an idea is wrong, is removing it safer than arguing with it? Safer for whom?
• What is the last thing you changed your mind about, and what changed it?

I do not think Sheldrake is right about everything. I am fairly sure he is not. But I am certain that the correct response to a Cambridge biologist asking awkward questions is to answer them — and that a movement confident in its own foundations would not have needed the delete button.

Part two looks at one place where these questions get very concrete indeed: what dogs appear to know. Part three hands you a much harder piece of footage and asks you to judge it yourself.

Ross Cline · rosscline.com

Sources and further reading: Sheldrake's own account of the TEDx removal, and the full talk subtitled in twenty-eight languages, at sheldrake.org. TED's statement is on the TED blog under "Open for discussion: Graham Hancock and Rupert Sheldrake." The book is The Science Delusion (UK) / Science Set Free (US). Portrait photograph by Reason4Reason, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.