Photography by Polly Borland

Rupert Sheldrake gazes, rapt, at the TV monitor. The videotape he is showing as part of a public lecture at Cambridge University portends, in his view, nothing less than the shattering of modern biology. It also features a cute dog. The tape, produced by an Austrian television station, looks more like a low-budget domestic farce than a paradigm smasher. On the right side of the split screen, the dog's owner, a woman named Pam Smart, is shown gadding about the English village of Ramsbottom. On the left side, her terrier-cross, Jaytee, who has remained at home, lies curled up at the feet of Pam's mother, Muriel. Beneath each of these slow-moving dramas, synchronized videotape counters tick by, confirming that the camera locked on Jaytee and the camera tracking Pam show simultaneous activity. Suddenly, a researcher accompanying Pam tells her it's time to leave. Eleven seconds later, as Pam exits a churchyard and strides toward a taxi stand to get a ride home, Jaytee rises and trots to a window. The Austrian reporter's voice-over states the dog waited patiently there for 15 minutes until his mistress walked in through the door.

The implication: Though Pam was several miles away, Jaytee sensed, somehow, the moment she formed the intent to return home.

In itself, of course, the Austrian tape proves nothing—it could be coincidence or a hoax. Indeed, that’s the judgment of Richard Wiseman, a British psychology researcher and avid debunker of pseudoscientific claims. Wiseman and two colleagues ran four owner-anticipation experiments with Jaytee and Pam and, in the August 1998 issue of the British Journal of Psychiatry, they concluded: “In all four experiments Jaytee failed to accurately detect when [Smart] set off to return home.” Sheldrake contends that Wiseman’s team arbitrarily established a two-minute waiting period as the criterion for owner anticipation and ignored the dog’s behavior after the return signal. “Wiseman’s own data shows the dog spent most of its time at the window when Pam was on her way home,” he argues. In any case, Sheldrake says, he has produced more than 200 similar tapes and found three dogs that anticipate their owners’ return 80 percent of the time.


Controversy follows Sheldrake at every turn, and little wonder. The existence of telepathy, a radical notion by itself, is just a subset of Sheldrake’s larger premises—that invisible, but nonetheless pervasive “morphic fields” are responsible for both the shape and behavior of all things, from atoms to zebras, organizing them much as a magnetic field lines up iron filings. Just as controversial is Sheldrake’s hypothesis that these fields broadcast across time and space, a phenomenon he calls morphic resonance. Result: A carrot seed grows into the shape of a carrot because it is directed by the cumulative morphic resonance of all previous carrots. A million blind African termites build a 10-foot-tall nest, featuring top-to-bottom ventilation shafts and other complex architectures, because they are guided by the morphic resonance of previous termite nests. A newspaper crossword puzzle is easier to solve late in the day, because the morphic resonance broadcast by thousands of successful solvers facilitates the task. A dog anticipates its owner’s return because the bond they forge through close association is what Sheldrake terms a “social” morphic field, which stretches, but does not break, when they are apart. Sheldrake contends the same transcendental bonding explains how pigeons home, fish school, and dogs and cats find owners who have moved hundreds of miles away. Humans, Sheldrake says, retain only vestiges of morphic-resonance telepathy, possibly because telephones and mass media make the ability less necessary for survival. In animals, he contends, it remains robust.

Sheldrake says humans retain only vestiges of morphic-

resonance telepathy because telephones and mass media

make the ability less necessary for survival

Sheldrake’s theories certainly seem to resonate with the public. His fifth and latest book, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home and Other Unexplained Powers of Animals, resides near the top of popular science best-seller lists worldwide, with 75,000 hardcover copies sold in the United States alone. Moreover,  Sheldrake has impressive academic credentials. A former research fellow of the Royal Society, he was director of studies in biochemistry and cell biology at Clare College at Cambridge University and a Frank Knox Fellow at Harvard.

But these days, he is unaffiliated with any university and is viewed as a pariah by many of his peers. “Morphic resonance is rubbish,” says Lewis Wolpert, professor of biology as applied to medicine at University College London. “It is unmitigated junk, and a great insult to people who do real work in the field.” In a now-famous editorial in the British science journal Nature, former editor John Maddox went further, terming A New Science of Life, a book in which Sheldrake outlines many of his theories, “the best candidate for burning there has been for many years.”

DANCES WITH DOGS:

Sheldrake contends that a variety of messages can be communicated telepathically between animals and humans, including fear, alarm, excitement, calls for help, anticipation of arrivals or departures, and distress.

In spite of such scorn (or, worse, anonymity—a half dozen developmental biologists in the United States claimed they knew little or nothing of his work), Sheldrake soldiers on. Here at Cambridge’s Union Society Hall, a severely Edwardian venue with ugly wallpaper, leather armchairs, poor heating, and foxhunt prints on the wall, he is showing his videotape and speaking about his theories to 75 students and faculty members as part of the society’s guest speakers program. His presentation brings hearty applause. If Sheldrake is deluded, he ushers more people into his fanciful realm every day.

That evening, returning to London on the 9:27 express, Sheldrake fights back fatigue. Clad in olive—olive tie, olive jacket, olive pants, and rather ratty olive down coat—his longish, graying hair is in a disarray of ringlets. He is thin; six inches of untethered belt-end flop across his lap. He has pale lab-dweller skin, watery blue eyes, and a soft, lilting voice. Now 58 years old, he impresses even his harshest critics with his politesse. Says Maddox: “He is one of the nicest and most well-mannered men I have ever met.”

But nothing in Sheldrake’s gentle demeanor should be interpreted as a lack of determination. He has pushed the hypothesis of morphic resonance for 20 years and claims, rather bitingly, that his motivation is a too-rare reverence for science as a vehicle for addressing deep, difficult questions. “My way of thinking about science is that major unsolved problems are the most interesting things to work on. I have noticed that many of my colleagues take the opposite view: that major, unsolved problems need to be denied, because recognizing them would show that science is radically incomplete.”

“The idea that the whole truth can be found via reductionism, examining the smallest particles, has never been proved,” says Sheldrake. “It’s an article of faith”

Sheldrake is not the first to posit the existence of morphic fields. In the early 1920s, three biologists—Hans Spemann, Alexander Gurwitsch, and Paul Weiss—independently proposed that fields govern the shape of growing organisms. Gurwitsch was, in particular, astonished by the activity of fungi. How is it, he wondered, that fungal threads, which live apart and free in the soil, converge to make a mushroom? As Gurwitsch hypothesized: “The place of the embryonal formative process is a field, the boundaries of which, in general, do not coincide with those of the embryo but surpass them.” Sheldrake’s embellishment of morphic fields is the idea of morphic resonance. Early biologists imagined relatively discrete morphic fields surrounding and shaping each plant or animal. Sheldrake hatched the idea that each field broadcasts from the past into the future and infinitely across space.

Morphic resonance would dictate that any acquired characteristic, whether a behavior or a shape, can be inherited. Acquired-characteristic inheritance is known as Lamarckism, after French biologist Jean-Baptiste de Monet de Lamarck, who proposed the idea in 1809, and is today almost universally rejected in favor of evolution by natural selection of random genetic mutations. Bucking this trend, Sheldrake fills much of his 1988 book The Presence of the Past with experimental evidence for acquired-characteristic inheritance. One example: In 1923, Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov trained mice to run to a feeding place when an electric bell was rung. The first generation required an average of 300 trials to learn, the second 100, the third 30, and the fourth 10. Pavlov was stumped when a new, unrelated strain of mice did not display the same learning increments, but to Sheldrake, that outcome makes perfect sense. The result would not be repeatable because the new mice had a head start. “Subsequent mice would be influenced by morphic resonance from those in the first experiment,” he says.

Some later experiments on other creatures imply that acquired shape-changes can be inherited. In one, reported in 1975 by C.H. Waddington, professor of animal genetics at Edinburgh University, embryonic fruit flies that mutated in response to high temperatures or exposure to ether began giving birth to similarly mutated offspring in as few as eight generations.

Critics assert such studies have not been reliably replicated, and abundant laboratory and cultural evidence points in the opposite direction. Lamarck and his followers should have realized, wrote marine biologist J.R. Whitaker, that “a millennium of circumcision rites by the Semitic races had certainly failed, for example, to result in the birth of males without foreskins.”