Sunday 11 March 2012

Book Review: "The Science Delusion" by Rupert Sheldrake

Hmm. It's 3:30am and I have just put this book down.

Fascinating. I read the dust jacket and my immediate thought was that this was a load of old bollocks.
But it isn't and the dust jacket is just plain wrong.

The tone is one of sober, deliberate questioning of the dogma and paradigm of 'traditional' science. In one sense the concept of 'traditional' science is the thing he's suggesting needs addressing.

Sheldrake isn't saying that his ideas are right or that the universe is alive or that parapsychology is real.
He's just saying that the questions about them should be treated the same way as other 'scientific' questions.
So at the end of each chapter he provides clear questions about what was discussed and possible experiments that could be performed to approach the 'heresy'.


I have to say that many of those experiments are doomed to failure because they are not constructed very well. The crystallization experiments are just plain silly. But that's not the point. In any case I particularly like his idea for X-Prizes for proving various things such as over unity devices. Cute.


Each chapter attempts to address a key assumption, dogma if you will, about the current state of science. He then asks questions about it and provides 'evidence' to the contrary. His 'evidence' in most cases is utter rubbish, but again that's not the point. The fact that asking the question at all in the current materialistic science view is viewed as heresy IS the point.

Finally I would like to say that if I hear the phrase 'morphic resonance' one more time I'll throttle the person saying it and shove an easter island statue into their nether regions. The idea is completely unfalsifiable and there are time-slice-universe field theories that, I feel, better address the issues than a morphogenic field.

No comments:

Post a Comment