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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Sheldrake grew up in Newark , Nottinghamshire , in the midlands of the United Kingdom . He later studied for a degree in biochemistry at the University Of Cambridge , from where he graduated with Honours in the First Class. Sheldrake held a Fellowship and taught biology at Cambridge University ( Clare College , from which he also studied natural sciences as an undergraduate and doctoral student), and was a Research Fellow of the Royal Society . He later went to Hyderabad, India , where he made contributions to crop physiology. While in India, he lived in a Christian ashram. His wife, Jill Purce, is a distinguished music therapist. In September 2005, Sheldrake was appointed to the Perrott-Warwick Scholarship for Psychic al research and Parapsychology by Trinity College, Cambridge . ''NEW SCIENCE OF LIFE'' In 1981, Sheldrake trailed his hypothesis of formative causation in an article in '' New Scientist '' magazine. The piece was provocatively headlined: "Scientific proof that science has got it all wrong". An editorial introduction admitted that, to modern science, an idea such as Sheldrake’s was "completely scatty", but justified its publication on the grounds that first, "Sheldrake is an excellent scientist; the proper, imaginative kind that in an earlier age discovered continents and mirrored the world in sonnets," and secondly, "the science in his ideas is good. … This does not mean that it is right but that it is testable". His best known book, '' A New Science Of Life '', was published a week after the ''New Scientist'' article. He put forward the hypothesis of ''formative causation'' (the theory of '' Morphic Fields ''), which proposes that phenomena — particularly biological ones — become more probable the more often they occur, and therefore that biological growth and behaviour are guided into patterns laid down by previous similar organisms. He suggests that this underlies many aspects of science, from Evolution to Laws Of Nature . |
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