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Rupert Sheldrake outraged the scientific establishment in the early 1980s with his hypothesis of morphic resonance: his book A New Science of Life was denounced by the journal Nature as 'the best candidate for burning there has been for many years'. With his academic career torpedoed, Sheldrake has become the champion of 'the people's science'. Books such as Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home and The Sense of Being Stared At have won him popular acclaim and academic opprobrium in equal measure. In this special issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies, Sheldrake summarizes his case for the 'non-visual detection of staring'. His claims are scrutinised by fourteen critics, to whose commentaries he then responds. In his editorial introduction, Revd. Anthony Freeman explores the concept of 'heresy' in science and in religion.
Rupert Sheldrake
Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist, a former research fellow of the Royal Society at Cambridge, a current fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences near San Francisco, and an academic director and visiting professor at the Graduate Institute in Connecticut. He received his Ph.D. in biochemistry from Cambridge University and was a fellow of Clare College, Cambridge University, where he carried out research on the development of plants and the ageing of cells. He is the author of more than eighty scientific papers and ten books, including Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home; Morphic Resonance; The Presence of the Past; Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic Consciousness; The Rebirth of Nature; and Seven Experiences That Could Change the World. In 2019, Rupert Sheldrake was cited as one of the "100 Most Spiritually Influential Living People in the World" according to Watkins Mind Body Spirit magazine.
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