Recently, Merlian News posted a review of Rupert Sheldrake’s book, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home — And Other Unexplained Powers of Animals.

Our reviewer, Cheryl Shainmark stated, “…one needn’t have read any of his other books to understand and enjoy this one … The author has compiled hundreds of fascinating stories of unusual animal behavior (and some human) and presents them in a thought-provoking way — reading them can be so much fun, in fact, that one almost loses sight of how much science and research has gone into this fine book.”

Dr. Sheldrake’s resume is a long, impressive, and world known list of achievements and studies. He is a biologist and author of more than 75 scientific papers and ten books. He is a former Research Fellow of the Royal Society and a current Fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences near San Francisco. The amount of work he has done is immeasurable.

MERLIAN NEWS:We have a ‘new physics’ – what do you think is the ‘new biology’ ?

RS:

The new biology is the subject of my first book, called A New Science of Life. The essence of a new biology is that it is holistic, rather than reductionistic; organismic rather than mechanistic. The principle metaphor is the organism rather than the machine. It treats living organisms as living organisms. My own proposal is that the holistic properties of organisms depend on fields called morphic fields. I think these are in general agreement with the principles of quantum physics, which is also based ont he field concept. Morphic fields like quantum fields are probabilistic.

MERLIAN NEWS: How do these two systems interrelate?

RS:

The organising fields of biological systems interact with the fields of physical systems by modifying probabilities. In this sense they are fields of information.

MERLIAN NEWS: What are the implications of this new biology for alternative and allopathic medicine?

RS:

It seems to me that for complimentary and alternative medicine we need a unifying paradigm and a field model of the body seems the most likely to provide that.

Merlian News would like to thank Dr. Rupert Sheldrake for his time.

For more information on Rupert Sheldrake visit http://www.sheldrake.org/intro/

(Bio continued) From 1968 to 1969, based in the Botany Department of the University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, he studied rain forest plants. From 1974 to 1985 he worked at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) in Hyderabad, India, where he was Principal Plant Physiologist. While in India, he also lived for a year and a half at the ashram of Fr Bede Griffiths in Tamil Nadu, where he wrote his first book, A New Science of Life. He is currently a Fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, near San Francisco, and an Academic Director and Visiting Professor at the Graduate Institute in Connecticut. He lives in London with his wife and two sons.

He has appeared in many TV programs in Britain and overseas, and was one of the participants (along with Stephen Jay Gould, Daniel Dennett, Oliver Sacks, Freeman Dyson and Stephen Toulmin) in a TV series called A Glorious Accident, shown PBS channels throughout the US. He has often taken part in BBC and other radio programmes. He has written for newspapers such as the Guardian, where he had a regular monthly column, The Times, Sunday Telegraph, Daily Mirror, Daily Mail, Sunday Times, Times Educational Supplement, Times Higher Education Supplement and Times Literary Supplement, and has contributed to a variety of magazines, including Resurgence, the Ecologist and the Spectator. (bio info cited from Sheldrake Online)

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