A New Science of Life: Hypothesis of Formative Causation (Paladin Books) - Softcover

Sheldrake, Rupert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0586085831 ISBN 13: 9780586085837

Publisher: Paladin, 1987

Synopsis

The Hypothesis of Formative Causation. The author maintains that species & organisms can learn, develop & adapt through a process which he calls morphic resonance. 1987 287pp pgs tanning

About this title

From the Back Cover

NEW SCIENCE / BIOLOGY

"As far-reaching in its implications as Darwin's theory of evolution."
--Brain/Mind Bulletin

"An important scientific inquiry into the nature of biological and physical reality."
--New Scientist

"An immensely challenging and stimulating hypothesis, which proposes an unorthodox approach to evolution."
--Arthur Koestler, author of The Lotus and the Robot and The Ghost in the Machine

"Sheldrake is a Cambridge-trained research biologist whose modest proposals. . . have upset scientific orthodoxy"
--Utne Reader

Why do many phenonmena defy the explanations of conventional biology and physics? For instance, when laboratory rats in one place have learned how to navigate a new maze, why do rats elsewhere seem to learn it more easily? Rupert Sheldrake describes this process as morphic resonance: the past forms and behaviors of organisms, he argues, influence organisms in the present through direct connections across time and space. Calling into question many of our fundamental concepts about life and consciousness, Sheldrake reinterprets the regularities of nature as being more like habits than immutable laws.

The first edition of A New Science of Life created a furor when it appeared, provoking the outrage of the old-guard scientific community and the approbation of the new. The British journal Nature called it "the best candidate for burning there has been for many years." A lively debate ensued, as researchers devised experiments testing Sheldrake's hypothesis, including some involving millions of people through the medium of television. These developments are recorded in this revised and expanded edition.

RUPERT SHELDRAKE, Ph.D., is a former Research Fellow of the Royal Society and was a scholar of Clare College, Cambridge, and a Frank Knox Fellow at Harvard University. His other books include The Presence of the Past, The Rebirth of Nature, and Seven Experiments That Could Change the World. He lives in London with his wife and two sons.
 

Synopsis

This is a revised edition of a book in which the author propounded his controversial revolutionary theory of "formative causation." As a result of its publication, several experiments were instituted to test the validity of the theory. In November 1982 the Tarrytown Group of New York announced the offer of a $10,000 prize for the best test of the hypothesis, the results of which are still to be announced. This book contains a new preface by the author as well as a lengthy appendix of a selection of the published comments and discussions which the first edition stimulated.

Edition details

• Publisher: Paladin
• Publication date: 1987
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0586085831
• ISBN 13: 9780586085837
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 288