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I have been a scientist for more than 40 years, having studied at Cambridge and Harvard. I researched and taught at Cambridge University, was a research fellow of the Royal Society, and have more than 80 publications in peer-reviewed journals. I am strongly pro-science.

Rupert Sheldrake

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Rupert Sheldrake
Age: 54
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Biochemist
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Newark
Nottinghamshire
Alfred Rupert Sheldrake
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More quotes by Rupert Sheldrake

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Of the seven experiments, the ones that have been most investigated so far have been the pets. The dogs who know when their masters for coming home, and the sense of being stared at.
Rupert Sheldrake
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Creativity gives new forms, new patterns, new ideas, new art forms. And we don't know where creativity comes from. Is it inspired from above? Welling up from below? Picked up from the air? What? Creativity is a mystery wherever you encounter it.
Rupert Sheldrake
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The cumulative nature of the evolutionary process, the fact that memory is preserved, means that life grows not just through a random proliferation of new forms, but there's a kind of cumulative quality.
Rupert Sheldrake
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The facts of science are real enough, and so are the techniques that scientists use, and so are the technologies based on them. But the belief system that governs conventional scientific thinking is an act of faith.
Rupert Sheldrake
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Basically, morphic fields are fields of habit, and they've been set up through habits of thought, through habits of activity, and through habits of speech. Most of our culture is habitual.
Rupert Sheldrake
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I still say the Lord's Prayer every day. It covers a lot of ground in our relation to the world.
Rupert Sheldrake
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Matter is merely mind deadened by the development of habit to the point where the breaking up of these habits is very difficult.
Rupert Sheldrake
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Not every good idea survives. Not every new form of art is repeated. Not every new potential instinct is successful. Only the successful ones get repeated. By natural selection and then through repetition they become probable, more habitual.
Rupert Sheldrake
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The idea is that there is a kind of memory in nature. Each kind of thing has a collective memory. So, take a squirrel living in New York now. That squirrel is being influenced by all past squirrels.
Rupert Sheldrake
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Contemporary science is based on the philosophy of materialism, which claims that all reality is material or physical.
Rupert Sheldrake
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When people see one of these new forms of art for the first time, often they can't make sense of it. Then, if it's around long enough, a lot of people get used to it and it becomes assimilated into culture. So there's a morphic field both for the kind of art and for the appreciation of it.
Rupert Sheldrake
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For more than 200 years, materialists have promised that science will eventually explain everything in terms of physics and chemistry. Believers are sustained by the faith that scientific discoveries will justify their beliefs.
Rupert Sheldrake
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I think that the 'laws of nature' are also prone to evolve I think they are more like habits than laws.
Rupert Sheldrake
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The fact that you can forge a twenty dollar bill doesn't prove that all twenty dollar bills are forgeries.
Rupert Sheldrake
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The Gaia Hypothesis of James Lovelock [and Lynn Margulis] puts forward a scientific view of the living Earth, which in one respect is modern, empherical, scientific, in another respect re-awakens an ancient archetype, which in fact is so clearly suggested by the very name of the hypothesis, Gaia, the Greek name for Mother Earth.
Rupert Sheldrake
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The assumption that the laws of nature are eternal is a vestige of the Christian belief system that informed the early postulates of modern science in the seventeenth century. Perhaps the laws of nature have actually evolved along with nature itself, and perhaps they are still evolving. Or perhaps they are not laws at all, but more like habits.
Rupert Sheldrake
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To describe the overwhelming life of a tropical forest just in terms of inert biochemistry and DNA didn't seem to give a very full picture of the world.
Rupert Sheldrake
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I think that creativity depends on having sufficient indeterminacy around for a new pattern to arise up within it.
Rupert Sheldrake
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There's a certain kind of scepticism that can't bear uncertainty.
Rupert Sheldrake
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A lot of us have all sorts of ideas, and we select some rather than others and give expression to those... and some works of art are more successful than others. Some languish in obscurity and are never heard of again, while others form the foundation of a whole school of art.
Rupert Sheldrake