The Rebirth of Nature : The Greening of Science and God

Rupert Sheldrake, one of the world's preeminent biologists, has revolutionized scientific thinking with his vision of a living, developing universe--one with its own inherent memory. In The Rebirth of Nature , Sheldrake urges us to move beyond the centuries-old mechanistic view of nature, explaining why we can no longer regard the world as inanimate and purposeless. Sheldrake shows how recent developments in science itself have brought us to the threshold of a new synthesis in which traditional wisdom, intuitive experience, and scientific insight canbe mutually enriching. Rupert Sheldrake, one of the world’s foremost biologists, has revolutionized scientific thinking with his vision of living, developing universe with it’s own inherent memory. In The Rebirth of Nature Sheldrake urges us to move beyond the centuries-old mechanistic view of nature, explaining in lucid terms why we can no longer regard the world as inanimate and purposeless. Through an astute critique of the dominant scientific paradigm, Sheldrake shows how recent developments in science itself have brought us to the threshold of a new synthesis in which traditional wisdom, intuitive experience, and scientific insight can be mutually enriching. Publishers Weekly Penicillin crystallizes the way it does, not because of timeless mathematical laws, but because it ``crystallized that way before . . . following habits established through repetition,'' claims British biochemist Sheldrake. His controversial theory of ``morphic resonance'' holds that self-organizing systems--molecules, crystals, cells, organisms, societies--respond to invisible regions of influence. He ransacks ideas from Greek animism to pagan polytheism to Darwin's embrace of the concept of Mother Nature as a vast, spontaneous creative process as counterweight to classical physics, which sees the world as a cause-and-effect machine. Sheldrake believes that the mechanistic outlook, coupled with the technological conquest of nature, is killing humankind and the planet. Extending the ideas he advanced in The Presence of the Past , he boldly argues that even the laws of nature may themselves be evolving, and that God might be ``a living, evolutionary cosmos.'' This frontal asault on conventional science embodies a radical rethinking of humanity's place in the scheme of things. Photos. (Jan.) Rupert presents a balanced and logical presentation of how scientific thought began, describing its progress from the dawn of civilisations through the Renaissance, to modern-day empirical platitudes. He shows that both sides are manifestly wrong in their attempts at explaining what is truly observed in terms of behaviour and function. He concurrently presents an alternative argument based on morphic fields and the fact that everything any living thing does is recorded into these fields forever, to be called on whenever a resonance with a living member of that species occurs with these fields. For example, DNA does not explain why, amid the same protein building blocks, and DNA pattern in each cell, an embryo's arm grows differently to its leg. Morphic fields, however, remember how the blocks go together and exert an influence to survival-successful ends. I cannot recommend this book enough. It is superb and really eye-opening. For example, the parallelism between marsupial and placental mammals, shows how the same design, but with slight variations, can come about through universal morphic fields. It also leaves room for speculation as to how the morphic fields caused by this planet, match those on other life- supporting planets in the universe, and hence, how similar aliens might be to us. A really wonderful read, and one of my top books ever. The only slur I could truthfully level at it would be the tendency to drift off into religious connotations as a way of explaining the spirituality of a place. I think energy fields cluster around different bits of nature differently, and they resonate with us in unconsciously noticeable ways differently. Sometimes the resonance affects a whole species in such a way that a place can become important because of its "nice vibe", but it is actually the underlying contours of that bit of nature, that are making the human form happy, not some "godly spirit". First published 1991. Rupert Sheldrake, one of the world's preeminent biologists, has revolutionized scientific thinking with his vision of a living, developing universe. In The Rebirth of Nature Sheldrake transports us to the threshold of a new paradigm in which traditional wisdom, intuitive experience, and scientific insight can co-exist and be mutually enriching