Stuff You Should Know - How Morphic Fields Work?

Episode Date: March 3, 2020

Biologist and science historian Rupert Sheldrake is known as a heretic of science, mostly for his deeply strange ideas about what connects all living things. But his pokes at science help keep the field from growing dogmatic and for that we salute him. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you've ever been at home and wondered, Josh and Chuck, is it really worth going to see them perform live? The answer is a resounding yes. Yes, and if you live in Vancouver, BC,

or anywhere near there, come on out to the Chan Center on Sunday, March 29th to see us and find out for yourself. And then the next night, if you live around Portland, Oregon, you can go to the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall and we'll be there, ready to go on Monday, March 30th. That's right, you can get all ticket information at SYSKLive.com. Welcome to Step You Should Know,

a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryan over there and there's guest producer Dylan sitting in this fine Wednesday morning of weirdness. Everything's out of whack and strange. I know, right? Hopefully our voices sound normal, Chuck,

I was worried about that. So, not that anyone cares, but our regular Tuesday sesh got pushed because our computer took a dump. Technical difficulties. And then we said, hey, let's just do it tomorrow morning. Had a few more technical difficulties, but here we are. Going strong, buddy.

I'm tired, are you? No, I'm okay, I've had enough coffee that I'm not tired. It's weird for us to record in the morning, it just, everything's out of whack. I would call it eerie, I think. Cause you know, I do the movie crush, mini crushes on Wednesday mornings, usually. So usually I'm just making dumb jokes

and cussing a lot with Noel right now. Right. I gotta switch my brain back into G-rated mode. Yep. To talk about Rupert Sheldrake. That's what we're doing. And you can curse if you want, we'll beep it out.

Sheldrake? Depending on, yeah. I think that's how the scientific community refers to. That's just one of those names that seems like it should be yelled at, like that. And I like to call him Rupert after Michael Cain in 30 Rotten Scoundrels. Oh, right.

Remember he called Steve Martin's name at one point was Rupert? There's a cork on the fork. Yeah, man, that was a good movie. It was. So we're talking about a different Rupert or Rupert. Rupert.

Rupert Sheldrake, who is widely considered in the scientific community, a heretic, a fraud, a hoaxer, a pseudoscientist, all sorts of things. And normally we don't entertain that kind of stuff or specifically people who are considered as such because we tend to be like, yeah, pseudoscience is not so great.

But there's something about Rupert Sheldrake. There is. That. The cut of his jib. It may be a little bit something like that, but he is different in some ways. He kind of stands alone. He's got staying power to say the least.

He was first branded a scientific heretic in 1981. And he's still around doing his thing, ticking off the scientific establishment. Yeah, but see, he's also in certain circles labeled as an open-minded scientist and someone not afraid to kind of question the unquestionable and someone who flies in the face of what some people call the scientific orthodoxy.

Or dogma. Where everything is so rigid that there is no room for new ideas to be explored. Right, that basically the scientific orthodoxy that you refer to, it kind of says, we are on basically the right track. We generally have the parameters kind of figured out. We know the math we need to be using.

We know the places we need to be looking. We have generally in everything from physics to biology an understanding of the general structure. Now it's just a matter of filling in the details. Yeah, we've looked under the hood. Uh-huh. And we know what's going on generally. We know that it's a combustion engine

and not an electric car that the universe is. That kind of thing. The heretical electric car. Right, so when somebody comes along and says, no, no, that's not even a car that you're looking at. That's a boat. The scientific establishment or really any establishment really tends to get shook by that kind of stuff.

They don't like that. And one of the reasons that I was trying to figure out like why people get so invested in this. I think there's a lot of people who come and say, I am a person of science. I believe in this. I subscribe to it. And they end up going so far as to pin their identity to it.

And this happens with just about any structure. And when you pin your identity to something, when that something, that structure is attacked, you take it as a personal attack. And I think that that's one of the reasons why a lot of people are so rabidly against Rupert Sheldrake. So should we talk about this guy? I think we should.

I think, Chuck, we should explain one of the reasons why he has such staying power and what makes him different is that he is about as trained a scientist as a scientist can be. Yeah, and as we move through this, you'll see that what makes him stand out from other kooks is that he's very, very intelligent guy. He's not a kook.

So that's why it's kind of like, that's why certain people listen to him. One of the other things I really want to point out at the start of this, and this is what really differentiates him from a lot of people on the fringes today, is he's not in a hole. He's very polite. He's very calm.

He's very measured. He doesn't engage in ad hominem attacks against his critics. He engages with his critics. He's actually a very congenial person. He's just on a different side of the coin from the scientific establishment in almost every respect. Yeah, and when I've read articles and interviews with other people from the establishment

that have hung out with him and done experiments, they're all like, he's a really affable kind of fun guy. Exactly. Even though when you look at him, and when you hear Rupert Sheldrake, it doesn't scream fun and affable. No. But he is.

Yeah, he's got a lampshade on his head, nine-tenths of the time. Man, can you imagine the lab parties? Beer bong. You get freaky. All right, so he started out his career, kind of right down the middle, science-wise. Went to Cambridge as an undergrad.

He won a botany prize there, the university botany prize. He then went to Harvard, studied philosophy. He studied the history of science. That was a big one. Went back to Cambridge. Yeah, apparently he's just like a savant when it comes to science history. Went back to Cambridge, got his PhD in biochemistry,

and then a postdoc with a Royal Society in plant development in the aging of cells. So I think that's unassailable, unimpeachable. It really isn't. Had he just kind of continued along, this was largely in the 70s, had he just kind of continued along this path, he probably would have been a really widely respected,

although pretty obscure plant scientist or biologist of some sort, right? Just one of many. But one of the things that happened to him was he went to India and studied and lived at an ashram for about a year and a half, and apparently smoked a lot of hashish while he was there. Now, is that true or are you just goofing?

The hashish part? Yeah. Oh, I'm just goofing, but... But surely he did, right? Surely. Yeah. But the thing is, is around this time, he elaborated on an idea that he'd had,

that he'd learned about probably in his history of science classes, that science can't explain how you can take some cells that start out as like a seed or something like that, and that little seed grows into an oak tree, and that that oak tree looks startlingly similar to other oak trees that you can dig up from a thousand years ago,

or imagine that they'll basically look like a thousand years from now, or that are spread out on different continents. They can't, science can't explain how morphology works, that how something becomes the thing that it is, and that that resembles something else. And you say, well, it's genetics, like that's kind of the common thing.

But here we get to that point where science is like, we've got the broad strokes, we just don't understand the details, and genetics can possibly be the thing that explains this later on, but we really have no idea how this stuff works because it's really, really intricate how something like that happens.

Yeah, it's almost like Sheldrake was like, Tom Hanks and Big in the boardroom when they're talking about the toys, and he's just like, I don't get it. Yeah, like, cause they'll say, oh, well, it's DNA, and he's like, yeah, but I don't get it. Like, how does a tulip become the tulip? Well, it's DNA.

Yeah, but that really doesn't explain it all. Well, it's DNA. We understand DNA. He's like, yeah, I don't get it. Yeah, and to him specifically, DNA is a chemical that dictates how other chemicals are produced, right? He thinks it's very overrated.

He does, which that in and of itself is heretical, but it's pretty funny too, but it is. But with morphology, with how something takes the shape that it has eventually and it's a mature state, there's a lot going on there. There's like little cells that have to set up and arrange in a certain pattern that later on down the road,

after all these processes play out, will form another pattern. So there's basically planning. There's timing, like all of those that process has to happen at just the right steps and just the right stages for that end result to be what it's supposed to be. There's differentiation of cells

where one cell can produce a new cell and the new cell has totally different genes turned off or on that will allow it to specialize. And these are the things we don't understand what's guiding it. And so Rupert Sheldrake kind of tapped into a thought that started, I think, back in the 1920s among biologists

that there must be some unseen guide or force that basically says, I've got this. I know what the end result is. I can take the starting bit and guide it into this end result. And we don't understand what that is. Yeah, there were a couple of scientists in the 20s and 30s studying

what they called morphogenetic fields, which is sort of like the idea that there is this invisible mold that we don't fully understand that gives the shape to these things. A guy named C.H. Waddington in 1936 had a paper called Morphogenesis and the Field Concept. And then a Russian biologist named Alexander Govitz

kind of had the same thoughts, but I think he came independently to these thoughts, which was, hey, there's something else going on here. We're calling it morphogenetic fields. And this is this, like I said, this idea that there are these invisible molds that we don't fully get that gives things their eventual shape.

And that's why they all look alike. Right, so on the ashram in the late 70s, early 80s, Sheldrake was kind of vibing on this idea of there must be some field, these morphic fields or whatever, that guide the development of something living into its mature form, because we just don't understand it.

So, hey, maybe that's just as good an explanation as our current understanding, which is really non-existent. So, he took it further though, and he wrote a book. He did, he took it further. He wrote a book called A New Science of Life. It was his first book, as far as I know, at the very least it was his first book

that really kind of made a splash. And in it, he kind of said these morphogenetic fields, we're gonna call them morphic fields now. And not only do they guide the morphogenesis of a living thing, they guide its behavior from that moment on, from the moment of conception on to I guess it's death. And then when that thing dies,

the life that it's led will contribute to this morphic resonance that carries on to the next generation, and the generation beyond that. And so, you eventually have this long line of tulips that know not only how to grow into the right shape, but how to behave and do all the things that tulips do because of all of the living tulips

that came before it through this process of morphic resonance. Yeah, and not just like that tulip growing nearby at the same time, but he said, what if it just was across all of space and time and the tulip in Africa in the 19th century has informed the tulip in Florida in the year 2020 how to grow.

Right. And everyone went, oh, good hashish over there in India in the 1970s, right? Sheldrake. Right. So, yeah, we'll get to how it was received in a minute, but you wanna take a break and then come back and kind of explain how he says it works a little more?

Yeah, but I also think I totally spoiled how it was received, but that's okay. That's all right, man. All right. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars,

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on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing.

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Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass

on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. Chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop. Okay, so we're at the point where, um, Rupert Sheldrake has published his 1981 book, A New Science of Life. And in it, he's talking about this morphic resonance that basically says, um, anything that self-organizes from a molecule to a giraffe, um,

knows how to take the shape or is guided by a process that shapes it called morphic fields. But even more than that, it's behavior. It's future behavior is shaped by these same morphic fields. All of the, all of the things that the, the giraffes that came before it learned and knew and saw and ate and figured out becomes this kind of body of consciousness that's passed along to every new giraffe that's born.

Yeah, I think we should read this quote. Okay. This is a great interview in Scientific American. Um, who was it, was it, who was it interviewing him? I can't remember now. Was it Rose? No. I'm not sure. It was, it was a contemporary who was, uh,

more, you know, traditional mainstream science, but he again was like, this Sheldrake guy, he's got something, he's got equality. Right. So here's how Sheldrake himself answers the question of morphic resonance. Morphic resonance is the influence of previous structures of activity on subsequent similar structures

of activity organized by morphic fields. It enables memories to pass across both space and time from the past to the greater the similarity, the greater the influence of, of morphic resonance. What this means is that all self-organizing systems like molecules, crystal cells, plants, animals and animal societies have a collective memory on which each individual draws into which it contributes.

And here's the key here, I think he says, in its most general sense, this hypothesis implies that the so-called laws of nature are more like habits. Yeah. Scientific establishment really particularly doesn't like that last bit right there. Yeah. Sheldrake just called out the laws, so-called laws of nature. Right.

So there's something in there that kind of stuck out to me that I was curious about. I couldn't find an answer to is that, he says the greater the similarity, the greater the influence of morphic resonance, but what is the similarity say in like a giraffe embryo that allows the morphic resonance of all the giraffes that came before to be like this?

This is the thing we need to exert our influence on. Like what similarity attracts that morphic resistivity? I took that to mean maybe not in the case of giraffes, but in the case of like different varieties of an orchid. Like the more similar, you know, cause that's why they're all different ones. I don't know, maybe not.

Yeah, but what is the initial similarity that that morphic field recognizes in that specific kind of orchid that says, oh, I'm going to influence you? Or is it just- We should call him. It just naturally happens. I don't know. But these are the questions that you start to wonder

about when you read Sheldrake's stuff, which is, I think the reason why I like him, like he, it just makes you think. You just start to think differently than, than just like, oh, it's DNA. Yeah, where are you with this guy overall? I am sympathetic to him because I admire that he has a tremendous amount of courage

and willingness to take tons of flak. And I'm sure in this day and age, lots of hate and threats. I think that I am critical of the fact that he stopped publishing peer reviewed papers all the way back in the mid 80s. That makes him currently less of a scientist and more a science communicator, but he's also kind of making up his own science too.

So I don't know if he qualifies as a science communicator, but I generally like him and I appreciate the role that he plays in this, this, with science. What about you? I'm kind of with you there. I admire his, his chutzpah because I don't think that he is a charlatan out just to make money selling books like some people think.

Yeah, I don't either. I think he's a really smart guy who gave, has given his whole life to deep, deep thought and research on this stuff. And I read some of it and I think he may be onto something. I read other stuff and I think this sounds like magic. And we are men of science, we are podcasters, but we have always roundly sided with the scientific method

as sort of the baseline. And if you can't, if you can't satisfy the scientific method, then we typically kind of poo poo it, but there's something again about the way he's gone about it that just doesn't seem like he's just some wacko out there making stuff up. Yeah, and I think he also kind of tunes into something that I dislike, which is, you know, he's really critical

and really challenges, you know, hardened dogma of a lot of the scientific community where he's like, this is just how it is. Well, why? Yeah. I don't know, I was taught that, that's just how it is and stop questioning it. And I really dislike that.

And I like him that he challenges that as well. Yeah, there's a rigidity in science that turns us both off, I think. So turned off right now. I was gonna make a joke, but I'm not going there because I'm in the mini crush mode, so. Right on, keep it in, that's why I came. All right, so let's look at a few examples

of claims that he makes about things that he thinks morphic resonance might explain in nature, specifically with animal behaviors. He says things like fish schooling, butterflies, monarchs flying thousands of miles to the same place, homing pigeons, termites in Africa that are blind that build, you know, a 10 foot tall nest with ventilation structures.

He said all this stuff, or more importantly, we'll look at this a little closer in a minute, a dog and their owner and a dog anticipating their owner's return, even though it might vary on what time that happens, like the sense that the dog knows and is waiting by the door. He thinks that's all explained by morphic resonance. Yeah, and I mean, like it's curious in that, you know,

how does a bee know after it makes that wax ring in a honeycomb, how does it know to melt it into a polygon shape rather than just a circle? Or like those termites, like why does a termite nest look almost identical to other termite nests? DNA. You know, yeah, exactly. Like there's a lot of behaviors

that we can't quite explain that. If you do kind of buy into this morphic resonance idea, you could say, well, that's actually really, really interesting. Now, and this is a real good criticism of morphic resonance is you could also just as equally say, magic or God or whatever, there's not, no one's proven that morphic resonance exists. This is just Sheldrake saying, here's a good examples

of what I'm talking about this morphic resonance stuff. Yeah, and this is kind of important too. He talks about the fact that humans are not as sensitive to this because, and this is where he kind of got me a little bit thinking, he says, we're so distracted by technology and we don't need collective memory of past humans to survive anymore.

So that's why we can't really sense these fields. And I kind of disagree with that in some ways. Like I think if it does exist, it still is, it still survives in humans and things like, think about how easily the average human can pick a snake out of the grass with peripheral vision, right? I wasn't raised around snakes. My parents didn't drum it into my head

to be really wary of all snakes. And yet I'm a pro at picking a snake out in the grass with my peripheral vision. Are you really? Sure. And it's been shown that people can like pick a gun out as quickly as they can pick out snakes and spiders. And we're really good at picking out snakes and spiders

in our environment and this would be a pretty good example of that if you ask me. That is the most common descriptor I think when people say, what's Josh like? I'm always like, he drinks a lot of beverages, coffee, water, you know, energy drinks. He's a hard worker and man, you should see that guy pick a snake out of his peripheral vision.

It's uncanny. It makes a gunshot ricochet sound. Like I don't go for a walk in the woods without him anymore. Sometimes you're nice and carry me on your back when I get tired. So, here's a couple of things with human morphic resonance that this is where it gets a little wacky to me.

He says, he claims that a crossword puzzle is easier to complete later in the day because of all the other people that had solved it earlier in the day. And they are broadcasting this morphic resonance out into the universe, I guess. Yeah, just their general awareness of the answers. That gets a little wacky to me.

Yeah, a little. The other one is not as wacky as that feeling eyes in the back of your head like you're being stared at. That's a thing. He says that's morphic fields. Yeah, that your morphic field extends beyond your head and that it's sensitive

and is the first thing contacted by that person's stare and it lets you know basically that you're being stared at. Yeah, this is where he just, he's going in the right direction, then I hear that and I think, oh boy, that is sounds a little wacky. I read another really good explanation for that, that it's a self-fulfilling thing where you, say you're in a library or whatever

and you get the sense that you're being stared at by somebody at a table behind you and when you start to turn around, the movement of your head catches that person's attention. Interesting. And when you finally complete that turn, that person is looking at you.

That makes sense, especially if you're like, ah, for God's sake, and you turn around. Right, yeah. Then they're definitely going to look the next time you turn too, because they're keeping an eye on you. That's right. Or they're just looking for snakes. So Charles, as you kind of said earlier,

this has not all been very well received by the scientific community. I get to say the least. They tend to think of it as Hocom, the fact that he doesn't publish peer-reviewed papers anymore and then said, writes books directly to the public, the fact that they claim that his stuff

isn't falsifiable. But if you read his explanations and descriptions, he's like, no, actually, this all is falsifiable. And I try to run experiments all the time. Sometimes it comes back with positive results. But they generally don't like the stuff that he's saying. And in particular, there was one guy who, looking back, made Rupert Sheldrake's career.

And his name was Sir John Maddox. And at the time that, what it was that the science, the new science of life. Yeah, a new science of life. When that book came out, Sir John Maddox happened to be the editor of the journal Nature. Nature and science are the two most prestigious scientific peer-reviewed publications in the entire world.

He's knighted for God's sakes. And this guy, right, was the editor of that. And he got his hands on the science of a new science of life and wrote, not just a book review, an editorial about this book from the editors of Nature claiming that it was an infuriating tract and that it was the best candidate for burning there has been for many years.

Yeah, also this, in a 1994 interview, he said, Sheldrake is putting forward magic instead of science. And that can be condemned in exactly the language that the Pope used to condemn Galileo for the same reason it is heresy. Right. So if you were curious about how Sir John Maddox felt about the dogma of science,

the fact that he used the word heresy kind of says it all, right? And this was 13 years after that first review. And it invoked the Pope. Yeah, he was doubling down on this. And he didn't mention that it turned out Galileo was right, even though he positioned himself in science and the Pope position in this one.

Burn. The fact is, he used the word burning. He and his defenders later on will say like, no, if you read the whole thing at the end, he says, no, we shouldn't be burning books, but he does say that there's, hadn't been a better candidate for burning. But if we were to burn books,

this would be the first one on the pile. Right. And so that, from that point on, Rupert Sheldrake's publishers are like, we'll be using that on the dust jacket of every edition of this from now on. And it made his career. He went from somebody who might have never been anybody

to the premier heretic of science, thanks to that dusty old crotch, Sir John Maddox. Yeah, here's a dusty old crotch. Yeah, I'm not a big fan of him. Oh man. Or anybody who suggests we should burn books. So here's another quote from another professor of biology at University College London, Lewis-Walpert.

Morphic resonance is rubbish. It is unmitigated junk and a great insult to the people who do real work in the field. Yeah, and I'm sure we could spend the next 20 minutes finding quotes like that about that book. Yeah, and Sheldrake's response has always been, I mean, he'll go back at people for sure, but not in a sort of a poopy pants way.

Right. He basically is like, and you know, in any idea that doesn't conform to this religion of science is denounced. And he said, it's closed-minded, it's a closed-minded system. It goes against the nature of what science is, which should be discovery and investigating hypotheses

and the fact that they're valid until they're proven or disproven by experimenting. So get off my back with your dusty crotch. And in fact, some scientists in the field, or a number of fields, have kind of come to Sheldrake's defense. Not so much that they've criticized John Maddox. I get the impression that you don't criticize Sir John.

Unless you're Josh Clark. Right, yeah. Well, I'm not a scientist. I've got no skin in this game, but they came to Sheldrake's defense and they said, okay, if you're saying these are falsifiable, let's do some experimentation. Let's take this to the point you're putting it at

and let's apply the scientific method to this. Yeah, here, smoke this hash. Right, no, Sheldrake said that to them, like, okay, for the data to make sense, you got to smoke this first. That's right. And they went, oh, okay. That explains everything.

Right, now I got it. But that's why everybody likes to hang out with him. Cause he's got the good stuff. Right. All right, so should we talk about a little bit about what he claims and what he's tried to prove? Yeah, because, so again, he's run these experiments,

but there have been, I just wanna say, there have been a few people who've come up and been like, you know, that was BS what Sir John said, we shouldn't be burning books. I'm going to extend an olive branch on behalf of the scientific community and we're going to test some of these experiments. Yeah, so he drilled down in a few different areas

that we're gonna talk about. One is the one I talked about about humans being stared at. The other is the dogs anticipating their owners return. Right, basically human dog telepathy. Right. And then, yeah, boy, as soon as that word telepathy is thrown out there, that's a science killer.

Yeah, and that's a, I mean, that's a big, easy criticism of children's ideas is that they include telepathy, that the idea that we're tuned into this general body of conscious knowledge that was accumulated by all the living things that came before us and that exists outside of our minds and we can connect to it with our minds.

That's telepathy, there's no way to put it otherwise. Well, in Psy in general, which we should probably do a podcast on at some point. Sure, I mean, we've been chipping away at it little by little, but yeah, yeah. And then the third one that he kind of drilled down on was the idea that successive generations of lab rats can solve their little puzzles and problems faster

and easier than generations before that is because of morphic resonance. Yeah, and there's been data. He's either carried out experiments himself or he's pointed out to publish data before that have shown that. I think back in the 30s, there was a, I guess a biologist or a psychologist

who was training rats how to run a maze and he found to his amazement that rats of successive generations over like 36 generations did better initially on these mazes than their predecessors, which would suggest, well, a lot of things, but apparently he controlled for genetics and environment and said, it's possible that this is somehow being passed

down from one generation to the next outside of genes. Yeah, so let's talk about the dog thing because we have dogs and we love to think that our dogs are little people and that they sit by the door waiting on us and look out the window and are just sad until we get home. Sure. And so he did this experiment

and then later on did some more experiments with a partner, which we'll talk about here in a sec, but he found a lady, a British woman who, her name was Pam and she had a dog named JT, J-A-Y-T-E-E. Very weird. And she said, hey, use me because I got this dog who waits by the window before I come home, no matter when I come home.

Right. So it doesn't matter if I come home at five or 10 o'clock at night or three in the afternoon, this dog is by the window. So I think there's some telepathy going on and Sheldrake said, well, step right up and let's see what's going on here. Yeah, and it wasn't just that her dog sits by the window

the whole time she's gone, it's that people had noticed that her dog would suddenly sit up, go to the window and then within a few 10 minutes or something like that, Pam would come home. Right, and started singing True Colors by Cindy Lauper. Right. And she would come home at different times of the day,

like this is a pretty, it was a remarkable thing. So apparently over a hundred different tests, Sheldrake found that 84 out of a hundred times, this dog accurately predicted when Pam was coming home. And Sheldrake's whole hypothesis. Within 11 seconds, well, people should understand not that this dog hears the car pull in, within 11 seconds of her leaving to go home.

Right, leaving her office, I think, miles away. Exactly. And again, this is at different times of day, they apparently experimented so that she would come home in different kinds of cars, including taxis, so that the dog couldn't somehow like hear this particular calm of Pam's motor or something like that. But he controlled for a lot of stuff.

And this is something you gotta understand about Rupert Sheldrake. He carries out scientific experiments, like under the scientific method. What people disagree with is his interpretation of the data typically. But he controlled for all this different stuff and he found that 84 times out of a hundred,

JT accurately predicted roughly when Pam was gonna come home by getting up and going to the window to wait for her, right? Yeah, I think that first one though was not quite so scientific. Wasn't that the deal? This is why they redid it? No, no, they didn't redo it because it wasn't scientific. They redid it because one of his greatest critics,

Richard Wiseman, who is a, I think a psychologist, but also like a professional skeptic, said, this is BS, but let me carry out, let me replicate your experiment and see if I get the same results. Oh, okay. Cause he had an Austrian documentary crew and they said that the test wasn't scientific.

Oh, I'm sorry. Right. Like they're filming what they did was not scientific, but he had already previously carried out. In private that no one saw. Yeah, but I mean, you know, the scientists do that all the time. I don't think that he's,

I don't think he has been accused of fudging his methodology. I think he's just roundly accused of cherry picking data or misinterpreting the data or interpreting the data to suit his needs, that kind of stuff. But I don't get the impression that a lot of people are like this data

on its, at its core is Hockham. All right. Well, Wiseman, like you said, noted skeptic, professional poo pooer of things, experimental psychologist. He comes in and says, all right, let's do this together. He said, all right, this dog did not, in four different occasions or four different experiments, this dog failed.

Right. And this dog is going to the window a lot. He's a window hanger outer. Yeah. This dog loves that window. And so they said, all right, let's rule out some of these false positives. And let's say, let's define what the real signal would be.

That's if this dog stays at the window for two minutes, not just pops up to see if it's raining or to sing a stanza of true colors, but really sits there for two minutes. And then let's see what happens. They did that. And Wiseman said, all right, and we gotta also say it's gotta be within 10 minutes

of her leaving from home, not 11 minutes. Right. One minute. And in all four of these experiments, this dog gives a signal before that 10 minute period, before she even started for home. So Wiseman said, failed. So if you read Sheldrake's rebuttal to Wiseman's findings,

and Wiseman ran around not just saying failed, he like gave, I think, four different talks about this experiment and how like it was, it didn't amount to anything. And so Sheldrake responded to it and he was like, well, this two minute duration was an arbitrary signal that you came up with. That wasn't part of my original methodology.

And then also, and I think all four of those experiments are maybe all four. So the dog went to the window early and then afterward, if he went to the window again, which apparently he did to wait for Pam, that was thrown out because he'd already gone to the window before. He's like, well, I never said the dog

only went to the window when Pam was coming home. I just said he would go to the window to wait for Pam within some certain timeframe of her leaving. And apparently the dog continued to do this, but it wasn't included in these tests because he had already gone to the window. So it's really detailed and you can read it yourself if you want to, but he has a good explanation

for why Wiseman's interpretation of the data was, or his methodology was flawed. But it's all very civil, like you were saying before. He's not like, Wiseman's a moron who couldn't do science if it sat on him and caused him to stop respirating or anything like that. Yeah, and I think it's the other thing, because the thing that Wiseman poo pooed

was the fact that the dog started this behavior before she started for home. And Sheldrake was like, hey, I think that further proves it actually, because I think that Pam is sending signals before she starts for home that she doesn't even realize like maybe she gets her coat and goes to the restroom for a few minutes or something even.

Well, she was with- And that's the beginning of the going home process. Yeah, or she was with Wiseman's assistant. And Wiseman's assistant was the one who knew what time they were going home. So he said maybe Pam was picking up on the guy looking at his watch or something like that and knew when she was gonna go home anyway.

There's a lot of, he has a lot of explanations for it. It's very interesting to kind of read the back and forth. But Wiseman won that one because everyone wanted Wiseman to win that one. And I think that's kind of par for the course for Sheldrake. He's like, well, no, here's all these other explanations for this interpretation and people just kind of ignore it unless you want to believe what Sheldrake has to say.

That's right. If you don't want to believe what Sheldrake has to say, people like Wiseman and other skeptics provide, here we carried out this experiment and now this is disproven, right? Another guy who did that is a really big critic of Sheldrake. His name is Steven Rose. I think he's a, no, I'm sorry, he's, yeah,

he's a biologist and a neuroscientist, Steven Rose. And he carried out another experiment about how chicks might be able to learn kind of like that lab rat experiment, how they successive generations learned how to do a maze. Well, they did this with chicks and they did this experiment together and they had different interpretations of the data

and it went back and forth in different journals or whatever. But the fact is there are scientists out there, skeptics who are critics of Sheldrake and his ideas and methods, but still scientists that are willing to engage his ideas. And I think that that's healthy, even if they are coming at it from the standpoint

like this is bunk, this is Hockham, they're still willing to go through with these experiments and I respect that. That's right. You want to take another break? Yes. All right, Chuck. We're going to take another break everybody

in case you didn't hear. ["Hey Dude", by David Lashor and Christine Taylor plays in the background." On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lashor and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends

to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself,

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or wherever you listen to podcasts. Cha, cha, cha, cha, cha, cha, cha, cha, cha, cha, cha, cha, cha, cha, cha, cha, cha. All right, so Rose, Steven Rose, and this quote kind of really puts the nail on the head of the critics of Sheldrake. And this actually is one that spoke to me because it's not an attack on Sheldrake. It's more of a sympathetic view, which is this.

Sheldrake is so committed to his hypotheses that it is very hard to envisage the circumstances in which he would accept its disconfirmation. So it's a very sweet way of saying this guy really, really believes this stuff so much that I don't think he is able to look at the data in a level-headed, unbiased way. Right, and it says it all.

I mean, that's tough to, it's a very cutting criticism because how do you show that's not true, other than to say, Sheldrake just said no. Well, no, these are wrong. You have to admit that your hypothesis is wrong to get around that. And then once you've done that, you've just lost anyway. So it's a tough, it's a very shrewd criticism.

Yeah, so Sheldrake over the years has, he's written a lot of books. He has been accused of, he's been accused by some of like, hey, this guy is just out there writing books to make money. And has sort of made himself the superstar of the alt side of science. That seems to be the biggest explanation for why he's doing what he's doing,

that he found an easier and quicker path to fame and recognition and probably money writing these books about his own made up ideas rather than writing, you know, academic papers like everybody else. Right, and on Sheldrake's side, he's like, listen, this, what he calls the default worldview of science and these dogmas, he said they should be sort of pushed back against.

And what about? Questioned. Yeah, questioned. What about the big bang? He's like, everyone thinks they have it all figured out and all laws in the universe are constant. Well, except for the big bang, and then, you know, we can't fully explain that.

And that, there's another great quote from a philosopher named Terence McKenna. I love this quote. Is, give us one free miracle and we'll explain the rest. Yeah. And you know, when it comes to things like the big bang, that kind of holds true. Yeah, specifically with the big bang,

I think is what he's talking about, that if you can just allow for there to have been nothing that came before and all of a sudden, all the matter and energy in the universe suddenly existed, then we can pretty much explain all other physics from that point on or we can use that. And that's the big question is what happened right before the big bang.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. But we also have other questions about the universe, like is it inflating, is there gonna be a big bang or is there gonna be a big crunch or we have a lot of questions and a lot of misunderstanding about it too. But we, physics needs the big bang to have happened the way that we think it might have happened. But even still, the way we think it might have happened

doesn't follow the physical laws as we understand them. And so, Sheldrake and others point to that one and they're like, come on guys, like this is just one of several examples of science just saying, this is the way it is, even though we don't fully understand it or the data we're getting suggests otherwise. Right, and oh man, how can I say this in a way that's not like controversial?

There isn't one. It's not the same as when, let's say a creationist saying, well, you can't really explain the big bang. So, it's all magic and that's okay. It's not along those same lines or something different about what Sheldrake is saying. I think what he's saying is, yeah, in some cases, he's like, we don't understand this.

So, here's my interpretation. I think in his more recent book, The Science Delusion, which came out in 2012 in the US is called Science Set Free. He's saying, here are some essential dogmatic beliefs of science that are worth challenging. And that if we don't challenge them, we might end up going down this wrong path of scientific inquiry and we need to be a little more free

to differing ideas because we don't understand these things like everybody generally believes we do. Yeah, I think he kind of, and the book title itself, you said in America, Science Set Free, that kind of encapsulates, I think he sees himself as some kind of emancipator of science, rather than a cuckoo who believes in telepathy. Right.

Even though he kind of, I mean, that stuff, and Dave Ruse helped us with this research. Yeah, he did a great job. He did, and he points out, and he's right, morphic resonance sounds very strange and weird. Yeah. And it also sounds like something that would sell a book. Right, right.

But to throw him in there, I think it's, Rose said he's basically no better than someone who endorses crop circles and creationism. Right, that is pseudoscience. Yeah, and I don't think that's necessarily fair. No, and even so, if you take away things like morphic resonance and things like, well, morphic resonance basically,

if you take that stuff away and just look at him as like a challenger to scientific dogma, you can appreciate him on that level as well. Like you can peel back different layers of this guy and appreciate different parts and also disagree with different parts. But so in his most recent one, the science solution, he basically says, here are some things

that science believes that we shouldn't necessarily believe like that matters unconscious. And there are people out there, including physicists who are like, if consciousness were just a property of all matter and that the more matter you put together, the more sophisticated consciousness you got, that would explain a lot of stuff,

including human consciousness. That's just an emergent property of all these particles that came together to form human beings. But currently, scientific establishment says, no, matters unconscious, that's just our understanding of it. That's the way it is. Although that is being challenged by more people than just Rupert Sheldrake.

And then there was another one, he gave a TED Talk, a TEDx Whitechapel Talk. That I think was later banned, right? Or not banned, but removed? They took it from their YouTube channel and then inserted it into a blog post. You can still see it, but they put it in a blog post because their science advisors have been like,

this is pretty heretical and I don't think you should just be presenting it. Like it's just, you need to couch it in some language. So they did and they put it in a blog post, but you can still see it. It's not like they just took it down all together. But it's a really interesting talk. It's only like 20 minutes long.

But in it, he makes a really good case about how the laws of nature like the gravitational constant or the speed of light aren't actually constant. And physics needs those things to be constant for it to do its inquiries, for it to do its formulae and equations for the current theories to work. And he's saying, no, there's been periods in history

where we've measured these things and gotten different measurements. And that during that same period, all these different scientists around the world were getting roughly the same different measurements from what we thought it was before. How do you explain that? And I think that point is really important

because if something like the speed of light does change and understanding that it does and how it does could give us an even greater understanding of physics. And that right there, I think is the greatest role that Rupert Sheldrake plays is to say, no, stop looking at it through this lens. This lens is possibly incorrect at the very least. Don't burn all your old stuff, don't throw it away,

but just step to the side and approach it from a different way just to see if that's the truth. And if it is the truth, then we'll have a greater understanding of how things actually work. Yeah, because the unexplainable are only unexplainable until they can be explained. You're right.

And at various points throughout history, there were a lot of claims that things were unexplainable until they figured it out. Yep. And again, we're not touting pseudoscience here because we have a pretty good track record of roundly siding on the side of science. Yes, and expertise too.

Like we both have a tremendous amount of respect for expertise and people who go study things for years and years and years and apply themselves to that understanding that one thing, that's an expert and they should generally be listened to. That's right. Aldrake has proven himself out enough to be listened to, I think.

He's not alien's man, whoever that guy was. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, make up your own mind. Go read about him. Go read both sides about him. If you're interested in this, don't just listen to us. Like he's definitely one of those people you should make your own mind up.

And if you disagree, great. If you agree, fantastic. We're just kind of, we just kind of admire thinkers like that. That's right. Are you got anything else? I got nothing else. Rupert Sheldrake, that was it.

If you want to know more about him, go read. I go, go read his books, go do what you want. And in the meantime, since I said go do what you want, it's time for Listener Mail. Yeah, this one is a little long, but this was a firsthand account from the Iowa caucus. So I thought it bared reading. This is from Lauren, a student at University of Iowa,

participated in her first Iowa caucus. She said I went. And last. Well, she did say that. I went because it's such a big deal here. And since I'm graduating, I thought it might be my only chance. However, this week's events,

it's looking like it may be the last time anyone is going to participate. There were several logistical issues in my opinion that led to issues where I was participating. My caucus location was downtown Iowa City at the Englert Theater. My roommate and I arrived about 45 minutes before to make sure we could be in the door before seven

since we had been told if you weren't in the door, then TS for you. Two lines for the caucus wrapped around the block. One for people who registered in the correct precinct and one for people who needed to change their registration to the correct precinct. There were over 700 people in our caucus location alone, far more than the Democratic Party of Iowa had expected.

Since my caucus location was a theater, it was almost impossible to distinguish where different candidates were in the room. The Bernie and Warren groups were so large they had locations on the floor and had to have satellite spots in the balcony. When it came time to do the head count, the overcrowded space led to issues tallying people.

All of the campaign volunteers had reported numbers. Caucus Delegate informed us that the total number of people under each candidate was about 50 under the amount of total people checked in. So they assumed that 50 people had chosen to leave before the votes were all tallyed, but the campaign volunteers demanded a recount. All in all, it took about two and a half hours

to get through the first round of caucusing to find out which candidates would be viable. My prediction is that because Iowans are so passionate about their caucus system, they'll probably happen again next election cycle. But since their faux importance is brought to public consciousness this year, they'll eventually die away to a primary system soon.

That is from Lauren Cheshire. Lauren, that was a great account. You're basically like the Hunter Thompson correspondent of Stuff You Should Know. We appreciate that big time. That's right. She took some AMO nitrates after that. Right.

The name of the subject line of the email was the Iowa caucus is depraved and decadent. Very nice. So if you want to get in touch with us to let us know something that's going on in your neck of the woods, well, we want to hear about it. You can go on to StuffYouShouldKnow.com. Don't know why you would want to these days.

Instead, just send us an email. Wrap it up, spank it on the bottom and send it off to StuffPodcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen

to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody,

about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.