Alex Balgavy

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Rupert Sheldrake: The Science Delusion

It is not anti-scientific to question established beliefs, but central to science itself…ideally, science is a process, not a position or belief system.

Attempts to explain organisms in terms of their chemical constituents are rather like trying to understand a computer by grinding it up and analysing its component elements…it is possible to learn…what it is made of. But in this process of reduction, the structure and the programmed activity of the computer vanishes…no amount of mathematical modelling of interactions between its atomic constituents will reveal the computer’s programs or the purposes they fulfilled.

At each level, the whole includes the parts…the whole is more than the sum of the parts, with properties that cannot be predicted from study of the parts in isolation. For example, the structure and meaning of this sentence could not be worked out by chemical analysis of the paper and the ink, or deduced from the quantities of letters that make it up.

For a rock falling down a mountain, a gravitational pull from the future is not a metaphor but a description.

The scientific question about the nature of inheritance became so intensely politicised that ideology, rather than scientific evidence, dominated the dispute.