That’s my little dog Roscoe P. Coltrane, a rescue who came to us in Dallas just for the weekend, and who has been with us for nine years. I did not care much for dogs until Roscoe showed up and made me his alpha against my will. He decided that I was going to be his master, and that was simply that. Now I’m fond of dogs in general, and crazy about Roscoe.

Roscoe’s devotion to me has been kind of a joke in our family over the years. Whenever I go away on business, his behavior changes. He becomes anxious and disoriented. Julie and the kids have noticed too that sometimes when I am a short distance from home, his behavior also changes. It’s as if he can sense my imminent arrival. I’ve watched him for years, and he’s never behaved that way with other members of the family. Obviously I couldn’t observe him awaiting me, but it’s happened so often, and been seen so often, that I believe it. We have also observed that Roscoe, who absolutely hates to be bathed, knows when that is about to happen, even when we have taken care to hide from him visual and aural cues (e.g., talking about “bath,” or fetching the dog shampoo within his sight). It’s the oddest thing. He has no regular time for his bath, which happens only once every couple of months, unless we have him groomed. But boy does he ever know what’s coming, and runs to hide to avoid it.

I was thinking about this the other day, and about a book I bought at a used bookstore a while back because I liked the title: Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home. It’s a book by Rupert Sheldrake, the maverick British biologist and controversialist. He’s a fascinating figure. Sheldrake has this idea called “morphic resonance” (look it up on the FAQ page of Sheldrake.org) that, in general, holds that some form of collective consciousness is an emergent property of systems, and that it involves information transferral. I’ll say no more about that here, because I don’t fully understand it, and don’t want to misstate Sheldrake’s hypothesis.

Sheldrake is widely rejected by the scientific community. In fact, his TEDx talk was taken off the TED site after scientists protested (I’ve embedded it below). His belief, as a biologist, that nature has a teleology, is heretical. That’s just one example of his heterodoxy. I was surprised and delighted, then, to see that John Horgan, a leading science writer and Sheldrake skeptic, wrote a nice piece in Scientific American about an e-mail interview he had with Sheldrake after spending time with him in person at a science festival. Excerpts:

Sheldrake is terrific company. He is smart, articulate and funny. He does a hilarious imitation of the late psychedelic scholar Terence McKenna, his friend and co-author, whom I met in 1999 and profiled here. There is an appealing reasonableness and gentleness in Sheldrake’s manner, even when he is complaining about the unfairness of his many critics.

He possesses, moreover, a deep knowledge of science, including its history and philosophy (which he studied at Harvard in the 1960s). This knowledge—along with his ability to cite detailed experimental evidence for his claims–make Sheldrake a formidable defender of his outlook. (For more on Sheldrake’s career and views, see his website, https://www.sheldrake.org.)

At one point Sheldrake, alluding to my 1996 book The End of Science, said that his science begins where mine ends. When I asked him to elaborate he said, “We both agree that science is at present limited by assumptions that restrict enquiry, and we agree that there are major unsolved problems about consciousness, cosmology and other areas of science… I am proposing testable hypotheses that could take us forward and open up new frontiers of scientific enquiry.”

From the interview itself:

Horgan: I admit that I’m still not sure what morphic resonance is. Can you give me a brief definition?

Sheldrake: 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. The greater the similarity, the greater the influence of morphic resonance. What this means is that all self-organizing systems, such as molecules, crystals, cells, plants, animals and animal societies, have a collective memory on which each individual draws and to which it contributes. In its most general sense this hypothesis implies that the so-called laws of nature are more like habits.

Horgan: Did the idea of morphic resonance come to you in an epiphany, or was it a gradual process?

Sheldrake: The idea of morphic resonance came to me when I was doing research at Cambridge on the development of plants. I was interested in the concept of morphogenetic, or form-shaping, fields, but realized they could not be inherited through genes. They had to be inherited in some other way. The idea of morphic resonance came as a sudden insight. This happened in 1973, but it was a radical idea, and I spent years thinking about it before I published it in my first book, A New Science of Life, in 1981.

Horgan: What is the single most powerful piece of evidence for morphic resonance?

Sheldrake: There is a lot of circumstantial evidence for morphic resonance. The most striking experiment involved a long series of tests on rat learning that started in Harvard in the 1920s and continued over several decades. Rats learned to escape from a water-maze and subsequent generations learned faster and faster. At the time this looked like an example of Lamarckian inheritance, which was taboo. The interesting thing is that after the rats had learned to escape more than 10 times quicker at Harvard, when rats were tested in Edinburgh, Scotland and in Melbourne, Australia they started more or less where the Harvard rats left off. In Melbourne the rats continued to improve after repeated testing, and this effect was not confined to the descendants of trained rats, suggesting a morphic resonance rather than epigenetic effect. I discuss this evidence in A New Science of Life, now in its third edition, called Morphic Resonance in the US.

Horgan: Is animal telepathy a necessary consequence of morphic resonance?

Sheldrake: Animal telepathy is a consequence of the way that animal groups are organized by what I call morphic fields. Morphic resonance is primarily to do with an influence from the past, whereas telepathy occurs in the present and depends on the bonds between members of the group. For example, when a dog is strongly bonded to its owner, this bond persists even when the owner is far away and is, I think, the basis of telepathic communication. I see telepathy as a normal, not paranormal, means of communication between members of animal groups. For example many dogs know when their owners are coming home and start waiting for them by a door or window. My experiments on the subject are described in my book Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home. Dogs still know even when people set off at times randomly chosen by the experimenter, and travel in unfamiliar vehicles. One of these experiments can be seen here: https://www.sheldrake.org/videos/jaytee-a-dog-who-knew-when-his-owner-was-coming-home-the-orf-experiment

Read the whole thing. Basically, Sheldrake believes that dogmatic materialism prevents science from exploring facets of reality that cannot be explained by pure materialism. He says that quantum physics opens up promising new avenues of scientific exploration, but biology — his field — is bogged down in dogmatism and reductionism.

Here’s another good, extensive interview with Sheldrake. And below, his banned TEDx talk. I toss all this out there for your discussion. I lack the competence to evaluate Sheldrake’s claims, but I do find these topics engaging.