Rupert Sheldrake, a Cambridge-trained biochemist who did legitimate work on crop physiology before deciding that nature keeps a collective memory in invisible fields, is circulating again on TikTok. John Maddox, the editor of Nature who in 1981 published an editorial “A Book for Burning?” (see below in full) and concluded that Sheldrake’s book should not be burned but placed firmly among the literature of “intellectual aberration.” The irony is not that Maddox was wrong to be sceptical; it is that Maddox’s own book, The Doomsday Syndrome, published in 1972, offers views more orders of scale more dangerous than the incorent ramblings of Sheldrake. Maddox deserves the same question he posed about Sheldrake. The man who could spot magic in morphic fields was himself performing a quieter act of faith, one that wore a lab coat and promised the future would arrive on schedule.
John Maddox could spot an unjustified leap of faith at considerable distance, particularly when Rupert Sheldrake was making it. His 1981 editorial dismissed Sheldrake’s proposed morphogenetic fields as an invitation to admit magic into science. “In reality, Sheldrake’s argument is in no sense a scientific argument but is an exercise in pseudo-science,” Maddox wrote. He accused Sheldrake of finding a place for magic within scientific discussion, perhaps deliberately. He demanded evidence for Sheldrake’s explanations. His own techno optimism deserved the same scrutiny.
In The Doomsday Syndrome, Maddox directed his scepticism towards environmentalists who questioned the safety and sustainability of industrial expansion. Sharon Beder places the book within the backlash against limits to growth, whose critics argued that technological innovation and markets could overcome ecological constraints. She quotes Maddox offering the sheer size of the planet as reassurance:
It is not entirely out of the question that human intervention could at some stage bring changes, but for the time being the vast scale on which the earth is built should be a great comfort.
Maddox
Earth, apparently, was too big to fail.
The IPCC’s latest completed assessment makes that reassurance difficult to sustain:
Human-caused climate change is already affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe.
Its 2023 synthesis concludes that human activities have unequivocally caused global warming, that risks increase with every increment of warming, and that some changes will be irreversible over centuries or millennia. In announcing its physical science assessment in 2021, the IPCC had already reported:
Scientists are observing changes in the Earth’s climate in every region and across the whole climate system.
Contemporary reviewers were divided. Kirkus Reviews acknowledged some sound points but criticised Maddox for dismissing The Limits to Growth without adequately examining its arguments. Reviewing the book in The Freeman, John Chamberlain welcomed its assurance that industrial growth and rising living standards need not entail worsening pollution. His argument offered defenders of the existing economic order considerable reassurance: environmental problems could be addressed while industrial growth continued. Decades later, Robert L. Bradley Jr. – a 16-year Enron veteran who wrote speeches for Kenneth Lay (the Enron chief executive and chairman convicted on fraud and conspiracy charges) and went on to run the fossil-fuel-funded Institute for Energy Research – would praise Maddox for debunking “the catastrophists” and for being “no alarmist” on climate change. The audience had not changed; it had merely acquired a longer paper trail.
Mr Enron Jnr wrote:
And on the specific subject of anthropogenic climate change, Maddox was no alarmist, as documented by Lawrence Solomon in his Financial Post tribute, “John Maddox, skeptic, 1925-2009”.
William Grimes in the New York Times’s obituary failed to mention how John Maddox was a lonely, powerful voice against Malthusianism in general and climate alarmism specifically. In that sense, Maddox of ahead of his time and a name to be remembered with Julian Simon’s.
Alarmist Not
I chuckle whenever I read the opening lines of The Doomsday Syndrome:
Prophets of doom have multiplied remarkably in the past few years. It used to be commonplace for men to parade city streets with sandwich boards proclaiming “The End of the World Is at Hand!” They have been replaced by a throng of sober people, scientists, philosophers, and politicians, proclaiming that there are more subtle calamities just around the corner.
There were good reasons to expect technology to help. That did not establish that it would solve the problems in time. A technical solution must still be developed, financed, adopted and implemented before the damage becomes irreversible. Past inventions demonstrate what people have achieved, not what they are certain to achieve next. Confidence is no substitute for an account of how the necessary changes will happen.
The IPCC itself recognises that effective, affordable options already exist. But it finds that securing a liveable future requires rapid changes across sectors and systems, supported by finance, governance and coordinated policy. Jason Hickel’s Less is More (2020) goes further, arguing that the pursuit of perpetual growth obstructs the changes needed to address ecological breakdown. Giorgos Kallis’s endorsement explicitly presents degrowth as necessary to avoid climate breakdown. These raise a question that Maddox’s optimism leaves inadequately answered: what happens when protecting profitable industries takes precedence over using the available solutions?
A similar problem appears in arguments about artificial intelligence. In its two-part discussion of technological inevitability, Citations Needed examines how claims that AI expansion is unavoidable can shut down democratic debate. The hosts place these arguments in a longer history that includes Manifest Destiny and free-trade ideology. Like the techno optimist its a belief that discouraged scrutiny of who makes decisions and who benefits. Data centres require investment, planning permission, electricity and water.
Maddox’s handling of uncertainty was challenged at the time. Wayland Kennet identified the weakness in 1971. Responding to Maddox’s treatment of the greenhouse effect, he challenged the slide from uncertainty about danger to confidence that fears were unfounded. Uncertainty about the extent of a risk did not establish that it could safely be dismissed. Kennet also warned that commercial interests would exploit this gap in the reasoning – which was precient, commercial interests not only exploiteed the gap but deibrately made it bigger, like an ever expanding coal pit.
That gives the argument political consequences. Reassurance can serve those who benefit from existing arrangements, particularly when the costs fall elsewhere. Consider Maddox’s calculation that the atmosphere contained “more than a million tons of air for each human being now alive.” Dividing the atmosphere by the population tells us little about exposure to pollution, responsibility for emissions or the ability to escape their effects. Nobody breathes the global average.
The same problem applies to promises of future prosperity. Who receives the benefits of growth? Who does the work, and who lives with the damage? Class, race and gender matter to those questions. Maddox’s appeal to humanity’s collective resources does not answer them. A apparently neutral calculation can leave them out.
When defenders of science dismiss legitimate concerns about power and harm, they may weaken trust in scientific institutions and make alternative comnspiracy based explanations more attractive.
This does not vindicate Sheldrake. The comparison concerns Maddox’s standards of evidence. He demanded testable explanations from Sheldrake while accepting much broader assurances about humanity’s capacity to manage environmental harm. Where Maddox accused Sheldrake of filling gaps with mysterious fields, his own techno-optimism risked filling them with future ingenuity.
In the interview discussed earlier, Maddox invoked the condemnation of Galileo and called Sheldrake’s ideas “heresy”. It was a peculiar choice of language for someone defending scientific inquiry against dogma.
Science can explain how a technology works. It cannot guarantee that an economic system will deploy it wisely, fairly or soon enough. That requires evidence about institutions, incentives and power, as well as technical capability.
Maddox was right to insist that unanswered questions do not justify magical explanations. But “we will think of something” is not an adequate answer to natures limits. A lab coat does not turn a promise into evidence.
A book for burning?
“A book for burning?” was a famous 1981 editorial written by John Maddox, the long-serving editor of the scientific journal Nature.
John Maddox, 24 September 1981. A book for burning?. Nature 293, 245–246 (1981). https://doi.org/10.1038/293245b0
Books rightly command respect, even affection. They are the products of sustained creative work, and even if their authors’ ambitions are not fully realized, find a niche somewhere as pebbles on the beach of scholarship and literature. And even bad books should not be burned; works such as Mein Kampf have become historical documents for those concerned with the pathology of politics. But what is to be made of Dr Rupert Sheldrake’s book A New Science of Life, published in the summer (Blond and Briggs, London, 1981)? This infuriating tract has been widely hailed by the newspapers and popular science magazines as the “answer” to materialistic science, and is now well on the way to being a point of reference for the motley crew of creationists, anti-reductionists, neo-Lamarckians and the rest. The author, by training a biochemist and by demonstration a knowledgeable man, is, however, misguided. His book is the best candidate for burning there has been for many years.
The argument is simple. If physicists cannot confidently calculate crystal structures or molecular configurations ab initio from a simple knowledge of their ingredient atoms, surely it is unthinkable that molecular biologists will be able accurately to relate the genetic structure of an organism to the successive phenotypes that arise during the course of its development? And the difficulty is not merely computational. Do not the cells of arms and legs contain exactly the same DNA, Sheldrake asks? And how can it be that the very similar genomes of human beings and chimpanzees give rise to very different phenotypes when, in Drosophila, much larger differences of genotype specify flies that are very similar in form? Sheldrake’s way of dealing with these and other observations is to borrow from embryology the vague notion of the morphogenetic field, the name given to the largely unidentified influences that give shape to a developing organism, and then to exalt this into a kind of universal agency. All aggregations of matter, animate or otherwise, are supposed to be exposed to a great variety of morphogenetic fields which fill the whole of space and which travel forwards in time. The effects of these morphogenetic fields (which are otherwise not described) are to ensure that particular aggregations of matter take on the form assumed by similar aggregations of matter elsewhere or at some earlier time. This is the “hypothesis of formative causation” — the subtitle of the book. The inheritance of acquired characteristics is at a stroke explained. Jung’s collective unconscious is made inevitable. Instinctive animal behaviour becomes a non-problem, for there will be a morphogenetic field that ensures that each set of neurones in each central nervous system is put into an appropriate correspondence.
This argument would not be taken seriously were it not that others have done so. As things are, however, Sheldrake’s book is a splendid illustration of the widespread public misconception of what science is about. In reality, Sheldrake’s argument is in no sense a scientific argument but is an exercise in pseudo-science. Preposterously, he claims that his hypothesis can be tested — that it is falsifiable in Popper’s sense — and indeed the text includes half a dozen proposals for experiments that might be carried out to verify that the forms of aggregations of matter are indeed moulded by the hypothetical morphogenetic fields that are supposed to pervade everything. These experiments have in common the attributes of being time-consuming, inconclusive in the sense that it will always be possible to postulate yet another morphogenetic field to account for some awkwardly inconclusive result and impractical in the sense that no self-respecting grant-making agency will take the proposals seriously. This, however, is not the most serious objection to Sheldrake’s attempt to endow his argument with an appearance of orthodoxy. The more serious objection to his argument is that it says nothing of any kind about the nature and origin of the crucial morphogenetic fields and contains no proposals for investigating the means by which they are propagated. Many readers will be left with the impression that Sheldrake has succeeded in finding a place for magic within scientific discussion — and this, indeed, may have been a part of the objective of writing such a book. But hypotheses can be dignified as theories only if all aspects of them can be tested. Sheldrake’s hypothesis is no better than the hypothesis that a person equipped with a water-divining rod is able to detect subterranean water as a consequence of some intervening “field” generated by the presence of water, and his proposals for experimental tests no better than the argument that since water-diviners succeed in making money, there must be something in the theory.
It is naturally distressing that these plain truths are not more widely understood. It is also a misfortune that the public expectation of what science can accomplish, now coloured by Dr Sheldrake’s argument, should so conspicuously lack patience. Sheldrake’s argument takes off from his catalogue of the ways in which the molecular biologists, no doubt the shock-troops of the reductionists, have so far been unable to calculate the phenotype of a single organism from a knowledge of its genotype. But so what? Have not the past twenty years shown clearly enough that molecular explanations of biological phenomena are, contrary to some earlier expectations, possible and powerful? And who says that molecular biology must be counted as a failure for as long as embryology is not a branch of mathematics? Dr Sheldrake, whose background should have enabled him to know better, has done a great disservice by helping to give currency to the misconceptions and false expectations. His book should not be burned (nor even confined to closed shelves in libraries) but, rather, put firmly in its place among the literature of intellectual aberrations.
Transcript of youtube from wiki:
I was so offended by it, that I said that while it’s wrong that books should be burned, in practice, if book burning were allowed, this book would be a candidate […] I think it’s dangerous that people should be allowed by our liberal societies to put that kind of nonsense into currency. It’s unnecessary to introduce magicinto the explanation of physical and biological phenomena when in fact there is every likelihood that the continuation of research as it is now practised will indeed fill all the gaps that Sheldrake draws attention to. You see, Sheldrake’s is not a scientific theory. Sheldrake is putting forward magic instead of science, and that can be condemned, with exactly the language that the popes used to condemn Galileo, and for the same reasons: it is heresy.
