The claim that nature has memory: every species inherits a collective habit-field, so a trick learned by rats in London should come easier to rats in Sydney.
Documented
The heretic had real credentials
Rupert Sheldrake was no outsider: Clare College fellow, Royal Society research fellow, co-developer of a working model of plant hormone transport, then principal plant physiologist at ICRISAT in Hyderabad. In 1981 he published A New Science of Life, arguing that form and behavior are guided by morphic fields carrying the memory of all previous similar systems, making nature's constants habits that evolved rather than commandments issued at the Big Bang. Nature's editor John Maddox answered with an editorial titled A book for burning?, calling the work an infuriating tract and, years later, condemning it in exactly the language the Pope used to condemn Galileo, and for the same reason: it is heresy.
Assessment: Every piece of the frame is documented: the credentials, the book, the editorial, the heresy comparison, and Maddox's later admission that the headline was injudicious. The hypothesis itself remains outside mainstream biology, criticized as vague and unfalsifiable, with no independent conclusive experiment in four decades.
Stories
The excommunication and the banned talk
The movement's founding story is a martyrdom: burned in effigy by Nature, shunned by colleagues, and in 2013 banned by TED, whose Whitechapel talk by Sheldrake, The Science Delusion, was pulled after two American bloggers objected. The suppression narrative is the brand: clones of the banned talk have since passed eight million views.
Assessment: The suppression story is half true and fully useful. Maddox explicitly wrote that the book should not be burned; TED did not ban the talk but moved it to a corner of its site with a caution label. What is documented is real social cost: Sheldrake described the aftermath as exactly like a papal excommunication, and the heretic frame has marketed every book since.
Interesting claims
Dogs, stares, and phone calls
Sheldrake did what fringe theorists rarely do: he ran experiments. Jaytee, a dog who appeared to anticipate his owner's returns, was videotaped over a hundred trials. The sense of being stared at was tested in thousands of school trials. Telephone telepathy, knowing who is calling before answering, got its own protocol. The claim: small, real, repeatable effects that materialism cannot house.
Assessment: The record is genuinely contested in an instructive way. Skeptic Richard Wiseman's own Jaytee data matched Sheldrake's pattern, and the two men disagreed over which criterion counted as a signal, a dispute about scoring, not footage. Independent replications have gone both ways and the statistical cases are modest at best. Epigenetics has since made soft inheritance respectable, but memory-in-nature fields remain, on current evidence, a hypothesis with excellent marketing.
Sources and further reading
Sheldrake, A New Science of Life (1981; 3rd ed. 2009), the primary text
Maddox, A book for burning?, Nature editorial (1981), and his 1999 retrospective
Wiseman, Smith and Milton (1998) and Sheldrake's rebuttal, the Jaytee scoring dispute
Sheldrake, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home (1999) and The Sense of Being Stared At (2003)
TED Blog, The debate about Rupert Sheldrake's talk (2013), the removal notice
Gomez-Marin, Facing biology's open questions, BioEssays (2021), the sympathetic reassessment
Worth asking
Forty years on, the theory is neither confirmed nor conclusively killed, and both sides retired unconverted. When a heresy refuses to settle, who is failing: the heretic, the jury, or the experiment?