"All this obviously contrasts with currently orthodox theories," he writes. The editor of the British science journal Nature put it more bluntly, calling Sheldrake’s first book, A New Science of Life, published in 1981, "the best candidate for book burning" he’d seen in years. And no wonder. Sheldrake challenges a central belief of mainstream science, centuries old, that nature is a kind of "eternal machine" driven by fixed laws. Instead, says Sheldrake, the more we learn, the more the universe seems alive. Sheldrake’s universe is a creature of habit that often gets stuck in its ways, sometimes for eons at a stretch; but it can also be wildly creative as it evolves through time.

Sheldrake was born in Newark-on-Trent, England, in 1942. Fascinated by the natural world as a child, he knew from an early age that he wanted to be a biologist. But as an undergraduate at Cambridge, he discovered that his chosen field was focused on breaking down life forms to their cells and genes. He couldn’t quite say why that troubled him until he happened to read an essay about the scientific insights of the German writer Goethe (1749–1832), a brilliant observer of nature with a special interest in how everything from clouds to leaves take shape. It was Sheldrake’s first glimpse of a holistic approach to biology that had actually been around for centuries.

Eager

to explore this alternative tradition, Sheldrake spent a year at Harvard reading up on the history and philosophy of science. He then returned to Cambridge to get his Ph.D. Thanks to one of the era’s most influential books, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn, he now saw mainstream biology’s mechanistic view of life as what Kuhn called a paradigm, a shared model of reality. And every so often paradigms collapse. In fact, Sheldrake had begun toying with the ideas that, if true, could bring the current one crashing down.

He left Cambridge to work at an agricultural institute in southern India in 1974. He lived in India for six years (and met his wife, Jill Purce, there; they have two sons). Along with his crop research he began studying Indian thought, a quest that finally led this one-time teenage atheist and soldier of science back to his Christian roots. He spent a year and a half living in a Christian ashram, the home of a man who was to play a crucial role in his life, Bede Griffiths. The English Benedictine monk helped the young biologist find a "bridge" between the insights of East and West, and to begin writing his controversial A New Science of Life.

Sheldrake explored the philosophical dimensions of his theory in his second book, The Presence of the Past (1988). In The Rebirth of Nature (1991), he traces both the rise of mechanistic science and the growing discontent with it, despite its tremendous successes. In Seven Experiments That Could Change the World: A Do-It-Yourself Guide to Revolutionary Science (1994), Sheldrake begins calling for new "grassroots" research on the amazing mysteries that lie right under our noses. After all, this was the approach of Darwin and others before the rise of beehive-style science in the 20th century. He renews the call in Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home and Other Unexplained Powers of Animals (1999). Whether such homegrown experimentation proves Sheldrake’s theory right or wrong, a more democratic science, driven by curiosity rather than aggression and greed, would be an earthshaking, and perhaps earth-saving, revolution in itself.