The Evolutionary Mind: Conversations on Science, Imagination and Spirit

The Evolutionary Mind: Conversations on Science, Imagination and Spirit is a transcribed trialogue among three long-standing conversation partners: the biologist Rupert Sheldrake, the mathematician Ralph Abraham, and the ethnobotanist and psychedelic theorist Terence McKenna. The book belongs to the same series of recorded conversations as Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic Consciousness, and it shares that volume's format: no single authorial voice, no settled conclusions, and a running negotiation over what counts as evidence.

The excerpt available here is partial. It preserves three distinct threads — Sheldrake's argument about pigeon homing, McKenna's 2012 concrescence claim, and Abraham's proposal for grassroots science — plus a short exchange on how plants colonized new land. Because the transcript is fragmentary, the article below describes what the participants actually say in the surviving passages and flags where the record breaks off.

The trialogue as a method

The three participants occupy deliberately different positions. Sheldrake argues from biological anomaly toward an unknown connective principle. Abraham supplies the vocabulary of dynamical systems and paradigm shift, and repeatedly plays the role of the internal critic who separates periodic phenomena from one-off constructions. McKenna pushes toward metaphysical and prophetic claims, then concedes ground when pressed. The value of the format is that disagreements stay visible rather than being smoothed into consensus.

Sheldrake on pigeon homing

Sheldrake's central empirical claim is that every conventional explanation for how homing pigeons find their way has been tested and has failed. He lists the candidates and the experiments against them:

• Magnetic sense. Pigeons have had magnets strapped to their wings or heads, and have been degaussed by exposure to extremely strong magnetic fields. According to Sheldrake, both treatments leave the birds able to home. He notes that the first experiments of this kind, in the late 1970s, appeared to show that magnets impaired homing on cloudy days, but that these initial results proved unrepeatable.
• Olfactory cues. Implicitly rejected along with the other sensory hypotheses.
• Auditory cues. Sheldrake addresses the suggestion that pigeons hear their home from hundreds of miles away, and counters it with the observation that deaf pigeons can still get home.
• Visual landmarks. Rejected as insufficient for the distances involved.

His summary is that "every hypothesis has been tested, and tested to destruction," and that the residual ignorance is often concealed behind vague references to "subtle combinations of sensory modalities." He extends the puzzle to cuckoo migration, Monarch butterflies, salmon, and to a possible human directional sense that he suggests is best developed in nomadic peoples — Australian Aborigines, South African bushmen, Polynesian navigators — and least developed in modern urban populations.

This is a strong claim, and the source presents it as Sheldrake's assertion rather than as a reviewed finding. Mainstream biology generally treats pigeon navigation as a combination of magnetic, olfactory, solar and visual cues, and does not accept that all of these have been eliminated. The transcript itself acknowledges the disagreement by noting how the mainstream position is usually phrased.

The mobile-loft experiment

Sheldrake proposes a converse test. Standard experiments move the bird away from its home and watch it return. His design moves the home away from the bird, using a mobile pigeon loft — a shed mounted on a farm trailer. He models the underlying connection as an "invisible elastic band" stretched between bird and home, and explicitly leaves open whether its physical basis lies within existing physics, within a nonlocal extension of quantum theory, or in a new kind of field.

He reports having attempted the experiment twice, first in Ireland and then in eastern England, and states plainly that he was unable to carry it past the first training phase. The training itself worked: pigeons can be taught to home to a mobile loft. On the first release after a short move of about a hundred yards, the birds circle the old location for hours before entering the loft in its new position — behaviour Sheldrake compares to a person returning to find their house moved down the street. After three or four repetitions, he says, the birds adjust.

The experiment is therefore reported as incomplete. No results beyond the training phase are given, and the source does not say whether the work ever continued. This is the most concrete and most bounded empirical item in the excerpt, and its incompleteness should be kept attached to it.

McKenna on the 2012 concrescence

McKenna describes a formal argument built from historical data. He constructed curves intended to represent the "ebb and flow of novelty in time," fitted them to historical records, and refined them by a procedure he calls "spiral closure," which accelerates the curve toward its endpoint. The result is a prediction of concrescence — a terminal convergence he also calls the Eschaton — at the winter solstice of 2012.

He then reports that he discovered, after making the calculation, that the Mayan calendar independently indicated the same date, and that computer simulations of the star fields showed the 21 December 2012 solstice coinciding with a helical rising of the galaxy. He describes this as a solsticial conjunction occurring once in roughly 26,000 years, in which the winter solstice sunrise catches 23 degrees Sagittarius on the plane of the galactic ecliptic. He cites Hamlet's Mill by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend for the idea that ancient peoples conceived galactic gates or way stations through which souls transited, while distancing himself from that reading as "a bit too mediumistic."

Abraham's response is the sharpest critical move in the excerpt. He separates the three claimed coincidences into two kinds. The Mayan calendar and the astronomical conjunction are both periodic phenomena that recur on a 26,000-year cycle and can be expected to recur again. McKenna's novelty curve, by contrast, is a one-off mathematical construction fitted to a particular historical database. Weighing them equally, Abraham argues, is a mistake: the extrapolation is closer to imaginative scholarship than to an independent confirmation. McKenna concedes the astronomical point but holds to the existence of a "nexus of prophetic intensity" drawing several traditions toward late 2012.

The claim is treated in more detail on concepts/timewave-zero-claim.

Abraham on grassroots science

Abraham proposes redirecting a tiny fraction — less than one percent — of existing science or education budgets into regional research councils that would fund amateur and grassroots research. He points to gardening as an example of a widely enjoyed activity that needs no grants, and suggests that modest funding for shared infrastructure such as data banks would regenerate public interest in science.

McKenna challenges the proposal on political grounds: public support for science, he argues, rests on the expectation that it will deliver new technologies and a better world, and severing that expectation would reduce science to the cultural status of tournament chess. Abraham replies that the old model should be abandoned, and that global environmental problems will generate demand for solutions rather than products. He adds that grassroots science cannot succeed as a parallel low-budget establishment; it would need to connect with journals and general-interest magazines. This thread is normative rather than empirical — it is a proposal about how research should be organized, not a finding.

Entelechy and the limits of the 2012 claim

In a later passage Sheldrake introduces entelechy, the Aristotelian notion of a culmination toward which animate beings move, and applies it cosmologically. He describes the universe as a unity — a uni-verse rather than a multi-verse — with an attractor and a process that comes to flower, while insisting that the details remain genuinely free: galaxies, stars, plants, crystals, fish and camels are contingent outcomes, and things could have been otherwise.

From this he draws a limit on McKenna's timetable. Human beings may not survive; 2012 may be a human moment of truth without being a cosmic one, or even a moment of truth for life on Earth. If civilization collapses, the date might mark only catastrophe and scattered survivors. Abraham adds that microbes would begin again; Sheldrake suggests whales or dolphins might have their own version of the time wave. His objection is that McKenna's evidence refers only to human history and, apart from a few remarks about the sun and neutrinos, leaves out most of the cosmos.

The spore-dispersal exchange

A short exchange concerns how the Hawaiian island chain and other new volcanic land were colonized. McKenna argues that nonflowering plants — ferns and the fern relative Psilotum — conquered the planet because early Earth resembled Hawaii: fresh lava, suited to tough spore-propagating plants. He notes that ferns are commonly imagined as delicate but are in fact among the hardiest plants. Abraham raises a "startup problem": the frequency of bird traffic seems far too low to deliver the right species in the right sequence, requiring what he calls dumptruck loads of genetic material arriving daily. McKenna replies that banded-bird studies show a great deal of material moving, and that a million years is a long time. Sheldrake offers the "duck's foot theory" — mud on migratory birds' feet carrying spores — while noting that aerial transport matters more for spores than for seeds, since spores are small and light. The participants do not converge, and the thread is left open.

Evidence boundaries

The excerpt mixes three very different kinds of claim, and the participants themselves mark the difference:

• Empirical and bounded: the pigeon-homing experiments and the mobile-loft design. The negative results for conventional hypotheses are asserted by Sheldrake, not independently verified here, and the mobile-loft experiment is explicitly incomplete.
• Mathematical and speculative: the timewave extrapolation and the 2012 date. The construction is McKenna's own, and Abraham's periodic-versus-one-off objection is recorded in the same transcript.
• Normative: the grassroots science proposal, which is a prescription rather than a finding.

The entelechy discussion is philosophical. The spore-dispersal debate is unresolved. Readers should treat the transcript as a record of an argument in progress, not as a source of settled results.

Related work

The volume sits alongside Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic Consciousness in the same trialogue series, and connects to the wiki's existing treatments of morphic resonance experimental tests, habits of nature, animal sense of direction, and the Gaian mind claim.

References

• The Evolutionary Mind: Conversations on Science, Imagination and Spirit — trialogue transcript, Rupert Sheldrake, Ralph Abraham and Terence McKenna.
• Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, Hamlet's Mill — cited by McKenna for the galactic-gate idea.
• Teilhard de Chardin — invoked by Abraham as a comparison for McKenna's timetable, with the observation that Teilhard gave no date.

Keep reading

• Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic Consciousness — Adds context.
• Morphic Resonance: The Nature of Formative Causation — Adds context.
• The Sense of Being Stared At: And Other Unexplained Powers of the Human Mind — Adds context.