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Wrong Turn: Biologist Rupert Sheldrake On How Science Lost Its Way, The Sun

“This is a core question: How do things take their forms? Whether we’re talking about a plant, an animal, an atom, or a galaxy, they all seem to organize themselves sponta­neously. Unlike machines, which are assembled by humans, they have no external “manufacturer” putting them together piece by piece; they just grow.

That’s where the concept of “morphogenetic fields” comes in. The word morphic is from the Greek word for “form,” and a morphic field is a field of pattern, order, and structure that not only organizes living matter but also what we call “inanimate” matter. I thought there must be these invisible fields, like gravitational or magnetic fields, that shaped and formed the different parts of the plants. Obviously the shapes were inherited, but I didn’t see how genes could be responsible.

All cells come from other cells, and all cells inherit fields of organization. Genes are part of this organization. They play an essential role, but they do not explain the organization itself. Genetically speaking, fruit flies, worms, fish, and mammals are very similar. They share the same Hox genes, which help determine how embryos develop into full-grown creatures with arms and legs or antennae and wings. These genes are like switches. But the switches are almost the same in fruit flies, mice, and humans. So these genes by themselves cannot determine form, or else fruit flies would not look too different from us.

I suggest that morphogenetic fields work by imposing patterns on otherwise random or indeterminate activity. Morpho­genetic fields are not fixed forever, but evolve. The fields of Afghan hounds and poodles have become different from those of their common ancestors, wolves. How are these fields inherited? I propose that they are transmitted from past members of the species through a kind of nonlocal resonance, which I call “morphic resonance.” So there is no need to suppose that all the laws of nature sprang into being fully formed at the moment of the big bang, like a kind of Napoleonic Code, or that they exist in a metaphysical realm beyond time and space. I believe morphic fields underlie our mental activity and our perceptions. The morphic fields of social groups connect group members, even when they are many miles apart, and provide channels of communication through which organisms can stay in touch at a distance.

When I was first thinking about these concepts, I was reading Remembrance of Things Past, by Marcel Proust, a fantastic novel about memory. A friend of mine said Proust had gotten a lot of his ideas from Henri Bergson, so I read Bergson’s book Matter and Memory, and to my astonishment it contained the key to understanding the nature of memory in general. Bergson theorized that memory is not stored in the brain, as is commonly assumed, but instead depends upon a direct link across time between the past and the present. This was a new and exciting thought for me.

I discussed it with my colleagues at the high table at Cambridge, and many of the philosophers and historians were excited as well. But when I discussed it with my colleagues in the biochemistry department, I found far less interest. In fact, there was open hostility to the idea of a shared memory in nature.”

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