Morphogenetic field

A morphogenetic field (or morphic field), according to biologist Rupert Sheldrake, is a hypothetical biological (and potentially social) equivalent to an electromagnetic field that operates to shape the exact form of a living thing, as part of its epigenetics, and may also shape its behaviour and coordination with other beings. These fields are occasionally used in fiction; for instance the theory is valid on Terry Pratchett's Discworld.

Rupert Sheldrake trained as a plant physiologist, and became interested in the way that plants, and all living things, took on their form. What starts as a single cell splitting into identical copies eventually changes, with some cells taking on specific characteristics, some become leaves, some stem. Once these changes have taken place, the reverse is no longer possible; for example, leaves cannot be changed back into stems.

At the time of his research in the late 1960s and 1970s, the reasons for this sort of development were unclear. In the 1920s, embryo regeneration and the capacity for willow shoots to grow whole new trees, were thought to imply such fields or knowledge or memory in the environment. The later discovery of DNA appeared at first to offer an explanation, but since the DNA remains largely identical throughout an organism, it was not, of its own, able to explain form. As Sheldrake later noted:

"The instructors [at university] said that all morphogenesis is genetically programmed. They said different species just follow the instruction in their genes. But a few moments' reflection show that this reply is inadequate. All the cells of the body contain the same genes. In your body, the same genetic program is present in your eye cells, liver cells and the cells in your arms. The ones in your legs. But if they are all programmed identically, how do they develop so differently?"

Sheldrake, already interested in "holistic" ideas after reading Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's works on the topic, developed a completely new theory to explain this problem. The basic concept relies on a universal field encoding the "basic pattern" of an object, the so-called morphogenetic field. The term morphogenesis came from the Greek morphe which means form, and genesis which means coming-into-being.

This morphogenetic field would provide a force that guided the development of an organism as it grew, making it take on a form similar to that of others in its species. DNA was not the source of structure itself, but perhaps a "receiver" that translated instructions in the field into physical form.

A feedback mechanism, morphic resonance, would lead to changes in this pattern, as well as explain why humans didn't "pick up" the pattern of plants during development. In Sheldrake's view, the existence of a form is itself sufficient to make it easier for that form to come to exist somewhere else.

He first published his ideas in 1973. As evidence, Sheldrake offered a selection of seemingly disconnected bits of evidence.

One was the research of Harvard University researcher William McDougall, who, in the 1920s, studied the abilities of rats to correctly solve mazes. He found that children of rats that had learned the maze were able to run it faster -- at first the rats would get it wrong 165 times before being able to run it perfectly each time, but after a few generations it was down to 20. McDougall felt this was due to some sort of Lamarckian evolutionary process. Sheldrake felt that this was instead evidence of a morphogenetic field. The rats running the maze the first times built their pattern of learning into the "rat field", and later rats were able to draw on this patterning. Several examples of this sort of "universal learning" were offered.

The other major piece of evidence came from pure chemistry, where another unexplained "learning behaviour" takes place during the formation of crystals. When a new chemical compound is first created it will crystallize slowly, but when other researchers repeat the experiment they find it occurs more quickly. Chemists generally attribute this to better experiments, the mistakes of the first are documented and not repeated. Sheldrake instead felt this was yet another example of a morphogenetic field, that the crystals being formed for the first time were creating a field that later experiments were able to draw on.

Since then a number of other examples have been added -- the behaviour of monkeys in Japan cleaning their food (the Hundredth Monkey effect), and birds in Europe learning to open milk bottles have all been offered as examples of a "nonlocal" force in behaviour and learning.

Although Sheldrake had talked about the theory in the 1970s and had become somewhat well known, the "big release" occurred when the theory was presented in book form in 1981 in A New Science of Life. Interestingly the book does not offer any examples from the problem that actually led Sheldrake to the theory in the first place: the theory was offered as an explanation of plant and animal development, but no actual direct evidence along these lines was offered. In addition the scope of the theory was expanded, with Sheldrake claiming that all of physics might operate along the same lines, in this view, nature may be a set not of laws, but of habits.

Generally when "theories of everything" are published the science community is skeptical. This is even more true if they are published in layman book form rather than in science journals, and even more so when the author is offering insights into fields they have no direct experience in. In this case A New Science of Life was all three, and generally dismissed out of hand. Sheldrake seems to have became increasingly disenchanted with the science world's reaction, eventually dismissing it all as a closed-minded bureaucracy (which he does on his web site, for instance).

The work did become famous in the new age field however, where it was considered interesting both because of its "connectedness" view of the world, as well as it being an example of a "real scientist" being put down by the science community. In 1988 he followed up his earlier book with Presence of the Past: A Field Theory of Life.

Sheldrake has since drifted away from his work on the morphogenetic field. Although he still considers it the basis of his work, more recent publications have had little to do with it directly.

As he drifted away from interest in mainstream institutions, he later sought a list of Seven Experiments That Could Change The World, (1994) which included, among other things, the seed of his study of Dogs that Know When Their Owners are Coming Home (1999). In 2003 he published The Sense of Being Stared At, about a sense reported widely by a great many people. This included an experiment by blindfolding people with airline blindfolds, and placing people behind them to stare either at their neck or off to another target - half of each, chosen by coin toss or random number tables. As of the sound of a loud click, the person being stared at (or not) must say whether they are or are not being stared at. If the guess is wrong, and they are told that, they get it wrong less often. Over tens of thousands of trials, the score is consistently above chance: 60% when the subject is being looked at, extremely significant, but only 50% when they are not - random chance. This suggests there may be a weak sense of being stared at, but no sense of not being stared at. Sheldrake claims that these experiments have been very widely repeated, in schools in Connecticut and Toronto and a science museum in Amsterdam, with consistent results.

Sheldrake's experiments remain just as controversial as his theory. His latest asks would-be experimenters to add to the body of the previous "stared at" work by simply filling out a form on his web page and sending in results. He claims this makes for an excellent broad-based study, one that encompasses people from around the world and all walks of life. Critics point out that all it does is collect useless information from people without even the slightest attempt at experimental control. Moreover it is practically guaranteed to select only successful results, as people who are tempted to carry out the experiments are unlikely to not believe it already works (leading to the experimenter effect).

Sheldrake maintains that this skepticism is due not to problems with the work, but due instead to the preconceptions of the scientists that hold them. His fundamentalist approach to the scientific method, based on Darwin's careful observations, took him further away from molecular biology and the focus on gene, enzyme, protein and cell functions. This is, he says, a challenge to the mechanistic paradigm that views biology as a function of chemistry and physics—part of 19th century materialism that has led to genetic engineering and to biotechnology in general, but away from an account of consciousness, which the field theories are seeking.

Critics instead interpret this lack of belief in the theory as the result of the lack of good experimental evidence. Moreover in the time since it was first proposed in the 1970s, tremendous strides have been taken in understanding just how form does arise from genetic material. Sheldrake's evidence continues to persuade some, and to repel others.

See Also

• Odic force

External links

• Sheldrake introduces 'The Extended Mind: Recent Experimental Evidence' (http://murl.microsoft.com/videos/msr/msr2003/Sheldrake_Extended_OnDemand_100_100K_320x240Slides.htm) (Video at Microsoft Research)
• Skeptic's Dictionary article on 'morphic resonance' (http://skepdic.com/morphicres.html)
• Rupert Sheldrake: The delightful crackpot (http://www.salon.com/people/feature/1999/11/23/sheldrake/print.html) - November 1999 article in Salon magazinede:Morphische Felder