by Kerry Bolton
Morphic Field Theory
To the rationalistic modern Western mind, concepts like “race memory”, zeitgeist, “spirit of the nation” etc. are akin to the astral plane of occultists, the abode of angels, devils, gods, hidden masters, and spirits. Carl Jung as a scientist saw the existence of archetypes, the recurrent symbols common to races, ethnoi, and the human species, within the collective unconscious, in dreams. Dr. Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of morphic fields and morphic resonance provide theories applicable to such concepts. Sheldrake is an eminent researcher in biochemistry and cell biology. While eminently qualified in the empirical sciences,135 his theories challenge materialist assumptions. Sheldrake questions the dogmatic primacy materialism has been assumed in science:
“Committed materialists are committed precisely because they believe that materialistic explanations will be found in the future. They put their trust in what they hope for — in what is not yet known. The philosopher of science Karl Popper called this attitude ‘promissory materialism,’ because it involves issuing undated promissory notes for future discoveries. Promissory materialism is a faith”.136
Formative Causation
Sheldrake’s revolutionary theory of “formative causation”, first proposed in 1981, “postulates that organisms are subject to an influence from previous similar organisms by a process called morphic resonance”.
“Through morphic resonance, each member of a species draws upon, and in turn contributes to a pooled or collective memory. Thus, for example, if animals learn a new skill in one place, similar animals raised under similar conditions should subsequently tend to learn the same thing more readily all over the world. Likewise, people should tend to learn more readily what others have already learnt, even in the absence of any known means of connection or communication. In the human realm, this hypothesis resembles C.G. Jung’s postulate of the collective unconscious. The hypothesis also applies in the chemical and physical realms, and predicts, for example, that crystals of new compounds should become easier to crystallize all over the world the more often they are made. There is already circumstantial evidence that this actually happens”.137
Does Sheldrake’s theory of “formative causation” offer an explanation as to how there can be collective memories across time and space, among a species? If “similar animals raised under similar conditions” contributed by experience to a “collective memory”, then, as Jung contended with the collective unconscious, not only are these applicable to the human species in general, but to the visions of races and ethnoi within that species. In regard to the human species, and the races and ethnoi within, we call the learning and conditions “culture” and history. “Formative causation” provides an added factor in the process of race formation by history, as does epigenetics. Sheldrake sees epigenetics as an allied area of research.138
Although the human species has an underlying unity through common learning and experiences when traced back to the most primordial of beginnings, expressed at the most primitive levels of hominid life, there are also differentiations among the races and ethnoi that have developed over millennia. Perhaps Sheldrake has not reached this conclusion, although Jung, as seen, did in postulating that each race has its own psychology. At least, it seems, there is an implied “race memory” in Sheldrake’s morphic resonance theory, when he states: “One of the most striking implications of morphic resonance concerns memory. Morphic resonance depends on similarity. The greater the similarity, the stronger the resonance”.139
Dr Rupert Sheldrake
In summarising “formative causation”, Sheldrake describes the manner by which acquired characteristics could be inherited through repetition of behaviour and become a predominance trait. The forms of an organism are predetermined by a pattern that exists at a morphogenetic field. A morphogenetic field is itself formed by the cumulative influence of similar fields that have been built up. A form has been established through the repetitive experience of “the ancestors of that organism”. A pattern has been established from which to build and has been fixed in a morphogenetic field. Like epigenetics, the hypothesis offers an explanation for the formation of an organism beyond the Darwinian evolutionary hypothesis of random mutations. Sheldrake writes:
“I have recently developed a hypothesis, called the hypothesis of formative causation, which takes as its starting point the idea that morphogenetic fields are indeed physical. … This hypothesis proposes that specific morphogenetic fields are responsible for the organization and form of material systems at all levels of complexity, not only in living organisms but also in crystals, molecules and atoms. These fields order the systems with which they are associated by affecting events which, from an energetic point of view, appear to be indeterminate or probabilistic; they impose patterned restrictions on the energetically possible outcomes of processes of physical change.
“If morphogenetic fields are responsible for the form and organization of material systems, they must themselves have characteristic structures. So where do these field structures come from? The answer suggested is that they are derived from the morphogenetic fields associated with previous similar systems: the morphogenetic fields of all past systems become present to any subsequent similar system; the structures of past systems affect subsequent similar systems by a cumulative influence which acts across both space and time. According to this hypothesis, systems are organized in the way they are because similar systems were organized that way in the past. For example, the molecules of a complex organic chemical crystallize in a characteristic pattern because the same substance crystallized that way before; a plant takes up the form characteristic of its species because past members of the species took up that form; and an animal acts instinctively in a particular manner because similar animals behaved that way in the past.
“The hypothesis is concerned with the repetition of forms and patterns of organization; the question of the origin of these forms and patterns lies outside its scope. This question can be answered in several different ways, but all of them seem to be equally compatible with the suggested means of repetition. A number of testable predictions can be deduced from this hypothesis which differ strikingly from those of the conventional mechanistic theory. Two examples will suffice. The first concerns the inheritance of form, which according to the hypothesis of formative causation depends both on recognized genetic factors and on a direct influence from similar past organisms.
“The larger the number of similar past organisms, the greater should be this influence. Thus, for instance, in first-generation hybrids produced by crossing plants of two varieties, A and B, the form of the variety which has had the largest number of past individuals should generally tend to be dominant. If both varieties have had similar numbers of past individuals, the hybrids should generally be of intermediate form. Now if hybrid seeds produced in such crosses are kept in cold storage while very large numbers of one of the parental types, say B, are grown, and then if these seeds are taken out of storage and sown, the form of the resulting plants should resemble the parent B type more strongly than in the original hybrids, even though they were grown from identical seeds. Thus in the hybrids the dominance of one parental form over the other should change even though the genetic constitution of the seeds remains the same. The second example involves changes in the rate of learning of new patterns of behaviour. If an animal, say a rat, learns to carry out a new task, which can be specially devised for the purpose of this experiment, there should be a tendency for all subsequent similar rats (of the same breed, reared under similar conditions, etc.) to learn more quickly to carry out the same pattern of behaviour. The larger the number of rats that learn to perform the task, the easier should it be for any subsequent similar rat to learn it.
“Thus, for instance, if thousands of rats were trained to perform a new task in a laboratory in London, similar rats should learn to carry out the same task more quickly in laboratories everywhere else. If the speed of learning of rats in another laboratory,
say in New York, were to be measured before and after the rats in London were trained, the rats tested on the second occasion should learn more quickly than those tested on the first. The effect should take place in the absence of any known type of physical connection or communication between the two laboratories. Such a prediction may seem so improbable as to be absurd. Yet, remarkably enough, there is already evidence from laboratory studies of rats that the predicted effect actually occurs. This hypothesis leads to an interpretation of many physical and biological phenomena which is radically different from that of existing theories, and enables a number of well-known problems to be seen in a new light. Its value will be uncertain until some of its predictions have been tested experimentally. But for the time being, it may serve to show that a specific organismic hypothesis is at least conceivable”.140
Rejecting the materialistic and mechanistic world-views that have been dominant in Western biology since the 1920s, Sheldrake suggests that the universe is “more like an organism than a machine”. Sheldrake, having been eminent in the field of genetic research, nonetheless departs from the current dogma and states of DNA:
“However, there is a big difference between coding for the structure of a protein - a chemical constituent of the organism - and programming the development of an entire organism. It is the difference between making bricks and building a house out of the bricks. You need the bricks to build the house. If you have defective bricks, the house will be defective. But the plan of the house is not contained in the bricks, or the wires, or the beams, or cement”.141
The DNA is the same in all the cells of an organism; the same for arms and legs, etc., and does not account for the differences of form between an arm and a leg. Mechanistic biology still does not even claim to understand what is involved. Morphogenesis contends that the form of an organism is shaped by morphogenetic fields both in and around the organism. Sheldrake writes: “As an oak tree develops, the acorn is associated with an oak tree field, an invisible organizing structure which organizes the oak tree’s development; it is like an oak tree mould, within which the developing organism grows”.142 The existence of morphogenetic patterns is suggested by the ability of fractured organisms to reconstitute themselves back to their form-pattern:
“One fact which led to the development of this theory is the remarkable ability organisms have to repair damage. If you cut an oak tree into little pieces, each little piece, properly treated, can grow into a new tree. So from a tiny fragment, you can get a whole. Machines do not do that; they do not have this power of remaining whole if you remove parts of them. Chop a computer up into small pieces and all you get is a broken computer. It does not regenerate into lots of little computers. But if you chop a flatworm into small pieces, each piece can grow into a new flatworm”.143
Organisms, chemicals, and crystals are physical expressions of pre-existing forms that are within a morphic field. Plato stated that Form expresses the actual substance of an object beyond the physical, material aspects. Goethe as a naturalist postulated a similar theory. A basic explanation of Plato’s Forms states:
“A form is an abstract property or quality. Take any property of an object; separate it from that object and consider it by itself, and you are contemplating a form. For example, if you separate the roundness of a basketball from its colour, its weight, etc. and consider just roundness by itself, you are thinking of the form of roundness. Plato held that this property existed apart from the basketball, in a different mode of existence than the basketball. The form is not just the idea of roundness you have in your mind. It exists independently of the basketball and independently of whether someone thinks of it. All round objects, not just this basketball, participate or copy this same form of roundness.144
Aristotle thought that an object is the organisation of matter by Form. He sought to explain Plato’s doctrine of Forms in regard to the organisation of matter. A basic explanation states:
“Take as an example a child playing with building blocks. The child could use the same blocks to first build a wall, and then tear it down and build a house. The material or matter in each case would be the same, the blocks. Yet, the house and the wall have the matter arranged in different ways. They have different forms. The house is still just one material object; yet it has two different aspects, its form and its matter. All objects then have matter, or the material of which they are composed, and form, the way the matter is arranged. It is the form of a thing, however, that makes a thing what it is. When the child knocked down the block wall, the blocks or matter remained. The wall no longer existed, however, because the blocks no longer had the arrangement or form characteristic of a wall. It is the form of an object that makes it the particular object that it is”.145
The soul is the Form of some organisms, and God is the cause. Such a theory accounts for the causality that is regarded as essential to the rational Western mind, while recognising the role of God and soul that have been destroyed by Western rationalism. Saint Anselm, the 11th century theologian who helped to disentangle Christianity from Levantine magic and mysticism and re-create it as the religion of Western High Culture, by considering such questions as the existence of God and soul from logic, causal perspective, using his so-called “ontological argument” for the existence of God. Sheldrake, who alludes to Aristotle and Plato, approaches similar questions from the perspective of empirical science in the Western tradition. He alludes to Form in describing morphic fields and their role in the manifestation of both species and individuals:
“Each species has its own fields, and within each organism there are fields within fields. Within each of us is the field of the whole body; fields for arms and legs and fields for kidneys and livers; within are fields for the different tissues inside these organs, and then fields for the cells, and fields for the sub-cellular structures, and fields for the molecules, and so on. There is a whole series of fields within fields. The essence of the hypothesis I am proposing is that these fields, which are already accepted quite widely within biology, have a kind of in-built memory derived from previous forms of a similar kind. The liver field is shaped by the forms of previous livers and the oak tree field by the forms and organization of previous oak trees. Through the fields, by a process called morphic resonance, the influence of like upon like, there is a connection among similar fields. That means that the field’s structure has a cumulative memory, based on what has happened to the species in the past.
“If you make a new compound and crystallize it, there won’t be a morphic field for it the first time. Therefore, it may be very difficult to crystallize; you have to wait for a morphic field to emerge. The second time, however, even if you do this somewhere else in the world, there will be an influence from the first crystallization, and it should crystallize a bit more easily. The third time there will be an influence from the first and second, and so on. There will be a cumulative influence from previous crystals, so it should get easier and easier to crystallize the more often you crystallize it. And, in fact, this is exactly what does happen. Synthetic chemists find that new compounds are generally very difficult to crystallize. As time goes on, they generally get easier to crystallize all over the world”.146
Through experience there is a build-up of group memory or what Jung in humans called the collective unconscious. Whereas Jung and analytical psychologists rely largely on dream interpretation and the archetypes that appear in dreams, Sheldrake as a biochemist cites laboratory experiments on organisms that indicate experiences contribute to a group memory and are passed along to generations of a species across time and distance. Sheldrake continues:
“There are quite a number of experiments that can be done in the realm of biological form and the development of form. Correspondingly, the same principles apply to behaviour, forms of behaviour and patterns of behaviour. Consider the hypothesis that if you train rats to learn a new trick in Santa Barbara, then rats all over the world should be able to learn to do the same trick more quickly, just b
ecause the rats in Santa Barbara have learned it. This new pattern of learning will be, as it were, in the rat collective memory - in the morphic fields of rats, to which other rats can tune in, just because they are rats and just because they are in similar circumstances, by morphic resonance. This may seem a bit improbable, but either this sort of thing happens or it doesn’t.
“Among the vast number of papers in the archives of experiments on rat psychology, there are a number of examples of experiments in which people have actually monitored rates of learning over time and discovered mysterious increases. In my book, A New Science of Life, I describe one such series of experiments which extended over a 50-year period. Begun at Harvard and then carried on in Scotland and Australia, the experiment demonstrated that rats increased their rate of learning more than tenfold. This was a huge effect - not some marginal statistically significant result. This improved rate of learning in identical learning situations occurred in these three separate locations and in all rats of the breed, not just in rats descended from trained parents”.147
Sheldrake suggests the inheritance of acquired characteristics that are imparted through ways other than by DNA. As we have seen, epigenetics is arriving at similar conclusions. Sheldrake states:
“I am suggesting that heredity depends not only on DNA, which enables organisms to build the right chemical building blocks - the proteins - but also on morphic resonance. Heredity thus has two aspects: one a genetic heredity, which accounts for the inheritance of proteins through DNA’s control of protein synthesis; the second a form of heredity based on morphic fields and morphic resonance, which is nongenetic and which is inherited directly from past members of the species. This latter form of heredity deals with the organization of form and behaviour”.148
