On top of that, you have—I’m not sure about the relative time scales of this—then you have an evolutionary process involving speciation either during or after the colonization of a brand new island. Is evolutionary process essential to the population of the new island or isn’t it?
TM: I think in the short term it isn’t and in the long term it is. Because many forms of life are arising in these islands, it’s not home free. New arrivals must contend with this kind of island-making by volcanic flow that I mentioned, and other large-scale catastrophic events that have gone on in the Hawaiian Islands. Basically I think that what we see here are genes being mixed and stirred at a faster rate than in most places and that’s without mentioning the vast number of plants and animal introductions brought by human beings. One of the other unique things about Hawaii that I didn’t enumerate is that human beings arrived late and this absence of long-term human impact gives us a clearer picture of what’s happening. It’s almost as though Hawaii is a speeded up microcosm of the earth itself, probably eight-tenths of the big island is in the pre-archeozoic phase—in other words, almost abiotic—and then large areas are covered by lichen, with a fern or two here in the crevasses.
RA: You used the word pumping, and I like that. There’s a sort of a forcing or coupling or a codependence between these different processes, physical ones, as for example new lava flows, the meandering of rivers, or the appearance of islands, and space/time evolutionary processes.
TM: Really the ice ages are the pump. They raise and lower sea levels. They create deserts and drop humidity. They force change. And they are probably driven by fluctuations in the dynamics of the sun.
RS: The evolutionary process looks rather different if you take morphic resonance into account. Habit formation then becomes a much more important evolutionary process. Individual organisms adapt to new environments. You can take seeds from a given plant and grow them at different altitudes and in different climates, and in many places they survive. But in these different environments, the plants grow differently. Grow them there over several generations and they develop a new group habit, stabilized by morphic resonance, without the need for genetic change.
TM: Well, adaptive behavior is that small margin of adjusting that supposedly is not genetically driven.
RS: Habit formation and the inheritance of these habits by morphic resonance could enable evolution to occur much more rapidly than neo-Darwinians suppose possible, because they ascribe almost everything to slow statistical changes in gene frequencies. Instead of mere random mutation and natural selection, you have the positive adaptation of animals and plants themselves to a new environment. They often react and respond in a creative way, forming new habits of life appropriate to the environment. So the creative adaptation of life to new circumstances, in my view, is not a matter of minor adjustments. What we are seeing is the innate creativity of life in action. Not blind random mutation, not just physical forces, not just natural selection, but a creativity inherent in all life. Morphic resonance would enable these new habits to be stabilized and inherited.
This theory suggests that not only can habits be passed on by morphic resonance from generation to generation, but also by morphic resonance forms and habits could jump from place to place. This could, for example, help to account for the parallel evolution of marsupials in Australia with placental mammals on other continents.
TM: It would augment the natural selection of separated genes in general.
RS: Yes, these things work together. There’s still natural selection of gene pools; but creative adaptation and spread of new habits take place as well. I suppose the thing about Hawaii that puzzles me most is why there haven’t been more species and more forms of life in Hawaii. In the rainforest here we see only half a dozen or so species of tree, whereas in Sumatra or in the Amazon, there would be hundreds.
TM: Again, the answer is time—200, 300 million years versus 20 million years. That’s what it is.
RA: There are so many reasons to fail here. I personally find the environment harsh, lush as it may look to you or other people, and I suppose that one way a new species could fail is through having bad habits. There may be habits that manifest visually to us only in terms of spatial patterns. The colonization of the black lava by the Ohia tree appears in a certain fractal pattern in which there are characteristic frequencies of distances that may have to do with the distance the seeds fly in the wind or something like that. It could just be response to a nutrient because of the change in size and therefore characteristic distance in the space/time patterns. We seem to see that—first we see the lichen, the lichen creates just a minimum of degradation of the surface that makes it possible for the Ohia tree to grab hold. Both the lichen and the lava surface are fractal. And fractal means that there’s a resonance across scales. Then the lichen scale, which is much smaller—there may be many kinds of lichen, but only this one grows because its fractal pattern has the right basic form, something like a time wave—so that as a matter of fact it’s compatible with the bare rock. And then the Ohia tree is compatible with its fractal pattern apparently on a much larger scale, which nevertheless resonates harmoniously as opposed to other species that might be disharmonious. And this harmony, this capability of a certain space/time pattern, is a habit, which may change and adapt in a way that requires no change in DNA at all, a nongenetic variation, just dependent on some kind of morphic field.
RS: You are talking about the evolution and development of whole ecosystems. I think what’s interesting about this island, the Big Island of Hawaii, is that this forest ecosystem gets established on the slopes of the volcano, but is wiped out again and again through new lava flows. When lava flows are recolonized, an entire ecosystem has to move not just single species. So it has to be an exceptionally portable ecosystem. Maybe that’s why it has to travel light.
TM: Good point.
RA: Coming back to this question of the morphogenetic field of an entire ecosystem, I just want to ask you about this. In this creation myth of the Hawaiian Island’s ecosystem that you described, there are islands that have already disappeared and ecosystems have jumped from them onto Kauai and so on. But as I understand it, these islands are rafting along over this more or less stationary hot spot. Those early islands were right here where we are sitting today, also very distant from any continental landmass. So is Day One of biology on the Hawaiian Island chain a result of long-distance dispersion?
TM: Yes.
RA: Nothing happened until the right lichen arrived after millions of years?
TM: Well the lichen I suspect can probably be found in air samples above any point on the planet.
RS: Say you’ve got spores as the first colonizers.
TM: Yes, and then the ferns come next, which also propagate by spores. The reason the nonflowering plants conquered the planet, if you think about it, is because the planet was like Hawaii. It was new lava, it was covered with lava flows, and the ferns could get hold. We think of ferns as soft, somehow spoiled plants. Actually, they’re the toughest plants there are. When we study biology they teach you about Psilotum, related to the ancestors of the ferns. The forest here is full of Psilotum plants. I can point them out to you; they’re tough.
RA: But how do they get here? Birds carry these spores?
TM: Well sure, by spores. Mud on the feet of migratory birds could carry millions of spores.
RS: The duck’s foot theory. More necessary for the transport of seeds than spores, which are so small and so light that they can be carried over long distances in the air.
RA: Well I think there’s a startup problem. I just can’t imagine that the frequency of ducks flying is enough to explain the arrival of correct species and in the correct temporal sequence. I mean they would have to be dumping literally dump-truck loads of different genetic materials on a daily basis on a brand new island in order to have a chance to get started.
TM: No, studies with banded birds show that there’s a lot of material mo
ving around and a million years is a long time, a number of improbable things can go on in a million years.
RA: Well I’ve been here for a week. I have not seen a new species of bird arrive from the mainland.
TM: Well stick around.
RS: Okay, let’s accept the duck’s foot hypothesis, especially in relation to migratory birds. Birds do migrate from place to place over large distances, including many species in Hawaii, which has migrants from different continents. But which is cause and which is effect? No one knows the evolutionary basis for migration.
TM: No, I don’t think it is migratory birds. I think the process is primarily one of a novelty, unusual events, and catastrophe. The greatest storm of the century, every century.
RA: Birds blown off course.
TM: Birds blown off course. Now that happens. A single big storm veering off course might equal a century of ordinary dispersal.
RS: But there are far more regular migrants. And migratory patterns of birds evolve. For example, new ones have appeared in Europe in a matter of a few decades, as in the case of the blackcap. Birds of this species that nest in Germany and Austria traditionally migrate in the winter to the western Mediterranean. But over the last 30 years, an ever-increasing proportion migrates to England instead, where they find abundant food on garden bird tables.
But how would species of migrants find out about Hawaii in the first place? Rather than individuals being blown here by chance or whole flocks of them starting out lemming-like from the coast of California in the hope of finding an island 2,500 miles away, they may in some way have known that there were islands there to go to. Perhaps this could happen through a kind of collective map that they share with other migratory birds. Some migratory species knowing about Hawaii may enable others to start off in that direction to follow a kind of pre-existing flight path rather like airline flight paths. On our flight to Hawaii, there was a vapor trail outside the window about a hundred feet away, which we followed exactly for two hours. It was presumably from the previous jet flight to Hawaii.
Maybe in bird migrations many species follow the same path, as many northwestern European species follow the Mediterranean coast of Spain and cross over the Straits of Gibraltar into North Africa, and North American migrants tend to follow four main north-south “flyways.”
Maybe when the Hawaiian Islands appeared, long-distance migrants like albatrosses or other large seabirds noticed them and started coming here. Somehow this got into a general bird navigation map, and other species started coming. The appearance of new land channeled bird migration routes towards it. The word got around and increasing numbers of species started coming here if only to rest on the way across the Pacific. Then the ducks’ foot hypothesis would be very plausible.
RA: A new island in the Pacific, tell the albatrosses, and the birds do their job as sort of a pack train to bring as much genetic material as rapidly as possible and dump it on the new island.
RS: Somewhat like an adventure of Doctor Doolittle. But the question of how migratory birds found Hawaii raises the further question of the original Polynesian people who found it. One possibility is that they were keen observers of migrant birds and noticed that birds set off from their islands in a particular direction and months later came back again. It would therefore be a fairly simple deduction that if you followed the migrant birds you’d reach land sooner or later.
TM: That’s right.
RA: That’s what “East is a big bird” means. But following the birds is no less of a mystery than the birds themselves being able to migrate. So either the people could follow the birds, which navigate by some unknown mysterious means, or the people could have had access to similar mysterious means themselves. So when a new island comes up, then the information is somehow injected into their own migration patterns in their canoe rides from one island to another.
RS: In terms of human migration, these islands are now the limit of the westward migration of Europeans, having gone right across North America, subjugating the natives and trying to eliminate their culture, the whole process has moved here. We can see it happening before our very eyes, and in evolutionary terms it’s the opposite of everything we’ve been talking about so far. Now there’s no separation of the islands from the TV networks and other cultural forces of America.
TM: One of the most frightening trends I think in modern culture is the wish to build shopping malls everywhere. There is a mentality that would like to turn the entire planet into an international airport arrival concourse. That’s someone’s idea of Utopia.
RA: There appears to be a double gradient here with the eastward migration of Asian people balancing the westward migration of European people. This is actually the interface where the double gradient can produce an increase in novelty and new mutations, and a forward leap perhaps, of human evolution, could begin here.
TM: A standing wave forming here as forces move both east and west.
RS: So can we point to any human creativity in Hawaii that exemplifies the cultural equivalent of the Malaysian Archipelago? Or is it more like a stalemate with roughly half of the island’s population coming from the East and half from the West, with the native Hawaiians trapped in between?
TM: Well, a Pacific Rim culture is hypothesized to be emerging, and Hawaii is central to all of that. It’s equidistant from Sydney, Lima, Tokyo, and Vancouver.
RS: Have they adopted the slogan, “Hawaii, the Pacific Hub”?
TM: If they haven’t, I’m sure they’re not far behind. The presence of the world’s largest telescopes here makes it a world center of astronomical science. I think the world’s first, second and third largest telescopes are on this island, with an identical twin of the largest being built 200 yards away from it.
RS: So it’s a center for linking humanity with the stars.
TM: We’re looking out from the top of Hawaii, chosen paradoxically for being the darkest place on earth.
RA: From here they’ll see the next wave of ducks’ feet departing for Biosphere II.
People accept an incredible variety of things that are denied by science, such as astrology. But the scientific community, I think, would resist the proof, no matter how rigorous, because the scientific system is so inflexible, so closed to novelty, that it’s essentially a dead end.
What we might be doing is not proving that telepathy is an invisible connecting web between everything, rather what we might be uncovering is but one more example of how language and cultural boundaries prevent us from correctly appreciating how nature works.
CHAPTER 7
PSYCHIC PETS
Rupert Sheldrake: I’ve been doing research on pets that suggests that many of them are psychic. Millions of people have dogs and cats that seem to know when they are coming home. The animal will go to the door, window or gate to wait for them coming home, often ten minutes or more before they arrive. This happens even when they are not expected, and even if they come home at irregular times. Many people have told me that they know when their partner is on the way home because of the behavior of the animal, and often start cooking a meal accordingly. The pet’s anticipation of the arrival of the absent one is often both appreciated, and taken for granted. No one seems to think about it much, beyond assuming that it must be some kind of psychic or telepathic ability.
This kind of behavior is surprisingly common. In most groups of ten or more people I’ve been in, there’s at least one person who has a personal experience of this anticipatory behavior of pets.
Once this phenomenon is brought to consciousness, it turns out to be a widely accepted item of common sense. In Britain, stories about this research have been featured in many newspapers and magazines, ranging from the London Times to Dogs Today, and I have had thousands of letters and emails from people telling me of the seemingly psychic powers of their pets.
In a BBC radio discussion on this subject, I was confronted with a notoriously witty but hard-bitten panel. I was expecting a skeptical response. The most
formidable of the panelists simply said, “Well, my dog’s been doing it for years.” and the others duly added their own stories. His conclusion was: “The only thing that puzzles me about this behavior is why Dr. Sheldrake feels he needs to prove it.”
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