The Morphogenetic Universe

In 1981 Rupert Sheldrake outraged the scientific establishment with his hypothesis of morphic resonance. A morphogenetic field is a hypothetical biological field that contains the information necessary to shape the exact form of a living thing.

Morphogenetic fields and Rupert Sheldrake

Rupert Sheldrake, trained as a plant physiologist, 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, 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 some such fields or knowledge or memory in the environment. The later discovery of DNA appeared to offer an explanation, but since the DNA remained largely identical throughout an organism, it was not, of its own, able to explain form. It explained that a cell was human, but not, it was thought, what part of a human. It was thought at the time that mechanisms encoded in the DNA were responsible for the development of form, but the exact nature of the system remained something of a mystery.

Sheldrake instead developed a completely new theory to explain this problem, one based on a universal field encoding the “basic pattern” of an object. 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. This Sheldrake called in 1973 morphogenetic field, in this view, nature may be a set not of laws, but of habits.

“The idea is that there is a kind of memory in nature. Each kind of thing has a collective memory. So, take a squirrel living in New York now. That squirrel is being influenced by all past squirrels. And how that influence moves across time, the collective squirrel-memory both for form and for instincts, is given by the process I call morphic resonance. It’s a theory of collective memory throughout nature. What the memory is expressed through are the morphic fields, the fields within and around each organ ism. The memory processes are due to morphic resonance.

“Basically, morphic fields are fields of habit, and they’ve been set up through habits of thought, through habits of activity, and through habits of speech. Most of our culture is habitual, I mean, most of our personal life, and most of our cultural life is habitual.

The whole idea of morphic resonance is evolutionary, but morphic resonance only gives the repetitions. It doesn’t give the creativity. So evolution must involve an interplay of creativity and repetition. Creativity gives new forms, new patterns, new ideas, new art forms. And we don’t know where creativity comes from. Is it inspired from above? Welling up from below? Picked up from the air? What? Creativity is a mystery wherever you encounter it, in the human realm, or in the realm of biological evolution, or of cosmic evolution.”

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