Morphic fields
Brian Inglis
A New Science of Life Rupert Sheldrake (Blond and Briggs pp.229, £12.50).
Some 60 years ago William McDougall, Professor of Psychology at Harvard, instituted experiments which revealed that successive generations of laboratory rats displayed Lamarckian tendencies; it was as if the ability to accomplish a task — in this case, choosing which route to use to escape from a tank of water — could be inherited. Needless to say, orthodox neo-Darwinians were appalled at his findings; but the only flaw they could detect in his protocol was that he had not employed another lot of rats as controls, to see what changes there were in their learning rate, down the generations. Some researchers in Melbourne accordingly devoted 20 years to repeating the experiment, with controls.
Their findings remain one of the great unsolved mysteries of science. The researchers obtained the same results as McDougall; the progeny of the 'trained' rats learned faster. But 'exactly the same tendency was also found in the untrained line'.
The quotation, and the italics, are Rupert Sheldrake's. The Melbourne findings appeared to cast doubt on McDougall's, and consequently on Lamarckian interpretation. But the way in which the progeny of the untrained rats learned faster, too, could hardly be accounted for in neo-Darwinian — or indeed in any conventional — terms. But there were no further experiments. As Sir Peter Medawar has unkindly told them, scientists like research which settles issues. This line promised only to confuse them.
A New Science of Life courageously attempts to make sense out of this and other related mysteries by advancing a theory of 'formative causation', which the pious defenders of the established Faith have been denouncing as crypto-Lamarckianism. (Nature, sunk in one of its periodic moreorthodox-than-thou comas, has even suggested, not altogether flippantly, that it is the kind of book which ought to be burned.) In general, however, it has had a surprisingly respectful reception. The neoDarwinians are, after all, a rapidly dwindling band, who now cause more openminded colleagues almost as much embarrassment as Creationists. And Sheldrake's proposition, however unpalatable to scientists brought up in the mechanistic tradition, is at least testable. The Melbourne experiment could be done again, in a great variety of forms.
Sheldrake's argument is that we can no longer think of evolution exclusively in terms of random genetic variations played upon by the survival of the fittest; not simply because the dogma fails to account satisfactorily for the course evolution has taken in the past, but also because it does not begin to account for what is happening now. Instead, we should be thinking in terms of morphogenesis — `the coming into being of characteristic and specific form in living organisms' — on the analogy of magnetic 'fields'. Shake iron filings around a magnet, and they will form themselves into the familiar pattern shaped by the 'field'. We need to think of 'coming into being' in similar terms.
In living creatures however, the concept has to be perilously extended to accommodate the knowledge that a 'field' can take on what appears to be a living identity — even an intelligence — of its own. In passing, Sheldrake notes the way in which termites repair their nests 'through the cooperative and co-ordinated activities of many individual insects', citing Marais as his source; I am surprised he does not make more of the aspect of his theory, because Marais, orthodox Darwinian though he was, was so astonished by the manner in which the termites went about their various chores — foraging, fighting off intruders, feeding the queen, and building, marvellously designed structures — that he felt compelled to use the term `soul' to describe how the orchestration was conducted. The way starlings fly in flocks, as if controlled by a computerised automatic pilot which not only guides them to their destination but enables them to 'twirl' in formation, is another example of this extension of 'field'.
On the evidence, too, 'fields' of this kind appear to be surprisingly immune from the limitations of space, and even time. Sheldrake uses 'resonance' as an analogy: the way in which a stringed instrument can be set 'twanging' by another. But Morphic resonance, he claims, not being of a type of energy in the usual sense of the term, `could be just as effective over ten thousand miles as over a yard and over a century as an hour'.
Such a notion would until a few years ago have excited the derision of physicists; but they, too, have been coming to accept that events in one place can influence events in another in as yet unexplained ways. And this, in turn, is beginning to make sense of old mysteries. If the experimental evidence for telepathy is accepted, it clearly demonstrates that extra-sensory communication is independent of distance, and often of time. On a mundane level, too, epidemiologists have long been puzzled by the way infections do not behave as they should, if transmitted person-to-person, but emerge independently yet synchronistically in different places. Morphic fields may explain much more that has been mystifying; they may, in fact, throw light on what has been left to poets and visionaries to perceive. The music which comes out of a radio, Sheldrake points out, depends not just on the set and its power supply but on the transmission. Can it be that as we extend our fields — even by 'straight' evolution — we are moving into connection with 'fields' which are destined to transform our destiny much as if a radio ham might find himself-turning in to the music of the spheres?
Not that Sheldrake indulges in such speculation — not, at least, in .4 New Science of Life. He is a biochemist by academic background, and he writes in the vocabulary of the modern sciences, which means that although he writes with a clarity which is becoming depressingly rare, it will not be easy reading for anybody on the other side of the cultural canyon. But the effort will be worth while. Decaying dogmas are given yet another drubbing; and the possibilities which Sheldrake opens up to replace them are exciting.
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