Morphogenetic field: Encyclopedia II - Morphogenetic field - Evidence

Morphogenetic field - Evidence

Sheldrake first published his ideas in 1973, offering a selection of seemingly disconnected bits of evidence in support.

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. The first 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 attributed this to some sort of Lamarckian evolutionary process. An alternative explanation, however, involved the rats following the scent left behind by their predecessors.

Sheldrake attributed this process to morphogenetic fields. 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 now-established pattern. Several examples of this sort of "universal learning" were offered, but no scientific explanation for why such "universal learning" exists has been backed up by substantial evidence. Conversely, no substantial evidence has been produced to dismiss the existence of such phenomena.

Another 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 hypothesize that this is due to better experiments — the parts of the first experiment that result in slower growth are documented and not repeated. If this is correct, using documented processes should consistently result in slower crystal growth. However, this hypothesis does not appear to have been tested. Sheldrake also attributed to a morphogenetic field, suggesting that the crystals being formed for the first time were influencing a field that later crystals drew on.

Sheldrake has pointed to a number of other examples: the behaviour of monkeys in Japan cleaning their food (the Hundredth Monkey effect, which has been largely discredited), and birds in Europe learning to open milk bottles have all been given as examples of a "non local" 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 provide 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 not a set of laws, but rather of habits.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Evidence", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki