Let me have your best classroom attention for a two-column span.* There are starquakes going on in scientific thought. Each confident assumption held about our mechanistic universe may have to be reblocked. The torque wrench for this profound revolution is morphogenetics—the theory of formative causation. No hypothesis spun off by Darwin, Freud, Newton, or Einstein will have more momentous effect on human understanding. Forma-tive causation has been both elaborated and popularized by Professor Rupert Sheldrake, FRS, a plant biologist from my British alma mater, Clare College, Cambridge. Sheldrake, however, didn’t originate it. Indeed, the theory of formative causation has lain dormant, an intellectual Godzilla, in scientific conjecture since 1920. Like plate tectonics (now given universal credence) it was disregarded as preposterous. And for good reason. Once accepted, formative causation would require that every district of materialist science be rethought. And this, I suspect, is what will happen.
The theory then. Sheldrake has surmised that morphogenetic (form-creating) fields exist. These are spatial and as real as any gravitational or electromagnetic field. They might be called habit patterns of form. An M-field will both order and shape matter—matter in crystal, cell, tissue, organ, whole organism—through morphic resonance. At higher levels morphic resonance can influence behavior and even collective thought. But this resonance will transmit only from like form to like form (rat shape on rat, tree shape on tree). Moreover (and here you must inhale intellectually) M-fields function not just across space but through time as well. Each previous M-field, therefore, is retained in the present. Thus a species’ entire formal history will be available to it at all times.
Comments