Customer Reviews

Morphic Resonance: The Nature of Formative Causation

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

When the first edition of this book came out in 1981 with the title "A New Science of Life," I well remember getting one of the first copies and being electrified by the ideas and the data to support them. There was also the guilty pleasure of reading a book that the editor of the esteemed journal Nature had declared, "This infuriating tract... is the best candidate for burning there has been for many years."

In the intervening years Rupert Sheldrake has worked tirelessly to either prove or disprove his hypotheses, published many peer-reviewed papers as well as several more books on this and related topics. I have also had the pleasure of meeting him several times and discussing his ideas with him in great detail. There are three things that have always come across: his intelligence, his integrity and his humility.

It is sad that when that Nature editor - Sir John Maddox - passed away last year, a number of commentators took the opportunity to renew their attacks on Sheldrake's work. Many of those attackers have clearly not examined the research - some even admitted it! - neither were they aware of the fact that Rupert had provided Sir John with detailed scientific responses to his critique of a later book, "Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home: And Other Unexplained Powers of Animals," but never received a response. So most students of biology and behavior have probably never even heard about this work, and many online sites simply dismiss the notion of "morphic resonance" as pseudoscience.

This is the third edition of the book that started all the controversy.

So what is this book about, and why does elicit such emotional - and unscientific - responses? The book proposes that current biochemical and genetic models cannot explain the ways in which atoms, molecules, crystals, cells, organs and even ecosystems organize themselves. The Hypothesis of Formative Causation proposes that the forms of self-organizing systems are arranged and fashioned by "Morphic fields." These fields provide the templates for the ways in which organisms develop and are also responsible for the behavior and social and cultural development of organisms and social groups. These are not static fields, they are able to learn and establish new patterns and habits across time and space, which is termed "Morphic resonance."

For example, it can be very hard to coax a newly created chemical compound into forming a crystal. But once it has been done in one laboratory, others find it ever easier to make crystals of the new compound. The idea being that the morphic field has learned how to do it. Or another example: rats were taught to run a maze. Once they had learned the task, rats on the other side of the world learned to run the same maze far more quickly. And could it be that the ever-younger age at which people master the game of chess is not only because of the use of computers for training, but also that the morphic field associated with chess is becoming stronger?

You will see why this is a controversial theory, even though it answers a lot of questions, and the research data appears firmly to support it. Having examined the research in great detail as well as analyzing virtually all of the supporting material that Rupert cites in this book, I think that his fundamental ideas are correct, and that they will in time be understood to be as important as the ideas of Darwin and the great men and women who created the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics.

This new edition is well written and even for someone familiar with the ideas, a thrilling read. And if you are new to the concepts, this is the best book to start with.

If you have read an earlier edition of the book, do you need to look at this one as well? My answer is a definite "Yes." Not only is there a new 23 page introduction, the entire text has been updated and there are two appendices - "New Tests for Morphic Resonance" and "Morphic Fields and the Implicate Order - A Dialogue with (the late) David Bohm," which add another 65 pages of fascinating material.

Very highly recommended.

Richard G. Petty, MD, author of Healing, Meaning and Purpose: The Magical Power of the Emerging Laws of Life

Length:: 8:43 Mins

As the late American Attorney General, Robert F. Kennedy, once stated in a speech he delivered in South Africa decades ago, "Moral Courage" is the willingness to incur the backlash of your own peer group for the sake of the truth as you see it.

Dr. Rupert Sheldrake has demonstrated such Moral Courage for decades, himself - standing up under the poorly substantiated ridicule of the scientific community for his daring theories of Formative Causation, Morphogenetic Fields, and Morphic Resonance, which contradict the unproven (but generally accepted in mainstream scientific circles) material reductionist theories of a random, chaotic and mindless universe giving birth to an equally random and mindless process of abiogenesis and evolution.

This book is the up-to-date compilation of his more than 30 years of research and experimentation. It will surprise, challenge and enlighten you.

Sheldrake's hypothesis of morphic fields and morphic resonance cannot be explained by anyone better than Sheldrake himself. What I love about Rupert Sheldrake (besides his simple yet elegant hypothesis) is that he is willing to find ways to test his ideas. In this book, he has an appendix where he brilliantly puts forth ways of testing for the existence of morphic resonance.

Whether Sheldrake's hypothesis is correct or not, future experiments will tell (so far findings seem to favor his hypothesis). One thing is certain: his ideas are refreshingly original. Reading this book will take you on a journey into the mind of one of the greatest and original thinkers of our time.

MORPHIC RESONANCE: THE NATURE OF FORMATIVE CAUSATION appears in a newly revised, expanded edition of A NEW SCIENCE OF LIFE, and will appeal to any interested in new science, biology and blends of new age thought. Using his theory of morphic resonance, Sheldrake was able to reinterpret the regularities of nature as being more like habits than laws. His ongoing research results in a vastly revamped title perfect for any collections with older editions.

Quantum Mechanics led physicists out of materialist orthodoxy some time ago. Many biologists are still addictively, obsessively materialistic. This explains the attacks on Sheldrake's ideas. One would need at least a high school biology class foundation to follow his arguments, however having said that, his arguments make a lot of sense. Scientific theory is, metaphorically, like atomic structure; vast areas cannot be explained well, and what is understood is as minimal as protons and electrons, with vast spaces inbetween. Far more is unknown, than known, and Sheldrake nicely points this out. Sheldrake at least did his homework, and doesn't call for book burning, as at least one of his opponents did. Take the simple citation "it remains impossible to predict the structure of even the simplest crystalline solids from their chemical composition.", on p. 58. The structure of hydrogen can be discussed well- because it is very simple, with few elements. As structures grow more complex, prediction and modelling becomes far more difficult. P. 46 notes that biologists speak of genetic and positional information is if these terms have some well-defined meaning, but they don't, this is only borrowed, as metaphor, from Information Theory. His point that Pythagorian mathematical mysticism is very influential in modern science is not one commonly noted. I suggest that modern science is basically an art form, that arose within a specific context. Art forms arise from their context, and influence their context, but they are not universal. Ballet is supremely French, for example, it could never have arisen among, say, Apache [Indeh] indians, who do have dance forms, which have vastly different forms and cultural meaning. Sheldrake's detractors hate him, perhaps, because he points out the limitations of their models, that they don't have all the answers. Sheldrake proposes some ideas to explain certain phenomena which are not explainable with current scientific theory, just as Darwin proposed some ideas to explain certain phenomena which could not be explained based on 19th century understanding of Biblical history. Both are under attack by fundamentalists, who are very unscientific, and biased. Neither Darwin nor Sheldrake have all the answers, even in the fields they work in- and at least both are humble enough to say so, saying that they offer the best ideas they can to explain how things work. No doubt later scientists will find new models that embrace even more, just as Quantum Mechanics reduced Newtonian Physics to a smaller domain. His critics do him a favor, though, as he goes back to re-examine and reinforce his ideas. Would that all science books were as well-referenced, and thought out, as this one is. Sheldrake would benefit more, though, from looking at more non-Western ideas. Feng Shui is an art form with at least 4,000 years of history. The real test of ideas is whether they work or not. Sheldrake's ideas do work, and can be tested even at the human scale. So can Feng Shui. A good Feng Shui man, in Hong Kong, can charge and get $10,000 USD/hour for his time, from the most pragmatic people in the world. Sheldrake is probably too conservative to look at ideas like those of Dr. Richard Bartlett Matrix Energetics: The Science and Art of Transformation, who, along with his protege Dr. Mark Dunn, teach people to work with and round Morphic fields. It doesn't really matter if Sheldrake's ideas are correct or not. Science is not much more than the 5 blind men of Hindustan, arguing about what the elephant is like. Morphic fields are a useful model, and if one works with that model, one can effect change. Quantum Mechanics would seem like witchcraft to any 1850's scientist, yet the computer on which you read this review could not exist without it. Jungian archetypes may also be morphic fields. D'Arcy Thompson's On Growth and Form, cited in Sheldrake's book, supports Sheldrake's ideas. This is a book that was well known to a whole generation of ... architects. The most important part of Sheldrake's ideas is that they can be applied, practically. Consider that serpentine brick walls last longer than brick walls built in straight lines. This is a simple fact. Why is that? Well, Feng Shui would say that curved lines are more in harmony with an environment of energy flow. I don't know how Sheldrake would explain this- perhaps something about meandering lines reflecting the M-field better. Another reason I like Sheldrake's ideas is that they are very much in line with indigenous models of life. One example of an adaptation of indigenous ideas to our culture is Systems Theory, as Bateson noted. Whispers of the Ancients: Native Tales for Teaching and Healing in Our Time notes that indigenous stories are pulled from some place that very much resembles a Morphic field, and that even when stories have been forgotten, a re-entry into the field, with some support from the right physical context, can recover a specific forgotten teaching story. The incident of the particular twist of the landscape that makes it possible for a bobcat to catch a squirrel, generation after generation, as one example, is a nice interplay between the pattern, and the specific bobcat catching a specific squirrel. Those who create advertisements, and other behavior modification techniquest, accept Sheldrake's ideas enthusiastically, even, on occasion, explicitly. I know a woman who used to work for a pharmaceutical company, selling drugs to doctors. 15 years ago, if she didn't spend $10,000/week on presents for doctors, she got a lowered performance rating. Her employers, and some other corporations, are extremely interested in the Morphic field support for their products, and they take action to explicitly tune their products accordingly. Their understanding of M-fields may not be as explicit as Sheldrake's, but they have working models. One might consider Toyota's position in the morphic field of cars as seen by Americans, now, vs. 2 years ago, and wonder how Toyota will address that. One of my favorite stories is a book I read some time back, on an Anthroplogist among sorcerers, in South America. Other sorcerers saw his field work, his notes, his explanation of their ideas and culture, as a form of sorcery. A college professor I had once said that education was the repetitive revelation of the obvious to the as yet unaware. Surely Sheldrake feels this way. I had a model for how the world works, when I was 5 years old. It worked for me at that time. I was open to new ideas, fortunately, and incorporated new ideas into my model of the world. I continue to do so. The Observer principle from QM haunts me, at times, for what you believe to be true filters your perceptions so you won't see evidence for what you don't believe to be true. Sheldrake is an irritant to a number of fundamentalists who don't want their models played with. Please keep writing, Dr. Sheldrake, you have good ideas. The ancient Greeks certainly thought about the world of forms, let us recall that 3 Graces would bring beautiful forms to supplicants, on request.