Morphic Resonance

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Morphic resonance is the proposal that nature remembers. On this account the regularities we call laws — the shape a crystal takes, the way an embryo folds into a body, the trick a rat learns in a maze — are not fixed prescriptions written into the universe at the start, but habits that have built up over time, each repetition making the next one a little easier. The more often a form occurs, the hypothesis runs, the more readily it occurs again, even across distances and between individuals with no physical connection. It is an old intuition given a precise modern shape.

That author is Rupert Sheldrake, born in 1942 and trained in the orthodox heart of British biology. He read biology and biochemistry at Clare College, Cambridge, held a Harvard fellowship in the history and philosophy of science, took a Cambridge doctorate in biochemistry in 1968, and worked as a Royal Society research fellow on auxins, the plant hormones that govern how cells differentiate. With Philip Rubery he developed a model of how auxin moves through plant tissue that remains genuine, cited plant-physiology work. He later spent four years in India as principal plant physiologist at an international crops institute. None of this is the biography of a fringe figure, and it is why the case is interesting. Sheldrake left the auxin problem because he came to think it could not be solved from inside biochemistry at all: after nine years, he wrote, it had become clear that the chemistry would not explain why living things take the basic shapes they do.

He set out the alternative in A New Science of Life, published in 1981 under the subtitle The Hypothesis of Formative Causation. The central move is to take the developmental biologist’s idea of a morphogenetic field — a region of organising influence that guides growth, a concept with respectable roots going back to the early twentieth century — and add to it a memory. Sheldrake calls his version a morphic field, and proposes that such fields are not the same in every place and time but evolve, shaped by the forms of every similar system that came before. The transmission, he holds, runs through what he names morphic resonance: a similarity-based influence of past patterns on present ones, carried without any transfer of energy. Memory, in this scheme, need not be stored in the brain at all; an organism tunes in to the accumulated forms of its kind. He pressed the argument well past biology, into chemistry, physics, and human culture, where he saw the same principle in rituals that make a founding event present again by re-enacting what others have enacted before.

What gives the hypothesis its edge is the metaphysical claim folded inside it. Sheldrake holds that the laws of nature need not have sprung fully formed from the Big Bang, “like a kind of cosmic Napoleonic code,” nor reside in a timeless realm beyond space — that the very language of law is, he concedes, a human metaphor carried into nature, since many kinds of system have habits but only humans have laws. As nature evolves, he argues, its habits evolve with it. This is, quite deliberately, a quarrel with eternal forms: a biologist proposing that the regularities the academy treats as given are instead accumulated and mutable, a collective memory laid down through repetition.

The reception is the part of the record that has lasted. In September 1981 John Maddox, the senior editor of Nature, reviewed the book under the headline “A book for burning?” He judged the argument “in no sense a scientific argument but … an exercise in pseudo-science,” not falsifiable in any practical way, and warned that readers might be left thinking magic had found a place in scientific discussion. He did not, in fact, call for the book to be burned, and later regretted the framing as injudicious — but the title traveled, and Sheldrake’s publishers used it to suggest the establishment was again suppressing something uncomfortable. The episode hardened in 1994, when a BBC documentary on him aired Maddox saying that Sheldrake was “putting forward magic instead of science, and that can be condemned with exactly the language that the popes used to condemn Galileo, and for the same reasons: it is heresy.” The broadcast intercut footage of book-burning. Even a critic of Sheldrake’s, the neuroscientist Steven Rose, complained that the programme dwelt on the rhetoric as if it were all that mattered. The word heresy, spoken about a falsifiability dispute in a biology journal, needs no verdict on the hypothesis to be telling.

Sheldrake’s reply to the charge of being untestable was to propose tests, and their record is mixed at best. His flagship case rests on rat-learning experiments run across three continents from the 1920s to the 1950s, in which later generations of rats — including, in the Melbourne work, untrained control lines — improved at a task their ancestors had struggled with. Mainstream science read the improvement in the untrained controls as refuting the Lamarckian inheritance the experiments were built to test; Sheldrake reads that same anomaly as the predicted fingerprint of morphic resonance, while conceding it cannot by itself prove anything. He proposed that the melting points of newly synthesised crystals should creep upward as the substance accumulates a crystallising history. He studied a dog, Jaytee, said to know when its owner was heading home, and reported strong results; Richard Wiseman and colleagues, whom Sheldrake himself had invited to examine the case, concluded the pattern was an artefact of how the data were cut. He ran staring-detection trials reporting a slight ability to feel an unseen gaze; David Marks and John Colwell traced the apparent effect to flawed randomisation in the test sequences. Each headline result has met a counter-analysis, and the predictions the academy could check it has, for the most part, declined to run.

The settled verdict is plain. Morphic resonance has no accepted mechanism, no replicated confirmation, and a standing classification as pseudoscience; critics call it vague to the point of explaining anything, inconsistent with what is known from genetics and neuroscience, and in the end unfalsifiable. Sheldrake answers that the materialism he is accused of betraying is itself a contestable creed rather than a finding, and that his experiments go unreplicated because mainstream researchers will not touch them. A 2021 retrospective in a peer-reviewed biology journal — neither an endorsement nor a debunking — observed that forty years on, the experimental implications of his ideas remain largely untested, and read the case as an illustration of how reluctant science is to revise its deepest commitments.

The lineage Sheldrake claims runs straight back through the material this encyclopedia covers. He traces the seed of the idea to Bergson’s argument that memory is not lodged in the brain, and he sets his fields beside Jung’s collective unconscious, where forms recur across people who never met — though where Jung leaned on physical inheritance, Sheldrake substitutes resonance. His later writing reaches further still, toward the anima mundi of the Hermetic and Platonic worlds, the conviction that nature is alive and holds its own memory. Seen from there, morphic resonance is something rare: a biologist of orthodox training putting an ancient esoteric conviction — that the world remembers — to the discipline of testable prediction. The doctrine is ancient; the demand that it pay its way in falsifiable predictions is modern; and the record, so far, is that it has not been made to stick. What the episode preserves, more durably than any of the experiments, is a clear sight of where the boundary of science gets drawn, and in what language it is defended when something tries to cross it.

→ Related: Carl Jung · Collective Unconscious