"Ordinary information theory reduces information transmission to causal connections, but it seems there is a more fundamental source of information laden connection in the world...the kind of information at issue here is not bit capacity but the semantically distinct correlation of 'distinct' physical systems, where there is no requirement that the correlation be maintained by some causal process connecting the two systems."

Nearly twenty years ago, biologist Rupert Sheldrake created a stir with the publication of his book A New Science of Life (1981). In it, he advanced a very radical idea which, if confirmed, would have profound implications for our understanding of not only evolution, but many other phenomena as well, including biological development and learning and perhaps even so-called psychic abilities. His theory does not actually imply that our current understanding of evolution is wrong. It's quite compatible, for example, with the Darwinian and self-organizing processes we examined in the previous two chapters. Sheldrake's ideas do suggest, however, that everything we know or think we know about physical, biological and mental processes is but the tip of a very large iceberg.

Central to Sheldrake's theory is the concept of fields. Fields are very familiar to physicists. Gravitational fields exist between any two bodies of matter. Electromagnetic fields are associated with the movement of subatomic particles like electrons. At one time, physicists viewed fields as the operation of forces at a distance. In the modern understanding, however, matter and the fields associated with them are essentially interchangeable. We can describe the subatomic world, for example, in terms of electrons, particles of matter which are distributed around the nucleus of the atom; or in terms of a field which encompasses this entire distribution.

Sheldrake takes the notion of fields and applies it not simply to physical matter, but to all other forms of existence. In his view, everything--atoms, proteins, DNA, cells, tissues, organisms, societies, and so forth--is associated with its own corresponding field. These morphic fields, as he calls them, are arranged holarchically, just as their associated visible forms of existence are. Thus they extend through both space and time, and can grow, change and become part of higher-order fields, just as the visible forms of existence associated with them can. Furthermore, they can interact with these visible forms, shaping them and in turn being shaped by them It's in this manner that Sheldrake attempts to use them to provide a powerful new evolutionary theory.

Imagine, for example, an early evolutionary event in which a primitive, cell-like structure emerges--Stuart Kauffman's autocatalytic networks, for example. As I pointed out in the previous chapter, this emerging metabolic system still lacks the ability to reproduce itself, at least in the manner of modern cells. While it unifies a series of enzymatic reactions, it has not evolved the genetic information needed to create copies of these enzymes, and so start another network. Without the ability to reproduce itself, the network is prevented from diversification and further evolution.

Suppose, however, that when the autocatalytic network was formed, a corresponding morphic field was created with it. This field, according to Sheldrake, would make it somewhat easier for another network of the same kind to emerge. It would form a sort of template or mold guiding another incipient set of metabolic reactions to form the same kind of autocatalytic network. It does this through a process Sheldrake calls "morphic resonance." Since the morphic field in some way corresponds to or resonates with the original autocatalytic network, it would tend to favor the formation of a second network of the same general constitution and properties. The formation of this new network, in turn, would further strengthen the morphic field, making it easier for still a third copy to emerge. Relatively soon, many such copies of this network would exist, together with an increasingly powerful field.

Sheldrake's morphic fields, in other words, provide a novel solution to the key problem of reproduction. We have seen that reproduction of an emerging new fundamental holon requires that it have information about all the lower-order holons it organizes. According to conventional science, this information, in the case of the cell, is contained in the genome. Sheldrake, however, locates another source of this information, in his morphic fields. Indeed, these fields, in his view, are primarily defined in terms of information, and morphic resonance is a process by which this information is transferred from the field to its corresponding visible form of existence, or in the opposite direction.

Of course, this doesn't mean we can simply dispense with the genome. Even if we were to accept Sheldrake's theory--and in a moment, when I discuss some of the problems with this theory, we will see that this is indeed a huge if--the genome still must have evolved. Given that a cell-like structure can initially reproduce itself without a genome, however--or at least make it more likely that similar structures will emerge--this evolution becomes a little easier to understand, and more amenable to currently available theories. One can imagine a primitive cell, for example, containing some DNA capable of synthesizing several different proteins. The DNA's ability to synthesize these proteins initially might be very slow and inefficient; and the proteins themselves might be little more than random chains of amino acids with no functional activity. But since the cells containing such DNA could reproduce themselves through the operation of morphic fields, the latter would provide an established form of life on which on which Darwinian processes could gradually improve the genetic apparatus. Through mutation and selection, cells could emerge which were more metabolically efficient, for example, or able to reproduce themselves more faithfully. These changes, too, would alter the morphic fields.

In other words, the development of the holarchy in Sheldrake's view is a kind of co-evolutionary process, in which the Darwinian processes of random variation and natural selection (and/or other processes, such as the self-organizing ones) proceed alongside morphic resonance, each advancing the evolution of the other. Because these morphic fields are proposed to exist for every form of existence, this co-evolutionary process could occur at other stages and levels of existence, and potentially shed light on other difficult-to-understand phases of evolution, such as the emergence of radically new organs, tissues and other features of organisms. They could even influence the evolution of mental qualities, providing another way of understanding cultural evolution and some of the other higher-level processes I discussed earlier. For example, Sheldrake believes that when a few human beings first learn some new way of thinking or of doing something, morphic fields are formed that make it somewhat easier for other people to attain this behavior. Understood in this way, these fields could play a very important role in the emergence of human behavior, but perhaps consciousness as well.

The theory of morphic fields has the potential to explain many other phenomena for which current scientific explanations are incomplete, such as the development of organisms from a single cell. As I pointed out in Chapter 8, when life is understood in terms of information, there appears to be a large gap between the genome and the organism. That is, the information contained in the genome is far less than that contained in the organism. One possible solution to this puzzle would be the acquisition by the organism of information from outside of the genome. Morphic fields, in Sheldrake's view, could provide this information. The entire human race, as it has existed over time and space, would form a field into which every newborn child would become imbedded; through morphic resonance, it would acquire information to augment that of its genes.

Finally, Sheldrake also suggests that his theory might even illuminate our understanding of psychic phenomena. The essence of most such reports is that certain individuals have access to information for which there is no ordinary scientific explanation. Thus, people have claimed to be able to see phenomena occurring at a great physical distance from them, to manipulate objects without being in physical contact with them, or to have witnessed events occurring in the past. The existence of morphic fields of information extending in both space and time suggests a means by which such abilities could occur.

The lack of respect that much of the scientific establishment has for Sheldrake's theory is not hard to understand. The notion of morphic fields has several major problems. First, Shledrake's description of them is rather vague. As I pointed out earlier, he suggests that they could have somewhat the same relationship to higher forms of existence as physical fields, such as gravitation or electromagnetic radiation, have to physical matter. In the view of modern physics, matter is interchangeable with energy, and thus at its elemental level, every form of existence is sometimes said to have a dual nature; it can behave as a quantal unit, a particle, or as a field. In the same way, then, other forms of existence would have a unitary nature--a cell or an organism, for example, seen as an autonomous form of life with distinct boundaries--as well as existence in a field extending over space and time.

If morphic fields are to do what Sheldrake says they do, however, this analogy seems to be somewhat misleading. An electron and its associated electromagnetic field, in the view of physicists, are two manifestations of the same process or phenomenon. One doesn't strengthen the other. We would not say that the existence of the field increases the probability of another electron evolving. Nor do we imagine that if another particle appeared, the field would somehow shape it so that its properties were like those of the electron. Yet morphic resonance, as I understand it, is supposed to operate in this manner on higher levels of existence.

Moreover, even without a precise definition of information in biological systems, we know that it interacts with energy. For example, when molecules are synthesized or degraded in the cell, there is an increase or decrease in information, and a corresponding increase or decrease in energy. The translation of the genes or the operation of the brain requires energy. To postulate that information can be transferred without energy therefore suggests a dualism that is inconsistent with this interaction. If two phenomena interact, how can one of them change independently of the other? As I pointed out in Chapter 5, it's just this kind of argument that has made mind-body dualism untenable to most scientists and philosophers.

In summary, the concept of morphic fields is not very precise. Though Sheldrake has tried to present them as somewhat analogous to the fields associated with subatomic matter, their similarity is not very clear. Nevertheless, this criticism is not necessarily lethal to his theory. Our understanding of quantum events and of information is still poor. It may be that future advances will provide a better model for understanding how morphic fields could operate. Or it could simply be that these fields are not analogous to physical fields, and we need a very different means of understanding them.

There is another major problem with the concept of morphic fields, however: there is very little direct evidence for them. As with other alternatives to Darwinism, most of the support for Sheldrake's theory is based on negative arguments, namely, the alleged inadequancies of random variation and natural selection to account for certain phenomena. However, many of the phenomena that Sheldrake discusses in this context are not considered particularly problematical to most scientists. For example, he argues that the fact that proteins that differ greatly in their amino acid sequence fold into the same conformations implies the presence of morphic fields guiding them into this conformation. But while it's true that the process of protein folding is not very well understood, this particular aspect of it is not mysterious. The common shapes of different proteins can be quite well accounted for by the fact that only certain regions of a protein molecule are critical for it to fold into a particular shape. Amino acids in these regions tend to be highly conserved--that is, they have not changed over long periods of evolution (Dorit et al. 1990)--while amino acids outside these regions may change without affecting the protein's function (Gerstein and Levitt 1997; Mirny et al. 1998; Poupon and Mornon 1999; Holm and Sander 1999). A more difficult problem to explain is how amino acid chains can "find" the right conformation so quickly, out of a literally astronomical number of possibilities (Gething and Sambrook 1992). In the case of some proteins, however, molecular chaperones--other proteins that interact with the folding protein in such a way as to favor some conformational intermediates--provides at least part of the explanation (Ellis and van der Vies 1991).

Finally, while Sheldrake, understandably, focusses on phenomena that he feels Darwinism can't explain, he overlooks the converse cases, that is, phenomena that seem to be inconsistent with his theory. Consider, for example, the effects of social isolation on organisms. Studies of severely deprived children, as well of experimental animals, have shown that severe behavioral deficits occur when humans and other organisms lack social interactions during a critical period of their development. If morphic fields exist corresponding to human social holons of all kinds, one would expect that socially isolated organisms, by virtue of still having contact with these fields, would still be capable of at least some mental and emotional development. Such studies provide no evidence of such an influence.

Of course, all evolutionary theories have a problem with positive evidence, since they are intended to be explanations of events that occurred long in the past. So they must garner support, to some extent, by demonstrating the inadequacies of the competition. But Sheldrake's theory does have an advantage here, in that morphic fields are supposed to be associated with all forms of existence, including ourselves, and have effects on other processes besides evolutionary ones. Thus the theory may be open to certain kinds of tests that would not apply to more conventional evolutionary theories. As I noted earlier, Sheldrake has predicted that learning and other forms of human behavior are likely to be favored if they have occurred previously. This is certainly a testable hypothesis, and in the wake of the great interest stimulated by his books, there have been numerous attempts to perform such tests. Some of these efforts have reported results consistent with the presence of fields--that is, they have found statistically significant differences between the behavior of people or other organisms in situations where they might have had the advantage of previous fields, and people who did not (Sheldrake and Rose 1992; Sheldrake 1995).

Some attempts by others to replicate these studies, however, have not been successful (Baker 2000). In addition, there are at least two other reasons why Sheldrake's work has made few believers in the scientific community.. First, his description of morphic fields is sufficiently vague that negative results can generally be ascribed to factors other than the weakness of the theory. For example, while these fields are supposed to act over both space and time, no one knows to what extent of space and time these actions might occur. Can a field formed through a process in one location have a significant effect on the emergence of another process thousands of miles away? Or years or decades in the future? Such questions can only be answered by experiment, but they can't even be really asked until the phenomenon itself is demonstrated in some form. Thus if a learning experiment does not yield positive results, it can often be argued that the distance between the subjects was so great that the field was relatively weak--or that there weren't enough repetitions of the behavioral phenomenon to strengthen the field.

A second problem is that the quality of evidence to support the existence of morphic fields has to be extremely high. A useful comparison can be made with studies of other phenomena for which the scientific worldview provides no ready explanation. In recent years, there has a been an explosion of scientific studies of what are loosely called psychic abilities--remote viewing, action at a distance, remote healing, and others. The evidence reported by these studies, like that currently available for morphic fields, is based on a statistical analysis of performance. When certain individuals perform in a manner that is better than chance--for example, guessing at the identity of a card selected by someone in another room--and the difference can be shown to be statistically significant, the experimenters conclude they have demonstrated that the phenomenon must be real (Radin 1997).

The problem most scientists have with studies like these (beyond the perennial one of fraud) is that there is an unwritten rule of the profession that says the more radical a theory is--the greater its premises and/or predictions deviate from current scientific paradigms--the more compelling the evidence for this theory must be. To some people, this may seem unfair or arbitrary, for there are many scientific studies that are accepted on the basis of fairly small statistical differences. For example, some drugs are determined to be efficacious on the basis of clinical trials demonstrating that people taking the drug are slightly more likely to show some improvement in their condition than people who don't take the drug. Often such statistical differences are very small, and can be rigorously demonstrated only by testing large numbers of patients.

There is, however, an important rationale for taking such statistical differences seriously. Before drugs even reach this phase where they are to be tested, they have passed through many other studies, all of them pointing in the same direction. The process might begin when it's shown that a candidate drug has a molecular structure very similar to another drug of proven ability. This alone suggests that the drug may be effective, for there is a vast body of literature--backed by well-accepted pharmacological theory--showing that drugs similar in structure often have very similar effects. The drug would then proceed through extensive tests on animals, to determine not only its effectiveness, but possible side effects. Only if the drug had the predicted effect in animals would it then go to clinical trials. Thus by the time these trials begin, there is already a very good reason for believing the drug may be effective. In these circumstances, even small statistical differences can be quite meaningful.

In contrast, the existence of morphic fields is not supported by either well-established theory, nor by appeal to precedent. The existence of these fields can potentially explain many presently unaccounted for phenomena, but this does not constitute evidence for them. It simply provides a justification for obtaining such evidence. And this evidence will have to rest on considerably more than on studies that show an effect occurring slightly more often than by chance.

It may well be, of course, that the nature of morphic fields, as well as the nature of certain pyschic phenomena, is such that their effects are always very slight, and are never detectable except through very slight deviations from chance. We might actually expect this to be so. If morphic fields were formed quickly--if they could have a powerful effect as soon as a new form or pattern of existence emerged--one might well ask why evolution has taken as long as it has. If, for example, the first organisms were associated with a morphic field that had a strong influence on the evolution of more of their kind, why did it take hundreds of millions of years for organisms to evolve? If a new way of thinking in one man brings with it a morphic field that can make it much easier for other people to think that way, why has it taken literally thousands of years for human beings to evolve to their present rational state--one still absent from large portions of the world? And why are Einsteins so rare?

In the following section, when we examine how morphic resonance might interact with known evolutionary processes, we will find some answers to these questions. The point to be made here, though, is that one might well wonder whether it's really reasonable to expect that morphic fields, assuming they do exist, could possibly be strong enough to be detectable in experiments of the kind that are currently being used to test for them--that is, studies in which a new pattern is being created for the first time. Perhaps, as seems to be the case with psychic phenomena, there will never be evidence of them strong enough to satisfy most scientists. If the evidence were very strong, one would expect that certain phenomena quite incompatible with the scientific worldview would be much more noticeable to us than they in fact are. Sheldrake suggests that there are such phenomena, and that people with no scientific background can become experimenters in "revolutionary science" (Sheldrake 1995). But if these phenomena do exist, they are extremely rare and faint, or they would be well-recognized by now.

In the previous section, I have tried to emphasize the serious weaknesses with Sheldrake's notion of morphic fields, weaknesses that so far preclude it's being taken seriously by the scientific establishment. Nevertheless, the idea remains very intriguing. As I have emphasized throughout this book, a growing number of scientists believe that information is the key to understanding evolution. Though we don't understand the concept very well, it seems clear that higher forms of life have more information than lower forms; thus evolution might be defined as a process by which life acquires more information. I have raised questions earlier in this book whether conventional evolutionary processes, or even self-organizing phenomena, can really account for information accumulation. We have also seen that there appears to be an information gap between one level of existence and the next, one that is not accounted for by the information stored in the lower level (in the brain or the genome). Morphic resonance might possibly shed some light on these issues. By extending the concept of fields from subatomic matter to all of existence, it suggests that information is not only fundamental, but pervasive throughout the universe.

Another potentially attractive aspect of Sheldrake's theory, as I noted earlier, is that it has been presented not as an either-or alternative to Darwinism or self-organizing processes, but as an additional factor. Thus it can in principle operate alongside these other processes. Morphic fields can, through their associated forms of existence, undergo random variation. They can be be subject to selection. They can even self-organize. In this way, they would make both transformative and transcendent processes more understandable.

On closer examination, however, the role of morphic fields in evolution appears to be quite limited. To begin with, they would not make a difference in the operation of most Darwinian processes. This is because the latter depend on competition, and the nature of morphic fields, as Sheldrake has described them, is such that they usually don't provide competitive advantage.

To appreciate this point, let's consider a typical Darwinian event: an organism arises with a mutation affecting its body structure. This variant body structure gives the organism an adaptive advantage, so the mutation is more likely to be transmitted to succeeding generations than the original body form. According to Sheldrake, the mutant organism would become associated with a slightly different morphic field from that associated with the rest of the population of this species. This field would not provide the mutant individual with a selective advantage, however, because the original morphic field, being associated with a much larger number of individuals, and presumably having existed for a much greater length of time, should be far stronger.

In other words, the disadvantage in numbers that a new variant always faces when it first emerges would be reflected in a correspondingly weaker morphic field. The field in this respect is like an amplifying mechanism, increasing the strength of both variant and original properties, and therefore not altering the balance between the two. Indeed, the existence of morphic fields might even make the new variant worse off than if no fields existed. For the strength of these fields, according to Sheldrake, is related not only to the number of individuals with a particular feature, but also to the length of time this feature has been in existence. A new variant must compete not only with the present, but with the past.

The effect of morphic fields, therefore, would most likely be to inhibit the emergence of new variants, rather than to enhance them. It would make the original population more stable to the introduction of potential variety. This is a legitimate evolutionary mechanism, one that helps a particular population of individuals become established. But it does not promote variety, and therefore does not increase the probability that new species will emerge.

There is one situation where morphic fields might promote a Darwinian process. This is when a new feature, already well estabished in one population of individuals, becomes transferred to a separate population of the same species, which lacks this feature. Sheldrake discusses the behavior of birds in England that have learned to remove the caps from milk bottles delivered on doorsteps, and drink some of the contents. This learned behavior has apparently spread from these birds to similar ones inhabiting distant geographical regions, where contact with the British birds can be ruled out. Thus Sheldrake suggests the behavior might have been transmitted through morphic fields (Sheldrake 1989).

Behavior such as this, however, is not subject to classic Darwinian evolution, since it's not inherited genetically. The behavior is transmitted by learning, and hence is an example of what is usually called cultural evolution, or what I referred to as social stage evolution in Chapter 8. Conceivably, the same principle might operate on genetically-transmitted traits. One could imagine a population of individuals in which a new mutation is established, in all or most of the population's members. This would be associated with a new and powerful morphic field. Under these conditions, this field might make it more likely that a similar mutation would be established in another population of the same species

Even this scenario, however, is problematical. Exactly how does the existence of the new morphic field in the first population increase the probability of the same variants arising in the second population? Does the field increase the chances of the same mutation occurring in one individual of the second population? Or does it merely increase the adaptive advantage of an individual with this mutation, assuming the latter arose by chance? Here, it seems to me, the vagueness of the morphic resonance concept makes it very difficult to understand how it could actually affect evolution in practice.

In any case, however, even if we accept that a new variant could be transferred from one population to another by morphic fields, this process, again, would not promote the appearance of a new species. As I explained above, both the original emergence of the variant, and its establishment throughout the first population, would have to occur through random mutation and natural selection. Morphic fields would only enable this new species to increase its geographic range. So again, morphic fields, when interacting with Darwinian processes, are much more of a stabilizing force than a creative one.

In summary, though Sheldrake argues that morphic fields could enhance evolution by Darwinian processes, a closer examination of their possible interaction with these processes suggests that their role would be quite limited. Their major impact on evolution, as I suggested earlier, would be on transformative processes, where selection does not always come into play. For example, in the evolution of cells or of organisms, fundamental holons (atoms or cells, respectively) had to associate to form social holons. If these social holons emerged through self-organizing processes, their evolution might have been inevitable; in this case, they would not be competing against the independent fundamental holons. Moreover, since a characteristic feature of social holons, as we have seen, is that they can't reproduce themselves, they would not be competing against each other, either, at least not in the Darwinian sense of reproductive fitness. The primary evolutionary problem posed by such intermediate forms of life would be stability, and morphic fields could enhance this.

So morphic fields, even more than the other evolutionary theories we have considered, leave many of the big questions unanswered--such as how new levels of existence emerged. They might provide a newly-emergent form of life with more time to solve evolutionary problems, but the eventual solution would have to be provided by some other process. If the solution did appear, morphic fields might accelerate its spread throughout a population.

This problem, of course, is at the heart of the belief in a God, an intelligent designer, a first cause. For too long, though, this has been merely a philosophical argument or a dogmatic belief. In Chapter 6, I discussed some of the evidence for a higher state of existence. It remains to be seen whether such a higher state of consciousness might influence evolution. That is the subject of the next chapter.

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