Morphic Resonance: The Nature of Formative Causation

Rupert Sheldrake's Morphic Resonance: The Nature of Formative Causation is a revised and expanded edition of his earlier A New Science of Life. The book sets out the hypothesis of formative causation: that the form and behaviour of organisms are shaped by morphic fields, and that these fields are themselves influenced by the accumulated forms of all previous similar systems through a process Sheldrake calls morphic resonance. In this edition he widens the argument beyond the original statement of the hypothesis, adding material on epigenetic inheritance, on a series of "old-field" experiments that test whether learned patterns become easier for later learners, and on parapsychology as a body of evidence he regards as difficult for a strictly mechanistic biology to accommodate.

The book is a work of hypothesis and argument rather than a report of new laboratory results produced by the author. Its central claims are attributed to Sheldrake throughout, and the experimental material he cites comes from other researchers whose results he interprets within his own framework. The available excerpt covers the opening survey of biology's outstanding problems, the framing of three theories of morphogenesis, the discussion of epigenetic inheritance, the old-field experiments, the McDougall rat-learning comparison, and the parapsychology section, together with Appendix A material on Suitbert Ertel's hiragana work.

The argument from unresolved problems

Sheldrake opens by cataloguing areas of biology that he argues remain unresolved under an exclusively mechanistic approach: morphogenesis, animal behaviour, evolution, the origin of life, the limits of physical explanation, psychology, and parapsychological phenomena. His conclusion is that these problems do not offer much hope of all being solved mechanistically. He treats morphogenesis and animal behaviour as genuinely open questions, regards the problems of evolution and the origin of life as insoluble in themselves and therefore unable to decide between mechanistic and other theories of life, and argues that mechanistic theory runs into serious philosophical difficulties over the limits of physical explanation, leads to seemingly insoluble problems in psychology, and conflicts with apparent evidence for parapsychological phenomena.

This is a rhetorical and philosophical survey rather than an empirical finding. Sheldrake is assembling difficulties and arguing that they collectively weaken the case for mechanism; he is not presenting new measurements of his own.

Three theories of morphogenesis

Sheldrake frames the comparison around three families of theory: mechanistic, vitalist, and organismic. He begins with morphogenesis because he treats it as the clearest test case. The descriptive and experimental study of development, he notes, can proceed in several ways: the external form of a developing organism can be drawn, photographed, or filmed across time; internal structure and microscopic anatomy can be described stage by stage; physical quantities such as weight, volume, and oxygen consumption can be measured; and the chemical composition of the whole system and of its regions can be analysed. Improving techniques allow these descriptions to become progressively more detailed.

The three theories are then compared on their prospects for explaining such development. The mechanistic position holds that biological phenomena can in principle be fully explained by physics and chemistry. The vitalist position holds that life depends on nonphysical causal factors or connecting principles. The organismic position is a third approach that Sheldrake presents as distinct from both. His own hypothesis of formative causation is offered as an organismic-style alternative, in which morphic fields carry the formative influence of past similar systems.

Epigenetic inheritance and the rehabilitation of acquired-character evidence

A substantial part of the book's argument concerns inheritance. Sheldrake points to a Swedish study of men born between 1890 and 1920, in which nutrition during childhood was reported to affect the incidence of diabetes and heart disease in their grandchildren. He also notes that many common diseases inherited within families may be passed on epigenetically, and cites the launch of the Human Epigenome Project in 2003 as evidence that this is a rapidly growing field.

He explains the prefix epi as meaning "over and above," and describes three kinds of epigenetic inheritance. The first involves changes in the configuration of chromatin, the DNA–protein complex that makes up chromosomes; such changes can pass from a cell to its daughter cells, and when transmitted through eggs or sperm they become inherited, so that gene activity is modified heritably without mutation. The second, sometimes called genomic imprinting, involves methylation of DNA molecules: there is a heritable chemical change in the DNA itself, but the underlying genes remain the same. The third depends on alterations in the cytoplasm, inherited through egg cells and therefore only from mothers. In light of epigenetics, Sheldrake argues, evidence for the inheritance of acquired characteristics that was previously rejected or ignored has been rehabilitated.

His own hypothesis, he says, allows for inheritance of acquired characteristics through morphic resonance without any need for genetic changes or even for epigenetic inheritance. He presents morphic resonance as complementary to, rather than contradictory of, both genetic and epigenetic inheritance, and as distinguishable from them by experiment. He also introduces the idea of canalization: when pathways of morphogenesis are altered by environmental or genetic factors, similar processes in subsequent similar organisms will tend to be canalized and stabilized by morphic resonance, with the strength of the influence depending on the specificity of the resonance and on how many previous similar organisms had their morphogenesis altered.

The epigenetic findings Sheldrake cites are established science; the morphic-resonance interpretation placed on them is his own hypothesis and is not established by the evidence he presents.

Old-field experiments

The book's experimental core concerns "old-field" tests: attempts to detect whether a pattern that has already been learned by many people becomes easier for later learners to acquire. Sheldrake reports several such efforts and is candid about their mixed results.

Suitbert Ertel's hiragana experiment asked participants to work with Japanese characters, some genuine and some artificial. In retrospect Ertel concluded that his preliminary tests had been mis-designed: participants had been told there were twenty genuine and twenty artificial symbols and asked to mark the genuine ones, when they should instead have been asked to rate the symbols for simplicity, pleasantness, and strangeness, since those intrinsic features had already been shown to be relevant. Sheldrake uses this admission to illustrate how hard it is to obtain clear-cut results in old-field work. Appendix A presents a figure, Figure A.7, showing the results of Ertel's experiment on recognition of hiragana characters: the vertical axis gives the number of words recognized across six successive trials, and the four sets of data points correspond to real and false characters, right way up and upside down. Sheldrake notes that the "intrinsic factor" may not be an alternative to morphic resonance but may itself depend on the characters' generic resemblance to right-way-up hiragana, which was built in from the start.

Ertel's second experiment ran through the magazine PM. It was designed as entertainment for readers and used artificial German words embedded in standard phrases or proverbs, so that the meaning of each invented word had to be guessed from context — for example, an invented word standing in for alt. Ten new words had to be learned across a hundred phrases, and the count of new meanings produced a ten-digit telephone number that readers called; a correct number earned confirmation from an answering machine, and a correct postcard entry entered a raffle for fifty copies of Sheldrake's book. Altogether 1,017 PM readers took part. The boosting effect was then tested in Dresden, where participants pressed a button marking a word "artificial" or "real" as quickly as possible after it appeared on a computer screen; the boosted artificial words were mixed with twenty non-boosted artificial words, and students were tested before and after the PM boosting. There was no difference in their success with the boosted and control words. Sheldrake acknowledges a methodological problem: the PM readers encountered the words informally at home, while the Dresden students were tested for reaction speed on laboratory computers, and these dissimilarities could have weakened any resonance effect.

A third test was carried out at the University of Innsbruck by Robert Schorn, Gottfried Tappeiner, and Janette Walde. Their stimuli were political, religious, and economic symbols — flags, emblems, and trademarks — that were once well known but have since fallen into oblivion, or that are familiar to many people in foreign countries, such as the Chinese Coca-Cola symbol, Indian trademarks, and Far Eastern religious symbols. For each symbol a designer created a control with a similar general pattern and similar complexity. To check comparability the experimenters ran seven pretests with more than two hundred participants, who indicated which symbol in each pair seemed less credible or real. The excerpt does not describe the outcome of the main experiment, so no result can be reported here.

Sheldrake's summary is that small-scale new-field tests have not given consistent, repeatable results. He suggests they may simply not be sensitive enough, since the resonance may be too weak to detect with only a few hundred or a few thousand boosters. He proposes that morphic resonance could be investigated on a much larger scale by studying changes in human performance over time, asking whether new skills show a tendency to improve as more people acquire them.

The McDougall rat-learning comparison

The book also revisits the older Lamarckian rat-learning experiments. William McDougall estimated the average number of errors in his first generation at more than 165. In F. A. E. Crew's repetition the figure was 24, and in W. E. Agar's fourth and final report it was 72. Sheldrake notes that if Agar's group had used rats of identical parentage and followed Crew's procedures, their initial score might have been expected to be even lower than Crew's; because of different parentage and different testing procedures, however, the results are not fully comparable. He nevertheless calls the greater facility of learning in the later experiments suggestive.

He also reports a correlation between vigour, measured as fertility, and learning rates in the "trained" line but not in the "untrained" line. Considering only the first forty generations, the correlation coefficients were 0.40 in the trained line and 0.42 in the untrained. Sheldrake argues that while this correlation may help account for fluctuations in the results, it cannot plausibly explain the overall trend: by standard statistical theory the proportion of variation explained by a correlated variable is the square of the correlation coefficient, so 0.4² = 0.16, meaning variations in vigour account for only about 16 percent of the changes in learning rate.

Parapsychology

Sheldrake's final area of difficulty for mechanistic theory is parapsychology. He notes that traditional societies tell stories of people with seemingly miraculous powers, that such powers are acknowledged by religions, and that psychic abilities are cultivated in shamanism, sorcery, tantric yoga, and spiritualism. In modern Western society there are persistent reports of telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, memories of past lives, hauntings, poltergeists, and psychokinesis. Surveys, he says, show that the most common kind of telepathy occurs in connection with technology — telephone telepathy, in which someone thinks of a person for no apparent reason and that person calls soon afterwards.

He concedes that investigators have discovered cases of fraud and have found normal explanations for some apparently paranormal events, but argues that a large body of evidence remains that seems to defy explanation by any known physical principles. He cites experiments testing extrasensory perception that have yielded positive results with odds against chance coincidence of thousands, millions, or even billions to one. From the mechanistic point of view, he argues, such phenomena ought not to occur if they cannot be explained by known physics and chemistry. If they do occur, he sees two possible approaches: either they depend on nonphysical causal factors or connecting principles, or they depend on laws of physics as yet unknown or on extensions of quantum theory, for instance by postulating that mental states play a role in determining the outcomes of probabilistic physical processes. He presents this as an open question to be settled by examining the evidence, not as a settled conclusion.

Limitations and unresolved questions

Sheldrake's own text acknowledges several limits on the evidence. The old-field experiments have not produced consistent, repeatable results, and he attributes this to insufficient sensitivity rather than treating it as falsification — a tension between the hypothesis and the data. Ertel's hiragana work required reinterpretation after the fact, and the PM experiment's boosted and control conditions differed so much between the magazine readers and the Dresden students that any resonance effect could have been weakened. The rat-learning figures are not fully comparable across McDougall, Crew, and Agar because of differing parentage and procedures, and the vigour correlation explains only a modest share of the variation. The parapsychological evidence is contested, and Sheldrake himself notes that fraud and normal explanations account for some cases.

The excerpt is partial. It covers the opening survey, the framing of the three theories, the epigenetics discussion, the old-field experiments, the rat-learning comparison, and the parapsychology section, but the full book contains further chapters and appendices not represented here. The Innsbruck experiment's main results are not described in the available text, and their absence from this article reflects the excerpt boundary rather than a claim about the experiment's outcome.

Related work

This edition extends the material in the earlier A New Science of Life, which is treated separately in this wiki. It connects to the wiki's existing pages on morphic-resonance-experimental-tests, habits-of-nature, and laws-of-nature-critique, and to the broader set of Sheldrake sources covering his experimental programme, his treatment of animal behaviour, and his arguments about the limits of mechanistic science.

Keep reading

• The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature — Develops a related question.
• A New Science of Life — Develops a related question.
• The Sense of Being Stared At: And Other Unexplained Powers of the Human Mind — Develops a related question.