The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature

Rupert Sheldrake's The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature (Park Street Press; the edition drawn on here carries copyright dates of 1988, 1989, 1995 and 2012) is the book in which the author's central proposal is pushed furthest: not only the shapes and behaviours of living things, but the regularities we call the laws of nature, are recast as habits — patterns sustained by repetition and inherited through a non-energetic resonance rather than fixed by decree. This guide describes the argument as it appears in the material available, follows the specific examples and studies it uses, and marks where the reasoning is interpretive rather than evidential. It treats every claim as the author's claim, not as an established result.

The thesis

Sheldrake proposes that self-organising systems inherit form from past similar systems by morphic resonance, and that this inheritance is what makes nature appear law-like. On this account the "laws of nature" are not eternal edicts imposed on a mechanical universe but accumulated habits, reinforced each time a pattern is repeated and therefore capable of evolving. The book presents this as a "new evolutionary synthesis" in which the regularities of physics and chemistry, no less than those of biology, have a history. The vocabulary the wiki already tracks — Formative Causation, morphic-fields, habits-of-nature — belongs to this same family of ideas, and this book is one of its fullest statements.

How the case is assembled

The argument proceeds in five broad movements.

1. Gaps in the mechanistic account

The book opens by cataloguing problems that a mechanistic framework is said not to have solved. The most concrete is the missing heritability problem. Height is highly heritable: simply measuring parents and children explains roughly 80–90% of the variation in children's height. Yet genome studies of about 30,000 people identified some fifty genes associated with being tall or short, and those genes together accounted for only about 5% of the inheritance of height. Sheldrake reports the same pattern in the genetics of heritable diseases and cites Steve Jones of University College London (2009), who said that hubris had been replaced with concern and suggested that continuing the present approach would be throwing good money after bad. To this he adds the unresolved "hard problem" of consciousness, the failure of most predictions about artificial intelligence, and the incompleteness of superstring and M theory — noting Stephen Hawking's remark in The Grand Design (2010) that no one seems to know what the "M" stands for, and that untestability is a vice rather than a virtue in science.

This is a rhetorical setup, not a proof. The gaps are real and widely discussed, but a gap in one framework is not by itself evidence for morphic resonance; the section establishes motive, not mechanism.

2. Darwin inside a pre-evolutionary frame

Sheldrake argues that Darwin's theory was formulated within a mechanistic universe of what he calls physical eternities, and that its imagery mirrored commerce and industry: innovation, competition, the elimination of the inefficient, the inheritance of wealth. He notes that the expansion of geological time was a precondition for gradualism, and that Darwin himself treated "natural selection" as a metaphor. Richard Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker (1986) appears as the modern restatement of the Darwinian reply to Paley. The purpose of this historical section is to suggest that assumptions now treated as neutral were once contingent choices — a claim about intellectual history rather than about nature.

3. Morphogenesis and regeneration

The strongest biological material concerns regeneration. Broken bones knit, severed nerves regrow, lost liver tissue is replaced, and a flatworm of the genus Planaria can be cut into pieces with each piece growing into a complete worm. Sheldrake contrasts this with machines: cut a computer and you get pieces of a broken computer, not new computers. He then points to physical systems with holistic properties — a cut magnet yields whole magnets, and a fragment of a hologram can reconstruct the whole image — and describes these as field phenomena, regions of influence rather than material objects. The historical thread runs through August Weismann's germ-plasm theory and Hans Driesch's entelechy, including Driesch's proposal that entelechy acts by affecting the timing of physicochemical processes. Sheldrake observes that this proposal looked impossible under the physics of Driesch's day but became less so after Heisenberg's uncertainty principle (1927) established microscopic indeterminism.

This section is historical and interpretive. It shows that regeneration is genuinely puzzling for simple mechanical accounts; it does not show that morphic resonance explains it.

4. Experimental tests in human learning

This is the empirical core. Sheldrake distinguishes old-field tests, which look for an influence from the many people in the past who have already learned a skill, from new-field tests, in which a genuinely new skill is acquired during the experiment itself — for example novel puzzles or new video games, whose average learning rate in one place is monitored while thousands of people elsewhere are learning the same thing. The old-field studies reported are:

• Japanese rhymes. After a 1982 New Scientist competition won by Richard Gentle, who proposed Turkish nursery rhymes, Sheldrake used Japanese rhymes supplied by the poet Shuntaro Tanikawa: one genuine nursery rhyme known to generations of Japanese children, one newly composed to resemble it in structure and meaningful, and one meaningless. In experiments with groups in Britain and America who chanted each rhyme a fixed number of times without knowing which was which, 62% found the genuine rhyme easiest to recall half an hour later, against a chance expectation of about 33%. In a written version of the experiment, 52% found the genuine rhyme easiest to learn. Chanting, closer to how Japanese children learn the rhyme, worked better than reading, and the two newly composed rhymes did not differ consistently from each other.
• Baumeier's word tests (Leipzig). Subjects memorised real and false Japanese words written phonetically in Roman characters without knowing which were which, and remembered the real words significantly better. In a second study they guessed which of two German words matched the meaning of real Japanese, Indonesian, Swahili and Sanskrit words; across 11,200 guesses, 54% were correct against a 50% chance baseline.
• Schorn, Tappeiner and Walde (Innsbruck). Real Russian words in Cyrillic script were paired with meaningless anagrams; participants asked which had more "spirit" chose the real words significantly more often. Some tests ran over the Internet.
• Symbols. The same researchers tested political, religious and economic symbols — including the Chinese Coca-Cola sign, Indian trademarks and Far Eastern religious symbols — against designer-made control symbols of similar pattern and complexity. Seven pretests with more than two hundred participants were used to discard intrinsically unconvincing fakes; in the main experiment participants again chose real symbols significantly more often.
• Chinese characters (Robbins and Roe, Northampton). Participants saw five real and five false characters in random order, three seconds each, then circled the ten they had seen from a sheet of twenty. Real characters were recognised significantly better, and with the decoys participants had significantly more false memories of real than false characters.
• Morse code. Samuel Morse's code, learned by many people since the mid-nineteenth century, is proposed as a candidate old-field test. Arden Mahlberg, an American psychologist who took third prize in the Tarrytown competition, built a new code by reassigning dots and dashes to different letters and compared subjects' learning of the new code with their learning of the real one, using written letters and excluding S and O because of familiarity with S.O.S.

The book also reports crossword experiments, and here the results are explicitly inconsistent. Monica England's test found a significant improvement on an easy Evening Standard puzzle after publication, with no change on a control; the quick crossword showed no significant difference. Sheldrake's 1990 replication, run far from London, found the reverse: a slight, non-significant improvement on the easy crossword and a statistically significant increase on the quick one. He reports this honestly and does not resolve it.

5. Evolution, habit and saltation

The final movement turns to habit in evolution. Lamarck's giraffe is discussed at length, and Sheldrake notes that Darwin agreed with Lamarck on the hereditary effects of habit: domestic fowl, ducks and geese have almost lost the power of flight, and ostriches may have lost flight through disuse while gaining stronger legs. Darwin is reported calling habit "omnipotent" in its hereditary effects, and the anthropologist Francis Huxley is quoted suggesting Darwin might well have called his book The Origin of Habits rather than The Origin of Species. Sheldrake then argues that strict gradualism conflicts with the fossil record and with large-effect mutations such as the ancon sheep and homeotic mutations, and that evolution involves both sudden jumps and gradual change.

Where the argument is weakest

Three limitations are visible in the material itself.

The intrinsic-factors confound. Sheldrake concedes that all old-field tests face the difficulty of controlling for intrinsic factors that might make old symbols, words or rhymes more memorable or attractive than newly invented ones. His reply — that intrinsic factors may themselves depend on morphic resonance — risks making the hypothesis unfalsifiable, since any result can be absorbed into the theory. The text flags this explicitly.

Inconsistent crossword results. The two crossword experiments produced opposite patterns. Sheldrake reports this rather than hiding it, but the inconsistency is not resolved.

Interpretive versus experimental material. The morphogenesis and evolution sections are historical and interpretive. They show that mechanical accounts face genuine puzzles; they do not test morphic resonance. Only the human-learning studies are experimental, and they carry the confound above.

Alternative readings

A reader who does not accept morphic resonance can account for most of the reported learning effects without it. Nursery rhymes plausibly survive because they are easy to remember, so a genuine rhyme may simply be better constructed than a newly composed imitation — a point Sheldrake himself raises. Real words and real symbols may differ from anagrams and designer fakes in subtle ways that pretesting cannot fully neutralise. The regeneration and evolution material can be read as evidence that current biology is incomplete rather than as evidence for a specific non-energetic inheritance mechanism. The book's own framing invites this reading by presenting the mechanistic gaps first and the resonance hypothesis as the explanation.

How to read this alongside the rest of the corpus

The Presence of the Past is a different book from Morphic Resonance: The Nature of Formative Causation (2009). The two overlap in thesis but are distinct publications, and the notes of The Presence of the Past cite the 2009 book directly; they should not be conflated. This guide joins the existing reading-guide series on Sheldrake's corpus, including The Sense of Being Stared At: And Other Unexplained Powers of the Human Mind, Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic Consciousness, The Physics of Angels: Exploring the Realm Where Science and Spirit Meet, The Evolutionary Mind: Conversations on Science, Imagination and Spirit, Science and Spiritual Practices: Transformative Experiences and Their Effects on Our Bodies Brains and Health and Morphic Resonance: The Nature of Formative Causation. For the test taxonomy and the specific studies, see morphic-resonance-experimental-tests. For the broader critique of fixed laws, see laws-of-nature-critique.

Coverage note

The available material consists of selected segments of the book, with many passages marked as intervening text not supplied. This guide describes the arguments and examples actually present and does not invent chapter summaries for omitted passages. The absence of a topic here is not evidence that the book omits it.

Keep reading

• Morphic Resonance: The Nature of Formative Causation — Develops a related question.
• A New Science of Life — Develops a related question.
• Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic Consciousness — Develops a related question.