Rupert Sheldrake keeps coming up. And despite his controversial 'anti christ of science
' image in popular culture after watching a few of his
talks to see his points I can't help warming to him, and can't help thinking the initial reaction to his theory was too reactionary for the reasons
To give some background, Sheldrake was a world authority on auxin in plants and plant hormones in the 1970s and 80s with numerous publications in
nature and other journals. Then he shocked the scientific community by publishing a new theory of life based on field theory. He called the field a
morphogenetic field, a self organizing field that can be used at all levels of complexity to explain mechanical biology. He claims that since matter
is less fundamental than fields and energy (my cursory year studying physics at uni is in agreement with this proclamation), and materialism is based
on the philosophy that the most fundamental thing is matter, materialism is no longer a philosophy with scientific support.
To try to explain the morphology and evolution of complex life Sheldrake is essentially expanding field theory used every day in physics into biology
and life sciences. He defines morphogenesis as the coming into being of form, the way that animals plants and even crystals come into being via some
formative process. He posits that molecular biology, DNA genes and chemicals alone can not explain morphogenesis, and the morphogenetic field provides
a kind of blueprint for the chemicals and biological material to follow.
The reason why his theory has proven popular with some biologists seems to be the fact that fields in general are inherently holistic, that meaning
you can not take a slice out of the Earths gravitational field, or if you chop the north pole off a magnet you dont end up with an isolated north pole
you end up with end up with two magnets. The Earths magnetic field is shown below. Although you can not see the field with any methodology you can
study the effect it has on physical things.
Magnets behavie totally different to how machines work; machines are made of parts put together that work together without an overall organizing field
that makes it a whole, if you cut a machine up into small pieces all you get is a broken computer. If you cut a magnet up you just get lots of little
Sheldrake's observation after studying biology for years was that life is much more like field phenomena than machines, if you cut an embryo
containing egg in half you don't get a broken embryo you still have a fully functional embryo that develops in one half, so you end up with a
complete yet smaller embryo.
This is a dragonfly egg that has been cut in two:
This half sized embryo now has a complete morphogenetic field even though it is half the size; no machine would do that. The same goes for plants, you
can cut a plant up into lots of little bits and each cutting could become a new plant, you can make thousands of cuttings from a willow tree. You can
cut up a flatworm into three bits at the head and tail and it generates a new head and tail from the middle part, if you cut it length ways it
regenerates a new half. Each of these new frangments has the field of the complete worm associated with it which leads to this regenerative
This is an Earth worm regeneration process:
Humans have far less regenerative powers than say newts or other animals, but far from negligible else we would not heal after injury. If you chop the
arm off a newt it will regenerate until it completely grows back, and this can be understood in term of the field associated with the limb even though
the limb is no longer materially there. This could be an explanation to what has become known as phantom limb phenomenon, what people feel is the
fields habit of regeneration where there is no longer any limb. Newts can even regenerate the entire lens of an eye
). In a laboratory the lens was surgically removed, producing a form of damage that would lever usually
happen in nature, and what happens is the edge of the iris forms a new lens and regenerates a perfectly functional eye, whereas in the embryonic
formation of the eye the lens does not form the edge of the iris but from a flap of skin on the outside. So it has formed a completely new lens in a
completely new way using a different tissue than it would normally arise from, showing that there appears to be a blueprint for the complete eye that
allows the regenerative process to occur.
Newt lens regeneration process:
Newt limb regeneration:
The part of the theory that some find controversial is the 'attractor' nature of the morphogenetic fields, that there is a end state that attracts
matter until the organ has fully embryonicly developed or an attractor that uses the physiological ability of the organism to regenerate to try to
grow back a limb from the field blueprint.
A main property of a morphogenetic field is that they are hierarchically organized.
Such as with atoms in molecules and molecules in crystals, the same goes for cells, cells in tissues, tissues in organs, organs in organisms,
organisms in societies; everywhere you look in nature there are levels of organization, the parts of one are wholes at another level. Appreciating the
totality and wholeness of nature is what a holistic perspective is, whereas a reductionist perspective tries to reduce everything to the smallest
Attempting to counter reductionism with a holistic perspective Sheldrake assigns a nested heirchy to the morphogenetic field so the field of an
organelle cell is inside the field of the cell, the field of the cell is inside the field of the tissue, the field of the tissue is inside the field
of the organ; and these fields work on the lower level fields of the system, giving them morphology and pattern. Sheldrake also states that the
morphogenetic field is only one kind of organizing field, the nervous system is highly indeterminate in its behavior and is moderated by another set
of fields, behavioral fields. Mental activity is moderated by mental fields. Social groups like flocks of birds or termites are moderated by social
fields. All these fields Sheldrake refers to as morphic fields, and morphic fields are the general category of which morphogenetic fields are only one
species, the kind of field for the development of form of life as we know it on Earth.
Sheldrake claims that the mathematics of the field is chaos theory and other branches of modern dynamics, including some intrinsic field probability
properties, as everything we associate with life in science is pretty much indeterminate over a long time frame. Just like the weather is a chaotic
system so does not obey definite laws life is more probabilistic than deterministic, if you look at all the different leaves on a specific tree they
all gave the same mechanical building blocks they all have the same genes and the same morphogenetic fields yet every leaf is different.