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Word Gems
exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity
Dr. Rupert Sheldrake's
Theory of Morphogenesis:
Historical Roots of Current Biology
return to "Evolution Controversy" contents page
Editor's note: The following, published in Beshara Magazine, is an extract from a seminar given by Dr. Rupert Sheldrake at Sherborne School, England (located beside Sherborne Abbey; the school has been in continuous operation on the same site for over 1,300 years.)
“Morphogenesis” means “the coming into being of form.” “Morphe” means “form,” “genesis” means “coming into being.” Morphogenesis is the way animals and plants, all living organisms, or even crystals, have forms that come into being.
Editor’s note: To restate: “Morphogenesis” is a term for the theory, the general area of enquiry, concerning how plants and animals, all living organisms, and even crystals, acquire their shapes.
The Current State in Biology
Biology got underway in a big way in the 19th
century experimental biology really
coming into its own by the end of the century
- and it was formulated within the mech-
anistic framework. This, in a nutshell, says
that living organisms consist of dead matter,
completely blind, governed entirely by
eternal laws (the laws of physics and
chemistry) and that's that: there's nothing
more to it - living things are essentially
inanimate and they can be understood
entirely in terms of the laws of the sciences
of the inanimate.
This is still the
predominant view in biology. While the
mechanistic philosophy has been
transcended over the past 50 years or so
within physics, within biology it is still taken
for granted as the very obvious, common
sense basis of the whole science. Most
biologists are proud to tell you that they are
mechanistic biologists; mechanistic has
become a pejorative word in many people's
vocabularies nowadays, but in biology it's a
good word - it shows that you are the right
kind of chap. (1)
(1) Not the wrong kinds of chaps who are usually called vitalists. Vitalism, as its name suggests, is the doctrine that living things are alive.
However, there are problems within this
mechanistic biology in understanding living
things, about which we will talk in a
moment. But before that, I would just like to
say that what has changed the context more
than anything is the idea that th e universe is evolving.
The idea of evolution of society, of ideas,
has been a commonplace for 2300 years
or even longer - one could say that there is an
evolutionary view of history inherent in the
whole Judaic-Christian-Islamic tradition.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, it became
widely recognised that there had been a real
change or advance in human understanding
- that Newtonian physics, for example, went
far beyond anything the Greeks had known -
and by the 18th century, most people thought
that human understanding, at least in the
sciences and arts, was progressive.
By the end of the 18th century this was commonly
understood in terms of social evolution as
well and this was the driving impetus behind
the American rebellion, the founding of the
United States, the French revolution and
indeed, all the great revolutionary move-
ments to the present day. At the end of the 18th
century came the idea of biological evolut-
ionary change and by 1859 with Darwin's
Theory of Evolution it became rather commonplace
and was in fact accepted very quickly.
But the context of evolutionary
discussions was physics, and the cos-
mology which prevailed until very recently
was, essentially, that the universe was
eternal , static, and in fact even worse than
static - it was slowly running down to a
thermodynamic heat death.
The only way of explaining how the evolutionary process
was possible was to regard it as local aberr-
ation, a kind of statistical fluctuation which
must be averaged out by things going the
other way elsewhere in the universe - hence
basically the product of blind chance. And so
we see that the Darwinian and neo-
Darwinian evolutionary theories that seek to
explain evolution in terms of chance are really trying to fit an evolutionary vision into a universe which is static or devolutionary.
But since 1966 physics itself has moved onto
the evolutionary paradigm. It is important to
remember th at this is very new; we tend to
think of evolution as a very old idea and
forget that physics was a bastion which stood
out against it until 1966, when, for reasons
which I have not got time to go into now,
evidence persuaded most physicists that the
universe had originated in a primeval
explosion and what's called the Big Bang
Theory became generally accepted. Now we
have an evolving physics and this really
changes the way that we think.
The evolutionary vision of things - of life, human societies, etc, - no longer needs to be seen as a local aberration but takes place within the context of a cosmology in which every thing is evolving.
But all existing thought in biology, the basic
concepts and the standard positions of
Darwinism and neo-Darwinism, were all
worked out long before 1966; they are, as we
have said, rooted in a 19th century version of
mechanistic theory. The reason that it
continues within the profession, as a kind of
living fossil of an older way of thought, is
that it has been very successful.
It has concentrated attention on the chemical and
physical details of life, and by exploring
those it has been possible to work out the
chemistry of th e genetic material, to
understand how hormones work and a great
many things about physiology; advances
have been made in medicine, agriculture,
chemical fertilisers, insecticide sprays, etc.
which have had a huge economic impact.
Now it seems to be yielding even more
promises of profit in the bio-technology
industry, genetic engineering and so on. So
most biologists are confident about this
approach - it works, it makes money, and
they are impatient with the minority within
biology who say, as a minority has always
said, that this may be all very well but it
doesn't go very far in explaining the nature of life.
Editor's note: See Prof. Goldman's lecture addressing the fallacy of "it works so it must be true" in modern science. Newtonianism, deemed to be the final word, "worked" but was later seen to be but a minor subset of physics.
There has always been, within biology, an
holistic tradition that has tried to
understand the nature of living things in a
different way. The holistic tradition histor-
ically grows out of the vitalist tradition, and
the vitalist tradition has grown from the
Aristotelian and Scholastic traditions.
The basic idea here is that living organisms - or
indeed, nature - are self-organising; i.e. they
have their own purposes, their own goals,
their own ability to organise themselves.
For Aristotle and the scholastics of the Middle
Ages, this organising principle was called
the Psyche or Soul. Their concept of Soul was
rather different from the vague and confused
ideas that are common today, which confine
it to human beings. The Psyche or Soul was
present in all living things - animals,
plants and indeed, the whole earth - and was
also, as Aristotle (and also Plato) put it, the
form of the body. The Soul was not in the
body, the body was in the Soul; it was that
which shaped and formed the body and in
animals, it was that which organised their behaviour. (2)
(2) The English word animal derives from anima, meaning soul
In human beings, in addition to the
vegetative soul (which organised the develop
ment of the embryo and maintained th e form
of the body) and the animal soul (which was
responsible for nutrition, respiration, and all
animal functions), there was a rational soul
with which was associated the higher funct-
ions and which was open to the spirit.
Thus, before the work of the mechanists
and Descartes in the 17th century, matter
was conceived of, not as dead and inert, but as
potentiality, as having the potential for
taking up form. There was a hierarchy of
matter, organised by the Soul, and above the
Soul was the realm of Spirit and the Divine
Ideas and Platonic forms.
Descartes eliminated the middle level [soul], leaving dead inert
matter on the one hand, and eternal, trans-
cendent laws [Platonic forms], on the other, with nothing in
between, and this is still the basis of mech-
anistic biology. The attempt was, and is, to
explain everything in terms of the properties
of atoms and molecules [micro-units of matter] - hence the emphasis on molecular biology on the one hand and the
laws of physics [eternal Platonic forms] on the other.
The only problem with this is that it doesn't work and it
has not actually led to an understanding of
even the most elementary things about life.
This is where we come to the problem of form,
and the hypotheses which I have been developing.
The Problem of Form - Traditional Approaches
Form is one of the most central and important
problems of biology because it is obvious that
all things have forms. We classify animals
and plants on the basis of their shape and
form - if you look up a plant in a flora you
will see a picture of it, a description of the
shapes of the leaves, fruit and flowers and the
ultimate reference is not a mathematical equation but a herbarium specimen of an actual plant pressed on a sheet of paper at
Kew (Kew is a district in the London, the location of the Royal Botanic Gardens).
Similarly with animals; even though
we may also take account of other things like
behaviour and, more recently, chemistry, we
basically classify them morphologically. So
to ask "How do organisms take up their
form?" is to ask about their most charact-
eristic feature, and brings us to one of the
most central problems of th e whole science of
life . Where does the form - of this fern for
instance - arise from? What is its source?
The Platonic tradition (at least in its most
popular form which has been accepted
within science) would suggest that there is
an archetypal fern - an eternal fern form -
which is reflected in the matter of this
particular fern. This is the approach which
many biologists have taken and at the beg
inning of the 19th century it was probably the
most orth odox .
People tried to study the
archetypes of organisms. Richard Owen, the
British biologist, for example, wrote a book
on the archetypes of vertebrates in which he
showed that the same pattern of the five
fingered limb could be seen in cows, people,
whales, fish , birds, etc. and concluded that
these were all variations of a fundamental
archetypal theme.
But he did not think of it
as an evolutionary process. He thought of it
in a much more Platonic sense, ie. that the
mind of God had basic themes on which He,
as it were, rang the changes and these were
then reflected in the different forms of living
things.
In the Platonic view, the affinities
between different kinds of animals and
plants were thus understood in terms of
affinities of form, not, as Darwin said, in
terms of historical affinities arising from
descent from common ancestors.
The problem of the Platonic view, inter-
esting and satisfying though it is in
many ways, is that it does not immediately
lend itself to an evolutionary interpretation
of nature and has therefore, traditionally,
tended to be associated with a static or cycl-
ical view of the universe. Thi s was one of
Darwin's strongest points; if there is a fixed
archetype, how can species change? How can
we develop new breeds of animal - great
danes, dachsunds, pekinese, greyhounds
and spaniels - if there is a fixed dog
archetype? An archetype, if it exists, must be
flexible and capable of developing in
different ways, since these are the facts we
see before us. And so the Platonic view has
gone out of fashion in biology since the time
of Darwin and although there are still
defenders of it, it is now very much a
minority view.
The mechanistic view from the 17th
century onwards was to try to locate
all form in matter. They proposed that in the
fertilised egg there was a miniaturised
version of the adult organisms - as an actual
material structure - and that development
involved an unrolling or inflation of this.
This is called the Pre-Formationist Theory.
Debates in the 17th century, right through
until the 19th century, amongst pre-
formationists largely took place on sex
lines; the majority opinion was that the
ready-made organism was in the sperm, and
the egg merely nourished it; the minority
was that the organism was in the egg and that
the sperm merely triggered off development.
This entire debate was superseded and made
irrelevant when close observations of embr-
yos showed that the organism underwent
genuine development which was more than
unfolding or inflation. Whole sheets of
tissue folded in, for in stance, to form new
structures such as the gut and the nerve cord,
producing complexity which was not present
to start with. The technical term for this is
epigenesis. (3)
(3) The idea of the unfolding of pre-existing structure was called evolution. Thus the original meaning of the word was 'unfolding of pre-existing germ structure'
Nevertheless, Pre-Formationism has
always been the view most attractive to
the mechanists, whose tendency is to find a
pre-existing material structure wherever
possible, and we have it back again now, in a
modified form, in the notion of the genetic
programme, which says that its all there in
the structure of the egg or, in this case, the
DNA. In our democratic age, it is, of course,
generally believed that the DNA is
contributed equally by the male and the female.
The Aristotelian view is that there is an
organising principle, the Soul or the Psyche,
which is neither inside the egg, nor an
eternal transcendent archetype, but which is
an invisible organising principle as sociated
with the organism and this is what gives it form; it contains the form, as it were, in an invisible, non-material manner.
A New Approach
To approach the problem of form in a slightly
different way, think of an architectural
analogy, such as a house. The house has a
form, a shape, a structure and it is made out
of materials. The form, however, is not
determined by the materials; it depends on
them but with the same building materials
you could build houses of different shapes.
There is, of course, a certain limit - you
could not build a sky-scraper out the
materials for a suburban house - but you
could build suburban houses of different
shapes and forms. If you demolish the house,
and analyse the materials out of which it is
made, you can produce a complete chemical
analysis in the laboratory, with very nice
computer print-outs and everything accurate
and true. If you demolish another house
made from the same building materials but
of a different form, it will have exactly the
same chemical analysis. The chemical
analysis tells you nothing about the form
because the form disappears as you grind it
up to analyse it.
Now exactly the same is true in realm of
biological organisms. You can analyze
any plant in the garden by grinding it up
and analysing its chemicals and proteins,
and you can produce a true analysis of its
constituents, including its DNA and genetic
materi al, but this does not tell you why the
plant has the form it does. To bring it closer
to ourselves, consider your arms and legs.
These have exactly the same chemical
constituents and if ground up and analysed
are chemically i dentical. The bones, the
muscles, the nerves, the skin, the cells - all
these are th e same in the arms and the legs ,
yet they have different forms. Moreover, the
DNA is the same. In fact, the DNA is exactly
the same in every single cell of your body,
including the eyes and the ears and the
kidney an d the brain. If we say that develop
ment of form is all there, programmed, in the
DNA, we then have the problem of explaining
how, with identical DNA in every cell of the
body, they develop differently. Its obvious
that DNA alone cannot explain this and all
biologists will admit this . What they will say
is that the DNA is influenced by "complex
spatia-temporaL-chemical patterns of interaction not yet fully understood". In other words, we don't know; and that's the present state of play and it's been the state of play all along.
We really have no better idea now than people did 100 years ago.
In the case of human constructions like
buildings, we know that the form arises as
a kind of idea from outside the building and
the mechanistic theory is based on just this
analogy; ie. the analogy of the machine. It
says that just as the designs and purposes of
machines lie outside the machine, in the human
mind, so the entire universe has designs
and patterns which are in th e mind of God
and the whole thing is imposed from without,
by God, on to matter. The mechanistic theory
does not exactly deny purposes an d designs, it
simply says that they are outside nature in the
mind of God or, in the modern form, in the
laws of nature (although the laws of nature
are now supposed to be purposeless).
But the problem in applying this view to the
biological realm is that, in living things, the
designs and purposes do, in some sense, seem
to be internal. This is what leads us to the
idea of a designing mind being associated
with the organism - not outside but somehow
in it - what Aristotle calls the Psyche or Soul.
This does not have to imply a fully conscious
mind, and one of the difficulties that we have
now, in understanding these things, is that
we hardly have the language to deal with them any more.
A new way of approaching the problem
was put forward in the 1920's, when it
was proposed that the form of the living
organism was organised by invisible,
organi sing fields. Now fields in modern
science play much the same role that Souls
did in yesteryear, but they are a better defined concept.
Fields are invisible, they are organ-
ising and most of them are teleological (or
purposive): even gravitational and electro-
magnetic field have goals and purposes and
lead to attractions and tendencies and
strivings, as it were. It was proposed that in or
around a developing embryo there is an
organising field called the morphogenetic
field (from morphe meaning form and
genesis meaning coming into being).
Morphogenesis means the coming into being
of form and the morphogenetic field is the
field which organises the coming into being
of the form.
This idea, which was first proposed in 1922,
has been quite widely adopted within biology,
especially within embryology and developmental biology.
In a cat embryo, for example, it is considered that the embryo is developing within a cat embryo field, and that the field is an invisible organizing structure that shapes the development. It is important to under stand that the field is not just within, but also around, the embryo. The analogy for this is the magnetic field, which is also not just within magnets, but also around them; they involve an invisible patterning of the space, which can be revealed by sprinkling iron
filings around the magnet. Even without the iron filings, the field is there; you can't see it, touch it, smell it, hear it, taste it but it's th ere,
even though it is not material.
When the field concept was first put forward in its more or less modern form by Michael Faraday (4), he was not
quite sure what fields were.
(4) See Hesse, M, (1961) Forces and Fields
One thing he was sure they were not, was matter. He had one
idea that they might be modifications of the ether (which was not ordinary matter but some more subtle form) but the idea that he
preferred was they were "modifications of mere space". (5)
(5) See Nersessian, N J. (1984) Aether/Or: the creation of scientific
concepts, Studies in History and Philosophyof Science
Maxwell preferred the ether interpretation but Einstein got rid of the ether in his Special Theory of Relativity and since 1905 it has not been taken seriously within physics.
Fields are now regarded as "modifications of mere space"; ie. space itself has a form and a structure which does not arise
from matter - rather, matter arises from it.
In modern physics, matter is not primary but represents energy or potentiality within fields.
When this very powerful idea was applied to
biology, it lead to the proposition that there are
spatial forms which organise matter but
which are not themselves material. This
would have seemed a highly occult notion
had it not been for the fact that physics
already has this idea as a commonplace,
taught to every student of the subject. Many
of us think of materialism and matter in
terms of grossly out-dated concepts which
bear no relation to the modern physical understanding.
The huge advantage of applying this idea
to biology was that it was able to explain
something which is otherwise virtually
inexplicable, which is the way that living
things seem to be wholes that are more than
the sum of their parts - that wholeness can
remain even though parts are removed. If
you cut a leg off a newt, it grows a new leg; if
you cut a flatworm into pieces, each grows
into a new flatworm; if you cut a piece off a
willow tree, each piece can give you a new
tree. This property of wholeness is not found
in machines (if you cut a computer into
pieces, all you get is a broken computer) but it
is found in fields; if you cut a magnet into
pieces, you get lots of little magnets, each with a complete magnetic field and if you cut a hologram (which is an electro-magnetic
field phenomenon) into pieces, each of them
can give you a complete structure.
Fields seem to have a property of inherent
wholeness which material objects do not
have, and it seems as if it is the field which is
the bearer or possessor of the wholeness.
With living things, it is supposed that the
morphogenetic field is around the organism,
and even if you cut part of it off, or cut it into
small pieces, in many conditions the pieces
still remain a whole field and can grow back
or regenerate into a whole organism.
This phenomenon is very hard to explain from a
mechanistic point of view which tries to ex-
plain everything in terms of the interaction
of parts, because if you remove a part, there
should no longer be a whole. For this reason,
the idea of morphogenetic fields has been
very widely accepted - it is almost indis-
pensable for understanding how embryos
develop. There must be many sorts of fields -
cat fields, dog fields, kangaroo fields, apple
fields - and not only does each species have
its own field but there are fields within
fields. For example, within the fields of our
body there are fields for our eyes, our ears
and our arms and legs, our kidneys, livers,
and within those, tissue fields and cell fields,
and then fields for cell nuclei and mitochondria and further fields for molecules and proteins, etc.
The Nature of Morphic Fields
Now if these fields are so important and have
such explanatory value, how do we explain
them? Well, this is the great problem. Over
the past 60 years, two approaches have been
favoured. On the one hand, there is a
resurgence of the Platonic idea that they're
present eternal forms or eternal mathem-
atical structures which are somehow transc-
endent of space and time. This view is advoc-
ated by a number of modern biologists,
including Brian Goodwin , Professor of the
Open University.
The other view is that, yes,
we adopt the concept of fields because we need
it but actually it is only a concept and they do
not correspond to anything in reality. What
they are is simply a short-hand way of talk
ing about "complex spatio-temporal-physico
chemical patterns of interaction not yet fully
understood". In this way, one returns to the
conventional position.
What I am suggesting - and this is the basis
of the entire hypothesis - is that morpho-
genetic fields do exist, that they are not just
ideas in our minds (or at least, that they are
as real as fields in physics such as gravity
and electro-magnetism) and that they have
histories; ie. morphogenetic fields have a
structure or pattern which depends on
previous similar forms. This means that the
cat field depends on the actual forms of
previous cats; tomato fields on the actual
form of previous tomatoes, etc. and through
these morphogenetic (or for short, morphic)
fields the organisms within them are in a
kind of resonant connection with all
previous similar forms. This process is
called morphic resonance.
An organism, such as a fern, is shaped by
morphic fields which are in turn shaped by
morphic resonance with all previous ferns of
the species. The fields contain a kind of
memory (collective memory) of the form of
previous ferns and the morphic resonance
takes place through or across space and time.
It is not coded in the genes or carried in the
material structure of the fern; rather, it is as
if the fern 'tunes in' to the form of previous
ferns.
This theory leads to a number of clear,
empirical predictions, and this is where
it begins to make contact with laboratories
and all the paraphenalia of science, because
as a scientist it is no use talking about these
kinds of ideas merely at a philosophical
level. Unless one can show that they have a
predictive value, and that they lead to
unexpected results, then scientists are not
going to be very interested. But if they do
lead to predictions of results that are
unexpected, then that means that it is an
interesting scientific theory. (6)
6) The value of a scientific theory is partly, as Sir Karl Popper has said, in proportion to the unexpectness of its predictions.
The theory applies in the realm of
behaviour, and so it predicts that if you train
rats to learn a new trick here in Sherborne,
then rats all over the world should sub-
sequently be able to learn the same trick
more quickly - just because the rats here
have learned it - and the more rats that learn
it here, the easier it should become every
where else. It should happen even in the
absence of taking the Sherborne rats there, or
making telephone calls telling people how to
do it; and even if people there do not know,
and even if th e rats have never been able to communicate by squeaking or any other means with the rats here.
And already, experiments have been done which show that
this sort of effect does in fact occur. The
experiments were not done to test this theory,
they were done to test others because, as you
know, people have been doing experiments on
rats for decades, and there is a vast literature
on rat psychology. Experiments measuring
the rate of rats escaping from mazes and such
like do show that they generally get better at
doing it as time goes on, and not only better in
one place, but all over the world; and not only
better if they are descended from rats who
have been trained, but all the rats in a given
breed seem to get better. In my book The New
Science of Life I give a particularly
striking example of this and give the details
and data for th ose who are interested.
This is not a unique example. There are a
number of others in the literature on rat
psychology, and in other forms of behav-
iourist research. B.F. Skinner, the bete noire
of Arthur Koestler, the chief behaviourist who
believed that you could explain everything in
terms of reflexes and so on, specialised in
training pigeons to peck at lighted panels in
order to get corn, a process called operant
conditioning. He had a complicated proc-
edure, by which he trained them in a series
of stages until after quite a long time he got
them to peck at the panel and obtain the grain
of corn . After he and several generations of
his PhD students had been doing this,
somebody discovered that it was all quite
unnecessary; one could simply put the pigeon
in the box, turn on th e lighted panel and the
pigeon would peck it straight away. They
concluded that Skinner and his students were
rather foolish not to have noticed this fact, but
the alternative explanation is that Skinner
and his students had actually changed the
collective psyche of the pigeons, so that the
pigeons themselves - all of them - had just
been getting better at doing the task.
This sort of phenomenon has been observed
by many experimental psychologists, and
in deed, animal trainers. Since my book was
published, I have received letters from all
over the world, from people involved with
animals, farmers, etc. telling me the most
interesting anecdotes which seem to support
the theory - only anecdotes, but very very
interesting ones based on observation and
experience by people who know animals and
work with them all the time .
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