Rupert Sheldrake isn’t afraid to stir up controversy. Best known for his hotly debated theory of “formative causation,” the British biologist and author has been lauded as the new Darwin by some and vigorously denounced by others. In 1981 Sheldrake rocked the biological establishment with his book A New Science Of Life, in which he put forward his theory to explain how all systems — from crystals to living plants and animals to societies — develop and maintain their forms. The British science magazine Nature promptly declared his book “the best candidate for burning there has been for many years.”
While Sheldrake’s theory complements orthodox ideas about biology, including the role of DNA in the development of living organisms, it challenges the commonly held conception of the universe as a machine governed by certain unexplainable laws of nature. Instead of evolving according to these laws, Sheldrake suggests, developing systems “remember” how to shape themselves: for example, an acorn would “remember” how to grow into an oak tree from the experience of previous oaks — a mysterious process he calls “morphic resonance.”
Sheldrake’s other books include The Presence Of The Past, The Rebirth Of Nature, and Trialogues On The Edge Of The West, which he co-wrote with Terence McKenna and Ralph Abraham.
Born in Newark-on-Trent, England, Sheldrake studied natural sciences at Cambridge and philosophy at Harvard. He earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry in 1967 at Cambridge, where he was director of studies in biochemistry and cell biology for six years. In 1974 he left England for Hyderabad, India, where he worked until 1985, first as a plant physiologist, then as a consultant physiologist, for the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics.
David Jay Brown and Rebecca McClen Novick interviewed Sheldrake for their book Mavericks Of The Mind: Conversations For The New Millennium, a collection of interviews with such thinkers as Terence McKenna, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, and John C. Lilly. While the interviews cover topics as diverse as psychedelic drugs, genetics, and poetry, all are centrally concerned with exploring the nature of human consciousness.
— Pamela Penick
Brown: What originally inspired your interest in biochemistry and morphogenesis?
Sheldrake: I was interested in animals and plants, and my father was a biologist. He was a natural historian of the old school, with a microscope room at home and cabinets of slides and so on. He taught me a lot about plants, and I learned about animals through keeping pets.
Biochemistry covered plants, animals, and microorganisms. That appealed to me. It was a kind of universal biological science. I saw, of course, quite soon, that biochemistry was no way of understanding the forms of animals and plants, and I spent a lot of time thinking about how to make the bridge between embryology, plant development, and what was going on at the biochemical level. This was the subject of my research for some ten years at Cambridge.
Brown: What are the basic elements of the theory of formative causation?
Sheldrake: The theory of formative causation is concerned with how things take up their forms, or patterns, or organization. So it covers the formation of galaxies, atoms, crystals, molecules, plants, animals, cells, societies.
You see, all these things organize themselves. An atom doesn’t have to be put together by some external agency. It organizes itself. A molecule and a crystal are not assembled by human beings bit by bit; they spontaneously crystallize. Animals spontaneously grow. All these things are different from machines, which are artificially put together by human beings.
So, my theory is concerned with self-organizing natural systems and the cause of form. The cause of all these forms, I believe, is organizing fields, form-shaping fields, which I call morphic fields, from the Greek word for form. I’m saying that the forms of societies, ideas, crystals, and molecules all depend on the way previous ones have been organized. There’s a kind of built-in memory in the morphic fields of each thing. So I think of the regularities of nature as being more like habits than things governed by eternal mathematical laws that exist outside nature.
Novick: Could you give a specific example of, and describe the morphogenetic process in terms of, the development of a well-established species, like the potato?
Sheldrake: The idea is that each member of a species draws on the collective memory of the species, tuning in to past members of the species and in turn contributing to the further development of the species. In a potato, you’d have the resonance from past species of potatoes, most of which grow wild in the Andes. Because it’s a cultivated plant, a lot of varieties of potatoes have been developed, and since potatoes are propagated vegetatively, they’re all clones.
So each potato clone resonates with all previous members of the clone, and that resonance is against a background of resonance with other members of the potato species, including the wild ones that still grow in the Andes. So there’s a complex background resonance, but what’s most important is the resonance from the most similar ones. This is what makes the potatoes of one variety develop the way they do, following the habits of their kind.
Usually these things are ascribed to genes. Most people assume that inheritance depends on chemical genes and DNA. I’m saying that view of biological development is inadequate. The DNA is the same in all the cells of the potato: in the shoots, in the roots, in the leaves, and in the flowers. The DNA is exactly the same, yet these organs develop differently. So something more than DNA must be giving rise to the form of the potato, and that is what I call the morphic field, the organizing field.
You’d test the theory by looking at some change in the species that hadn’t happened before — a new phenomenon — and seeing how it spreads through the species. So, for example, if you train a few rats to learn a new trick, then all rats of that breed everywhere in the world should learn it more quickly, just because the first ones have learned it. The more rats that learn it, the easier it should get for others to learn.
Most people assume that inheritance depends on chemical genes and DNA. I’m saying that view of biological development is inadequate.
Novick: What about how the morphic field develops in a new system, like a newly synthesized chemical, or a drug? How would the field evolve around that?
Sheldrake: The first time the chemical is crystallized, there won’t be a morphic field for the crystals, because they would not have existed before. But as time goes on, the chemical should get easier to crystallize, because of morphic resonance from previous crystals. So, however the first pattern is taken up — this is a question of creativity, but assume, for example, it’s random — that pattern will be stabilized through morphic resonance, and the more often it happens, the more likely it will be to happen again, through this kind of invisible memory connecting crystals throughout the world. There’s already evidence that new crystals, new compounds, do get easier to crystallize as time goes on.
Brown: What are morphic fields made of, and how is it that they can exist everywhere all at once?
Sheldrake: You could ask the question, What are any fields made of? What are the electromagnetic and gravitational fields made of? Nobody knows, even in the case of the known fields of physics. It was thought in the nineteenth century that they were made of ether. But then Einstein showed that the electromagnetic field isn’t made out of ether, it’s made out of itself. It just is. The magnetic field around a magnet, for example, is not made of air, and it’s not made of matter. When you scatter iron filings, you can reveal this field, but it’s not made of anything except the field. If you say, well, maybe all fields have some common substance, or common property, then that’s the quest for a unified field theory.
Then you might ask, What is it that all fields are made of? The only answer that can be given is space and time. The substance of fields is space; fields are modifications of space or of the vacuum. And according to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, the gravitational field, the structure of space-time in the whole universe, is not in space and time: it is space-time. There’s no space and time other than the structure of fields. So fields are patterns of space-time. The morphic field, like other fields, will be a structure in space and time. They have their own kind of ontological status, the same kind of status as electromagnetic and gravitational fields.
Brown: But those are localized, aren’t they? I mean, if you sprinkle iron filings around a magnet, you can see the field around it. How is it that a morphic field can exist everywhere all at once?
Sheldrake: It doesn’t. The morphic fields are localized. They’re in and around the system they organize. So the morphic field of you is in and around your body. The morphic field around a tomato plant is in and around that plant. I’m suggesting that morphic fields in different tomato plants resonate with each other across space and time. I’m not saying that the field itself is delocalized over the whole of space and time. I’m saying that one field influences another field through space and time. Now, the medium of transmission is obscure. I call it morphic resonance. What this is replacing in conventional physics are the so-called laws of nature, which are believed to be present in all places, and at all times.
But what is the substance of a law of nature? How are laws of nature present in all places and at all times? It’s not as if ordinary physics proposes something that makes more sense than morphic resonance. It posits invisible mathematical laws, which are not material or energetic, yet present everywhere and utterly mysterious. Morphic resonance is mysterious, but it involves not a pattern imposed from outside space and time but rather a pattern that can spread through space and time.
Novick: You suggest that the hypothesis of formative causation does not refute orthodox theory but actually incorporates and complements it. How is this so?
Sheldrake: The orthodox mechanistic theory says all natural systems are like machines, and are made up of physical and chemical processes. What I’m saying is that you can, if you like, think of aspects of nature as being machine-like, but this doesn’t explain them. Nature isn’t a machine. You and I are not machines, though we may be like machines in certain respects: our hearts may be like pumps, and our brains, in some cases, like computers.
But in other important respects, nature in general, and organisms in particular, are not machines or machine-like. The mechanistic theory is all right as far as it goes. It gives us useful information about the physics of nerve impulses, or the chemistry of enzymes. But when it says that life can be explained in terms of ordinary physics — and this is what most mechanistic biologists do say — then I think it’s wrong, because it’s too limited. It’s taking a part of the picture and assuming it’s the whole. It’s a half-truth.
Novick: You’ve incorporated that into your theory, and just taken it to another level.
Sheldrake: Yes. There are still enzymes and nerve impulses in the kind of world I’m talking about; everything in regular biochemistry and biophysics is still there. What isn’t still there is the assumption that these aspects of the process are all there is.
To take an analogy, it’s like trying to understand a building. On one level, it’s made of wood and other components that you can measure and analyze. You can find out exactly what chemicals are in the wood, the exact molecular composition. But when you break up the building to analyze the parts, the form of the building — the plan — disappears. The plan of the building is also part of the building. You’ll never understand the plan of a building, its form or its function for that matter, just by analyzing the constituents — although without the wood and the other constituents you can’t have a building.
Brown: What are the implications of the theory of formative causation? How do hypothetical morphic fields affect the sciences, the arts, technologies, and social structures?
Sheldrake: It gives a completely different understanding of formative processes in biology and chemistry. It gives a new understanding of instincts and behavioral patterns as being organized by morphic fields. It gives a new understanding of social structure, in terms of morphic fields, and cultural forms, and ideas. All of these I see as patterns organized by these fields with an inherent memory.
In the human realm, for example, it leads to the idea of a collective human memory on which we all draw, which is very like Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious. In terms of social groups, it gives rise to the idea that the whole social group is organized by a field. That field is not just an organizing structure in the present, but also contains a memory of that social group in the past, a group memory — and also, through morphic resonance, a memory of other similar social groups that have existed before.
So, a football team, for example, will tune in to its own field in the past. The individual players on the football team will be coordinated not just by observing each other but by a kind of group mind. This group mind will in turn have as a kind of background resonance the morphic fields of other similar football teams.
Novick: On the one hand, it’s reassuring that a certain pattern or order is being maintained, and yet options must be available for change if that pattern ceases to function effectively. In what ways does nature supply the necessary conditions for this balance of repetition and novelty?
Sheldrake: The universe is not in a steady state; there’s an ongoing creative principle in nature, which is driving things onward. Cosmologically speaking, this is the expansion of the universe. If the universe had been in a steady state at the moment of the Big Bang, it would still be at billions of degrees centigrade. We wouldn’t be here. The reason we’re here is because the Big Bang involved a colossal explosion, an outward movement of expansion of the whole universe, such that it cooled down and virtually created more space for new things to happen. And in the ongoing evolutionary process, there’s a constant destabilization of what’s there because the universe is not in equilibrium.
This ongoing process in the whole of nature tends to break up old patterns and prevent things from just stopping where they were. You see it in the history of the earth, the ongoing evolutionary process, through the catastrophic changes that have happened to the earth, through the impact of asteroids, and so on.
The cumulative nature of the evolutionary process, the fact that memory is preserved, means that life grows not just through a random proliferation of new forms, but cumulatively. You start with single-celled organisms, and you end with complex multi-cellular ones, like there are today. New species arise usually when new opportunities appear, and the biggest bursts of speciation that we know about in the history of the earth occurred soon after great cataclysms, like the extinction of the dinosaurs, which created new opportunities. Thereafter species tend to be fairly stable. So, quite often, the reasons for creativity depend on accidents or disasters that prevent the normal habits from being carried out.
Novick: When a system hits an evolutionary dead end, an organism becomes extinct or an object obsolete. What happens to its field? Does it just break up and merge with other similar fields?
Sheldrake: In a sense, the ghosts of dead species would still be haunting the world, the fields of the dinosaurs would still be present, if you could tune into them. If a dinosaur egg could be reconstituted, you could get them back again. I think that in the course of evolution these past forms do indeed reappear. They’re known in the biological literature as atavisms — the reappearing of forms, or patterns, or behaviors of extinct species in living ones. Like babies being born with tails.
Brown: Or parallel evolution?
Sheldrake: Parallel evolution would be where you have the features of some species traveling across space, and similar patterns evolving somewhere else — like, for example, the evolution of forms among marsupials in Australia that parallel those of placental mammals elsewhere. But what I’m talking about is the influence of extinct species traveling across time and these features reappearing.
Brown: You said before that there could be a sort of collective memory analogous to Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious. Is it possible then that morphic fields are, or can be, actually conscious?
Sheldrake: I don’t think that morphic fields are conscious. I think that some aspects of morphic fields could become conscious in human beings. I think that the underlying patterns of mental activity — our ideas and thoughts — depend on our morphic fields. I think they become conscious in us. But most of the collective unconscious, most of our habits, are unconscious — the habit of speaking English, for example, one’s mannerisms, one’s accent, or the habit of driving a car. When you drive a car, you don’t have to be conscious of every muscular movement. Those habits unfold spontaneously. The more deep-seated biological habits, like the functioning of our bodies, and our heartbeat, and the way our guts work, are completely unconscious to most of us.
Brown: In The Presence Of The Past, you suggest that memories are not actually stored in the brain, but rather may be stored in an information field that can be accessed by the brain. Do you believe then that human consciousness, our personal memories and sense of self, may survive biological death in some form?
Sheldrake: Certainly the idea that memories aren’t stored in the brain opens the way for a new perspective on the question of survival of death. Most people assume memories are stored in the brain, simply because this is the mechanistic paradigm that’s rarely challenged. There’s hardly any evidence for memory storage in the brain, as I show in my book, and what evidence there is could be interpreted better in terms of the brain as a tuning system, tuning in to its own past states. The brain is more like a TV receiver than a tape recorder or a video recorder.
If memories are stored in the brain then there’s no possibility of conscious, or even unconscious, survival of bodily death, because the brain decays at death. No form of survival of any kind, even through reincarnation, would be possible in such a scenario. That’s one reason why materialists are so attached to the idea of memory storage in the brain, because it refutes all religions in a two-line argument. In fact, there’s very little evidence they’re stored in the brain.
If they’re not stored in the brain, then the memories won’t decay at death. But there will still have to be something that can tune in to them or gain access to them. So could some nonphysical aspect of the self survive death and still gain access to the memories? I regard it as an open question. I think that we do survive bodily death in some form, and that some aspect of the self does survive with access to memories. That’s a personal opinion. The theory as such leaves this question quite open.
I think that nature — the entire cosmos, the natural world we live in — is in some sense alive, and that it’s more like a developing organism, with developing habits, than like a fixed machine governed by fixed laws.
Brown: Do you think there is a morphic field for dreams, mystical experiences, and other states of consciousness?
Sheldrake: I think that any pattern of activity — which includes dreams, mystical experiences, and altered states of consciousness — has a structure. Such structures could indeed move from person to person by morphic resonance. Indeed, in many mystical traditions, it’s believed that people through initiation are brought into that particular tradition and resonate, or enter into communion with, other people who previously followed in the tradition.
In Hindu and Buddhist lineages, you often get the idea that through initiation and the transmission of the right mantras, the initiate comes into contact with the guru, the teacher, and the whole line of those who’ve gone before. There is a similar idea in Christianity, the idea of the communion of saints: those who participate in the Christian sacraments, particularly the Eucharist, are in contact not just with other people doing it now but with all those who’ve done the same thing before.
Novick: What are your ideas about the hierarchical nature of morphic fields?
Sheldrake: I think all such fields are hierarchical. Cells are within tissues, and tissues are within organs, and organs are within your body. There’s a sense in which the whole of you — the body and the mind — is greater than the organs in your body, and those in turn are greater than tissues, those in turn greater than cells, those in turn greater than molecules.
If you think about the way nature is organized, you can see the same pattern at every level. Our earth, Gaia, is included in the solar system, the solar system is in the galaxy, the galaxy within a cluster of galaxies, and ultimately everything is included within the cosmos. So you could say the most primal field of nature is the cosmic field, and then the galactic fields, and solar system fields, planetary fields, continental fields, and so on, in this nested hierarchy. At each level, the whole organizes the parts within it, and the parts affect the whole; there’s a two-way influence.
Brown: Do you think it’s possible that morphic fields from the future may be influencing us, as well as those from the past?
Sheldrake: I think that is related to the question of how new patterns come into being. There may possibly be some influence from the future. But the habitual fields are not influenced by the future, at least as far as this theory is concerned. It would be possible to have a theory that says the future and the past exert equal influences, but that theory would be different from the one I’m suggesting, which says that the past is influencing the present through morphic resonance. If future and past influenced it equally, the theory would be virtually untestable, because we don’t know what will happen in the future, so we wouldn’t know what influences we’d be testing for.
If the future influenced things as much as the past, then the experiments I’m suggesting, like rats getting better at learning something all around the world, shouldn’t work. Rats should start off just as good at learning as they continue to be, because there would always be limitless numbers of rats in the future, which would be influencing them.
I think that habits and memories come from the past. This is just common sense. We have memories of the past, and we don’t have memories of the future in the same way. Occasionally some people have pre-cognitive flashes. We may have hopes, plans, desires, inspirations, and insights, but they’re not memories in the same sense that memories from the past are memories. We don’t get habits from the future, we get them from the past.
Novick: Could the presence of the future be described as the potential state of the system?
Sheldrake: Yes, I think so. I think there are two ways of thinking about it. One is that there’s a kind of aura around the present stretching into the future, which is the realm of hopes, fears, possibilities, dreams, imaginings. But then there’s a further question, and a more fundamental one, as to whether the whole evolutionary process is being pulled from the future, rather than being pushed from the past.
The traditional Judeo-Christian view of history is that history is being pulled from the future, that there’s something in the future — which Terence McKenna calls the transcendental object, which Teilhard de Chardin calls the omega point, which the Book of Revelation calls the new creation. Some future state of perfection is drawing the whole cosmic evolutionary process toward itself in some mysterious way. Therefore, the whole cosmic evolutionary process has a goal or purpose. It’s a view that lies at the root of the doctrine of progress, which dominates our society.
This view isn’t just philosophical. In a secularized form, it dominates both capitalist and communist societies — the dream of a better future. Most traditional societies haven’t had that dream — they looked to the past for a model of the way things should be, how it used to be in the golden age. They haven’t tried to create a new kind of future golden age. Our society represents an ambitious global attempt to do just that through conquering nature by means of science and technology. The inspirational basis for the destruction of the environment, the development of the tropical forests, is this dream of a future state on earth that progress will lead us toward, where there’s peace, prosperity, and plenty through man’s conquest of nature.
Many of us now think that dream is a chimera, a vision that is utterly destructive in its consequences. But all forms of Western thought are under the influence of this particular attractor, as one could call it. The idea of a future goal attracting things toward it is utterly dominant, even among the new age communists with their millenarian vision.
Novick: How do you use the concept of attractors in the theory of formative causation?
Sheldrake: The idea of attractors, which has been developed in modern mathematical dynamics to understand the way systems develop, involves modeling the end states toward which systems tend. This is an attempt to understand systems by understanding where they’re headed in the future, rather than just where they’ve been pushed from in the past. The attractor, as the name implies, pulls the system toward itself. A very simple example is throwing marbles into a basin. The balls will roll round and round, and they’ll finally come to rest at the bottom of the basin. The bottom of the basin is the attractor, in what mathematicians call the basin of attraction.
The basin is, in fact, their principal metaphor. The ball rolls down to the bottom — it doesn’t matter where you throw it in, or at what speed you throw it in, or what route it takes. This model tells you where it’s going to end up. This kind of mathematical modeling is extremely appropriate, I think, to the understanding of biological morphogenesis, or the formation of crystals or molecules, or galaxies, or ideas, or human behavior, or the behavior of entire societies — because all of them seem to have this tendency to move toward attractors, which we think of consciously as goals and purposes. But, throughout the natural world, these attractors exist largely unconsciously. The oak tree is the attractor of the acorn. The growing oak seedling is drawn toward its formal attractor, its morphic attractor, which is the mature oak tree.
Novick: It’s like the future in some sense.
Sheldrake: It’s like the future pulling, but it’s not the future. It’s a hard concept to grasp, because what we think of as the future pulling is not necessarily what will happen in the future. You can cut the seedling acorn down before it ever becomes the oak tree. So, it’s not as if its future as oak tree is pulling it. It’s some kind of potentiality to reach an end state, which is inherent in its nature. The attractor is the entelechy, in Aristotle’s language and in the language of the medieval scholastics. Entelechy is the aspect of the soul which is the end that draws everything toward it. So all people would have their own entelechy, their own destiny or purpose. Each acorn would have the entelechy of an oak tree. But that end, purpose, or goal is not necessarily in the future.
Brown: What types of research experiments do you think need to be done that would either prove or disprove the existence of morphic fields?
Sheldrake: I outline quite a number of them in my books. There’s a series of experiments that can be done in chemistry with crystals, in biochemistry with protein folding, in developmental biology with fruit-fly development, in animal behavior with rats, in human behavior through studying rates of learning tasks that other people have learned before. Some of these tests are going on right now in some universities in Britain.
Novick: Perhaps the most compelling implication of your hypothesis is that nature is not governed by eternally fixed laws but more by habits that are able to evolve as conditions change. In what ways do you think the human experience of reality could be affected as a result of this awareness?
Sheldrake: First, the idea of habits developing along with nature gives us a much more evolutionary sense of nature itself. I think that nature — the entire cosmos, the natural world we live in — is in some sense alive, and that it’s more like a developing organism, with developing habits, than like a fixed machine governed by fixed laws, which is the old image of the cosmos.
Second, I think the notion of natural habits enables us to see how there’s a kind of presence of the past in the world around us. The past isn’t just something that happens and is gone. It’s something that is continually influencing the present, and is in some sense present in the present.
Third, it gives us a completely different understanding of ourselves, our own memories, our collective memories, and the influence of our ancestors and the past of our society. It also gives us an important new insight into rituals and forms through which we connect ourselves with the past. I think it also enables us to understand how new patterns of activity can spread far more quickly than would be possible under standard mechanistic or psychological theories: if many people start doing, thinking, or practicing something, it’ll make it easier for others to do the same.
Moving from the exploitive mechanistic attitude to a symbiotic attitude, we realize that we’re not in charge of nature, we’re not separate from nature and somehow running it. Rather, we’re part of ecosystems and part of the world, and our continued existence depends on living harmoniously with the planet. It’s an obvious thing, this Gaian perspective, but until now it hasn’t been taken seriously in politics. Today, however, the idea of nature as alive has become a very important force in our society through its political manifestations as well as its scientific ones.
Our thanks to The Crossing Press for permission to reprint this interview. Mavericks Of The Mind is $12.95 from P.O. Box 1048, Freedom, California 95019.
— Pamela Penick
