In 1986, my cousin, the painter John Macdonald and I were having a very expansive, wee hours discussion in a shotgun apartment in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. He was describing something called the ” hundredth monkey principle “. It went something like this:
| There is a certain species of monkey that lives on two different islands. The two groups of monkeys that live on the two islands are just alike, the same species, the same basic environments, and hence, the same basic lifestyles, but the two islands are far apart, and the monkeys don’t swim, so there is never any contact between the two groups. One day, on the first island, one of the monkeys somehow makes a discovery that by taking a piece of the fruit which is their main food down to the water and so aking it, it becomes much easier to peel. This is a wonderful discovery, a real breakthrough. Soon, the other monkeys on the island begin to catch on, and learn this helpful new technique. Now, although this species of monkeys may have lived for genera tion upon generation on these two islands without making this discovery, now that it has been done, by the time the hundredth monkey on the first island has learned it, there will be monkeys doing it on the second island as well. |
KW What is morphic resonance?RS The idea is that there is a kind of memory in nature. Each kind of thing has a collective memory. So, take a squirrel living in New York now. That squirrel is being influenced by all past squirrels. And how that influence moves across time, the collective
| The whole idea of morphic resonance is evolutionary… |
| Basically, morphic fields are fields of habit, and they’ve been set up through habits of thought, through habits of activity, and through habits of speech. Most of our culture is habitual, I mean, most of our personal life, and most of our cultural life is habitual. |
| Morphic fields organize self-organizing systems, things that organize themselves, like snowflakes, or molecules, or ecosystems, or animals, or plants, or societies, like flocks of birds |
| In the entire process of cosmic evolution you see a spiritual process as well as a material process. You can’t separate the two. |
RS Yes. So that’s what he was doing there, and the ashram he founded is still continuing.
KW In Bede Griffith’s book he refers to the ‘perennial philosophy’, a set of ideas that all traditional people seem to share to some degree. This seems to be a type of understanding of the world to which your hypotheses would be sympathetic. It i s interesting to me, the idea of someone going into these ancient beliefs as a contemporary scientist and connecting it to an empirical approach.
RS Well you see, I think a lot of harm was done in the West by splitting apart science and religion in the 17th century. Science became very limited in its focus to mechanical, material things, and religion became very introverted; it became very concerned just with the human spirit and with morality and so forth, and so religion signed over the whole of the natural world including the cosmos to science and science signed over to religion human ethical questions and left this terribly limited dom ain as the sphere of religion. In most traditional cultures, these are not separated in that way. For an American Indian looking at the sky, he’s not looking at just a material collection of bodies moving in accordance with inanimate laws. The sky is a living being, the abode of the spirit. The earth is a living mother; it’s not just a collection of rocks with physical forces at work in them. So, if you look at any traditional world view there isn’t a separation between nature and spirit, and religio n and science. The two go together. It’s a much more holistic and integrated view of the world, and I think that, as science emerges from this narrow, mechanistic phase that it’s been in and we move to a broader vision, a new kind of connection between the realms of science and spirituality becomes possible. They can converge again. They can relate to each other once more. This is something I spent years exploring with Bede Griffiths and more recently I’ve been having a whole series of discussions wi th Matthew Fox. Matthew Fox is a maverick theologian who was expelled from the Dominicans last year and who’s working independently. He has written several well-known books. One is called Original Blessing. Another is called Coming of the Co smic Christ. Essentially, he is trying to recover a sense or spirituality in nature, that it’s not just something inside, or to do with morality and sin. It’s to do with the whole of nature. The divine presence in the sky, in the earth, in our expe rience of nature all around us. In the entire process of cosmic evolution you see a spiritual process as well as a material process. You can’t separate the two. They go together. And human evolution involves both a spiritual conscious and a cultural e volution, and the evolution of science and technology. You can’t separate these things. He’s been working along these lines for quite a long time, and he and I have been having a series of discussions, and we have a book coming out in spring called N atural Grace: Dialogues on Science and Spirituality, which is an attempt to explore these connections in this new context. He’s also very much involved with innovative rituals, the rediscovery of ritual and the way in which art and multimedia, and ne w forms of expression including electronic means can be used in new forms of ritual. He’s been working particularly with several groups in England where amazing new forms of experimental services have come out of the rave nightclub movement. In northern England, in cities like Sheffield and Leeds there’s a whole flowering of new forms of religious ritual which have grown out of the psychedelic rave scene, where they’ve taken on a Christian form in a rave setting with multimedia, sampling, and music. Co smic masses bringing together the elements of earth, air, fire, and water. One of these was held in Grace Cathedral in San Francisco a few months ago. Some people cam they’ve been done before, and by setting up a whole pattern of movements and activitie s in this similar way, you resonate with previous people who’ve performed the ritual. Traditional cultures believe that rituals are a way of connecting through time, of collapsing time. You could say that the patterns of rituals embody morphic fields- I would call them morphic fields, but you could also call them archetypes, because archetypes is another word, I think, for the same idea. So it’s interesting what you say that people who try to invent new ones after a while find in fact they’ve resurrect ed old ones. There are, perhaps, certain very basic forms that occur again and again in rituals, and for ritual to be effective it has to link to these ancient patterns or morphic fields. If you make up something totally new with no background it won’t have any resonant power, at least to start with.
KW From the artists’ point of view, an act or a form will tend to feel arbitrary or inauthentic if it doesn’t find some grounding in resonance.
RS Yes.
KW Returning to what you said earlier about Darwinian natural selection, in the realm of conscious creation, as in art, the process looked at from a distance looks like natural selection at work, but for the individual artist there is conscious, de liberate selection going on, too, which seems to complicate the issue.
RS Well, natural selection was an idea that Darwin developed by analogy with conscious human selection. That’s where he got the idea from. The idea came from animal and plant breeders who have hundreds of different kinds of plants or animals, and they choose- consciously choose- one rather than another. Sometimes they might choose them unconsciously, but any skilled plant or animal breeded is consciously choosing the parents of the next generation to coming their characteristics. So it was that conscious selection that provided for him the model for natural selection, and natural selection is the same. It’s selective, but he says it’s unconscious. So conscious selection by an artist, or a creative person from among the various ideas they have is the first stage. A lot of us have all sorts of ideas, and we select some rather than others and give expression to those. So the first selection is internal, if you like. It’s within our minds. We select, and then we put it out there, and some work s of art are more successful than others. Some languish in obscurity and are never heard of again, while others form the foundation of a whole school of art. People copy or are influenced by such a style, it’s recognized and given a name. So in art you have the development of new schools like the various renaissance schools, modernist schools, various post-modernist schools, all those kinds of things. Then you also have the education of people who look at them. When people see one of these new forms of art for the first time, often they can’t make sense of it. Then, if it’s around long enough, a lot of people get used to it and it becomes assimilated into culture. So there’s a morphic field both for the kind of art and for the appreciation of it.
KW I’m also interested in the kind of art that is created by a person working in isolation perhaps over a long period of time doing a lot of work and the kind of influence that might have–affecting or creating a field that others could pick up. There’s a man in India, named Nek Chand, who over a period of several decades has been creating beautiful sculptures of humans and animals in a clearing in the middle of a dense forest. No one knew about it for years, and in fact, he had to keep it a secr et because it was on government land, and he had no one’s permission to do what he was doing. He started in 1965 and had created this kind of park with a multitude of figures over years before anyone else saw it or knew about it. He was creating as a kind of devotional or prayerful act. Although now it’s known, and other people have seen it, it seems to have accrued a kind of power before it was discovered. I’m curious about people who might work in obscurity and never be known–are they still infl uential in a non-materially transmitted way? The fact that certain acts are carried out over and over in secrecy or in private…
RS Well I think so. In the transmission of ideas or forms, art forms, by morphic resonance, there are two things. One is the number of people who do it or the number of times it’s being done, and then there must be some variable of intensity. It m ust make a difference if someone is absolutely intensely involved with an idea and dwells on it with huge intensity compared with someone who just flicks through a magazine and sees a picture of your particular kind of thing for a few seconds and it’s ver y superficial–there must be a big difference. So there must be an intensity factor and if somebody in solitude works away in an extremely intense way it may indeed set up a morphic field. In fact, we know that something like that does seem to happen, bec ause it’s very common in art, in fashion design, in science and technology for different people to have similar inventions, and very often they’re trying to keep them secret. I went to a symposium in London recently of fashion designers. We were discussin g morphic resonance and the zeitgeist in relation to fashion. It was convened by Vogue magazine, and I was asked to go, along with various fashion designers, and fashion retailers, and people in that world, and also people in the stock mark et world, and the art world, some art critics. Everybody in all those worlds was very familiar with this phenomenon. You have something that’s ‘in the air’ and these fashion designers are trying to keep their designs secret. They don’t want other people t o know about them, and often they find that other designers, even in other countries, come up with very similar designs.
KW I think everyone who’s an artist is familiar with that phenomenon.
RS So there we’re dealing with things before they become public. We’re dealing with things where you’ve got a few people intensely working on something, and others come up with the same thing, and they’re always surprised by this–well after a whi le they’re not so surprised by it–but it’s a mysterious sort of thing, and it’s happened many times in the history of science. There are famous examples, like Sir Isaac Newton and the German philosopher Liebniz coming up with the calculus at the same tim e and then spending years afterward squabbling about who thought of it first. So, again, inventors come up with similar gadgets at the same time. So morphic resonance could play a part in the zeitgeist. There are times when certain things seem to h appen. They seem to be ‘in the air’. This is a phrase we use because we don’t know what’s going on. There’s no scientific theory to explain these things except perhaps morphic resonance.
KW Given that a morphic field is built up through repetition of similar events, I was wondering about when there is mechanical or electrical reproduction as in a computer where something comes up many times, is there a kind of resonance built up?
RS I don’t think morphic resonance will happen with machines or photocopiers or computers. The reason is this: First, morphic fields organize self-organizing systems, things that organize themselves, like snowflakes, or molecules, or ecosystems, or animals, or plants, or societies, like flocks of birds. These all have morphic fields. A computer or a photocopier doesn’t have a morphic field. It doesn’t organize itself. It’s artificially put together in a factory, so it’s a completely different kind of thing. Essentially, man-made machines are the one exception to this principle because they are not organized from within, by themselves, but from without, by people. Secondly, the way morphic fields work, as I explain in my book, The Presenc e of the Past, is by modifying probabalistic events. Most of nature is inherently chaotic. It’s not rigidly determined in the old sense. It’s not rigidly predictable. The breaking of wave, the weather patterns, the turbulent flow of liquids, the b ehavior of the rain- all these things are inherently indeterminate, as are quantum events in quantum theory. With the decay of a uranium atom, you can’t predict if the atom will decay today or in 50,000 years. It’s only statistical. Morphic fields work by modifying probabilities of truly random events. Instead of a wide spread of randomness, they sort of focus it, so that some things happen, instead of others. That’s how I think they work. Now the whole point about machines is they are designed not to be random. When you call up a word processing program on your computer, you don’t want it to be different every time you call it up. You want it to stay the same. Every effort it made in machinery to make it do the same thing every time. So randomn ess is kept to the barest possible minimum. So there’s nothing for a morphic field to get a grip on in a computer or a photocopier. These would be exceptions because they are artificial, non self-organizing, and fully deterministic systems, whereas almo st everything else in nature except man-made machines is self-organizing and indeterministic.
KW Of the questions that have been tested empirically and where you have had time for results to come in, which ones have shown the strongest evidence?
RS Of the seven experiments, the ones that have been most investigated so far have been the pets. The dogs who know when their masters for coming home, and the sense of being stared at. And these are also ones which are in accordance with million s of people’s experience. So I think that the circumstantial evidence is extremely strong for these phenomena, and also the results of the experiments that we’ve done so far, that many people have done, are very positive. So, I wouldn’t claim that these are completely established facts, but I would say that the evidence is stacking up in favor of these being real phenomena.
KW (The following question refers to two experiments proposed in one of Sheldrake’s books, which might demonstrate effects of morphic resonance in a laboratory. In the case of the crystals, Sheldrake explained how, when forming a new type of cr ystal in a lab, even with all the right conditions and ingredients, forming the new crystal tends to be quite difficult. Yet, once a new type has been formed, and as it is repeated, it will tend to form more easily under identical lab conditions. This t ends to be true with all subsequent crystallizations even in different labs, with different scientists, and in different parts of the world. Sheldrake says that although scientists have noticed this effect for years, they usually ignore it, or assume it to have a mechanistic explanation. Sheldrake suggests that this might be an effect of morphic resonance, and that the question could be decided by doing carefully constructed experiments. The protein-folding experiments concern proteins which, have a pa ttern of refolding in a particular way. The question is whether the particular pattern they follow could be determined or influenced by morphic resonance. Please refer to Sheldrake’s book for a detailed explanation.) Of some of the possible experime nts which were discussed in your book, A New Science of Life, concerning the folding of proteins, and crystallization, have these been followed up, and what has been the result?
RS There have been two or three attempts to do experiments with folding proteins, and they haven’t been successful. The problem is technical. If you want to do research with morphic resonance, you have to find a protein that people haven’t done t his kind of experimental research with before. So you’ve got to find a new protein and get it to unfold and refold. Because all of this research is being done on very small budgets, we had to find new proteins that are cheap, and we tried unfolding and refolding them, but, in fact, none of those that we tried would refold at all so you couldn’t do an experiment to see if they refold faster in test tube, or maybe they do, but it takes a long time to try them all to find the right conditions. So instead of doing standard experiments with proteins that are known to refold, we were trying to find new proteins that would refold in the limited time available, and for our limited funding for this experiment we didn’t find that. So it was not possible to carr y that experiment through. The crystallization experiments are tantalizingly simple, yet they’d require the cooperation of chemists working in chemistry labs, and despite the fact that I’ve met many chemists who’ve expressed an interest I’ve not been abl e to persuade any to do these particular experiments. Not because they think they are impossible, but simply because they’re being paid to do other things, and if you ask people to undertake a whole new unorthodox research project in their free time in l aboratory, it’s sometime hard to persuade them. If any of your readers are chemists who are interested, I’d like to hear from them. I don’t suppose you have many professional chemists among your readers?
KW We assume our readers are in various fields. In addition to the physical version of Hootenanny, this will go on our on-line version. It’s a Web site accessible to lots of people all over the world including chemists.
RS Well, I’m always hoping to hear from interested chemists and protein chemists, because I’d love for these experiments to be done properly.
KW I take it that some of these problems were the inspiration for seeking experiments that are inexpensive and can be done by anyone.
RS Well, that’s it. With morphic resonance research in general, you need to have a certain degree of scientific expertise, and facilities- laboratories, and that’s been a problem, because morphic resonance is highly controversial within science, a nd most scientists are mortally afraid of the disapproval of their colleagues. So they tend to be very conformist in the laboratory. Many of them have quite wild ideas when they get home. But in the laboratory, they pretend to be just ‘regular guys,’ s ticking closely to the established paradigm. The advantage of this new approach is to find experiments so simple and so cheap that literally anyone can do them. That removes it from the constraints that apply to scientists. There are far more ordinary p eople than there are scientists.
KW People who are under no pressure to only show interest in certain kinds of ideas.
RS Yes, and they are not people who are going to be dominated by fear. Most pet owners aren’t afraid that other people will think they’re crazy if they say their dog knows when they’re coming home. Chances are other people will say, ‘Oh, my dog does it too.’
KW At your lecture on Friday I was thinking that you must sometimes encounter people, including other scientists, with a strong resistance to your approach. In your latest book you talk about scepticism, and about the die-hard type of professional skeptic (spelled with a ‘k’).
RS The point of what I’m doing is to talk not about science backed up by hundreds of committees, thousands of professors, and many tons of textbooks. I’m talking about science on the leading edge, where it’s not clear which way things are going be cause we don’t know, and I’m dealing with areas which we don’t know about. The normal approach is to say to people: ‘Well, scientists have now found that…’, and hand down truth from on high. That’s the standard method of science popularization, but, t hese are areas which scientists have not thought about. They have nothing much to say, because these are areas they have been so prejudiced against, or there has been such a strong taboo against investigating. The areas I’m talking about are quite unkno wn, quite undecided, where the questions are all open. Rather than saying to people, ‘Ok, these are the answers,’ I’m really saying, ‘These are the questions, and these are the ways in which we can investigate them.’ Science can be different from the wa y it’s been in the past. It can be participatory. Anyone can be part of the process. Right now, any opinion anyone has about whether dogs can or cannot really tell when their owner is coming home by some unknown means…nobody knows. The weight of evi dence suggests they can. Millions of dog owners find that this happens. Scientists have never investigated this phenomenon and have nothing to bring to bear except their prejudices. If they come out with a strong opinion against it, it’s mere prejudice . It’s really an open question- one that only empirical inquiry can decide. It’s really an attempt to make the scientific process open and out there. Some skeptics may indeed say, ‘Well, we’ll only believe things that have got tons of textbooks and hun dreds of National Science Foundation Committees backing them up, and lots and lots of professors. If they’re on our side then we must be right.’ Well, that’s just saying that somehow the established paradigm or majority opinion at any given time must be the right one. We know from the study of history that this is a very risky position to adopt. They’re the kind of people who in the middle ages would’ve believed everything that the Pope said, or in the 19th century would’ve believed that the universe is made of billiard ball atoms. There’s a certain kind of scepticism that can’t bear uncertainty. There are people like that. I encounter them all the time. Those who think that science should be a matter of certitude. They want science to be like a kind of religion, but where everything, instead of being belief, is fact and totally certain. But it is really not like that. It’s a matter of theories. The mechanistic theory of nature is a theory of nature, and one that I think is wrong, or at least too limited. It’s not an eternal truth. Even the constants of nature, as I’ve shown in my book, Seven Experiments That Could Change the World, the so-called absolute constants, like the speed of light, when you look at the actual data, don’t appe ar to be constant at all, and then they have to say, ‘Oh, well, we don’t really need to pay attention to the data, because we know they’re constant.’ Well, that’s an act of faith, you see. The same people who say they trust empirical data are in a diffi cult position when it comes to the constants, because the data doesn’t support constancy, so, in fact, they’re coming back to belief or faith. I’m trying to be skeptical not just about things science hasn’t taken on board- most skeptics with a ‘k’ are sk eptical about everything that’s not part of established science, like the paranormal, but when it comes to established, they’re totally credulous. They believe every word of it, and as scientific opinions change their opinions move along with the latest issue of Scientific American. That’s not true scepticism. I have no objection to skeptics if they’re real skeptics and they really focus on their scepticism on any belief, including those of established science.
KW That kind of open-endedness could feel very de-stabilizing to someone with a lot invested in the conventionally agreed-upon paradigm.
RS Yes. Then they shouldn’t call themselves skeptics. Because a truly skeptical position would be a very uncertain one.
