Around the same time as the Hundredth Monkey story had begun being spread via Ken Keyes book, a British biologist Rupert Sheldrake proposed a theory called Morphogenic Fields put forth in his book, A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance,
Sheldrake is an academic researcher who sides with a theoretical school of biology, currently in disfavor, which holds that heredity in living organism is not governed by DNA alone. Instead, morphogenetic fields established at the time the first organism formed are the basis of all future organisms in its family tree.
Sheldrake posits that these theoretical morphogeneic fields in biological cells are particular case of what he terms morphic fields. According to Sheldrake is a nested hierarchy of other natural units of organization, including atoms, molecules, crystals, cells, plants, animals, patterns of instinctive behavior, social groups, elements of culture, ecosystems, planets, planetary systems and galaxies he calls morphic units, and that each of these has its own morphic field. Once this morphic field, is established in one member of a morphic unit, it extends its influence to every other member by a principle he calls morphic resonance.
Morphic resonance, according to Sheldrake is,
. . . the basis of memory in nature….the idea of mysterious telepathy-type interconnections between organisms and of collective memories within species.
Sheldrake’s theory received a mixed reception from the scientific community This included one harsh review in September 1981, Nature published an editorial written by John Maddox, the journal’s senior editor, entitled “A book for burning?” Here is a video based on the review.
Listening to Maddox declare that Sheldrake’s book should be burned for precisely the same reason that the Church burned the works of Galileo, “. . . because it is heresy,” most likely would cause even a member of most skeptical among us to take pause.
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