Around the time 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 dictated by DNA alone. Instead, morphogenetic fields established at the time first organism of a particular type takes form provides a template for the form that all future organisms take.
Sheldrake extends the concept of these theoretical morphogeneic fields in biological cells are particular case of a phenomenon he dubs morphic fields.
According to Sheldrake, the universe is a nested hierarchy of natural units of organization, which include biological cells and also molecules, crystals, plants, animals, patterns of instinctive behavior, social groups, elements of culture, ecosystems, planets, planetary systems and galaxies, that he calls morphic units.
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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