Morphic Fields

If morphic resonance is the memory of nature, morphic fields are what that memory shapes. A morphic field, in Rupert Sheldrake's definition, is "a field within and around a morphic unit which organizes its characteristic structure and pattern of activity." Fields of this kind, he proposes, organise everything from molecules and cells to instincts, minds and societies — and they are his answer to one of biology's oldest unsolved problems.

The problem of form

Every cell in a body carries the same genes, yet cells build utterly different structures. As Sheldrake puts it, an arm and a leg are chemically identical — "if ground up and analyzed biochemically, they would be indistinguishable. But they have different shapes. Something other than the genes and the proteins they code for is needed to explain their form." That something, he argues, is the morphogenetic field: a morphic field that draws a developing organism toward the form characteristic of its kind, much as a magnetic field arranges iron filings into a pattern that is in no single filing.

How the fields work

Morphic fields are described as probabilistic, ordering influences, explicitly likened to the fields of physics. "Like quantum fields, they work probabilistically," Sheldrake writes. "They restrict, or impose order on, the inherent indeterminism of the systems under their influence." A protein field guides a chain of amino acids to fold into one shape out of the many that are energetically possible; a social field coordinates the movements of a flock of birds or a school of fish. Crucially, the fields carry information, not energy — they shape how energy flows without adding to it, which is how Sheldrake answers the objection that his fields would violate the conservation of energy.

A family of fields

The same idea runs up through every level of nature as a family of fields: morphogenetic fields organise bodily form; behavioural and motor fields organise instinct and movement; mental and perceptual fields organise mental activity — and, reaching beyond the body, give rise to The Extended Mind; and social and cultural fields coordinate animal societies and human cultures.

Wholes within wholes

Sheldrake's picture is one of wholes nested inside larger wholes — atoms within molecules, molecules within crystals, cells within tissues, tissues within organs, organs within organisms, organisms within social groups. Each is a "morphic unit" or holon, organised by its own field, and at every level "the whole is more than the sum of the parts." Borrowing from the mathematician René Thom and the biologist C. H. Waddington, he describes each field as containing attractors — the end-states toward which a system is drawn — and chreodes, the canalised pathways of development along which it travels.

A century of fields

Sheldrake is careful to credit those who came before him. Biologists have invoked "morphogenetic fields" for a century: Hans Driesch proposed a non-material, goal-directed principle he called entelechy; Alexander Gurwitsch introduced the term morphogenetic field; Paul Weiss developed it; and C. H. Waddington gave us the chreode and the famous image of the epigenetic landscape, a ball rolling down a branching valley. The mainstream treated such fields as mere shorthand for unknown physico-chemical processes. Sheldrake's claim is that they are real, not reducible to known physics — and that what they always lacked, a source of their form-giving order and a means of passing it on, is supplied by morphic resonance. After a decade working in developmental biology, he writes, he "came to the conclusion that these fields were not just a way of talking about standard mechanistic processes, but something really new."

Sources

Primary sources: Rupert Sheldrake, "Morphic Fields," World Futures 62 (2006): 31–41 · A New Science of Life (1981; rev. Morphic Resonance, 2009), especially the chapters on morphogenetic fields · The Presence of the Past (1988) · and the glossary at sheldrake.org, where his definitions of morphic field, morphic unit, chreode and entelechy are given in full.