Is Morphic Resonance Real

Landon Caeli said:

Well, honestly, unless they're talking about Morphic Resonance, I'm not so interested at the moment.

Click to expand...

No actual scientists are talking about "morphic resonance".

Landon Caeli said:

AI Overview

Morphic resonance is
a theory proposed by biologist Rupert Sheldrake that suggests all natural systems, including organisms and crystals, have a collective memory that influences their form and behavior over time. This proposed mechanism of "formative causation" claims that past forms and behaviors of similar systems create a cumulative, invisible influence that shapes the development and patterns of present systems, rather than being governed by fixed physical laws alone. It implies that nature is habitual and that new behaviors can spread more rapidly through a species because of this shared, non-physical memory.

Key concepts

Collective memory: Each species, from animals to plants, possesses a collective memory that individuals can access and to which they contribute.

Habitual nature: The theory suggests that the regularities of nature are more like habits that have been reinforced by repetition, rather than being immutable laws.

Similarity: The resonance is based on similarity. The more similar an organism or system is to past ones, the greater the influence it will have.

Behavior and form: Morphic resonance is said to influence both the physical form and the behavior of a system. For example, it is proposed to explain instincts and how certain patterns of behavior, like a new trick learned by rats in one location, can be learned more quickly by other rats of the same breed elsewhere.

Individual memory: The resonance of a system with its own past is also suggested as a way to explain individual memory, where memories are not entirely stored in the brain but are accessed through a resonance with the brain's past states.

Click to expand...

I have a personal life principle similar to it based on something I've observed for many years.

It gives me certain advantages I prefer to keep. The vast majority don't care enough so I have no intention of sharing it.

Landon Caeli said:

This is the solution I have been looking for, in regards to why convergent evolution exists - why an octagon shaped species on the north side of the planet looks almost exactly like a species on the south end, completely unrelated, and having evolved separately from one another. Couldn't it be true, that the one species existed first, and the successes were somehow *easier* to develop then for another.

The amount of times, and the amount of crabs that have evolved, completely unrelated - Couldn't it be, because it happened once, and twice, and then three - and then many more because of morphic resonance?

View attachment 373934

Convergent evolution - Wikipedia Convergent evolution - Wikipedia

Click to expand...

I think this idea is one of many under the heading of 'The third way'. Which is basically ideas that are trying to find a middle ground or expanded avenues of research that can better explain the observations.

Another idea is the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis or EES. Which basically incoporates a bunch of ideas that expand on evolution and developmental aspects. One well supported idea is Developmental Bias and related to this Developmental Plasticity.

Developmental bias may help explain convergent evolution in that there is a basic toolbox of core genetics that will always produce certain outcomes and not the result of complete radomness and natural selection. Rather there are only certain phenotypes that can be produced.

Developmental plasticity is the scope in which creatures can naturally change to their enviornment. Sometimes this is not geneticially encoded but a morphological change due to envionmental pressues that may later be incorporated. But not necessarily for survival. To show there is a fair degree of flexibility within the existing genomes.


There are a number ideas under the third way. From memory biologist James Shapiro mentions the idea of Natural Genetic Engineering where organisms can actively modify their own genomes and there are Non-Random Variation.


I like Sheldrakes openness. Which just brought to mind another I think Sheldrake refers to Donald Hoffman who also has produced some interesting ideas.

But there definitely seems to be a trend towards a more holistic view of life. I think a more interactive, self organising and organic view of life where life itself either by agency or by the well designed mechanisms that allow life to adapt and regenerate new solutions to their environments.

The basic difference in all these ideas is that the standard views exclude anything that may indicate design or pre loaded design and agency of creatures. Everything has to be limited to random and naturalistic processes that do the sorting and creating.

But part of the reason why these alternative ideas are coming up is that the standard models across a number of fields don't fit the observations. Like convergent evolution just happening to be a big coincident. So often these ideas though perhaps not yet exact are the most promising.

I'm about to teach a short OLLI course "What Your Dog Thinks", along with a well-regarded dog trainer. It was humbling to read the literature and see how much philosophical, scientific, and theological work there has been on the issue of animal sentience.

Being untrained as a theologian, I'm struggling through The Wisdom of the Liminal, by Notre Dame professor Celia Deane-Drummond. Does anyone have any familarity with it or Professor Deane-Drummond's ideas?

Landon Caeli said:

• Harvard Water Maze Experiment: A series of experiments started by William McDougall at Harvard in the 1920s involved training rats to escape from a water maze by avoiding a brightly lit pathway (which resulted in an electric shock).
  • Generational Improvement: Over many generations (up to 22 in some studies), rats learned the maze significantly faster. The initial rats required an average of around 150 shocks to learn, while later generations needed only about 20.
  • Control Groups' Improvement: Crucially, Sheldrake points out that even control rats whose parents had never been trained showed the same rate of improvement, suggesting the ability was not passed genetically but through a wider influence.
• • Global Spread of Learning: This is the core of the morphic resonance argument. When the same experiment was replicated with rats of the same breed in Edinburgh (Scotland) and Melbourne (Australia), those first-generation rats started their learning at the advanced rate where the Harvard rats had left off. The knowledge seemed to be instantly and non-locally accessible to rats of the same species and breed.

Sheldrake's Interpretation
According to Sheldrake, this phenomenon occurs because:

• Repeated behavior forms a "morphogenetic field" which acts as a kind of species-wide collective memory.
• Individual animals can "tune in" to this field through a process called morphic resonance, making it easier for them to learn behaviors that many other members of their species have already mastered, even without any physical communication or genetic link.

Click to expand...

The Harvard Water Maze Experiment has been heavily criticised for poor controls, statistically weak data, being vulnerable to experimenter bias, and unblinded scoring. Somewhat understandable, as many modern control & blinding regimens weren't used at the time.

The major difficulty with the work is that attempts to replicate it with modern controls have failed, and a number of effects that McDougall was unaware of, or did not report, were found to significantly alter performance and could result in improvements unrelated to learning.

McDougall's conclusions are likely unreliable as the task itself is ambiguous, and there is disagreement on what is being measured - whether escape behaviour, navigation, cue-based learning, or stress-driven strategies.

Since McDougall was said to be a Lamarckian, it has been suggested that selective reporting & confirmation bias were also at play.

FrumiousBandersnatch said:

The major difficulty with the work is that attempts to replicate it with modern controls have failed,

Click to expand...

That alone kills the theory; if one can't reproduce the results of a reported experiment, no one with any sense will accept it.