A Critique of Sheldrake’s Morphic Resonance

Skipping the introductions for now, Sheldrake starts right in with a major misdirection. He critiques biology as primarily mechanistic. And by mechanistic he appears to mean reductionist mechanistic resulting in predictability. There is no problem with mechanism per se, all processes can be described in terms of their mechanical aspects. Few, however, can be summed up that way. It is reductionism that is the problem, the assumption that mechanistic processes are the only thing that is going on.

He is obviously no biologist. If you look at the work of such biologists as Maturana and Varela, and Warren McCulloch, the philosophers of science Isabelle Stengers and Ilya Prigogine, biosemiotician Jesper Hoffmeyer, as well as studies in ecology and population biology, you will see that a reductionist conception of biology has been thoroughly debunked for a long time.

In fact, even the notion that mechanism equates to predictability is considered out of date, ("’The more we know about our universe, the more difficult it becomes to believe in determinism.’ …According to Prigogine, determinism loses its explanatory power in the face of irreversibility and instability”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Prigogine).

So he proceeds to debunk the straw man of reductionist biology. So what? Reductionist theory was a seventeenth century reaction to the earlier position of the Church that God’s Hand directed everything and that independent inquiry into the nature of what we and the world are constituted punishable heresy.

Then he brings in teleology, calling it purposiveness, saying that evolution can account for purposiveness, which is antithetical to any sense of Darwinism except in the tautological sense that the purpose of life is to live. He posits three possible causes that “determine the goals of the process of development.” And here he brings in for the first time without any explanation what he calls a morphogenetic field. These three “causes” are simply words made up as placeholders for phenomena we don’t understand: “vital factors”, “morphogenetic fields” “genetic programs”. All three of these are what Bateson might call “dormitive principles”; words that put us to sleep by hiding the fact that they are pointing to something undefined.



OK, now he’s talking about signal proteins transmitting locational information. And again he uses the word mechanistic. One begins to wonder what he means by mechanistic. Location is a relationship. It is information derived by an organism by evaluation of difference. The receipt or creation of information constitutes a communication; not a mechanical event but rather a mental process.

One thing he ignores here is that no individual organism exists in a vacuum. Development of form doesn’t depend on preexisting factors alone. An organism, whether developing or sustaining, exists in context. Context is complex, variable, nested. Like the turtles of Turtle Island, it’s context all the way down. Development of form always occurs in response to context. I’ll repeat that. Development is responsive. It responds to context. If the context is sufficiently wrong, the organism will not develop at all, regardless of “genetic program” or “field effects”. This ignoring of context is a major epistemological mistake. An organism may be a whole entity unto itself, but it never occurs alone. An organism cannot occur without a population, a progenitor, a niche, a food supply, a terrain, etc. One of the grave mistakes of mechanistic reductionism is to take the context of the organism out of the equation. Why should we perpetuate that error, rendering all our subsequent thought fallacious, being based on false premises?

Chapter two

Three theories of morphogenesis. How did he pick these three? Are there others?

Not only does he elide the question of what is form, he conflates form in living systems and nonliving systems and objects. Form in objects is sufficiently accounted for by the material the object is made of and the forces it has undergone. Whether you examine a river-rolled rock or an erosion pattern, the properties of stone and water, gravity and the ensuing rotation of the earth and its weather are sufficient to account for the general process, and the history of the individual iteration of the process would describe the object’s distinctiveness.

But form in organisms is a different matter. The osteopaths say "Structure governs function". But the converse is also true. The process is circular. Function governs structure by shaping it. The structure of an organism directly reflects the needs of the organism in its environment.  Pebbles are rounded by their journey downstream. But fish are rounded by water in a different way. They have evolved and are born with a shape that both records and anticipates the need to move efficiently through water. It takes no mechanical tumbling to create their streamlined form. Water shapes the way fish grow and move, and the "map" of success in moving through water that exists in the fish genome determines how is shaped.

He claims that if physical laws are active and valid in morphogenesis, then it ought to be predictable in terms of the laws of physics. In the case of nonliving objects, they are somewhat, subject of course to the aforementioned limits of prediction.

But in the case of living systems or that subset of living systems we call organisms, that’s absurd. Physical laws may be active, they are always active, but they are not controlling. The organism is controlling the process. Even if the organism did not control its own development, a sufficiently complex physical phenomenon follows the laws of chaos theory: sensitive dependence upon initial conditions would make the resultant process at least as unpredictable as the path of a hurricane, a much less complex phenomenon than the most simple organism.

He also states that morphogenesis takes place spontaneously, and likens it to a house “spontaneously” building itself. More nonsense. Even a purely “physical” model of what is occurring requires energy to do work. A house has no metabolism to power its spontaneous self-assembly, nor the independent access to two by fours and concrete. There’s nothing “spontaneous” about growth and development. They are powered by the metabolism of the organism and directed by the internal template of the organism in communication with itself and its environment. And they are made possible by the organism actively obtaining the materials with which it builds itself. Even the accretion of a crystal, though spontaneous, is not without external requirements. It depends on the correct conditions (temperature, saturation, etc.). And it is also unpredictable. Think of a snowflake, a much more simple case of molecular assembly than even an amoeba. The final form of an individual snowflake is totally predictable in that the symmetry is hexagonal and self-similar. The final form is totally unpredictable in the details of its unfoldment.

He then demolishes vitalism, another eighteenth century theory that needs no debunking except perhaps among those religious fundamentalists who are opposed to science on principle.

Then he takes on what he calls the organism model of morphogenesis, which he claims involves fields. He admits “field terminology… remained ill-defined”. In other words, they are saying, “We think there’s something there that explains the stuff we can’t understand and we don’t know what it is, so we’ll call it a field so that we don’t have to point out its physical components.” But all the fields we have previously encountered are observable in terms of the laws of physics, so field theory ought to be considered under the mechanistic model, not the organism model.

The primary problem that he sees with the organismic model is that it is descriptive rather than analytical. He apparently finds that problem insignificant and stays with this model, rather than debunking it like the former two. This allows him the heuristic conjecture of a hypothetical field, whatever that may be. He goes on to investigate how this field might work. The primary problem that I see with the organism model is that he fails to define what he considers an organism. It would appear he defines it differently than a biologist would, but in the absence of rigorous description, all one is left with is implication.

Chapter three

He talks about the world being full of forms which we perceive.

If you are familiar with Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form you see that all form is created through the drawing of boundaries. In other words, it is perception that creates form. A boundary creates a distinction between a one and an other, between this and that. That difference does not reside in any material location, the difference is created in our mental process through abstracting a way to identify location and other properties, comparing a property in two locations, drawing the boundary. A creative act. Difference inheres in the comparison, not in the objects compared. Any “thing” has an infinity of potential differentiations in it.  Things don’t exist in themselves, a “thing” is a mental abstraction of a part of the universe based on observation of difference. Form is built of difference.

And we perceive nothing directly. All perception is mediated though our neurological patterning apparatus, and we can say nothing about what it actually “out there”. Yes, there is consensus reality, and it seems to have some fairly tight correlations, but still all perception is map, not territory. So any forms we perceive are “in” our perception, not “in” the world. Or more accurately, they are generated at the interface of our (patterned) perception and the world. That’s an interaction, not a location.

Forms are sets of relationships. Relationships between parts, relationships between perceiver and perceived.

Sheldrake is right, form cannot be measured. Form can, however, often be described numerically. But number is an artifact of counting, not of measurement. Quantity is different from number. Measurement results in quantity. Counting results in number. I would call number a perceptual archetype. Many animals have the ability to number, and it would appear that so does our developmental process. He claims that most forms cannot be represented symbolically (mathematically or verbally), that they are too complex. But plants can be described algorithmically. (c.f. http://algorithmicbotany.org/) It is not the measurements, the quantity, that can specify form, it is number, the ratios, the relationships. Life is built of relationships.

 Chapter four

At this point I am losing my ability to focus on his arguments. He seems primarily to be making statements of how the morphogenetic field would work if it existed. Many of his claims come from physics and chemistry. Those are not my fields of study, so I really can’t say much about them. But I fail to comprehend how the morphogenetic field differs from the Flying Spaghetti Monster. What happened to Occam’s Razor? Why do we need new explanatory principles? Why does he find the laws of physics to be either inadequate or of optional applicability?

I must admit I am something of a Pythagorean. I do believe that understanding the mathematical underpinnings of the world gives us insight into how this universe we are part of is constituted. But I don’t believe that it can be explained, just as a whole system cannot be fully represented by a smaller subsystem.

He says, “The morphogenetic field is part of the system-to-be. … the rest of the field is not yet … filled out”.” How does this differ from the embryo of an organism?

If morphogenetic fields cause crystals to form differently after other crystals have “shown the way”, why did not the eternal morphogenetic field preform those crystals in the first place? What does he mean by habits? My understanding of the word habit is that it means something an individual organism has learned to do so thoroughly such that it no longer requires conscious attention. The habit of using the clutch when one slows down disappears fairly easily after one learns to drive an automatic, though it may be retained as a tendency to drive with the left foot on the brake.

How is this word applied to the organization of non-living matter/energy? He seems to be positing an explanation for change that is not in itself changing, an eternal morphogenetic field that nevertheless develops habits.

If the field is eternal, what invokes it? What cancels it? If the field changes, by what process do the new habits come to take precedence over the old ones? There must be communication with it, and decisions made, and I don’t see such a process or the mechanism for it to occur. He equates a morphogenetic field with the probability structure of an atom. However the probability structure of an atom is a description, not a cause. There seems to be a general confusion between descriptions and causes in this book.

Either the morphogenetic field is eternal, in which case we are mystified as to what causes it to be active at one time or place and not another, or it is developing, in which case an action is required that, as he says, is unlike any known physical action. What is he saying? That it is impossible either way? That it has a physical action despite being physically imperceptible? That the laws of physics are selectively in abeyance? Under what circumstances are the laws of physics to be applicable? I know he doesn’t believe they are laws, but some of them appear to still be in effect. And what happens to the eternal morphogenetic field when a species goes extinct? Or when a geologic upheaval reshapes the terrain?

Chapter six

He states that, unlike amoebas or stem cells, cells that are specialized to a particular tissue do not continue to reproduce by division and growth. But they do.

In most organisms that reproduce sexually, the polarity of the zygote originates in the location of the sperm in the fertilization of the ovum.

He talks about absolute positions of things, but I’m afraid I’m clueless what that could possibly mean. All positions are relative.

He is saying that the size of a system is irrelevant, that form is scalable. That may be true of a crystal, but it is not true of an organism, in which the variables of homeostasis need to be kept within certain ranges. A twelve foot tall human of normal human exterior proportions would spontaneously overheat and probably die because the surface to volume ratio would no longer be able to sustain an appropriate temperature.

He is redefining so many words as to be incomprehensible. I had to look up morphic unit, which is defined on page 74 as a system or organism. He seems to be redefining organism to include nonliving structures.  I don’t accept that, but if I did, then why would he need the neologism morphic unit, when he is happy to use the word organism for the same thing?

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I give up. I can no longer follow his arguments. There is a world of “stuff’, matter and energy and their field effects. All we know about it is what we can observe of its regularities. We do not know, and cannot know, what it is “in itself”.  What we observe about stuff constitutes physics and chemistry. Mass, velocity, direction, oxidation number, molecular weight, electron shells, etc.  I don’t understand fields, but I know they are aspects of matter/energy, not separate from matter/energy.

Then there is the world of living things. Living things are built of stuff, but the laws of stuff are not the controlling factors in living beings. All the processes of life are mental processes. They are shaped by the receipt and transmission of information. Information is “a difference that makes a difference” to the organism or living system that is capable of receiving it. The nutrient gradient is information to an amoeba. The location the sperm entered the egg is information to the blastocyst. Gravity is information to a sprouting seed. The cotyledons don’t sink down in accordance with gravity, they push up. The seed has within it the preparedness to perceive gravity and grow its roots towards it and its leaves away from it.

Living organisms can be defined so as to be recognizable. They derive energy – metabolic, not purely kinetic, energy from an external source. They use that energy to perpetuate their far-from-thermal-equilibrium form. They reproduce. They perceive or differentiate. They have a set of feedback loops that enable them to keep a homeostasis that perpetuates their aliveness.

OK, I’m starting over.

What does Sheldrake mean by a field? A magnetic field or a gravitational field affects all bodies similarly. They are consistently observable, mathematically defined and proportional to certain measurable physical properties.

But the proposed morphic field acts selectively on some bodies but not others, at some times and not others. There is no observable regularity to the occurrence of the field. That would imply some sort of decision process at work invoking the field at some times but not others.

To me, that’s the kicker. There is no acknowledgement of the decisions involved in growth and development. The organism somehow knows which field to respond to, when and where. But no mechanism for the interaction between the organism and the field is proposed. The morphic field can be invoked to explain anything. But in its ability to explain everything, it explains nothing. It’s the same as saying it is the way it is because it is that way. In a world where anything is possible simply through the development of a habit, you have no need for science and long drawn out explanations of the mechanisms involved in life. There is no use learning how to heal a body or an ecosystem if its morphic field is going to develop new habits that negate what you know. There is no use learning to cross an ocean or build a computer if a mutating morphic field is going to change the relationship between the map and the territory when you are halfway there.

I don’t comprehend what is wrong with using the word laws to describe things we see in the universe. The concept of law may derive from fiats handed down by rulers, but that doesn’t mean that’s what we think they are, any more than pine-“apples” grow on trees. The “laws” of physics are simply observed regularities.  If he finds them friendlier calling them “habits” in private, that’s his prerogative. But in philosophic discourse it’s unfortunate, as it confuses what a habit is. Humpty Dumpty (in Alice in Wonderland) calls things what he wants to call them, claiming that makes him, not the word, master. But dominating one’s own vocabulary is not the point. Clear communication is the point. Words are only tools. Observed regularities are all we have on which to base our understanding of the world. Certainly as our knowledge and tools change our understanding of the laws changes. But that’s our understanding, not the laws. Quantum phenomena seem to follow different laws from macroscopic phenomena, and they are perhaps not easily grasped, but they are still observed regularities. Their description is probabilistic, but not random. Chaos theory, on the other hand, seems to provide much less predictability, but even given sensitive dependence on initial conditions, observable regularities occur.

My understanding is that growth is regulated at all stages by the cell’s reception and transmission of messages regarding what’s already laid down, what’s next, and what the conditions it has to cope with are. Exactly how the DNA encodes this is not clear, and I, not being a microbiologist, wouldn’t really care anyway. But the understanding occurs at the interfaces. But just as a person cooking needs the recipe and the ingredients and the tools, the cell growing needs the genetic material, the nourishment, and its own metabolism. The recipe might say if you want a lighter cake, use less butter. If the recipe is correct and you follow it you get what you want. The DNA might say if there are already four divisions between fingers, don’t divide again. If the DNA is correct and nothing interferes with the embryo’s reading and implementation of it, you get five fingers.

The physical world is not explained. Never has been. It is observed and described. The fact that there are observable regularities; laws, waves, numbers, chemical elements, crystal structures, impacts with transmission of force, substances with consistent properties seems to indicate there is something “here”. But really, we don’t know, nor can we know, what that is or how to explain it. We know what we perceive, but not how we perceive. We know some aspects of how we perceive, i.e. we create transforms or representations of what our organs of perception have encountered and compile them into a gestalt. But there’s so much more to it than that, it’s another essay entirely, and can never be complete, as the (small) consciousness can never encompass the (vastly larger) unconscious processes of living.

 Without a distinction between living systems or mind(s) and stuff or substance, I see no description of the world as I know it. And since he is not talking about the world as I know it, he does not interest me. I fail to comprehend the point, and I’m tired of picking out the bits that specifically make no sense to me within the larger story that makes no sense to me to the point that I just go Tilt. Yes he refers to important distinctions between the generally accepted mechanistic view of things and what is actually happening, but that’s really a critique of our educational system. Life is not a mechanism. Stop beating a dead horse, stop inventing an extra mechanism to explain what the known mechanisms don’t explain, and look at what makes difference possible: the ability to communicate and learn. DNA communicates with cells. Cells communicate with each other. Organisms communicate. Nerve cells communicate. Organelles communicate. They discern and respond. They transmit selectively. Decisions are being made at every level. Syntheses are occurring. None of the descriptions of morphogenetic fields explain how the control systems work. How organisms stop growing. Which of various conflicting morphogenetic fields takes effect under what conditions. How anything new is created. How evolution occurs. Biological evolution is not simple change, it is a recursive stochastic self-referential process perpetuating the tautology that this (changing) organism is part of this (changing) population that coexists with this (changing) environment.

Regarding Lamarckian inheritance, it’s problematic for a number of reasons. Perhaps the primary one is this: Sexual reproduction is in essence a fact checking operation. If my DNA and your DNA match sufficiently, our offspring will be viable. If not, we cannot procreate together. If the germ plasm of an organism is affected directly by changes in its life experience, soon the DNA would diverge too far for procreation. The breeding population of a species would shatter and cease to function, and the creatures so affected would go extinct. There is also the problem of inconsistencies in the data. Yes, fruit fly bithorax becomes more common, as a genotype able to create bithorax viably under certain stresses becomes more dominant in the population. But Jews have been circumsizing for millennia. You’d think such an unpleasant procedure would give the organism plenty of impetus to produce progeny without foreskins if possible, It hasn’t happened yet. What decides when the inheritance of acquired traits occurs?

One could consider the morphogenetic germ or morphogenetic field to be a metaphoric expression identical with what we call the chromosomes. Regardless of what constitutes it, the question is, how is it selectively applied, what causes it to be invoked or turned off?