Morphic Resonance: How Nature Remembers

Rupert Sheldrake and the Radical Idea That the Laws of Nature Are Habits

Imagine you are watching a river carve its way through a valley. The first trickle of water has no path. It finds its way through soil and rock by pure chance, eroding a groove that is shallow and uncertain. But as more water follows, something shifts. The groove deepens. The channel widens. Each successive flow finds the path easier, faster, more defined — not because someone built a canal, but because the river itself has created a memory in the landscape.

Now imagine that this principle applies not just to rivers, but to everything. To crystals forming in a laboratory. To proteins folding in a cell. To baby birds learning their first song. To the way your heart beats, your neurons fire, the way galaxies spiral into shape. Imagine that nature itself has memory — that the patterns of the past shape the possibilities of the present, not through material inheritance alone, but through a kind of resonance that operates across time and space.

This is the central thesis of Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of morphic resonance. And it is one of the most controversial, provocative, and potentially transformative ideas in the history of science.

The Man Behind the Heresy

Rupert Sheldrake was not an outsider lobbing criticisms at science from the margins. He was science’s golden child. Born in 1942 in Newark-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire, he won a Major Open Scholarship to Clare College, Cambridge, where he earned a Double First Class Honours in Natural Sciences and received the University Botany Prize. In 1963, he was awarded a Frank Knox Fellowship at Harvard, where he studied the philosophy and history of science. He returned to Cambridge for his PhD in biochemistry, completing a thesis on “The Production of Hormones in Higher Plants.”

From 1967 to 1973, as the Rosenheim Research Fellow of the Royal Society, Sheldrake did pioneering work on plant development. Together with Philip Rubery, he discovered the mechanism of polar auxin transport — the process by which the plant hormone auxin is carried from shoots toward roots, governing how a plant shapes itself. This was real, mainstream, published-in-top-journals science.

Then Sheldrake went to India. From 1974 to 1978, he worked as principal plant physiologist at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) in Hyderabad. And somewhere between the laboratory benches and the banyan trees, between Western mechanism and Eastern philosophy, the question crystallized in his mind that would change the trajectory of his life: What actually shapes living things?

Not what genes do they have. Not what chemicals are present. But what invisible force organizes trillions of molecules into the specific, coherent, wildly improbable form of a living organism?

The Question Mechanistic Biology Cannot Answer

Consider a flatworm. If you cut a flatworm in half, both halves regenerate into complete organisms. The head end grows a new tail. The tail end grows a new head. This is not a trivial phenomenon. Every cell in the flatworm contains the same DNA. The DNA does not change when you cut the worm in half. Yet somehow, the cells in the tail know to make a head, and the cells in the head know to make a tail.

DNA provides the recipe for proteins. It is the cookbook, not the chef. It tells a cell how to make hemoglobin or collagen, but it does not explain why hemoglobin ends up in your blood and collagen ends up in your tendons. It does not explain the shape of your hand, the structure of your eye, or why your arms and legs develop differently even though the cells in both limbs carry identical genetic instructions.

The mainstream answer is that gene regulation handles this — different genes are switched on and off in different cells at different times. And this is true, as far as it goes. But it raises a deeper question: what orchestrates the switching? What is the conductor that tells the violin section to play here and the percussion to come in there? You can map every instrument in the orchestra and still not explain the symphony.

This is the problem Sheldrake tackled in his 1981 book A New Science of Life. And his answer was morphic resonance.

The Theory

Morphic resonance proposes that self-organizing systems — from molecules to minds — inherit a collective memory from all previous similar systems. This memory is not stored in any material structure. It is not encoded in DNA or etched into crystals. It exists in what Sheldrake calls morphic fields — nonmaterial regions of influence that extend through space and persist through time.

The mechanism is resonance. Just as a tuning fork vibrates in response to a sound of its own frequency, a developing organism resonates with the morphic fields of all previous organisms of its kind. A growing oak tree resonates with the accumulated experience of every oak tree that has ever grown. A crystallizing molecule of sodium chloride resonates with every sodium chloride crystal that has ever formed.

This resonance is not mystical. Sheldrake frames it as analogous to other field effects in physics. Gravitational fields shape the movement of planets without any physical connection between them. Electromagnetic fields organize the behavior of charged particles across vast distances. Morphic fields, Sheldrake proposes, organize the behavior of complex systems across time.

The key insight is cumulative memory. The more often a pattern has been repeated, the stronger the morphic field becomes, and the more probable it is that the pattern will be repeated again. This means the so-called “laws” of nature are not eternal edicts written at the moment of the Big Bang. They are habits — patterns that have been repeated so many times they appear fixed, just as a river channel appears permanent until a flood carves a new path.

Habits, Not Laws

This reframing is perhaps the most radical aspect of morphic resonance. Western science since Newton has assumed that the laws of nature are eternal and immutable — that the gravitational constant, the speed of light, and the behavior of atoms are the same today as they were at the birth of the universe and will be the same at its end.

But Sheldrake asks: how do we know this? We have been measuring physical constants for a few hundred years at most. The assumption of their constancy is exactly that — an assumption, not an observation. And when you look at the actual measurements, interesting things appear.

Between 1928 and 1945, measured values of the speed of light dropped by about 20 km/s. Then, in 1948, they went back up. The gravitational constant G, supposedly one of the most fundamental numbers in physics, varies between measurements by as much as 1.3% — a range far larger than the precision of the instruments used. In 1998, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology published values of G measured on different days that ranged from 6.64 to 6.73 in standard units.

When Sheldrake discussed these variations with the head of metrology at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, England, the response was revealing: “The speed of light couldn’t have actually changed. It’s a constant!” In 1972, the problem was “solved” by defining the meter in terms of the speed of light — locking the measurement into a circular definition so that any future variation would be invisible by construction.

Whether or not physical constants actually vary, Sheldrake’s point is that the assumption of their constancy is just that — an untested assumption elevated to the status of dogma.

The Reception: “A Book for Burning”

When A New Science of Life was published in 1981, the reaction from the scientific establishment was immediate and volcanic. Sir John Maddox, the editor of Nature — one of the most prestigious scientific journals in the world — published an editorial titled “A Book for Burning?” in which he declared Sheldrake’s work “the best candidate for burning there has been for many years.”

Maddox did not offer a scientific rebuttal. He offered an inquisition. In a 1994 BBC interview, he went further: “Sheldrake is putting forward magic instead of science, and that can be condemned in exactly the language that the Pope used to condemn Galileo, and for the same reason. It is heresy.”

The irony was not lost on Sheldrake or on many observers. The editor of a scientific journal was using the language of religious persecution to suppress a scientific hypothesis. The very accusation — that Sheldrake was being unscientific — was being delivered in the most unscientific manner possible: through authority and censorship rather than evidence and experiment.

Other scientists were more measured. The New Scientist, to its credit, sponsored a competition to devise empirical tests for morphic resonance. The winning idea involved testing whether people could learn Turkish nursery rhymes more easily than scrambled versions — the real rhymes having been resonated with by millions of Turkish children. The results were mixed but intriguing, sparking further experiments.

Why It Matters

The implications of morphic resonance, if validated, are staggering. They would mean that nature is not a machine but a living, remembering, evolving system. They would mean that consciousness and memory are not confined to brains but are woven into the fabric of reality itself. They would mean that every organism that has ever lived has left an imprint on the fields that shape all future organisms of its kind.

They would mean that when you learn something, you make it fractionally easier for every other human being to learn the same thing. That the accumulated wisdom of your ancestors is not just a metaphor but a literal inheritance transmitted through resonance. That the habits of nature are still forming, still deepening, still evolving.

And they would mean that the mechanistic worldview — the view that the universe is a dead machine made of inert particles governed by fixed laws — is not just incomplete, but fundamentally wrong. Not wrong in its details. Wrong in its foundational metaphor.

Perhaps nature is not a machine. Perhaps nature is more like a river — carrying the memory of every path it has ever carved, deepening its channels with each passing, and yet always capable of finding a new way through the landscape when the old channels can no longer serve.

What would it mean for how you live your life, if every thought you think and every habit you form leaves a trace in a field that the next generation will inherit?