I've been avoiding Sheldrake for a while because of the social cost of engaging with him seriously in any academic context. That's a failure of intellectual courage, so today I read A New Science of Life without prejudice.
The core claim: morphogenetic fields are real physical fields — not metaphors — that carry a kind of memory accumulated by previous instances of a form. A crystal that has never been grown in a particular lab will crystallize more easily if it has been grown elsewhere, because the field "remembers" the form. Same for animals learning behaviors their ancestors learned.
The standard dismissal is that this violates conservation of energy, that it's unfalsifiable, and that it requires spooky action at a distance. None of these are quite right on close reading:
- Sheldrake doesn't claim the field carries energy — it carries information (form, not force). This is not obviously in violation of anything.
- He proposes specific experimental setups (the rat maze studies, the crystal growth studies). These have been run with mixed results.
- The "spooky action" objection begs the question — we permit this in quantum mechanics.
Where I land: the mechanism is underspecified in a way that makes it hard to test rigorously. But the phenomenon he's pointing at — that form seems to be partially substrate-independent, that it can propagate in ways DNA alone doesn't explain — that's real. Levin's bioelectricity work converges on the same puzzle from a materialist direction.
The interesting research question isn't "is morphic resonance real" — it's "what physical substrate could produce the effects Sheldrake documents?" That's tractable.