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From: ckk@pobox.com (Chris Koenigsberg)
Subject: Re: Sheldrake reducks (was Re: Secrets of AI
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Date: Tue, 7 Jan 1997 23:52:15 GMT
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I actually formed a musical group called "Morphic Resonance", back in
1984, after I read Sheldrake's book "The Hypothesis of Formative
Causation". I didn't know if it made sense or not as a theory, but it
was a great name for a musical group! :-) :-) so, hello to any of you
scientists reading this, in Pittsburgh PA, who saw us play, from 1984
through 1991 when I left town...

Sheldrake's idea, reduced to vague sound bites, was basically
analogous to ice skating. Your skates cut grooves in the ice as you
skate along in a particular direction. But they also may be influenced
by previous grooves, already cut by previous skaters. And if you stay
within previous grooves, they get deeper over time, harder and harder
to ignore, easier and easier to just follow along.

Sheldrake's idea was that there are "chreodes", paths in space and
time, taken by anything which develops morphology (structural form) or
exhibits repetitive behavior patterns, which are somehow "cut into the
ice", in something he called "morphic resonance". And the grooves of
each skater, or the "chreodes" of each new developing thing, also are
influenced by previous grooves in the ice.

Thus, we know that a developing embryo is constrained as it grows, in
certain ways, by genetic code, carried out by protein synthesis
etc. But certain "decisions", certain allowable variations in shape
and form along the way, are "arbitrary", not influenced one way or the
other by the genetic code itself.

Somehow, Sheldrake proposed, these "arbitrary decisions" are actually
the things which follow those "chreodes", which cut "grooves in the
ice", like skaters, and are also influenced by the "morphic resonance"
of previous grooves in the "ice". That's where the "DNA is like a
radio tuning into these additional signals" analogy comes in; the
arbitrary "decisions", in embryonic development, not directly governed
by any genetic code, could be influenced, according to Sheldrake, by
this "morphic resonance" from previous embryonic developments.

It's a kind of "snowball effect", and another famous example he gave
was the "Hundredth Monkey Effect"; supposedly several members of a
species of monkey (being observed and documented by some
experimenters) learned to wash their potatoes in salt water, so they'd
taste better. And the experimenters were surprised to discover that
soon OTHER monkeys, on faraway islands, suddenly began washing THEIR
potatoes too. It was as if the first monkeys' salt washing behavior,
once there were enough of them (thus the "hundredth monkey effect")
had created enough "morphic resonance" to influence the other more
distant monkeys. I don't know if it's crap or not, probably is, but
Sheldrake gave references in his book, to the original reports.

Even non living things which exhibit structural development, he
hypothesized, might be affected by morphic resonance. Certain proteins
can fold up either right-handed or left-handed, but don't do so in
even, random proportions. What causes the majority of them to fold in
one certain, apparently arbitrary way? Morphic resonance, he says;
previous proteins folded a certain way arbitrarily, but they cut the
"morphic resonance" grooves that way in the "chreode ice", so
subsequent ones are more likely to do the same, to "follow the
deepening grooves".

Supposedly, in another example given in Sheldrake's book, there was a
long-running, large-scale experiment in training rats to learn mazes,
and then feeding their brains to other rats, to see if THEY'D learn
the same maze faster. The experimenters hoped to show the transmission
of learning somehow in some proteins or something. Their results were
negative, no increased learning in new rats who'd been fed learned
brains, compared to rats who HADN'T been fed learned brains. So they
ended the experiment, after publishing the data.

But Sheldrake re-interprets the published data from this
experiment. He claims that actually ALL future generations of rats
learned the maze faster than previous ones, regardless of whether they
were fed brains, or were offspring of trained rats, or were just other
random rats in future generations. So his hypothesis was that the
"morphic resonance" of the maze training was increasing over time,
affecting future generations so they'd ALL learn faster.

A strict Darwinian theory would expect that offspring of
quicker-learning rats would learn quicker than offspring of
slower-learning rats. A "Lamarckian" theory would expect that just
being trained would somehow be passed on to a rat's actual
offspring. A theory of learning encoded in proteins somehow would
expect that a rat learned faster after being fed brains of trained
rats. But Sheldrake's theory is different from all these, he claimed
that ALL future rats learned faster, both offspring and non-offspring
of faster learners, both who had been fed learned brains and who
hadn't. So his theory was neither Darwinian nor "Lamarckian", in that
anyone can tune into "morphic resonance" independently of genetic
inheritance.

That's how I understood it back in 1984 when I read his book. As I
said, I don't know if it has any validity as a theory, whether it has
been disproven experimentally or not, but it was a great name for a
musical group! :-)

--------------------
Chris Koenigsberg: ckk@pobox.com
<URL: http://www.pobox.com/~ckk>

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