# Chapter 2 - The Habits of Nature

The morning routine at the Christian ashram of Fr. Bede Griffiths, in the South Indian hill country near Kerala, ran to a rhythm that would have been unrecognizable to Sheldrake's Cambridge colleagues: dawn meditation, then hours of reading in Hindu and Christian mysticism side by side, then physical labor in the garden, then - in the heat of the afternoon, when a European visitor might reasonably have been expected to rest - long, unhurried conversation about whether the mechanistic picture of life he'd spent a decade being professionally trained in was actually adequate to the plants he'd spent that decade studying. Sheldrake spent several months there in 1968, and he did not stop being a biochemist while he was there. He kept working; a paper on auxin transport in pea stems, drafted partly at the ashram, would appear in a mainstream journal not long after. What changed was not his data. It was his growing conviction that the standard story - a fertilized cell, its genome, and nothing else, producing a coherently shaped organism - was doing more rhetorical work than explanatory work, and that no one in his field seemed troubled by the gap.

This is not the introduction you'd expect for a scientist who would spend the following decade as a mainstream, well-funded plant physiologist studying the biochemistry of tropical legumes at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, outside Hyderabad - publishing conventional papers on nitrogen fixation and pigeon-pea seed development, running field trials with Indian agronomists on crops that fed real people, in a job about as far from mysticism as biology gets. But both things are true of Rupert Sheldrake, and understanding how they fit together - the ashram and the biochemistry, the philosophical unrest and the rigorous experimental training - is the fastest way into understanding what morphic resonance actually is, and isn't.

## An Unusually Credentialed Heretic

It is worth dwelling on Sheldrake's early career for a moment, because the popular caricature of him - mystic, parapsychologist, TED-talk-banned pseudoscientist - tends to erase just how deep his mainstream training actually ran, and erasing that history makes it too easy to dismiss the hypothesis without engaging with where it actually came from.

Sheldrake read natural sciences at Clare College, Cambridge, taking a double first - the top classification - and specializing in biochemistry and cell biology. A Frank Knox Fellowship then took him to Harvard for a year to study philosophy and the history of science, an unusual detour for a bench scientist that matters enormously for what came later: it meant Sheldrake spent serious time with Aristotle, with the history of the concept of "form," and with how the mechanistic philosophy of Descartes had gradually replaced older, more organicist ways of thinking about living systems. He returned to Cambridge for a PhD in biochemistry and a Research Fellowship at Clare - by any measure, elite scientific credentialing, achieved through entirely conventional means.

His applied work was, if anything, even more conventionally productive: as a plant physiologist at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics in India, he worked on the physiology of pigeon peas and other legume crops, contributing to agricultural research with direct application to food security in the developing world. This is not the career trajectory of someone hostile to rigorous science, uninterested in evidence, or unfamiliar with the demands of controlled experimentation. It is the career trajectory of someone who spent roughly fifteen years fully embedded in mainstream biological research before deciding, deliberately and after long reflection, that mainstream biology was missing something structurally important - and who then spent the rest of his career trying to name what that something was.

## The Puzzle That Wouldn't Resolve

The specific puzzle, as we touched on in Chapter 1, was morphogenesis: the question of how organisms develop their characteristic forms. This had been a live, unresolved puzzle in biology for a very long time before Sheldrake came to it, and it's worth understanding its actual history, because morphic resonance did not spring from nowhere - it was Sheldrake's answer to a question that generations of embryologists before him had asked and failed to fully resolve.

In the early twentieth century, the German embryologist Hans Driesch performed an experiment that has become a staple of biology courses precisely because of how strange its result is. Driesch separated the first two cells of a sea urchin embryo - normally, these two cells would each go on to form half of a single urchin - and found that each separated cell, instead of forming a half-urchin, regulated its development to form a complete, smaller, but entirely normal urchin. Something in the system "knew" the target shape and could reorganize development to reach it even after a radical intervention that, on a purely mechanical, parts-assembly view of development, should have produced two half-organisms rather than two whole ones. Driesch was so struck by this capacity for what he called "harmonious equipotential systems" that he concluded biology needed a non-physical explanatory principle, which he called entelechy, borrowing the term from Aristotle. Driesch's entelechy was largely abandoned by mainstream biology in the following decades - it explained too little in mechanistic detail to generate testable predictions, and mechanistic embryology, armed increasingly with genetics, seemed to be making real progress without it.

But the underlying puzzle Driesch had identified - that developing organisms show a robust, goal-directed capacity to reach a target form even after significant perturbation, a property later biologists would call developmental canalization or regulative development - never actually went away. It was reframed, redescribed in the vocabulary of gene regulatory networks and morphogen gradients, and partially explained through decades of excellent molecular biology. But the deep "how" of it - how a genetic parts list becomes a specific, reliably reproduced three-dimensional form, robust to real-world perturbation - remains, honestly, an active area of research rather than a solved problem, as we'll explore in detail with the fairness it deserves in Chapter 11.

Sheldrake's contribution was to take this specific, technical, unresolved puzzle in developmental biology and generalize it dramatically. If form is not fully specified by genes and biochemistry alone, he reasoned, then whatever additional organizing principle is at work might not be limited to embryology. It might be a general feature of how self-organizing systems of every kind - crystals, cells, animal instincts, learned behaviors, even mental habits and social conventions - acquire and maintain their characteristic patterns. That generalization is either Sheldrake's greatest insight or his greatest overreach, depending on whom you ask, and the honest answer, this early in the book, is that nobody yet knows which.

## Formative Causation

Sheldrake's first full statement of the hypothesis appeared in his 1981 book _A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Formative Causation_. The term "formative causation" is worth pausing on, because it signals something important about how Sheldrake was trying to position his idea relative to existing physics. Conventional physics recognizes a small number of fundamental causal categories: the four fundamental forces (gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces), and various forms of energy transfer built from them. Sheldrake proposed formative causation as an additional causal category - not a new force in the electromagnetic sense, but a different kind of causal influence altogether, one that shapes the form and organization of a system through resonance with previous similar forms, rather than through the transfer of energy or momentum.

This is a crucial technical point that gets lost in a lot of popular treatments, so let's be precise about it. Sheldrake was not proposing morphic resonance as a fifth fundamental force of the ordinary kind, transmitted by some as-yet-undiscovered particle in the way gravity is (hypothetically) transmitted by gravitons. He was proposing something closer to a different category of causal relationship altogether - one that does not weaken with distance in the way physical forces do, is not blocked by any known form of physical shielding, and acts through similarity of pattern rather than through spatial proximity or a mediating physical field of the conventional kind. This is exactly what makes the hypothesis so hard to reconcile with existing physics (a problem we'll dig into properly in Chapter 15), and it's exactly what makes it, in Sheldrake's framing, potentially able to explain phenomena - instinct, telepathy-like effects, the coordinated behavior of flocks and schools - that conventional physical causation, transmitted at or below the speed of light through known fields, struggles to account for.

## Nature's Habits, Not Nature's Laws

The philosophical heart of Sheldrake's proposal, and the phrase that gives this chapter its title, is his re-description of the laws of nature as habits rather than fixed, eternal decrees. This idea did not originate with Sheldrake - it echoes, as we'll see in Chapter 5, philosophers going back to Charles Sanders Peirce, who speculated in the late nineteenth century that the laws of nature might themselves have evolved, becoming more fixed and reliable over cosmic time as the universe "practiced" them, rather than having been fully fixed from the instant of creation. Sheldrake's innovation was to try to turn this speculative philosophical idea into something closer to a working scientific hypothesis, with a proposed mechanism (morphic resonance) and, crucially, testable - or at least argued-to-be-testable - predictions.

Consider the practical content of this reframing. If the laws of nature are actually habits, built up through the resonant accumulation of countless past instances, several things should follow, at least in principle. First, genuinely novel patterns of organization - the first time a particular crystal structure forms, the first time an animal of a given species learns a particular trick, the first time a specific chemical reaction occurs - should be comparatively rare and difficult, precisely because there is no accumulated resonance yet to draw on. Second, once a pattern has occurred, it should become progressively easier for it to recur, not just at the original location, but anywhere, because the "habit" being reinforced is not tied to a specific place. Third, and most controversially, the strength of this facilitation should scale with the number of previous occurrences and with the degree of similarity between the new instance and the population of past instances - meaning the effect should, in principle, be statistically detectable, given a large enough number of trials and a sufficiently sensitive measure.

This is, again, precisely why the hypothesis has proven so contentious. It's testable in principle - a clear, quantitative, falsifiable-sounding claim - and yet devilishly hard to test cleanly in practice, because ruling out every conventional explanation for "things get easier over time" (general practice effects, cultural transmission, selection bias in publication, experimenter effects, and the simple fact that populations change and improve for many mundane reasons) requires exactly the kind of careful, large-scale, well-controlled experimental design that the field has historically struggled to fund and execute at the necessary scale. This tension - a hypothesis that sounds testable in principle but has rarely been tested with the rigor the claim demands - will be a recurring theme across the whole of Part II.

## The Personality Behind the Hypothesis

It would be a mistake to treat Sheldrake purely as an abstract source of hypotheses, disconnected from a broader intellectual temperament, because that temperament shapes how he has approached the whole research program. Sheldrake has always positioned himself explicitly as a critic of what he calls "the scientific worldview" - by which he means not science as a method (which he has consistently defended and practiced) but scientific materialism as an unexamined metaphysical assumption: the a priori commitment, common among many working scientists, that all phenomena must ultimately be explicable in terms of matter, energy, and the four known fundamental forces, with nothing left over. His 2012 book _The Science Delusion_ (published in the United States as _Science Set Free_) made this critique explicit, identifying what he called ten "dogmas" of contemporary science - the assumption that nature is purely mechanical, that matter is unconscious, that the total amount of matter and energy is always the same, that the laws of nature are fixed, and so on - and arguing that each was an unexamined assumption rather than an established fact.

This more combative, philosophically ambitious side of Sheldrake's work has done real damage, in the eyes of many working scientists, to the credibility of the narrower, more specific empirical claims about morphic resonance, because it's easy to read _The Science Delusion_ as an attack on the scientific enterprise itself rather than a call for open-mindedness about its unexamined assumptions - and no small number of critics have read it exactly that way, sometimes uncharitably, sometimes with real justification given some of Sheldrake's own rhetorical choices. We will meet those critics properly in Chapter 4. To be fair to them: a scientist who frames his own minority hypothesis as liberation from the "dogmas" of the mainstream is making a rhetorical move that, however sincerely intended, poisons the well for calm evaluation of the empirical claims underneath it. Separating the testable claims of morphic resonance from the broader philosophical polemic against materialism is one of this book's central tasks, and I'll keep doing that separation, chapter after chapter.

## Looking Forward

We now have the biographical and intellectual scaffolding: a rigorously trained biochemist, confronted with a genuine and still not fully resolved puzzle in developmental biology, who generalized that puzzle into a sweeping claim about the nature of memory, form, and causation across the universe, and who has spent four decades defending that claim from a position increasingly outside the scientific mainstream, while never abandoning the vocabulary or self-image of a scientist testing a real hypothesis.

The next chapter gets precise about the actual content of that hypothesis: what exactly a morphic field is claimed to be, how morphic units are supposed to nest within one another (atoms within molecules, cells within tissues, individuals within societies), and how resonance is supposed to operate across the gulfs of space and time that separate a morphic field's past instances from its present ones. We need this precision before we can fairly evaluate any evidence, because - as we'll see repeatedly in Part II - a great deal of the controversy around morphic resonance stems from imprecise popular descriptions of the hypothesis being tested (or dismissed) rather than Sheldrake's actual, more carefully qualified claims.