Preface

to the 2011 edition

This book argues that memory is inherent in nature. The so-called laws of nature are more like habits. Nature’s memory depends on a process called morphic resonance.

I first proposed this hypothesis in my book A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Formative Causation, published in 1981. In the new edition of A New Science of Life published in 2009, I discussed recent experimental evidence and new tests for morphic resonance.

In the first edition of this book, The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature (1988), I developed this hypothesis further, and explored its implications for the understanding of heredity, memory, psychology, social behaviour, cultural inheritance and evolution, including cosmic evolution. This new edition is revised and updated in the light of discussions, criticisms, further thoughts, new evidence and ongoing developments in physics, cosmology, biology and consciousness studies. Changes in science since the 1980s have made this hypothesis more plausible, rather than less so.

When the hypothesis was first published, it was inevitably controversial. I was not surprised by disagreement, but I was surprised – and relieved – by the fact that even my most vociferous critics came up with no evidence against the hypothesis, nor pointed out any serious logical flaws. Instead, they dismissed this hypothesis as unnecessary.1 The unsolved scientific problems to which I drew attention were non-problems, or at least only temporary problems, and they would soon be solved by further research along established lines. Talking about morphic resonance was a waste of time, an unwelcome distraction from the serious business of science.

In the 1980s many scientists were confident that biologists were about to explain the nature of life in molecular terms, especially through the sequencing of genomes. Neuroscientists would soon understand the nature of minds through brain scanning and computer modelling. In the computer sciences, artificial intelligence would soon be created in machines that rivalled and even exceeded the intelligence of humans themselves. In physics, through the imminent development of an ultimate Theory of Everything, the origin of the universe and all material reality in it, including life and mind, would be explained in terms of mathematical formulae – ideally in ‘a single theory that will describe the whole universe’, as Stephen Hawking put it in A Brief History of Time (1988). In his words, this theory would be ‘the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we would know the mind of God’.

In 1997, the American science writer John Horgan published a book entitled The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age. After talking to leading scientists in many areas of research, he concluded:

My guess is that this narrative that scientists have woven from their knowledge, this modern myth of creation, will be as viable a hundred or even a thousand years from now as it is today. Why? Because it is true. Moreover given how far science has already come, and given the physical, social and cognitive limits constraining further research, science is unlikely to make any significant additions to the knowledge it has already generated. There will be no great revelations in the future compared to those bestowed upon us by Darwin or Einstein or Watson and Crick.2

Things look very different today. The proud promises of the human genome project have not been fulfilled, despite the immense technical achievement it represented. When the first draft was published in the year 2000, the first surprise was that it contained only about 23,000 genes, far fewer than the 100,000 expected. Sea urchins have more than us, around 26,000, and rice plants 38,000. Moreover, our genome differs very little from that of chimpanzees, and tells us almost nothing about our differences from apes. Billions of dollars were invested in genomics, but the commercial payoff has been minimal.

The predictive value of human genomes turns out to be very limited. Everyone knows that tall parents tend to have tall children, and just by measuring parents and children with tape measures, it is possible to explain about 80 to 90 per cent of the differences in children’s height in terms of their parents’ height. In other words, height is 80 to 90 per cent heritable. Recent studies on the genomes of 30,000 people identified about 50 genes associated with being tall or short. But – shockingly – these genes together accounted for only about 5 per cent of the inheritance of height!3 This phenomenon is now called ‘the missing heritability problem’. The same problem has shown up in the genetics of heritable diseases. ‘Hubris has been replaced with concern,’ said Steve Jones, professor of genetics at University College London in 2009. He suggested that continuing the present approach, which puts great faith in the predictive power of the genome, would be ‘throwing good money after bad’.4

Meanwhile, brain scanning and computer modelling have failed to explain the nature of minds, and in consciousness studies there is no agreed solution to the ‘hard problem’, the very existence of consciousness itself. Most predictions about the powers of artificial intelligence have turned out to be fantasies.

Physics too has run into seemingly intractable problems. Superstring and M-theories, with ten and eleven dimensions respectively, take science into completely new territory, and try to explain all reality in terms of vibrating strings billions of times smaller than electrons. It is not even clear what M-theory means. In The Grand Design (2010), Stephen Hawking confessed: ‘No one seems to know what the “M” stands for. It may be “master”, “miracle” or “mystery”. People are still trying to decipher the nature of M-theory, but that may not be possible.’5 Superstring and M-theories are incomplete, have several rival versions and are untestable, at least so far. In science, untestability is a vice, not a virtue. One critic wrote a book called Not Even Wrong,6 and a growing number of eminent scientists are worried that theoretical physics has lost its way.7

Meanwhile, cosmologists have come to the conclusion that known kinds of matter and energy constitute only about 4 per cent of the universe. The rest consists of dark matter and dark energy. The nature of 96 per cent of physical reality is literally obscure.8

Within cosmology, there has been much discussion about the cosmological anthropic principle, which asserts that if the laws and constants of nature had been slightly different at the moment of the Big Bang, biological life could never have emerged, and hence we would not be here to think about it. So did a divine mind fine-tune the laws and constants in the beginning? Many cosmologists prefer to believe that our universe is one of a vast, and perhaps infinite, number of parallel universes, all with different laws and constants. All these other universes actually exist; we just happen to live in the one that has the right conditions for us. Therefore there is no need for a God to fine-tune the laws and constants.

The trouble is that there is no evidence for these extra universes. In the eyes of sceptics, the multiverse theory is the ultimate violation of Occam’s razor, the principle that entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily. And invoking billions of unobserved universes does not even succeed in getting rid of God. An infinite God could be the God of an infinite number of universes.9

All is not well in contemporary science. The fundamental problems have not gone away; instead they have become more urgent. Here are some of the areas in which the hypothesis of morphic resonance points to new ways forward:

In the Introduction I summarize this hypothesis, and outline the plan of this book.

London

January 2011