The Science of Spirit. Part 10
By: Seeker
Rupert Sheldrake has moved on from his basic start into the strangeness’s of species behavior. He has more recently been running experiments on humans. You can participate in these – he runs online versions of several of the ones he tried on TV in the UK, Europe and the USA, as well as others.
You can look for yourself to find out what he has been up to in detail, but where it has led him is to propose that Life is about fields, what he terms morphogenetic fields, which are the substrate of both individuals and species.
For those who have read Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, think of a morphogenetic field as a Philote. For those who haven’t, think of it like a little piece of Consciousness that exists in the centre or as the basic for everything that exists. Philotic connections explain (in the books) how people and things connect to each other. For Sheldrake, morphogenetic fields are connected philotes, capable of directing the organism or species.
For example, the South American butterflies that have a reptilian eye on their wings to help their survival rate against the predatory birds didn’t need to spend thousands of generations developing an effective camouflage if there was an awareness directing their evolution.
If morphogenetic field exist it helps to explain a bit of a mystery about evolution – just how, after each ELE (Extinction-Level Event) through history, did Life manage to rebound so quickly? If evolution is governed solely by random mutation, there would seem to be nothing about the aftermath of an ELE to cause a massive surge in mutation rates so that Life spread almost instantly (in geologic time) to fill in all the niches left vacant by the wholesale slaughter.
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