The Morphic Field: Sheldrake's Claim and What Holds Up

What this piece gives you: what Rupert Sheldrake actually claims, why his term keeps getting confused with a real one from developmental biology, what happened in Nature in 1981, where the hundredth monkey story really comes from — and what survives of all of it under an honest look. What it does not give you: confirmation that the field exists. That is not available.

What Sheldrake actually claims

Rupert Sheldrake, a British biochemist and plant physiologist, published A New Science of Life in 1981. In it he sets out a thesis he calls formative causation, and it fits in a sentence: nature has no rulebook, it has a memory.

On his account, the form of a crystal, an organism or a behavior is not fixed by genes and physical law alone but by morphic fields. Every time a pattern occurs, its field gets stronger — and the next occurrence comes more easily. The transmission that is supposed to do this he calls morphic resonance: like influences like, across distance in space and time.

This is not a woolly formulation. It is a testable claim. If it holds, newly synthesized chemical compounds should crystallize more readily worldwide as time passes. Rats should learn a maze faster if other rats have learned it before them — even on another continent. That is exactly what makes the thesis interesting: it can be falsified. And that is exactly its problem.

Three terms that get mixed up constantly

Term	Comes from	Means
Morphogenetic field	developmental biology, since the early twentieth century	a region in an embryo where cells coordinate through chemical signaling. An established technical term, describable in terms of actual molecules.
Morphic field	Sheldrake, 1981	a hypothetical memory field transmitting form and behavior across space and time. Not accepted, not confirmed.
Knowing field	constellation work, late twentieth century	a working term for the fact that stand-ins in a constellation say things they could not know. Names an observation; does not explain it.

The confusion has consequences. Say “morphogenetic field” while meaning Sheldrake and you have borrowed the credibility of an established scientific term for an unconfirmed hypothesis. It happens in this literature constantly, usually with no intent to mislead at all.

The fight of 1981

The response from the scientific establishment was fast and unusually harsh. John Maddox, then editor of Nature, ran an editorial in September 1981 headlined with the question “A book for burning?” and named Sheldrake’s book the leading candidate for that treatment in years.

That is remarkable because a journal thereby stepped outside its own method. You refute a falsifiable hypothesis with experiments, not with an editorial. Sheldrake has cited the episode ever since — understandably. And it is also the most convenient argumentative move available: reading resistance as confirmation. Do that and your thesis becomes unassailable, and an unassailable thesis is no longer a scientific one.

The same pattern replayed in 2013, when a TEDx talk of his was pulled from TED’s main channel after complaints and moved to a separate page with a disclaimer. The internet took it as a censorship story and it became one of his best-known moments. Both things can be true at once, and you have to hold both: the rejections were unfair in their form, and they changed nothing about the fact that the evidence is missing.

The hundredth monkey: a story that is not true

No anecdote is offered more often as proof of field transmission. On a Japanese island, a young female macaque learns to wash sweet potatoes. When the hundredth monkey has it, the skill is said to have appeared suddenly among monkeys on other islands, with no contact between them.

The story in that form comes from Lyall Watson’s Lifetide (1979), and it reached the American mainstream through Ken Keyes Jr.’s 1982 book The Hundredth Monkey, written as anti-nuclear activism and given away in enormous numbers. That is the vector: a metaphor for how quickly a change of mind can spread, repeated until it was heard as a finding.

Underneath it are real Japanese primate observations at Koshima. The potato washing happened, and it did spread — the way behavior spreads: slowly, over years, animal to animal, first among juveniles and their mothers. There is no threshold at one hundred in the data, and the jump to other islands is not in them either. American skeptics did the checking in the mid-1980s — Ron Amundson in the Skeptical Inquirer and Elaine Myers in In Context — and went back to the original field reports to do it.

I find that more important than it sounds. When the most-cited support for an idea turns out to be a retelling that grew in the retelling, it tells you something about the idea — and rather more about us. We quote what we want to believe and we do not look it up.

What the experiments found

Sheldrake did not only write; he tested. Whether people can feel when they are being stared at. Whether dogs know when their person is heading home. Whether you can guess who is calling. The setups are simple enough for others to rebuild, which was deliberate.

That is the sober state of it. The effects Sheldrake reports are small, and independent replications come out inconsistent. Where critics rebuilt the trials, little survived; where Sheldrake did the analysis, something did. That specific pattern is a warning sign in any field — not of dishonesty, but of expectation doing part of the measuring. The same pattern, and the same caution, applies to what the near-death studies actually found, where both camps cite the same paper.

Why the idea still carries

Here is the part that matters to me. A thesis being unproven does not make it worthless — it makes it something other than what many people take it for. The morphic field is an excellent metaphor and a poor piece of evidence.

As a metaphor it names something everyone recognizes. That the second time is easier than the first. That groups have a memory sitting in no single head. That habits wear a groove until they feel like laws of nature. None of that needs unknown physics — learning, imitation, culture and language account for it completely. But the image of a field makes it felt, which is why half the coaching world runs on it.

The error starts only where the image becomes a proof. That is the same move as with the egregore or with synchronicity: a useful picture presenting itself as physics. You are allowed both. You just have to know which one you are holding.

Practically: how to handle it

• Say “as if.” “I work as though there were a field” is honest and loses nothing. “The field showed me” claims more than you know.
• Check which term someone is using. Morphogenetic or morphic? The difference decides whether you are hearing established biology or a hypothesis.
• Ask for the source on the hundredth monkey. It leads to a 1979 book and a 1982 paperback, not to a study. That alone settles a lot of conversations.
• Observe your own field. Which patterns repeat for you, in which situations, with which people? Thirty days of notes gives you data that is actually yours. Shadow work in the Jungian sense is the same exercise with a longer pedigree.
• Do not score resistance as confirmation. That an idea gets rejected says nothing about whether it is right. Otherwise every rejected idea would be true — and this is also the engine behind spiritual bypassing, where your doubt is reframed as your problem.
• Stay curious rather than convinced. How form arises is an open and genuinely large question. It deserves better answers, and you only get those by treating the provisional ones as provisional.

What people report

People who have worked with the field for decades often say the same thing: learning it was unproven did not change the work, it changed how they talk about it. Others describe the more uncomfortable version — having repeated the monkey story from a stage several times before ever looking it up. And plenty land on: it is an image, nothing more, and an image that helps is worth more to me than a proof I do not understand. None of these are evidence. They are the three honest positions available, and all three are better than pretending the question is settled.

What we do not promise

• That the morphic field exists. Controlled experiments have not confirmed the hypothesis.
• That the hundredth monkey story describes a real effect. The field observations do not support it.
• That field work has any physical or medical effect.
• That rejection by the scientific establishment supports the thesis. Resistance is not evidence.
• What remains: an honestly posed, still-open question — and a metaphor that keeps its value for exactly as long as you keep calling it one.

Frequently asked questions

What is the morphic field?

A term introduced by Rupert Sheldrake in 1981 for a hypothetical memory field said to transmit form and behavior across space and time. The more often a pattern occurs, the more easily it should occur again.

Is the morphic field scientifically accepted?

No. The hypothesis is framed testably, but controlled experiments have not confirmed it. It is not accepted in mainstream science.

How is it different from the morphogenetic field?

The morphogenetic field is an established term in developmental biology describing how cells in an embryo coordinate through chemical signaling. Sheldrake’s morphic field is a separate, unconfirmed hypothesis. The two are frequently conflated.

Is the hundredth monkey story true?

Not in that form. It comes from Lyall Watson’s Lifetide (1979) and reached a wide American readership through Ken Keyes Jr.’s The Hundredth Monkey (1982). The potato washing on Koshima was real but spread slowly over years, animal to animal. No threshold at one hundred and no jump to other islands appears in the observations.

What was the 1981 Nature editorial?

Editor John Maddox published a piece in September 1981 headlined “A book for burning?” naming Sheldrake’s book the leading candidate for that in years. It is still cited as an example of an unusually sharp response from a journal.

Can I still work with the idea of a field?

Yes — as an image and a working model. It becomes a problem only when the image turns into a factual claim. Saying “I work as though there were a field” keeps the two apart cleanly.

Sources and further reading

• Rupert Sheldrake, A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Formative Causation, Blond & Briggs, London 1981.
• John Maddox, “A book for burning?”, editorial, Nature 293 (5830), September 1981, pp. 245–246.
• Lyall Watson, Lifetide (1979) — origin of the hundredth monkey narrative; Ken Keyes Jr., The Hundredth Monkey (1982) — the American popularization.
• Ron Amundson, “The Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon”, Skeptical Inquirer (1985), and Elaine Myers in In Context (1985) — the checks against the original Koshima field reports.
• Standard developmental biology literature on the morphogenetic field.
• In the magazine: The egregore explained · What synchronicity describes · Signs of spiritual bypassing · What the near-death studies found · Shadow work, in the Jungian sense
• Questions about an order or a product: 28@templeofdesire.com

This piece places a scientific hypothesis and its reception. It makes no claim of efficacy.