Sebastian Hayes

I

Science, or rather ‘natural philosophy’ (as Newton and his contemporaries called it), must give some sort of an answer to the following basic questions :

Why do objects remain the same?

and

Why do animals do the same things at more or less the same time over and over again?

Well, as to the first question, you might reply that things don’t in fact remain the same for long otherwise we’d have the same vista in front of our eyes every day of our lives. This is true on our human level, especially in our short-term style of society, but on a macroscopic or microscopic level is much less so. Mountains and, at the other end of the scale, rock crystals remain in much  the same state for thousands of years. We now know that whole continents drift about and that no substance remains the same for ever if only because of radio-active decay —  but the time span is, to say the least, vast. Similarly, although it is now established that stars and galaxies are evolving and the whole universe expanding, seemingly at an ever increasing rate, this expansion is not evident to the naked eye and the discovery that the universe as a whole has changed markedly over time was only made as recently as the nineteen-thirties.

I personally find it surprising that anything remains the same for any two or more consecutive moments — why should it?  The issue does not seem to bother contemporary physicists very much (because they are all wedded to a ‘continuous’ model of the world whose origins lie in mathematics, not experimental science) but it certainly perturbed Descartes, one of the founding fathers of the modern scientific outlook. He considered the universe to be intrinsically unstable which is why he put forward a theory of Perpetual Instantaneous Creation whereby God re-created the universe (and us) at every single moment. Buddhist thinkers such as Dignaga and Dharmakirti   had come to much the same conclusion a thousand years earlier, though they ascribed the disappearance and rapid re-appearance of material objects — so rapid that it passes unobserved  — not to God’s intervention but to a purely mechanical process, ‘Dependent Origination’, a material version of karma.

Generally, scientists today take the convenient option of consigning all such difficult questions to the Philosophy Department, while nonetheless making all sorts of metaphysical assumptions which are never questioned because they are never stated specifically. We do not today believe that rocks and oceans and stars remain the same indefinitely, but the majority of  contemporary scientists assume (without stating it) that the so-called ‘laws of the universe’, ‘physical laws’ and so forth do remain the same indefinitely. But why should they? Mathematicians go even farther, believing for the most part that mathematical truth is entirely independent of the physical universe : this is the so-called Platonic position held, overtly or covertly, by the vast majority of pure mathematicians. Human beings, trees, planets, even stars, come and go but the laws and principles of Physics and Higher Mathematics remain unchanged for ever.

This is a tempting point of view — at least for mathematicians and scientists — but it can hardly be called self-evident or even reasonable. Newton and Leibnitz and Boyle and practically everyone else before the mid nineteenth century believed in God and envisaged Him as the supreme architect, craftsman  and above all mathematician. Human beings, with varying degrees of success, were able to decipher the divine language which was essentially mathematical : the key theorems and formulas were, quite literally, regarded as thoughts in the mind of God.  Moreover, according to Leibnitz, God, being God, had ‘got everything right’ first time and so there was no need for His continuing personal involvement with the physical universe. Newton was a little more circumspect and allowed God a limited role in keeping the clockwork universe running smoothly, for example by stopping galaxies getting too close to one another. But as observation of the heavens became more accurate and mathematical methods more sophisticated, there was less and less need for divine intervention, hence Laplace’s famous claim that, “I did not require that hypothesis” — the hypothesis  in question being God’s existence (except possibly as a First Cause).

Currently, we have a situation where the so-called ‘laws of Nature’, likewise the ‘laws of mathematics’ from which they are not wholly distinct, are out there all on their own, seemingly fully formed before there was a physical universe at all. Extremely few attempts have, however, been made to deduce the actual state of the universe from first principles and the attempts that have been made, for example by Eddington, are considered to have been a complete failure. (Maybe string theory, Loop Quantum Gravity or Garrett Lisi’s E₈ theory can do better but, as they say, the jury is not out on any of these yet.) Many scientists now admit that the basic constants of Nature may not always have had the same value as they do now, for example the gravitational constant G. So maybe even Newton’s Celestial Mechanics evolves with time. And physicists now envisage the very real possibility of universes where life is not necessarily carbon based nor hydrogen the commonest element, so these familiar features of our world do not seem to be deducible from first principles either. All we know for sure is that, for as long as precise measurements have been made by humans, there seem to have been striking regularities in the behaviour of both large and small elements of matter. The dogged persistence of both matter and form is mind boggling  : one reads in physics textbooks the statement that “every single proton and neutron in the known universe was created during a millisecond shortly after the Big Bang” while the basic chemical processes which power unicellular and multicellular life have changed remarkably little during the last 1,500 million years at least. Plato’s eternal Ideas or Newton’s and Leibnitz’s ‘God-given’ legalistic framework can account for such relative fixity of material form and function whereas the contemporary scientific world-view seemingly cannot. Why should anything carry on existing at all, let alone in recognizably the same shape or sequence?

Turning now to biology, what is one to make of migration? As I write, since we are well into autumn, vast quantities of birds, insects and mammals are on the move. In many cases the distances covered are stupendous : Monarch butterflies, not reckoned particularly strong fliers, often travel 3,000 kilometres each autumn from  Canada to Mexico while the all-time record holder, the arctic tern, covers 32,000 kilometres every single year of its life as it flies from one polar region to another.

Why embark on such perilous journeys? The ultimate cause for all this is, of course, the sun whose rays heat regions of the earth’s surface very unequally at different times of the year mainly because of the tilt of the earth. But the loss of heat and illumination does not usually bring about migration as a straight case of cause and effect. Strong evidence that there is no direct causal link between decrease or increase of sunlight and migration is the strange phenomenon known as Zugenruhe. Bird fanciers have long noticed that caged birds often become excited at around the same time as their uncaged cousins  leave or return to the country. And the German scientist, Gwinner, established beyond reasonable doubt that the restless movements of willow warblers in autumn and spring were orientated south and north, and that this behaviour persisted throughout several generations.

In many cases, the benefits of migration, for example a warmer climate or more abundant sources of food, outweigh the considerable dangers and discomforts. For all that, it seems strange that most birds migrate (over 60% of the world’s avian species) even those living in semi-tropical regions. And what are we to make of migrations for the purpose of breeding ? Loggerhead turtles swim all the way from Brazil to Ascension Island to mate, a distance of over 2,000 kilometres — why? Granted, the remoteness of Ascension Island means there are less bird predators around when the tiny turtles hatch from the eggs than there would be on beaches off the coasts of Brazil, but one would have imagined that any number of other islands would have been  just as good. In like manner salmon laboriously swim upstream to their place of birth, there to spawn and, in the vast majority of cases, to die from exhaustion. It has become an iron dogma of contemporary  biology that there is always some evolutionary advantage attached to every little detail of animal behaviour (provided the species seems to be thriving), but this is no more than a gratuitous  assumption which, incidentally, goes far beyond what Darwin himself taught. Why not simply conclude that, at least some of the time, some birds, insects and animals move about, mate in a particular fashion, forage for food in a particular way and so on simply through force of habit.

Familiar though the ‘force of habit’ is to us humans — think of the difficulty we have changing our eating and drinking habits let alone drug intake — scientists scrupulously avoid the term. True, a certain Count von Pernau does speak of “a hidden force driving them [migrating birds] to depart at the right time” but he was writing in the early eighteenth century. Today, everything in animal behaviour that is not a clearcut response to physical stimuli — and thus falls within the remit of physics —  is presumed to have some ‘adaptive advantage’ and is attributed to ‘genetic programming’ (a vague term at best) combined with natural selection. The more extreme neo-Darwinists apply the same treatment to human beings : if they are to be believed, we are essentially automata without wills of our own moving about mindlessly in response to physical forces in our environment, or because we are ‘programmed’ genetically before birth to behave in certain circumscribed ways.

In a few cases, we have a fair idea of the mechanism which enables birds and insects to move about with assurance at more or less the same time year after year, but in the vast majority of cases what is going on remains a complete mystery. Again and again we come across statements like the following in the two fascinating and authoritative books by Foster and Kreuzman Rhythms of Life (2004) and Seasons of Life (2009)

“The insects [cicadas] seem to have a 17 year calendar that is accurate to a few days, but nobody has a clue as to how they count off the years and keep track of where they are in the count.”  Foster & Kreuzman, Rhythms of Life p. 52

“Despite years of study, the laboratory evidence for circadian rhythms in rodents being adaptive is barely encouraging.”   Foster & Kreuzman, Rhythms of Life, p. 160

“Where the circannual clocks reside in birds and animals, or indeed whether there is an anatomical localisation for the circannual mechanism, remains an open question.”  Foster & Kreuzman, Seasons of Life p. 60

‘Presumably’ is one the most commonest words in popular (and not so popular) books on biology and is usually followed by “there is some adaptive advantage, otherwise…”  It could just be that in a lot of cases, scientists have a hard job finding a reason for certain behaviour patterns because there isn’t one (in Darwinian terms) and that they are not able to pinpoint the precise mechanism involved because they are looking in the wrong place. Instead of looking inside the body (and brain) of the animal for mechanisms, why not look outside instead, to the source of behaviour patterns in formative past experiences ?

But contemporary scientists are reluctant to attribute specific behaviour traits to events that have taken place in the distant past or to events taking place con-currently the other side of the world, and — up to a point — I can understand their reluctance. Implicit in modern scientific theory and rationalistic thought is the Principle of Spatio-Temporal Continuity which, roughly stated, means that a causal influence cannot go from spot A to spot B without traversing the distance between the two spots. This principle became the cornerstones of Einstein’s  Special theory of Relativity, though it is implicit in scientific theory as far back as Galileo. Quantum Mechanics does indeed, at least in the official ‘Copenhagen’ version, does seem to involve some sort of ‘Non-locality’ but this is precisely what is worrisome about it : Einstein himself was one of the foremost scientists to criticise this very aspect of Quantum Mechanics and never, to the end of his life, got completely resigned to it.

For all that, migratory behaviour defies normal explanation. Monarch butterflies return, year after year, in their millions to the same circumscribed wooded area of Mexico to hibernate. On the face of it, any number of other sites would have been just as good and the most immediate explanation for this astonishing convergence of butterflies (which many people have seen for themselves on David Attenborough’s Life programme) is that they return there each year for no better reason than that that their butterfly ancestors did. But to suppose that there is a direct influence coming from the past is, for most scientists, out of the question for it would mean that the influence in question had somehow ‘leapfrogged’ over a vast area of Space/Time, a whole year at the very least. So, the directive “Go to this part of Mexico in winter”, which the Monarch butterfly undoubtedly receives and obeys, must come from within the insect by way of a ‘memory trace’ prompting an automatic reflex action. There is, according to  contemporary biological wisdom, simply no alternative.

Dr. Rupert Sheldrake drew down upon himself universal opprobrium from the scientific establishment when, in effect, he made the ‘force of habit’, duly baptised ‘morphic resonance’, the cornerstone of his ‘new theory of nature’. Why such a fierce reaction to what is, on the face of it, an innocuous and commonsensical notion? Essentially because contemporary scientists only recognize four kinds of force, electro-magnetism, gravity, weak and strong nuclear force. Everything else is thrown into the convenient hold-all of ‘genetic programming’, ‘memory traces’ and so on. What is particularly alarming to the establishment scientists about ‘morphic resonance’ — a useful but not a pretty term to us laymen — is that, if it exists at all, it undercuts or underpins all the other alleged ‘laws’ of physics.

One or two isolated thinkers, notably William James and Nietzsche (as Dr Sheldrake recognizes), had, in the nineteenth century, thrown out the idea that ‘natural laws’ were perhaps no more than patterns of physical behaviour which had become, simply by being repeated over and over and over again, extremely change resistant. I myself believe that there must be some ‘laws’ or principles that hold in all possible universes but they are not so much physical as ‘logical’. I cannot, for example, conceive of a universe where there is not a basic difference between ‘composite’ and ‘prime’ quantities, i.e. groups of discrete items that can be arranged in non-unitary numerically equivalent sub-groups like 000000 and those which cannot like 00000. Similarly, I cannot conceive of a universe where an event can have occurrence and at the same time not have occurrence at the same spot (Principle of Non-Contradiction for Events). However, these and similar principles are a far cry, indeed, from the ‘physical laws’ one learns about in a school or university Physics textbook.

Leaving aside such difficult questions for the moment, there can be no doubt that the hypothesis of morphic resonance does give an answer of sorts to the two questions raised at the beginning of this article : Why do objects remain (more or less) the same? and Why do animals do the same things over and over again?

In the first case, the answer is that inanimate objects remain the same because of self-resonance :

“…the persistence of matter itself, and indeed of radiation, depends on a continuous process of resonance of the fields with their own past states. (…) All organisms are dynamic structures that are continuously recreating themselves under the influence of their own past states.”        Sheldrake, The Presence of the Past p. 133

The second question (Why do animals do the same thing over and over again?) is a little more complicated because there is more than one type of event-cycle involved. The Sun itself in its apparent movement round the Earth is, in ‘morphic resonance’ terms, a self-contained stabilised sequence of events which is the ultimate, though not usually the direct, cause of animal migration. Similarly, the Earth’s spin which gives rise to the light/dark diurnal rhythm we all experience is the ultimate, though not usually the direct, cause of circadian (nearly daily) rhythms of activity in many mammals and insects including ourselves.  In such cases we have a stabilized event-cycle giving rise to a secondary (animal) event-cycle which often becomes partly or wholly autonomous, because  it persists  even when animals are transported to a constant environment. Usually this ‘constant environment’ is that of a human laboratory but in some cases is a natural habitat : mole rats spending their whole lives deep underground still retain circadian rhythms of behaviour and their mating habits partly depend on them.

Scientists are fond of appealing to the so-called Principle of Parsimony whereby the theory which requires the least assumptions is, other things being equal, to be preferred to a theory which requires more assumptions. There can be no doubt that, on this count, a theory such as ‘morphic resonance’ which does not require a vast number of sophisticated internal clocks and programs has the advantage over conventional theories which do.

During an after dinner family gathering years ago, rather surprisingly those present got onto discussing the difference between scientific hypotheses and fact. My father mentioned Boyle’s Law, someone else mentioned something else. But my cousin’s husband, an industrial chemist and the only practising scientist present, suddenly said, “Forget Boyle’s Law, Ohm’s Law and all that. Only the experiment is true, all the rest is theory”. I have never forgotten this statement. I took his meaning to be : “What is real is what actually happens, not what is supposed to happen, or the theory says ought to happen.”

It has become fashionable to reject, even ridicule, visual or tactile schemas in physics and  mathematics : loafing through contemporary learned journals, you would get the impression that major scientific revolutions are brought about by painstaking experimental work carried out by men and women so ‘objective’ that they have no pre-conceived opinions about anything at all, and certainly have no world-shaking theories about the nature of life and the universe. However, Democritus and Epicurus, the founding fathers of atomism, did no experiments and to be looking for atoms in their time would have been pointless. This unverified and originally unverifiable hypothesis eventually resurfaced in Western Europe some two thousand years later and stimulated a more technologically advanced society to actually look, and eventually find, these atoms. Newton was a keen experimentalist but he was not able to point to experiments which verified his absurd sounding theory that every particle of matter in the universe attracted every other : it was left to Cavendish, years after Newton’s death, to provide the first evidence of Newtonian universal attraction on this earth, and even then the effect was so slight that many contemporary scientists dismissed it as a fluke.

Something as important as the emergence of a new scientific paradigm will, almost certainly, take time and require contributions from many different persons before the different strands are assembled into a coherent theory. Such a  paradigm will most likely come about through a combination of three items :

1.) a clearcut conceptual schema;

2.) an appropriate mathematical apparatus which fits the schema and

3.) experimental verification and development.

Newton’s schema of a billiard ball universe of massy particles colliding with each other, recoiling in specific directions and also influencing each other from a distance by ‘attraction’, was tremendously useful for developing classical physics even though practically all the basic assumptions he made have turned out not to be strictly true ! (Atoms are not indivisible, we do not today envisage gravitation as a ‘force’ passing from one object to other but as a deformation of the local region of Space/Time, and so on.)  If the theory of ‘morphic resonance’ and ‘formative causation’ is to become a scientific paradigm in the future, or a key element in such a paradigm (as I firmly believe), it is important at this early stage to develop piecemeal a viable  conceptual schema which fits (some at least) of the data.
There are, moreover, advantages in starting at this end of the spectrum rather than starting at the mathematical end of the spectrum. Newton found himself obliged to develop a novel mathematical tool, his ‘theory of fluxions’ (his version of the Calculus) in order to better investigate the orbit of planets and he was interested in planetary orbits mainly because they would, hopefully, provide the first concrete evidence of his highly speculative theory of Universal Attraction. Of course, it could be that the mathematical apparatus for the coming scientific paradigm is already out there, lying as yet unused in the vast wonderland of pure mathematics. Riemann invented  Hyperbolic Geometry as an exercise in pure mathematics and would probably have been the first person to be surprised had he known that astronomers were subsequently going to lean heavily on it, since it turned out to be tailor made for General Relativity.  But without Einstein’s speculations, Hyperbolic Geometry may well have lain there unused for centuries as Greek investigations into conic sections did until Kepler and others applied them to planetary orbits.

So let’s now look at the essential attributes of natural phenomena such as, say, bird migration, mating habits and so forth right down to oscillations within rock crystals.

The first essential feature is repetition and not only that, involuntary repetition. These are two features here which an eventual conceptual schema must capture : the idea of things happening again and again, without a deliberate plan or strategy. Swallows and Monarch butterflies do not make a conscious decision to migrate and, in the present era, we (rightly) no longer believe they behave in this was because God or some other supernatural deity is directing them.

“‘When they [reindeer] decide they want to move, they just turn and go. We don’t have to persuade them.’  John Eirap, a Lapp herder explaining how his reindeer almost always migrate towards their winter home on the same day each year — 29 July.”              Hodge, quoted Foster & Kreitzman (2004)

As mentioned before, even when in captivity, birds show restlessness at certain moments of the year. This urge is so powerful that it makes some species cross half the world, sometimes for a good reason (better living conditions) but just as often for no apparent reason at all. Whether there are any advantages accruing to migration, most animals seem to migrate because they feel compelled to do so at usually quite precise moments of the year. We thus have the idea of force.
I propose giving a name to this force : I shall refer to it as karmic force. This is not an ideal term, perhaps, since mention of karma introduces the idea of morality even though the Sanskrit word karma simply means ‘action’, ‘activity’.     I prefer the term ‘karmic force’ to ‘morphic resonance’. ‘Resonance’, a term originating in Newtonian mechanics, is generally  applied to repeating sequences of events which engender similar sequences in other objects. But a single event can have considerable ‘karmic force’. Certainly, this is the case on the human level since a single dramatic event which does not repeat, for example a childhood trauma or a religious experience (like Saint Paul’s) can have life-long consequences. And even within the inanimate world, it seems legitimate, indeed necessary, to attribute considerable karmic force to single events (or single very tightly packed group of events). For, otherwise, how did repetitive cycles of behaviour ever get started in the first place?

The basic meaning of ‘resonance’ is “a sound vibrating in sympathy with a neighbouring source of sound” (Collins Dictionary) and the feature we are generally concerned with in physics is the frequency of the vibration. All material objects vibrate though the sound emitted is usually inaudible to humans and the phenomenon of ‘entrainment’ where two or more vibrating systems ‘fall into synch’ was remarked upon by Huyghens as far back as the seventeenth century. However, what we are more frequently concerned with in animal behaviour is not simply, or even mainly, the frequency of the ‘vibration’ but what distinct events make up the ‘vibration’ and why they occur at all. Indeed, I think we would do well to dispense with the notion of vibration since although I do in fact believe that the phenomenon of ‘entrainment’, or, as I prefer to call it, the dominance of one system over another, is very important indeed I do not think that event sequences communicate themselves across Space/Time in the sort of way that rhythmical sounds and oscillations pass from one material body to another that is close to it.

To return to karmic force. What can be said about this force?  For a start,  it is evident that not all events have the same, or even roughly comparable, karmic force. This force is clearly far more powerful in the physical world than in the biological, and more powerful in the non-human animal world than in the human. Which is to say no more than that, if one insists on putting it in such a way, physical objects generally do seem to ‘obey natural laws’ whereas, going to the other end of the scale, human beings more often than not behave unpredictably and lawlessly (though they remain subject to the same underlying physical constraints as inanimate objects).

As scientists have found out to their cost, it is extremely difficult to radically change animal patterns of behaviour. But it is not impossible : permanently depriving animals of daylight eventually disrupts their circadian rhythms, at any rate in the majority of cases. Sometimes, this effect occurs  naturally as well : it seems that the timing of the breeding of certain birds, such as great tits, is at this very moment changing spontaneously because of global warming .

When we come to human animals, we find that substantial changes in behaviour can be brought about by technological innovations, peer pressure, cultural imitation and so forth especially when backed up by substantial rewards and penalties. However, it is worth noting that the most deep-rooted animal ‘instincts’ (read, event-patterns) have proved very resistant to change despite prolonged and intensive efforts over centuries, not to say millennia : I mean, for example, competitiveness amongst young males, the drive to territorial expansion amongst social groups which fuelled the two worst wars in human history in the ‘rational’ twentieth-century, likewise the failure to impose strict fidelity within marriage even in societies where the penalties for adultery are very severe indeed. And on the emotional/ethical level, the two and a half thousand year attempt made by  Buddhism and Christianity to make human beings altruistic rather than selfish and aggressive has had very limited success by any standards. All that we can conclude is that it is sometimes possible to radically change individual traits, i.e. to oppose and even reverse the ‘karmic force’ that is at work in the background, but usually very drastic methods are required such as, for example, prolonged military training, deliberately engineered traumatic (or ecstatic) emotional experiences culminating in religious revivalist techniques and/or brainwashing.

When we come to inanimate objects, clearly the karmic force making for stability and near identical repetition is very strong indeed, which is why we still  speak gaily of the ‘laws of nature’ even though few scientists these days believe in a cosmic law-giver. Nonetheless, if the behaviour even of inanimate things is not fixed once and for all, it is not inconceivable that these ‘laws’ can occasionally be broken. It has been said that the key doctrine of the Enlightenment was “Miracles cannot and do not occur”, where ‘miracle’ is to be understood as an event which goes against the ‘laws of nature’. This is why alleged psychic feats such as levitation, distant visioning, production of ectoplasm and so forth  were, and are, such a bugbear to out-and-out rationalists  : they apparently involve suspension of natural laws and so they simply can’t (and thus don’t) happen.

So-called primitive societies universally believed that natural phenomena could be affected by man, in particular  by appropriate religious ritual. If we posit a generalised ‘karmic force’ rather than omnipresent ‘laws of nature’, it is not entirely inconceivable (though by no means certain) that some seemingly  ‘impossible’ events might occur, or be made to occur. But this is a minor point which need not confuse the main thrust of the enquiry.

So far, then, we have a supposed ‘karmic force’ which varies according to the nature of the entities subjected to it, which has a finite upper limit and which, at any rate in the case of animal behaviour, can be sometimes successfully opposed and modified.

What are the components of this force ?    Dr Sheldrake himself puts the emphasis on cumulative Repetition :

“Structures of activity tend to occur more readily the more often they have occurred before”
The Presence of the Past, p. 307

This might be termed the 1^st Law of Morphic Resonance.

I have no quarrel with this but I believe that it is only one of three or four components. The second would be the Intensity of the original event or sequence of events that ends by repeating. Clearly, certain events in our own lives have such overwhelming intensity, as compared to banal daily events, that they can influence behaviour for decades, and often tend to produce rough copies of themselves by bringing about a near repetition of the original situation. If psychologists are to be believed, adults in their love lives and partnerships tend to endlessly engineer repetitions of childhood relations with their parents, for example by unconsciously ‘choosing’ as partners women or men who either strongly resemble or, less frequently, strikingly contrast with the original parent of the opposite gender.

Intensity is clearly an important factor in animal behaviour also. I do not think even the most convinced genetic determinist goes so far as to attribute every little nuance of the observed behaviour of an animal to genes. Animals have individual characteristics and within certain limits ‘choose’ how they want to move about for example, whether they want to sit on a particular branch rather than another, what other animals they want to forage with and so on. However, where mating is concerned, animals are clearly impelled  by a force which, especially in the insect world, is so strong that males are quite ready to pay the ultimate penalty (death). Clearly, there is no choice here, merely the operation of overwhelming force.

A third factor is what I propose to call clustering (of events). Repetition involves sequence but by clustering I have in mind the proximity of similar event chains. Karmic force seems to be relatively distance independent — an event which occurred a year ago, for example the previous year’s migration, can be  equally or more powerful in its effects than an event which occurred an hour or a few minutes ago : circannual rhythms are as potent as circadian. However, it is not necessary to assume that karmic force is entirely distant independent and it would seem at least plausible to assume that there is a certain entrainment by spatial proximity — I shall return to this point in a moment. Moreover, I would expect the clustering effect to be exponential rather than linear : a crowd of a hundred people is not just a hundred times more dangerous than one, it is more like a thousand or ten thousand times more dangerous (or exhilarating).

An event chain that combines repetition, intensity and clustering I would expect it to become very firmly established indeed.

A word about terminology. An event will, for the purposes of this article, be considered to be ‘intuitively clear’ : it is ‘something that happens at a particular time and spot’. (More detailed discussion is given elsewhere, in the Introduction to my Theory of Eventrics which I working on and will shortly be posting chapter by chapter on this site.)

An event chain is a connected sequence of (usually dissimilar) events and an event-cycle is a repeating event-chain which will be assumed to be regular unless stated otherwise.

Thus, for example, striking a key on the piano constitutes an event, striking one key after another to span an octave is an event-chain and a repeating melody is an event-cycle.

A single event-chain which turns into an identically repeating event-cycle has acquired self-dominance — what Dr Sheldrake refers to as ‘stabilization’. The vibration of molecules and atoms, for example, has clearly been stabilized for a long time. At this point we should introduce the idea of a threshold. Prior to a certain point an event chain has negligible effects on other event chains around it, but, once this threshold is passed, it begins to exercise what I term dominance over other similar event chains.

Almost certainly there was a time when Monarch butterflies did not all migrate to Mexico to hibernate : they either stayed put and died of the cold or went all over the place, some migrating  to one location, some to another. There was, then, by hypothesis, an original much more varied event situation where no single event chain had acquired dominance and, to judge by the usual scale of known evolutionary development, this period probably lasted for some time. Nietzsche,  has a remarkable passage quoted by Sheldrake :

“At the beginning of things we may have to assume, as the most general form of existence, a world which was not yet mechanical, which is outside all mechanical laws, although having access to them. Thus, the origin of the mechanical world would be a lawless game which would ultimately acquire such consistency as the organic laws seem to have now…. All our mechanical laws would not be eternal, but evolved and would have survived innumerable alternative mechanical laws.”        Nietzsche, Works Vol. 16 quoted Sheldrake 1988

We have, here, three key assumptions

1.) An original Chaos ;
2.) Evolving laws;
3.) A very long process leading up to the ‘consistent’ universe we now have.

Throwing this into what one might call ‘event mode’, we have, then, an original state  when events occurred pell-mell, were disconnected from each other and there were no recognizable stable patterns (Chaos). At this ‘time’, events would not, for example, have occurred regularly in pairs such as our ‘cause and effect’, nor would a particular event have normally repeated identically : it would have appeared, and disappeared almost as soon as it had occurred.

But first we might ask why anything coherent should ever emerge at all from the original Chaos — why shouldn’t Chaos just last for ever?  I can only suppose that something akin to gravitational attraction between particles operated, and still operates, on events, an attraction perhaps based on similarity of some sort. A particular association of similar events, if repeated enough times and in reasonable proximity, would eventually constitute a single unchanging event (or rather dense event cluster), in other words would acquire  what I call self-dominance which makes it all the more likely to repeat itself. The stage of self-dominance marks a point of no return and eventually, whole event sequences or event chains of dissimilar events would acquire self-dominance, defining a second point of no return.

Having acquired the ability to repeat identically (the equivalent in event terms of the reproductive capacity), the next stage is reached when an already well-defined event chain exercises dominance over similar, but not identical, event-chains, forcing them into line, as it were. An example may illustrate what I have in mind. Suppose an event chain with a small number of member events, as few as six or seven, which will be symbolized as ‡ ♣ ♥ ♦ Ø ¶  This event chain becomes associated with other self-dominant event chains (either through being in physical proximity or through some other manner) which are similar in the sense that they contain several of the constituent events of the first chain, but not all of them, for example sequences symbolized by ‡ ♣  ¥ € Ø ¶  and ‡ ♣  ¢ ω  Ø ¶  If the first event chain acquires dominance over the other two, the latter will not repeat identically in their current form, but will, after a lapse of time, transform to
‡ ♣ ♥ ♦ Ø ¶   thus strengthening the dominance of this event-chain.  (For the moment I leave aside the question of reversals of order since they involve time and the big issue of reversibility in nature.)

Once this sort of thing has happened again and again over a large time span, the regular appearance and disappearance of events and their bonding together into clearly recognizable chains, would indeed give the impression that all physical events were subject to certain immutable  ‘natural laws’ — although these laws would in reality simply be ‘emergent’ features of the universe, not pre-existing scientific principles. (That there must be certain underlying principles I do not deny, but such very general principles would be more ‘logical’ than what we understand by ‘scientific’. They would be no more than principles that guaranteed a certain coherence and non-contradictoriness to a universe, any universe, not specific principles leading inevitably to the sort of universe we ourselves inhabit. Eddington said that any universe would have to have an upper limit for the propagation of matter and/or radiation through Space, but this upper limit did not need necessarily to be c, the observed speed of light in a vacuum in our current universe.)

We must now ask where all this is happening?  Dr Sheldrake appeals to the field concept which biology inherited from nineteenth century physics. What is a ‘field’? It is generally understood to be a region of space (or more correctly Space/Time) where an influence from a material body makes its presence felt, noticeably affecting the behaviour of other bodies within a certain distance. The commonest examples are electro-magnetic fields and gravitational fields though, long before Sheldrake’s time, one or two biologists such as Weiss and Waddington talked of morphogenetic fields. Where exactly are these fields situated? For traditional biologists there is only one place where they can be situated, namely the ‘normal’ Space/Time locality where everything that is anything takes place. When faced with supposed influences from the distant past, official mechanistic  biology has to assume that the original events are in some way recorded as ‘memory traces’ and that current events activate these stored traces. The ‘memory traces’ in question are supposedly located in the brain which is itself located in ‘normal’ Space/Time. As a matter of fact, it has usually proved very difficult, not to say impossible, to specify  the precise location of these memory traces since animals who have had large sections of their brains excised, still manifest circadian or circannual patterns of behaviour.

Sheldrake proposes dispensing with the necessity of such elusive traces and supposes that, at any rate in some cases, events long past exercise a direct influence over present and future behaviour. This flouts the Principle of Spatio-Temporal Continuity, which is one of the cornerstones not only of physics but of rational thought, and is thus unthinkable for most contemporary scientists. I sympathise with such hesitations up to a point, since I myself have a problem with the notion of a ‘morphic field’ stretching far back in time, as also  with the notion of contemporaneous but spatially distant events exercising dominance directly.

Is there any other way round this problem?  Yes. I personally find much more plausible the idea that there is a separate region where stabilized event-chains are situated  — in my terms acquire dominance —  and from which these event-chains or schemas influence current and future behaviour in the physical world. (I realize that for many people this philosophic ‘cure’ appears a good deal worse than disease.) What is the advantage of such a supposition ? The advantage is firstly that we no longer have to look either for elusive memory traces inside the brain or for undetected influences criss-crossing the physical world like rays of light. This domain may be considered to be largely ‘equidistant’ from locations in real Space/Time which are themselves very far apart, and it may also be considered to occupy a negligible area of ‘its own space’.

An early vocal opponent of the theory of morphic resonance (the editor of Nature) observed that  to Dr Sheldrake that if  his ‘morphic fields’ existed, there would be a vast number of them, a ‘morphic field’ for the primrose, one for the termite, one for the preying mantis and so on ad infinitum. This is indeed hard to believe if we think in terms of ordinary ‘fields’ but one can imagine that basic event schemas exist somewhere in a highly concentrated form, rather like drastically compressed data in a contemporary computer. As to where this domain is exactly, one can only appeal to the notion of a direction ‘orthogonal’ to ordinary Space/Time : if this notion is acceptable in String theory and all sorts of other theories, I do not see why it should not be employed here.

In my SF novel, The Web of Aoullnnia, I distinguish two distinct large-scale regions, the Unmanifest and the Manifest, themselves subdivided to give us The Unmanifest Non-Occurrent, the Unmanifest Occurrent, the Manifest Occurrent and finally the Manifest Non-Occurrent. The first two need not concern us for the moment. The Manifest Occurrent corresponds to the physical universe in which we live, more precisely to that part of the Locality where physical (and mental) events can and do have occurrence. The Manifest Non-Occurrent is a constructed domain peopled by Plato’s Ideas,  Jung’s Archetypes, ‘mythic forms’ and so forth which have no power of independent action but  which have a semblance of vitality by means of which they can and do strongly affect human behaviour patterns. The concept is relatively respectable if we stick to cultural norms, generalized folk tales and mythologies but I propose extending it to cover non-human event chains as well. From my ‘events perspective’, what we have in the Manifest Non-Occurrent are event-chains and schemas that have acquired dominance, and, from there, they exert an influence on events that are about to have occurrence in the Manifest Occurrent, forcing them to conform to pre-existing models.

Plato’s ‘Ideas’ have proved to be one of the greatest success stories in the history of thought, even though few people read Plato any more and many of his physical and cosmological assumptions are today regarded as misguided or absurd. But the notion of  timeless ‘ideal’ Forms to which actual shapes in the real world conform is instinctively appealing and has proved to be extremely serviceable in the development of Western science. The very term ‘ideal gas’ is Platonic and the conception even more so. No actual gas actually ‘obeys’ Boyle’s Law (that the volume of a gas is inversely proportional to the pressure at a fixed temperature) exactly, but not only has this principle been extremely useful but one feels that an ordinary gas ought to behave in this simple, orderly manner. Indeed, the whole of Newtonian Mechanics is “a synthesis of the science of ideal machines, where motion is transmitted without collision or friction between parts already in contact, and the science of celestial bodies interacting at a distance [by attraction]” (Prigogine, Order out of Chaos). This is what makes both Euclidian Geometry and Newtonian Mechanics beautiful in a quasi-mystical sense.

As far as I am concerned, Plato and other transcendentalists were right in their instinct that what happens ‘down here’ is in some sense directed and controlled by what happens in another domain, far removed from the bustle and messiness of the real world. However, the domain they speak of is not populated by geometric forms, or sliding mechanical parts that make no noise, nor even abstract mathematical formulae, but by event-schemas. These schemas, those that are the most solidly established at any rate, do indeed appear to be timeless and unchangeable, but in reality they periodically get replaced and ousted from their dominant position, though most likely never completely destroyed. This is why we have the strange occurrence of occasional reversions in plants and domesticated animals to the ‘wild type’,  and, notoriously the same thing happens with periodic reversions to incredible barbarity within ‘civilized’ nations like Germany and Japan in the mid twentieth century.

I cannot conceive of small changes in day to day life down here having any effect on event schemas established in the Manifest Non-Occurrent (which I sometimes refer to as Shangri-la) : a schema that is already stabilised there never gets modified or tinkered with, only sidelined or replaced. And as we know it is precisely the transition from observable smallscale modifications within species to vast evolutionary transformations that has proved to be a permanent bugbear for Darwin’s theory. The fossil record does not in fact support the assumption of gradual change, on the contrary we obtain
“the contrary pattern of the sudden emergence (in successive waves) of a diversity of new life forms; their persistence, virtually unchanged, over millions of years — only for the whole cycle of emergence, stability and extinction to be repeated.”                           Le Fanu, Why Us?   (p. 95)

Now, as it happens, this is precisely what I would expect given the assumptions I am making. A new event schema, perhaps after much confusion and variability of shape and behaviour, would eventually become dominant and fixed in Shangri-la from which it would exercise a powerful influence on the actual behaviour of the species concerned. Moreover, I would expect any such large-scale changes to be both sudden and in general  irreversible — “For a temple to appear, a temple must disappear”, as Nietzsche put it dramatically. This commits me firmly to the camp of ‘sudden’ evolutionary change.

Take the human genome. The astonishing thing about it is that it is not specific to humans but is (very nearly) universal and has, seemingly, changed very little in the last five hundred million years. According to the theories of Woese, Goldenfeld and others, there was, during the microbial era of evolution a much more varied and confused state of affairs when lateral gene transfer was the norm rather than the exception and “an individual microbe may have had access to the genes found in the entire microbial population around it” (New Scientist, 23 Jan p. 36). The origins of the genetic code can be traced back to this period, which explains the presence of so much heterogeneous material most of it apparently useless  to us (junk DNA). However, once the genome reached a certain level of complexity, it would seem that the Darwinian model of vertical transfer (whereby genes can only be transferred from parents to offspring) became established to the exclusion of other methods. This is exactly in line with my a priori assumptions.

Moreover, it may well make more sense to envisage the genome and the genes that compose it in terms of ‘event schemas’ rather than in terms of actual bodies with precise locations. “Unlike chromosomes, genes are not physical objects, but are merely concepts that have acquired a great deal of historical baggage over the past decades” writes the biologist Gelbart (quoted Keller, The Century of the Gene, p. 67).

Again, consider the evolution of human systems and societies. Even though the injustices and economic inadequacies of the Communist economic system had long been apparent, the system seemed impregnable until, to everyone’s amazement, in country after country within a period of months communism collapsed in eastern Europe in some cases with scarcely a shot being fired. In China the change-over has been somewhat more protracted, but China’s emergence as an industrial giant and economic world leader has come about in two or three years, taking most of the world by surprise (certainly me) and is now considered unstoppable. In the realm of sexual habits and mores, precisely where one would expect there to be the most stubborn resistance to change because reproduction is such a key evolutionary area, I myself lived through the change-over in the Sixties, a change as unexpected as it has proved to be radical and irreversible.

The history of societies and civilizations shows much the same pattern : empires rise from nothing and fall suddenly and irreversibly. In my terms, a dominant event-schema for a civilisation gets established in the Manifest Non-Occurrent and, despite all sorts of upsets and vicissitudes, re-asserts itself triumphantly time and time again until eventually it is abruptly overthrown for ever. This is certainly true of China, the country which effortlessly absorbed its nomad conquerors like the Mongols and the Manchu, making them if anything  ‘more Chinese than the Chinese’. The recurrent and interminable peasant revolts throughout Chinese history never did anything more than replace an existing clique by another and scarcely affected the basic  hierarchical bureaucratic social structure which carried on imperturbably. However, once the alien model of a  secular democratic republic finally reached China at the beginning of the twentieth century, a new dominant event-schema abruptly ousted the Imperial one irreversibly.

Is all this saying anything new ? Perhaps not, though the mindset of people like Spengler and Toynbee who view civilizations rather in the mode of biological organisms has for a long time been judged to be politically incorrect, not to say downright fascistic. But in my case, the theory of the decline, or rather displacement, of civilizations, follows directly from my first principles of ‘Eventrics’, not from any fanciful comparison between societies and plants.

To be continued                                                                                   Sebastian Hayes