Quantum
HEALTH
M
emory is inherent in nature. This is a central feature of the hypothesis discussed in my book
A New Science of Life. The laws
of nature are more like habits. Each species has a collective memory on which all individuals draw and to which they contribute.
My interest in evolutionary habits arose when I was doing research at Cambridge on developmental biology, and was reinforced by reading Charles Darwin, for whom the habits of organisms were of central importance. As Francis Huxley has pointed out, Darwin’s most famous book, whose 150th anniversary we celebrate this year, could more appropriately have been entitled The Origin of Habits.
Morphic fi elds in biology
Over the course of fi fteen years of research on plant development, I came to the conclusion that genes are not enough for understanding how plants grow. Morphogenesis, literally meaning the coming-into-being of form, depends on organising fi elds. The same arguments apply to the development of animals. Since the 1920s many developmental biologists have accepted that biological organisation depends on organising fi elds, variously called biological fi elds, or developmental fi elds, or positional fi elds, or morphogenetic fi elds.
Many organisms live as free, individual cells. Some form complex mineral skeletons, as in diatoms and radiolarians, spectacularly pictured in the nineteenth century by Ernst Haeckel. Just making switching on the right genes at the right times cannot explain the complex skeletons of such structures without many other forces coming into play, including the organising activity of cell membranes and microtubules.
Morphogenetic fi elds work by imposing patterns on otherwise random or indeterminate patterns of activity. For example, they cause
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