Thank you to the Scientific and Medical Network and to the Institute of the New Ethics Sciences,
which have supported me and my work. No, I've had the sort of encouragement
of both of these organizations practically since the first publication of my book in 1981. And I'm immensely grateful for that because as David mentioned, there's been quite a lot of hostility, many attacks. But it's been enormously reassuring
and in fact, essential to feel that I have friends as well. And the two organizations that have been the rocks
on which I've been able to rest and build foundations are institute genetic sciences
and the Sun if I can medical network. So it's very appropriate that this event is hosted
by both of them. Well, first of all, I want to say something about what the idea of morphic resonance is for those of you
who are not familiar with it. So just a very brief summary. It basically is the idea there's a memory inherent in nature. The so-called laws of nature are more like habits. Each species has a kind of collective memory. Giraffes, hedgehogs, hummingbirds, each hummingbird species, each species of plant, foxgloves, roses. Each species has a collective memory. And then each variety within
the species has a kind of collective memory as well. And each individual contributes
to that collective memory and draws upon it. So the idea of the collective unconscious of young is just the human aspect of this much more general hypothesis of collective memory. And perhaps the most radical aspect of this hypothesis,
and certainly one of the most controversial is the idea that our own memories
don't depend, as usually assumed on stored memory traces inside our brains,
but rather depend on morphic resonance from our past. The idea
of morphic resonance is essentially based on similarity. Similar patterns of vibratory activity
in self-organizing systems, influence subsequent similar systems across space and time resonance works on the basis of similarity. It's the automatic similarity selection system. So what I'm suggesting is that morphic resonance works from the past to the present across space and time. I'm not saying it works independently of space and time, because
that would mean work from the future as well as the past. I think there are influences from the future,
but they're much rarer than those from the past. And morphic
resonance is a hypothesis about memory, principle in nature. So it's from the past, but it's across space and time. And because we are most similar to ourselves in the past, that's why we resonate specifically with ourselves in the past
more than any other human or any other organism. And that's the basis I suggest of our memory. Well, this very brief in a nutshell, summary of this hypothesis. I first thought of this idea, at least in Clone, in 1973. I was the fellow college Cambridge. I was also a research fellow of the Royal Society,
and I was working on the development of plants. How do plants form their leaves,
flowers, their stems, their roots and I was working on the hormone auxin endo acetic acid, and I discovered that auxin this hormone is made by dying cells. It's a breakdown product of tryptophan,
which is one of the amino acids in proteins. And when cells die, the proteins are hydrochloric
and they're broken down. And then the amino acids
released by the hydrolysis of proteins are further broken down. And one of the byproducts of this process is auxin. I discovered it was made by dying cells in Kline's wood cells in particular. I published this hypothesis,
but it didn't really catch on because most people thought something as important as a hormone must be synthesized
by complex biochemical pathways. However, 50 years later,
it turns out that all these attempts to explain it in terms of complex pathways have failed
and the dying cell hypothesis has recently risen. Before again, I published a paper on it just a month ago in the Journal of Experimental Botany
and called the production of oxygen by dying cells. You can see it on my website and I also worked in Cambridge
on the way in which oxygen is transport heated in a polar direction from the leaf
tips towards the roots, if any moves in one direction and what's called the polar auction transport system. And this is a foundational study. It's now in all the botanical textbooks. It's a key feature of the way oxygen works and plants develop. Well, this is what I was working on and it became clear that this hypothesis hypotheses
were really victims of their own success. They explain oxygen production and explain auxin movement, but they explain it in all plants, in sons, in pine
trees, in palms, in bamboos, in roses, in foxgloves, in cabbages. And what's more, they explain it in the petals of the same plant and the leaves of the same plant. Hence, this can't explain why they're different, why the petals in the daffodil
and the cup and the corona are different from each other. Why? The leaf shapes of all the different species are different. You need some other explanation, and I got interested in the idea of more genetic fields from shaping fields like invisible molds or blueprints
for developing systems, an idea that had been proposed
first in 1921 by Alexander Gavage in Russia. And the idea of more genetic fields seemed to me
the best way forward to understand form. But then there was the question of how
how are these fields inherited? Because genes don't explain form that. Explain the inheritance of proteins
and the control of of protein synthesis. There had to be some other way they could be inherited. And I was completely stuck for about two years. I just couldn't understand how these fields could work
because they were clearly inherited. Do historical biology is historical. It has history built into it. So it's not just a reflection of platonic ideal forms. The whole point of evolution is that it's historical. So I couldn't understand how this worked until a great new insight came to me. Basically the idea of morphic resonance
and it came through reading a book of Philosophy by Henry Bergson, the French philosopher. I read his book Matter and Memory
not because of science, but because I was interested in Marcel Proust,
the great novelist who'd been influenced by Bergson. And so I was reading it for literary reasons. But what Bergson shows there is
that memory is probably not stored in the brain and as a form of causation that works directly across time. Now, it had never crossed my mind before that there could be
a causation that worked, as it were, at a distance in time. And as soon as I realized that could be a form of causation,
working across gaps in time, then the idea of the inheritance of morphic genetic fields
by a new kind of causation working across time
suddenly made sense of huge amounts of biology. Then I tried to think how it might work
and the idea of morphic resonance popped into my mind. I was in a state of extreme excitement for days, weeks, because more and more seemed to become clear. It didn't impress my colleagues
in the biochemistry department at Cambridge who, when I explained it to them,
they were completely baffled by what I was trying to explain. So it didn't go over terribly
well in the biochemistry department tearoom. So we went over a little bit better on the high table
in Clare College, where some historians and philosophers were quite intrigued by the idea
and quite supportive and helpful. But it soon became clear to me that if I published this,
I'd have to think it through in much more detail. The biochemistry department
in Cambridge wasn't the right place to do that. Everybody was busy working out enzyme mechanisms
and structure of nucleic acids and so on. It just wasn't the right place for me. I wanted to work holistically with clients
and I'd been to India. I went there first in 1968 and the idea of working in agriculture in India suddenly became enormously appealing. I could work holistically. Agriculture was about holistic studies. You have to study whole plants in real fields
with real weather and real diseases and farmers who work under really economic conditions. And I also wanted to do something useful. And as it happened at that time, a new international institute
was being set up in India, the International Crops Research Institute
for the Semi-Arid Tropics at present. And I was appointed principal plant physiologist. It was a very high prestige international institute and it gave me a whole team
to work with a lab fields on an experimental farm. I could do experiments all over India,
and indeed I did some in the Middle East as well. I was working on chickpeas and pigeon peas. I was running experiments in the back
valley in Lebanon, for example. We had to abandon those because of machine gun damage, a problem
we didn't encounter anywhere else. But the the working in it was wonderful. I greatly enjoyed it and being in India was wonderful and it gave me the space
to go on thinking about morphic resonance. And I did this for another five years or so until I felt ready
to write a book about it to bring it together. I was helped when I was living in Hyderabad, where A.S. is by friendship with Helen Sperber,
a great British biologist of a previous generation who had gone out to India with her husband, JP, as Haldane had died in India, but she'd inherited his library. And so a lot of the books I needed
I could get from Haldane's library, at least those that hadn't been eaten by termites
or gnawed by her jackal, she had a pet jackal. And so I got to the point where I was ready to write a book about this. And at that stage I met Father Bede Griffiths,
who lived in an ashram in Tamil Nadu in South India. He invited me to go and live in his ashram,
a Benedictine ashram, and write my book, which I did. And I lived in total there for about two years. So I just had a palm thatched hut under a palm tree on the bank of the Sacred River Cauvery and the ashram had quite a good library. Of course not scientific. I had to get books
posted from the British Council library in Bombay for from the scientific work or from friends in England. But it was a perfect time for me to think about this too, to write and to write this book. I then went back to England and with the book, which was called Towards the New Science of Life and it was I submitted it to publishers and it was rejected
by 12 different publishers, one after another. They just they sent it to scientific friends or colleagues to these publishers
who were literary figures. And at that time, you had any publishers
who knew anything about science, and their colleagues told me it would be controversial. So they backed off until I was the only publisher
I actually knew personally and knew Blond,
who had a publishing firm called Plant and Briggs. And Antony said, Oh, I'd love to do the book, RUPERT. And then here's the contract
he produced on a few days later and said, Sign here. And I said, Shouldn't I read it first? Is there no formalities? So after dinner and lots of wine, I signed this contract signing over the world
rights to this book for nothing to to blond. He later went bankrupt and I got the rights back, fortunately. But one of his inputs, apart from the fact he published it,
for which I is very grateful, was to change the titles. He said, no one reads books called Towards. He said, Just cross it out. A New Science of life notable doesn't
that sounds a little bit immodest doesn't matter. So trust me old boy he said I know about titles. He said I told Schumacher to call his book Small is Beautiful. It worked, he said. So I know. Okay. So anyway, Blond published the book and came out with a wonderful launch party by a friend of mine, now deceased. Who? That's Linda Dufresne on Midsummer's
Day Out the summer solstice, June the 21st, 1981. And to start with, things went swimmingly well. There was a feature in New Scientist
Colin Couch was immensely supportive and helpful. The Guardian wrote editorials that were serious discussion and many scientific journals and magazines. But then three months later came this Hammer Blow editorial
on the front page of Nature of the leading international scientific journal
called A Book for Burning. And I was denounced by the editor of Nature,
Sir John Maddox, for heresy. And his aim was to run me out of tongue to make sure I'd never
get to got a job again or a grant in the scientific world. And he succeeded. I couldn't I was unemployable from then on, and I became extremely dangerous to know. So magic succeeded. But it did mean in terms of research on this hypothesis, I couldn't do it in regular universities
because it was just too controversial. However, a new doors opened
and when my book was published in America in 1982 by Jeremy Torture in Los Angeles,
a whole new world opened up California I'd never been before. I was invited by Stan Graff to teach in his program at In the Union Societies in Los Angeles and San Francisco invited me to give talks,
and I discovered a whole network of union analysts and people influenced by Jung,
who were very well disposed towards my hypothesis. The folks at Claremont College, the Process Philosophy Group at Claremont College in California who studied the philosophy of Whitehead
were extremely sympathetic and helpful. I came to know David Boehm and Krishnamurti. We did dialogs together
and as David mentioned, and David Boehm became enormous help and support because from his way of thinking about quantum theory,
morphic resonance made perfect sense. The the idea that things could be connected through what
he called the implicate order at a distance in time and space worked very well with his interpretation of quantum theory. I came to know other quantum theorists
and in Britain and Germany and elsewhere in in America and in Europe. And then New Scientist helped further in 1982, a New Scientist ran
an international competition for ideas for testing, morphic resonance with a prize, a cash prize that led to a really creative set of ideas for tests. And they had to be simple tests
because there was no funding for this research at the time. And there's never been very much
I mean, there's been a trickle of funding, but nothing on the scale of regular science. And so it was the idea of countless, simple, inexpensive tests, and it was a very productive international brainstorming. And the winners were announced
and it really helped kickstart a new phase of research. Then in 1982, also Robert Alan Schwarz of the Tarrytown Center in New York, upstate New York, offered a Tarrytown prize for the testing of morphic resonance and a $10,000 prize for the best test. He mentioned this to me. We were on the way to on the way to a party,
a given by Michael Murphy, who founded the Aspen Institute. And I said, Bob, that would be a tremendous idea. And and when we arrived, I told Michael Murphy about it, Bob Schwartz's offer of this prize. And Michael Murphy immediately
got in class and banged it with a spoon called Sunset folks. He said, Robert Bob Schwartz has just offered this $10,000 prize for a test of morphic resonance, and they were great cheers. And Schwartz was the hero of the evening. And I said to Michael afterwards, I asked him
why did you announce it so quick? And just told you,
you said, I didn't want Bob to go back on the idea. He said I thought I'd hold him to it and indeed it
did hold him to it. And there were there was a $10,000 prize. There was some very, very good entries. The prize was won by Gary Schwartz, who many of you will know
as a consciousness researcher who was at that time a professor of psychology at Yale
who did an ingenious test involving Hebrew words. And then in 1987, Institute of Noetic Sciences launched a contest
for student projects to test morphic resonance. The results were announced in 1991, and again
there was a great creative outpouring of projects,
and the prize first prize was won by Monika England, who was an undergraduate in psychology
at Nottingham University in Britain, who did a test with crossword puzzles. She got the Evening Standard crossword puzzle
before it was published in the London Evening Standard and tested people in Nottingham
where you couldn't get the Evening Standard, a London paper. And in those days nothing was unknown. And she found, as predicted by morphic resonance,
the crossword puzzle became easier to solve when tens of thousands of people had done it in London
than it was the day before. Before all these people had done it, as compared
with a controlled crossword. So that was a very helpful intervention
of the Institute of Ethics. Science is sponsoring this contest. It then turned out that this area could be tested
in a number of other realms. I hadn't initially thought of all these possible tests, and
what I was concentrating on was trying to test the hypothesis. Empirically, I'm an experimental scientist and I'm the the idea of testing it experimentally was what preoccupied me and still does. I was giving a seminar in the chemistry department
at the University of Vermont when one of the professors raised the possibility
that if morphic resonance is true, if it really happens,
then the melting points of chemical compounds should increase over time because morphic resonance
should make the crystal structure more stable. And if it's more stable, it should be harder to disrupt it. And how you disrupted his by heating them up. And if it's hard to disrupt, you should be able to heat them
to a high temperature before they melted. So this this idea led to the prediction that by morphic
resonance, the melting points of new compounds should rise. Those that have been run for thousands of years
that crystallized naturally, like salt crystals or asparagus seen on the leaves of plants, wouldn't have this effect because they've already had a backlog
of millions of crystals. You wouldn't notice any difference against that background. But new compounds should show rise in melting points. So this was an outrageous prediction
because melting points are called physical constants. So you look them up in handbooks of physical constants. So so on the cover that the constants. And so I started looking at melting points
and I found actually they seem to go up for new compounds. I later worked with a retired chemist in British Columbia class and tasked to do much more exhaustive survey than I had done
and the results in the first slide show the melting points of a compounds you see at the black line. In the middle is the melting point given in the oldest reports that he could find in chemical literature. Then you see the changes over time, over the next few decades of melting points
and you see the great majority of them have gone up. There's a few that went down that could have been erased. I mean, you would expect some errors. If they are random errors,
you'd expect them to go up and down more or less equally. And probably the ones that seem to go down
might have been errors or measuring different versions of the compound like hydrates as opposed to anhydrous crystals,
something like that. But as you say,
the great majority went up and many of them went up. As you see, five degrees, ten, 20, 30, 40,
something went up 20, ten, 20, 30 or 40 degrees centigrade. We're not talking fractions of a degree here. I then did a series of studies of compounds that crystallize in nature compared with similar compounds
that are human made. The next slide shows the the melting point of the compounds sanitation which occurs in willow bark. And between 1902 and 1996,
it was virtually no change in its melting point. If we look at the next slide,
we see aspirin first synthesized in the 19th century as a synthetic derivative of salicylic acid. And I didn't get the records in the 1890s,
but between 1914 to 1996, the melting point had gone up by eight degrees
centigrade and pressing back further. I'm sure we'd find a bigger increase. The next comparison shows cocaine,
which occurs in coca, leaves the coke. The plant and the natural form
that crystallizes in coca leaves when they're dried hasn't shown any change in Melting Point over the 20th century,
but cocaine hydrochloride the next one, which is produced by extracting coca leaves with hydrochloric acid,
the cocaine of commerce shows a considerable increase from 184 296, 12 degrees centigrade or centigrade over the 20th century. So here we see a series of data from chemicals,
and it should be possible to do much more rigorous experiments with chemicals, looking at melting points for looking for morphic resonance effects, I've tried to persuade chemists to do this. The closest I got was a shell industrial chemical laboratory
here in Britain. But every time I've managed to persuade some chemists
that it might be worth doing, it comes before the head of the lab or some committee or other. And then people say it is enormously controversial. Well, open a can of worms. We don't want it opened in our laboratory and then I get this
apologetic email has happened over and over again from the person I've been talking to, saying,
sorry, my boss has said, we just can't do this. And people are frightened and they should wouldn't be told because anything
to do some of these experiments, the barrier is not financial for some of these tests,
but psychological and sociological. Well, now the the hypothesis can be tested in the realm of biology. I mentioned in my books and tests done with fruit flies
by May one hope the next slide shows a normal fruit fly at the top and a four winged fruit fly at the bottom,
which can come about as a result of mutation. It's called a homoerotic mutant, where one organ is changed
to another that alters the balancing organs. They changed into an extra pair of wings that can happen as a result of a genetic mutation
that switches the development from whole test wings. I would say the morphing genetic field of the whole is switched. Its light goes on to an alternative
like flipping a channel on the TV set. Then the morphed genetic field of the wings takes over. Now you can also produce this four wing fly
by exposing the eggs of fruit flies to ether. Soon after they're blade. This doesn't cause genetic changes,
but if it changes the development, it's a bit like thalidomide causing abnormal babies to develop. It's not a question of genetic change,
but developmental disturbance. No experiments on this were done by May one. Who and her colleagues at the Open University in England,
and the next slide shows what they found. And in the first generation, which used to the extreme left hand corner, about 2% of the flies
developed four wings in response to ether fumes, exposing the eggs, being exposed to ether fumes. In the next generation it was about 6% and it went on. After 11 generations. It was over 30%. If you stopped exposing them to ether, the dotted line showed that the percentage of falling flies
fell off, but it continued. They continued to produce falling flies
for quite a few generations, five generations or more. They were still producing some fall wing flies. This might now be called an epigenetic effect. Something is it changed the expression of the genes. But I think it's a mixture of morphic resonance
and epigenetic effects. And the next slide shows what you would expect the top box you see the untreated flies, then they're treated with ether, and the shaded boxes are ones
which have been treated with ether. And normally in those experiments she bred from
the ones treated with ether. So you don't know whether there's been an inheritable change
through the inheritance, through acquired characters,
which has now been rebranded to epigenetic inheritance, or whether it's morphic resonance. The lower line shares
how you do the experiments and distinguish them. In each generation
you breed from flies that haven't been exposed to ether. Then some of them are exposed to weeks
and you see how many develop for wings. And according to morphic resonance, the proportion
developing for wings should increase,
even though the ancestors have never been exposed to ether. And in the next slide we show what you see, what happens, who actually did an experiment like that? And in the first generation, 2% were changed. And then when she came back into the second experiment, the first generation
of the second experiment of untreated flies, it was 10%. The second generation it was 6% originally. But when she did the experiment again, after
a lot of flies had undergone this change, it was nearly 20%. That, I think, is a morphic resonance effect
as opposed to an epigenetic effect. Now, what are the predictions of this hypothesis
is that if you train rats to learn a new trick in one place, rats all around
the world should learn it quicker. There's already evidence to this. I was challenged by a skeptical British scientist, Stephen Rose, at the Open University to test what he called my seemingly absurd hypothesis in his laboratory
under his control. Some of my friends said you'd be foolish
to let Rose who such an extremely intemperate and and also hostile critic to be in charge of this research. But I thought, okay, well,
no one else has offered me a chance to test it. So, you know, I'll take what I offered. And so I accepted his challenge. We did an experiment with tailed chicks. They were exposed to yellow and red light, and they made six. Soon after, they pecked at it. And that meant thereafter they no longer pecked yellow lights. But they
there was a control stimulus that they went on pecking at. My prediction was that relative to the control generation
after generation, fresh batches of chicks should show more hesitancy,
a greater latency before cracking at the bead and the results in the next slide showed there was exactly that effect. The latency increased over these generations as if they weren't descended from the previous chips,
which are still fresh back. This was a significant effect. Well, Rose immediately denounced this result as being an artifact of some kind
and said it couldn't possibly be morphic resonance. But the fact is, it showed the effect
and it worked as predicted. And that made it very clear to me
if I needed further evidence that people who are opposed to something don't just say when you present them with the evidence
in this case from this. And they don't say, okay, yes, it really is happening. As I say, there's something terribly wrong with this evidence
and anyway, he did say that and I then refuted what he said. And and the dispute took place in scientific journals. And you can read about it if you're interested in the details. I also did a series of tests on television,
and the next slide shows a puzzle picture and oh, sorry, did I mention just one further slide here? This shows the rise in IQ average IQ over a generation from 1918 to 1989, so-called Flynn effect. I predicted that there would be an average average rise in average IQ, not because people are getting smarter, but because the tests are getting easier,
because so many have done them. And this effect is now well known. And this shows the effect of 3% rise in the US IQ. No evidence that people have got 30% smarter. The tests have just come off easier to do and the next slide shows a puzzle picture. And I did a series of experiments on British television
with pencil pictures. This puzzle picture those are hidden, has a hidden image. And once you've seen the answer, you just get it. And the idea was when people have been shown the answer
to a puzzle picture on British television, do people in Germany and elsewhere in Europe recognize it more easily compared to the control puzzle picture and the. Let me show the answer no. And it's a cowboy on a horse. If if we now go back to the initial image,
you should get it straight away. It's a very rapid form of learning. And it turns out people did get it did get easier for people to recognize the puzzle picture in Germany
after people had been shown it in Britain. Now the research has been going on in a variety of ways,
which sheds further light on morphic resonance. And one of these experiments was done by a French scientist,
Miroslav Hill, who wasn't looking for morphic resonance effects, but was looking at the ability of cells grown
in tissue culture and mammalian cell walls to respond to toxins to overcome toxic stresses
or heat stresses. And the next slide shows what he did in his experiments. And in each experiment he sub cultured cells
and put some of them into the normal medium. We toxin. The white circles represent each generation of the cells
with some cultured, but some of them were put in a toxic medium. And after perfusion durations, the cells in the toxic medium
began to thrive. They began to survive and divide and grow. And after that, all the cells in the toxic medium or these,
many of them were able to survive, whereas previously they hadn't. Now his explanation, which in the next slide we see, was that the top diagram represents Hill's explanation
that somehow the cells that have developed the resistance infra inside the untreated cells so that when they were treated
in the next generation they had this resistance. But he had to postulate that they did this through
some kind of quantum entanglement. There was no physical contact
for which there's no evidence in cellular cultures. My interpretation, you see below is that the ones who develop
resistance could pass this on by morphic resonance. The dotted lines, the curved dotted lines at the top would mean that subsequent cells exposed to this toxin would be able to resist it better because the morphic resonance
from previous ones exposed to the toxin. Now this type of experiment
should be relatively easy to carry out with microbes, with yeasts, always cells in tissue culture. And if any of you have labs
where you're able to do this, do please get in touch with me. You can contact me through my website because this would be a
very productive way of testing for morphic resonance in biology. It just requires
someone who's open minded with a lab and time to do this. The actual cost of materials is very small. Okay, well, no. In the new edition
of A New Science of Life, it's now in its third edition. I outlined ten further tests for morphic. One of them is in the realm of low temperature
physics, Bose-Einstein condensates where matter behaves strangely
it becomes superconductive superfluid. There's no electrical resistance. The whole system behaves as a single quantum particle,
even though it's made of millions of atoms. And this only happens at low temperatures. So the background temperature of the universe is 2.7 degrees
above absolute zero. In low temperature physics
times, people can get down to 4.1 degrees above absolute zero or even less, and anything that's done at that temperature
would be new in the history of the universe, because unless they're a high temperature,
very low temperature physics labs on other planets, these could happen for the first time. And therefore, one could do
morphic resonance experiments in low temperature physics labs. If a Bose-Einstein condensate takes a certain amount of time
to appear, if you keep making it to same compound at the same temperature,
it should appear more quickly as time goes on. And you have it built up anyway. There are ten new tests
I put forward in a new science of life in the appendix. And if you're interested, take a look. And if you have a lab
and these are tests in physics, chemistry, biology, psychology and analog computing, do please get in touch. Because what I keep most keenly want
is for these tests to happen. Now, there's also been advances in the study of vibratory systems, and the next slide shows some results from some experiments I did with my son
Mellon, who wrote a book on fungi called Entangled Life. We have a laboratory at home
and we've been doing experiments with vibrating fluids. These are water vibrated at different frequencies
and as do you see, there are always patterns appear. Just add vibration. And these different frequencies produce these complex patterns
and there's a whole range. More We've published a paper on this in Water Journal
and I think that these natural systems of vibratory brain
suddenly are, and I think developing tissues are. And I think recent research on vibration
feeds into an understanding of morphic resonance
through giving us a better understanding of vibratory fields. And the next slide shows a model of the computer model of vibratory modes
in the electromagnetic fields, and believes that these experiments, these simulations, are due to a researcher called Piatek. And she, as you see,
showed that you can get patterning effects of vibration. And so a lot of modern developmental biology
still based on the idea of clunkier chemical gradients. You just don't need them. I think leaves and other developing systems
have electromagnetic fields which have resonant patterns and I think the morphic resonance works
through those electromagnetic patterns. Moffett Resonance
also plays to the organization of groups of animals, and the next slide shows flocks of starlings, a murmuration of starlings over Brighton West Pier. And the next slide shows other pictures of starlings as they move in these flocks. It's like a field phenomenon. The birds not only know where their neighbors are,
but where they're going to move to. Otherwise they collide and they don't collide. And the next slide shows a school of fish where you have very similar phenomenon. I think that social groups of animals have fields,
morphic fields, the fields of social groups
that move the social equivalent of morphic genetic fields. And the generic name for these fields is morphic fields
with morphic resonance a kind of memory in the group field. And I think that some of them are similar fields effect human groups in including human families and we can finish that slide now. And this again is an area where morphic resonance has taken on a whole new dimension through the work on family constellations therapy. Many of you will have heard of this where the therapist treats the whole family as a field,
a members of the family within an interrelated field. And these family fields often seem to inherit patents from past generations,
which can sometimes be very destructive. If a member of a in a past generation
committed suicide, tied or was expelled from the family, or committed some terrible crime,
or for some other reason was excluded. Then in the present generation, a member of the family
follows them, as it were, and excludes themselves or becomes suicidal
in ways that individual psychotherapy can't address. But this form of family constellation
therapy is very, very effective. I've had many opportunities to watch it in action
because my wife, Jo Purse, does wonderful family constellation sessions,
which she's not doing on Zoom. And this I've seen through Jill's work
and through the work of Bert HENNINGER, the German, the proponent of this, who was one of the main people
to popularize this system of therapy. I've seen many examples of transformative effects
that seem to me to show field effects with non-local effects
on different members of the family. People can be miles away from someone doing this therapy,
and yet it can seem it can affect them. Well, in conclusion, I just want to say that the problems
within mainstream science have continued to pile up. I address these in my book, The Science Delusion, called Science
and Free in the United States. And many of these problems can be resolved if we take into account morphic resonance in cosmology. For example, there's a big debate about whether this universe at the moment of the Big Bang
had all the constants and laws of nature fixed. Exactly right for life. As we know, it was a fine tuning of all these laws of nature. A lot of scientists are atheists and they hate the idea
of the idea of some kind of mechanical god. Just fine tuning the world
machine. It's a very crude idea of God. Most Christians and most believers in
God would not think of God as an engineer outside the universe. Fine tuning it. But anyway, to avoid any hint of God, they prefer to say there must be billions,
trillions of actual universes, of which ours is the only one which is useful for us to be aware of it in the area
when we can exist in which all the others actually exist. So you don't need God. Well, this debate, the multiverse universe debate. I see both sides assumed that all the laws of nature were fixed at the moment,
the big bang and all the constants to a fixed one. As I've shown, the constants may vary. I discussed this in the science tradition, but also the laws don't have to be fixed if. The laws are like habits. They can evolve along with nature. They don't all have to be fixed at the moment. The Big Bang, the whole of this debate just dissolves away
like the morning mist. If we have a view of the evolution of the habits of nature, then cosmologists have had to postulate dark matter to explain galaxies,
which they ask to be held together by gravitation and the known amounts of matter. Don't explain the structure of the galaxy. So they then assume this invisible dark matter which is titrated into their equations of galaxies
in just the right amount to explain the facts. The only problem is that no one knows what dark matter is,
and there's no evidence that it actually exists at all. And yet the space to be about five times
more dark matter than real matter of kind, we already knew. But if the galaxy is an organism, if the stars within is like cells within an organism, we don't have to say it's just gravity that holds it together. In my article on is the Sun Conscious, I discussed the the hypothesis of Greg Matloff,
who proposes that stars naturally move like cells to an embryo to take up the right position. He calls it the Volitional Star hypothesis. And if we think of the galaxy as an organism then we don't need all this dark matter. We can have a much more organic view of astronomy
and indeed of the cosmos. Then morphic resonance helps understand
very puzzling data about inheritance. It turns on genes. The results of the genome project. We now know that genes don't explain
more than about 10% of inheritance, even of common things like height or proneness
to diseases, or proneness to schizophrenia. And the amount of inheritance they tend to explain is something like 80 or 90% of what's inherited this is called the missing heritability problem within biology. I think the reason that there's a missing heritability problem
is that the genes don't explain form instinct behavior. They only explain the inheritance of the structure of proteins,
which is what we know. Genes do. So morphic resonance together with epigenetic inheritance,
I think can enable us to reinterpret inheritance and the entire evolutionary process,
which depends on inheritance in what is now called the extended evolutionary synthesis,
which is taking over from the narrow, rather shrill, dogmatic neo-darwinism that's been so widely popularized
by Richard Dawkins and his colleagues. And then attempts to locate memories in brains have failed over and over again, and recent attempts
to track down the so-called engram, the memory traits again have run into problems,
as they always do over and over again for more than 100 years. And I think this is
because the memories aren't in the brains in the first. So morphic fields also enable us to think in terms of extended minds. I don't have time to discuss that. I'm giving a seminar next weekend
on the extended minds of animals and how they connect with what's called the unexplained powers of animals and a whole new range of ways of thinking about consciousness open up so this is very much an ongoing project, and if you're interested in finding out more,
then do take a look at my books. The next slide shows a new science of life in the UK edition. This is the third edition, fully updated and in the US it's been retitled Next Slide Morphic Resonance. It's the same book by both your thinking you'll get more,
you won't. You'll get the same book with a different title. And this was my first book as we met this evening to discuss and is brief and somewhat technical. My main theoretical book on Morphic Resonance,
which deals with memories, psychology, cultural inheritance, rituals, the role of morphic professions and religious rituals
and many other topics is called the presence of the Past. And this is the new edition in Britain and the US. New edition, both of these fully updated is looks like that it's the same book, it's just across different editions in Britain and America. So if you're interested in going into more detail,
do please take a look at these books. And right now I think we've got some time for questions. If you'd like to ask more about this. Thank you so much. Rupert. Well, that was a sort of tour de force of the tour dailies. All the French would say, you know, giving us an idea of the the the epigenetic development of morphic resonance
over the last 40 years and what still needs to be tested. And indeed, at the end, you were talking about the puzzles
that are illuminated by the hypothesis. And and these
the the which could potentially be an angle of approach in a number of disciplines. And so I think that I think that's very exciting
and we really need orthodox scientists to spread their wings a bit and to be a little more adventurous
and less fearful for their narrow reputations. And I just want to I've got some very interesting questions
to to put to you, but I, I wondered if I know that Louis Wolpert died recently
and he is one of you. In the past, you actually had a debate with him,
which I attended at the Royal Society of Arts. And. But you had a bit didn't
you ever have a case of fine pause? I remember advising you on what porte to get out of that. How's that going in terms of can you remind us of what the
debate was, what the issue was, and where you think it's got to? Well, in 2009, Louis Wulf and I had a debate at Cambridge University and the last event in the Cambridge University Science Festival,
it was on the nature of Life. And Wolpert, in this debate said that it would soon be possible to predict every detail of a new organism
based on the genetic code and its fertilized egg and modify as it will,
and say that genetics could predict everything about organisms. And I challenged him on that. I said I didn't. That's at all true, Louis.
I don't think it's going to happen. And and and I said, I'll bet your bottle of champagne
it won't happen within ten years. You said, Well, maybe not ten years, maybe 20. I said, okay, bottle of champagne in 20 years. And you said, Well, no, actually,
I might be a bit more complicated. I mean, perhaps 100 years too. You said soon. And I said both of us will be dead in 100 years time. Promiscuity, materialism in its most extreme form. And anyway, I followed up afterwards and I said, Louis, can we have a debate, a bet that's feasible within our lifetimes or potentially lifetimes? No, 20 years is. And so he said, all right. He said I said, you've said humans are too difficult. What about the mouse? All right. 20 years predict every detail of a mouse. Then we agreed on it. We agreed on the steak. The case of quinoa deficiency of 2005. Thanks to your advice to it, we paid half each and there it is. This case of fine porters in the vaults of the Wine Society awaiting 2029 when the bet terminates. And so with new scientists, we're going to publish the bet. But he got on to me. He said, Ruth, I just kind of tricks the mouse a bit too. Doesn't have to be a chick. Anyway, after several iterations we got down to a nematode worm and so I said, okay, any multicellular organism. And we published the bat and and last year, the 10th anniversary to 2019, the 10th anniversary,
a betting company called Fitz des Open to book. So anyone who wants to can bet on whether one or or I will win this battle in 2029. Anyway, it looks extremely unlikely that he or his as well. He obviously he won't win it. But his and he has a son
who's a fellow of Trinity College Cambridge. He's got a scientific son who will no doubt be able to watch out
for the Wolpert interests in the case and so anyway, that's where the status of that bet. And and I think that if you took a bet among biologists today,
the vast majority would think that Wolf is going to lose drastic variance. I think that's a little personal,
but very interesting questions. And the first one from John Brown president would be a vehicle of pre-determined information. And he said the ancient myths as a bird. So the harbingers of the knowledge of death on three separate occasions
I personally experienced this in all three separate incidents. A bird appeared inside my house all on a Friday night,
one week on the following and and spaced a few years apart. First my son, second my sister,
my wife all died in exactly the same kind of accidents. In addition, my wife and sister had exact first and last names and are exactly the same age. Gosh. Well, I think these I mean, I've had many stories of this kind of presaging of death, and it's very,
very hard to understand these. I mean, it would be in part an you know, you can't exactly do experiments on it. You know, you can't sort of have people die at randomized times
to make joke to see whether the birds appear a week before. So it's one of those those mysteries
which I think the most we can do is document them and to explain it in terms of morphic
resonance would be difficult. Morphic resonance is about habits of nature, and perhaps
it's a habit for birds to announce tests and certain families. It seems to be the heart of the birds. No. And this is going way beyond the scope of this hypothesis. I mean, there are many mysteries
which this hypothesis doesn't embrace. I mean, it might hint towards a possible answer, but I myself focused primarily on the regularities of things that are easier to test. This would take us into those very intriguing realms where we can only say We just don't know,
we just don't understand. I think to a good answer,
then there's one more related to the current situation. You think there's any relationship
between morphic resonance and herd immunity? Well, I'm I've thought quite a bit about this. The thing is that morphic resonance would mean
or might mean that when you have a lot of people recover from a disease,
that the response to the antibody response to that disease might become easier for others
to to have the same kind of response. In other words, immune responses might be subject to morphic resonance. And the more people that get better from the disease,
the easier it may be for others to get better from it. And it's interesting
that about a third of the people who are infected with COVID now, at least in Britain, have no symptoms at all. The antibody response to
so effective that you wouldn't know they had it unless you did actual COVID tests. So it's possible that's happening, on the other hand, but it can't be true of all diseases
otherwise all diseases would die out and diseases in the flu and cold family,
these viral respiratory diseases do die out or tend to die out,
but there are other diseases like smallpox and so on, that if any, died as a result of eradication
campaigns with vaccination. So it if morphic resonance plays a part, then one would have
to find out why does it work more for some diseases than others? This would be a whole realm of exploration in epidemiology. I mean, as soon as you start thinking in terms of morphic
resonance, new questions come up everywhere and potential new scientific experiments and lines of inquiry. Yes, thank you. And there's a couple of questions
about how movement resonance relates to the holographic universe
and also connection with quantum entanglement. I think the quantum entanglement
you already addressed through what you said about David Byrne, but you want to comment too long. Holographic universe. We had called pre brown mystics and scientists
around the same time and I'm sure you knew him. Yes, he did indeed. I met my wife Jo through Carl Pre Brown. We were at a conference in Bombay in 1982 and I was talking
to Carl program, arguing about the nature of memory. When Joe came up, he introduced us because he knew. Joe said,
I have Carl programed to think for introducing me to my wife. Well, program at first thought memory was stored in the brain. Then he thought because you couldn't
find localized memory traces that would be stored
holographic tree over large regions of the brain. Then he became interested in David Bowie's ideas and then thought it might be stored holographic
through in the whole universe. You know that the holograms have a distributed pattern of storage and the whole is present in each part. And so in a sense, morphic resonance is saying that. It's saying that the whole of the infinite
all information universe is potentially present everywhere from the past. There's a kind of entanglement,
if you like, but it's not the same as quantum entanglement, as we usually think of it, which is simultaneous in space. This involves a connection from the past across time
and that goes beyond current quantum theory. David Byrne thought current quantum theory needed extending or expanding,
but you wouldn't get many conventional quantum theorists who would think of morphic resonance as fitting within quantum
theory as can be understood. So the holographic universities, a kind of metaphor of the way that the whole can be present in each part,
a hologram is in itself is static. It's a kind of a photograph,
so it doesn't have the time dimension. So all metaphors are inadequate. But what it's trying to show
is that the information is everywhere. And in morphic resonance
and in David Bowman's idea of the input control order, that's what we're saying,
that the information is potentially present everywhere. Yes. Do you think. I'm not sure how this question angle angles in,
but do you think that morphing fields will ever be detectable in any way? Both experiments I propose for morphic
resonance are ways of detecting the fields. If you train rats to then a new trick in London and rats
learn it quicker in Paris and New York, that's detecting a morphic field. When people ask this question,
they usually think you get some kind of meter that detects, Yes, I can, or a meter. But the fact is that meters that detect things,
usually people think in terms of electric meters. When electric meters detect electric phenomena,
magnetometers detect magnetic phenomena, you don't detect a gravitational field with an electric meter
or gravity or a magnetometer. You need to detect fields of the appropriate kind. So to detect a morphic field,
you'd need a morphic measuring system, which is the kinds of experiments I've been proposing. You wouldn't necessarily expect to to see it or to detect it. It might interact. I think they do interact with electromagnetic fields,
and it's possible that some kinds of carry on photography where you see a kind of aura around leaves, may be ways
of visualizing these fields, but there are many artifacts in carry on photography caused by damp and humidity and and do research on it as being not very rigorous. And so it's very hard to know. I would say it's an open question
as to whether you can detect them through it, through electrical electrical means. But all the experiments for testing, for morphic
resonance are ways of testing morphic fields ultimately. Yes, exactly. You interesting question here. Could the Moffett Field be the result of the mind
acting in matter or in a matter data that forms even the laws of nature,
since consciousness is an intimate element or part of the fabric of our reality, as proposed by Sir
Roger Penrose. I think what you're saying is. Well, not exactly. I mean, this is a this is a really tricky question because morphic resonance is really about habits. The subtitle of my book, The Presence of the Past, is Morphic
Resonance and the Habits of Nature and Habits Are unconscious. Our own habits are largely unconscious, and I think that the instincts of animals
are largely unconscious and the habits of plants when they grow leaves and things are largely unconscious
and probably the habits of galaxies might be unconscious too. So most habits are unconscious, and where consciousness comes in
is where there has to be a choice among possibilities. And it's to do with freedom and I follow Whitehead in this way of thinking about it. And what I haven't discussed this evening
actually lives time is creativity. Evolution has to involve more than simply habits. Otherwise things will just repeat. And you can sometimes. And it's spreading like in parallel or convergent evolution,
a habit that develops in one part of the world, like being a mammal, like a mouse, for example,
could spread to another part world like Australia. We can have a marsupial mouse. You could have parallel evolution
or parallel evolution of the eye, and that could be habit spreading. But then you've still got the question of how you get the mouse
in the first place or an eye in the first place. And morphic resonance doesn't explain creativity. It only explains once new things have happened
through repetition, they become habitual and consciousness plays a part in creativity. But it's again even more when we come to that. It's not immediately obvious. I mean, we humans are often creative and new science,
new arts, new music happening all the time. But when you ask a creative person where it came from,
they often don't know. They just say, It came to me in a flash, or I'd
suddenly realized or I dreamt of it or something like that. So how does it come into our own minds? We don't even understand creativity in the human realm. So when we come to the whole cosmic realm there, it clearly is a creative influence, working through all nature,
interacting with the habits of nature. But the way you think of it really depends on your bigger picture metaphysical or religious or theological or philosophical view of the larger picture of reality. But once those things happened and been repeated,
then morphic resonance can take over and and help it to be repeated more and more. Now, one of our one of the attendees has pointed out
we can hear the birds coming from your garden, and through the zoo,
which is rather nice. And this leads into the next question
is, can morphic resonance help us rescue the ecosphere? Does increased concern of property make it easier others to become concerned, or more likely that they will? More likely they'll become concerned. So could morphic resonance be triggered
or amplified by mainstream media suggesting parents and carers likely? Well, I think morphic resonance plays a part
in this space of the times, what the Germans call the zeitgeist, that it's an influence. It influences our thinking and our attitudes. It's not. However, compulsory morphic resonance doesn't have a built
in moral filter, and it means that things that become habitual when more people do them, they become easier for others
to adopt the fastest spreading habits. The world at the moment are those of consumerism
which Western capitalist culture has now converted. Billions of people all over the world into being consumers who look at advertising and want things they might not
otherwise have wanted. So consumerism is unfortunately a very fast spreading habit in China and India, in Africa
and in many other parts of the world. And of course, it's long been a dominant feature,
our own societies. But I think also that the awareness of environmental problems will be amplified by and made easier for people to get through morphic resonance
and an evolutionary moral filter. In morphic resonance itself, it does mean we're a bit more responsible than you might otherwise be,
not only for our actions and our words, but also for our thoughts and attitudes,
because those are likely to spread by morphic resonance, making it easier for others
to adopt the same attitude or way of thinking. Yes. And I wonder whether this also applies to coming out,
which we've we've talked about coming out in this in a science making philosophical sense, because a lot of scientists
and we did this survey three years ago, remember, have interesting paranormal psychic spiritual experiences. They don't want to admit that to their colleagues
because they're afraid that they're going to lose their reputation, even though the very same colleagues
they're afraid of are in exactly the same situation. So I wonder if we could somehow use means as a way of helping people pluck up the courage to be true to themselves? Well, I think it would happen automatically
if the more people who come out of the closet herbalists who are present in most scientific and medical and engineering institutions, the more people do come out,
the more it will empower and help others and make it easier for them to accept
that you can actually survive. And like gay people know,
they've they've come out of the closet, many of them, and it's become much more socially acceptable. And I think that holistic ideas and sons
will become more acceptable as more people identify with them in public and, say, yes, morphic
resonance might help that process, but it's something that all of us who live at the Institute of Noetic Sciences
and the Scientific and Medical Network and probably the two main catalysts
for coming out in the Western world, and I remember when I first joined it,
it became part of these organizations. They were really quite small and fringe, and now the number of members is increasingly
the it's becoming much more mainstream consciousness. Research, which new ethics sciences has promoted for nearly 50 years, is now a major topic in many universities,
and the more holistic approach to science and medicine that the scientific and medical networks promote,
it is becoming increasingly important. So I think that these organizations that we are part of have a very valuable role to play in
actually catalyzing this process and they have been doing that increasingly effectively over the years. Yes, thank you. Thank you. Rupert, final question that we've got time to take
and I'm sorry, we obviously go through 123 questions here. So look at them. And so at our leisure is this the Alamo beyond cathedrals? It's very much up your street. And places of worship seem to have a tangible atmosphere
sense of stillness and peace. Could this be due to morphic resonance? And he's asking whether one could do experiments with blindfolds
as individuals entering different buildings to show the effect. But I'm not sure about that. But any any thoughts on that? You might you might say something
your choral evensong initiative. Well, yes. The the the thing is that there's a memory when we go to places. So you enter a cathedral or a temple or a moscow or some sacred cave or a sacred grove or something like that. A holy place. When you go there, the sensory stimuli
impinge on your eyes and ears and nose and so on. A similar to those that another people have experienced there. And that will put us in morphic resonance with those
who've been there before. So there'll be a kind of memory of the place. I'm not suggesting that it's etched
into the stones of the temple or the cathedral. I'm suggesting we resonate with a lot of people
who've been there and had experiences. There's often a mystical experience or revelatory experience or a sense of connection, some kind of spiritual experience. Now, there are places also with very bad,
and those stories you hear of haunted houses usually tell some of some awful things happened there
so they can be negative memories, too. Again, it's not all good, but I think the holy places, which become a focus of pilgrimage, do this kind of memory and quality. And I'm one of the people who helped
set up the British Pilgrimage Trust, which is reopening the ancient pilgrimage
footpath, pilgrimage routes to the old holy places of Britain and British Pilgrimage Trust has a website
which you can call British Pilgrimage dot org. And one of the best ways of visiting a cathedral
in England is to walk on, pass through the countryside. The routes are different on the British Pilgrimage website
and time your arrival. So you arrive in the evening
and English cathedrals have a wonderful choral service in the evening, every day in many cathedrals
weekdays as well as Sundays, cork, choral Evensong, Sung very well trained choirs and free of charge. You can enter this enchanted world, literally enchanted
as the whole cathedral echoes sacred chant. And it's one of the most uplifting experiences I know of in Britain and strongly recommend as a website called Choral Evensong
dot org c h a l. Even if you have an essay in g dot org
where you can find out where these services are happening and know because many of them are doing them
streamed on Zoom or Facebook anywhere in the world you can attend the services virtually by going to this website
and to catch recordings or livestreamed services. So tapping into these traditions
and memories is actually open to everybody and it's free. It doesn't require you to sign up
to any particular belief system. Indeed, the British Pilgrimage Trust, when it has organized
pilgrimages, has a slogan Bring your own beliefs. So yes, this question of memories in places
I think is very important as another aspect of life,
which I think morphic resonance can help to illuminate. Thank you. You missed out a very important element here, which is the
research on tea and which you have before you go to Evensong. And there you will fish and order cream cheese and say more about that. And an exciting and for Americans who may not know
what cream tea is here in England as a tradition, you have a tea with scones and or scones and instead of butter, clotted cream and things like strawberry jam, I'm afraid not a low key to your diet,
but as an occasional treat. Very good. And most cathedrals have tea rooms
where you can have a cream tea before called Evensong. So that's part of the experience, at least for some of us. Yes. Thank you. Thank you, Rupert. We'll put these in the in the recording email. They're all the references to the various initiatives. Any closing thoughts? Well, I'm just very, very pleased
that we've reached this 40th anniversary and that things are opening up, you know, almost every day that passes. I feel that at last
the sciences are moving in the right direction and does this greater sense of openness
within the scientific world. And so I suppose my closing thought some of the time actually,
despite all the gloom in world, I was quite optimistic about the transformation
and science paradigm shift that all of us on probably all the people on this Zoom
call have been thinking about for years is actually happening and I think we need to prepare ourselves for a whole new world
in which the educational system needs to reflect this more holistic attitude to science
funding needs to reflect it. And of course, it needs to play an urgent play
to our need to adapt to living more sustainably on the earth. The mechanistic mechanical world view is the worst possible worldview
for living sustainably on the earth, a more holistic world view of which morphic resonance and of part seems to me
not only true, but essential for our survival.
Rupert is the man! I love his ted talk about the dangers of dogmatic thinking in modern science.
Really is. Him and his wife are human treasures.
I took part in an experiment for Sheldrake, once. I had to predict who was going to telephone me.
This will be a prized theory in the science of future