Usually these columns follow a common pattern. I begin with some history and background on a scientific subject, bring it up to the current state of knowledge, and then nudge a little farther to see what the future may bring. My objective is to offer suggestions about which a practicing scientist in the field would say, perhaps grudgingly, "Yes, I suppose it could happen that way."

Occasionally, however, it is fun to examine a scientific heresy. This is something about which 99 percent of all scientists will say, flat out, "That can't possibly be right."

This does not mean that the heretical idea is necessarily wrong. I want to emphasize that point, because when I have written of certain scientific ideas in the past, I have been accused by their supporters of being "against them," when I was neither pro nor con. By a "scientific heresy," I simply mean an idea which, regardless of its possible future fate, runs contrary to conventional scientific wisdom. Eventually the idea may prove to be an improved description of Nature, so that it later (and often after much argument) becomes part of the standard worldview; or the idea may prove to be misguided and join the vast group of discredited or crank theories.

For example, the idea that the Earth goes around the Sun was once a scientific (and a religious) heresy. So, more recently, are the notions that Mars has canals, that nuclear energy can be obtained by cold fusion, that an asteroid impact caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, that the agent for certain infectious diseases contains no DNA or RNA, that the Universe did not begin with a Big Bang, that Vitamin C has powerful curative properties for the common cold, that the human brain operates in a way which no computer will ever be able to mimic, and that most stomach ulcers are caused by infection with a specific form of bacteria.

Some of these one-time heresies now form part of the scientific mainstream; others have been banished to the lunatic fringe of science, the undiscovered country from which a scientist's return is enormously difficult. Either way, a scientific heresy is likely to lead to lots of arguments.

That is certainly true of the scientific heresy I want to discuss. It is known as the theory of "morphogenetic fields," or, more general in concept, "morphic fields." My attention was first drawn to morphogenetic fields when the well-known British science magazine, "Nature," suggested that a book on the subject ought to be burned. A statement like that, in terms of publicity, is worth a thousand positive reviews. So when, soon afterwards, I had the chance to attend a lecture in a private home by the author of the book, Rupert Sheldrake, I jumped at the chance.

Sheldrake began with a genuine and deep scientific mystery. If every cell of an organism contains the same genetic material, how can some cells decide to become part of an eye, while others form part of a liver, and still others parts of arms and legs? The process is called "differentiation," but giving it a name does nothing to explain it. And how do plants, many of which are cloned and thus contain identical genetic material, manage to take on shapes appropriate to the environment in which they happen to land?

Since the 1920's, biologists had spoken of morphogenetic fields, viewed as some kind of overall template or blueprint, which guides the development of a growing organism. The assumption was that there eventually would be an explanation of how such a blueprint might derive from genetic material, and recently there has been progress in explaining differentiation as arising from a small initial asymmetry of the original embryonic cell.

Sheldrake, however, proposes something far more radical and original. Morphogenetic fields, he asserts, are only one example of general morphic fields. Morphic fields exist in every aspect of nature, not just living things. They are a form of memory of particular shapes, built into space itself, and they apply to everything from the structure of crystals, to the form of a nuclear reactor or steam turbine, and even to patterns of behavior in human society, where they form social and cultural fields. When something is created, perhaps by pure accident, and it resembles an existing pattern, then the morphic field of the existing pattern will apply to the new entity and make it more similar to the old.

This is scientific heresy with a vengeance, but Sheldrake goes farther. Morphic fields, he asserts, are not constant, but evolve over time. Information is passed from an existing process (say, for making a certain drug) to a subsequent system through a phenomenon known as "morphic resonance." Morphic resonance involves the influence of like upon like. As evidence of this, Sheldrake points to the fact that once humans, perhaps after years or centuries of effort, succeed in making a particular structure or chemical compound, others in the future find it far easier to achieve the same result. In addition, the more that a pattern is repeated, the stronger the morphic field becomes. Sheldrake even suggests, though he does not press the point, that what we call "laws of nature" should be thought of as more like acquired habits, processes repeated so often in the past that they now form invariable patterns.

Morphic fields are presumed to decay only slowly, if at all, with distance, and to propagate into the future but never into the past. Sheldrake suggests that in living things they form an alternative to the normal transmission of information from one generation to the next, which traditional science says must take the form either of somatic information (carried in the embryo) or learned information, acquired during an organism's lifetime. It is even, he proposes, the reason why whole new languages can spring up in a single generation among polyglot groups of children, as Hawaiian Creole arose about a century ago. The ability for language is then not hard-wired, as the linguist Noam Chomsky and others have suggested; nor is language all learned using our mental software. The morphic field is at work, and the young child has morphic resonance with other speakers now and in the past.

I am running out of space, but I will ask two questions and answer one. Are you ready to accept Sheldrake's work? How do I feel about it?

Personally, I am unpersuaded. But let's both keep in mind what Thomas Huxley said a century and a half ago: "It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies."

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