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From: jackson@esosun.UUCP (Jerry Jackson)
Newsgroups: sci.bio,sci.misc,sci.research
Subject: Re: Strange results in Nature article
Message-ID: <237@esosun.UUCP>
Date: 22 Jul 88 22:18:42 GMT
References: <10465@lll-winken.llnl.gov>
Organization: SAIC, San Diego
Lines: 54
In-reply-to: colvin@mahler.llnl.gov's message of 22 Jul 88 20:33:32 GMT


This sounds related to Rupert Sheldrake's Hypothesis of Formative
Causation -- Would anyone who knows more about Sheldrake's recent work
care to comment on this experiment?

(Briefly for anyone who hasn't heard of this work -- Sheldrake is a
developmental biologist who has taken a radical approach to explaining
morphogenesis -- He postulates the existence of 'morphogenetic fields'
that influence the development of forms.  For systems with a clear
lowest energy state, the energetic considerations leave no room for the
effects of these fields... That's why all hydrogen atoms look alike.

In complex systems, however, there may be an enormous number of states
with nearly equal energy -- this leaves some room for the
morphogenetic fields to influence the time development of the system..
For instance, proteins have very distinct patterns in which they fold;
so far, the rapid folding of identical proteins into identical shapes
is very difficult to explain.  Sheldrake suggests that the morpho. fields
direct the developmental path of the protein molecules...

A related suggestion is that crystals of a particular type should be
easier to form after they have been formed in the past.

Another suggestion is that an animal behavior may be easier to learn
when many other animals have already learned it e.g. the 100th monkey.

There is actually experimental evidence supporting this last conjecture
that was arrived at when testing the Lamarckian inheritance hypothesis
for rats.  The idea of the test was to teach a subset of a group of
rats a behavior then see if the descendants of the educated rats would
perform better on the behavior without training -- The actual results
did not support Lamarck (Big surprise :-). What did occur, however,
made no sense until years later -- *all* the new rats performed better
than the previous set.  Hmm..)

A caveat -- I know this sounds absurd... However, morphogenesis is 
such an incredibly difficult problem with no deep understanding in sight
that it seems worthwile to consider unusual ideas.  Until the standard
explanations actually *explain*, I don't think someone should be
discouraged from trying new approaches.  BTW: Sheldrake seems to be
far from a raving crackpot.. On the contrary, his book is very measured
and careful to avoid glossing over difficulties or pretending his
hypothesis is more than just that.


In any case, it would be very nice to hear more from someone in the know.

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|   Jerry Jackson                       UUCP:  seismo!esosun!jackson          |
|   Geophysics Division, MS/22          ARPA:  esosun!jackson@seismo.css.gov  |
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