The Presence of the Past

Rupert Sheldrake's The Presence of the Past, subtitled Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature, is his second book, and it expands the hypothesis he had introduced in 1981. Its argument is that memory is inherent in nature, and that natural systems inherit a collective memory from all previous things of their kind, so that the regularities usually called laws of nature are better understood as habits built up by repetition. Sheldrake marshals what he presents as experimental evidence in support of the idea, and offers his own explanations of standard biological subjects such as development, inheritance and memory, proposing that morphic resonance also underlies telepathy-type interconnections between organisms. The book drew mixed responses. The historian Theodore Roszak reviewed it favourably in New Scientist, calling it engaging and provocative, though the magazine later remarked that attitudes had since hardened. Writing in The Times in 1988, David Jones criticised the hypothesis as magical thinking and pseudoscience, arguing that it was so vast and formless that it could be made to explain anything, and that without confirmatory experimental evidence the structure of the theory falls to Occam's razor.

Written from the wikipedia article on Rupert Sheldrake.

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