Thoughts On Evolutions

This blog post is a crowdfunding special and a teaser for the upcoming collaborative paper on the harmonic architecture of consciousness. You can support the crowdfunding here.

A Prelude

In the annals of scientific history, few theories have been as simultaneously influential and controversial as Rupert Sheldrake’s morphic resonance. Introduced in his 1981 book “A New Science of Life,” the theory proposed that mysterious “morphogenetic fields” guide form and behavior through resonance with similar patterns across space and time (Sheldrake, 1981). In a delicious irony, I’ve been preparing a paper on the harmonic architecture of consciousness and synthesising interesting evidence that Dr Rupert Sheldrake, despite his pioneering ingenuity, may have been searching for an exotic new field while the most universal force in the universe was already performing the function he described. Has morphic resonance been in front of our noses all along?

Sheldrake’s central insight was compelling: there must be some organizing principle that explains how forms maintain themselves, how similar structures arise independently, and how information transfers between systems without direct contact. He called this principle “formative causation” – a phrase so precisely descriptive that it begs the question for why hasn’t he considered gravity’s role in biological organization before postulating a new field. Or has he? (I couldn’t find anything.)

The search for morphic fields (just as the search for consciousness in the brain—not the world-model!) reveals a fascinating blind spot in scientific inquiry: Sheldrake proposed that nature requires special information channels to maintain biological patterns, while overlooking that gravity—invisibly shaping every cell, tissue, and system—was already fulfilling this exact role. We see this phenomenon repeatedly in science: the most fundamental organizing principles often hide behind their own ubiquity. As Yates et al. (2014) note,

“The universality of gravity in our daily lives makes it difficult to appreciate its importance in morphology and physiology.”

When Gravity Shapes More Than Just Weight

Like a fish asking about water, did Sheldrake overlook the medium in which all biological forms swim? Papaseit et al. (2000) demonstrated that microtubule self-organization is gravity-dependent – when tubulin proteins were allowed to polymerize under microgravity conditions, they failed to form the organized patterns observed at 1g. This isn’t just mechanical stress; it’s gravity directly orchestrating cellular architecture at the nanoscale.

Even more striking is the discovery that alpha-B crystallin, a cytoskeletal chaperone protein, decreases in microgravity conditions (Atomi, 2015). This molecular marker doesn’t just respond to gravity’s pull – it appears to be part of an elaborate biological system evolved specifically to harness gravitational information for maintaining cellular form.

Gravity as Biology’s Hidden Architect

Sheldrake sought a field that could:

• Maintain forms across space and time
• Create resonance between similar structures
• Transfer information without direct contact
• Provide organizing principles for biological development

Through its curvature of spacetime, gravity provides a universal reference frame. Through its influence on cellular and tissue architecture, it maintains biological forms. Through the sophisticated sensory systems evolution developed to detect it, it enables information transfer throughout organisms.

His error wasn’t in recognizing the need for “formative causation” – he was right that biological forms require organizing principles beyond simple chemical reactions. His mistake might have been in thinking that this required inventing new physics when nature had already solved the problem using the most fundamental force at her disposal. Gravity, as it might turn out, already does all of these things, and not just for matter but for consciousness as well.

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While the paper is in preparation, please consider supporting my research and donating to a crowdfunding campaign to support our attendance at the ASSC conference this July in Crete.

Thank you.

References

Atomi, Y. (2015). Gravitational Effects on Human Physiology. In K. Akasaka & H. Matsuki (Eds.), High Pressure Bioscience, Subcellular Biochemistry 72, 627-659. Springer Science+Business Media.

Johnson, M. (2023). The Principles of Vasocomputation. Opentheory.net.

Loued-Khenissi, L., Pfeiffer, C., Saxena, R., Adarsh, S., & Scaramuzza, D. (2023). Microgravity induces overconfidence in perceptual decision-making. Scientific Reports, 13, 9727.

Papaseit, C., Pochon, N., & Tabony, J. (2000). Microtubule self-organization is gravity-dependent. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 97(15), 8364-8368.

Sheldrake, R. (1981). A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance. Blond & Briggs.

Yates, B.J., Bolton, P.S., & Macefield, V.G. (2014). Vestibulo-Sympathetic Responses. Comprehensive Physiology, 4(2), 851-887.