And tonight was the kicker. They had on a true quack. A real live pseudo-scientist. And they gave him the whole hour, unchallenged, even supported, by the interviewer (David Cayley). The quack was Rupert Sheldrake, who proposes the idea of morphogenetic fields and morphic resonance, the idea that organisms develop not due to genetics, epigenetics, and environmental factors, but because they are surrounded and embedded in mysterious 'fields' that magically shape them into what they are to become.

He pulled out all the stops. Science is a religion, with a dogma and a priesthood, and a mythology. The evidence for his morphic ideas *abounds*, but the conspiracy of 'mainstram' science won't let him publish. Scientific materialism is evil and leads to people becoming unfeeling robots who kill animals without remorse or sympathy. Blah blah blah.

The instructors [at university] said that all morphenogenesis is genetically programmed. They said different species just follow the instruction in their genes. But a few moments' reflection show that this reply is inadequate. All the cells of the body contain the same genes. In your body, the same genetic program is present in your eye cells, liver cells and the cells in your arms. The ones in your legs. But if they are all programmed identically, how do they develop so differently?

All of the general principles discussed thus far pertain to all cells. However, multicellular organisms are composed of different types of cells with different phenotypes. What exactly do we mean by different types of cells? By now it should be very clear. It has been stressed time and time again that a cell is determined entirely by the proteins present within it, which is why that particular thing is in the end what is being controlled by the vast regulatory pathways present in the cell.  Thus different cell types are determined by different gene expression patterns. This is in fact the solution to a puzzle that had confounded biologists for some time. During the embryonic development of a multicellular organism, the central process is that of differentiation in which cells develop into their distinct phenotypes. Biologists initially thought that during the developmental process, cells undergoing differentiation selectively lost sequences of genes so as to gain distinct transcription patterns, but this is wrong. It was experimentally verified that all cells within a multicellular organism regardless of their phenotypic differentiation contain the same genome. Thus the process of cellular differentiation depends on the alteration of gene expression patterns so as to create unique complements of proteins in particular cell types. In most cell types, approximately 20,000 of the 30,000 proteins in the human genome are expressed. The particular proteins which are expressed, and their levels of expression, thus determine the cell type under discussion. Previously, we have discussed how the gene regulatory pathways create distinct gene expression patterns but what was perhaps not stressed enough is that many of these patterns are permanent, and not just permanent to the cell being differentiated, but also to the cells created once that cell duplicates. In this way, particular gene expression patterns can be preserved through generations, despite the fact that the initial extracellular signal which caused them occurred a long time, even years ago. This is the fundamental concept of cell memory. Thus, the general principle we must understand is that the permanent process of cellular differentiation occurs because initial transient extracellular signals can induce permanent alterations in the gene expression patterns of particular cells which can then be passed onto progeny.

The mechanisms by which cells do remember expression patterns are too numerous and complex to elucidate fully here, but like everything else in molecular biology, they do obey the general principles we have already talked about. A very simple example will suffice here. Suppose a particular protein serves as a gene regulatory protein to regulate its own synthesis in a positive feedback loop. In other words, suppose for example that the promoter region of this gene cannot allow the RNA polymerase to initiate transcription without the presence of the gene regulatory protein which is being coded for by the very sequence under discussion. Thus, under normal circumstances, this protein will not be part of the gene expression pattern, since it requires itself to initiate its own transcription. But once a transient extracellular signal allows the transcription of this protein to proceed, it will continue to maintain its own expression long after that signal has dissipated. Not only that, it will maintain its own expression in the daughter cells of the initial cells once that cell has duplicated because the proteins present are inherited during duplication. This rudimentary example of cell memory is a ubiquitous mechanism by which cells differentiate.

This rudimentary example however does not by itself do justice to the ingenuity of differentiation, because cell differentiation incorporates the processes of signal transduction and combinatorial control in a very clever way. Recall that combinations of gene regulatory proteins could serve to regulate the expression patterns of certain genes. Thus, the introduction of gene regulatory proteins to some cells but not others is a principle mechanism by which cells are differentiated by virtue of position. Let us suppose we have two clusters of cells A and B which are initially identical. Now suppose that cluster A is in a region of high concentration of a particular gene regulatory protein and cluster B is not, such that the GRP is inducted into the cells of cluster A and is responsible for the transcription of particular genes which will not be present in cluster B. Those genes in turn could code for gene regulatory proteins which in turn could, by means of combinatorial control, serve to give rise to distinct expression patterns that cluster A will possess and cluster B will not. Of course we could keep going and suppose that some of the gene regulatory proteins coded for by the genes activated by the proteins which were initially activated by the initially inducted GRP are themselves gene regulatory proteins and so on. We are witnessing the power of combinatorial control to propagate expression patterns because combinatorial control allows for individual gene regulatory proteins to propagate large scale alterations in the cell’s expression pattern. This is not just hypothetical. This is in fact the mechanism by which an entire organ (the eye) is formed.

The above diagram shows how clever this mechanism is. If we begin with distinct cell clusters only one of which has a particular GRP introduced, then within one generation we will have two distinct expression patterns resulting from the induction of the GRP, and we have seen above that this GRP, by means of combinatorial control, could by itself introduce a major alteration in the expression pattern of cells into which it is inducted. Now suppose that a new GRP is introduced into the daughter cells of both distinct generations of cells that arose after the initial induction of GRP 1. In this case it is clear that we will have four distinct expression patterns, and continuing this argument, with another GRP introduced to the daughter cells of all four cells of generation 3 will result in eight distinct expression patterns, all because the initial clusters differed by the introduction of a single GRP! This demonstrates the power of the combinatorial control process, and is a reason that combinatorial control has been and still is critical in the evolution of multicellular organisms. I use "still is" because evolution is of course an ongoing process.

the quack was Rupert Sheldrake, who proposes the idea of morphogenetic fields and morphic resonance,

I'm just saying that morphogenetic field should be carefully distinguished from the ridiculous idea of a "morphic field". The former is a real term which comes up in devolopmental biology. The latter is the idea Sheldrake proposes. They are not the same thing.

Sheldrake suggested, some sort of form-giving field that holds the memory of each thing’s proper shape – he called it a morphogenetic field. This intriguing idea was widely discussed in the months after the book’s publication.

I just sent CBC an e-mail about it and would recommend you do the same, natural.

Wait, I thought you were in Prague.

argued that only a field hypothesis could account for the discrepancy between the sketchiness of the genetic information from which creatures begin and the elaborate and complex forms they eventually attain.  This book initially provoked a lot of public discussion, and was then roundly denounced by the editor of Nature – a denu

This is complete madness!

The genetic information constituting any organism is not "sketchy"!

How on earth can Mr. Cayley have the sheer gall to claim that the genetic information constituting an organism is "sketchy" when he does not actually understand in any depth whatsoever the relationship between genotype and phenotype the processes of gene regulation and the principles of developmental genetics?

Dear Kevin Brown,  

Thanks for your letter.  You are one of several people who have objected to our including Rupert Sheldrake in our series “How To Think About Science.”   A rough summary of the arguments these listeners have put forward is as follows: Rupert Sheldrake is not a real scientist but rather a pseudo-scientist; Sheldrake has no evidence for his hypothesis; my presentation of Sheldrake’s ideas was inappropriately “supportive”; Ideas should not be presenting the ideas of such a person and certainly not “unopposed.”

 

Here is my response: “How To Think About Science” was a series of 24 broadcasts which canvassed a wide variety of views about what sort of enterprise science is.  The series was not called “How To Do Science” or even “What is Science?”  Rather the title referred to the changes that have occurred in the last couple of generations in how many people think about science.  A comprehensive treatment of such a theme would be impossible.  No attempt was made to disguise the partial and personal nature of my inquiry.  I interviewed people whom I had read, and whose ideas I found interesting. 

All the interviews in the series were “supportive” in the sense that what I was trying to do was to expound the ideas of the person(s) featured in each programme.  In that sense, everyone in the series spoke “unopposed.”  There was no intention to endorse anyone’s ideas.

 

What was the justification for including Sheldrake?  Well, Rupert Sheldrake is a properly trained and qualified plant physiologist who began his career doing “real” scientific research in developmental biology, and then, in the early 80’s, published a book that argued that only a field hypothesis could account for the discrepancy between the sketchiness of the genetic information from which creatures begin and the elaborate and complex forms they eventually attain.  This book initially provoked a lot of public discussion, and was then roundly denounced by the editor of Nature – a denunciation whose sequellae have shaped Sheldrake’s career ever since.  Sheldrake believes that he was excommunicated from the church of science, and, in the broadcast I presented, he gives evidence for his belief that science can be a dogmatic and church-like institution.  Likewise he gives evidence for his field theory of morphogenesis – a theory which he has continued to advance, and to try to test in the years since A New Science of Life first appeared.

 

I think this is an interesting, and potentially revealing story.  Certainly the vehemence of some of the responses I received indicate that there are people who strenuously object to Rupert Sheldrake presenting himself, or being presented by the CBC as a scientist.  In that sense I don’t think it can be denied that the case of Rupert Sheldrake indicates where the boundaries of science are currently drawn, at least by those to whom I am now responding.  And yet Sheldrake has a proper scientific training, he has put forward a hypothesis that might be true, and he has presented evidence in favour of his theory.  Of course the hypothesis might be non-sense, and the evidence might be wrong.  Other people who spoke in the series might also be wrong.  Most scientific theories are wrong sooner or later.  All I want to say here is that I find Sheldrake’s theory interesting;  I don’t see why the evidence he presents for it, whether its McDougall’s puzzling rat trials or blue tits siphoning the cream off milk bottles, should be dismissed out of hand; and I think the history of the reception of his theory says something about what many insiders think that science is and is not.  That is my justification for including him among the diverse voices that I presented in this series.

 

If anyone who wrote is unaware of the full scope of the series, I would suggest a visit to the show’s web-page at cbc.ca/idea under features.

 

Sincerely yours,

 

David Cayley

No joke. I got exactly the same response. It's some sort of automated response letter.

Natural, do you know if there's a transcript of the show available? I'd like to read it. Who wants to bet that Sheldrake lies through his teeth about what happened between himself and Maddox?

but heresy was still a poor choice of word. Science is not a formal orthodoxy and 'morphic fields' are excluded from it based on their lack of merit, not simply because they overturn the proverbial apple cart.