A Dancer in the Infinite - Chapter 39

Chapter 39

Jackie Shellborne

 

I suggest that morphogenetic fields work by imposing patterns on otherwise random or indeterminate patterns of activity. For example they cause microtubules to crystallize in one part of the cell rather than another, even though the subunits from which they are made are present throughout the cell.

Morphogenetic fields are not fixed forever, but evolve. The fields of Afghan hounds and poodles have become different from those of their common ancestors, wolves. How are these fields inherited? I propose that that they are transmitted from past members of the species through a kind of non-local resonance, called morphic resonance. – Rupert Shelldrake

 

 

     Jackie Shellborne was already a fellow at Oxford, when the whole of her scientific learning felt obviously incomplete.  It was probably the failure of the human genome project to explain in genetic terms the differences between humans and chimpanzees.  What was it her colleague had said?  ‘Based on DNA alone, we frankly cannot explain why these two species are so fundamentally different from each other.’

     And that set her on her course to figure out why.  Why some cells within the same organism became a brain and others became stomachs, why a poodle was different than a wolf, where exactly the patterns of specific forms were hid if not in the DNA.  She explored the so-called dead ends and pseudo-sciences to find clues.  Russian research showed the modern seeds grown in an electromagnetic field grew into their primal ancestral forms.  How was this possible?  She learned that chemists and crystallographers had great difficulty in the initial crystallization of new compounds, but afterwards they became easier to crystallize all over the world.  Absurd theories such as crystal seeds being carried to other laboratories in chemists’ bears were readily accepted, because there was simply no alternative theory.  The further afield Jackie turned her gaze, the more she encountered this problem, which she quickly deduced was not simply one of biology, but one shared by all sciences.

     At last, she found what she was looking for, something all biologists had taken for granted, the teleological solution, one dismissed as intellectual short hand, the concept of morphegenetic fields.  With this in mind she turned her studies to physics, to the realm of the quanta.  What if the resonance of similarly structured forms of quanta created fields that guided the shapes and functions of both organs and organisms, as well as all manner of physical phenomena?  What if the laws of nature itself were more like habits?  Perhaps form itself existed as a blueprint in some Platonic manner that was inherited much like DNA, by all similar forms that followed.

     She published her first book on what she then called Morphic Resonance, which was quickly denounced as pseudoscientific twaddle by the establishment, prompting one critic to suggest that all copies of the book be quickly burned.  This infuriated Jackie, and prompted her to resign her position at Oxford, and devote herself completely to her new science of life and physics.  Her second book found print in a New Age publisher.  The irony was not lost on her.  She traded barbs with her former colleagues in the news papers and scientific press on those few occasions such bastions of established paradigm gave her voice.  She engaged in experiments with a few willing scientists who were eager to put this ridiculous upstart theory to bed, once and for all.  In most such experiments, Jackie felt vindicated by the results but her co-sponsors declared an inconclusive result in unanimous manner.

     It was a frustrated Jackie Shellborne, burnt-out by the constant battle with the entrenched current paradigm, who wrote her critique, The Flaws of the Religion of Science.  This, of course, completely destroyed any hope of resuming her academic career at any point.  It was only a few weeks later, as she was typing out an angry rebuttal to one of her former colleagues’ diatribes, that she got the email that would change her life.

     She was shocked when she saw who it was from, the legendary Rian Jenkins, a brilliant theoretical physicist who had vanished from academic life ten years previously, after his paper setting the stage for what would become the Simulation Hypothesis, was ravaged by the physicist community roundly.  The subject line made her heart jump, “I think I can help you”.  She clicked on the email to open it, but that the body of the email contained was a phone number from France.  She looked at the time and quickly reached for her telephone.

copyright 2017 Diana Hignutt