Morphogenesis

If you look up the word in the internet, you will find many credible scientific descriptions of morphogenesis, the creation of limbs and organs from a single cell. But, if one looks more deeply into the subject, it becomes something of a mystery how this works. We can now study single cells down to atomic levels but there is nothing there to describe arms and legs. That is a slight problem!

Modify your search for “mystery of morphogenesis” and a whole different series of links appear, most of which state… er, we don’t know how it works!

Rupert Sheldrake talks about it on YouTube and also on his website, along with many other fascinating mysteries. Are we not simply reaching a kind of mental end-stop to what the human brain can comprehend. For example, we cannot start to imagine what happened in the Big Bang, and what there was before the Big Bang.

But there is nothing to stop us theorising about effects which, although we don’t understand them and can’t see them, are still real. Rupert Sheldrake acknowledges that there is nothing in the first living cell which describes limbs and organs, but he does put forward a theory which he calls morphic resonance – a kind of memory for each species.