Rupert and I explored the emerging convergence between morphic resonance, Michael Levin’s work on bioelectricity and developmental intelligence, and a renewed philosophical account of form. We began from the question of how biological form can be neither reduced to molecular mechanism nor frozen into timeless Platonic archetypes. Rupert described Levin’s recent movement toward what he calls an “evolutionary Platonism,” in which forms are not merely passive templates outside space and time but active realities seeking to ingress into nature, learn from their incarnations, and modify themselves through the history of their actualization. Rupert’s point was that, whatever vocabulary Levin prefers, the empirical predictions of this view appear to converge remarkably with morphic resonance: once a pattern has occurred, it becomes easier for similar patterns to occur again elsewhere.
I tried to situate this convergence within the older dialectic between Plato and Aristotle, and the more recent tensions between Darwin and Whitehead. Aristotle already brings form down into things; Darwin then deflates form into an accidental accumulation of functions filtered by survival. But Darwinism, especially in its neo-Darwinian form, became blind to the intelligence at play in development and to the creativity evident in macroevolution. I mentioned Whitehead’s critique of survival as an adequate explanation: “the art of survival is to be dead.” If survivability were the motive force of evolution, we would have no explanation for why organisms that are more fragile, sensitive, and complex, but comparatively deficient in survival power ever emerged. What we need is not a rejection of Darwinian historical contingency, but an account of form that integrates history and ingression, emergence and emanation.
Rupert clarified that morphic resonance is not primarily a theory of creativity, but of repetition: once a new morphic field has come into being, does repetition strengthen the habit of nature? The origin of genuinely new wholes can be interpreted in different ways—Bergsonian creativity, Platonic or theological ingression, materialist chance—but morphic resonance remains empirically testable regardless. We discussed the difficult question of similarity: whether resonance follows lineage, behavior, species, family, culture, or some more general field-like affinity. Rupert’s answer was pragmatic and empirical rather than definitional. Like Faraday’s field concept before Maxwell, morphic resonance need not yet specify the full mechanism in order to generate testable predictions. Similarity, in practice, may operate through overlapping fields—family fields, species fields, cultural fields—which interpenetrate and fuse in ways material objects cannot.
We also discussed crystals, protein folding, dog breeds, family constellations, and Darwin’s Lamarckian sympathies for the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Rupert emphasized that Darwin himself was more holistic, physiological, and almost vitalist than later neo-Darwinians. He spoke of “the coordinating power of the organism,” a phrase that already points beyond the reduction of life to genes and selection. The case of deer antlers became especially important: if mutilations or injuries to antlers in one year reappear in modified form the next year, that seems far more naturally explained by morphic resonance than by a pre-existing Platonic form containing every possible accidental deformation.
The theological dimension then became unavoidable. If forms have agency, or if they function as lures and attractors, then we are already asking questions of final cause, value, and divine ordering. I brought in Whitehead’s distinction between God’s primordial envisagement of eternal objects and God’s consequent feeling of the world’s actual decisions. Rupert responded by opening a related but distinct path through the world-soul and the Cosmic Christ tradition: not every evolution of form need be placed directly in God the Father if there is an intermediate cosmic organism, a world-soul, within which fields, finite souls, and formative powers evolve. This led us to the deeper claim that changes in science are always also changes in natural philosophy, and finally in natural theology.
The conversation ended with the sense that the old mechanistic consensus is weakening not merely at the margins, but at the cutting edge of developmental biology and field theory. The question is no longer whether form can be reduced to matter, but which post-mechanistic account of form can best explain the evidence. Morphic resonance, evolutionary Platonism, Whiteheadian prehension, Bohm’s implicate order, the world-soul, and the field concept in physics may be different vocabularies circling the same breakthrough: nature is not made of inert matter externally arranged, but of living patterns, memories, and lures.
