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Suddenly, one day in a laboratory, a compound, never before observed in a crystalline state, begins to form crystals. Soon, in laboratories all around the world, similar reports are made of the crystallisation of this enigmatic compound. How are we to explain such a chemical conspiracy? The conventional explanation for this phenomenon is that fragments of previous crystals that serve as ‘seeds’ got carried from laboratory to laboratory on unsterilised specimens, on the bodies or personal effects of peripatetic scientists, or perhaps that they floated in on their own as migrating microscopic particles of air. Rupert Sheldrake proposes an alternative explanation. Perhaps when the first crystal formed, it took on one of a number of structures compatible with pre-existing laws of nature. Thereafter, whenever or wherever the compound crystallised under similar conditions it would take up the same structure owing to a fascinating causal influence from the original ‘volunteer’ crystal. By ‘action at a distance’ in space-time (as allowed by Bell's Theorem) the pioneer crystal could be considered as the conductor of a vast symphony of inseparable, interacting and interpenetrating components. The mechanism for this transformation is a ‘morphic resonance’; the underlying explanation resides in what Sheldrake calls the ‘hypothesis of formative causation’ (SHELDRAKE 12).
Before going into more detail about Sheldrake's hypothesis, some remarks should be made about Bell's theorem.
Using appearances to go beyond appearances, J. S. Bell, a physicist working in Switzerland in , began the attack on ‘conventional reality’. Now it turns out that the whole universe may be a single hologram with the information about all of it encapsulated in every part of it. It is unnecessary to go into details of Bell's mathematical deduction to explain that he takes the result of a certain local (i.e., bounded by the speed of light as relativity theory insists) experiment (the EPR experiment named after