re: #163 So?

Theoretical biologist Rupert Sheldrake used the concept of morphogenesis to develop an exciting alternative model to explain the habits of nature. According to Sheldrake’s Hypothesis of Formative Causation, each species has its own field, and within each organism is a composite of many fields. Within the human body, for example, there’s a field for the entire body, plus fields for each limb, muscle, organ, cell, etc., all the way down to the sub-cellular and molecular level. Each of these fields contains their own “memory,” derived from past, similar forms. For example, in a ten-year experiment started at Harvard University, rats were trained to escape from a water maze. Each new generation of rats learned to escape quicker. After ten years, the latest generation of rats could escape ten times faster than the original rats. Interestingly, rats of the same lineage in other areas of the world also escaped ten times faster, a phenomenon which cannot be explained by any localized instruments (unless the rats figured out how to communicate via email or instant messenger and we just haven’t found out :-).

I think the proper conclusion here is that the attention span of Harvard graduate students decreased linearly over the course of the ten year experiment.

Or maybe the maze floors just got slipperier after ten years of rats running over them!