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You see evolutionary history as a tension between the two forces: habit—or what you call morphic resonance—and creativity, which involves the appearance of new morphic fields. But in the case of mass extinctions, you suggested once that "the ghosts of dead species would still be haunting the world, that the fields of the dinosaurs would still be potentially present if you could tune in to them." Would you comment on how it might be possible for extinct species to reappear?

Well, I don’t have in mind some kind of Jurassic Park scenario. I was thinking that the fields would remain present, but the conditions for tuning in to them are no longer there if the species is extinct, so they’re not expressed. However, it’s a well-known fact in evolutionary studies that some of the features of extinct species can reappear again and again—both as occasional mutations and turning up in the fossil record. And when the features of extinct species re-appear, they’re usually given the name "atavism," which implies a kind of throwback to an ancestral form. Darwin was very interested in atavisms for the same reasons I am, that they seem to imply a kind of memory of what went before.

Do you think that morphic fields could account for the existence of ghosts?

Well, the fields represent a kind of memory. If places have memories, then I suppose it’s possible for a type of ghostly phenomena to be built into their fields. This is a very hazy area of speculation and not one I’ve thought through rigorously. I’ve had no incentive to think it through rigorously because it’s so hard to think of repeatable experiments with ghosts. But ghosts do seem to be a kind of memory thing, and morphic fields have to do with memory, so there may well be a connection.

Karl Pribram suggests that memories are spread throughout the brain like waves, or holograms. You go further in suggesting that memories may not be stored in the brain at all, but rather that the brain acts as a tuning device and picks up memories analogous to the way a television tunes in to certain frequencies. You’ve also suggested that if memories aren’t stored in the brain, this leaves the door open for the possibility of the existence of the soul. Can you explain how your ideas on the existence of the soul fit into this paradigm?

Well, we should clarify the terms here. The traditional European view was that all animals and plants have souls—not just people—and that these souls were what organized their bodies and their instincts. In some ways, therefore, the traditional idea of soul is very similar to what I mean by morphic fields. The traditional view of the soul in Aristotle and in Saint Thomas Aquinas was not the idea of some immortal spiritual principle. It was that the soul is a part of nature, a part of physics, in the general sense. It’s that which organizes living bodies. In that sense, all morphic fields of plants and animals are like souls.

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