Fact Check: Morphogenic Fields Article

[one_raven]

I was reading an article regarding "morphogenic fields".

http://twm.co.nz/shel_morfields.htm

I am not really all that interested in the author's conclusions, rather I want to verify the experiments cited. Specifically what he claims in this excerpt:

In the meantime, the puzzles about memory have grown even stranger. This part of our story will take us to one of the most controversial frontiers of current science, although it actually starts back in 1920 when W. McDougall, a biologist at Harvard, began an experiment to see if animals (in this case white rats) could inherit learning. The procedure was to teach the rats a simple task (avoiding a lighted exit), record how fast they learned, breed another generation, teach them the same task, and see how their rate of learning compared with their elders. He carried the experiment through 34 generations and found that, indeed, each generation learned faster in flat contradiction to the usual Darwinian assumptions about heredity. Such a result naturally raised controversy, and similar experiments were run to prove or disprove the result. The last of these was done by W.E. Agar at Melbourne over a period of 20 years ending in 1954. Using the same general breed of rats, he found the same pattern of results that McDougall had but in addition he found that untrained rats used as a control group also learned faster in each new generation. (Curiously, he also found that his first generation of rats started at the same rate of learning as McDougall's last generation.) No one had a good explanation for why both trained and untrained should be learning faster, but since this result did not support the idea that learning was inherited, the biology community breathed a sigh of relief and considered the matter closed.

I have done a little checking and one of the two websites I came across cited the article I linked to as its source (not much help there) the other one claimed that Agar started his experiment in 1938 and ran it for twenty-five years.

Not only would I like correct information on this, but I am also looking for much more complete and specific information regarding how these experiemnts and others (F.A.E. Crew, for example) were performed and the exact results found.

Can anyone help me out with this one?
Thanks.

 

[Moonbear]

I don't have any information on those old studies. I'm afraid you're likely to find yourself at the mercy of a librarian going through dusty old archives to find those articles. The last time I needed a reference ca 1920s, I found myself in an old warehouse, with one librarian, who took about a half hour to find the journal (surely he took a nap in between...if I worked in that place, I'd spend a lot of time napping too).

If you find a copy of it, I can help you interpret the methods and identify any flaws or biases. It'll probably wind up being some horribly boring monograph that's 50 pages long!

 

[one_raven]

I have gathered a bit more information.
This may help find the articles.

In 1920 William McDougall of Harvard began training rats to learn to escape from a water maze by choosing the correct exit. While the brightly lit exit would give them an electric shock, when they picked the dimly-lit exit, they got out undisturbed. McDougall found that the first generation of rats had to endure 165 shocks before getting the message. But by the 30th generation, only 20 transgressions were necessary to persuade the rats of the error in their way. (McDougall, 1938. British Journal of Psychology 28:321-345.)

McDougall assumed the rats were passing on acquired characteristics. Wishing to disprove this "Lamarckian" (and Darwinian) interpretation of the data, F. A. E. Crew replicated the experiment in Edinburgh. Right from the get-go, Crew's rats needed only 25 errors to learn their lesson, as if picking up where the Harvard rats had left off. (Crew, 1936. Journal of Genetics 33:61-101.)

In Melbourne, W. E. Agar found the same effect. His trials went on for over twenty years, and even when he tested control subjects that weren't descended from trained rats, they still showed improvement over the performance of previous generations. So it couldn't have been coming from their parents. (Agar, 1954. Journal of Experimental Biology
31:307-321.)

Where might I be able to get past issues or articles from the British Journal of Psychology, the Journal of Genetics and the Journal of Experimental Biology?

 

[one_raven]

I tried http://jeb.biologists.org/search.dtl online, but the electronic articles only go back to the sixties.

 

[Moonbear]

Request the articles through your library. If the journal is owned by a scientific society, the society likely has archives as well.

In both studies, look carefully at the strains of rats used. There are a variety of strains of rats, not to mention that they were far less inbred in the 1920s, so it may be coincidence that they "picked up where they left off" and just that the inbreeding has selected for learning ability either intentionally or not. Back it the 1920s, if they didn't find the exit, were the rats allowed to drown? Was there something in the breeding that would account for only breeding the faster learners?

When they received the shock upon attempting to exit, were they still allowed to exit? It seems escaping drowning might be more important than a shock. Male rats are well known to run across a mildly electrified grid to get to a female on the other side, so a shock might not have been much of a deterrent to escaping via any exit.

Did they record the time it took to find the exit? Was the experiment terminated as soon as they found the dimly lit exit? How long of a time elapsed between attempts? Was it 20 days of testing for 20 attempts, or did the poor, soaking wet rat keep getting tossed back into water? Were there other spatial cues in the room? Where was the experimenter located during the test? How visible were the exits other than the presence of lights? Were the water mazes cleaned thoroughly between tests to remove the scent of previous rats? How many rats were used? What was the variation among the rats? Where was the starting platform, and what direction did the rats naturally swim if there was no light and no electric shock? There are a LOT of ways these tests could be biased, especially back in the 1920s when people weren't aware of how those biases could be introduced.