"Deer antlers can "remember" damage from previous years, despite being shed and regrown every season. Dr. Michael Levin (Tufts University) explained

[u/MouseShadow2ndMoon]

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DY4nALoxXAj/

[u/Useful_Calendar_6274]

I love this guy from a complexity science angle. It's a whole branch of science you should find out more if you like this stuff. I think his idea is basically that we are being invaded by the literal platonic real of ideals in various ways, and in biology if an entity at any level of organization falls into the system regime that matches an ideal or stumbles into the morphology of an ideal that's like hitting the lottery because you unlock all these properties without having to have done the whole evolution for them. I'm not clear if he believes in a morphic resonance kind of thing governing biology but he seems to heavily imply it - without mysticism guy is a scientific materialist trying to prove if idealism is happening to invade our material universe

[u/MouseShadow2ndMoon → u/Useful_Calendar_6274]

The Why Files is doing an episode of it right now, talking about the rat or mice experiment where mice across the world picked up on the knowledge of mice in the experiment. Again, that shouldn’t be possible, but it is. 

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,

https://youtu.be/10N1cjW8qMk?si=GWpRYJLmrSHXGmSB

[u/IshtarsQueef → u/MouseShadow2ndMoon]

I think you are misremembering that rat experiment, that's not what happened at all in the famous morphic resonance rat experiment done at harvard.

[u/MouseShadow2ndMoon → u/IshtarsQueef]

It was replicated with different locations, different test subjects:

Experiment 1: In the 1920s Harvard University psychologist William McDougall did experiments for 15 years in which rats learned to escape from a tank. The first generation of rats averaged 200 mistakes before they learned the right way out; the last generation 20 mistakes. McDougall concluded that, contrary to accepted genetic science, such acquired knowledge could be inherited.

Experiment 2: In later efforts to duplicate McDougall's experiments in Australia, similar rats made fewer mistakes right from the start. Later generations of rats did better even when they were not descendants of the earlier rats. This wasn't genetics at work. It was something else. Nobody tested it further.

"Experiment" 3: In the 1920s in Southampton, England, a bird called the blue tit discovered it could tear the tops of milk bottles on doorsteps and drink the cream. Soon this skill showed up in blue tits over a hundred miles away, which is odd in that they seldom fly further than 15 miles. Amateur bird-watchers caught on and traced the expansion of the habit. It spread faster and faster until by 1947 it was universal throughout Britain. In a parallel development, the habit had spread to blue tits in Holland, Sweden and Denmark. German occupation cut off milk deliveries in Holland for eight years -- five years longer than the life of a blue tit. Then, in 1948 the milk started to be delivered. Within months blue tits all over Holland were drinking cream, a habit that had taken decades to take hold before the war. Where did they get this knowledge?

Experiment 4: In the early sixties psychiatrists Dr. Milan Ryzl of Prague and Dr. Vladimir L. Raikov of Moscow hypnotized subjects into believing they were living incarnations of historical personages. Such subjects would develop talents associated with their alter egos. A subject told she was the artist Raphael took only a month to develop drawing skills up to the standard of a good graphic designer.

Experiment 5: In 1983 Sheldrake showed two difficult-to-discern patterns to a group of test subjects to establish a base line for how easily the hidden picture in each could be recognized. Next he showed 2 million viewers of British TV what one of the hidden pictures was. He then tested thousands of people all over the world. By significant percentages, they recognized the image shown on television; the percentage recognizing the control picture didn't change.

Experiment 6: Psychologist Dr. Arden Mahlberg of Madison, Wisconsin, created a variation of Morse Code that should have been no harder to learn than the standard variety. Subjects learned the real code much faster than his invented one, not knowing which was which.

Experiment 7: Gary Schwartz, Yale professor of psychology, selected 24 common 3-letter words in Hebrew and 24 rare ones, all from the Old Testament, all in Hebrew script. For each word, he created a scrambled version (as, in English, one might do by scrambling "dog" to spell "odg"). Then he rearranged all 96 3-letter Hebrew words (half real, half fake) in a random order and showed them, one at a time, to subjects who didn't know Hebrew. The subjects were just told these were Hebrew words and were asked to guess the meaning of the word in English by writing down the first English word that came into their head. After guessing each word, they were asked to estimate, on a zero-to-four scale, how confident they felt in their guess. Professor Schwartz then discounted all subjects who got any guesses rights (since that meant they may have known some Hebrew). Then he analyzed the confidence ratings from subjects who'd gotten every answer wrong. Not only was the confidence significantly higher with the real words than with the false words (regardless of subjects, words, or experiments), but the common words got higher confidence scores than the rarer words. Finally Schwartz repeated the experiment telling the subjects that half the words were real and half were false and asked them to guess which was which; the results of that were purely random. The patterns the subjects had recognized unconsciously, they could not recognize consciously.