ABSTRACT
Studies in purely physical geography have, in general, no option but to be carried out using the methods of contemporary science, whether these are reductionistic or attempts at holism like systems analysis. The term holism was invented by the South African statesman-scholar Jan Smuts and for him, as for some later writers, it was suffused with ideas which belong equally to mysticism and vitalism, that is an element of a metaphysical reality had to be involved. One of the central ideas in the Gaia hypothesis is that of co-evolution of both inorganic and living matter, with breaks in symmetry as new levels of complexity are achieved. Experimental work showed that if laboratory rats learned a new pattern of behaviour, subsequent rats all over the world tended to learn the same pattern more easily. This process Rupert Sheldrake called 'formative causation', with the transmitting pattern being labelled 'morphic resonance'.
