The science and philosophical implications of bioelectric fields

While the relation to Sheldrake's work on Morphic Fields is rather obvious, I do want to note that Andreas Wagner also suggested Platonic Forms might be involved with Evolution:

Possible creatures

It seemed Darwin had banished biological essences – yet evolution would fail without nature’s library of Platonic forms

How do random DNA changes lead to innovation? Darwin’s concept of natural selection, although crucial to understand evolution, doesn’t help much. The thing is, selection can only spread innovations that already exist. The botanist Hugo de Vries said it best in 1905: ‘Natural selection can explain the survival of the fittest, but it cannot explain the arrival of the fittest.’ (Half a century earlier, Darwin had already admitted that calling variations random is just another way of admitting that we don’t know their origins.)

In physics, the Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner called it ‘the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics’. And indeed, it is not clear why Newton’s law of gravitation should apply to so much more than the falling apple that might have inspired it, why it should describe everything from accreting planets to entire solar systems and rotating galaxies. Except that it does. For whatever reason, reality appears to obey certain mathematical formulae.

Nature’s libraries add another dimension to a centuries-old debate about the reality of the Platonic realm. Until now, this debate largely revolved around abstractions like the ones we find in mathematics. With the genotype networks, a new element enters: experimental science.