Partial clip:
http://www.wie.org/j11/sheldrake.asp?page=2
Rupert Sheldrake: I'm interested in the recovery of the sense of the life of nature. The thrust of all my work is to try to break out of the mechanistic view of nature as inanimate, dead and machinelike, which forces the whole of our understanding of nature into a machine metaphor. This is a very man-centered metaphor. Only people make machines. So looking at nature in this way projects one aspect of human activity onto the whole of nature. It's an extremely limiting view of nature, and an alienating one.
Right from the beginning, since my book A New Science of Life was published, my aim has been to try to find a wider picture or paradigm for science that is not constricted to an inanimate, mechanistic view of things. In a way, the bigger picture is the idea of the whole universe as a living organism.
The big bang theory gives a picture of the origin of the universe in a small, undifferentiated, primal unity. The universe then expands and grows, and new forms and structures appear within it. This is more like a developing organism than like a machine. So implicitly we've got a new model of the universe as a developing organism.
Physics, also, has broken out of the old mechanistic universe. The old idea of determinism has given way to indeterminism and chaos theory. The old idea of the earth as dead has given way to Gaia, the idea of the living earth. The old idea of the universe as purposeless has been replaced by a new physics based on the notion of attractors, of things being drawn towards ends or goals. And the old idea of the universe as uncreative has given way to the idea of creative evolution, first in the realm of living things, through Darwin, and now we see that the whole cosmos is in creative evolution. So, if the whole universe is alive, if the universe is like a great organism, then everything within it is best understood as organisms rather than machines.
....WIE: What do you think of the view of neo-Darwinians such as Richard Dawkins or Stephen Jay Gould, who believe that evolution is without purpose or design and is the result of blind chance and natural selection?
RS: I think this is an act of faith on their part. It's not scientifically proven that it is without design?it is simply their assumption to start with. They want to believe that it is without purpose or design and so they say so. They are materialists and, as materialists, their view of the universe, their philosophy, has no place for purpose or design in evolution. Without looking at a single piece of evidence or data, they can deduce that it has no purpose or design because it follows from the premise from which their entire world philosophy starts.
I think that they are tied up in a way of looking at the world which starts not from observation but from dogma. I don't think there's anything in science itself that can tell us that evolution has no purpose or design. Maybe there's nothing that can prove scientifically that it does have purpose or design either. What we see is a variety of organisms amazingly well adapted to their environment. We see in evolution an amazingly creative process. Their philosophy says this is just chance and natural selection. But there are other evolutionary philosophers who say, "Okay, natural selection plays a part, it weeds out unfit organisms. But the creative process in evolution is a mystery."
Creativity is not blind chance. It's only blind chance if you start with the dogma that it has to be blind chance?the materialist dogma. Alfred Russel Wallace who, together with Charles Darwin, discovered the principle of natural selection and founded evolutionary theory, ended up with the idea that evolution was guided by intelligent spirits, that the creative side of evolution was guided by an immanent creative intelligence, or many kinds of intelligences, within the natural world. And that's just as compatible with the evolutionary facts as the neo-Darwinist dogmas. However, even if evolution is guided by intelligent spirits or?just to put it more generally?by intelligence immanent in nature, that doesn't necessarily mean that this immanent intelligence is working in accordance with an overall master plan or that human cultural evolution is guided by an intelligence immanent in human beings. You know, every innovation, every gadget that's invented, every new advertising slogan, every new book that's written, every new piece of music or work of art that's made, is guided by a creative intelligence. But that doesn't mean that we know where we are going. It doesn't mean that these creative intelligences are working in accordance with some master plan for the destiny of humanity. Mostly they are working in accordance with much more short-term goals.
So for me, it's an open question as to whether the intelligence that underlies the creativity in life is working in accordance with some fixed goal for the end of evolution. I don't get that impression. If you look at the diversity of life?several million species of beetles, for example, on this planet?you get the impression that there's a kind of creativity for its own sake, a proliferation of form and variety. It's not at all clear why there should be so many millions of species of beetles. A quote I like is J. B. S. Haldane's reply when someone asked him, "Mr. Haldane, you have spent so many years studying life. What do your studies of life tell you about the nature of God?" "Sir," Haldane answered, "He seems to have an inordinate fondness for beetles."