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The cumulative nature of the evolutionary process, the fact that memory is preserved, means that life grows not just through a random proliferation of new forms, but there's a kind of cumulative quality.

Rupert Sheldrake

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Rupert Sheldrake
Age: 54
Author
Biochemist
Biologist
Parapsychologist
Philosopher
Writer
Newark
Nottinghamshire
Alfred Rupert Sheldrake
Form
Memories
Cumulative
Mean
Grows
Proliferation
Kind
Quality
Preserved
Life
Fact
Evolutionary
Process
Random
Means
Forms
Facts
Memory
Nature
Evolution

More quotes by Rupert Sheldrake

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Creativity gives new forms, new patterns, new ideas, new art forms. And we don't know where creativity comes from. Is it inspired from above? Welling up from below? Picked up from the air? What? Creativity is a mystery wherever you encounter it.
Rupert Sheldrake
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I have been a scientist for more than 40 years, having studied at Cambridge and Harvard. I researched and taught at Cambridge University, was a research fellow of the Royal Society, and have more than 80 publications in peer-reviewed journals. I am strongly pro-science.
Rupert Sheldrake
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In both religion and science, some people are dishonest, exploitative, incompetent and exhibit other human failings.
Rupert Sheldrake
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Matter is merely mind deadened by the development of habit to the point where the breaking up of these habits is very difficult.
Rupert Sheldrake
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Bad religion is arrogant, self-righteous, dogmatic and intolerant. And so is bad science. But unlike religious fundamentalists, scientific fundamentalists do not realize that their opinions are based on faith. They think they know the truth.
Rupert Sheldrake
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The Gaia Hypothesis of James Lovelock [and Lynn Margulis] puts forward a scientific view of the living Earth, which in one respect is modern, empherical, scientific, in another respect re-awakens an ancient archetype, which in fact is so clearly suggested by the very name of the hypothesis, Gaia, the Greek name for Mother Earth.
Rupert Sheldrake
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The assumption that the laws of nature are eternal is a vestige of the Christian belief system that informed the early postulates of modern science in the seventeenth century. Perhaps the laws of nature have actually evolved along with nature itself, and perhaps they are still evolving. Or perhaps they are not laws at all, but more like habits.
Rupert Sheldrake
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At the moment of insight, a potential pattern of organized behavior comes into being.
Rupert Sheldrake
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Not every good idea survives. Not every new form of art is repeated. Not every new potential instinct is successful. Only the successful ones get repeated. By natural selection and then through repetition they become probable, more habitual.
Rupert Sheldrake
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For more than 200 years, materialists have promised that science will eventually explain everything in terms of physics and chemistry. Believers are sustained by the faith that scientific discoveries will justify their beliefs.
Rupert Sheldrake
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Because a truly skeptical position would be a very uncertain one.
Rupert Sheldrake
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When people see one of these new forms of art for the first time, often they can't make sense of it. Then, if it's around long enough, a lot of people get used to it and it becomes assimilated into culture. So there's a morphic field both for the kind of art and for the appreciation of it.
Rupert Sheldrake
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Science at its best is an open-minded method of inquiry, not a belief system.
Rupert Sheldrake
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Contemporary science is based on the philosophy of materialism, which claims that all reality is material or physical.
Rupert Sheldrake
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To describe the overwhelming life of a tropical forest just in terms of inert biochemistry and DNA didn't seem to give a very full picture of the world.
Rupert Sheldrake
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Basically, morphic fields are fields of habit, and they've been set up through habits of thought, through habits of activity, and through habits of speech. Most of our culture is habitual.
Rupert Sheldrake
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I think that the 'laws of nature' are also prone to evolve I think they are more like habits than laws.
Rupert Sheldrake
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A lot of us have all sorts of ideas, and we select some rather than others and give expression to those... and some works of art are more successful than others. Some languish in obscurity and are never heard of again, while others form the foundation of a whole school of art.
Rupert Sheldrake
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I think that creativity depends on having sufficient indeterminacy around for a new pattern to arise up within it.
Rupert Sheldrake
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The science delusion is the belief that science already understands the nature of reality in principle, leaving only the details to be filled in.
Rupert Sheldrake