Elisabet Sahtouris - After Darwin

Posted by Olly Robinson on 31 October 2008 | 0 Comments

Tags: Consciousness, Philosophy

Sahtouris is a rare thing; a biologist who is not a materialist. By that I mean she does not adhere to the philosophy that matter, or at least some kind of nonconscious stuff (energy, quanta) is primary. Sahtouris prefers to see consciousness as primary and therefore that the universe is alive and sentient. She sees the materialist idea that we are living things in a nonliving universe as false, and the corresponding problem of how life emerged therefore does not exist for her.

Why does this position, which has an ancient philosophical heritage from Plato to Kant to Berkeley, seem so heretical for a biologist? There is an insidious tendency in science to become very entrenched in a philosophical worldview, despite the non-empirical nature of that philosophy, and then to pretend that that philosophy is reinforced by science, when it is not. This is where science attempts to do more than it can do - to overstep its limits as a form of knowledge.

It takes courage to propound rational and coherent ideas that are squarely outside of common consensus and which do not conform to oversimplified polarities, and that is what Sahtouris is doing. Here are three parts of a brief presentation entitled "After Darwin."

Dr Olly Robinson