Aging & Wisdom Quote by Rupert Sheldrake

Sheldrake’s line is doing a careful two-step: it sounds like a modest observation about complexity, but it’s also a cultural jab at the old priesthood of certainty. By stacking three short sentences - “chaotic,” “not rigidly determined,” “not rigidly predictable” - he turns a technical point into a philosophical mood. The repetition isn’t redundancy; it’s a drumbeat aimed at a particular kind of scientific swagger, the kind that once sold the universe as a clockwork machine if you just had enough equations.

The phrase “in the old sense” is the giveaway. He’s not arguing against science so much as against a 19th-century version of it: Laplacian determinism, the fantasy that perfect knowledge of initial conditions yields perfect foresight. Modern physics already punctured that story (nonlinear dynamics, quantum indeterminacy, measurement limits), but Sheldrake’s rhetoric widens the crack into a doorway. “Most of nature” is an expansive claim that invites listeners to map the same looseness onto biology, mind, even meaning - territory where he’s been most controversial.

Subtext: if prediction is limited, then orthodox authority should be, too. That’s the soft power of the sentence. It doesn’t demand you accept his specific theories; it asks you to feel newly entitled to doubt the idea that reality is fully owned by reductionist explanation. In an era obsessed with modeling, forecasting, and “data-driven” governance, the quote reads less like a lab note and more like a warning: the world keeps a remainder, and anyone promising total predictability is selling metaphysics dressed as math.