Materialism, the scientific doctrine that describes the world as a machine of particles, is a fairly new way to think about the universe, 16th century. It's been very successful in producing machines, repeatable machines. But it's not the only way to think about how the universe is organized.

Rupert Sheldrake is a very interesting scientist who's re-introducing an much older model for how the universe is organized, called panpsyicism, where all matter is considered conscience. Conscience is defined as having a probabilistic future,and maybe being able to make choices about that future. He has some other interesting hypotheses that build on top of this, such as morphic resonance as which is like a memory for conscience. He doesnt expect materialist science to be able to explain the forms of plants, believing that DNA is not going to be able to account for how the plant is shaped. I find that a very interesting idea, that there we are something more then our DNA