Sheldrake prefers teleological to mechanistic models of reality.
Rather than spend his life, say, trying to develop a way to increase crop yields, he prefers to study and think in terms outside of the paradigms of science, i.e., inside the paradigms of the occult and the paranormal. And Other Unexplained Powers of Animals. He prefers a romantic vision of the past to the bleak picture of a world run by technocrats who want to control Nature even if that means destroying much of the environment in the process. He describes it as a kind of memory in things determined not by their inherent natures, but by repetition. This gives him a conceptual framework wherein information is transmitted mysteriously and miraculously through any amount of space and time without loss of energy, and presumably without loss or change of content through something like mutation in DNA replication.