In this TED Talk, Rupert Sheldrake identifies what he calls the ten dogmas of modern science - and I think he's pretty spot-on with many of them. What's interesting though is that scientists don't seem to like being called dogmatic, so TED's scientific advisors recommended that the video be removed from distribution on the TEDx channel.
Here's what the folks at TED have to say about the controversy:
At TEDxWhitechapel on January 13, 2013, Rupert Sheldrake gave a provocative talk in which he suggests that modern science is based on ten dogmas, and makes the case that none of them hold up to scrutiny. According to him, these dogmas — including, for example, that nature is mechanical and purposeless, that the laws and constants of nature are fixed, and that psychic phenomena like telepathy are impossible — have held back the pursuit of knowledge.
TED’s scientific advisors have questioned whether his list is a fair description of scientific assumptions — indeed, several of the dogmas are actually active areas of science inquiry (including whether physical ‘constants’ are really unchanging) — and believe there is little evidence for some of Sheldrake’s more radical claims, such as his theory of morphic resonance, and claim that the speed of light has been changing. They recommended that the talk be should not be distributed without being framed with caution. Accordingly, we have reposted his talk here, with the above cautionary introduction.
If you watch the video, you'll see that it's clear he is expressing his opinion about the scientific community and its culture. Nowhere does he make any actual scientific claims. And if he had, and if those claims had been grossly erroneous, surely a correction would have sufficed. But the scientific advisors aren't objecting to errors in Sheldrake's presentation, they are objecting to his questioning of their assumptions, just as they object to his questioning of the constancy of the speed of light (he does not, as the advisors claim, assert that the speed of light has been changing, he simply raises the question as well as questioning the methods by which it has been tracked.) Those advisors don't sound very scientific to me.