Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Speaker A: ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent Design.
Welcome to ID the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Today, David Klinghofer reads to us from his new book, Plato's the New Signs of the Immaterial Genome, now available from Discovery Institute Press.
This is a compact book, but it's the story of a very big idea, and one that has the potential to usher in the next great revolution in biology.
You may be familiar with David's work as editor of our flagship news and commentary site, Evolution News and Science Today.
He's a Discovery Institute Senior Fellow and former senior editor at National Review.
His books include the Discovery of God, the Lord Will Gather Me in, and as editor Debating Darwin's Doubt. He has contributed to the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. In a few moments, you'll hear David read the introduction to his new book, First A Few Words on what it's about, and I'll share some advance praise that's been given to the book. First there was the genetic revolution, the discovery that physical structures in the cell, including DNA and rna, shape every organism.
Now, says evolutionary biologist Richard Sternberg, we are overdue for another and more profound revolution.
Recent findings reveal that genetic and even epigenetic sources alone cannot account for the rich dynamism of life. Not even close. Some other informational source is required. The idea was anticipated 2,400 years ago in Plato's Timaeus and periodically revisited in the ensuing centuries.
Sidelined by scientific materialism, it's now reasserting itself on the strength of cutting edge molecular biology, higher mathematics, and common sense reasoning.
In Plato's Revenge, science writer David Klinghoffer takes Sternberg's profound explorations and weaves them into a lively and accessible account of a most remarkable realization.
At every moment, we owe ourselves and our lives to a genome that is more than matter and to an informational source that is immaterial, trans, computational, and beyond space and time.
Let me share with you a little bit of the advance praise for the book. Jay Richards, Ph.D. and co author of the Privileged Planet, also editor of God and Evolution, said this about the Darwinian materialism fails to explain the biological information in DNA sequences, but that truth merely scratches the surface when it comes to explaining biological form.
To understand organisms in all their complexity, argues Richard Sternberg, we must break completely with 19th century materialism and reconsider the thought of ancient greats such as Plato and Aristotle.
Sternberg's argument might seem daunting to the non specialist, but David Klinghoffer does a masterful job of explaining Sternberg's revolutionary thought in a delightfully accessible way. Dr. Brian Miller, Ph.D. and research coordinator for the center for Science and Culture at Discovery Institute, puts it this as Klinghoffer explains, Sternberg has woven together the fields of biology, mathematics, and philosophy to argue that an organism's genome is not entirely contained in DNA.
Moreover, the information representing a species, structures and processes is not confined to any physical molecule. Instead, an organism's architecture results from immaterial principles.
Sternberg's arguments draw from the leading theorists who applied mathematics, such as category theory, to life, and his analysis demonstrates that the control center that directs an embryo to develop into an adult requires far more information than could be contained in the entire initial cell, let alone DNA. The control center must reside in a mathematical structure outside of time and space. Klinghoffer, following Sternberg, also traces scientists understanding of the genome throughout history, illustrating that many leading biologists have recognized the genome's immateriality and I want to share one more thing with you before we hear from David. This is the epigram that David included at the beginning of Plato's Revenge.
Hold it up, said Gandalf, and look closely. As Frodo did so, he now saw fine lines, finer than the finest pen strokes, running along the ring, outside and inside lines of fire that seemed to form the letters of a flowing script. They shone piercingly bright and yet remote, as if out of a great depth. I cannot read the fiery letters, said Frodo in a quavering voice. No, said Gandalf, But I can.
Those are lines, of course, from J.R.R. tolkien's the Fellowship of the Ring. Here's David now, reading the introduction to Plato's Revenge.
[00:05:18] Speaker B: I'm David Klinghoffer reading the introduction to my new book, Plato's Revenge, the New Science of the Immaterial Genome.
When I first heard biologist Richard Sternberg describe his immaterial genome hypothesis, reviving the thought of the Greek philosopher Plato in a modern and scientific context, another biologist on hand took in her breath. If that's true, she said, it changes everything.
I felt. Similarly, the idea spooked me all familiar thinking about the genome assumes that it is, of course, purely material the twisting strands of DNA and a few other physical structures in the cell. The proponents of intelligent design, or id, have in large part accepted this premise and argued according to its terms.
Sternberg goes further. He argues, sometimes from commonsensical and accessible evidence and sometimes from highly technical mathematical and biological realities, that the material resources of the physically instantiated portion of the genome are woefully inadequate to shape life from generation to generation. The the conclusion still gives me a shiver. An immaterial source exists in company with DNA and the other material sources of biological information.
That source extends not only beyond us, but beyond physical reality.
I vividly recall the meeting. It was 2012, a time of great strain in my life. In a small conference room in Seattle, several of us, including scientists and non scientists like me, gathered to listen to Sternberg sketch an argument he had been developing, rooted in his observation that there simply is not enough information physically in the cell, including the DNA, and epigenetic, from the Greek meaning beyond genetic sources to account for the development of an organism. According to him, this finding applied not only to the more complex organisms, but such as whales and humans, but also to the relatively simple ones such as yeast.
He also spoke of those who had influenced him, in particular theoretical biologist Robert Rosen and the men who had first devised the idea of a gene. As Sternberg explained, they saw it in terms that might not be material.
The nature of genetics and heredity is inherently of more intimate interest to some people than are many other scientific topics. The law of gravity says nothing about me as a person except how fast I would fall if I were pushed off a tall building.
Heredity promises to say much about who I am. As I'm writing this, I've just put a tube of spit in the mail to the DNA ancestry company 23andMe. On the top of the test kit you get from Amazon is the message to the customer, welcome to you.
Siddhartha Mukherjee, who teaches medicine at Columbia University, begins his book the An Intimate History by detailing why the subject is painfully personal for him.
Behind his narrative of scholarly discovery lies his father's family, with its history of a mental illness, schizophrenia. In that family history he is himself implicated, as are any children he might have.
Madness, he writes, has been among the Mukherjees for at least two generations.
It is buried like toxic waste in the genetic inheritance.
In 2012, heredity was on my mind. That year, my birth mother, Harriet Lund, had come to live near me in the Seattle area, bringing emotional turbulence with her.
She was suffering from dementia, and with it episodes of rage and paranoia. It was at this time, she told me, that in Los Angeles in 1965, my birth father, George Thomas, raped her, and this was how I was conceived.
She was Swedish, born from a long line of Lutheran pastors.
She was a social worker at the time, and George, a Mayflower descendant from Kansas, was her supervisor. I had first met her in 1993 and, charmed, wrote a book about her in relationship to my own conversion to Orthodox Judaism. She had not told me the crucial point about George Thomas until 2012, right around the time I first heard Sternberg's immaterial genome idea.
Harriet sounded perfectly lucid when she said it. Your father raped me. You are the son of a rapist.
Later, after Harriet had already slipped away, present in her body but not in her mind, and thus incapable of answering questions, a cousin of hers contacted me. The cousin revealed with credible details that Harriet had kept another secret as well. Harriet's own father, my grandfather, the Swedish filmmaker Oscar A.C. lund, had sexually molested Harriet when she was a girl.
Before she became ill, Harriet had wanted to save me from the truth about my heredity.
Only in the throes of dementia did she tell me that point about my birth father. Now I knew it all, as they put it, at 23. And me welcome to you. This is the first reason that Sternberg's discussion moved me.
There was something else about Sternberg that struck me. Given that he is a man decorated with two PhDs in biology, one in molecular evolutionary genetics and another in mathematical biology, and has held a scientific post at the Smithsonian National Museum, it's natural to expect him to have little interest in classical history.
Here surely is a man oriented toward science, natural history, and the vanguard of discovery, but when you meet him in person, you quickly sense that a more complex description will be required. He's a man as interested in the history of science and philosophy as he is in the latest scientific evidence and ideas.
I confess that I find this very relatable. As a college student at Brown studying Greek and Latin, I was narrowly diverted from an academic career in comparative literature.
After graduation, I was set to start in September in the classics department at Columbia to work toward a PhD that summer, though, I was offered a job as assistant literary editor at William F. Buckley Jr. S National Review.
I deferred grad school for the coming academic year, but then never went. The journalism virus had infected me, yet I continued to find the Greeks the picture of life that they offered and their difficult language, enchanting.
More than this, I have remained fascinated by intellectual life as a form of archaeology, digging for insight and wisdom in ancient sources.
My children grew up hearing me say many times over that there are two kinds of people.
There are those who see modern opinions as the product of an upward driving, almost teleological evolutionary process, with a kind of natural selection picking out the very best concepts from what has come before. The more modern the better.
And Then there are others like me, who look around at contemporary existence, with its increasing surrender to mental illness as a philosophy of life, conclude just the opposite. Jewish tradition calls this yeridat hadorot, the devolution of the generations.
Human beings are not getting wiser. This is not only an axiom, but is evident just from observing the world around you. So I was naturally sympathetic to Sternberg. For though he grounds his argument for the immaterial genome in the latest discoveries of molecular biology, he is also, by temperament, sufficiently suspicious of novelty that he mined the history of philosophy and science to excavate intimations and intellectual forebears of his argument. In the process, he turned up a line of thinkers and scientists from Plato to Rosen.
Recently, as I was reading about Sternberg, I came across the essay Goethe and the Evolution of Science by Craig Holdridge of the Nature Institute, an organization which seeks to revive the ideas of the German Enlightenment author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, about science and nature.
As you will see, Goethe is among that line of great thinkers who influenced Sternberg. But I was struck by something Holdridge said. Sometimes people tell him, craig, we need to move beyond Goethe. He replies, that has truth to it. But even more true is that in important ways, we haven't even reached Goethe. That's why, in going back to Goethe, we can move into the future.
Back to the future with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in other ways as well. Sternberg defies easy categories of description. He's a formal person, yet goes by Rick. He has a precise manner of speaking and writing and the faintest hint of what sounds almost like a Southern accent. But like me, he is from Los Angeles.
After his father died in 1969, he and his mother moved to Florida.
There he attended a Catholic high school, but was expelled just before graduation for persuading girls in chapel to let him pen on their legs in all innocence, the legend Rick was here.
A characteristic gesture of his is touching the tips of the fingers of one hand to the tips of the other, forming a bridge in five parts.
When I first encountered him, he went by his legal name, Richard von Sternberg, as he still does in professional publications.
My most recent in person visit with him was in 2024, when he was in Redmond, Washington, for a meeting. A female colleague noticed that for a gathering of just three days, Sternberg, who had traveled from across the country, had brought two pairs of dress shoes. I would not have brought one pair, I thought at the time. He alternated between these from day to day, because, after all, you would not want to be seen wearing the same shoes twice in a row. The same colleague was surprised one day when Sternberg wore jeans, though they were carefully pressed. On a subsequent occasion, when Sternberg was at the beach with his wife on a summer day, my colleague was startled to see him wearing shorts. I thought he would be wearing long pants, she admitted. Sternberg indulges in collecting art and animals in terrariums and vivariums. His reading and learning styles involve highlighting phrases in various colors according to source and other categories. He has a thin mustache that makes him look as if he stepped out of the 1940s, perhaps playing a physician giving court testimony in a noir film.
He's given to certain formal expressions, like referring to admired scientists and other thinkers of the past as a man such as James Clerk Maxwell or a man like William Bateson, he will occasionally curse otherwise. He's courtly and thoughtful not only about science. When I saw him at the meeting I just mentioned, he referred to how, almost two decades before, on another visit to Seattle, our wives had traded tips on swaddling babies. I did not remember that. While daunting in his intelligence and his encyclopedic memory, he is funny and humble. Standing at a whiteboard and mapping out a projected work on the immaterial genome, he he summarizes his planned preface by writing on the board how I got to this state of conceptual insanity he's given to offering asides often historical in nature. Endearingly, he's continually asking forgiveness for faults that don't exist and for things that need no apology.
I'm sorry for lingering on history, he will say in a lecture that greatly benefits from his stimulating historical digressions. And it's an interesting historical point from my perspective at least. Maybe not from yours. I apologize for that if it's not or I've not done this justice at all, and I apologize for that. Or again, well, I'll touch on that at the very end of this long winded lecture, and I apologize for that.
What follows is not remotely as technical as a rigorous submersion into his argument would require.
This is not an academic book. It aims only to relate the main lines of Sternberg's thesis. It looks forward to his much more technical volumes on the immaterial genome, which are in progress.
How, you might wonder, did a book like this about another man's ideas come to be the pages that follow it draw from or adapt interviews and conversations, recorded lectures and podcasts and articles I wrote about him for the Wall Street Journal and National Review, as well as from other writings of his and of other people. Some conversations were in 2005, others in 2024 and 2025. Emily Sandiko, working with Sternberg on a parallel project, offered insights from her own talks with them.
I extend My thanks to Dr. Sternberg for his openness, inspiration and agreement to being portrayed, as well as for sharing some of his vast knowledge of biology philosophy.
He has read the manuscript and answered questions posed to me by the book's gifted editor, Jonathan Witt. But any errors of a scientific or other nature should be condemned as mine alone, and I apologize for that.
[00:19:50] Speaker A: That was David Klinghoffer reading the introduction from his new book, Plato's the New Signs of the Immaterial Genome. The book is available now from Discovery Institute Press. Learn more and order your copy at Discovery Press. That's Discovery Press.
As our colleague Dr. Anne Gager said of Sternberg's thesis, upon first learning of it, if that's true, it changes everything. Folks, you're going to want to begin learning about the new science of the immaterial genome right now so that you're better prepared to share it with friends and family. And you'll better understand Sternberg's books detailing the idea when they come out. Learn more about Plato's Revenge and order a copy at Discovery Press. Easy website there. Discovery Press for ID the Future, I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for listening.
Visit us at idthefuture.com and intelligent design.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
