[00:00:04] Speaker A: ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
Welcome to ID the Future. Today my guest is science writer David Klinghoffer to discuss his new book Plato's the New Science of the Immaterial Genome. It's a concise and user friendly introduction to the work of Dr. Richard Sternberg in his intriguing thesis that an immaterial force beyond physical reality underpins life existence, something for which neither DNA nor epigenics can account.
Now 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. A Brown University graduate, he lives on Mercer island in Washington. And best of all, I get to work with him and I'm really grateful for that. David, welcome to Idea the Future.
[00:01:12] Speaker B: Thank you very much, Andrew. And it's an interesting thing for your listeners to know that we're speaking to you from Redmond, the Redmond office of Discovery Institute where we all work. And we have also Emily Sandiko here who is Dr. Sternberg's associate. We'll get into that a little bit later, but there are two parallel Sternberg projects going on. One is my little book about the immaterial genome and another is a large two volume technical work that Emily is working on with Dr. Sternberg.
[00:01:47] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I. And we'll get into more of that and that is definitely something we can look forward to, the technical details of Sternberg's work coming to light in the project that he's working on. But your little book is a great little introduction to the whole idea. Let me read for you listeners the jacket copy for the new book Plato's Revenge. I think it will help set the stage for us today. Well, 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. The not even close. Some other informational source is required.
This idea was anticipated 2400 years ago in Plato's Timaeus and periodically revisited in the ensuing centuries. Sidelined by scientific materialism, it is 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 as and weaves them into a lively and accessible account of a most remarkable realization. At every moment, we owe ourselves to a genome that is more than matter and to an informational source that is immaterial, trans, computational and beyond space and time.
All right, so there. There it is in a nutshell. And if you haven't said wow to yourself yet, well, I'm sure you're going to by the end of this little chat here.
[00:03:35] Speaker B: This.
[00:03:36] Speaker A: But we're so glad, listeners that you've come along on this little journey as we enter into the thought of Dr. Richard Sternberg and his pretty awesome idea. Now, David, in Plato's Revenge, you're writing about the work of Dr. Sternberg. And as Dr. Brian Miller points out in his advance praise of your book, this is not an easy task to introduce the general reader to a scientific hypothesis that is profound, potentially revolutionary, but hardly simple. And by all accounts, you've managed to actually do that to paint an engaging portrait of the scientist behind the idea. So how did this book come about, this little book we're looking at today?
[00:04:15] Speaker B: Well, it's a long story, Andrew. How much time do you have?
I've known rick Sternberg since 2004, 2005, when he had a run in with the Smithsonian Institution where he worked. He also worked at the nih, and he published an article by Stephen Meyer in a technical journal at the Smithsonian, the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. And that caused a huge storm. Rick may well have been naive in not realizing that publishing the very first article about in a scientific journal advocating and arguing for intelligent design would cause a huge mess. And he endured a lot of persecution on the part of his supervisors both at the Smithsonian and the nih. And I wrote an article about him for the Wall Street Journal about his story and about all the consequences of his having published Steve meyer's article in 2012.
I was by that time working at Discovery Institute, and Rick gave a presentation in a small conference room in Seattle about the immaterial genome. And I had never heard him up till that point discuss this thesis of his.
And it really gave me a chill.
He was speaking to a small number of us. And one of the scientists who was present, Ann Gager, said at the time, if this is true, it changes everything.
And it really did, because he had taken an idea that goes back, as you mentioned, 2,400 years to Plato's Timaeus and found that it was found scientific evidence that There really is an immaterial counterpart to, to the physical genome. The physical genome is DNA. The immaterial genome is located somewhere else. It's not in space, it's not in time. And that idea I found thrilling for a couple of reasons. One, it just blew my mind. The other is when you find a figure from history, a book from history that that was neglected, and you realize that it actually speaks to concerns of yours in your life at that moment. It is amazing and thrilling. And that was my subjective experience when I first heard Sternberg's thesis.
[00:06:58] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And I can relate to what you're saying there. To find that that ancient wisdom in really old books is quite the thrill indeed. Well, how long has Sternberg been stewing on these ideas? I mean, this goes back to a paper he wrote at least 20 years ago now.
[00:07:17] Speaker B: 2002. Yeah.
In the book I describe a very interesting dream that Rick had. I'm going to call him rick instead of Dr. Sternberg, if that's okay.
Where he was in Rome in 2007, speaking of the. The Pontifical Academy of Sciences. And he had a dream of a priest, an orthodox Christian priest who opened for him a very interesting dream, an ancient book filled with figures of organisms. And he was inspired.
He couldn't sleep for the rest of the night. And the priest spoke to him and said, this information is being shared in order that men should repent. But what he meant by repent was not stop sinning, it meant changing your outlook about reality.
And it was from that moment that Rick explains that he began thinking about in earnest about this idea of an immaterial genome.
[00:08:27] Speaker A: Right. Now this is not a book like it's not a biography of Richard Sternberg, is it? And it's not a biography of you either.
[00:08:35] Speaker B: No, there is a lot of personal, as I've just mentioned, when you start talking about a scientist and his dreams or you talk about some of the very personal things that I share about myself in the introduction. Anyway, it's not your average everyday scientific work. Work.
I do try to summarize Rick's thinking in a way that is friendly to the lay reader. But there's a lot in it also that is personal to him and to me. So when Rick publishes his two volume technical work, it will not be that kind of book. But this one is intended to speak personally.
[00:09:17] Speaker A: Right. And as such, it's concise and it's user friendly on purpose. Well, with PhDs in both biology and systems science and having worked at the Smithsonian Institute and the National Museum of natural history. Dr. Sternberg is every bit the world class scientist, but he's also knowledgeable and interested in history. And that was something you say you were surprised by because you too have a deep love of history, is that right?
[00:09:43] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, his immaterial genome thesis, as I mentioned, goes back to Plato. And when I was in college, I studied Greek and I've always been fascinated by intellectual searches as an act of archaeology. And Sternberg feels much the same way that he is as interested in the history of science, in the history of philosophy as he is in science.
And so, yeah, I do identify with him in that sense.
[00:10:15] Speaker A: Yeah. You even mentioned in your book an old Jewish idea of the devolution of generations.
There's this view that we can move forward progressively and we shouldn't look back because we can always do things better and move toward just a better, more comprehensive idea of life and the world. But in doing so, you will often forget what has already been thought.
[00:10:41] Speaker B: Right. Great thinkers have thought about these questions going back thousands of years. We're not the first to have considered them. And a lot of people have found clues in ancient thought that shed light on very modern problems.
[00:11:00] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Now the immaterial genome thesis connects Plato, as you say, with cutting edge modern science research. So it's a very old idea, but it's also a very new one. As the science emerges, that confirms it. So this literally goes back 2,400 years.
Had you ever read Timaeus closely? Did you catch these things before you came across Sternberg's work, or did it encourage you to go back to these?
[00:11:26] Speaker B: No, I had not. But when I did read the Timaeus, I was struck by there are a lot of strange things about it that are not modern, but there are other things that really are, like straight out of an ID playbook. I mean, he talks about the idea of a multi. He shoots down the idea of a multiverse.
He discusses, he doesn't use the phrase privileged planet, but he discusses the design of our planet for scientific discovery, which is a thesis right out of conversations about intelligent design that we have. So it's, it's an ancient but in some ways very modern book. And he discusses the idea that there are these immaterial forms that are outside space and time that inform the development of every life.
So that is not an idea that was invented by Sternberg at all.
[00:12:27] Speaker A: Well, and in his own research, Sternberg turns up a whole line of thinkers from Plato all the way to, you know, moderns like Professor Michael Levin of Harvard and Tufts who have circled this idea in their work and have entertained it. That's a long line of intellectual forebears for this argument.
[00:12:45] Speaker B: Yeah. As we, as we, as this book was coming to completion, I was very startled to see a pre printed article by Professor Michael Levin, who as you mentioned, has appointments at Tufts University and at Harvard, who explicitly discusses, and he's not an idea advocate at all, but he explicitly discusses the idea that Platonic forms and minds play a role in shaping life.
And I thought, I was struck by the synchronicity of that.
Synchronicity means a meaningful coincidence, as you know. And I was also struck by the fact that the, that Levins paper ends with an endnote to Carl Jung's. The psychologist Carl Jung's book Synchronicity.
[00:13:35] Speaker A: Wow. Wow, that is cool. So you've got a lot of thinkers who across the centuries have been looking at this idea. Do you think we're now in a place where we can have signs that will back it up? Is that what's been missing since Plato's time?
[00:13:53] Speaker B: Yeah. And in fact, Andrew, I want to read a couple of paragraphs from the book that discuss what is called Bremerman's limit. A lot of this is quoting from Sternberg, who was discussing a molecular machine called the spliceosome, and he talks about calculating its activities. And he says if I start looking at it in terms of numbers, says Sternberg, it becomes less and less likely to be a standard run of the mill mechanical process, the sort necessarily entailed in the model of the genome as a purely physical entity.
The numbers are not just large, but trans. Computational. That's a word that comes up in this book a number of times, he says, because beyond the capacity of any purely physical system to compute in our material universe. The German mathematician and computer scientist Hans Joachim Bremerman, who lived between 1926 and 1996, defined the limit of this, again quoting Sternberg. He imagined a computer the size of the Earth, of which every atom is devoted to processing bits, running for however long the earth has been in existence, so billions of years. And his question was how many bits could it process?
He calculated that it would be a maximum of about 10 to the 93 bits, that is a one followed by 93 zeros. That's a problem because in the example Sternberg gives of normal activities going on in the nucleus of a cell, the information processing is already far beyond the number calculated by Bremerman. It would seem that the nucleus is not of the age or size as a computing entity to Manage the computations expected of it. To say not even close is an absurd under representation of the problem.
So there's this really, this is not just about airy fairy philosophy. It's about hard numbers. And the numbers for the material genome do not add up. There is simply not enough information, the phys in a cell to account for the operations of that cell. There isn't enough information.
[00:16:12] Speaker A: Right, yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that. This is, this isn't just a purely philosophical idea by any means. This comes down to hard math and the inability of a physical entity to be the source of it. It's pretty deep. But. But listeners, I hope you can grasp it. Now one, one idea I had was there's a mainstream scientist who has explored the immateriality of the genome, Dr. Dennis Noble, and he provides a helpful analogy to grasp this. Listeners, if you're having a difficult time with it so far, let me, let me give it to you this way. So, and this is Dennis Noble's analogy. You have an organ and you have an organist, a person who plays an organ. The organ represents an organism's genome. The organist is the immaterial genome. When the organist plays the organ, he or she is imposing a pattern on the passive organ pipes. And what results is a recognizable pattern we know and love as music.
So, David, I don't know if you've come across that in your research yet, but does that analogy resonate with you?
[00:17:19] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, something is.
It is as if the DNA, the physical genome, were an instrument that someone or something is playing.
The DNA is not playing itself. Something is playing it.
And just as with your analogy of an organist, whoever is playing the DNA is an intelligent agent, but it's not happening within the cell itself. It's happening somewhere else, somewhere necessarily, not in our space time.
[00:17:52] Speaker A: Right. And what you just said, there is another good way to summarize it. It's not the DNA playing itself, it's something playing the DNA. Right. Well, it's a lot to wrap your head around. But again, this is just a teaser. Don't freak out, don't run for the hills. This is a really compelling idea and it just takes a little time to germinate, to wrap your head around what.
[00:18:15] Speaker B: I've tried to do.
Sternberg's ideas are not easy.
And what I've tried to do is explain them as a journalist, which is what I am in terms that are understandable by me. Anything that I couldn't understand coming from Rick, I didn't include in the book only things that I personally do understand.
So I can promise that anyone who reads this book will understand Rick's ideas insofar as they are represented in this book.
[00:18:50] Speaker A: Okay, yeah, that's. That's great. And that's a service you've. You've given us, so I appreciate that. Well, Dr. Brian Miller has written recently at Evolution News, which you edit and often write for, about some of the mainstream scientists who are intrigued by the idea of an information source beyond DNA and epigenetics. In his post, three words jumped out at me that helped to kind of explain this whole immaterial genome idea, and that is mind before matter.
In the ID community, we're familiar with mind over matter. We hear that a lot. But mind before matter, that sort of helps put it into a deeper perspective. And it points to a causal input into mind and life that originates outside the physical world.
[00:19:37] Speaker B: And something that also strikes me about Sternberg's ideas is that we are accustomed to thinking of design, intelligent design, as having happened in historical time. We think of it as a historical science, and it is.
But Sternberg's thesis really takes intelligent design to a different level. It shows design operating in real time, operating right now in every cell in your body right now, and in the development of every embryo in the womb. There is some information gap that is not provided by the DNA of the embryo as it develops. It is coming from somewhere else. So this is intelligent design in real time.
[00:20:26] Speaker A: Wow, that's an awesome thought to bring into the mix there. Yeah, you do tend to see intelligent design described as an historical theory similar to, you know, Darwinism. They're both historical ideas of origins. But when we toss this into the mix, then we understand just the real time, immediate, right now sense of the design in action.
[00:20:53] Speaker B: And this is. This is not a contradiction to intelligent design. I mean, this doesn't take away anything from the inference that design occurred in the Cambrian explosion, for example, and all the other explosions of novel biological information that we find traced in the fossil record. It's not taking away from that at all. It's saying that design is not only historical science, it is a science of the present moment.
[00:21:21] Speaker A: Well, David, Plato's Revenge is not an academic book, as you've mentioned and alluded to. It's a short, accessible introduction to a man and his potentially revolutionary idea. As a colleague noted to you years ago, Ann Gager, if it's true, it changes everything. Now, what do you hope that this little book in front of us is going to accomplish in the weeks and months to come? And what Are readers going to get out of reading it?
[00:21:45] Speaker B: Well, I know that people have been waiting for Rick's technical work and I've been waiting for it.
I'm very eager to read it.
Emily has had sort of a sneak preview of it, but I want to be able to give our readers and our followers a little bit of a preview of what Rick's thinking is that we've all been following for years. And as you mentioned with Michael Levin and other scientists who are not, who are not in our community, there's a sense that this idea has developed enough that it is broken out of intelligent design and it's being described by others. And one of my hopes is to stake a claim for Sternberg before other people get there. And it's, it's an idea whose time has come.
[00:22:53] Speaker A: Yeah, that's beautifully put. Well, David, where can listeners go to learn more and order a copy of the book?
[00:23:00] Speaker B: Well, at Discovery Institute Press, which is the publisher on Amazon and your favorite bookseller. The. Of course, the easiest place is Amazon.
[00:23:10] Speaker A: Mm. Yeah. Yeah. And again, we're talking about a slim book. I mean, weekend reading. You know, it's not going to take you long to, to consume this, but it's going to set you up for what's to come. And what's to come is going to be powerful and it's going to be potentially revolutionary and it has the power to change everything in biology and beyond. So it's pretty exciting. Listeners, I do encourage you to get a copy at DiscoveryInstitute Press and you'll be able to get your hands on a piece of scientific history that is still playing out and is overdue. Well, David, thank you for joining us today for this little chat. I hope we can come back and talk again further.
[00:23:51] Speaker B: Thank you very much.
[00:23:52] Speaker A: As David mentioned, get a copy of Plato's Revenge at Discovery Institute Press website and be sure to follow daily coverage of the evolution debate and the scientific evidence for intelligent
[email protected] there we're writing daily covering all these topics and as they happen, including things in the news and what we're putting out in our research, all the different fellows and researchers who are involved in the intelligent design community. It's a great resource. EvolutionNews.org for ID the Future. I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for listening.
Visit us at IDTheFuture.com and IntelligentDesign.org this.
[00:24:36] Speaker B: Program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
