Episode Transcript
[00:00:07] Speaker A: Welcome to ID the Future, a podcast about intelligent design and evolution.
Today on ID the Future, guest host Beatrice Russu interviews Dr. Richard Sternberg, holder of PhDs in molecular evolution and systems science focusing on theoretical biology. He's a research scientist with the Biologic Institute, and she caught up with him after lectures he delivered to Discovery Institute's Seattle summer seminars this summer.
[00:00:37] Speaker B: So we have here Dr. Sternberg and Dr. Sternberg, thank you for taking the time to talk with me. And I wanted to ask you if you can give us a summary of your talk. What was your main message? I know you gave two talks, one on whales and one on immaterial genome, and I wanted to ask you to give us a quick summary of your main points.
[00:01:00] Speaker C: Well, first, my main point is that the gene, a term that was coined in 1909 by Wilhelm Johansson, lacks a coherent material description. It's not a particle as many people have conceived it. I don't think it can be identified with DNA, though DNA is certainly part of the picture. And when we look at the information carrying capacity of DNA and we look at the actual processes that take place in ontogeny, that is going from a single celled a zygote to a fully developed, say, human being like yourself, you suddenly realize that there's this gap in data content that 20,000 quote unquote protein coding genes are simply not adequate to explain the complexity that we see in a human being, or indeed the complexity that we see in a plant. So there has to be something in addition to just the DNA sequences alone that explains development. And that's what the gene concept is supposed to explain. That's where it came in as a placeholder. So the argument is that when we look at the existing body of information as of today, and we try to say, okay, can I take the complexity of a plant, or a complexity of a fly, or complexity of a human being, just pick any organism and can I reduce it to some nice defined set of material entities? My argument is that you cannot. I'm not making an occultic argument. I'm not making any. Any. It sounds spooky, perhaps, but what I'm actually arguing is that we can know this on logical and mathematical grounds. It doesn't mean that we can know, say, the source of the, quote, unquote, extra ontogenetic information. It doesn't mean that we know that there's some kind of spooky action at a distance that's taking place. I'm not saying that at all. But I'm saying we can figure out using the existing logic and mathematics that we have today, that some arguments, such as those proffered by a standard materialist, are simply not true. They cannot be true.
[00:03:24] Speaker B: You were mentioning in the immaterial genome lecture that you talked about the source and the target and the closed system and an error correction. And you just mentioned it's hard to. Outside of just knowing the parts that we have, even if we break the system apart, it's hard to know how the system came to be the way it is originally. But I wanted to ask you from an engineering perspective. I'm an engineer, and so, so many times in engineering we do reverse engineering to find out how to put the system together, how was it made. And so could we explain, for example, how we put together a cell or possibly come up with a model for it by doing reverse engineering?
[00:04:13] Speaker C: Yeah, I certainly think that's a possibility. And you're right, reverse engineering is possible. But it's possible if you pay very close attention to the details and if you don't try to fudge the facts, so to speak, to make things simpler than they actually are. And what's happened, though, is that the focus up until, say, 1900 or before, the focus was on development itself. You're looking at an embryo. You're studying how cells divide and so forth. And of course, people are doing that today. But when you get into the area and you say, well, I can just approach this problem from the standpoint of just making a parts list, number of proteins, number of RNAs and things like that, this, then I think you're getting off track and you're missing the possibilities to do something like that, to actually say, okay, I know that a yeast cell can change its metabolic machinery to use different carbon sources. If it doesn't have it, it will change its morphology and go into a quiescent state. I know that if it's just so a bunch of components randomly, then all of a sudden the number of combinations of things becomes an astronomical figure. So I know yeast can navigate between different metabolic states very efficiently, and I believe that has a scientific explanation. But I do not believe reverse engineering is possible if you just simply focus on a parts list. You've got to go beyond that. You've got to actually study what the cell is doing, what the embryo is doing. If you're just preoccupied with what has been called beanbag genetics, that is shuffling around big A's and small A's and big B's and small B's, following one Punnett square to another Punnett square, I don't think that's going to tell you how a yeast cell does what a yeast cell does.
[00:06:14] Speaker B: How is Mendel maybe getting us in any way closer. To potentially come up with a model. To know how to put back the system. Or how the system came to be. And to potentially put it back together once we break it apart?
[00:06:26] Speaker C: To understand what Mendel was doing was he was paying attention to plant hybridization. And what he discovered, so to speak. Was the mathematical regularity in traits appearing from one generation to the next. Mendel did not explain why, for example, a pea plant is tall or short. But he was able to follow the traits from one generation to another generation to another generation. And he was able derive a statistical probabilistic formulation of what was taking place. And so the groundwork that Mendel laid. Was a foundation that men such as William Bateson and Wilhelm Johanson found very useful. But what they also understood, though. Is that these Mendelian characters, as they're called. Are not necessarily things that can be tied to chemical substances. So Bateson certainly believed that he was studying a physical phenomenon. I believe it's a physical phenomenon. But to argue it's a physical phenomenon. Is not necessarily the same thing. To argue that it's a mundane, materialistic phenomenon. Something can be true, physically true, you can study it. But that does not necessarily mean. That one is dealing with a mundane pedestrian phenomenon. Like many people assume. And so, yes, but Mendel picked characters very carefully so he could study them. Many characters you cannot study Using Mendelian genetics. And that's one thing that William Bateson understood. And that's one thing that Wilhelm Johansen understood. So for Johansen, for example. His argument was that the Mendelian characters. Yes, you can swap them, and yes, you can change them. Yes, you can have flies that lack wings, and you can have this. But that the fundamental nature of what a species is. He did not believe that could be factorialized. He thought it was, as he called it, a great central something. He didn't know the name of it, but he said there's a unity. Yes, you can make a fly. You can change its color over generations. It's similar to what Jonathan Wells said. You can have a normal fly. You can have a deformed fly. You can have a dead fly. But the fact of the matter is that it remains a fly of a particular species. And that's something that Johansen and Bateson and others recognize. That there may be something fundamental about the species. That you're never going to be able to track down. Just using Mendelian genetics alone.
[00:09:06] Speaker B: So I wanted to ask you, I know you gave a similar lecture last year. Is there any sort of updates or maybe research you have been working on or you're currently working on that maybe you want to share with us?
[00:09:19] Speaker C: Well, what I have been working on for the past decade or so is trying to bring to bear things that we know in both logic and mathematics, of things that can be exported from those fields and brought into the arena of genetics. So, for example, you have the question of whether or not a gamete, you know, like a sperm or egg cell, carries, quote, unquote, all the information for the organism. Could that possibly be true?
And the argument would be, well, we don't know. But if you suddenly look at it from the standpoint of, let's say, set theory, you bring to bear what we know from Cantor's diagonalization method. You can reasonably infer that, no, not all the information can be in there, that you're going to end up with things that are epigenetic in the truest sense of the term. Things are going to appear that could not have been, quote, unquote, preformed in the original cell. So that's an example of where I've reached out and I said, well, you know, Cantor's proof using power sets can be brought to bear on some of these embryological issues. You can do the same thing with Tarski's theorem, for example, his undefinability of truth. You can do the same thing with Godel's incompleteness theorems, with Turing, his notion of what is computable, what is not computable, also his notion of an oracle, which many people think cannot be physical, or it's something that has to be infinite, etc. But that's not necessarily true. And so what I've been doing is, to borrow a term as one mathematician referred to it, is I've taken things from logic and mathematics, I've taken some philosophical standpoints largely from Aristotle. I've taken our existing knowledge that we have today by no means complete. I've put it into a cocktail shaker. I've shaken very vigorously, and I'm trying to see what's coming out. And so I've been working on a series of monographs where I make the argument that really, by 1969 we knew with absolute certainty that many of the things that we think are true about DNA and about the cell are not true. They're not the case, and they cannot be for logical and mathematical reasons. And it's not that they point us in the direction of some obscurities. But they tell us that what cells are doing is really something phenomenal and we need to expand our scientific notions to accommodate it.
[00:12:03] Speaker B: And could you give one quick example of what that would be, that one idea that you think that maybe you would refute?
[00:12:11] Speaker C: Well, one thing I do think, and this really comes from the work of Robert Rosenberg, his student Aloysius Louis, and I hope I'm pronouncing his name correctly, and this falls out of the mathematics of category theory. Trying to understand a cell from the standpoint is that cells are closed to efficient causation. Unlike standard machines, cells build themselves and from the inside out. And in order to get that property, in order to really have a property of being something that's truly self transformative, self repairing, etc. You have to have some very interesting logical mathematical prerequisites. And those prerequisites lead to things that Douglas Hofstadter referred to as strange loops. These are, they're very odd. It's like, you know, Escher's drawings where one hand is drawing the other hand, etc. They're self referential structures. They're tricky from a number of standpoints. They certainly don't fit into our standard paradigm of what a machine is. And there may be aspects of them that are simply not computable. But knowing why they're not computable is, I think, of fundamental importance because it tells us to what extent an organism is really machine like. It's going to tell us to what extent artificial life is possible.
And it's going to tell us also to what extent organisms are evolvable. Are there limits to what you can do? Are there intrinsic aspects to cells that say, yes indeed, they can evolve in one direction, but they can't evolve in another direction. So there are a number of questions that fall out from that that ties.
[00:14:00] Speaker B: Into the next question. Are you working on writing some of this? Like are you currently working on maybe a book? Or if you are, would you give us a brief where you. And when maybe it's coming up?
[00:14:15] Speaker C: Well, right Now I've spent 10 years, more than 10 years working on a series of monographs. And they fall in a chronological order. So I'm trying to maintain continuity. Maybe this isn't the right expression, but I pit, for example, someone like Georg Cantor against someone like August Weissmann. So I take the logician and I say, how would he reflect on the genetic speculations of an August Weismann or Thomas Hunt Morgan's ideas of genes in linear arrays that are symbolic representations, a complete description of an organism. And I pit that concept against, say, what Kurt Godel worked on or what Alfred Tarski worked on. So it's been a long term endeavor. So that's what's happening right now. Six books. I want them to come out in the series. My aim is to provoke and stimulate thought. And so it's like a dialectical. That's kind of the approach that I'm hoping for.
[00:15:18] Speaker B: Wanted to ask you and gear the discussion a little bit towards the summer seminar and your time here. How would you say your experience has been as far as the nature of questions that you're getting and overall, just what does it mean for you to come and teach here at the summer seminar at Discovery?
[00:15:36] Speaker C: Well, it's a very enjoyable experience. The students, all of them and the years I've been doing this, they're highly intelligent, the questions are very good, there's a wide range of opinions, and so invariably they stimulate thought. I don't think there's been a year that I've ever left my teaching experience not having learned something. And so I don't even like to regard it as lecturing because just speaking with students after the lectures or the questions that are fielded, it compels me to, in many cases, to expand my own research. I mean, a few years ago there was a young woman who posed a question to me on whether or not there were other people out there who ever questioned whether the gene was a material object. And that provoked me to start going through the literature and discovering that William Bateson questioned it and Wilhelm Johansson questioned it. So had this young lady not posed that question to me, and that was, I don't remember how many years ago, I would have probably never pursued this question. So for me, it's an enjoyable experience.
I learn a lot. I'm really thankful for the opportunity to do so.
[00:16:56] Speaker B: And what would you say to a young person who is in college days, undergrad, or even graduate work as far as anything that ties to their professional development and pursuing truth and pursuing these ideas? Because you are trying to answer some very difficult questions, given that we're not sometimes allowed to even maybe question some of the existing theories or the existing ideas, how should a young person deal with that kind of maybe opposition? At the end of the day, I think we're all trying to find out the real answers to the big questions.
[00:17:36] Speaker C: Well, I think the most important thing if someone is in the pursuit of truth, all right, is to first and foremost to stay true to themselves and that is, to know what one thinks or to have an idea of one's worldview, how one is approaching the world. To not ever be worried about being wrong, about making mistakes. Failure is actually a good thing because you learn a lot from it. Everybody fails. It's the road to success, ultimately, because you know what doesn't work and what's also very important. And this is, I would put it up there next to, first and foremost, being true to oneself. It's also very important to read and to read serious books. Don't take anything as necessarily being true. What one has to do is go to the literature, whatever field one is interested in doesn't matter, and read seriously into a topic, think about it, and rinse and repeat. Go back and do it. Because even if one picks a certain topic and finds after six months or a year or whatever that they're really not interested in that topic, they want to go in some other direction, they will still have benefited from learning something. In the university system right now, I think it's very difficult, especially in the United States of America, for young people. I would not want to be a student, and I don't want to sound too pessimistic. I wouldn't want to be a student today simply because there are so many societal pressures really coming in the form of leftist Marxist ideologies. They're putting pressures on students that just did not exist in my time, or at least I was not aware of it. And those pressures, I think, are detrimental. And so the only way to navigate or to circumvent those pressures is to have a strong sense of self, to be willing to pursue truth. And at times, if you can't move forward, you may have to make what used to be called a lateral move, to pivot, to move forward. And so flexibility is called for.
[00:20:05] Speaker B: So how would you tie all the work and these couple lectures, as well as the kind of work that you said that you've been in Progress for about 10 years to work on? How would you tie that to the work of Intelligent Design?
[00:20:20] Speaker C: Well, my view is not the view that most people have of Intelligent Design. For me, Intelligent Design is best encapsulated in Plato's Timaeus, where he's making the argument that one can look at the natural world and one can see reflections of a higher truth, whereas one may not be able to provide a total scientific explanation for it. What one can infer is that there is an intelligibility, and one does not have to be a Christian at all to come to that truth. This is not something that's, if you will, faith dependent. I think of Eugene Wigner's the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics. How is it that one is able to discover something mathematically out of the blue, so to speak, and then find that that provides a perfect description of some physical phenomenon? To me, that is possible because there's a rationality to the structure of the universe. So my approach to id, so to speak, is not for the sake of apologetics.
It's not for the sake of promoting a particular religious view of any sort. I look at the universe, I see it through the eyes of a Platonist, and it makes sense to me. So that's my standpoint. For me, the approach I take to it is a rational approach and very much a Platonic one.
[00:21:52] Speaker B: Thank you so much, Dr. Sternberg. It's been a privilege to get to learn more about your work and appreciate the insights you provided.
[00:22:00] Speaker C: It's all my pleasure.
[00:22:02] Speaker A: You've been listening to Dr. Richard Sternberg in conversation with Beatrice Russu for ID of the Future. This is Tom Gilson. Thank you for listening.
This program was recorded by Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture. ID the Future is copyright Discovery Institute. For more information, visit IntelligentDesign.org and IDTheFuture.com.
[00:22:42] Speaker C: It.
