In my view, creationists and Darwinists are the same.

At those words (as I recall them), I sat up a bit straighter in my chair. It was summer of 2016, and I was an innocent biological science major, just at the end of my sophomore year in college. The lecturer was Richard Sternberg, a research scientist with two PhDs in biology (in evolutionary biology and in theoretical biology). And I couldn’t fathom what he might be talking about — what two views could be more different from each other than creationism and Darwinism? 

As Sternberg went on, my perplexity transformed into astonishment. What Sternberg was saying — if it were true — would undo my most basic assumptions about biology going back to elementary school. If it were even possibly true, then whether or not it was true should be the question dominating research programs and philosophy of biology conferences around the world. Not something relegated to a relatively obscure summer seminar. 

It turned out that Sternberg was questioning nothing less than our idea of what it means to be “alive.” Darwinists and creationists — famously — disagree about where life came from, but they typically don’t disagree about what it is. That is, most everybody is content to treat living things, from microbes to sequoia trees, as extremely complex but entirely physical systems. Creationists might say “machines” and Darwinists might say “machine-like,” but the underlying picture is the same. To question that would be to question the foundations of modern science, after all.

But that is where Sternberg demurs. He does not believe that a living organism can be reduced to any material construct, no matter how complex you make it. In Sternberg’s view, materialist models of life are theoretically unworkable. In other words, it is not merely that an influx of information was needed in the distant past, as most creationists and ID proponents maintain. It’s far more than that. For an organism to develop and reproduce at all, it needs a continuous input from an “immaterial genome.”

After the lecture, I cornered Sternberg and interrogated him. I wanted to know if (a) he really meant it, (b) if I had misunderstood him, and (c)… wasn’t this vitalism? 

Sternberg clarified he did mean it and I had not misunderstood, but that he was not a vitalist according to the common usage of the word — someone who believes in a “life spark” or universal “life force.” Rather, he thought (or suspected) that living organisms receive some sort of information input from what might be called a neo-Platonic soul — essentially a non-physical blueprint, to which the physical morphology of a developing organism conforms. 

Lecture Notes, for a New Disciple of Plato 

I went home that day with my thoughts in disarray. I can relate to the late German paleontologist Günter Bechly, who, after first hearing Sternberg lay out his thesis in a lecture, lay awake that night unable to sleep as he considered the implications of it. Like Bechly, and who knows how many others, I left Sternberg’s lecture on that sunny July day with my worldview shaken. 

… And that was that. Although Sternberg said he was planning to publish a monograph or a series of monographs (a polygraph, I suppose) on the subject, the work was ongoing. For the time being there wasn’t much of anything tangible I could lay my hands on. 

And I’m a bad notetaker. So, since that day in 2016, I have been waiting for a published account of Sternberg’s ideas. It’s quite tantalizing to hear a lecture that would turn your perspective on the world around you upside-down — every blade of grass, every shrub, every tree — but have no way to follow up or come to any conclusion about whether what you heard might be true or not. Every once in a while, I would check to see if Sternberg had published his work. 

Sternberg has not yet published his technical work. But, fortunately, it seems I’m not the only one who has been impatient. Discovery Institute Senior Fellow David Klinghoffer has just completed what is essentially a summary of Sternberg’s thinking, in his new book Plato’s Revenge: The New Science of the Immaterial Genome. Part of this slim volume has the rather unusual approach of following two of Sternberg’s lectures, putting the reader in the place of a lucky fly-on-the-wall. Klinghoffer augments the lectures with expository material from his own personal communications with Sternberg, as well as from other writings and interviews. 

Photo: Richard Sternberg, by Nathan Jacobson, via Discovery Institute.

In a way, I suppose the format is not unique, but a new installment in a grand tradition — some of Aristotle’s treatises are thought to be lecture notes, perhaps written down by one of Aristotle’s students rather than the philosopher himself. So you might say that in Klinghoffer and Sternberg, we simply have, respectively, a new notetaker for a new disciple of Plato. 

Now that those notes have been published, you too can hear what Sternberg has to say, and come to your own conclusion about whether that comparison is merited. 

The Neo-Platonic Tradition

At least in one sense, the comparison certainly is fitting: Sternberg’s thesis is very Aristotelian. One thing that stands out in the book is how unoriginal Sternberg’s basic idea is — in the best possible way. After all, when a figure on the periphery of academia takes on the whole establishment, it’s wise to be skeptical. But Sternberg is not some arrogant fringe-thinker who believes that he alone can see what all other scientists and philosophers have been blind to. Rather, he emphasizes the non-originality of his ideas—that he is following a tradition of thought that, although now marginal, has always been present in the circles of respectable science and philosophy. Even as mechanistic ideas of biology have become increasingly dominant, older ideas have always survived and found advocates. In the new book, Klinghoffer and Sternberg trace the development of the “immaterial genome” idea from its origins in Plato and Aristotle, through the likes of Goethe and Hans Driesch, all the way to well-respected scholars in the present time. 

For example, the esteemed biophysicist Robert Rosen (1934-1998) argued that the idea that organisms are machines can be traced to René Descartes’s confusing cause and effect. That is, Descartes concluded that living things must be machines, when in fact living things seem like machines simply because machines were designed to seem like living things. Rosen admonished everyone to consider Erwin Schrödinger’s pro-Platonist arguments, and posited that the idea of automatons building equally complex automatons ad infinitum (that is, the mechanist model of life) resulted in a logical paradox, since the information to build the new robot would add to the complexity of the programming, which would add to the complexity of the replication procedure, which would add to the complexity of the program… etc. 

Likewise, computer scientist Lars Löfgren (1925-2013) argued that “complete reproduction” was impossible from an information-theory perspective, without involving some outside “independent axioms.” Biologist C. H. Waddington (1905-1975) and mathematician René Thom (1923-2002) collaborated to investigate these independent axioms, and came to the thought-provoking conclusion that the structures of life are not determined by rigid algorithms, and have to deal with a huge amount of environmental unpredictability, yet nevertheless somehow end up conforming to abstract, ideal forms. 

These theoretical arguments have been matched in recent years by experimental results that seem to point to something shaping life that is beyond its mere machinery.  

For a long time, the opposite trend seemed to hold. The mechanist perspective seemed destined for dominance. Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure and function of DNA, famously told a group of biologists, “And so to those of you who may be vitalists I would make this prophecy: what everyone believed yesterday, and you believe today, only cranks will believe tomorrow.” Such statements are typical of a certain triumphalist view that followed the discovery of DNA — that the core of the matter had been discovered, and it was a core of matter, and soon all remaining questions would be resolved. 

But in the ensuing decades, genetics has not lived up to those expectations. The genome has turned out to not be a code like a computer code, to be read in a straightforward algorithmic fashion, but rather (in the assessment of Oxford physiologist Denis Noble) more like a musical score, which needs to be interpreted. Instead of following simple if/then pathways like a computer, organisms seem to somehow decide which genes to use. The genetic code is itself edited by the organism in the process of transcription, which leads to the question…who or what is guiding the editing? Not the DNA, surely, since this would lead to another chicken-or-egg type problem. Sternberg sees this as evidence of, not merely design in the ancient past, but some sort of purposiveness acting in the present to shape the development of the organism.

A Platonic Idea

As a result of Klinghoffer’s efforts, everyone who has not had the opportunity to attend one of Sternberg’s lectures now has an opportunity to access this obscure but rich intellectual tradition. If you are the least bit curious about the deeper nature of Nature, or about what makes living things alive, then you owe it to yourself to read Plato’s Revenge. 

What’s lacking is mostly Sternberg’s unique contributions to the question: his highly technical mathematical case for the necessity of neo-Platonic informational input, based on the impossibility of true self-replication. For that, we still have to wait. 

Like Plato’s forms, the truths about the natural world are out there, waiting to be discovered. Well, if Sternberg is right, I suppose they aren’t “like” Platonic forms — they are Platonic forms.

And as it so happens, Platonism in biology already seems to be making something of a comeback. Andreas Wagner, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Zurich, who has written several popular books about evolutionary theory, has put himself on the record as a member of the Platonist camp. So did Günter Bechly. And Michael Levin, a professor of biology at Tufts University with an appointment at Harvard as well, came out with a paper recently arguing for a Platonist interpretation of biology. 

I suppose I wish that Sternberg would take a note from the Demiurge (and from Darwin, for that matter) and release a meagre, physical shadow of his analysis, in advance of the Ideal version. When he does that, then the debate can really begin. But in the meantime, it’s good for those of us who are bad notetakers to have something besides our memories to go on. For that, we should all be grateful.