The new book Plato’s Revenge: The New Science of the Immaterial Genome, by David Klinghoffer, details in accessible form the thinking of biologist Richard Sternberg. But others before Dr. Sternberg had also foreseen the recognition of Platonic forms as realities in modern science. Historian of science Michael Flannery cites quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg as an example:

The mathematician-turned-philosopher Alfred North Whitehead famously said that all of Western philosophy consists of a “series of footnotes to Plato.” Now what Whitehead said of philosophy may be applied to science. Plato’s Revenge is about the teleologically ordered biological systems theory that Richard “Rick” Sternberg calls the immaterial genome. It is an ancient story that dates back to the atomists on the one hand and the teleologists on the other — Leucippus vs. Anaxagoras. The argument between reductionist evolutionists like Charles Darwin and design-oriented evolutionists like Alfred Russel Wallace harkens to these pre-Socratic sources, proving King Solomon’s wise adage, “There is nothing new under the sun.”

With Darwin the triumph of chance and necessity was considered complete. But one of the greatest teleological proponents of all history, Plato, now has his revenge as we find that design and purpose have won the day. The quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg understood this, saying, “I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. In fact these smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language.” Now Sternberg, as told eloquently by David Klinghoffer, expresses this in the language of life. This book unites the best elements of metaphysics with cutting-edge science to put the threadbare materialist reductionisms of the neo-Darwinists to shame. [Emphasis added.]

MICHAEL A. FLANNERY, AUTHOR OF NATURE’S PROPHET: ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE AND HIS EVOLUTION FROM NATURAL SELECTION TO NATURAL THEOLOGY AND AMERICA’S FORGOTTEN POET-PHILOSOPHER: THE THOUGHT OF JOHN ELOF BOODIN IN HIS TIME AND OURS

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