Editor’s note: We are glad to offer an excerpt from the first pages of the new book from Discovery Institute Press, Plato’s Revenge: The New Science of the Immaterial Genome, by David Klinghoffer.

My view is not the view that most people have of intelligent design.

Richard Sternberg

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 (ID) have, in large part, accepted this premise and argued according to its terms.

Sternberg goes further. He argues — sometimes from common-sensical 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 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.

A Meeting in Seattle

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, 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 (1934–1998) 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 pushed off a tall building. Heredity promises to say much about who I am. As I am writing this, I have 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 Gene: 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.

The Crucial Point

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 conversion to Orthodox Judaism. Yet 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’re 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 the point about my birth ­ father. Now I knew it all. As they put it at 23andMe, welcome to you. That 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 is 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 towards a PhD. That summer, though, I was offered a job as assistant literary editor at William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review.

A Form of Archaeology

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, and conclude just the opposite. Jewish tradition calls this yeridat ha’dorot, 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 forbears of his argument. In the process he turned up a line of thinkers and scientists from Plato to Rosen.