The new book Plato’s Revenge: The New Science of the Immaterial Genome, by David Klinghoffer, is about an amazing idea. It previews a project that Dr. Richard Sternberg has been working on for two decades.

I first met Rick Sternberg in about 2006 when he began coming to our lab meetings. He would report amazing things being discovered by genomics researchers. He once said that looking into the DNA record was like looking into an abyss of information that kept going deeper and becoming more complex the further down you went. That image stuck with me.

That was almost 20 years ago. Certain things about him have not changed. His shoes are still leather — no sneakers. He is generally reserved, even quiet, until you say something he objects to, at which point his voice may rise for emphasis. He is always a gentleman — and one of the most scholarly persons I have ever known. He is also still thinking, but now his thought goes beyond the genome.

Rick is both brilliant and deep. The two traits do not necessarily always go together. He is also widely read, having studied the classics of biology that most people born after 1953 (the year the structure of DNA was discovered) don’t bother to read. For them the old literature doesn’t matter. It’s too bad, because in it you find conundrums that have puzzled scientists for generations, and that DNA cannot answer.

Grandmother’s Pearls

For nearly 50 years scientists were enamored with the idea of the gene, the supposedly unitary element of inheritance, arranged like beads on a string along the DNA sequence. Then came the discovery of moving genes, transposable elements, that could change positions in the genome. Imagine if some of Grandmother’s pearls had begun to leap about on her necklace — that is how hard it was for nearly all geneticists of the time to picture.

As genomes began to be sequenced in the mid 1990s, it became clear that each organism’s genome had too few genes to explain that organism’s development. The rest of the genome did not code for protein, and a large part of the non-coding genome were transposable elements. Though the non-coding genome was disparaged as junk, Rick recognized that it was not junk at all — the transposable elements had regulatory function and were hotspots for recombination.

He was always bringing surprising data to our lab meeting. He told us that genes could be overlapping or embedded in other genes, in different frames. That expanded the information-carrying potential. It also expanded my mind. He told us about the extraordinary degree of alternative splicing that the RNA from one gene could undergo, leading to the possibility of thousands of variant proteins. This was fascinating and unwieldy at the same time. How could that possibly be regulated?

The Biggest Surprise

But the biggest surprise was his argument that there is far too much information required to take an organism from egg to adult than could be explained by the information-coding capacities of the material genome. I recognized that the idea of an immaterial genome, if confirmed, would change everything we understood about biology. 

The last century has been dominated by a strict materialist worldview, that life is “composed by” and “composed of” nothing but matter and energy. This view is now dogma in the biological citadel, even though it is a philosophical view, not a scientific one.

Rick’s argument for an immaterial genome is based on the mathematics of set theory. He emphasizes that this is not some anti-science spooky story. It is based on rigorous scientific and mathematical argumentation. The brilliant mathematician Georg Cantor established (created/discovered) set theory, in which he proposed that some infinite sets were larger than others. Cantor’s set theory has since proved to be a quite powerful tool of analysis. 

Rick used set theory to establish that a developing animal form requires an “ever-expansive, nonfinite orchestration” to bring cells together at the right time, with the right constraints, and the right modes of being for all the parts to function cooperatively. The instruction set required for that transfinite orchestration cannot be circumscribed by (cannot be described by) a finite set of genetic instructions.

An Intriguing Analogy

And Sternberg says the immaterial genome, the instruction set for each cell in each living thing, is transfinite (one of Cantor’s infinities), yet the cells themselves are finite. David Klinghoffer brings in an intriguing analogy from the Jewish kabalistic tradition: in God’s creative act the Infinite folds itself, or contracts itself, to fit within the finite creation. This contraction, or folding of the infinite into the finite, is called tsimtsum. 

The idea of an infinite God somehow making himself finite appears in Christian belief also. I think of the Incarnation of Christ, when the infinite God took on a finite human form. Rick’s work may point toward a deeper, wider, and broader perspective that only the mystics among us — or perhaps the Greek philosopher Plato, says Rick — have foreseen.

Image source: Discovery Institute Press.

I don’t understand completely. I am fumbling my way trying to describe something quite beyond me. The implications for our understanding of the world are quite powerful, however. For one thing, it has the potential to demonstrate conclusively the need for a designer. It would put a stake through materialist explanations for life, and reveal the infinite value of the creation, both material and immaterial.

Older theoretical biologists like Robert Rosen (author of Life Itself) had recognized that the information to produce and maintain life was too large to fit inside individual organisms. Rosen showed how set theory might be a way forward, but he lacked a detailed knowledge of the utter complexity and mystery of life. Rick read Rosen. So now Rick is uniting his wide knowledge of genome structure and function, evolutionary theory, and animal development with his knowledge of the deep philosophical work underlying biology and the mathematics of set theory. It is a labor of love still in progress.

Editor’s note: For more information about Plato’s Revenge with praise and endorsements, please visit Discovery Institute Press.