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

In a meeting with colleagues at Discovery Institute in 2024, Richard Sternberg was sketching his thoughts on a whiteboard. What he was arguing for was revolutionary, but one would never have guessed it by his manner. He seemed to have taken advice from an icon of the American founding, Benjamin Franklin. 

In his Autobiography, Franklin advocates for a modest way of setting your viewpoint before others, one he himself had employed to good effect and that involved “never using, when I advanced anything that may possibly be disputed, the words certainly, undoubtedly, or any others that give the air of positiveness to an opinion; but rather say, I conceive or apprehend a thing to be so and so; it appears to me, or I should think it so or so, for such and such reasons; or I imagine it to be so; or it is so, if I am not mistaken.” This “diffidence,” he wrote, has the effect of making your opinion seem comelier and more acceptable than any more dogmatic approach. 

A Summary of the Argument

In that presentation Sternberg was diffident in asserting his argument, a quality I will try to carry over into the summary of the argument below:

• Sternberg says that he conceives that the gene occupies “no single physical locus,” that is, not a locus or place limited to DNA alone. This is already somewhat well known. He makes mention of regulatory RNAs, riboproteins, alternative splicing, the spliceosome, overlapping genes (don’t worry about these or other technical terms for now), and the evidence that repetitive or junk DNA is not functionless but acts similarly to an operating system in a computer. DNA is like a library to be read, but who or what is the reader? Or it’s like an art gallery, or a museum, but who is the curator?
• Moreover, beyond there being no single locus where the gene resides, it appears that the gene “has no physical locus” at all. Sternberg cites the Levinthal paradox, most familiar in its application to protein folding but expanded to the whole cell (in this case, yeast) by Peter Tompa and George D. Rose in a 2011 paper in Protein Science. Moving from the ­ single-celled yeast to the more complex form of a chicken, the paradox, Sternberg jots on the whiteboard, is that the “information output in a developed animal form exceeds the information present in the fertilized egg. Information transmission from egg to fully developed animal requires an external source of information to correct errors and an external channel of transmission.” The information travels from elsewhere than the fertilized egg, and it does so by no “channel” that existed in the egg. He summarizes: “The information required to build the fully developed animal (the chicken) will not fit in the fertilized egg.” If I am not mistaken, this means the information comes from a place outside the animal, and that place could not be a material place, since the channel by which it travels is not material. In connection with these matters, he notes the “problem of specifying future states while course correcting,” Claude Shannon’s 10th theorem, an 1875 entry on the atom by James Clerk Maxwell in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (9th edition), Walter Elsasser in The Physical Basis of Biology, and Robert Rosen’s 1991 book Life Itself and a 1999 follow-up, Essays on Life Itself. To his argument, Sternberg adds many modern scientific papers and discoveries, as we will see.
• In conclusion, he apprehends that the genome is immaterial in nature.

That Infamous Outgroup

The basic and important question, of course, is whether his conclusion is true. Closely tied to that is the question of how well supported it is by the evidence in biology and related fields. Less basic and less important but still of interest is whether Sternberg, in making such an argument, has fallen in with that infamous outgroup, the proponents of intelligent design.

Image source: Discovery Institute Press.

Sternberg explains that “I look at the whole ID issue from the standpoint of ­neo-Pythagorean Neoplatonism.” He adds that such a response is “apparently often seen as an evasion by means of ­high-sounding metaphysical labels or an attempt at obfuscation.” Yet it is less strange for a scientist to speak this way than it might seem. As this book was nearing completion, biologist Michael Levin, with dual appointments at Tufts and Harvard and not an ID advocate, published a paper arguing, in his own words, “for a Pythagorean or radical Platonist view in which some of the causal input into mind and life originates outside the physical world.”

What does ­neo-Pythagorean mean? It means, says Sternberg, that “the ­ universe — including every object in it and all relations between and among those ­objects — has its basis in logical-mathematical structures.”

A Snail Called Sancho

He cites decorative seashells, the exquisite patterns of butterfly wings, the shapes of flowers and of mollusk shells. I think of my pet garden snail, Sancho, collected from outside my building after a rain one night. The house he carries on his back features a gorgeous colored pattern, chartreuse with an ironic dark brown racing stripe. Sternberg perceives a “transcendent form” behind such phenomena.

Photo: Garden snail, by JonRichfield, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons.

As for the source of the form, he thinks his Platonism and structuralism “enable one to remain agnostic,” but do not preclude “­holding that the structure emanated from Nous (mind) or Logos (intellect).” His own view was held by such “pagan ‘saints’” of the ancient world as the Neoplatonist Plotinus and the “venerable and virginal Hypatia.” “I hold with Plotinus on down to Proclus that the Realm of the Forms proceeds from the One, which is beyond all Being,” he tells me in an email. “That said, this Realm is ‘in’ the Nous, which emanates from the One. In turn, all that is intelligible in the realm of ­ coming-to-be emanates from the Nous and, hence, from the Forms.” 

Don’t worry if you aren’t entirely following this. More explanations and clarifications are to come.