Richard Sternberg’s immaterial genome thesis sounds radical, and it is. As described in my book Plato’s Revenge, he argues from the evidence of mathematical biology that the information stored in DNA, and in other cellular structures, falls very far short in accounting for organismal development, even in a relatively simple microorganism such as yeast. Instead, something like Platonic forms, outside time and space, are at work.

The Quiet Part Out Loud

What I’ve learned since the book came out is that Dr. Sternberg, far from being isolated in his views, is only saying the quiet part out loud. Many of his colleagues in the ID community had been thinking the same thing. For instance, in a new ID the Future podcast, philosopher Jay Richards points out that biologist Jonathan Wells had come to an “immaterial genome”-like conclusion perhaps even before Sternberg did. 

Dr. Wells told Dr. Richards that there are 

orders of information that you really can’t possibly locate anywhere physically in the organism. And if we’re going to understand what’s happening in biology, we’re ultimately going to have to be willing to consider what [Wells] described as these higher plains of explanation, these extra sources of information.

While I knew that Wells and Sternberg were close friends, I didn’t know that. Richards says that Wells explained this to him sometime between 1997 and 2000, and he (Dr. Richards) found it “mind blowing.”

Since the book was published, physicist Brian Miller has emerged as a major force in concisely detailing the mathematics that point to the immaterial structures that Sternberg posits. He does that in an ID the Future episode (here), and in articles at Evolution News (for instance, here). Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor, co-author of the new book The Immortal Mind, agrees with Sternberg that “mere physical causation cannot account for the information and dynamism in living organisms. An idea in a mind is required for life.”

Physicist Eric Hedin also concludes that “the molecular coding within DNA, rich and vast as it is, falls impossibly short of being able to supply the informational guidance needed to supervise the development and moment-by-moment cellular activities of living organisms.”

Support Already Reported

That’s all since Plato’s Revenge was published. It’s on top of support for the thesis already reported in the book. Paleontologist Günter Bechly, “like Sternberg, thought life might represent ‘Platonic forms…in the mind of an intelligent designer.’” Add to that biologists outside the ID community, not proponents of intelligent design at all, who nevertheless are circling Platonism as Sternberg is. There is evolutionary biologist Andreas Wagner at the University of Zurich, and the daring biologist Michael Levin at Tufts and Harvard.

Image source: Discovery Institute Press.

In other scientific fields, as our colleague Daniel Witt observes, “Levin points out that respected physicists have been Platonists (e.g., Werner Heisenberg, Max Tegmark, David Deutsch, George F. R. Ellis, Roger Penrose), as well as plenty of computer scientists and mathematicians. In other words, it’s not that quack-ish of an opinion at all.”

“Not that quack-ish” is one way of putting it. Another is to say that Sternberg may be pointing to a conclusion, on the horizon of thought about what life is and how it works, destined to gain much more support than some have realized.