Plato’s Revenge

First there was the genetic revolution — the discovery that physical structures in the cell, including DNA and RNA, shape every organism. Now, says evolutionary biologist Richard Sternberg, we are overdue for another and more profound revolution. Recent findings reveal that genetic and even epigenetic sources alone cannot account for the rich dynamism of life — not even close. Some other informational source is required.

The idea was anticipated 2,400 years ago in Plato’s Timaeus, and periodically revisited in the ensuing centuries. Sidelined by scientific materialism, it is now reasserting itself on the strength of cutting-edge molecular biology, higher mathematics, and commonsense reasoning. In Plato’s Revenge, science writer David Klinghoffer takes Sternberg’s profound explorations and weaves them into a lively and accessible account of a most remarkable realization: At every moment, we owe our lives to a genome that is more than matter, and to an informational source that is immaterial, transcomputational, and beyond space and time.

Praise

In 2004, for allowing impure thoughts about evolutionary theory to see the light of day, Richard Sternberg found himself targeted as a modern-day heretic. It was a shocking early instance of cancel culture. Despite what happened to him, Sternberg has never wanted his story to obscure the important idea he wanted aired: that the concept of the gene itself was deeply flawed and that hereditary memory is more complex, more dynamic, and more intelligent than the crude conception of the gene would allow. 

David Klinghoffer’s Plato’s Revenge beautifully honors Sternberg’s wish. He writes compellingly about Richard Sternberg himself and the controversy that engulfed him, revealing the shocking intolerance at the heart of Darwinism. More importantly, he frames Sternberg’s story within the concept of the “immaterial genome,” anticipating emerging challenges of epigenetics and gene expression that are undermining the gene as the “atom of heredity.” In so doing, he brings to the fore the central, and largely unacknowledged dilemma of evolutionism: that how we think about evolution is as much philosophy as it is science.

J. Scott Turner, Emeritus Professor of Biology, SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, Syracuse, New York; author of Purpose and Desire: What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It

Some thirty years after Francis Crick proclaimed the central dogma of molecular biology and its attendant materialist triumph, serious doubts began to emerge. This led another theoretical biologist, one of Rick Sternberg’s early influences, Robert Rosen, to examine the question of Life Itself in rigorous detail. His conclusion regarding that reigning paradigm: “Something is missing, something big.” Now, some thirty years after Rosen, in Plato’s Revenge, David Klinghoffer masterfully chronicles Sternberg’s decades-long search to fill the void articulated by Rosen, fulfilling the quest to which fate, or perhaps Providence itself, had assigned to his brilliant career. Klinghoffer’s detailed yet accessible and engaging portrayal of such a demandingly wide-ranging topic leaves the reader breathless in anticipation of Sternberg’s emerging synthesis of what almost certainly will prove to be one of the most momentous developments in the history of science.

Stephen Iacoboni, MD, award-winning researcher, oncologist, and author of The Undying Soul and Telos: The Scientific Basis for a Life of Purpose

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.

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

Science journalist David Klinghoffer’s task is not an easy one: Introduce the general reader to a scientific hypothesis that is profound, potentially revolutionary, but hardly simple. Klinghoffer succeeds and, into the bargain, paints an engaging portrait of the scientist behind the idea, Richard Sternberg. As Klinghoffer explains, Sternberg has woven together the fields of biology, mathematics, and philosophy to argue that an organism’s genome is not entirely contained in DNA. Moreover, the information representing a species’ structures and processes is not confined to any physical molecule. Instead, an organism’s architecture results from immaterial principles. Sternberg’s arguments draw from the leading theorists who applied mathematics, such as category theory, to life, and his analysis demonstrates that the control center that directs an embryo to develop into an adult requires far more information than could be contained in the entire initial cell, let alone DNA. The control center must reside in a mathematical structure outside of time and space. Klinghoffer, following Sternberg, also traces scientists’ understanding of the genome through history, illustrating that many leading biologists recognized the genome’s immateriality.

Brian Miller, PhD, Research Coordinator for the Center for Science and Culture, primary organizer of the Conference on Engineering in the Life Sciences, and contributor to The Mystery of Life’s Origin: The Continuing Controversy and Inference Review

This combatively titled volume is in essence one long argument in favor of the philosophical underpinning  pertaining to ideas of human existence bequeathed to us initially by the ancient philosopher Plato in his Timaeus some two and a half millennia ago. Lest any modern-day  technocrats, exulting in our civilization’s latest gadgets and gizmos, should think ancient philosophy superannuated and entirely dispensable, Klinghoffer reminds us of A. N. Whitehead’s apt observation that modern thinkers have provided little but “a series of footnotes to Plato.” Linking Plato with cutting-edge modern science research, the author makes much of the work of Richard Sternberg who, like Plato before him, posits an immaterial force beyond physical reality. Invoking up-to-date scientific findings he observes that neither DNA nor any other known epigenetic factors can account for us in the fullest sense. Beyond genetics and epigenetics there must lie some Platonic reality all its own.

Klinghoffer’s arguments will inevitably affront those holding to materialist presuppositions, but glib objections  will have to take into account the most outstanding desideratum of modern biological science, which the author locates in the fact that information sources beyond the material genome are required in order to answer that perennial question, What is life? This is an important contribution in that the author shows himself to be just as much at ease with modern scientific advances as he is with the still very timely thinking of Plato. The volume is to be highly recommended, and readers may be glad to hear that even the most rebarbative-sounding “hard science” is presented with an admirable lucidity.

Neil Thomas, Reader Emeritus, University of Durham, author of Taking Leave of Darwin

There are more things than are dreamt of in our materialist philosophy — not just in heaven, but right here on earth. At a time when this is becoming newly, exhilaratingly apparent, David Klinghoffer’s wonderfully readable book explores some breathtaking implications of the latest natural science in an area — genetics — that touches deeply on our origins, our characters, and perhaps our souls.

Spencer Klavan, Associate Editor of the Claremont Review of Books and author of Light of the Mind, Light of the World: Illuminating Science Through Faith

Darwinian materialism fails to explain the biological information in DNA sequences. But that truth merely scratches the surface when it comes to explaining biological form. To understand organisms in all their complexity, argues Richard Sternberg, we must break completely with nineteenth-century materialism and reconsider the thought of ancient greats such as Plato and Aristotle. Sternberg’s argument might seem daunting to the non-specialist, but David Klinghoffer does a masterful job of explaining Sternberg’s revolutionary thought in a delightfully accessible way.

Jay​​​​ Richards, PhD, co-author of The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos Is Designed for Discovery and editor of God and Evolution