The Non-Algorithmic Nature of Life | Physicist Dr. Brian Miller

ID The Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design. Well, for decades we've thought the control center of life lies in DNA, but a new scientific framework is emerging that challenges that idea and suggests that vast portions of the genome are immaterial and lie outside the physical world. Hey everyone, welcome to ID The Future. I'm your host Andrew McDermott. My guest today is Dr. Brian Miller and I want to get his perspective on the cutting-edge, potentially revolutionary research of mathematical biologist Dr. Richard Sternberg on the immaterial aspects of the genome. Now in case you don't know him yet or aren't very familiar, Dr. Miller is a senior fellow of Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture where he serves as research coordinator. He holds a BS in physics with a minor in engineering from MIT and a PhD in physics from Duke University. He helps to manage the CSC's ID 3.0 research program and is a primary organizer of the Conference on Engineering in the Life Sciences, or CELS, and you'll be hearing more about that later because we'll talk about that on another episode. He has contributed to multiple books and journals covering the debate over intelligent design, including the expanded edition of The Mystery of Life's Origin and The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith. He contributes regularly to our flagship news and commentary site evolutionnews.org and you'll also hear his voice now and then on the ID The Future podcast. Welcome back Brian. Thank you, it's a pleasure to be back. Pleasure to have you. Well, we've recently had David Klinghoffer on the podcast to discuss his new book Plato's Revenge, which traces the ideas and the intellectual journey of Dr. Richard Sternberg, who offers a rigorous scientific evidence that the true control center of life lies not in DNA alone but in a timeless non-material mathematical structure. Let me share part of the endorsement that you gave Plato's Revenge because I think it'll help introduce our topic today. You write, 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 the DNA. The control center, you say, must reside in a mathematical structure outside of time and space. Now, Brian, you've recently penned several articles related to Dr. Sternberg's research at evolutionnews.org, so let's unpack some of your insights today to help folks better understand this provocative new frontier in biology. So, how would you describe Sternberg's research to someone who is brand new to it? Well, what happens is Sternberg's research is engaged in a debate that's taken place since about 500 BC, and this is what David Klinghoffer wrote about in his book, and what Rick Sternberg likes to lecture about, is that the question's been posed of what exactly is life, and where is the information housed that explains how to build life. And since ancient times, some have said that it's all in the material constituents of life, that you have some sort of particles that contain the information, that's what explains how life is built, and that those particles are passed down from generation to generation. And again, this goes back to the ancient Greeks. And of course, in modern day terms, that's DNA. That DNA is very much like a computer program, and then the cell is like a computer, and it runs the program to build life and to reproduce and do everything that life does. And of course, others, all the way back to Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, didn't believe that was the case. They believed that life was more than just the material, that there was this immaterial reality to life. In very crude terms, you could almost use the analogy of a soul, that how do people think? Are we just purely physical? And many would say no, that our mind is more than our physical brain, that there's this immaterial reality to it. In the same way, you can sort of crudely think of life having souls, where the souls are what help to build life and development, and to explain how life functions. So Rick Sternberg is making that case that life is more than just physical matter, and he's doing that from a very mathematical foundation, like category theory, topology, and also from philosophy. So Rick is, one, arguing that all the information is not just in DNA, there's a lot more information in the cell, but that a lot of the information isn't even physical, but it's sort of a mathematical structure. Well, when did you first encounter his ideas? Well, I was, I attended the summer seminar back in 2016, the summer of 2016, and I first encountered these ideas through the lectures of Jonathan Wells, who talked about embryological development, and then from Rick Sternberg himself. I just remember how striking it was, because Jonathan Wells asked the question, well, how do you explain development? Because in development, what happens is you have cells that divide, and then each of those cells has certain bits of information in their cell membrane, and that cell membrane will determine how it interacts with other cells, how it responds to certain molecules that are signals from other cells, and how it responds to the actual physical environment. And Jonathan asked the question, well, what happens in development to explain this process? And you have to explain how, when a cell divides, the cell membranes have to be different if the cells do different things. So there must be some mechanism that explains how the membrane changes. So let's sort of imagine there's some region in the DNA or in the cell membrane that explains that. Well, the problem is, when the cell divides again, the cell membrane has to change, but in a different way. So whatever mechanism is changing the membrane, that mechanism has to change itself. And what you find is there's sort of this infinite regress, where the amount of information needed to explain that is absolutely enormous. And Jonathan Wells argued it can't be contained in the genome. And then Rick Sternberg spoke, he talked about the history of different biologists understanding the genome, and many of the founding scientists in biology actually thought that the information that controls life is not material, that it's beyond the physical reality of the organism. So when he presented these ideas, it really opened my mind to whole new concepts about life. Wow. So as you were listening to these men, you know, just delivering this information to you, your initial reaction was, wow, but how did it sink in, in terms of your own research and your own career in science? Well, first of all, it was really disturbing, because there were challenging assumptions I had, and virtually all scientists believe have been around for hundreds of years. So this radically altered my view of reality and science itself. So it was really unsettling. And I remember having different talks with Jonathan Wells and Rick Sternberg and have really thought about this for, now it's been almost a decade. And then over time, I've started to realize that what they're saying actually makes sense. And now part of what my research will be is actually trying to understand these ideas of Rick Sternberg at a very deep level, and understand the mathematics so that I'll be able to really evaluate them effectively and communicate them. Yeah. Now, as part of your own journey, what led you to lean in the direction that material processes can't fully explain life in the context of molecular biology? Yeah, well, one of Rick Sternberg's lectures was really on the idea of what is going on with DNA and molecular biology and what happens inside cells. And it was really striking, because what he exposed was that DNA was far more complicated than what people are taught in your average biology class. But you don't simply have this little region of DNA, and then it gets transcribed into RNA, and the RNA goes to the ribosome to produce a protein. That very simple idea, which is really used to be considered a foundational principle of biology. But what happens is you have, let's say a gene can be at different times, different regions on different chromosomes that are somehow linked together. So where the gene is located is not very simple. And then it goes into these very complex machines like spliceosomes. And the gene can be kind of put up and rearranged. And then there can be other mechanisms that go in and actually alter the nucleotides. So what is controlling that? What is happening? And what happens is you can say, okay, well, maybe an RNA is coming in and doing something. But then what controls the RNA? What makes that happen? So you end up with this infinite regress again, where as you start to look at what's making all this happen, it becomes unfathomably complicated. And then DNA isn't static either, because you can have mechanisms that will alter DNA in different ways. So during development, like the DNA that controls your neurons is rearranged and altered, and you've got things like transposable elements. And then DNA itself, the physical DNA that's part of the chromosome, can act as part of structures that help with cell division. So what happens is a simple idea that DNA is like software, the cell is like hardware, breaks down very quickly when you start to analyze it. So that started to make me think that there's something much more deep taking place in what's been proposed in the past. And you see this in developmental biology too, especially, you know, in the embryonic stage of organisms, you get to kind of grasp the layers of information required to produce an organism and make it what it is. What did you learn in that field that convinced you, you know, that material processes were not enough? Well, the molecular biology made me rethink biology dramatically, but it was developmental biology that really led me to consider these ideas as credible. Because you have top-level mathematicians like Rene Tom, who decades ago wrote a book talking about developmental biology. And he was a topologist, he was like one of the top mathematicians in the world. And topology is just the study of shapes and how they can bend and transform and how they connect together. He said, when you look at developmental biology, it's really remarkable because you've got these three-dimensional shapes of organs and tissues, and they're migrating and changing and dividing and combining. And he talked about how, if you want to think about what would it take to control these complex three-dimensional shapes? Well, it would require, and this is really remarkable, he said it would require a mechanism, a mathematical or algebraic structure that's outside of time and space, it's immaterial. That was really striking. And then also is the thought about it, I realized that there's something incredible happening, because let's use an analogy. Imagine you've got a marching band of like 10,000 people, and this marching band is going to go out and create a picture of, let's say, the road map of Los Angeles or the road map of California in great detail. And now imagine they're blindfolded. Well, how is this going to happen? Well, if you would have these individual marching band participants memorize instructions, what would happen? Well, as soon as they start to walk out, they're going to be a little bit off course here, a little bit off course there. And those problems are going to become worse and worse and worse. And by the end, you're going to have a complete mess. It won't look anything like a map. The only way the map would work is if you had like little radio transmitters, you keep telling people how to go back on course. Well, that's just a two-dimensional grid. And that's something that's like a simple road map. But now in development, what happens is you've got these cells and these tissues moving in three dimensions. And what happens is, in principle, if you try to put all the information in at the beginning, they're going to go off course in countless different ways. So there's simply no way an embryo is going to turn into an offspring without being horribly deformed. So there has to be something happening where you're constantly putting everything back on track. And this gets into the research of people like Michael Levin, who's a professor at Tufts, and I think he's got an appointment also at Harvard, one of the top researchers in the world. He's received just top-level awards. He talks about, in these beautiful papers about top-down design and biology, he uses a little bit of a different word. You might use teleonomy or something. But he talks about how there has to be a map at every stage for embryology, the development of an embryo into an adult or an offspring, that tells it what to do in the next stage. So it has to know how to get back on track. Now, if you start thinking about what would allow that to happen, again, the amount of information would just be astronomical. So these are issues that I've thought about very deeply, and I'm becoming more and more convinced that there is something immaterial taking place. Fascinating. Yeah, I was going to ask you about other voices in this, you know. It's not that Dr. Sternberg is a lone voice in the wilderness. You point out that other visionary scientists are recognizing the immateriality of the genome and its importance in organismal development and form. One of those is Oxford physiologist Dennis Noble, who has argued that DNA is not the privileged center of control for organisms, but instead organisms control their genomes. Noble uses the analogy of an organ, that is, an organ that you could play to convey the relationship between organism and genome. To think that the genome completely determines the organism, he says, is almost as absurd as thinking that the pipes in a large cathedral organ determine what the organist plays. The pipes, Noble says, are the organist's passive instruments until he or she brings them to life in a pattern that they'll impose on them, just as multicellular organisms use the same genome to generate all the 200 or so different types of cells in their bodies by activating different expression patterns. Is that a helpful analogy, do you think? Yeah, that's a beautiful analogy, because what happens is the traditional idea of biology was that the genes, again, are like software, it's a control center, and then you have the hardware that's making this happen, whether it's a cell or an embryo. But in reality, that's not what's taking place. Dennis Noble talks about this in Biological Relativity, this is a paper he did, where every level in the hierarchy, like you have genes and proteins that form tissues, tissues form organs, organs form systems, systems form the entire body, and then you can even go to ecology and ecosystems if you wanted. And he talks about how every level in your hierarchy controls lower levels. So the genes aren't just doing their thing like a program, but the genes will do different things depending upon the signals they receive from the organs, or from the systems, or from the environment, or from tissues. So what happens is the genes only work in the context of the tissues or the organ, that three-dimensional structure, and then they're what often control the genes. So you've got the control of higher levels are controlling lower levels, and vice versa. So everything is controlling everything else in an incredibly complex pattern. So that analogy is very much like the analogy of the organ, that simply the pipes are part of it, they're an essential part of it, but you have a lot more going on telling the organs what to do. And the same way in biology, there's different levels of biology, they're telling the genes what to do. So it's very helpful. Yeah. Now you write that Sternberg's most striking prediction is that the genome is immaterial, implying that standard algorithms do not govern biological processes. So what does it mean for life to be non-algorithmic, and also fundamentally governed by cognition? Yeah, and this is, I did an article recently, and I did an article describing an article that was published by Sagar, Tim Perry Marshall, and Stuart Coffin. And Stuart Coffin is really just a legend when it comes to the idea of self-organization, and he's thought about the origin of life and evolution. And in this article, they really make this case in a beautiful way, that what happens in life is non-algorithmic. Now, what does that mean? Well, let me use a simple analogy. Imagine I ask you to take your wife out for dinner, then go to an opera, then go shopping, go to like five different places. And I'm going to ask you, how would you do that as efficiently as possible? Well, what you would do is you would draw a map, you'd connect all the different cities or locations you want to go to, and then you could write a simple computer program to decide what's the shortest path. That's an algorithm. It's like a program to solve some problem. And it's very doable. It's sort of called the traveling salesman problem. So that's algorithm. It's a simple program. There's constraints, there's mathematics you can apply. But what if I said, I want you to make your wife as happy as possible next Tuesday? Well, how do you do that? Well, there's countless ways you could go about that. You could think about going to dinner, getting flowers. If you were, let's say, a psychiatrist, you might give her drugs to make her feel better. So that's non-algorithmic, because it's an open-ended problem where there's countless mathematical frameworks you could use to solve it. Well, what happens in life is non-algorithmic, because if you look at embryology, what happens is you can perturb embryos. You can throw things off course, you can throw chemicals at them they've never seen before. And what the embryo will do is come up with very, very creative solutions to go back on course. So one of the examples that Michael Levin uses in one of his papers is he says, if you look at the kidneys of newts, they have to create these tubes. And what happens is they normally will have different cells that communicate, and then they'll create this tube from eight or ten cells. But now what happens if you duplicate the chromosomes and you make the cell incredibly large? Well, somehow the embryo will figure out that it'll use a completely different mechanism. It'll actually fold the one cell into a tube-like structure. So it's using mechanisms it's never used before to create a kidney in a very creative way to solve a problem. And this is the challenge, because what embryos are doing is facing really open-ended problems where they could address these problems in countless ways, yet it's figuring out how to solve the problem in what Levin argues is the most efficient way possible. So to program, let's say, if you imagine a developmental program that can solve these complex open-ended problems, would be fantastically difficult. Simple algorithms simply won't do what embryos are doing. That is fascinating. And as you know, I study technology too, and so it's very interesting to hear that, you know, and I've always considered that humans are non-algorithmic just because it's hard to apply, you know, technique and algorithmic details to a human being. You know, there's just too much element of surprise, there's too many ways of doing things, and so it's interesting that even at the heart of life you've got that non-algorithmic cognitive view of it. It's very interesting. Well, you also wrote an article demonstrating mathematically the challenges of explaining life purely in terms of chemistry and physics. I thought that was pretty fascinating too. Can you summarize that article for us? Sure, and let's talk about the traditional view is that all the information to produce life is in DNA, and that's about three—in humans, let's talk about humans—it's about three billion base pairs, and a base pair is in DNA or RNA, is really a chain of nucleotides, and there's four nucleotides, usually represented by A, C, T, and G, or in RNA, you might change the T with U. So you have basically four types of letters for DNA, so that means each letter, each nucleotide, corresponds to two bits because two times two is four. There's four possible nucleotides. That's basically two bits of information for each location in DNA. There's three billion locations. That's roughly six billion base pairs, or I mean six billion bits of information. Well, now you have to ask yourself how much information is necessary to control all of development. Well, to answer that question, what I did in my article is I said, how many independent regions are there in an embryo? In other words, if you looked at a region of an embryo, where will it be distinct from other regions? It'll have different types of cells, different types of cell states, different local environments, different tissues, etc., etc. And a good estimate would be roughly about that a single unit in an embryo is like one millimeter by one millimeter by one millimeter, or one millimeter cubed, and that can be tens of thousands, even up to a hundred thousand cells. And that's based on the resolution of an embryo, because every single region of an embryo has to have a blood vessel, capillary, giving it sustenance. You need nerves to control different cells. And they're all spaced out more than a millimeter. I mean, I'm sorry, less than a millimeter. And basically signaling molecules will have a range of less than a millimeter very often. So that's a good sense of how large a unit is. So if you break up an embryo into cubic millimeters, that would be on the order of a hundred thousand to a million separate units. And then you ask the question, how many stages are there in development? Because you have cells that divide, they change states, the genes that are active are different, the chemical environment's different, the location's different. And you can break an embryology in humans up to about a thousand different steps. And that's a very safe estimate, because things are changing much faster than that. Well, and now you start to ask yourself if you've got, let's say, on the order of a million separate units with a thousand steps, that's like a billion transitions. That's roughly a billion transitions. Okay, if every one of those transitions has to be controlled by DNA, that only leaves you maybe six bits of information for each transition. If you look at the complexity of transition, you've got cells that are changing their gene states, they're changing location, they're changing shape, they're sending signals. That's not an information at all to control embryology. Now, even if you imagine there's a lot more information in the early zygote, it's when the sperm and the egg come together as the zygote. If you assume that all the information is there, then well, how much information can you pack in there? Well, you have maybe 10 to the 15, less than the 10 to 15 molecules in the cell that would be things like lipids, things like proteins, things like RNA or nucleotides. And even if you assume that, that's only about a million bits of information for each transition. Well, if you ask how much information are you going to need? Well, if you look at models of cells, like whole cell models, well, that's like half a billion bits of information for that program to control the whole cell model. So if you think about a unit of the embryo, a cubic millimeter, that has to change shape, size, states, and so forth, it has to deal with these incredibly complex problems, like if it's perturbed, it faces new challenges. Well, you're just not going to be able to fit all the information you need in the zygote. That's the basic argument I made, is that you're dealing with these incredibly complex problems. Wow, yeah, yeah, you get a real sense of just the sheer amount of information, and there is a limited physical space for that, and that is part of the argument of the immaterial genome. Well, we've mentioned Dennis Noble. Are there other researchers who share Sternberg's views? Yeah, in fact, Sternberg goes through a beautiful lecture, historically, of who has really questioned that the genome, the control center of life, is really material. So historically, there's been a lot of famous figures. Even some of the founders of genetics, or of the genome ideas, were questioning this idea. But even more through the century, of course, I mentioned Renee Thom, who is a mathematician. There's people like Walter Elsizer. Of course, one of the most famous is Robert Rosen. Robert Rosen was, again, another top-level mathematician that wrote the book, What is Life? He talked about how when you look at life, it's hard to explain because you have what's called causal closure. So if you have a car, you can talk about the physical car, but then you've got to have machines that manufacture the car, but then you need a driver. So there's always things from the outside making the car work. Well, in a cell, a cell makes itself, it runs itself, so everything has to fall back in on itself, and that's incredibly hard to model mathematically. In fact, Rosen argued it can't be modeled algorithmically, which is pretty remarkable. So he's an example, but probably the most famous recent person would be people like Michael Levin, because, again, he's considered one of the top biologists in the world. He wrote an article recently talking about how you have to understand life in terms of platonic forms, this idea of an immaterial mathematical structure that has all the information you would need to explain life. He even talks about the idea of panpsychism, which is going to this idea that matter has cognition, minds. So he's using language which is very similar to Rick Sternberg, and Rick Sternberg would think about it differently than Michael Levin, but nevertheless, he's going in the same direction for the same reason. So that's just really, really striking. Oh, also, there's a recent book that came out in the last few years by MIT Press, it's called Evolution on Purpose, Chileanomy and Living Systems, and it has a lot of the real top-level theorists, people like Denis Noble, people like Michael Levin, it's got people, just the who's-whos of really profound thinkers about this, who are really talking about how you're seeing evidence of cognition, decision-making in embryos. You're seeing what looks like a mind at work in evolution, in adaptation, in development. They're talking about how this idea of purpose is central to life and has to be central to life. So again, you're seeing the whole kind of leaders in the field going in this direction that the standard materialist view of life, that DNA controls everything, is just not accurate, but there's something much more profound taking place. So I would say that we're really in the earliest stages of the next great scientific revolution. In many ways, Rick Sternberg anticipated this by a few decades and is really working on the mathematical framework to help drive this revolution forward. Yeah, well, it's an exciting moment, for sure, to be at that stage of an early seismic shift. Well, what about in the intelligent design research community? How is it being accepted by theorists who, up until now, felt that it was all in DNA and that the genome was largely physical? Well, many, when they hear the arguments, are taking this very, very seriously. And of course, there's, for very understandable reasons, concerns. There's people that say, look, this is so radical. We got to really make sure this is right. That saying that there's information in the material structure, I mean, you're challenging ideas of science that are centuries old. So people are justifiably skeptical, and they're just waiting to see the arguments fleshed out and just kind of staying, let's just be cautious about that for very, very good reasons. So I understand that, and that's a very healthy and lively debate, even in the intelligent design circles. Yeah, definitely. Well, what research, if a scientist came along and said, well, I want to, I want to unpack this more or even try to falsify it, what research would need to be done to challenge or support Sternberg's views? Well, really what needs to happen is we need better experimental techniques. We need better equipment, because what you really need to do is look at the membrane and image the membrane at the level of molecules. And then what you have to do is, during development, is watch how this molecular structure changes with time. You have to go back and see what's causing that to happen. You have to trace back a lot of the chemical reactions. And we just simply don't have the equipment to do that yet. So what needs to happen is much deeper experimentation on embryology, on membrane structures, and how they change during development. So that's a great way, those are great places to really study this. Also, genetics, looking at DNA, looking at things like natural genetic engineering, how does DNA change, why does it change, what's making that happen, is a great place to look. And also mathematics, like really taking these ideas of category theory of morphology, and really looking at Richard Sternberg's research, and just looking at it in greater and greater depth to see what's really going on. Those are great fields to go into to really help flesh out these questions. Yeah. Well, what do you see as the implications of the immaterial genome for the design debate in general? Well, whether the immaterial idea is right or wrong doesn't change the idea of design, because there's one of two possibilities. One is it isn't material, and you've got literally these mathematical structures acting like minds making decisions. And only a mind can create a mind. A mind just can't self-organize through natural processes. So design would be taken for granted at that point. But even if you want to say it is purely material, well, what happens is when you see what's happening in development, you're seeing it would have to require genetic programming, so to speak, which is way beyond human capacities. But in the early zygote, the early cell that is going to turn into an offspring, you would have to have engineering at a level that vastly surpasses anything that humans can even conceive of, that you're dealing with a mind vastly superior to our cells. And then if you think about the conversations we've had about things like protein rarity, that proteins represent such rare sequences and sequence space that it's not going to happen by chance. Well, that pales in comparison to what's going to be required for embryology, because you could, let's say, the origin of something like insects. Well, if you look at the time frame in the fossil record, all these different orders of insects appear within the order of millions of years. It's a geological instance. And what has to happen is you have to have the embryos radically re-engineered in an instant, geologically speaking, to get something like an insect, particularly one that does metamorphosis. But here's the problem. When you look at embryology, what happens is you have the embryo developing, and at every stage, in every location, there's a map of the future where it wants to go. So let's imagine a mutation or an intervention knocks this embryo off course. Every other stage is going to move it back on course. And if it can't move it entirely on course, in every experience we have, you're dealing with a deformed embryo. There's no such thing as a radically altered embryo that's good. It's always bad. So in order to go from one type of animal to a completely different animal, insects often have completely different embryology, that even the logic is different, you would have to change every single location in the embryo at every single stage, essentially at once, to make this thing coherently move towards a single goal. Because if mutations caused part of embryos to move to different goals, every other stage goes towards the original goal, which creates serious problems. So the design debate is essentially over when you talk about embryology, because only a mind can radically alter every stage in every location in an embryo to achieve a new outcome. So that's a very, very serious issue. Yeah, yeah. That's an interesting point too. Well, will you play any direct role in advancing Dr. Sternberg's research on the immaterial genome? Well, I plan to understand the mathematics at a very deep level, and then I want to help Dr. Sternberg communicate this to the public. And that is going to be a multi-year path, because there's just layer after layer of mathematics and analysis. But my hope is to really assist in making this understandable to the public. Yeah. Well, and I dare say if anyone can do that, it's you. You're great in front of an audience, and you really help, you know, unpack scientific concepts so they can be grasped by the everyday person. So that's going to be a great contribution. Well, Brian, thanks for giving us a clearer picture of Dr. Sternberg's work and this very provocative hypothesis. I'm looking forward to learning more. Thank you. It's been a pleasure to be here. So listeners, viewers, if you'd like to learn more about Dr. Sternberg's work on the immateriality of the genome, a good place to start is David Klinghoffer and his book Plato's Revenge. You can learn more about that and order a copy at discovery.press. That's discovery.press, the website of Discovery Institute Press. And we have just put that book out, so you'll find all the details. But that'll give you a good understanding of Dr. Sternberg and just the way that he came up with these ideas and the research he's done thus far, as we look forward to what he will put out in the near future. Well, until next time, I'm Andrew McDermott for ID the Future. Thanks for joining us. ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.