Behind enemy lines

 

OoL science is a study in failure?

 

Darwinism's third way problem?

 

The thumb print of JEHOVAH in the cell

 

On evolution and the design debate.

The greenest tech of all vs. Darwinism

 

No intelligence allowed?

 

Darwinism does not have enough time to find this needle in this haystack?

 

Homeostasis vs. Darwin

 Homeostasis Is More than Treading Water

David Coppedge

If you were to watch a person treading water in a murky lake, you might assume she is standing on a shallow bottom. She might look calm and be talking to you, but below the surface a lot of kicking and stroking going on. That’s a bit like homeostasis, a broad term for maintaining internal stability in a dynamic environment. Here we will look at recent discoveries showing the complexity of systems required to keep organisms functioning while the surroundings are changing.

Frog Breath

Consider the case of a frog maintaining its breathing reflex while the temperature is dropping. Like us, it must keep the oxygen coming in and the CO2 going out, but without endothermy, breathing might drop to a standstill in the cold or accelerate too quickly when the temperature rises. What keeps the frog happily breathing?

In Current Biology, Tara A. Janes and Richard Kinkead review a study by Cannon and Santin also in Current Biology. The researchers identified specific neurons, signals and receptors involved in maintaining the rhythm. Janes and Kinkead comment that breath homeostasis is anything but boring:

Respiratory networks, like most networks, aim to maintain relative stability in their activity level over time. Traditionally, this has been described in terms of activity-dependent mechanisms where neurons respond to their own level of activity. At the cellular level, this often involves responses to intracellular calcium signallingthat occur proportional to activity. Neurons can also stabilise network function by fine-tuning ion channel density, synaptic strengths, and intrinsic excitability. 

Before Cannon and Santin’s work, they say, much of what was known about homeostatic networks came from studies on rodents which benefit from endothermy. How do frogs keep up their autonomic breathing rhythm without that luxury? Even more challenging, how do they maintain oxygen intake when undergoing metamorphosis from tadpole to adult?

A fundamental principle is that as body temperature goes down, so does metabolism and drive to breathe. Remarkably, frogs survive and thrive in the face of these environmental fluctuations by maintaining activity in the respiratory rhythm-generating networks for air-breathing. So how do they do it?

By altering temperatures in brainstem-spinal cord preparations from bullfrogs which can survive in vitro for a day, Cannon and Santin in “a clever set of experiments” found “a novel, environment-driven mechanism regulating network activity that is capable of driving compensatory changes in respiratory function in response to cold exposure.”

First, they determined that temperature alone acts as a trigger for certain changes at the cellular level. At 10°C motor activity ceased, but became hyper-excited as the temperature returned to 22°C. “This suggests that cold exposure elicits increased network excitability in an attempt to restore respiratory motor output,” the commentators say. But much more is involved: production of norepinephrine in the locus coeruleus (LC), “a compact and highly homogeneous group of neurons located rostral to the respiratory networks,” which triggers changes in calcium ion channels. 

Ensuing pharmacological experiments showed that in response to acute temperature changes, inhibition of the electrogenic Na+ pump serves as a critical transduction step, which then activates network compensation via β-adrenergic receptor signalling

And  so to keep breathing when it’s cold, a frog depends on the coordinated responses of temperature sensors, hormones, LC neurons, neural circuits, sodium pumps, receptors, calcium ions and muscles. The research does not explain everything, but

the authors propose novel ideas that are certainly worthy of further exploration. One that caught our attention is the suggestion that central respiratory circuits switch from CO2/pH-sensing to temperature-sensing as an important source of drive to breathe at cool temperatures. In this way, temperature sensitivity allows the network to restore activity under conditions where it might be needed, while maintaining the ability of the network to fall silent when it is adaptive to do so.

Speaking as air-breathers themselves, Janes and Kinkead conclude, “Despite our respiratory bias, we humbly acknowledge that neural circuits regulate other important physiological processes beyond breathing.”

Synapse Traffic Control

In my  2024 article on the synapse, I shared my bewilderment at how those nanoscopic signal transducers work and perform rapidly and reliably despite multiple transitions in information-bearing media. A new paper adds to my bewilderment by claiming that synapses bring order out of randomness. (For more on how life brings order out of chaos, see this article.)

Krisha Aghi et al., writing in Current Biology about fruit flies, find that “spatial distribution of facilitating and depressing synapses is random” and yet the neurons maintain stable transmission anyway. How?

Synaptic strength can vary greatly between synapses. Optical quantal analysis at Drosophila glutamatergic motor neuron synapses shows that short-term plasticity also varies greatly between synapses, even those made by an individual motor neuron. Strong and weak synapses are randomly distributed in the motor neuron nerve terminal, as are facilitating and depressing synapses. Although synapses exhibit highly heterogeneous basal strength at low-action potential firing frequency and undergo varied plasticity when firing frequency increases, the overall distribution of strength across synapses remains remarkably constant due to a balance between the number of synapses that facilitate versus depress and to their degree of plasticity and basal synaptic weight.Constancy in transmitter release can ensure robustness across changing behavioral conditions.

The  robustness of the transmitted signal despite individual variations in synaptic plasticity allows fruit flies to fly, but this method also enables us to live and move. How this “method in madness” mechanism is able to work automatically in the nervous system from infant in the womb to athlete to senior citizen must cause us all to stand in awe.

Clearing Up Clock Confusion

Imagine having to follow two clocks that run at different rates. It would be like trying to play drum or trumpet in Symphony No. 4 by Charles Ives, who in one movement called for two conductors waving their batons at different tempos.

Because we have minds and large brains, we humans can track lunar cycles, solar cycles, and orbital cycles simultaneously with the help of experience, language, charts, and computers. But how does a crustacean do it? Here’s a case of life cycle homeostasis. If a crustacean gets out of rhythm, it might become desiccated on rocks or fail to reproduce.

How marine species cope with both diurnal and tidal cycles is unclear. A new study in crustaceans identifies distinct brain cells that exhibit either 24- or 12.4-hour rhythms of gene expression, thus providing a mechanism for tracking multiple environmental cycles.

So begin Victoria Lewis and Patrick Emery in a Dispatch within the same issue of Current Biology. They say that the circadian clock (day/night cycle) is fairly well understood:

The nuclear accumulation and subsequent degradation of the repressor complex are dependent on kinases and phosphatases that adjust the period of the circadian pacemaker to ∼24 hours (h). The circadian clock is primarily entrained by the light–dark (LD) cycle, but also responds to the temperature cycle and other relevant cues. With the elucidation of the molecular mechanisms underlying circadian clocks comes a key question: are similar mechanisms implicated in other biological rhythms?

Indeed they are. They comment on research reported in the same issue by Oliphant et al. who “present evidence supporting the idea that the circadian clock machinery is retooled to allow marine organisms to cope with tidal cycles through dedicated brain cells.” 

The new study helps narrow down three hypotheses about how marine crustaceans can keep up with two tempos: the circadian rhythm and the circatidal rhythm. But how do the resulting proteins interact when regulated by different brain cells? “The extent of the mechanistic overlap between the two clocks,” they remark, “still needs to be determined.” Indeed, “considerable work is still needed to understand how circatidal rhythms are entrained and generated.” Yet the humble sand flea gets along without a thought.

Much More to Homeostasis

These three studies illustrate the complexity of homeostasis, but there are many thousands more that could be drawn from. Other recent examples in my pile include, in brief:

A “mitochondrial contact site and cristae organizing system” that keeps the membranes intact in these cellular powerhouses (Current Biology).

A system to prevent crowding in epithelial tissues which otherwise might cause cell damage and loss (Northwestern University Medicine).

Spatiotemporal control of mitosis by cyclin-dependent kinase (CDK) to keep order during the many rapid changes across the cell (Nature).

A relationship between the cell cycle, circadian clock, and sense of taste that can cause food to taste differently at different times of day (PNAS)

A new organelle in the cell, dubbed the hemifusome, that “could fundamentally reshape our understanding of how cells recycle their contents and sort and direct intracellular cargo” (University of Virginia School of Medicine).

Homeostasis is a tremendously varied and complex field ripe for discoveries from a design perspective. It adds an essential time dimension to irreducible complexity, revealing the interactions of multiple IC components working in cooperation to keep an organism stable in a changing environment. And so while admiring the smiling swimmer’s face above water, we must not be unaware of the vigorously beating legs and arms under the surface that are keeping her afloat.

The OoL science empire strikes back(sort of)

 

There is no simple lifeform(still).

 Engineered Complexity in the Microbial World

Andrew McDiarmid

On a classic episode of ID the Future, host Jonathan Witt speaks with molecular biologist and professor Dustin Van Hofwegen about his research into the engineered complexity in microbial life. The two sat down at the yearly Conference on Engineering in Living Systems to discuss the event, which brings together biologists and engineers to study how engineering principles can be applied to living things, as well as Hofwegen’s article in the Journal of Bacteriology, co-authored with Carolyn Hovde and Scott Minnich, based on research conducted at the University of Idaho. 

Hofwegen shares his research on the famous decades-long E. coli evolution experiment conducted by Richard Lenski, which showed the sudden appearance of an ability to utilize citrate after many generations. However, Van Hofwegen’s own experiments demonstrated that this “evolutionary innovation” could occur much faster and repeatedly under stressful conditions, suggesting it was not a random evolutionary leap but rather the activation of pre-existing genetic mechanisms, akin to flipping a switch. The discussion highlights that many biological “adaptations” may involve the use of innate abilities or the disruption of existing functions, rather than the creation of entirely new ones, supporting the idea of engineered complexity in microbial life. Download the podcast or listen to it here.

Yet more on the fall of reductionism

 

More on why chemistry cannot beget biology.

 

JEHOVAH is fluent in mathematics?

 

JEHOVAH'S "folly" defeats man's "wisdom"

 

Those pesky missing links again?

 

The fall of reductionism foreseen?

 Flannery: What Werner Heisenberg Foresaw

Plato's Revenge

The new bookPlato's Revenge : The New Science of the Immaterial Genome, by David Klinghoffer, details in accessible form the thinking of biologist Richard Sternberg. But others before Dr. Sternberg had also foreseen the recognition of Platonic forms as realities in modern science. Historian of science Michael Flannery cites quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg as an example

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. [Emphasis added.]

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

Get your copy of Plato’s Revenge now and find more information and endorsements at Discovery Institute Press.

Richard Sternberg's body blow to reductionism

 Spooked by Sternberg: From the Introduction to Plato’s Revenge

David Klinghoffer

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

My view is not the view that most people have of intelligent design.

RICHARD STERNBERG

When I first heard biologist Richard Sternberg describe his immaterial genome hypothesis, reviving the thought of the Greek philosopher Plato in a modern and scientific context, another biologist on hand took in her breath. “If that’s true,” she said, “it changes everything.” I felt similarly. The idea spooked me. All familiar thinking about the genome assumes that it is, of course, purely material: the twisting strands of DNA and a few other physical structures in the cell. The proponents of intelligent design (ID) have, in large part, accepted this premise and argued according to its terms.

Sternberg goes further. He argues — sometimes from common-sensical and accessible evidence and sometimes from highly technical mathematical and biological ­ realities — that the material resources of the physically instantiated portion of the genome are woefully inadequate to shape life from generation to generation. The conclusion still gives me a shiver: An immaterial source exists, in company with DNA and the other material sources of biological information. That source extends not only beyond us, but beyond physical reality.

A Meeting in Seattle

I vividly recall the meeting. It was 2012, a time of great strain in my life. In a small conference room in Seattle, several of us, including scientists and ­ non-scientists like me, gathered to listen to Sternberg sketch an argument he had been developing, rooted in his observation that there simply is not enough information physically in the ­ cell — including the DNA and epigenetic (from the Greek, meaning beyond genetic) ­sources — to account for the development of an organism. According to him, this finding applied not only to the more complex organisms, such as whales and humans, but also to the relatively simple ones, such as yeast.

He also spoke of those who had influenced ­ him — in particular, theoretical biologist Robert Rosen (1934–1998) and the men who had first devised the idea of a gene. As Sternberg explained, they saw it in terms that might not be material.

The nature of genetics and heredity is inherently of more intimate interest to some people than are many other scientific topics. The law of gravity says nothing about me as a person, except how fast I would fall if pushed off a tall building. Heredity promises to say much about who I am. As I am writing this, I have just put a tube of spit in the mail to the DNA ancestry company 23andMe. On the top of the test kit you get from Amazon is the message to the customer: “Welcome to You.”

Siddhartha Mukherjee, who teaches medicine at Columbia University, begins his book The Gene: An Intimate History by detailing why the subject is painfully personal for him: Behind his narrative of scholarly discovery lies his father’s family with its history of a mental illness, schizophrenia. In that family history he is himself implicated, as are any children he might have. “Madness,” he writes, “has been among the Mukherjees for at least two generations.” It is “buried, like toxic waste,” in the genetic inheritance.

In 2012, heredity was on my mind. That year, my birth mother, Harriet Lund, had come to live near me in the Seattle area, bringing emotional turbulence with her. She was suffering from dementia and, with it, episodes of rage and paranoia. It was at this time she told me that, in Los Angeles in 1965, my birth father, George Thomas, raped her. And this was how I was conceived.

The Crucial Point

She was ­ Swedish-born, from a long line of Lutheran pastors. She was a social worker at the time, and George, a Mayflower descendant from Kansas, was her supervisor. I had first met her in 1993 and, charmed, wrote a book about her in relationship to my conversion to Orthodox Judaism. Yet she had not told me the crucial point about George Thomas until 2012, right around the time I first heard ­ Sternberg’s immaterial genome idea. Harriet sounded perfectly lucid when she said it: “Your father raped me! You’re the son of a rapist!”

Later, after Harriet had already slipped away, present in her body but not in her mind and thus incapable of answering questions, a cousin of hers contacted me. The cousin revealed, with credible details, that Harriet had kept another secret as well: Harriet’s own ­ father — my grandfather, the Swedish filmmaker Oscar A. C. ­ Lund — had sexually molested Harriet when she was a girl.

Before she became ill, Harriet had wanted to save me from the truth about my heredity. Only in the throes of dementia did she tell me the point about my birth ­ father. Now I knew it all. As they put it at 23andMe, welcome to you. That is the first reason that Sternberg’s discussion moved me. 

There was something else about Sternberg that struck me. Given that he is a man decorated with two PhDs in ­ biology — one in molecular (evolutionary) genetics and another in mathematical ­ biology — and has held a scientific post at the Smithsonian National Museum, it’s natural to expect him to have little interest in classical history. Here, surely, is a man oriented toward science, natural history, and the vanguard of discovery. But when you meet him in person, you quickly sense that a more complex description will be required. He is a man as interested in the history of science and philosophy as he is in the latest scientific evidence and ideas.

I confess that I find this very relatable. As a college student at Brown, studying Greek and Latin, I was narrowly diverted from an academic career in comparative literature. After graduation I was set to start in September in the Classics Department at Columbia to work towards a PhD. That summer, though, I was offered a job as assistant literary editor at William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review.

A Form of Archaeology

I deferred grad school for the coming academic year but then never went. The journalism virus had infected me. Yet I continued to find the Greeks, the picture of life that they offered, and their difficult language enchanting. More than this, I have remained fascinated by intellectual life as a form of archaeology, digging for insight and wisdom in ancient sources.

My children grew up hearing me say many times over that there are two kinds of people. There are those who see modern opinions as the product of an ­ upward-driving, almost teleological evolutionary process, with a kind of natural selection picking out the very best concepts from what has come before: the more modern, the better.

And then there are others like me who look around at contemporary existence, with its increasing surrender to mental illness as a philosophy of life, and conclude just the opposite. Jewish tradition calls this yeridat ha’dorot, the devolution of the generations. Human beings are not getting wiser. This is not only an axiom but is evident just from observing the world around you.

So I was naturally sympathetic to Sternberg, for though he grounds his argument for the immaterial genome in the latest discoveries of molecular biology, he is also by temperament sufficiently suspicious of novelty that he mined the history of philosophy and science to excavate intimations and intellectual forbears of his argument. In the process he turned up a line of thinkers and scientists from Plato to Rosen.

The irreducible complexity of Logos vs. Darwinism

 Communication, in Human Life and Beyond: An Irreducibly Complex Design

Eric Hedin

Communication is something that we can easily take for granted, and yet this pervasive attribute of living things represents bedrock evidence for intelligent design.

Communication, to be effective, always includes three features.

Expression

Reception

Comprehension

Effective communication necessitates and relies upon the operation of all three features. A lack of any one of these causes communication to fail. In short, effective communication is irreducibly complex.

When we refer to communication, we usually imagine people talking and listening, or someone reading what another has written, or maybe we’re listening to a music performance. Beyond ourselves, however, communication saturates the animal kingdom in myriads forms. Insects also communicate. Even within biological organisms, at the cellular level, communication forms an integral part of sustaining our physical being.

The Example of Blood Pressure

For instance, the physiology controlling blood pressure within our circulatory system utilizes all three features of communication. Complex hormonal chemicals, such as epinephrin and angiotensin, when emitted, interact with sensors and receptors throughout our bodies to regulate blood pressure and maintain it within required tolerances. Communication occurs unconsciously, but without it, we’d go unconscious!

Let’s look in more detail at the form of communication we’re most familiar with — human speech. Creating sounds with vocal chords, pharynx, tongue, mouth, and lips is just the first step in the communication process. The multitasking capabilities of the pharynx have been highlighted in a previous post by Howard Glicksman and Steve Laufmann.

The pharynx affords us the dual abilities to breathe and swallow food and water, but it does much more. It affords the ability for speech, language, and tonal activities like lyrical speech and singing. The percussion and acoustic shaping of the tongue, teeth, throat, oral and nasal cavities, and most of the other parts of the pharynx, are absolutely required for the nuanced communication that’s essential to the human experience.

All the coordinated anatomy that allows us to form sounds corresponding to words would be wasted and in vain if we didn’t also possess a marvelously attuned sense of hearing. Even a cursory description of the delicate structures of the ear required for us to hear sounds over a thousand-fold range of acoustic vibrations reveals intricately interrelated details surpassing human engineering abilities. 

More than Anatomy

And yet, hearing is much more than anatomical structures precisely arranged to transform acoustic vibrations to electrical nerve impulses. We must also have the ability to interpret impulses in the auditory nerve, to comprehend the electrical signals channeling to our brains, for any communication to occur.

The brain takes signals, and turns them into words and sentences and, then eventually, into ideas. In a few tenths of a second, a sound from your ear can become an idea in your mind. Your ears and brain need to work together to make this happen properly.

The complexity of interpreting auditory signals within the brain has challenged our understanding.

For neuroscientists, human hearing is a process full of unanswered questions. How does the brain translate sounds — vibrations that travel through the air — into the patterns of neural activity that we recognize as speech, or laughter, or the footsteps of an approaching friend?

Independent Complex Systems 

Perhaps we let this incredible phenomenon of communication go unappreciated by virtue of its familiarity to us. Three independent complex systems are required: speech, hearing, and cognitive interpretation. Having (or, to use the evolutionary view, evolving) one feature provides no guarantee the other two will arise. No partial benefit to communication comes from, say, speech and comprehension without hearing. Or hearing and comprehension without speech. All three features of communication are needed. Each of the features entail specific, complex biochemical and neurological functionality. Together, the three essential components of communication comprise a system of irreducibly complex systems.

In the animal kingdom, we can recognize many examples of communication. Even though squirrels may not be discussing politics or theories of cosmology, they use a variety of vocalizations for their own benefit.

Vocal communication is an important method squirrels (Sciuridae) use to transfer information from one individual to others….vocal communication is important to the development, reproduction, and survival of squirrels…

Most research emphasizes the evolutionary origin of animal communication, citing its obvious benefit for enhancing survival. While the survival benefit of communication ability should be obvious, the irreducible complexity of any communication system defies explanation from evolution.

The independent complex features required for effective human communication are mirrored in animal communication (expression, reception, comprehension), and they even appear in the plant world. For example, research indicates that trees engage in communication.

[Trees] are connected to each other through underground fungal networks. Trees share water and nutrients through the networks, and also use them to communicate. They send distress signals about drought and disease, for example, or insect attacks, and other trees alter their behavior when they receive these messages.

The national park service reports:

It has been known for at least a couple of decades that trees and plants can communicate by releasing volatile organic compounds (VOCs).

Again, an irreducibly complex system is involved in arboreal communication: the message must be expressed and received. But this is not enough — the message must produce the intended result, otherwise the whole system is a waste.

Considering again the example of physiological communication within the body, the importance of this process for life has not been lost on the scientific community, expressed with the presupposition of evolution.

In the process of evolutionary history, advancement of the life as a group wouldn’t be possible without cells, tissues and systems communicating with each other with specific communication mechanisms.

Neither has the interconnected necessity of features of successful communication gone unnoticed.

Theory predicts that for a signal to evolve, both the sender(s) and receiver(s) should benefit from their interaction. Thus, there should be tight coevolution between signal production and subsequent perception and response.

In the process of evolutionary history, advancement of the life as a group wouldn’t be possible without cells, tissues and systems communicating with each other with specific communication mechanisms.

Neither has the interconnected necessity of features of successful communication gone unnoticed.

Theory predicts that for a signal to evolve, both the sender(s) and receiver(s) should benefit from their interaction. Thus, there should be tight coevolution between signal production and subsequent perception and response.

Suspending Disbelief

How is it possible to assume that the myriad forms of sophisticated communication between and within living things just happened to evolve? How can one conclude that each essential feature happened to come online in parallel, through undirected processes whose only raison d’être is enhanced procreation? Doesn’t such a hypothesis require an unbearable suspension of disbelief?

The implication of the irreducible nature of communication is clear, but by holding the wrong assumptions it’s possible to hear the signal and miss the message.

The science against reductionism.

 Plato’s Revenge: An Interview with David Klinghoffer

Andrew McDiarmid

You’re familiar with the genetic revolution — the discovery that physical structures in the cell, including DNA and RNA, shape every organism. But we are now overdue for another and more profound revolution in science, one you’ve probably heard very little about. 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. On a new episode of ID the Future, science writer and Discovery Institute Senior Fellow David Klinghoffer speaks with me about his new book Plato's revenge: The New Science of the Immaterial Genome. A little book about a very big idea, it tells the story of the scientist, Dr. Richard Sternberg, who has spent the last two decades bringing together cutting-edge molecular biology, higher mathematics, and common-sense reasoning to flesh out this potentially revolutionary new idea.

Intelligent Design in Real Time

The immaterial genome hypothesis is a very old one, sketched by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato in his dialogue Timaeus over two millennia ago. But aspects of it are very new too, confirmed by the latest scientific discoveries about the genome. And although the past figures into this story prominently, it’s very much a theory of the present, affecting all of us, as well as every developing organism, at this very moment. Klinghoffer explains: “We are accustomed to thinking of intelligent design as having happened in historical time…And it has. But Sternberg’s thesis really takes intelligent design to a different level. It shows design operating in real time, operating at this moment in every cell in your body.”

Also discussed: a useful analogy to help you wrap your head around the immateriality of the genome, a glimpse into the long line of intellectual forbears behind Sternberg’s idea, and some thoughts from Klinghoffer on what you’ll get out of reading this user-friendly and concise volume. Download the podcast or listen to it here.