Welcome to ID the Future, a podcast about intelligent design and evolution.

Today on ID the Future, guest host Beatrice Rusu interviews Dr. Richard Sternberg,

holder of PhDs in molecular evolution and system

science, focusing on theoretical biology. He's a research scientist with the Biologic Institute,

and she caught up with him after lectures he delivered to Discovery Institute's Seattle Summer

Seminars this summer. So we have here Dr. Sternberg, and Dr. Sternberg, thank you for taking the time to talk with me.

And I wanted to ask you, if you can give us a summary of your talk, what was your main message?

I know you gave two talks, one on Wales and one on immaterial genome. And I wanted

to ask you to give us a quick summary of your main points. Well, first, my main point is that

the gene, the term that was coined in 1909 by Wilhelm Johansson, lacks a coherent material description. It's not a particle,

as many people have conceived it. I don't think it can be identified with DNA, though DNA is

certainly part of the picture. And when we look at the information-carrying capacity of DNA, and we look at the actual processes

that take place in ontogeny that is going from a single-celled zygote to a fully developed,

say, human being like yourself, you suddenly realize that there's this gap in data content,

that 20,000 quote-unquote protein-coding genes are simply not adequate to explain the complexity

that we see in a human being, or indeed the complexity that we see in a plant.

So there has to be something in addition to just the DNA sequences alone that explains development.

And that's what the gene concept is supposed to explain.

That's where it came in as a placeholder.

So the argument is that when we look at the existing

body of information as of today, and we try to say, okay, can I take the complexity of a plant or

a complexity of a fly or a complexity of a human being, just pick any organism, and can I reduce it to some

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