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

Today on ID the future, guest host Beatrice Russu 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

nine by Wilhelm Johanson 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

a 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

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