Torday Meets Leskowitz- A Synthesis

John S. Torday
Professor of Pediatrics
Obstetrics and Gynecology
Evolutionary Medicine
University of California- Los Angeles

Email: jtorday@ucla.edu  

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Synopsis:

In a MAVERICK Talk on Aug 9, 2026, Rick Leskowitz presented his interest in biofields to the SSE. In his talk, Leskowitz hypothesized a relationship between biofields and the environment. On the other hand, Torday has provided similar interrelationships based on the essential role of gravitational force in the process of evolution in a MAVERICK Talk on December 14, 2025. According to Torday’s hypothesis, the progression is from Stellar Nucleosynthesis to the elements, to the protocell, to Symbiogenesis and Homeostatasis as the means and purpose for evolution. 

Bearing in mind that Stellar Nucleosynthesis produced crystals, which when pressure is applied produce piezo electricity. Biology mimics the latter, producing energy to sustain and perpetuate its existence through internal selection to maintain homeostasis. Bearing in mind the homology between the atom and the cell, both being deterministic and probabilistic, life is derivative of non-life, due to Symbiogenesis in combination with homeostasis, yielding the complementary observations by both Leskowitz and Torday. 

The homologies between non-life and life are important because they provide insights to the fundaments of both, such as the meaning and purpose of life, the nature and significance of aging, as well as that of consciousness. Such insights to the ontology and epistemology of life are provided by Leskowitz and Torday in an age when AI threatens to steal our ‘birthright’ as humans, the latter being unable to account for non-local consciousness

Biography: 

John S. Torday received his MSc (1971) and PhD (1976) from McGill University. He has been on the faculties of Harvard Medical School (1976-91); University of Maryland Medical School (1991-98), and UCLA (1998-present). He is Director of the Guenther Research Laboratory, Lundquist Institute. He has authored >250 peer-reviewed articles and 16 monographs on the cellular origin of consciousness to date. He has given lectures concerning the necessity for gravity in evolution in the U.S., Canada, U.K., France and Germany. His ground-breaking article on ‘quantum entanglement’ and consciousness launched a special issue of Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology in 2024.