Why We Were Told So Often the Huge Lie That DNA Is a Specification for Building Humans

The Big Lie Repeatedly Told About DNA

Not long after DNA was discovered about the middle of the twentieth century, scientists and science writers began spreading a false idea about DNA: the idea that DNA contains a specification for building an organism such as a human.  There are various ways in which this false idea is stated, all equally false:

• Many described DNA or the genome as a blueprint for an organism.
• Many said DNA or the genome is a recipe for making an organism.
• Many said DNA or the genome is a program for building an organism, making an analogy to a computer program.
• Many claimed that DNA or genomes specify the anatomy of an organism. 
• Many claimed that genotypes (the DNA in organisms) specify phenotypes (the observable characteristics of an organism).
• Many claimed that genotypes (the DNA in organisms) "map"  phenotypes (the observable characteristics of an organism) or "map to" phenotypes.
• Many claimed that DNA contains "all the instructions needed to make an organism."
• Many claimed that there is a "genetic architecture" for an organism's body or some fraction of that body. 
• Using a little equation,  many claimed that a "genotype plus the environment equals the phenotype," a formulation as false  as the preceding statements, since we know of nothing in the environment that would cause phenotypes to arise from genotypes that do not specify such phenotypes. 

Some of these claims are documented in Table 1 of the paper here, where some authors count (in only June and July of the year 2000, in a single newspaper) 10 claims that DNA is a draft or script, 6 that it is a software program, 8 that it is a blueprint, 6 that it is a cook book (a recipe), and 12 that is a map. The same table shows similar claims being made abundantly in the leading scientific journal Nature; and Table 2 and Table 3 of the same paper shows similar claims being made abundantly in 2001 and 2003 in both the newspaper and Nature. 

There was never any justification for making any such claims. The only coding system that has ever been discovered in DNA is a system allowing only low-level chemical information to be specified.  That coding system is known as the genetic code, and it is merely a system whereby certain combinations of nucleotide base pairs in DNA stand for amino acids.  So a section of DNA can specify the amino acids that make up a protein molecule. But no one has ever discovered any coding system by which DNA could specify anything larger than a protein molecule. 

The Genetic Code

No one ever discovered any coding system in DNA by which parts of DNA can specify high-level anatomy such as the arrangement of parts in an organ, or a skeletal structure, or an overall body appearance.  No one has even discovered any coding system in DNA by which the structure of cells can be specified.  The human body has at least 200 types of cells, and the structure of none of these cell types is specified by DNA. DNA does not even specify the structure of organelles that are the building blocks of cells.

If you ponder the simple fact that blueprints don't build things, you can start to get an idea of how nonsensical is the claim that a human arises because a DNA blueprint is read.  Blueprints have no power of construction.  When buildings are built with the help of blueprints, it is because intelligent agents read the blueprints to get an idea of what type of construction work to do, and because intelligent agents then follow such instructions. But there is nothing in the human body below the neck with the power to understand and carry out instructions for building a body if they happened to exist in DNA. 

Consider what goes on when you read a web page at a complicated site such as www.facebook.com or www.buzzfeed.com.  What occurs is a very complicated interaction between two things: (1) a web page that is rather like a blueprint for how the page should look and act, and (2) an extremely complicated piece of software called a web browser, which is rather like a construction crew that reads the web's page blueprint (typically written in HTML), and then constructs very quickly a well-performing web page.  If the web browser did not exist, you would never be able to get a well-performing web page.  The construction of a three-dimensional human body would be a feat trillions of times more complicated than the mere display of a two-dimensional web page.  Just as it is never enough to have just a web page without a web browser,  having some DNA blueprint for building a body would never be enough to build a body.  You would also need to have some "body blueprint reader" that would be some system almost infinitely more complicated than a web browser, in order for a body to get built.  

We have no evidence that DNA contains any instructions for building cells or anatomy, and we also have no evidence for the existence of any such thing as a "body blueprint reader" in the human body, capable of reading, understanding and executing incredibly complicated instructions for building a human body. When you consider the amount of organization in a human body, you may start to realize the gigantic absurdity of thinking that a human specification can be found in some molecule merely listing low-level chemical information. 

The organization of large organisms is extremely hierarchical.  Subatomic particles are organized into atoms, which can be organized into amino acids, which are organized into protein molecules, which are organized into protein complexes, which are organized into organelles, which are organized into cells, which are organized into tissues, which are organized into organs, which are organized into organ systems, which are organized into organisms. 

Cells are so complex they have been compared to cities. The diagrams you see of cells are enormously misleading, making them look many  thousands of times simpler than they are.  A cell diagram will show 20 or 30 organelles in a cell, but the actual number is typically more than 1000.  A cell diagram will typically depict a cell as having only a few mitochondria, but cells typically have many thousands of mitochondria, as many as a million. A cell diagram will typically depict a cell as having only a few lysosomes, but cells typically have hundreds of lysosomes. A cell diagram will typically depict one or a few stacks of a Golgi apparatus, each with only a few cisternae, but a cell will typically have between 10 and 20 stacks, each having as many as 60 cisternae.  There are about 200 different types of cells in the human body. 

Internally organisms are enormously dynamic, both because of constant motion inside in the body, and also because of a constant activity inside the body involving cellular changes. Just one example of this enormously dynamic activity is the fact that protein molecules in the brain are replaced at a rate of about 3% per day. A large organism is like some building that is constantly being rebuilt, with some fraction of it being torn down every day, and some other fraction of it being replaced every day.  The analogy comparing a cell to a factory gives us some idea of the gigantically dynamic nature of organisms.

When we consider this complexity, you may realize that the very idea of a blueprint for building a body is an absurdity. To have a visual specification for building a human body, you would need something more like a thousand-page textbook filled with color diagrams and tons of fine print.  Even if such a specification existed in the human body, it wouldn't explain morphogenesis: because the specification would be so complex it would require some super-genius to understand it all and build things according to such a specification. 

We may compare the idea that a human body arises because of the reading of a body blueprint in DNA to the myth of Santa Claus. Just as there is no evidence of a big toy workshop around the North Pole manned by toy-making elves and led by Santa Claus, there is no evidence of any such thing in DNA as a specification for making cells, organs or human bodies. And just as you would never explain the phenomenon of children getting Christmas gifts even if there were to exist Santa flying around in a sled filled with toys (who would have neither the time nor the toys to give more than a thousandth of the world's children their gifts on Christmas night), you could never explain the growth of a vastly organized full-sized human body from a speck-sized zygote even if there were to exist a blueprint for building humans in DNA (because of the simple fact that blueprints don't build things, and we know of nothing in a body capable of understanding a vastly complex human body construction blueprint if it happened to exist in DNA). 

Below are some examples of miniature languages, two of them involving artificial constraints, and the other matching what can be expressed in DNA:

MINIATURE LANGUAGES
NAME	LIST OF WORDS IN LANGUAGE	WHAT CAN BE SPECIFIED BY LANGUAGE	WHAT CANNOT BE SPECIFIED BY LANGUAGE
Sandwich Language	Bread, Turkey, Ham, Cheese, Lettuce, Tomato, Onion, Bacon	Various types of sandwiches	Anything that is not a sandwich
Exercise Language	Jump, Crouch, Stretch, Punch, Lift, Bend, Squat, Spin	Various types of exercises	Anything that is not an exercise
DNA Language	Alanine, Asparagine, Aspartic acid, Arginine, Cysteine, Glutamine, Glycine, Glutamic acid, Histidine, Isoleucine, Lysine,Leucine, Phenylalanine, Methionine, Serine, Proline, Tryptophan,Threonine, Tyrosine, Valine	Polypeptide sequences – a linear one-dimensional  sequence of amino acids	Anything that is not a polypeptide sequence, including the 3D shape of a protein, the shape of any body part, the structure  of any organism, or a behavior or instinct.

So how does a full-sized human body manage to arise from the tiny barely visible simplicity of a speck-sized egg existing just after human conception? This is a miracle of origination a thousand miles over the heads of today's scientists. 

Some of the Scientists Who Lied to Us About DNA

Let us now look at some of the prominent scientists who told us outrageous lies about DNA. An example of a Darwinist biologist shamelessly telling this gigantic lie is the utterly deceptive statement made below by French biologist Francois Jacob on page 313 in his 1970 book "The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity":

"The formation of a man from an egg is a marvel of exactitude and precision. How can millions of cells emerge, in specialized lineages, in perfect order in time and space, from a single cell? This baffles the imagination. During embryonic development, the instructions contained in the chromosomes of the egg are gradually translated and executed, determining when and where the thousands of molecular species that constitute the body of an adult are to be formed. The whole plan of growth, the whole series of operations to be carried out, the order and the site of syntheses and their coordination are all written down in the nucleic-acid message." 

The last two sentences were a huge fiction, written decades before the Human Genome Project had even started to analyze the contents of DNA. Jacob's ideological motivation in telling this lie is made rather clear by the quotation he gives at the very beginning of this book, where he quotes Diderot as saying this:

"Do you see this egg? With it you can overthrow all the schools of theology, all the churches of the earth." 

From this quote, you can infer what was going on in the mind of Francois Jacob, who scorned all religion as a "farce":

(1) He got the idea that if a blueprint for making humans was to be found in a human egg, that this might be a devastating blow against religion, one that might help to "overthrow all the schools of theology, all the churches of the earth" by somehow showing that the physical origin of each human was a purely mechanistic affair that required no special assistance (directly or indirectly) from some divine power. 

(2) Not content to wait for the discovery of such a blueprint in DNA, Jacob simply told us the lie that such a thing had already been discovered in a "nucleic acid message" (DNA) in the human egg. 

Another French biologist who told us gigantic lies about DNA was Jacques Monod. On page 104 of his 1971 book "Chance and Necessity; An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology," Monod told us the following grotesque lie about DNA:

"The universal components -- the nucleotides on the one side, the amino acids on the other -- are the logical equivalents of an alphabet in which the structure and consequently the specific associative functions of proteins are spelled out. In this alphabet can therefore be written all the diversity of structures and performances the biosphere contains."

The first sentence is a half-truth, and the second statement is a huge lie. Nucleotides specify amino acids, which merely specify the chemical chain that is the starting point of a protein, not its three-dimensional structure. Protein molecules are merely a low-level building block of organelles, which are building blocks of cells, which are building blocks of tissues, which are building blocks of organs, which are building blocks of organisms. Claiming that the DNA alphabet (merely spelling out amino acids) "can therefore be written all the diversity of structures and performances the biosphere contains" was a gigantic fiction. The lists of amino acids given in DNA do not and cannot spell out anatomical structures. DNA does not even specify the structure of cells. The fictional idea that DNA specifies the human structure was stated in various other ways by Monod. 

Like Francois Jacob, Monod gives away his ideological motivations in a quotation at the front of his book. Monod's quotation is some atheistic passage by Sartre. On page 171 Monod further gives away his ideological motivations by referring to the "disgusting farrago of Judeo-Christian religiosity, scientistic progressism, belief in the 'natural' rights of man, and utilitarian pragmatism." Monod's book is largely devoted to trying to combat what he calls "animist" thinking, by which he means any kind of spirituality or theism or belief in souls or spirits or human destiny. It seems the intensity of Monod's hatred towards all spiritual ideas was one of the things that led him to tell the lie that DNA was a specification for making a human. Such a lie was a linchpin of his anti-religious reasoning. On the next page Monod tells us that it "is perfectly true that science outrages values" and telling us (using italics) that science must ignore values. He expounds on this idea of ignoring values very emphatically in the next pages. 

Monod certainly followed his own "ignore values" suggestion, by ignoring the value of telling the truth, and telling the outrageous lie that DNA contained a program for constructing human bodies, telling this lie decades before the Human Genome Project for analyzing the contents of DNA had even begun. Another example of a scientist lying about DNA came from Francis Crick, who in 1988 told us the lie that "the growth of an organism is controlled by an elaborate program, written in its genes," followed later in the same book by the lie that "genes are units of instruction in an elaborate program that both forms the organism from the fertilized egg and helps control much of its later behavior."  DNA is not a program, and the genes that make up DNA are not any program that forms organisms. DNA does not have any of the control structures (such as if/then statements) found in computer programs. DNA does not specify the growth of an organism, and does not know or state anything about organisms or their cells. In the same book Crick tells us of his "strong inclination towards atheism," which helps explain his DNA misrepresentations.  The Human Genome Project had not even started when Crick told us these whoppers about DNA. 

Another example of a Darwinist biologist telling the appalling lie that DNA is a blueprint for building organisms may be found in the 1991 book "One Long Argument" by Ernst Mayr. On page 150 he falsely stated, "The genetic program does not by itself supply the building material of new organisms, but only the blueprint for making the phenotype." No such blueprint for making organisms exists in DNA. On page 99 we get a hint about the atheistic motivations of this lie, for Mayr tells us this:  "The conviction that the diversity of the natural world was the result of natural processes and not the work of God was the idea that brought all the so-called Darwinians together."

Carl Sagan was another prominent scientist who lied to us about DNA. On page 259 of a book, Sagan stated, "Molecular biologists are busily recording the sequence of the three billion nucleotides that specify how to make a human being." That job was finished in the year 2003 when the Human Genome Project was completed, and no such specification of "how to make a human being" was ever found in DNA or its nucleotide sequences. When Sagan wrote the words, we already knew why DNA could not possibly be a specification of "how to make a human being," because we knew that DNA only specifies low-level chemical information such as the amino acid sequences of proteins, not higher-level structural information such as how to make a cell or an organ or organ system or a human. Sagan's misrepresentations about DNA also occurred on page 16 of his book "The Dragons of Eden," where he claimed that DNA was a specification of how to make a human:

"It is clear, then, that the sequence of rungs on our DNA ladders represents an enormous library of information. It is equally clear that so rich a library is required to specify as exquisitely constructed and intricately functioning an object as a human being."

On page 253 of his book Billions and Billions, Sagan told us this  lying boast about DNA:  "The most significant aspect of the DNA story is that the fundamental processes of life now seem fully understandable in terms of physics and chemistry." To the contrary, scientists lack any credible explanation of so simple a thing as how human cells are able to reproduce; they lack any credible explanation of the most basic mental processes such as thinking and memory; and since DNA is not a specification for making a human, scientists lack any credible explanation for the progression from a speck-sized zygote to an adult human. Later on the same page, Sagan made clear his ideological motivations for the previous quote, making clear that it was all about asserting "no life force, no spirit, no soul." Sagan was guilty of quite a few severe misrepresentations about important scientific matters, as I document in my post "Misstatements and Dubious Claims of Carl Sagan." 

 

Erwin Schrodinger was a famous physicist who wrote a book about biology entitled What Is Life?  Schrodinger told a huge lie in that book. It came when he stated this:

"Let me use the word 'pattern' of an organism in the sense in be which the biologist calls it 'the four-dimensional pattern', meaning not only the structure and functioning of that organism in the adult, or in any other particular stage, but the whole of its ontogenetic development from the fertilized egg the cell to the stage of maturity, when the organism begins to reproduce itself. Now, this whole four-dimensional pattern is known to be determined by the structure of that one cell, the fertilized egg. Moreover, we know that it is essentially determined by the structure of only a small part of that cell, its large nucleus....It is these chromosomes, or probably only an axial skeleton fibre of what we actually see under the microscope as the chromosome, that contain in some kind of code-script the entire pattern of the individual's future development and of its functioning in the mature state."

No such knowledge existed when Schrodinger wrote these lying words in the 1940's. By now the cell, the cell nucleus and DNA have all been exhaustively studied, and no one has found in such things anything like a pattern specifying the structure of an adult organism or "the whole of its ontogenetic development from the fertilized egg the cell to the stage of maturity, when the organism begins to reproduce itself." All that is contained in DNA and the cell nucleus and genes is low-level chemical information such as which amino acids are in a particular protein molecule, and not even a specification of the structure of any cell. 

The only thing true about Schrodinger's statement is the insight that to specify a body you would need four-dimensional information. Human bodies are not just three-dimensional structures, but also things with constant internal dynamism, as internally active as a very active factory. To specify a human body and its enormously active metabolism and its development from a speck-sized zygote, you would need four-dimensional information, something that understood width, height, depth and also the element of time. 

But what we have in DNA is merely one-dimensional information. Schematically you can think of it like this:

Amino Acid #1--> Amino Acid #2 --> Amino Acid #3 ....

Here the "..." means "and so on and so forth." 

One of the sacred rituals of Darwinism is to endlessly quote a profoundly misleading statement by the geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky, one claiming that nothing makes sense in biology except in the light of evolution. Given that Darwinists lack any credible explanation for anatomy or human minds (neither of which are explained by DNA or its genes), and the fact that Darwinists lack any theory of biological organization that can explain the mountainous levels of organization and purposeful complexity in biological organisms, a more truthful statement would be to say that pretty much nothing in biology makes any sense in the light of the dogmas of Darwinist biologists such as Theodosius Dobzhansky. 

On page 242 of his 1955 book Evolution, Genetics and Man, Dobzhansky told us the following huge lie:

"What we do inherit is, instead, genes which determine the pattern of developmental processes. The fertilized egg is a single cell which becomes many cells; these cells become compounded into various organs and acquire various physiological functions; the body grows, reaches a stage when it is capable of reproducing its like, and finally becomes old and dies."

There was no evidence at the time that genes (parts of DNA) "determine the pattern of developmental processes." A similar lie was told by Dobzhansky in his 1975 book Mankind Evolving: The Evolution of the Human Species. On page 42 he stated this: "All the traits, characters and features of the phenotype are, of necessity, determined by the genotype and by the sequence of environments with which the phenotypes interacts." There is no specification of how to make a human body or any of its organs or cells in a organism's genotype (its DNA or set of genes), and such a specification is not to be found anywhere in "the sequence of environments with which the phenotypes interacts." Your life experiences do not make up any organizational effect that can explain the progression of a one-celled zygote to the vastly more organized state of a human body.  

On page 164 of the same book, Dobzhansky showed himself to be a very big liar by making the preposterous claim that "the differences between man and ape are quantitative and not qualitative." Anyone who makes such a claim (so contrary to all human experience) is a very big liar. 

Robert Sinsheimer was a biologist who described DNA as "the book of life." He told this big fat lie about such a "book of life": "In this book are instructions, in a curious and wonderful code, for making a human body." No such instructions have been found in DNA. We understand the simple code used by DNA, and it is a code for specifying low-level chemicals such as amino acids, not a code for specifying the structure of cells, organs or human bodies.  

On page 287 of his book The Strands of a Life: The Science of DNA and the Art of Education, Sinsheimer engages in some very serious miseducation by writing this:

"In the deepest sense, we are who we are because of our genes. Genes provide our physical framework, much of the specific basis for personality, and the raw material for intellect."

This was all a very big fiction. Genes do not specify any anatomical structures, and certainly do not "provide our physical framework." They also do not provide any basis for personality, and do any even specify how to build any of the neurons in the human brain (which are not actually the raw material for intellect).  We are who we are mostly because of things having nothing to do with genes, such as the experiences we have had. On the same page Sinsheimer told us this gigantic whopper: "Here in our genome is written in DNA letters the history, the evolution of our species over billions of years." DNA is not a history book, and the human species is only about 100,000 years old, making it impossible for anything to specify "the evolution of our species over billions of years." Such a statement is as absurd as claiming that you have a book detailing "the history of the United States government over millions of years." 

Sydney Brenner was a Nobel Prize-winning biologist. On page 159 of the book Mind, life, and universe : conversations with great scientists of our time, Brenner tells us a great big lie about DNA and genes:

"If you look at genes, they are a description of the final organism...Encoding of the entire organism in a molecular description (that we call DNA) allows indirect propagation."

Later on the same page, Brenner gives away his motivation for this fiction: it is back up his claim that "the wonderful feature about living systems is that they evolved without a designer."

On US government web sites such as www.genome.gov there still stands the false claims the US government made about DNA being a blueprint for building humans, which I list in the post here. I will skip a mention of the many living biologists (including quite a few famous names) who told lies exactly like the lies I have quoted above. One of these famous names told us the complete fiction that DNA is a set of instructions for life's assembly and also the utterly fictional claim that DNA is a screenplay spelling out the history of a person's life.

 

Some Scientists and Doctors Who Told the Truth About DNA

Since the lie that DNA is a blueprint or program or recipe for building bodies has so often been told, I will need to cite again a list I have compiled of distinguished scientists and other PhD's or MD's who have told us such an idea is untrue. Below is the list:

• On page 26 of the recent book The Developing Genome, Professor David S. Moore states, "The common belief that there are things inside of us that constitute a set of instructions for building bodies and minds -- things that are analogous to 'blueprints' or 'recipes' -- is undoubtedly false."
• Biologist Rupert Sheldrake says this "DNA only codes for the materials from which the body is constructed: the enzymes, the structural proteins, and so forth," and "There is no evidence that it also codes for the plan, the form, the morphology of the body."
• Describing conclusions of biologist Brian Goodwin, the New York Times says, "While genes may help produce the proteins that make the skeleton or the glue, they do not determine the shape and form of an embryo or an organism." 
• Professor Massimo Pigliucci (mainstream author of numerous scientific papers on evolution) has stated  that "old-fashioned metaphors like genetic blueprint and genetic programme are not only woefully inadequate but positively misleading."
• Neuroscientist Romain Brette states, "The genome does not encode much except for amino acids."
• In a 2016 scientific paper, three scientists state the following: "It is now clear that the genome does not directly program the organism; the computer program metaphor has misled us...The genome does not function as a master plan or computer program for controlling the organism; the genome is the organism's servant, not its master.
• In the book Mind in Life by Evan Thompson (published by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press) we read the following on page 180: "The plain truth is that DNA is not a program for building organisms, as several authors have shown in detail (Keller 2000, Lewontin 1993, Moss 2003)."
• Developmental biologist C/H. Waddington stated, "The DNA is not a program or sequentially accessed control over the behavior of the cell."
•  Scientists Walker and Davies state this in a scientific paper: "DNA is not a blueprint for an organism; no information is actively processed by DNA alone...DNA is a passive repository for transcription of stored data into RNA, some (but by no means all) of which goes on to be translated into proteins."
• Geneticist Adam Rutherford states that "DNA is not a blueprint," a statement also made by biochemistry professor Keith Fox. 
• "The genome is not a blueprint," says Kevin Mitchell, a geneticist and neuroscientist at Trinity College Dublin, noting "it doesn't encode some specific outcome."
• "DNA cannot be seen as the 'blueprint' for life," says Antony Jose, associate professor of cell biology and molecular genetics at the University of Maryland, who says, "It is at best an overlapping and potentially scrambled list of ingredients that is used differently by different cells at different times."  
• Sergio Pistoi (a science writer with a PhD in molecular biology) tells us, "DNA is not a blueprint," and tells us, "We do not inherit specific instructions on how to build a cell or an organ." 
• Michael Levin (director of a large biology research lab) states that "genomes are not a blueprint for anatomy," and after referring to a "deep puzzle" of how biological forms arise, he gives this example: "Scientists really don’t know what determines the intricate shape and structure of the flatworm’s head."
• Ian Stevenson M.D. stated "Genes alone - which provide instructions for the production of amino acids and proteins -- cannot explain how the proteins produced by their instructions come to have the shape they develop and, ultimately, determine the form of the organisms where they are," and noted that "biologists who have drawn attention to this important gap in our knowledge of form have not been a grouping of mediocrities (Denton, 1986; Goldschmidt, 1952; B. C. Goodwin, 1985, 1988, 1989, 1994; Gottlieb, 1992; Grasse, 1973; E. S. Russell...Sheldrake, 1981; Tauber and Sarkar, 1992; Thompson, 1917/1942)."
• Biologist B.C. Goodwin stated this in 1989: "Since genes make molecules, genetics...does not tell us how the molecules are organized into the dynamic, organized process that is the living organism."
• An article in the journal Nature states this: "The manner in which bodies and tissues take form remains 'one of the most important, and still poorly understood, questions of our time', says developmental biologist Amy Shyer, who studies morphogenesis at the Rockefeller University in New York City."
• Timothy Saunders, a developmental biologist at the National University of Singapore says, "Fundamentally, we have a poor understanding of how any internal organ forms.”
• On the web site of the well-known biologist Denis Noble, we read that "the whole idea that genes contain the recipe or the program of life is absurd, according to Noble," and that we should understand DNA "not so much as a recipe or a program, but rather as a database that is used by the tissues and organs in order to make the proteins which they need."
• A paper by Stuart A. Newman (a professor of cell biology and anatomy) discussing at length the work of scientists trying to evoke "self-organization" as an explanation for morphogenesis states that "public lectures by principals of the field contain confidently asserted, but similarly oversimplified or misleading treatments," and says that "these analogies...give the false impression that there has been more progress in understanding embryonic development than there truly has been." Referring to scientists moving from one bunk explanation of morphogenesis to another bunk explanation, the paper concludes by stating, "It would be unfortunate if we find ourselves having emerged from a period of misconceived genetic program metaphors only to land in a brave new world captivated by equally misguided ones about self-organization."
• Referring to claims there is a program for building organisms in DNA, biochemist F. M. Harold stated "reflection on the findings with morphologically aberrant mutants suggests that the metaphor of a genetic program is misleading." Referring to  self-organization (a vague phrase sometimes used to try to explain morphogenesis), he says, "self-organization remains nearly as mysterious as it was a century ago, a subject in search of a paradigm." 
• Writing in the leading journal Cell, biologists  Marc Kirschner, John Gerhart and Tim Mitchison stated, "The genotype, however deeply we analyze it, cannot be predictive of the actual phenotype, but can only provide knowledge of the universe of possible phenotypes." That's equivalent to saying that DNA does not specify visible biological structures, but merely limits what structures an organism can have (just as a building parts list merely limits what structures can be made from the set of parts). 
• At the Stack Exchange expert answers site, someone posted a question asking which parts of a genome specify how to make a cell (he wanted to write a program that would sketch out a cell based on DNA inputs).  An unidentified expert stated that it is "not correct" that DNA is a blueprint that describes an organism, and that "DNA is not a blueprint because DNA does not have instructions for how to build a cell." No one contradicted this expert's claim, even though the site allows any of its experts to reply. 
• A paper co-authored by a chemistry professor (Jesper Hoffmeyer) tells us this: "Ontogenetic 'information,' whether about the structure of the organism or about its behavior, does not exist as such in the genes or in the environment, but is constructed in a given developmental context, as critically emphasized, for example, by Lewotin (1982) and Oyama (1985)."
• Biologist Steven Rose has stated, "DNA is not a blueprint, and the four dimensions of life (three of space, one of time) cannot be read off from its one-dimensional strand."
• Jonathan Latham has a master's degree in Crop Genetics and a PhD in virology. In his essay “Genetics Is Giving Way to a New Science of Life,” a long essay well worth a read, Latham exposes many of the myths about DNA. Referring to "the mythologizing of DNA," he says that "DNA is not a master controller," and asks, "How is it that, if organisms are the principal objects of biological study, and the standard explanation of their origin and operation is so scientifically weak that it has to award DNA imaginary superpowers of 'expression'” and 'control' to paper over the cracks, have scientists nevertheless clung to it?"
• An interesting 2006 paper by six medical authorities and scientists tells us that "biochemistry cannot provide the spatial information needed to explain morphogenesis," that "supracellular morphogenesis is mysterious," and that "nobody seems to understand the origin of biological and cellular order," contrary to claims that such order arises from a reading of a specification in DNA. 
• Keith Baverstock (with a PhD in chemical kinetics) has stated "genes are like the merchants that provide the necessary materials to build a house: they are neither the architect, nor the builder but, without them, the house cannot be built," and that "genes are neither the formal cause (the blueprint), nor the efficient cause (the builder) of the cell, nor of the organism."
• Evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin stated, "DNA is not self-reproducing; second, it makes nothing; and third, organisms are not determined by it." Noting that "the more accurate description of the role of DNA is that it bears information that is read by the cell machinery," Lewontin lamented the "evangelical enthusiasm" of those who "fetishized DNA" and misspoke so that "DNA as information bearer is transmogrified into DNA as blueprint, as plan, as master plan, as master molecule." In another work he stated "the information in DNA sequences is insufficient to specify even a folded protein, not to speak of an entire organism." This was correct: DNA does not even specify the 3D shapes of proteins, but merely their sequence of amino acids. 
• In 2022 developmental biologist Claudio D. Stern first noted,  "All cells in an organism have the same genetic information yet they generate often huge complexity as they diversify in the appropriate locations at the correct time and generate form and pattern as well as an array of identities, dynamic behaviours and functions." In his next sentence he stated, "The key quest is to find the 'computer program' that contains the instructions to build an organism, and the mechanisms responsible for its evolution over longer periods." Since this was written long after the Human Genome Project had been completed, he thereby suggested that no such instruction program had yet been discovered in the genome (DNA). 

In the very mainstream publication The Guardian, science writer Phillip Ball says this about the Human Genome Project that ended in 2003, noting the failure of science figures to clean up their old misstatements about DNA after they were debunked by the Human Genome Project:

"But a blizzard of misleading rhetoric surrounded the project, contributing to the widespread and sometimes dangerous misunderstandings about genes that now bedevils the genomic age. So far, there have been few attempts to set the record straight. Even now, the National Human Genome Research Institute calls the HGP an effort to read 'nature’s complete genetic blueprint for building a human being' – the 'book of instructions' that 'determine our particular traits'. A genome, says the institute, 'contains all of the information needed to build and maintain that organism'. But this deterministic 'instruction book' image is precisely the fallacy that genomics has overturned, and the information in the genome is demonstrably incomplete. Yet no one associated with genomic research seems bothered about correcting these false claims...Plenty remain happy to propagate the misleading idea that we are 'gene machines' and our DNA is our 'blueprint'.

The correct relation between DNA and the different levels of organization in a human body is illustrated in the diagram below. The black bar makes it clear that none of the seven most complex levels of organization is specified by DNA or genes.

Why We Were Told So Often the Huge Lie That DNA Is a Specification for Building Organisms

Very clearly, when we were told so often that DNA is a specification for making an organism, we were told a lie. But why was this lie told so often? Is it because biologists or science writers just enjoy making up lies, for no particular reason? No.  The main reason why we were told so often the lie that DNA is a specification for building organisms is that this was a lie that Darwinists very much needed to tell. 

If a 16-year-old teenage female has a very strict and often angry father, and this daughter arrives home at 1:00 AM after a long romantic session with her boyfriend, why does the daughter say, "I'm late because the car broke down"? Because this is the lie she needs to tell in this situation.  If an unfaithful husband spends the evening with his mistress, and comes home to his wife at midnight, why does he say, "Sorry, honey, I had to work late at the office"? Because this is the lie he needs to tell in this situation.  If a politician is photographed taking a thick sealed manila envelope from a corporate polluter who has given him 500 new hundred-dollar bills, why does the politician say something like, "The envelope just had some suggestions on how to help people?" Because it's the lie he needs to tell in this situation.  People typically lie because they are trying to get themselves out of some difficult situation. 

That's the main reason why Darwinists started telling us the lie that DNA is a blueprint for building humans, a specification for making organisms: because it was a lie they very much needed to tell. The discovery of DNA was kind of a combined blessing and curse for Darwinist theorists. In one limited sense, such a discovery was a blessing, because Darwinists could now point to concrete examples of microevolution that were well understood. For example, a paper might be written describing how some DNA mutations might cause a virus to become more dangerous.  But there were two gigantic problems for Darwinism caused by the discovery of DNA. The first gigantic problem was that DNA contained a vast repository of low-level information, specified information that had to be just right. This presented a new explanatory problem as to how this huge repository of "had to be just right" information had arisen. Darwin had used the word "information" a total of 37 times in his two main works, never once using such a word to claim there was information stored in an organism.  The second gigantic problem was that DNA wasn't the anatomy specification that Darwinists needed.  The DNA molecule merely contained low-level chemical information.  

Darwinism has always maintained that mutations can accumulate to produce dramatic structural transformations, such as an ape-like or chimp-like species gradually changing into a human species, or fish species gradually changing into reptile species.  However enormously unlikely such a transformation might be,  it would at least be not utterly impossible if an organism carries inside it some genetic plan that specifies an anatomy; for such a plan might be changed by mutations. But what if the genetic material passed from one generation to the next contains no specification of anatomy, and fails to even have a specification of the structure of cells? That would be a fatal difficulty for Darwinism, a "show-stopper."  If DNA does not specify anatomy,  then one species gradually changing into some other species with a vastly different anatomy through random mutations is not just improbable, but seemingly downright impossible. 

For Darwinists the choice was pretty simple. They could concede that a fatal difficulty had been discovered in their theorizing, and that mutations in genetic material (DNA) could not possibly be the explanation for complex anatomical and cellular innovations occurring during Earth's history (an admission that would have destroyed the credibility of their boasts about understanding biological origins). Or they could start misleading people by telling them the fiction that DNA was some kind of blueprint for making an organism (against all the evidence). It was kind of a choice of "die or lie," "defeat or cheat," "retreat or deceit."  Many Darwinists chose the second of these options. 

Soon after the discovery of DNA, Darwinists began telling us all over the place the huge lie that DNA was a blueprint for building a human body. There were various different versions of this lie (some involving a metaphor of a recipe or a program or a map). They all involved planting in people's mind the utterly erroneous idea that DNA was a specification for making a human body. Again and again (contrary to all the facts), we were told the lie that Darwinists needed to tell: that DNA contains all the information to build a human body. 

Such statements were lies both before and after the Human Genome Project was completed in 2003.  Before the completion of the project, the situation was that we knew what parts of DNA did (which was merely specify the amino acid sequences of proteins), and there was no sign of any anatomical information in DNA.  Even if you don't know the complete contents of something, it is a lie to claim that such a thing contains something completely different from what you have discovered in it.  For example, if you know that a small child has 20 notebooks, and you have checked a few of them and found nothing but crayon drawings, it would be a lie for you to claim that the notebooks you haven't looked in contain symphony scores or novel astrophysical theories.  Similarly, before the Human Genome Project was completed, it was a lie to claim that DNA was a blueprint for making organisms, because no signs of anatomy instructions had been found in DNA, and also no signs of instructions for making cells had been found in DNA. 

After the Human Genome Project was completed in 2003, DNA had been exhaustively cataloged, and there was still no evidence of any anatomy specification in it, no evidence that DNA specified how to make any type of cell.  But the "DNA is a body blueprint" lies and the "DNA is a body construction program" lies continued full blast from Darwinists, who kept repeating the earlier lies told by earlier people like the biologists Jacob and Monod. 

Other than the reality that telling lies about DNA is necessary for Darwinist theorists to cover up a fatal difficulty in their theory, a lesser reason why Darwinists told such lies was to try to lend credence to their atheistic or anti-spiritual ideology (such a motivation is made rather clear in some of the cases cited above).  There were countless others who just mindlessly parroted the claim that DNA is a blueprint, kind of thinking to themselves that it must be true because someone else said it; and it is debatable whether such persons should be called liars or just extremely careless writers. 

Telling us huge lies about DNA is only one of many ways in which Darwinism enthusiasts have been "cheating for Charles" by making misleading statements. It is rather as if such people think they are soldiers in some kind of intellectual holy war, that the ends justify the means, and that the regular rules of honest speech may by violated, as long as it serves the grand purpose of assuring the global dominance of Darwinist ideology.  Misrepresentations and misleading language have been core features of Darwinist literature from its very beginning. Examples include the following:

• More than 160 years of using the misleading phrase "natural selection," which does not actually refer to any selection (selection is a word meaning a choice by a conscious agent). Darwin himself in a letter to Charles Lyell dated June 6, 1860 said, "I suppose  'natural selection' was a bad term ; but to change it now, I think, would make confusion worse confounded." Darwin wrote in 1869,  "In the literal sense of the word, no doubt, natural selection is a false term."
• The use of doubly-deceptive phrases such as "selection pressure," a reputed effect that does not actually involve either selection or pressure. 
• The use of enormously deceptive claims that there is no fundamental difference between humans and animals, or only quantitative differences.
• The frequent use of misleading language trying to make animals sound like they have minds rather like humans, and trying to make humans sound like beings who have minds like animals. 
• Misleading equivocations involving the word "evolution" that shift between four different definitions of evolution, switching between defining evolution as (1) mere gene pool variation; (2) macroevolution (dramatic anatomical transformations such as dinosaurs turning into birds); (3) common descent (the idea that all organisms are descendants of the same ancestor), or (4) the claim that all earthly organisms have natural accidental origins  (the factuality of the first definition being used to "prove" the correctness of the three vastly more presumptuous definitions, none of which involve things proven or observed). 
• Misleading equivocations involving the words "variant" and "variations" that switch around between mere assertions of variations in the size, weight and health of some organism to assertions that nature produces "variants" that involve dramatic new features (something not well-observed in the study of any generation of organisms).
• The frequent use of misleading cell diagrams that depict cells as being thousands of times simpler than they are. A Nature article says that "textbook depictions of the cell’s innards have changed little since 1896," and quotes a scientist saying, "Nothing is drawn the way the cell actually looks."
• Frequent misleading uses of the phrase "body plan," in which a body plan is strangely defined as the mere rough shape of all organisms in the same phylum, despite the term suggesting something vastly different: a blueprint for how to build the whole structure of an organism. 
• The very frequent use of misleading analogies, such as comparing Darwinian evolution to a tinkerer (a tinkerer is a conscious agent willfully attempting to improve something by trial and error, and evolution is no such thing). 
• Misstatements about the complexity of protein molecules,  such as documented here and here,  in which an author claims that a typical protein molecule involves only about 100 amino acids, when the median number of amino acids in a human protein molecule is about 431, exponentially harder to achieve than merely 100. 
• The frequent use of misleading language designed to "sweep under the rug" the vast levels of organization and purposeful molecular machinery in organisms, such as language describing humans as "bags of chemicals" or "star stuff." 
• Deceptive appeals to artificial selection (a purposeful guidance of breeding) to try to support claims about so-called "natural selection" (claimed to involve no purposeful agency).
• Frequent misleading uses of the term "early human" to describe long-extinct organisms without any evidence to show that such organisms had any of the defining characteristics of humans (such as language and the ability to use symbols). 
• Extremely misleading statements that Darwinian evolution is not random, evoking some special, uncommon definition of the word "random" different from the normal definition of that term: "happening, done, or chosen by chance rather than according to a plan."
• Misleading claims claims that "trees of life" (speculative social constructs of analysts made after countless arbitrary analysis choices) are "yielded" or "produced" by genomes, things that do not naturally tell any story about a "tree of life."  
• Extremely misleading language in which non-biological reactions in lifeless chemicals are referred to as "metabolism" (contrary to the definition of metabolism, which is chemical reactions required for the maintenance of living thing), used for the sake of deceptively blurring the difference between life and lifeless chemicals .
• Extremely misleading claims of universal acceptance of Darwinist dogma, something not well-established by secret ballot opinion polls (the only reliable way to determine scientific opinion).
• Misleading claims that when scientists say something is a theory, it means it is well-established (a claim that can be refuted by many examples, such as the common example of the term "string theory" to describe a completely unsubstantiated type of physicist speculation).
• Misleading characterizations of opponents, often involving attempts to insinuate people making no reference to scriptures are fundamentalists.
• Deceptive claims about chance protein evolution, such as the assertion by one authority that if you have "trillions" of random protein molecules you can get "any function you want" (because the average amino acid length of a human protein is more than 400 amino acids, and because there are 20 possible amino acids in each position of a protein, such a statement underestimated by about 10 to the 500th power the difficulty of getting by chance "any function you want"). 
• Misleading language about natural history, such as failing to describe enormous leaps of organization and complexity as very complex innovations, but merely describing them as "variants" or "diversification."
• Misleading language using the phrase "missing link," often referring to things that are not credible evolutionary missing links, such as claiming that a type of dinosaur is a missing link between dinosaurs and birds, because it has a triangular membrane on its front similar to a triangular membraine on the back of birds.
• Misleading claims that evolution might have occurred before life existed, claims evoking a special use of the word "evolution" very different from  normal definitions. 
• A massive repetition by Darwinists of a doubtful claim that human genomes and chimp genomes are 98% or 98.6% the same, ignoring a 2005 paper with the title "Eighty percent of proteins are different between humans and chimpanzees." A 2021 study found that "1.5% to 7% of the human genome is unique to Homo sapiens," suggesting the 98% claim may have been much in error.   
• Misrepresentations involving fossils, often including gluing together (using a mixture such as superglue and baking soda) fossil fragments not known to be from one organism and claiming they are from a single organism.
• Visual misrepresentations of organisms, such as a visual attempting to persuade us that giraffes could have easily evolved from okapi, and depicting okapi as being half the height of giraffes (they are actually only about a third the height of giraffes). 
• Misleading statements about the quality of evidence for spiritual and psychical phenomena that tend to contradict Darwinist explanations, typically made by people who have never seriously studied such evidence, combined with misleading sterotypical or gaslighting characterizations of the people who have reported such phenomena.
• Deceptive drawings of embryos such as used by Darwinist zealot Ernst Haeckel, to try to create some impression that a study of embryos supports Darwinist claims, and the use of such drawings in Darwinist literature to the present day, decades after they had been debunked.  
• Many decades of erroneous claims about origin-of-life studies, which have not made any substantial progress in explaining an origin of life from non-life. 
• Doubly-misleading language in which experiments involving deliberate continuous artificial selection by humans and producing mere disorganized clumps of cells are referred to as examples of "multicellularity evolution," when they are neither multicellularity (examples of organisms with many cells) nor natural evolution.  
• Misleading language about the origin of life, such as referring to amino acids as "seeds of life," which is misleading as saying bricks are the seeds of cathedrals. 
• Questionable research practices: a survey of evolutionary biologists and ecologists reported that "around 64% of surveyed researchers reported they had at least once failed to report results because they were not statistically significant (cherry picking); 42% had collected more data after inspecting whether results were statistically significant (a form of p hacking) and 51% had reported an unexpected finding as though it had been hypothesised from the start (HARKing)."
• The very frequent use by natural history museums of "fossil exhibits" that are entirely plaster or fiberglass, with countless visitors getting the idea that such things were real fossils.
• The evocation of enormously implausible tales such as the tale of monkeys rafting across the Atlantic oceans millions of years ago, with such wild tales described as facts. 
• Frequent evocation of an utterly fallacious principle which one Darwinist evoked by saying "let us suppose instead that each step made in the good direction provides a small advantage in terms of survival or fecundity to the being that makes it," a principle extremely erroneous because improvements in survival or fecundity (reproduction) almost always require many coordinated changes before any such advantage is achieved. 
• Passing off deliberately faked fossils as important evidence of evolution (such as the fraudulent Piltdown Man fossil which for forty years was hailed as a fossil of key significance). 

Once we have realized that the Great DNA Myth has been a huge lie, and that DNA does not contain any specification for building a human body, we can start to realize the truth about how little progress our biologists have made in explaining biological origins and the realities of the human body and mind. That lack of progress is summarized in the table below:

Question	Answer	Discussion
Did scientists credibly explain the appearance (in appreciable quantities) of the building blocks of the building blocks of one-celled life on the early Earth?	No.	What can be called the building blocks of the building blocks of one-celled life are chemical units such as amino acids and nucleotide base pairs. No such things have ever been produced in any experiment realistically simulating the early Earth. The widely discussed Miller-Urey experiment failed in multiple ways to be a realistic simulation of the early Earth.
Did scientists credibly explain the origin of any of the main building blocks of one-celled life on the early Earth?	No.	The main "building blocks" of one-celled life are functional proteins, with even the simplest one-celled life requiring hundreds of types of proteins. No functional protein has ever been produced in any experiment realistically simulating the early Earth.
Did scientists credibly explain the origin of one-celled life?	No.	Life has never been produced from non-life through any kind of laboratory experiment.
Did scientists credibly explain why life uses only left-handed amino acids, when laboratory experiments always produce equal numbers of left-handed and right-handed amino acids?	No.	This long-standing problem (called the homochirality problem) has never been credibly answered. Homochirality is accidentally unachievable.
Did scientists credibly explain the origin of eukaryotic cells?	No.	The most popular current explanation for the appearance of eukaryotic cells (cells many times more complex than the simplest types of cells) involves an unbelievable appeal to non-Darwinian "endosymbiosis" events that are basically "miracles of chance."
Did scientists credibly explain the origin of any of the thousands of types of proteins used by the human body?	No.	The average protein molecule has about 400 amino acids, well-arranged to achieve a particular biological effect. The chance appearance of a functional protein molecule is as improbable as typing monkeys producing a long, grammatical, functional paragraph. Because protein molecules do not fold correctly and are not functional if half or a third of their amino acids are missing, you cannot explain the origin of protein molecules by a gradual accumulation of many parts that were each useful.
Did scientists credibly explain how any cell in the human body is able to reproduce?	No.	Scientists have described various phases in cell reproduction such as anaphase and prophase, but scientists are unable to credibly explain how any eukaryotic cell is able to reproduce. Since cells in the human body are units with a complexity like that of  jet aircraft or automobiles, such a cell reproducing is no explicable than a car splitting into two different functional cars.
Did scientists credibly explain how protein complexes are able to form in the human body?	No.	As there are more than 20,000 types of proteins used by the human body, and DNA does not specify which proteins make up particular protein complexes, the formation of protein complexes in which proteins "find the right team to join" is a mystery, one not credibly explained by mere random combinations. A scientific paper notes that "the majority of cellular proteins function as subunits in larger protein complexes," but also notes that "very little is known about how protein complexes form."
Did scientists credibly explain the occurrence of protein folding continually occurring in the human body?	No	Scientists cannot currently explain how sequences of amino acids are able to continually fold to form the 3D shapes used by protein molecules. Success in the different task of protein structure prediction (using advanced AI software and huge “deep learning” databases) does nothing to explain how protein folding occurs in the human body.
Did scientists credibly explain how a human is able to instantly recall detailed facts when asked a short simple question such as "How did Lincoln die"?	No	We know how information can be instantly retrieved using books or computers: by the use of things such as sorting, addressing and indexing. Since there is no sorting, addressing or indexing in the human brain, the instant recall of learned information is inexplicable under prevailing assumptions of scientists. Finding the right answer to a question by looking in a brain that has no sorting, indexing or addressing should be as hard as finding a needle in a haystack.
Did scientists credibly explain how cells find the right positions in a developing human body?	No	Claims that “morphogen gradients” do anything to solve this mystery are unfounded, and such claims merely shift the mystery from one place to another, creating an equally great mystery of how such chemicals could know where cells should go to.
Did scientists credibly explain how protein transcription occurs so rapidly?	No	Protein transcription is part of the process by which new proteins are created when particular genes in DNA are read to help make a new protein. Protein transcription occurs almost instantly, but scientists are unable to explain why such a thing should not take a very long time, because finding the right gene would be like finding a needle in a haystack. I will describe this issue in a later post. In an article on Chemistry World, we read this: "How does the machinery that turns genes into proteins know which part of the genome to read in any given cell type?" The article makes rather clear that the answer has not yet been found.
Did scientists credibly explain the appearance of any adult human body?	No.	Human DNA merely specifies low-level chemical information such as which amino acids make up a protein. Since the "DNA as body blueprint" or "DNA as body recipe" or "DNA as body program" tales are all lies having no basis in fact, the progression from a speck-sized zygote to the vast organization of an adult human body is unexplained.
Did scientists credibly explain the fossil record?	No.	Scientists have never given a credible explain of the Cambrian Explosion, involving the appearance of all or almost all animal phyla within a relatively short period about 540 million years ago, contrary to what we would expect from Darwinist assumptions. Scientists have also failed to credibly explain the geographic distribution of fossils,  resorting to ridiculous explanatory tall tales such as the story of monkeys rafting across the Atlantic Ocean millions of years ago.
Did scientists credibly explain the appearance of any adult human mind?	No.	There are very many reasons why the human mind cannot be credibly explained as a mere product of the brain, or as the same thing as the brain.
Did scientists credibly explain the origin of the human species?	No.	The answer to this question could only be “Yes” if all  or almost all of the answers above are “Yes.” When all are answers are “No,” the answer to this question is “No” in the loudest voice.

On this blog I have been teaching you the truth about DNA since 2014, when I published a post noting the utter inadequacy of DNA as an explanation for human beings, and noting the need for some conceptual leap to postulate some explanatory reality far beyond anything known by biologists.

The lack of any specification for making a human body in DNA is a clue of the most gigantic importance. In my very long essay here, I list it as being one of what I call the Six Main Clues About Reality. If you study these six clues with sufficient diligence, you will be led to a worldview radically different from the views being taught by our materialist professors. The gigantic implication of the centrally important fact that our bodies lack any molecular specification of a human body or any human cell is this: that we are not at all organisms that arose in any "bottom up" way explicable through low-level chemistry, but must be organisms that arose in a "top-down" way from some unfathomable agency vastly greater than any of us. 

The grand climax is the "rabbit hole bunker" of the multiverse