Reasons for Suspecting You Have Both a Visible Body and an Invisible Body

According to astrophysicists who believe in the theory of cold dark matter, as most astrophysicists do these days, every galaxy has two bodies: a visible body and an invisible body.  According to the theory, most of the mass of each galaxy consists of invisible matter called dark matter. Astrophysicists claim that the invisible body of each galaxy extends in a halo that stretches beyond the disk of the galaxy.  The claim is represented in the diagram below. According to the theory, a disk-shaped galaxy may have a visible body that is disk-shaped, but a larger invisible body that is spherical. 

Astronomers have a particular reason for thinking that every galaxy has an invisible dark matter body that is more massive than the galaxy's visible body, something having to do with the speed at which stars rotate around the center of the galaxy. It is believed that the visible body of a galaxy is contained within the larger dark matter body of a galaxy, and that our entire galaxy is pervaded by dark matter.  According to such a theory, the entire surface of our planet is pervaded by invisible dark matter, which co-exists everywhere with visible matter. 

From such a theory you might conclude that you have two bodies, a cold dark matter body and a warm visible matter body. But under the cold dark matter theory beloved by astrophysicists, cold dark matter has no function, and is not organized at all. So while you might conclude that you have a kind of invisible body of cold dark matter, the idea would not be a particularly interesting one, as it would not explain anything that goes on in your body or your mind. 

However, there is a strong rationale for suspecting that you may have two functional bodies: a functional visible body and a functional invisible body. To explain that rationale, I must explain the gigantic failure of scientists to explain either the origin or the continuation of any adult body. 

If someone defines a fertilized human egg as a human being, a definition that is very debatable, you might be able to say, "I understand the physical origin of a human being," and merely refer to a sperm uniting with an egg cell as such an origin.  But a more challenging question is whether anyone understands the physical origin of an adult human being. The physical structure of an adult human being is a state of organization many millions of times more complex than a mere fertilized speck-sized egg cell.  (A human egg cell is about a tenth of a millimeter in length, but a human body occupies a volume of about 75 million cubic millimeters.) So you don't explain the physical origin of an adult human being by merely referring to the fertilization of an egg cell during or after sexual intercourse. 

We cannot explain the origin of an adult human body by merely using words such as "development" or "growth." Trying to explain the origin of an adult human body by merely mentioning a starting cell and mentioning "growth" or "development" is as vacuous as trying to explain the mysterious appearance of a building by saying that it appeared through "origination" or "construction."  If we were to find some mysterious huge building on Mars, we would hardly be explaining it by merely saying that it arose from "origination" or by saying that it appeared through "construction." When a person tries to explain the origin of a human body by merely mentioning "growth" or "development" or "morphogenesis," he is giving as empty an explanation as someone who tells you he knows how World War II started, because he knows that it was caused by "historical events."

There is a more specific account often told to try to explain the origin of an adult human body. The account goes something like this:

"Every cell contains a DNA molecule that is a blueprint for constructing a human, all the information that is needed. So what happens is that inside the body of a mother, this DNA plan for a human body is read, and the body of a baby is gradually constructed. It's kind of like a construction crew working from a blueprint to make a building."

The problem with this account is that while it has been told very many times, the story is just plain false. There is no such blueprint for a human being in human DNA. We know exactly what is in human DNA. It is merely low-level chemical information such as the sequence of amino acids that make up polypeptide chains that are the starting points of protein molecules. DNA does not specify anatomy. DNA is not a blueprint for making a human. DNA is not a recipe for making a human. DNA is not a program or algorithm for making a human. 

Not only does DNA not specify how to make a human, DNA does not even specify how to make any organ or appendage or cell of a human. There are more than 200 types of cells in human beings, each an incredibly organized thing (cells are so complex they are sometimes compared to factories or cities).  DNA does not specify how to make any of these hundreds of types of cells. Cells are built from smaller structural units called organelles. DNA does not even specify how to make such low-level organelles. 

The chart below diagrams the hierarchical organization of the human body, and what part of that organization is explained by DNA:

Here are a few relevant quotes by authorities:

• 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.” 
• In an essay pointing out the vast complexities and interlocking dependencies of even simpler aspects of biology such as angiogenesis (the formation of new blood vessels),  Jonathan Bard of Oxford University states, "It is pushing the boundaries of belief too far to believe that it is helpful to see the genome as holding a program." 
• 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 for it, 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." 
• Physician James Le Fanu states the following:

  
  

  "The genome projects were predicated on the reasonable assumption that spelling out the full sequence of genes would reveal the distinctive genetic instructions that determine the diverse forms of life. Biologists were thus understandably disconcerted to discover that precisely the reverse is the case. Contrary to all expectations, there is a near equivalence of 20,000 genes across the vast spectrum of organismic complexity, from a millimetre-long worm to ourselves. It was no less disconcerting to learn that the human genome is virtually interchangeable with that of both the mouse and our primate cousins...There is in short nothing in the genomes of fly and man to explain why the fly has six legs, a pair of wings and a dot-sized brain and that we should have two arms, two legs and a mind capable of comprehending the history of our universe."

The lack of any specification for building a human in DNA is only one of two major reasons why a reading from DNA cannot explain the physical origin of a newborn baby or an adult. The second major reason is that there is nothing in the human body that would be capable of reading a DNA specification for making a human, if such a thing happened to exist.  Consider what goes on when a house is built. Dumping some building materials and a blueprint will never cause a house to be built. The house can only get built if there are intelligent blueprint readers smart enough to read the complex blueprints, and carry out their instructions. With more than 200 types of cells in the human body, each so complex they are often compared to factories, a human body is something a million times harder to build than a mere house. If there were some instructions for building a human in DNA, such instructions would be so complex that they would require something extremely intelligent to interpret such instructions and carry them out. But we know of no such intelligence existing in a human womb where a baby grows. 

The "DNA as blueprint" idea is further disproved by the C-value paradox under which many relatively simple organisms have genomes much larger than more complex organisms. For example, a certain flower from Japan has a genome 50 times longer than the human genome, and quite a few amphibians have genomes 10 times bigger than the human genome. 

Told by many scientists for a particular ideological reason that I explain in my post here, the often-made claim that DNA is a blueprint or program or recipe for building a human is an "ivory tower old wives' tale" that simply is not true.  There is no blueprint or recipe or program for making a human in human DNA, and there is nothing intelligent enough in a human womb to read and execute such immensely complicated instructions if they happened to exist. So the physical origin of each full-sized human body is currently a miracle of hierarchical organization far beyond our understanding.  

It is not just the origin of the adult human body that is far beyond our understanding. It is also the continuation of the adult human body that is very far beyond our understanding. Internally adult human bodies are enormously dynamic things. Specifically:

• Many types of cells in the human body have short lifetimes. At the site here, we read, "Dr Frisén has shown that most cells in the body are less than 10 years old." Scientists do not understand how cells are able to reproduce. Scientists merely understand different stages in the reproduction of a cell. 
• The reproduction and maintenance of cells requires a constant creation of many types of protein molecules in the body. Scientists have some understanding of how the body starts to create a new protein molecule, by reading some gene specifying the amino acid sequence of the protein molecule. But protein molecules are not simple linear sequences of amino acids.  To be functional protein molecules typically must fold into elaborate 3D shapes needed for that function. How does that folding occur? Scientists still have no credible explanation. Don't be fooled by those incorrect "science news" headlines claiming that some AlphaFold2 software "solved the protein folding problem." That software merely made some progress on a different problem, what is called the protein folding prediction problem.  The protein folding problem is still unsolved.  We don't understand how in a human body (without anything like the AlphaFold2 software or its deep learning database) string-like polypeptide sequences are able to form the 3D shapes needed for protein functions.  
• A large fraction of all proteins (and probably most proteins) cannot do their jobs themselves, but can only be useful when they act as team members within what are called protein complexes. Such complexes are often quite complex, and may consist of ten or twenty different types of proteins.  But how do these protein complexes arise? Scientists lack any credible explanation.  

Below are some quotes backing up my claim that scientists don't understand how protein complexes form:

• "The majority of cellular proteins function as subunits in larger protein complexes. However, very little is known about how protein complexes form in vivo." Duncan and Mata, "Widespread Cotranslational Formation of Protein Complexes," 2011.
• "While the occurrence of multiprotein assemblies is ubiquitous, the understanding of pathways that dictate the formation of quaternary structure remains enigmatic." -- Two scientists (link). 
• "A general theoretical framework to understand protein complex formation and usage is still lacking." -- Two scientists, 2019 (link). 

For all these reasons, it is not merely the origin of the adult human body that is very, very far beyond the understanding of scientists, but also the continuation of the adult human body, its persistence for fifty years or more after adulthood is reached. This is the most gigantic explanatory shortfall. 

To explain the origin and continuation of individual adult human bodies, we might imagine the continual action of some supernatural force throughout the earthly biosphere.  We might imagine such an agency making millions of small-scale interventions in each of billions of humans, to produce the origination and preservation of adult human bodies. 

But I can imagine a simpler idea. The idea is that some agency may  provide each human with a second body: an invisible body that can be called an invisible morphogenetic body.  The purpose of such an invisible body would be mainly to take care of the massive work of causing the growth of a full physical human body from a tiny speck-sized egg. Such an invisible body might also have the job of maintaining such a physical body. Even the maintenance of a human body seems to require continually a vast amount of organizational work we cannot mechanistically explain. For example, every minute your body is creating new three-dimensional proteins through the marvel of protein folding, a marvel we don't understand. 

But why postulate such an invisible body rather than postulating a continuous stream of interventions by some higher agency? Such a thing would seem to be a much simpler explanatory scheme.  With the idea of an invisible morphogenetic body we are left with a fairly simple explanatory scheme that would work like this:

(1) Each new human may be given a soul which is purely mental, and which can grow in a non-physical way into the full reality of an adult human mind. 

(2) Each new human may be given an invisible morphogenetic body which is like a localized physical agency specialized for the task of causing the physical progression from a speck-sized zygote to the vast state of organization that is a full-grown human body, and perhaps also specialized for the task of preserving such a body so that it can last until death. 

You might get a very rough idea of such an invisible morphogenetic body if you consider the software and operating system in a computer, which is crucial for the computer's operation and maintenance, but is invisible to someone visually inspecting the computer and looking for visible signs of it. But such an invisible morphogenetic body would be a more dramatic reality. A better crude analogy might be some almost magical software that might cause a smartphone to gradually change over years into a full desktop computer. 

Under such a framework, we might imagine that a person's mind-soul (something purely mental) persists after death, but that a person's invisible morphogenetic body dies with the physical body, such a thing having no use after a person dies. 

Phenomenon	Is it explained by physical science?	How could it be explained?
Protein folding, in which protein molecules form into elaborate three-dimensional shapes needed for their proper function.	No. DNA and genes merely specify the linear amino acid sequences of protein molecules, not their 3D shapes.	Postulate an invisible morphogenetic body.
Formation of protein complexes, often consisting of different types of protein molecules (derived from genes on different chromosomes) that team up, often forming very complex "molecular machines" that may include microscopic motors.	No. DNA does not specify which protein molecules belong to particular protein complexes.	Postulate an invisible morphogenetic body.
Formation of specialized cells arriving in the right places in the body, particularly as the body grows.	No. DNA does not specify the structure or proper body location of any cell, and does not even specify how to make the organelles that are the building blocks of cells.	Postulate an invisible morphogenetic body.
Cellular reproduction.	No. Since cells are fantastically complex structures with the complexity of a factory, the reproduction of a eukaryotic cell is something unlike anything human technology can produce using non-living things.	Postulate an invisible morphogenetic body.
Formation of organs and organ systems	No. DNA does not tell how to make organs or organ systems.	Postulate an invisible morphogenetic body.
Growth from a speck-sized zygote to the hierarchical organization of a human body.	No. DNA does not tell how to make human bodies.	Postulate an invisible morphogenetic body.
Human self-hood and consciousness.	No. A unified human self is not something that can be explained by neurons or neural activity.	Postulate a mind-soul.
Instant memory formation.	No. Brain processes such as protein synthesis and synapse strengthening are way too slow to explain instant memory creation.	Postulate a mind-soul.
A person's instant retrieval of rarely accessed facts learned long ago.	No. By including things such as sorting, addressing and indexing, humans make things that allow fast retrieval. But no such things are found in the brain.	Postulate a mind-soul.
50-year preservation of episodic memories.	No. The proteins in synapses have lifetimes 1000 times shorter than the longest length of time humans can remember things (60 years).	Postulate a mind-soul.
Abstract thinking.	No. This is not explicable from brain activity.	Postulate a mind-soul.
Insight and understanding.	No. This is not explicable from brain activity.	Postulate a mind-soul.
Out-of-body experiences.	No. This is 100% unexpected to arise from brain activity.	Postulate a mind-soul.
Psychic powers (clairvoyance, ESP, etc.)	No. These are 100% unexpected to arise from brain activity.	Postulate a mind-soul.
Human language abilities	No. The human use of language is unexpected from a study of non-human organisms, which have nothing like human speech.	Postulate a mind-soul.
Near-death experiences.	No.	Postulate a mind-soul.

If such an invisible morphogenetic body exists, how long would it survive? It would seem that such an invisible morphogenetic body would die about the time the known physical body exists, or soon thereafter. Since such an invisible morphogenetic body would have no role other than the formation and persistence of the physical human body, there is no reason to regard it as something long surviving the death of the physical human body.  There is some interesting evidence that certain types of metabolic activity such as gene transcription persist for a few hours beyond death. That could be a kind of gradual fading away of an invisible morphogenetic body, a process that might persist for a few hours or days beyond death. 

Some might suggest that we need to postulate an invisible body in humans for a different reason: the fact that humans see apparitions of other humans. The sighting of apparitions is a very real phenomenon, with very many examples that cannot be credibly explained by assuming hallucinations. Two of the reasons why apparition sightings cannot be all explained away as hallucinations are:

(1) People often see apparitions of people they did not know had died, only to very soon learn that the person had died about when the apparition is seen. For examples see my posts here:  

An Apparition Was Their Death Notice

25 Who Were "Ghost-Told" of a Death

25 More Who Were "Ghost-Told" of a Death

Yet Another 25 Who Were “Ghost-Told” of a Death

Scientific American's Very Lame "Ghost Explanations"

They Also Were "Ghost Told" of a Death

More Accounts of Veridical Apparitions

Even More Cases of Veridical Apparitions

When Apparitions Serve as Announcements

Still More Cases of Veridical Apparitions

When Apparitions Act as News Bulletins

They Too Were "Ghost-Told" of a Death

They Seemed to Ghost-Learn of Someone's Death

(2) There are many cases of the same apparition being seen by more than one person. Some examples are discussed in my posts below:

When an Apparition Is Seen by Multiple Observers: 17 Cases

When an Apparition Is Seen by Multiple Observers: 17 More Cases

More Apparitions Seen by Multiple Observers
Many an Apparition Is Seen by More Than One
Still More Apparitions Seen by Multiple Observers

When an Apparition Is Seen by Not Just One

When Two or More See the Same Apparition

Do we need to postulate a kind of immaterial physical double of the body to explain cases like this? Not necessarily. If a mind-soul survives death, then such a soul might be able to telepathically create a visual impression of itself that arises in someone else's mind. Freed from the limitations of a brain, a surviving mind-soul might be able to create such a visual impression in the mind of multiple witnesses present at the same place. 

An interesting problem of parapsychology is: why are ghosts or apparitions seen wearing clothes? If we imagine that each of us has a body-double inside us, one with arms, legs and a head, then if such a body-double were seen, it presumably would not be wearing clothes. It seems rather easier to explain apparition sightings by supposing the apparition is a kind of projection of a surviving mind-soul, one in which it has a clothed appearance. For example, if you survived death, and wanted to show yourself to a relative as a sign you had survived death, you might be more likely to kind of telepathically project yourself as a clothed version of yourself, rather than appearing as a naked ghost. 

Another idea is that a person surviving death may have a kind of faint mind-over-matter power or mind-over-energy power, allowing him to briefly appear as a faintly physical presence, or perhaps even as a solid form. If your relative reports seeing a transparent image of you after you died, that could be your mind-soul projecting such an image in a kind of semi-physical way, like a kind of holographic projector. It might be rather like the scene near the beginning of the first Star Wars movie, in which Luke Skywalker sees the holographic projection of Leia Organa, projected by the little robot.  

Supposing a single invisible body for each of us may be insufficient to explain observed phenomena. It may be necessary to postulate that each of us has multiple bodies, one visible body and one or two or three invisible bodies. If that sounds too far-fetched, you might remember that according to modern physics, the space within a meter of you is always occupied by three overlapping realities: physical matter, dark matter and dark energy. 

The ideas above are speculative, and I do not claim that there is any "open-and-shut" case for such an invisible morphogenetic body. I merely claim that such a hypothesis may be useful in trying to explain some of the most baffling aspects of biology. 

I have noticed a fundamental difference between cosmologists (the scientists who study the universe as a whole) and biologists. It is as if they are operating under different rules. The rule of the cosmologist seems to be: when the observed visible reality is insufficient to explain something, then boldly postulate some unobserved invisible reality to try to fix the shortfall. Cosmologists followed such a rule in three cases:

(1) Not able to explain the rotation speeds of stars around the center of a galaxy with the known amount of observed matter, cosmologists created the theory of invisible cold dark matter.

(2) Not able to explain the accelerating expansion of the universe under assumptions about regular matter and dark matter, cosmologists created the theory of invisible dark energy. 

(3) Not able to explain the enormous fine-tuning of the universe's initial expansion rate under standard assumptions, cosmologists invented various very complicated theories of primordial cosmic inflation. 

None of these explanation attempts has been verified, but at least we have to credit cosmologists for having the audacity to boldly speculate about invisibles and unobservable realities when cosmologists find themselves with some type of big explanatory shortfall. No such credit can be given to biologists. It seems like biologists operate under an entirely different rule, a rule that can be stated as "just keep claiming that chance and known observed reality explain everything, no matter what is observed." 

And so we have biologists continuing year after year to claim that the vast mysteries of biology and human mentality (so far over the heads of today's humans) can all be explained by chance and what is already known. When you stick to such a claim for many years you will probably end up becoming entangled in many a lie and deception, which certainly is what has gone on among materialist biologists, with about fifty of such lies and deceptions listed here.  

A foolish T-shirt to be wearing