Trying to Explain Human Development, Physicists Offer Only the Emptiest Hand-Waving

 The marvel of human development is a miracle of organization a thousand miles over the head of today's scientists. Somehow a speck-sized zygote existing just after impregnation progresses to become something a trillion times more organized: the internally dynamic structure of the human body. Scientists have long told a childish lie to try to explain this wonder so very far beyond their understanding: the tall tale that human bodies grow because there occurs a constant reading of a specification for how to make a human body, one stored in DNA or its genes. Such a specification has been called a blueprint, a recipe or a program. This tall tale is a lie because no such specification for how to make a human body exists in DNA or its genes. Instead of having a blueprint or recipe or program for building a body or any of its organs or any human cell, DNA and its genes merely have very low-level information such as which amino acids make up a protein. 

The very childish nature of the "DNA blueprints build bodies" tall tale may become clear to you once you realize that even if such a blueprint were to exist inside DNA, it would never explain how a human body gets built, for the simple reason that blueprints don't build things. Dump a blueprint for a house and the construction materials at a vacant lot, and that will never cause a house to get built. Things get built with the help of blueprints only when there are intelligent agents around smart enough to read blueprints and get ideas about exactly how to build things. A human body is so enormously organized and has such fantastically intricate biochemistry and internal dynamism that any blueprint for making a human body would be a specification so complex that only a superhuman mind could understand it. There is in the human womb nothing like a mind capable of interpreting and understanding instructions so complex, if they happened to exist in DNA and its genes, where there is no such specification for building a body or any of its organs or cells. 

There is therefore an ocean-sized explanation shortfall in explaining the physical origin of any full human body. Strip them of their lies about what is in DNA and its genes, and our developmental biologists stand empty-handed before us, "with their pants down." To make it look like the explanation shortfall is not so enormous, discussions of morphogenesis sometimes appeal to physics.  The maneuver is futile. Physics does pretty much nothing to explain the origin of a human body. 

In Quanta Magazine in late 2025 there was an example of one of the misleading articles we get when someone is trying to persuade us that physics does much of anything to explain human development. We have an article entitled "Genes Have Harnessed Physics to Help Grow Living Things." 

Early on the writer states this:

"Typically, biologists try to characterize growth, development and other biological processes as the result of chemical cues triggered by genetic instructions. But that picture has often seemed incomplete."

We get no explanation of why "that picture has often seemed incomplete." The reason is that genes do not give any instructions more complex than instructions for how to build a polypeptide sequence (a chain of amino acids) that is the beginning of a protein molecule. But constructing a human body requires many types of higher level organization such as building protein molecules into protein complexes, building protein complexes into organelles, building organelles into cells, building cells into tissues, building tissues into organs, and building organs into organ systems consisting of an organ and many other parts.  Genes cannot explain how such building occurs, because genes have no instructions on how to perform such operations. 

The writer's next sentence starts to tell us the very misleading story of "mechanical forces" that "steer" human development, saying, "Researchers now increasingly appreciate the role of mechanical forces in biology: forces that push and pull tissues in response to their material properties, steering growth and development in ways that genes cannot."  The story is baloney. You cannot explain any of the marvels of the construction of a human body by appealing to blind "mechanical forces" and the claim that such forces are "steering." Constructing a human body is a task almost infinitely harder than the simple task of steering a car.  And blind mechanical forces don't do steering anything like the steering that occurs when a driver with vision and an idea of a desired destination is steering a car. 

There is almost always the same kind of misleading word trickery in discussions of this type. They include the following:

(1) There is the extremely misleading trick of trying to shrink the problem of explaining the arising of a human structure to a mere problem of explaining a shape. Within a human body is the most enormous organization of matter, a degree of organization that dwarfs the level of organization inside an automobile or computer. The problem of morphogenesis or human development is the problem of explaining how so gigantically organized an arrangement of matter arises. Such a problem is more than a billion times greater than a mere problem of explaining a human shape. 

(2) There is the extremely misleading trick of trying to speak as if a mere "sculpting" or "shaping" could explain the origin of a human body, which is just another way of trying to make an explanation problem look a billion times easier than it is. Any action of "sculpting" or "shaping" could merely explain a shape, not an internal structure that is vastly organized.  So it is always misleading to speak as if some kind of "sculpting" or "shaping" action could explain the arising of a human body or any of its cells or organs.

(3) There is extremely misleading personification language in which mindless and blind mechanical forces are described as "steering" or "sculpting" as if such mindless and blind mechanical forces were intentional agents who could see and will.

(4) Here and there there are sprinkled a few references to mechanical forces such as pulling or pushing or stretching. Using "give me an inch and I'll take a mile" tactics, some attempt is made to make such references sound like mechanical forces are helping to explain the origin of a human body, something that is not true in any substantial way. 

The Quanta Magazine article employs all of those misleading tricks. Nothing of any real substance is discussed in explaining how blind mechanical forces can help explain the miracle of the arising of a gigantically organized human body having a special arrangement of parts far more impressive than the special arrangement of parts in an automobile or a jet aircraft. All that we have is the emptiest of hand-waving, combined with a few gossamer threads of speculation, which (even if true) would explain no more than a thousandth of the marvel of the origination of a human body. 

We have in the article scientist Alan Rodrigues engaging in very empty hand-waving by saying this: 

" 'What’s really amazed us is that you might be able to get by with a relatively simple amount of instruction from the genetic and molecular level,' said Rodrigues. 'Because you have additional emergent processes and properties happening at other levels.' ”

No, you can't "get by" with a "relatively simple amount of instruction" from DNA and its genes merely telling low-level chemical things like which amino acids make up a protein. Constructing something as enormously organized as a human body (with so many layers of organization and so many interdependent components) requires a causal reality enormously greater, which cannot be mere "instruction," because instructions don't engineer things. 

See here for more on this issue

In articles such as these in Quanta Magazine, we almost always see photos of smiling, confident-looking scientists, having some "I got this" look on their face. Were such scientists to be photographed with appropriate body language matching the limits of their knowledge, the photos would show them looking like this:

And were such scientists to give quotes matching how little they know, we would read quotes such as this:

I don't understand this stuff. It's all a mystery a thousand miles over my head. How do proteins ever form very complex three-dimensional shapes needed for their function, shapes not specified by DNA or its genes? I don't understand that. Why do proteins constantly form into just-right functional teams of proteins: protein complexes so well-engineered they are often called "molecular machines," complexes that sometimes use literal motors, forming the most astonishingly well-arranged machines? I don't understand that. How do organelles ever form from proteins and protein complexes? I don't understand that. How do cells of such enormous complexity ever form? I don't understand that. How do cells ever find the right positions in human bodies, with the right types of cells ending up in the right type of organs? I don't understand that. How do cells ever reproduce, something as astonishing as one automobile splitting up into two functional automobiles? I don't understand that. How do cells ever form into organs and organ systems as complex as the human cardiovascular system? I don't understand that. I don't understand these things, and neither do any other scientists. 

Very rarely we will get the truth on this matter from scientists, such as in the quotes below:

• "Yet while these are several examples of well-understood processes, our study of animal morphogenesis is really in its infancy." -- David Bilder and Saori L. Haigo1, "Expanding the Morphogenetic Repertoire: Perspectives from the Drosophila Egg." 
• "Fundamentally, we have a poor understanding of how any internal organ forms." -- Timothy Saunders, developmental biologist (link).
• "An adult human body is made up of some 30 to 40 trillion cells, all of which stem from a single fertilized egg cell. The process by which the right cells appear to arrive in their right numbers at the right time at the right place -- development -- is only understood in the roughest of outlines." -- Five scientists (link). 
• "Our understanding of how our organs form is still in its infancy" -- A research project abstract written by scientists (link). 
• "Biochemistry cannot provide the spatial information needed to explain morphogenesis...Supracellular morphogenesis is mysterious...Nobody seems to understand the origin of biological and cellular order."  -- Six medical authorities (link).  "
• "Understanding the rules underlying organismal development is a major unsolved problem in biology. Each cell in a developing organism responds to signals in its local environment by dividing, excreting, consuming, or reorganizing, yet how these individual actions coordinate over a macroscopic number of cells to grow complex structures with exquisite functionality is unknown." - Five scientists (link). 
• "However, our understanding of the molecular and physical basis of morphogenesis in plants or in any other eukaryotic system [e.g. mammals] is still in its infancy due to the complexity and non-linearity of processes involved in morphogenesis dynamics (or Morphodynamics)." -- A description of a 2017-2021 scientific project, presumably written by scientists (link). 
• "Understanding morphogenesis in vertebrate tissues in development and disease poses one of the most significant challenges in the life sciences. Despite the impressive technical advances aimed at cellular and subcellular characterization and manipulation over the past half century, a clear picture of how form is created still remains in its infancy." -- Four scientists in 2025 (link). 
• "We don't know what dark matter is, we don't understand how the brain works or consciousness, we don't understand morphogenesis, we don't understand the origin of life." -- Physics PhD Michael Nielsen (link). 
• "You start off as a sperm and an egg, and nine months later [your body has been built], through a magical process of morphogenesis, which we don’t understand." -- Donald Hoffman, Professor Emeritus of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine (link). 
• "We take it for granted that we go to bed with two sets of fully functional kidneys and that we wake up with them the next morning but we don't understand the fundamental processes that give rise to this very well choreographed maintenance of an organism's form and function." -- Scientist Sanchéz Alvarado (link).