Despite thinking of themselves as Men of Reason, materialists make some of the goofiest and most ridiculous claims that humans have ever made. Below is a "top 10" list of the most glaringly false or absurd assertions of materialists.
Claim #1: The origin of species was explained by a man 167 years ago, before scientists knew anything about the complexity of cells, genes and protein molecules.
This claim is the triumphal legend that Charles Darwin explained the origin of species such as our species. You can start to realize how absurd this claim is by considering the vast organization of the human body.
A human body consists of a skeletal system and organ systems; organ systems are made up of one or more organs and other components; organs are made up of tissues; tissues are made up of cells; cells are made up of many organelles of many types; organelles are made up of protein complexes and proteins; protein complexes are made up of many different types of proteins; proteins consist of special well-arranged sequences of hundreds or thousands of amino acids, folded into 3D shapes; amino acids consist of atoms; and atoms consist of protons, neutrons and electrons. The infographic below illustrates some of this hierarchical organization:
How much of this organization complexity did Darwin know about? He only knew about the anatomical complexity of the human body. Darwin knew nothing about the complexity of cells, nothing about the complexity of protein molecules, and nothing about the complexity of genes. So claiming that Darwin explained the origin of the human species (or any other species) is as silly as claiming that the ancient philosopher Plato explained the origin of smartphones. Plato knew nothing about smartphones, and Darwin knew nothing about 90% of the information-rich complexity and organization of the human body.
Claim #2: Life (a state of very high organization and very great information richness, requiring hundreds of different complex inventions) arose from chemistry accidents billions of years ago.
This silly claim is the doctrine of abiogenesis, that life arose accidentally from accidents of chemistry. Robust science provides not the slightest warrant for this dogma, which has no basis in observations or relevant experiments. Even the simplest self-reproducing cell is a very high state of organization and information richness, requiring hundreds of types of complex inventions. Those inventions are the hundreds of types of protein molecules and genes required for even the simplest one-celled life to exist and reproduce. Experiments realistically simulating the early Earth have never produced any of the protein molecules needed for life. Experiments realistically simulating the early Earth have never even produced any of the amino acid components that are the building components of such protein molecules. There was a widely discussed Miller-Urey experiment that produced some amino acids. But the experiment was not a realistic simulation of the early Earth, as it required a very special glass apparatus unlike anything that would have naturally existed in the early Earth, as well as a degree of electrical bombardment vastly greater than any volume of space would have ever naturally received.
The paper "Fundamental behaviors emerge from simulations of a living minimal cell" describes "a genetically minimal bacterial cell, consisting of only ... 493 genes on a single 543-kbp circular chromosome with 452 genes coding for proteins (Breuer et al., 2019 ), some of which are subunits of multi-domain complexes." Each of those genes is a complex invention with hundreds of fine-tuned parts that almost all have to be just right. The total number of amino acids that have to be arranged just right in the proteins partially specified by these genes is roughly 150,000, which is roughly the same as the number of characters or letters that have to be well-arranged to produce a 100-page technical manual.
The amount of functional information required for even the simplest one-celled life is roughly equivalent to the amount of functional information in a hundred-page technical manual. This shows all ideas of the accidental origin of life to be claims that are absurd, as absurd as the claim that you could get a well-written novel by throwing gobs of ink onto paper pages and collecting the luckier ink splashes.
Claim #3: Cells many times more organized than the simplest cells first appeared when there suddenly occurred a lucky accident in which one cell gulped up other cells, with all of the lucky cell's offspring having the characteristics of the original and the gulped up cells.
The claim I refer to is the ridiculous tall tale known as endosymbiosis. Human cells are a type of cell called a eukaryotic cell. A eukaryotic cell is vastly more organized than the simplest type of cell, called a prokaryotic cell. How did we ever get eukaryotic cells? Materialists have in recent decades developed a speech custom of claiming that eukaryotic cells first arose by some lucky accident involving one prokaryotic cell gulping one or more other prokaryotic cells, with the offspring of this gulping cell being vastly more complex. It's as silly a tale as the idea that a woman might eat a bird like a flying eagle, and then have flying children as her offspring.
There are several reasons for thinking that such a thing is far too improbable to have ever happened. Among these are the following:
- No one has ever observed any type of event like the supposed event in which prokaryotic cells combined to become a eukaryotic cell. Microbiologists have done innumerable experiments with prokaryotic cells, and have never observed any combination of prokaryotic cells become anything like a eukaryotic cell.
- A prokaryotic cell injected with the DNA of a eukaryotic cell will not start producing eukaryotic cells as its offspring.
- Nowhere in human DNA does it specify the overall shape of a human body, the structure of a human organ system, the structure of a particular human organ, the structure of a tissue, the structure of a cell, or even the structure of any organelle of a cell. Although genotypes influence phenotypes, genotypes do not specify phenotypes. Genotypes merely list chemicals used by an organism. DNA does not specify the physical structure of an organism. We can therefore imagine no conceivable event by which some lucky combination of prokaryotic DNA could result in a cell that produced eukaryotic offspring, because the structure of a eukaryotic cell is not even specified in DNA.
In the book Aliens, biologist Matthew Cobb gives a description of current thinking on this topic, emphasizing the improbability of it:
"What happened on Earth – known as eukaryogenesis – was not the product of random mutation and the subsequent sifting of acquired characters that have differential fitness (the essence of natural selection). Instead there appears to have been a single event of mind-boggling improbability, for it involved two life forms interacting in a most novel way....Prior to that moment, all life had consisted of small microbes with no cell nucleus and no mitochondria. Everything changed when one unicellular life form, known as an archaebacterium, ended up inside another, called a eubacterium."
On another page Cobb says this:
"We could in principle calculate the probability of the appearance of eukaryotes, but we would soon run out of zeros...That weird hybrid was our ancestor, and its existence – and therefore ours – was incredibly improbable. As far as we are aware, no such event happened before or since."
Obviously we have here a fairy tale, an "old wives' tale." Scientists have no credible tale to tell of how eukaryotic cells originated, just as they have no credible tale to tell of how prokaryotic cells originated.
Claim #4: Monkeys rafted across the Atlantic Ocean millions of years ago.
There are many similarities between Old World monkeys and New World Monkeys. Committed to the assumption that such similarities must be because of common descent, Darwinist professors maintain that the New World monkeys are descendants of the Old World monkeys, and that such an ancestry was able to occur because some Old World monkeys rafted across the Atlantic ocean something like 40 million years ago, arriving in the New World. Such an idea is supremely unbelievable for several reasons: (1) the incredible improbability of a sea-worthy raft appearing accidentally from logs or vegetation; (2) the almost equally great improbability that any monkeys would ever swim out to sea and jump on such a raft; (3) the almost equally great improbability that such monkeys could ever survive a voyage across the Atlantic.
Claim #5: Iguanas rafted 5000 miles across the Pacific Ocean millions of years ago.
The story below was one day the lead story on the ScienceNews.org site.
An unbelievable "just-so" story
The story above is the most laughable nonsense, asserting that iguanas (a type of lizard) made a 5000-mile rafting trip across the Pacific Ocean millions of years ago. Such is the nonsense that Darwinists are forced to spout to maintain their doctrine of common descent, the dogma that all species came from a common ancestor.
In the article we read of the biological reality that was the seed of this nutty tale:
"All members of the iguana evolutionary family are found in the Americas, with one glaring exception: the Fijian iguanas (Brachylophus). The origins of the four living iguana species in Fiji have been a mystery for researchers, considering all the reptiles’ closest relatives are an ocean away."
The Fijis are a group of islands fairly close to Australia, so the distance between the Fijis and the Americas (North and South America) is roughly 5000 miles or 8000 kilometers. The article then tries to tell us this crazy tale of a 5000-mile journey by rafting iguanas:
"These genetic results, combined with the geography of where iguana fossils have previously been found, point to ancestral iguanas rafting across the ocean from the shores of North America. The team thinks the lizards set sail between 31 million and 34 million years ago, possibly causing the evolutionary split between Brachylophus and Dipsosaurus."
The source of this laughable nonsense is a scientific paper. The title of the paper is a perfect example of scientists matter-of-factly asserting the factual truth of the most unbelievable claims. The paper is entitled "Iguanas rafted more than 8,000 km from North America to Fiji." In the article we have this example of witless reasoning from an evolutionary biologist:
"For Gyllenhaal, the findings illustrate how an incredibly rare, chance event — like iguanas successfully floating across an ocean — are more likely to play out as long as millions of years of time are available. 'When you’re dealing with evolutionary time, you’ve got a lot of opportunity for these very small probability things to occur.' ”
It's the same old witless reasoning that Darwinist biologists keep making over and over again: the claim that the most gigantically improbable things would happen as long as there were millions of years to happen. The claim is false. Given sufficiently low improbabilities, you can confidently say: that would not happen in a million years; that would not happen in a billion years; and that would not happen in a trillion years.
Claim #6: There is no fundamental difference between the minds of animals and the minds of humans.
On page 99 of The Descent of Man. Charles Darwin made this hugely misleading claim: "My object in this chapter is to shew that there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties." That statement shows that Charles Darwin was either a very big liar or someone who was enormously self-deluded. It is a very obvious fact of human experience that there are the most gigantic fundamental differences between the mental faculties of man and other higher mammals. So, for example, when I recently read a book by an astrobiologist saying that "humans are not exceptional, even on Earth," I said to myself: this is a crazy materialist speech custom that should cause me to have no confidence in anyone who parrots it.
A very silly thing to say
Claim #7: Millions of types of very complex inventions in the animal kingdom and the plant kingdom arose from an accumulation of random mutations.
Scientists like to make various types of big boasts about their knowledge of things, such as the boast that they understand the basics of how the human species appeared. But various types of unsolved problems act as antagonists to such boasts. It's kind of like this:
Scientist: I understand how life originated.
Boast antagonist problems: No, you sure as hell do not.
Scientist: I understand how a human mind arises.
Boast antagonist problems: No, you sure as hell do not.
Scientist: I understand how the human species arose.
Boast antagonist problems: No, you sure as hell do not.
In regard to biological origins, these boast antagonist problems include the problems of the origin of DNA, the origin of the genetic code, the origin of genes, the origin of the first protein molecules, and the origin of homochirality. In regard to the origin of large organisms, the boast antagonist problems include the problems of the origin of eukaryotic cells, the origin of most of the proteins used by mammals, the origin of protein complexes, the origin of multicellular life and the origin of bipedalism. In regard to the origin of man, the boast antagonist problems include the problems of explaining morphogenesis, the origin of language, the origin of higher abstract reasoning, and the problems of explaining instantaneous memory creation, instant memory recall and the persistence of memories for 50 years.
The problem of the origin of protein molecules is one of the boast antagonist problems I referred to above. Inside each human body there are more than 20,000 different types of protein molecules, each a different type of complex invention requiring a very special arrangement of thousands of atoms. Scientists lack any credible theory for the origin of protein molecules.
Protein molecules require very special arrangements of amino acids, arrangements as hard-to-achieve by chance as it is hard for ink splashes to produce useful functional paragraphs. Because protein molecules are in general very sensitive to small changes, with their functionality typically being broken if you change only 10% or less of their amino acids, protein molecules have very high organization thresholds for them to be functional, meaning that they are not credibly explained by gradualist ideas such as Darwinism. The difficulties in explaining the origin of protein molecules is one of the biggest reasons for rejecting boasts that biological origins are successfully explained by ideas of Darwinian evolution. The issue is discussed at much greater length
here and
here.
When materialists attempt to explain the origin of different types of protein molecules by claiming an accidental accumulation of tiny random mutations, they are advancing an idea as silly as the claim that there arose functional, well-written paragraphs by ink splashes. It's kind of like the conversation below, in which James fails to tell a credible tale.
Mary: Wow, I see your living room wall has a large paragraph on it telling how to make a particular useful structure.
James: Yes, that writing on my wall arose purely by accidental ink splashes.
Mary: You expect me to believe that some ink splash wrote that paragraph all at once?
James: Of course not. It was just hundreds of little ink splashes, occurring on different days, gradually over years.
By appealing to gradual accumulation, James has not actually done anything to make his ridiculous claim any more credible.
Below are quotes from a recent paper by a mathematics PhD, a paper I read today:
"The contemporary synthesis of biological evolution holds that the variety of life on Earth is mostly the outcome of random genetic changes sifted via the deterministic sieve of natural selection. Over the last century, this framework has served as the fundamental framework for biological sciences. However, mathematicians, biologists, and computer scientists have increasingly questioned the statistical and probabilistic mechanisms behind these assertions....Within this defined scope, we investigate the mathematical barriers that prevent gradual, step-wise mutations from traversing the vast fitness landscapes without falling into fatal functional degradation...We have demonstrated that the probability of random genetic mutations generating novel, functional structures is mathematically negligible....Ultimately, the mathematical constraints that govern complex systems cannot be bypassed by appealing to vast scales of cosmological time. The combinatorial explosion associated with biological constraint satisfaction problems presents an insurmountable barrier to the neo-Darwinian mechanism of unguided, gradualistic change."
Claim #8: Memories that can persist very well for 60 years are created by the strengthening of synapses, tiny unstable units that do not last for years, and are built of protein molecules that only last an average of a few weeks, synapses that are connected to short-lived dendritic spines that do not last for years.
Some of the reasons that this claim is very silly include these:
- the fact that there is no plausible account to be told of how brains could possibly be storing memories that last for fifty years, given the high protein turnover in synapses, where the average protein only lasts a few weeks;
the fact that there is no understanding of how brains could achieve the instantaneous recall of distant, obscure memories that humans routinely show, given the lack of any coordinate system or indexing in a brain that might allow some exact position of a stored memory to be very quickly found (with synapses making this problem much worse, as trying to find something in a dense jungle of a trillion synapses would be like trying to find a particular vine in the middle of the billion tangled vines of the Amazon rainforest); the fact that there is no understanding whatsoever of how concepts, visual information, long series of words, and episodic memories could ever be physically stored by a brain in any way that would translate all these diverse types of information into synapse states or neuron states; the fact that the microscopic examination of very many thousands of brains of recently deceased people (and the microscopic examination of endless samples of brain tissue extracted from living people) has never produced the slightest trace of learned information, something that would have been discovered in brains 50 years ago if brains stored memories and brains are the source of the human mind;
the fact that for more than 50 years numerous people have reported vivid near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences occurring after their hearts stopped and their brains were inactive, during times when they had no brain waves, and they should have had no consciousness at all (under "brains make minds" assumptions), with many of the observation details they reported seeing during such brain-inexplicable should-have-been-utterly-unconscious experiences being independently verified (as described here).
Below are some quotes by scientists supporting my statements above about the short lifetimes of synaptic proteins and the instability of synapses and the dendritic spines they connect to.
- "Experiments indicate in absence of activity average life times ranging from minutes for immature synapses to two months for mature ones with large weights." -- Six scientists (link).
- "The synaptic turnover rate is as high as 1% per day in the visual cortex." -- 7 scientists (link).
- "A recent imaging study revealed that the synaptic turnover rate in hippocampal CA1 cells is very high, with an estimated lifetime of ~1–2 weeks (Attardo et al., 2015)." -- Scientist Yuichiro Hayashi (link).
- "We observed a two-fold higher spine density than previous studies and measured a [dendritic] spine turnover of ~40% within 4 days, which depended on spine size." -- Nine scientists (link).
- "We find that [dendritic] spines appear and disappear over periods of days to weeks, even though their average density remains constant (Fig. 5)....About 80% of synapses were detectable for a day or longer; about 60% belonged to the stable pool imaged for at least 8 days. Even this stable pool was found to turn over, with only ~50% of spines surviving for 30 days or longer. Assuming stochastic behaviour, we estimate that the mean lifetime of the stable pool [of synapses] would be on the order of 120 days." -- Seven scientists (link).
- "Another study used in vitro metabolic labeling of primary cortical cultures to measure relatively shorter half-lives for 2802 brain proteins (average half-life =~5 days; (Cohen et al., 2013)." Four scientists (link).
- "Very few studies report long-lasting structural changes of synapses induced by behavioral training." -- Three scientists (link).
- "Mathematical modeling revealed that the data best matched kinetic models with a single population of [dendritic] spines of mean lifetime ~1–2 weeks. This implies ~100% turnover in ~2–3 times this interval, a near full erasure of the synaptic connectivity pattern." -- Three scientists (link).
- "It has been shown that in the hippocampus in vivo, within a month the rate of [dendritic] spine turnover approaches 100% (Attardo et al., 2015; Pfeiffer et al., 2018)." -- Three scientists (link).
- "Experience-dependent behavioral memories can last a lifetime, whereas even a long-lived protein or mRNA molecule has a half-life of around 24 hrs. Thus, the constituent molecules that subserve the maintenance of a memory will have completely turned over, i.e. have been broken down and resynthesized, over the course of about 1 week. Yet memories can persist for years or decades." -- Two scientists (link).
- "Recent studies have revealed that most proteins, including synaptic proteins, have half-lives that range between 5 and 7 days (Cohen et al., 2013, Dörrbaum et al., 2018)." -- 7 scientists (link).
"Where skeletal muscle tissue has been shown to turnover at a rate of 1–2% per day, here we show that brain tissue turns over much faster at a rate of 3–4% per day. This would imply complete renewal of brain tissue proteins well within 4–5 weeks." 10+scientists (link).
Claim #9: Memories form in the hippocampus (a brain region of particularly high instability), and then migrate to the cortex so that they can exist where there is more stability.
Having no real evidence on a cellular level or a synaptic level to support their claims of neural memory storage, neuroscientists sometimes resort to claims about parts of the brain, claiming that some-such part of the brain is needed for memory. Such claims usually involve claims that the hippocampus is crucial for memory. The experimental evidence has never supported such claims. People with no hippocampus or a damaged hippocampus usually perform fairly well on tests of memory.
In my widely-read long post here (entitled "Studies Debunk Hippocampus Memory Myths") I discuss very many scientific papers that discredit the claim that the hippocampus has some big relation to memory. Some clear speaking occurs in the 2004 paper "Relationship between hippocampal volume and memory ability in healthy individuals across the lifespan: review and meta-analysis." Contradicting claims often made about the hippocampus and memory, the paper states this:
"A negative relationship between hippocampal volume and memory (smaller is better) was significant for studies with children, adolescents, and young adults. For studies with older adults, the most striking observation was extreme variability: the evidence for a positive relationship between hippocampal size and episodic memory ability in older adults was surprisingly weak."
One of the many reasons the "hippocampus as memory center" narrative does not hold up to scrutiny is that the hippocampus is particularly unstable in regard to things that have a relevance to whether a brain can store memories. Synapses are attached to little bumps on brain dendrites, bump called dendritic spines. The more unstable that dendritic spines are, the more unstable are synapses. The 2015 paper "Impermanence of dendritic spines in live adult CA1 hippocampus" states the following, describing a 100% turnover of dendritic spines within about six weeks:
"Mathematical modeling revealed that the data best matched kinetic models with a single population of spines of mean lifetime ~1–2 weeks. This implies ~100% turnover in ~2–3 times this interval, a near full erasure of the synaptic connectivity pattern."
The paper
here states, "It has been shown that in the hippocampus in vivo, within a month the rate of spine turnover approaches 100% (Attardo et al., 2015; Pfeiffer et al., 2018)."
Because of this particularly rapid turnover in dendritic spines in the hippocampus, the hippocampus is particularly implausible as a site in the brain that might be storing memories lasting decades. But being eager to preserve the "hippocampus as memory center" myth, neuroscientists have created a tall tale to try and save this claim. The tall tale is that memories are created in the hippocampus, and then migrate to the cortex of the brain.
There is zero observational basis for this claim. Scientists have never actually seen a memory anywhere in the brain (despite "Jesus in my toast" pareidolia claims to the contrary), and scientists have never seen any memory migrating from the hippocampus to the cortex. This "memory migration" myth doubles the explanatory problems of neuroscientists. Now they have to imagine two physical things in the brain corresponding to the formation of a memory: first, the creation of a memory and then its migration to a place elsewhere in the brain.
The idea that memories stored in synapses could become stable if such memories migrated to the cortex is a fallacious idea. The same instability problems exist in the cortex. The proteins of synapses in the cortex have the same very short lifetimes of proteins in the hippocampus: lifetimes of only a few weeks. Synapses are connected to dendritic spines, and such dendritic spines are almost as unstable and short-lived in the cortex as they are in the hippocampus.
Claim #10: Your body arose because cells read a blueprint in your DNA for how to construct your body.
For decades materialists have pushed an untenable misconception about the origin of an individual human body. They told the tall tale that DNA in a cell contains a blueprint or set of instructions for making a human, and that morphogenesis occurs when such instructions are read and carried out inside the human womb. But there are several reasons why this idea cannot possibly be true. They include the following:- Human DNA has been thoroughly studied, and no blueprint of a human form has ever been discovered in it, nor has anyone discovered anything in it like a program, algorithm, or set of instructions for making a human, or even any organ or cell of a human. There is not anything like a general blueprint for an overall human form in DNA, nor is there anything like a blueprint for making any large system of a human, nor is there anything like a blueprint for making any organ of a human, nor is there even anything like a blueprint for making a particular type of human cell. Similarly, there is not anything like a set of instructions or program for making an overall human form in DNA, nor is nor is there anything like a set of instructions or program for making any large system of a human, nor is there anything like a set of instructions or program for making any organ of a human, nor is there even anything like a set of instructions for making a particular type of human cell.
- The actual information in DNA is merely very low level chemical information, information on the chemical ingredients that make up proteins and RNA.
- DNA is written in a minimalist bare-bones language in which the only things that can be expressed are things such as lists of amino acids. There is absolutely no high-level expressive capability in DNA that might ever allow it to be something that might be a blueprint for making humans or a set of instructions for making humans.
- The amount of information in human DNA and the number of genes in DNA are vastly smaller than we would expect if DNA was a specification of a human. For example, a simple rice plant has twice as many genes as a human.
- There is nothing in the human womb that could ever be capable of reading and executing the fantastically complicated instructions that would need to exist in DNA if DNA were to be a specification of a human. Blueprints don't build things; building construction occurs only when there's an intelligent blueprint reader and a construction crew. We know of nothing in the human womb that could act like an intelligent blueprint reader or a construction crew. If a human specification were to exist in DNA, it would need to be instructions so complicated it would require an Einstein to understand it; and there's no Einstein in the womb of a pregnant woman.
See this post, this post and this post for a very detailed discussion of why DNA cannot be a human specification. Those posts include quotes by dozens of biological experts supporting my statements on this topic. Below are only a few of dozens of similar comments that I have collected at the end of this post.
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." 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. Rather, 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 press account of the thought of geneticist Sir Alec Jeffreys states, "DNA is not a blueprint, he says." B.N. Queenan (the Executive Director of Research at the NSF-Simons Center for Mathematical & Statistical Analysis of Biology at Harvard University) tells us this:
"DNA is not a blueprint. A blueprint faithfully maps out each part of an envisioned structure. Unlike a battleship or a building, our bodies and minds are not static structures constructed to specification."
"The genome is not a blueprint," says Kevin Mitchell, a geneticist and neuroscientist at Trinity College Dublin. "It doesn't encode some specific outcome." His statement was reiterated by another scientist. "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. He 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." 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."
The visual below shows you the very humble reality about DNA (so much less than the grossly inflated myths so often spread about it): that DNA merely specifies low-level chemical information such as the amino acids that make up a protein. Particular combinations of the "ladder rungs" of the DNA (the colored lines) represent particular amino acids (the "beads" in the polypeptide chain that is the starting point of a protein).
Human bodies have multiple levels of organization beyond such simple polypeptide chains, including: - The three-dimensional structure of protein molecules
- The three-dimensional structure of protein complexes, teams of different proteins, which can be so specially arranged that they are often called "molecular machines"
- The three-dimensional structure of the many types of organelles used by cells
- The three-dimensional structure of the 200 types of cells in the human body, most of these cell types being fantastically complicated arrangements of matter (scientists have compared the complexity of a cell to the complexity of an airplane or city)
- The structure of tissues
- The structure of organ systems and skeletal systems
- The overall structure of the human body, what you see by looking at a naked human body
None of the structures listed above are specified by DNA or genomes or genes. How such structures arise is unknown. The lack of any credible physical explanation for the progression from a speck-sized zygote to the vast hierarchical organization of the human body is one of the biggest reasons for rejecting materialism.
The idea that a human body gets built by the reading of a blueprint in cells was always an idea that was very silly, both because it fails to explain how 200 types of enormously organized cells in the human body originate (which is half of the difficulty of explaining how a human body arises from a speck-sized zygote), and also because blueprints don't build extremely complex things. Things get built with the help of blueprints only when there are one or more intelligent agents to read the blueprints and get ideas about how to build things.
