New Study Helps Show That Genes Do Not Determine Personality

In my post here I document various false ideas taught by the  Smithsonian Institution and its site www.smithsonianmag.com.  Over the years the  Smithsonian Institution has played a large role in the propagation of false or unbelievable ideas taught by materialists. The latest false headline at that site is an article with this false clickbait headline:

Part of Your Personality Is Encoded in Your Genes. Huge Analysis Links Characteristics to More Than 1,200 Common Genetic Variants

It is not true at all true that part of your personality is encoded in your genes.  Genes only specify low-level chemical information such as which amino acids make up a particular protein molecule. 

You may start to realize the utter impossibility of a gene specifying a personality trait if you study the genetic code, and how simple it is. Below is a visual representing the genetic code. 

The letters such as A, C, T and G are types of nucleotide base pairs found in DNA and its genes. Using the scheme of representation depicted above, particular triple combinations of these base pairs can stand for or represent particular amino acids, the twenty types of chemicals shown in the outer right ring of the diagram. So, for example, the combination of CTC stands for the amino acid leucine. 

A gene is long sequence of such A,C, T and G "letters," typically many hundred or thousands, with each triplet of such "letters" standing for an amino acid in a sequence of amino acids used by a particular protein. There is no way a gene can represent anything mental or any aspect of a personality. There is no encoding scheme in DNA or its genes allowing such high-level representation, just as there is nothing in DNA or its genes allowing the specification of any complex structure bigger than a protein molecule. 

What is the study the Smithsonian article is referring to? It is the study "Robust inference and correlates from genetic associations with personality," which you can read here. Did that study find any decent evidence that personality is determined by genes? No, it found results entirely consistent with the idea that genes have no major influence on personality. 

The paper is a meta-analysis that crunches data from studies that gathered genomic data on lots of people who had taken personality tests. Such tests might give someone a scoring of how he rates on what is called the Big Five personality traits. Those who use this dubious term describe those traits as "openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, aggreableness and neuroticism."  The paper attempted to find some examples of what are called SNPs that are correlated with particular personality traits. An SNP or single-nucleotide polymorphism is a tiny variation in a gene. The Google Gemini infographic below explains what an SNP is. The depicted portion of a gene is only a tiny fraction of a gene, which is many times longer. 

The paper says, "On average, the estimated effective number of independently associated common SNPs for each trait was 16,180 (Supplementary Table 17)." That number may sound impressive, but it actually is not any good reason for suspecting that genes determine  personality. The reason why is that the total number of SNPs in the human genome has been estimated as 600 million, and purely because of chance we would expect that an analysis like this would have produced as many correlations as the authors found, even if genes and their SNPs have no effect at all on personality. 

There are five traits in the Big Five list of traits. If on average each trait correlated with 16,180 SNP's, that would mean that roughly 100,000 SNPs out of 600 million would have some correlation with one of the Big Five traits (about 1 in 6000). Is that a number higher than we would expect to occur if genes and SNPs have no causal relation to personality traits? No, it is not. 

The correlations reported are weak correlations. When one thing exactly varies whenever some other thing varies, with the strength of the variation in the first thing always matching the strength of the variation in the second thing, then scientists say that is a correlation coefficient of 1.0. When there is a much weaker numerical association, scientists assign a much smaller number.  So, for example, the correlation between between height and weight is only about .3 and .4. Greater height tends to suggest greater weight, but the fact that you are 6 feet tall does not prove you weigh more than someone who is 5% shorter. 

The correlations reported in the new study are very weak correlations  We read this:

"Individual SNP effects were extremely small, reflecting the highly distributed genetic architecture of personality. For example, the median association estimate among extraversion lead SNPs, corrected for the winner’s curse, is 0.009 s.d. [standard deviation] per effect allele (corresponding to scoring at the 50.35th versus the 50th percentile in extraversion)."

A statistical effect of  0.009 s.d. [standard deviation] is a negligible effect, basically nothing. 

But should we be impressed that some non-zero correlations were found? No, we should not. That's because when analyzing causally unrelated things, you will often find small correlation coefficients greater than .1, even when the first thing has no real influence or effect on the second thing. 

I created an Open Office spreadsheet to demonstrate this reality. I typed in the Rand() function into one of the cells, and then copied that cell to fill up the two columns shown below. The spreadsheet then had two columns of completely random numbers, as shown below.

At the bottom of the spreadsheet, I typed in a formula that calculates the correlation between these two columns of random numbers. The formula is below:

=CORREL(B28:B57;C28:C57)

Now, the way this spreadsheet works, each time I press the F9 key on my keyboard, all of the random numbers are randomly regenerated, which causes the correlation number at the bottom to change. Each times that happens we are left with two columns of freshly generated entirely random numbers, and there is absolutely zero causal relation between those two columns.  Here are different correlation coefficient numbers I got at the bottom, after pressing the F9 key 10 different times. Each time I did that, there was recalculated the correlation between two new columns of freshly regenerated random numbers. 

Try 1: .007

Try 2: .118

Try 3: .127

Try 4: -.26

Try 5: .127

Try 6: .171

Try 7:  -.160

Try 8: .450

Try 9: .364

Try 10:  .0007

What does this spreadsheet and my ten recalculations of it show? It shows that correlations can always be found between two sets of causally unrelated data. It is not at all true that when analyzing two sets of data that have no causal connection, that you will always find a correlation coefficient very close to 0.  It is, in fact, extremely common to find weak correlation coefficients (below .35) when comparing two data sets that have no cause and effect relation at all.

The new meta-analysis paper analyzing personality traits and genome data fails to clearly report any correlations between personality traits and genomes/SNPs higher than we would expect to get from chance if there was no causal connection between personality traits and genes. What's going on seems to be what I call correlation-fishing or noise mining. That's typically when someone analyses two things that have no or very little causal relation, and finds tiny little correlations here and there, without finding any strong evidence of a causal relation.

The trick of reading the paper's figures may elude some readers, as key graphs are found in a kind of sidebar on the far right of the paper. If you look at the numbers reported in those graphs, you will fail to find any strong positive correlation being reported. We see lots of weak-looking numbers such as .15 or .25, with apparently no sign of good correlations. There are also some indications that the correlations reported are mostly negative correlations.

I can imagine some ways in which that might work. For example, some SNP resulting in a defective gene leading to a genetic disease or genetic abnormality might result in a sick or ugly subject who is weak in "extraversion," because extraversion (an outgoing personality) is more common in those who are healthy and good-looking.  Similarly, someone with a broken gene resulting in sickness or ugliness might tend to be less self-confident because of such a shortfall; and that might show up in a slightly lower "openness to experience"  tendency. But you are torturing language in a misleading way if you try to make something like that sound like genes determining personality. Much better to just say, "Body problems can have a negative effect on personality."

There's something to be learned from the study of SNPs, but it isn't the false lesson of "genes determine personality." Instead it is a lesson of "genes and their corresponding protein molecules can often malfunction if only 1% of their content randomly changes." The paper here lists only a small fraction of these SNPs that have been associated with health problems. 

A biology textbook tells us, "Proteins are so precisely built that the change of even a few atoms in one amino acid can sometimes disrupt the structure of the whole molecule so severely that all function is lost." And we read on a science site, "Folded proteins are actually fragile structures, which can easily denature, or unfold." Another science site tells us, "Proteins are fragile molecules that are remarkably sensitive to changes in structure." A paper describing a database of protein mutations tells us that "two thirds of mutations within the database are destabilising." Evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin stated, "It seems clear that even the smallest change in the sequence of amino acids of proteins usually has a deleterious effect on the physiology and metabolism of organisms."

The frequent tendency of genes and proteins molecules to malfunction when only 1% of their parts randomly change is something important that suggests that such wonders of organization (involving hundreds or thousands of parts as well-arranged as the letters in a well-written paragraph) are accidentally unachievable, and that their origin cannot be credibly explained under existing theories of unguided evolutionary origins. 

Common Ancestry Is a Severe Example of a Missing-Pillars Theory

There is a type of theory we can call a missing-pillars theory. A missing-pillars theory is a theory that lacks pillars of observation that should exist before the theory is asserted. To explain the idea, let me give a schematic diagram of a theory with a strong basis in observations:

Each one of the pillars is some observation that supports the theory. Here is an example. Imagine you are a prosecuting attorney, and your theory is that Johann Schmitzenkoler killed his wife by shooting her at her work. Observation Pillar #1 is a video showing the wife being fatally shot at work by a masked man the same height as the husband. Observation Pillar #2 is a witness saying Johann said he was going to kill his wife the day before the murder, to collect insurance money. Observation Pillar #3 is a video showing Johann approaching the wife's workplace just before the murder, and putting on a mask like the mask the killer wore.  Observation Pillar #4 is that you found buried in Johann's garden a gun that the ballistics division says is the same gun that killed the wife. 

A theory like the one just described is well-supported by evidence. But imagine a very different situation. Your theory is that Walter Willtowsky killed his wife Wilma. The wife has not been seen in a few days, but no one has found her body. In fact, it has not even been proven that the wife is dead.  When Walter is questioned, he says that his wife is just visiting her mother, and will be back before long.  You do not know any "when" involving the wife's murder. You do not know any "why" involving the wife's murder, and you do not know any "how" involving the wife's murder. In fact, you do not even know an "if" regarding the wife's murder, because you do not even know she is dead. In this case we have an example of a missing-pillars theory. The situation is illustrated below. Missing-pillars theories are like the two theories in the bottom row. 

I will give another example of a missing-pillars theory. Imagine Dave married his wife four weeks ago. Since then, Dave has never been apart from his wife. He was with his wife on a honeymoon for two weeks, and the next weeks they worked together at their business, and lived together. Dave for some reason develops the theory that his wife is being unfaithful to him. The problem is that he lacks a "when" and lacks a "where" and lacks a "how" to support this theory. He cannot think of when or where or how his wife could have been unfaithful since marrying him. All that Dave has is a "why." He speculates that maybe his wife is being unfaithful in order to have better sex with some other man. 

Lacking a "when," a "where" and a "how," Dave's theory of his wife's infidelity is a missing-pillars theory. Because all that Dave has is a "why" speculation, his theory is like the structure shown at the bottom right of the diagram above, a structure with only one pillar.  A structure so wobbly will not hold up well. 

Are there missing-pillars theories in the science departments of academia? There are many. In theoretical physics there are the various theories called string theory, all of which are completely lacking in any observational pillars. There is also a theory called supersymmetry theory that is lacking in any observational pillars. Theoretical physicists have written thousands of papers and spent endless thousands of man-hours on these dead ends. In cosmology there is a missing-pillars theory called the cosmic inflation theory (not to be confused with the Big Bang theory). There seems to be at least observational pillars of the Big Bang theory (the expansion of the universe and the observation of the cosmic microwave background). But there are no observational pillars supporting the cosmic inflation theory. 

In the field of astrophysics, there are at least two major missing-pillars theories: the theory of dark matter and the theory of dark energy. Neither has ever been supported by direct observations. The believers in these theories are reduced to appealing to claims of indirect evidence for such theories. 

Are there missing-pillars theories in the biology departments of academia? There are quite a few. One big example is the theory that the brain is the source of the human mind and the storage place of memories.  

To analyze whether a theory is a missing-pillars theory, we should not first look for things we can call pillars of the theory, but instead look for pillars of observation that should exist before someone asserts the theory. In the case of the theory that the brain is the source of the human mind and the storage place of memories, such missing pillars are "all over the place," pretty much everywhere. Below are some of the missing pillars of such a theory. 

• Neuroscientists have microscopically examined many thousands of brains of the recently deceased, and also microscopically examined very much tissue recently removed from living people who had operations such as operations in which brain tissue was removed to reduce seizures. Such microscopic examination has often been done with microscopes which should have been powerful enough to find learned knowledge if it existed in human brains. But such microscopic examination has never discovered the slightest trace of learned information. By microscopic examination no one has ever found a single word someone learned or even a single letter or character stored in a brain. By microscopic examination no one has ever found a single image someone ever saw, and no one has ever found a single pixel of such an image. 
• Neuroscientists lack any credible theory of how a brain could store a record of experiences someone had or how a brain could store something someone learned in school. When they are asked to discuss how such a thing could occur, neuroscientists merely engage in the vaguest hand-waving, such as muttering something about "synapse strengthening" (not a credible theory of how learned information could be stored in brains). 

• There seems to be no place in the brain suitable for storing memories that last for decades, and things like synapses and dendritic spines (alleged to be involved in memory storage) are unstable, "shifting sands" kind of things which do not last for years, and which consist of proteins that only last for weeks.

• The synapses that transmit signals in the brain are very noisy and unreliable,  in contrast to humans who can recall very large amounts of memorized information without error.

• Signal transmission in the brain must mainly be a snail's pace affair, because of very serious slowing factors such as synaptic delays and synaptic fatigue (wrongly ignored by those who write about the speed of brain signals), and also the relatively slow  transmission speed of dendrites, meaning brains are too slow to explain instantaneous human memory recall.

• The brain seems to have no mechanism for reading memories.

• The brain seems to have no mechanism for writing memories, nothing like the read-write heads found in computers.

• The brain has nothing that might explain the instantaneous recall of long-ago-learned information that humans routinely display, and has nothing like the things that allow instant data retrieval in computers. 

• There is no sign that the brain or the human genome has any of the vast genomic apparatus it would need to have to accomplish the gigantic task of converting learned conceptual knowledge and episodic memories into neural states or synapse states (the task would presumably require thousands of specialized proteins, and there's no real sign that such memory-encoding proteins exist).

• No neuroscientist has ever given a detailed explanation of how such a gigantic translation task of memory encoding could be accomplished (one that included precise, detailed examples).

• Despite frequent misleading claims that the brain is like a computer, no one has ever discovered in a brain most of the things that are used by computers to compute. The brain has nothing like a CPU, nothing like an operating system, and nothing like software. No neural foundation has been discovered for human thinking abilities, and neuroscientists are unable to credibly examine how a human could think or reason. 

• Neuroscientists are so lacking in an explanation of how a brain could hold a belief or store an idea or principle or rule that there does not even exist a term used by neuroscientists to describe a belief or idea or principle or rule that is stored in a brain. There exists the word "engram" to describe the idea of a memory stored in the brain, but there does not exist a similar word to describe a belief or idea or principle or rule stored in a brain. 

• It is nowadays widely confessed by neuroscientists that they lack any neural explanation for the basic reality of consciousness or experience. 

• Neuroscientists lack any explanation for how the chemical and electrical activity of the brain could give rise to a strong experience of a single unified self, an experience that persists even when the two hemispheres of the brain fail to be joined by the connecting fibers of the corpus callosum, and even when such fibers are severed in operations to reduce seizures. 

You can read in the most abundant detail about all of these missing pillars by reading the posts of my site here. All of these things are missing pillars of the theory that the brain generates the mind and that the brain stores memories. That theory is a very severe example of a missing-pillars theory. But there may be an even more extreme example of a missing-pillars theory in the world of biology: the theory of common ancestry, also called the theory of common descent. 

The theory of common ancestry is the theory that all life on Earth descends from a common ancestor.  The theory of common ancestry is one that is staggering in its presumptuousness.  You might realize this when we compare the theory of common ancestry to the neuroscientist's theory that brains make minds and that brains store memories. That neuroscientist theory is a theory that merely attempts to offer an origin for what goes on in the minds of humans. There are two basic problems in explaining any particular human: 

(1) how did he get his body?

(2) how did he get his mind?

The neuroscientist attempts to answer the second of these questions, but not the first. The great mystery of how a speck-sized zygote progresses to become the vast state of organization that is a human body is not one addressed by neuroscientists. 

But instead of being limited to trying to explain the mere mental side of humans (a single species), the theory of common ancestry is something that struts around like some biological Theory of Everything. That theory of common ancestry attempts to offer a theory of explanation for all species that now exist, both in the physical sense and the mental sense. It also claims that the same explanation explains every species that has ever existed. Instead of limiting itself to explaining the earthly biology that now exists, the theory of common ancestry promulgates a grand, sweeping dogma that it claims applies to every species that has ever existed: that they all are descendants of a common ancestor. It is hard to imagine any theory that could be more presumptuous, short of some general abstract Theory of Existence applying to everything that exists, living or dead. 

The bigger the theory, the more observational pillars that it requires. Here we should remember some basic principles along the lines of "you cannot run unless you can first walk" and also "you cannot walk unless you can first stand." Specifically:

• It makes no sense to claim that you understand the origin of all species unless you understand in full the origin of the human species. 
• It makes no sense to claim that you understand the origin of the human species unless you understand the origin of the human mind and all human mental capabilities. 
• It makes no sense to claim that that you understand the origin of the human species unless you understand both the physical origin and the mental origin of individual human beings. 
• It makes no sense to claim that that you understand the physical origin of an individual human being unless you can give a credible theory explaining the progression from a speck-sized zygote to a full adult body. 
• It makes no sense to claim that that you understand the mental origin of an individual human being unless you can give a credible theory or theories explaining such phenomena as human self-hood, imagination, thinking, the phenomenon of instant learning, the phenomenon of the lifelong persistence of memories, and the phenomenon of the instant recall of detailed correct answers when someone is asked a question. 
• It makes no sense to claim that that you understand the origin of all species unless you can credibly explain how there could have occurred a progression from one type of organism to some other type of organism with a vastly different structure and vastly different mental capabilities. 
• It makes no sense to claim that you have some grand theory explaining the natural origin of all species if you cannot explain the origin of life itself; because if the origin of life requires a miracle or purposeful intervention, then "all bets are off" and miracles or purposeful intervention cannot be excluded elsewhere in the history of life. 
• It makes no sense to claim that you have some grand theory explaining the natural origin of all species if you cannot explain a progression from microscopic life to macroscopic life in the form of large visible organisms. 
• If makes no sense to claim that you have some grand theory explaining the natural origin of all species if you cannot explain basic matters of biology a million times simpler, such as how a eukaryotic cell is able to reproduce. 

Realizing such things, we can start to make a list of the missing pillars of the theory of common ancestry. They are "all over the place" and pretty much everywhere. We can start by listing every single missing pillar of the theory that the brain is the source of the human mind and the storage place of memories. This is the 14-item bullet list that was the first bullet list of this post.

Why are all of these missing pillars of the theory of common ancestry? Such a theory makes no exclusions, making a claim about all species on Earth. If we do not understand the origin of human minds, we are not entitled to claim that we understand the origin of the human species. And if we do not understand the origin of the origin species, we are not entitled to claim that all species have a common ancestor. 

Below are some of the very many other missing pillars of the theory of common ancestry.

• There does not exist any credible theory explaining the natural origin of any very complex innovation in biology. Darwinism is no such theory, because it fails to credibly explain the vast leaps in organization and fine-tuned functional information needed for biological innovations. Such leaps cannot be explained by any gradualist theories, for reasons explained in my post "Anatomically Uninformative DNA, Nonfunctional Intermediates and Useless Early Stages Are Why Gradualism Does Not Work," which you can read here. 
• There does not exist any credible theory explaining the natural origin of any  complex anatomy innovation. The claim that such innovations are explained by random mutations in DNA is not tenable, largely because DNA does not specify the anatomy of any organism, contrary to the misstatements so often made by Darwinists. DNA only specifies low-level chemical information such as which amino acids make up a protein. 
• There does not exist any credible theory explaining the natural origin of any  type of very complex cell. The claim that such innovations are explained by random mutations in DNA is not tenable, largely because DNA does not specify the structure of any cell, and also does not specify the structure of any of the organelles that are the building components of cells. 
• Far from being able to explain the origin of any cell type, biologists are unable to even explain the reproduction of any of the more complex cells in human bodies. The total number of well-arranged parts in a eukaryotic cell (the type of cell that humans have) is greater than or roughly the same as the total number of well-arranged parts in an automobile. Every time a typical eukaryotic cell reproduces, it is a marvel as hard-to-explain as an automobile splitting into two working automobiles. 
• Scientists lack any credible explanation for the origin of new types of genes and new types of protein molecules. Requiring a very special arrangement of hundreds of amino acid parts (or a special arrangement of hundreds of nucleotide base pairs specifying such parts), the origin of a new type of gene or a new type of protein from accidental events is as unlikely as an ink splash producing a new paragraph of functional text that is well-written, well-spelled, useful and grammatical. One of the reasons why new types of genes and new types of protein molecules cannot be credibly explained by accidental natural processes is that they are both very sensitive to small changes and have very high functional thresholds, being non-functional in half-form. See my three posts marked "protein sensitivity" for a discussion of some of the scientific studies indicating that protein molecules are very sensitive to small changes. 

Does the common ancestry theory have any pillars at all? It has often been claimed that the fact that all life uses the same genetic code is a pillar of the common ancestry theory. But such a universal genetic code is not something that we would expect to occur only under a theory of common ancestry. If earthly species appeared because of purposeful action by some divine agency or superhuman power (perhaps some visiting extraterrestrial spaceships), we might well expect that earthly organisms would have a common genetic code. Pretty much the entire US internet uses the ASCII code for information storage and information transmission, a scheme of encoding that can be represented on a single page, just as the genetic code can be represented on a single page. But that is not a sign of common natural ancestry. It is a sign of deliberate standardization.  So the fact that all earthly life uses the same genetic code is not any real pillar of the theory of common ancestry. 

It is also claimed that the fossil record is a pillar of the theory of common ancestry. But fossils do not tell us whether one species descended from some other species. And it can be reasonably argued that the fossil record conflicts with the theory of common ancestry. The most dramatic feature of the fossil record is a sudden explosion of fossils that have been dated to about 540 millions ago. Such a sudden explosion in the appearance of fossils is known as the Cambrian Explosion. Almost all of the major groups of animals types (known as phyla) date back to the time of the Cambrian Era, where they suddenly appear in the fossil record.  For almost all of the animal phyla to have appeared with such relative suddenness is not what we would expect under the theory of common ancestry. So the fossil record is no real pillar of the theory of common ancestry. 

Not at all what we would expect under common ancestry

Claims have been made of a genetic similarity between one species and some other species. Such claims could never show anything more than a likelihood that one species was descended another species; and if that is done, it never proves that all species are descended from a common ancestor.  Similarly, you may show that you are descended from some US president of the nineteenth century; but that would never show that everyone in your town was descended from that president. Claims of a genetic similarity between one species and another should be received with skepticism. Darwinists long matter-of-factly claimed that the human genome and the chimpanzee genome are 98% similar. But (as discussed here) a recent paper suggests that the human genome and the chimpanzee genome differ by something like 14%. 

How can a missing pillars theory such as the common ancestry theory stay in circulation? What happens is that each new generation of scientists keeps getting recruited to hold up the socially constructed theory, by promoting it in their books and papers. So the theory stays hoisted up by a "keep the faith" process of the regimented perpetuation of dogma by a conformist belief community that  stigmatizes and sanctions all who deviate from its mandated speech conventions. 

The confessions below by scientists shed light on some of the missing pillars of the common ancestry theory. 

• "A wide variety of protein structures exist in nature, however the evolutionary origins of this panoply of proteins remain unknown."  -- Four Harvard scientists, "The role of evolutionary selection in the dynamics of protein structure evolution." 
• "Tawfik admits the issue of a first protein is 'a complete mystery' because it reveals a paradox: enzymatic function depends upon the well-defined, three-dimensional structure of a protein scaffold, yet the 3D structure is too complex, too intricate, and too coordinated to arise without simpler precursors and intermediates....Tawfik soberly recognizes the problem. The appearance of early protein families, he has remarked, is 'something like close to a miracle.'....'In fact, to our knowledge,' Tawfik and Tóth-Petróczy write, 'no macromutations ... that gave birth to novel proteins have yet been identified.' " -- Tyler Hampton, quoting Dan  S. Tawfik, professor in a Department of Biological Chemistry (link). 
• "We have addressed a large body of evidence related to transitions (micro- and macro-) in proteins that have a pre-existing globular 3D-structure (and function), but how does structure and function evolve in de novo [new] proteins? ...Overall, the evolution of MIPSs, the recruitment of first enzymes, and de novo emergence of proteins are aspects where our knowledge is still at infancy -- Scientists confessing in 2022 that we don't know how new proteins originate (link).    
• "The problem of protein folding is one of the most important problems of molecular biology. A central problem (the so called Levinthal's paradox) is that the protein is first synthesized as a linear molecule that must reach its native conformation in a short time (on the order of seconds or less). The protein can only perform its functions in this (often single) conformation. The problem, however, is that the number of possible conformational states is exponentially large for a long protein molecule. Despite almost 30 years of attempts to resolve this paradox, a solution has not yet been found." -- Two scientists, "On a generalized Levinthal's paradox," 2018.  
• "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). 
• "Comparative genome analyses indicate that every taxonomic group so far studied contains 10–20% of genes that lack recognizable homologs in other species...It is surprising that orphans have been completely ignored by most comparative genomics studies." -- Several scientists, "More than just orphans: are taxonomically-restricted genes important in evolution?" 
• "Neo-Darwinism can't account for sexual reproduction."  -- biologist Josh Mittledorf PhD, "Cracking the Aging Code," page 31.
• "It is not sufficient to postulate an amazing feat of mis-copying that contrived to produce a highly beneficial structural change. We have to postulate the simultaneous occurrence of three miracles. Whatever miracle occurs to a male, say, there must be the even greater miracle that just the same structural change occurs, by a chance mis-copying to a female, and furthermore, that the two miracles must happen in the same place at much the same time, otherwise the changed male will not find the changed female. Mathematically, this means that the probability of an appreciable change being successfully propagated is the product of these three small numbers, making the result negligibly small." -- Scientist Fred Hoyle (link).  

• "Replication [of cells] is one of the deepest mysteries of biology. It is really something totally counterintuitive if cell is seen as a sack of water plus some chemicals. We have a lot [of] facts about what happens in the replication at DNA level but how this miracle happens is a mystery. At cell level the situation gets even more complex." -- M. Pitkanen, physics PhD, "Getting philosophical: some comments about the problems of physics, neuroscience, and biology."

• "How cells control their size and maintain stable size distributions is one of the most fundamental, unsolved problems in biology...Even for the bacterium E. coli, arguably the most extensively studied organism to date, no one has been able to answer this question."  --Suckjoon Jun, an assistant professor of physics and molecular biology (link).
• "Cell biology is a mystery for many reasons one
  of which is the lack of basic knowledge. This may
  be the fault of scientists or simply a failure in basic
  information at the level of common contemporary
  knowledge. The well known sentence of Socrates:
  'I know that I know nothing' is as true in cell
  biology as in other scientific fields. This sentence
  was modified by Lloyd in 1986 who claimed: 'The
  closer we look, the less we see'. I would like to
  modify this sentence yet again as a cell biologist and
  microscopist: 'The closer we look, the less we know
  about.' ... Everyone involved in cell
  biology, is surprised how limited is our knowledge
  about the various cell compartments....It should now be mentioned that our knowledge even of basic cell organelles, including their various functions, is very limited....We know something about cell organelles, including various nuclear compartments, but most of their functions are waiting for further and better clarification....Depending on conditions, selected genes may be repressed or derepressed and activated giving to rise to the particular cell lineage with characteristic cell structures and functions. On the other hand, such transformations, including the homing of the transformed cells are also very mysterious although both these processes are empirically used in clinical medicine."  Karel Smetana, cell biologist, "To the Mystery of Cell Biology.," (link). 
• "Despite the centrality of multicellularity and cell differentiation to animal biology, their origins are little understood." -- Two cell biologists (link).  
• "Protein assemblies are at the basis of numerous biological machines by performing actions that none of the individual proteins would be able to do. There are thousands, perhaps millions of different types and states of proteins in a living organism, and the number of possible interactions between them is enormous...The strong synergy within the protein complex makes it irreducible to an incremental process. They are rather to be acknowledged as fine-tuned initial conditions of the constituting protein sequences. These structures are biological examples of nano-engineering that surpass anything human engineers have created. Such systems pose a serious challenge to a Darwinian account of evolution, since irreducibly complex systems have no direct series of selectable intermediates, and in addition, as we saw in Section 4.1, each module (protein) is of low probability by itself." -- Steinar Thorvaldsen and Ola Hössjerm, "Using statistical methods to model the fine-tuning of molecular machines and systems,"  Journal of Theoretical Biology.
• "The greatest twentieth century paleontologist, George Gaylord Simpson, in midcentury had to admit to a reality of the fossil record: 'It remains true, as every paleontologist knows, that most new species, genera, and families, and that nearly all new categories above the level of families, appear in the record suddenly, and are not led up to by known, gradual, completely continuous transitional sequences.' " --"Lamarck's Revenge” by paleontologist Peter Ward , page 43. 
• "The first eye, the first wing, the first placenta. How they emerge. Explaining these is the foundational motivation of evolutionary biology. And yet, we still do not have a good answer. This classic idea of gradual change, one happy accident at a time, has so far fallen flat.”  -- Biologist Armin Moczek.
• "Considering that the total number of known fossil species is nearly one hundred thousand, the fact that the only relatively convincing morphological sequences are a handful of cases like the horse, which do not involve a great deal of change, and which in many cases like the elephant may not even represent phylogenetic sequences at all, serves to emphasize the remarkable lack of any direct evidence for major evolutionary transformations in the fossil record." -- Michael Denton, MD and biochemistry PhD, "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis," 1986, page 185. 
• "Major transitions in biological evolution show the same pattern of sudden emergence of diverse forms at a new level of complexity. The relationships between major groups within an emergent new class of biological entities are hard to decipher and do not seem to fit the tree pattern that, following Darwin's original proposal, remains the dominant description of biological evolution. The cases in point include the origin of complex RNA molecules and protein folds; major groups of viruses; archaea and bacteria, and the principal lineages within each of these prokaryotic domains; eukaryotic supergroups; and animal phyla. In each of these pivotal nexuses in life's history, the principal 'types' seem to appear rapidly and fully equipped with the signature features of the respective new level of biological organization. No intermediate 'grades' or intermediate forms between different types are detectable." -- Biologist Eugene Koonin, "The Biological Big Bang model for the major transitions in evolution" (link).
• "This is the basic story of evolution, as recounted in countless textbooks and pop-science bestsellers. The problem, according to a growing number of scientists, is that it is absurdly crude and misleading." --Stephen Buranyi, science writer, "Do We Need a New Theory of Evolution?" in The Guardian. 
• "I may challenge the adherents of the strictly Darwinian view, which we are discussing here, to try to explain the evolution of the following features by accumulation and selection of small mutants: hair in mammals, feathers in birds, segmentation of arthropods and vertebrates, the transformation of gill arches in phylogeny, including the aortic arches, muscles, nerves, etc.; further, teeth, shells of mollusks, ectoskeletons, compound eyes, blood circulation, alternation of generations, statocysts, ambulacral system of echinoderms, pedicellaria of the same, cnidocysts, poison apparatus of snakes, whalebone, and, finally, primary chemical differences like hemoglobin vs. hemocyanin, etc. Corresponding examples from plants could be given." -- Biologist Richard Goldschmidt, "The Material Basis of Evolution," pages 6-7. 
• “While scientists are still working out the details of how the eye evolved, we are also still stuck on the question of how intelligence emerges in biology.” -- Scientists Rafael Yuste and Michael Levin, an article in Scientific American. 
• "Biological systems have evolved to amazingly complex states, yet we do not understand in general how evolution operates to generate increasing genetic and functional complexity." -- four scientists, "Adaptive ratchets and the evolution of molecular complexity."
• "I should like to critically object that this model has not been supported by an affirmative estimate of probabilities so far. Such an estimate of the theoretical time scale of evolution as implied by the model should be compared with the empirical time scale. One would need to show that, according to the assumed model, the probability of de facto existing purposeful features to evolve was sufficiently high on the empirically known time scale. Such an estimate has nowhere been attempted though." -- Eminent physicist Wolfgang von Pauli, discoverer of the biologically crucial Pauli Exclusion Principle (link).
• "Until  reading  an  able  and valuable  article  in  the  North  British  Review  (June,  1867),  I did not  appreciate  how  rarely  single  variations,  whether  slight  or strongly  marked,  could  be  perpetuated." -- Charles Darwin (link).
• "The higher the organization, whether of an entire organism or of a single organ, the greater is the number of the parts that cooperate, and the more perfect is their cooperation ; and consequently, the more necessity there is for corresponding variations to take place in all the cooperating parts at once, and the more useless will be any variation whatever unless it is accompanied by corresponding variations in the cooperating parts; while it is obvious that the greater the number of variations which are needed in order to effect an improvement, the less will be the probability of their all occurring at once....There are improbabilities so great that the common-sense of mankind treats them as impossibilities. It is not, for instance, in the strictest sense of the word, impossible that a poem and a mathematical proposition should be obtained by the process of shaking letters out of a box ; but it is improbable to a degree that cannot be distinguished from impossibility ; and the improbability of obtaining an improvement in an organ by means of several spontaneous variations, all occurring together, is an improbability of the same kind." -- Joseph John Murphy, biology scholar, author of a massive biology tome (link). 
• "What gambler would be crazy enough to play roulette with random evolution? The probability of dust carried by the wind reproducing Durer's 'Melancholia' is less infinitesimal than the probability of copy errors in the DNA molecule leading to the formation of the eye...There is no law against daydreaming, but science must not indulge in it." -- Biologist Pierre-Paul Grasse (link). 
• "Natural selection acting on populations is incapable of guiding evolution." -- Biologist Pierre-Paul Grasse (link). 
• "Big picture, we want to understand how initially dumb clumps of cells, cells that are one or two mutations away from being single-celled, don’t really know that they’re organisms — they don’t have any adaptations to being multicellular, they’re just a dumb clump — how those dumb clumps of cells can evolve into increasingly complex multicellular organisms, with new morphologies, with cell-level integration, division of labor, and differentiation amongst the cells. Just like, we want to watch that process of how do these simple groups become complex. And this is, like, one of the biggest knowledge gaps in evolutionary biology. I mean, in my opinion.....We don’t really know the process through which simple groups evolve into increasingly complex organisms."-- Biologist Will Ratcliff (link). 
• "How animals evolved complex multicellularity from their unicellular ancestors remains unanswered." -- A 2026 paper by several scientists (link).
• "The evolutionary divergence of a single species into two has never been directly observed in nature, primarily because speciation can take a longtime to occur." -- Irwin, Bensch, and Price, "Speciation in a Ring," Nature, 2001.
• "Genetics might be adequate for explaining microevolution, but micro-evolutionary changes in gene frequency were not seen as able to turn a reptile into a mammal or to convert a fish into an amphibian. Microevolution looks at adaptations that concern only the survival of the fittest, not the arrival of the fittest. As Goodwin (1995) points out, 'the origin of species — Darwin's problem — remains unsolved." "Resynthesizing Evolutionary and Developmental Biology," Gilbert, Opitz and Raft, 1996.

Some types of experts acting as information overlords

Clearly the theory of common ancestry is a severe example of a missing-pillars theory. There does not exist a fifth of the pillars that would be needed for someone to convincingly advance such a theory that all organisms have a common ancestor. Consequently the theory of common ancestry is not one that you should feel right about advancing if you are a serious scholar of biological complexity and biological organization and the human brain and its severe physical shortfalls and the vast depths and staggering wonders of human mental experiences and human mental capabilities.  Far better for you to say: I do not understand how Earth's species arose, and I do not understand how the human species arose. Far better for you to say that such matters are mysteries a hundred miles over your head.