Two 2024 Nobel Prize Press Releases Misinformed Us Badly

In a previous post entitled "Misleading Statements in a Recent Nobel Prize Announcement" I analyzed quite a few misleading statements in the press release (and a supplementary document of that release) issued by a  Nobel Prize committee announcing the year 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The press release I discussed was not the only misleading press release issued in 2024 by a Nobel Prize committee. There were also bad errors in the press release announcing the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. 

In its second sentence that press release contained this piece of fiction: "The information stored within our chromosomes can be likened to an instruction manual for all cells in our body."  The information referred to is DNA, also called the genome. DNA consists mainly of genes. But neither DNA nor its genes contain any such thing as an instruction manual for cells. DNA has no specification of how to build a cell or any of its organelles, or how to maintain or correctly position any cells.  DNA does not even specify how to construct the protein complexes that make up organelles. 

The level of organization in the body is as follows: a body consists mainly of organ systems and a skeletal system; organ systems are built mainly from organs; organs are built from tissues; tissues are built from cells; cells are built from many types of organelles; organelles are built mainly from proteins complexes; protein complexes are built from proteins; and proteins are built from amino acids. The chromosome and its DNA does not have any specification of how to construct any of these levels higher than protein molecules. So it is a huge falsehood to claim that "the information stored within our chromosomes can be likened to an instruction manual for all cells in our body."  DNA does not tell how to make a cell or any of the main components of a cell; and DNA does not tell cells how to act or where they should go in the body. 

The Nobel Prize press release contained the following paragraph. I will put the false statements in boldface underline:

"The information stored within our chromosomes can be likened to an instruction manual for all cells in our body. Every cell contains the same chromosomes, so every cell contains exactly the same set of genes and exactly the same set of instructions. Yet, different cell types, such as muscle and nerve cells, have very distinct characteristics. How do these differences arise? The answer lies in gene regulation, which allows each cell to select only the relevant instructions. This ensures that only the correct set of genes is active in each cell type."

No, gene regulation does not constitute even a half-explanation of why we end up with different cell types.  Gene regulation refers to a cell's use or non-use of certain types of proteins. But that does not even half-explain why the human body has 200 different types of cells, with so many different functions, structures and characteristics. Similarly, if there were some person traveling to different construction sites, and merely saying things such as "use copper pipes" and "don't use cinder blocks" and "use steel beams" and "don't use wood 2 by 4's," that would never explain how one construction site might produce a stone church and another construction site might produce a mansion and another construction site might produce a shopping mall. Nowhere in chromosomes or DNA are there any instructions for building a cell or any of its organelle components, and neither chromosomes nor DNA nor its genes has any instructions on how to maintain, position or reproduce a cell. 

The press release in question announced the awarding of a Nobel Prize for the discovery of a microRNA  by Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun. A microRNA is a very tiny chemical unit that is only 18 to 25 nucleotides. About 1000 microRNA molecules have been discovered.  Molecules so small with so little information are utterly incapable of explaining the vast mystery of why there arises so many different types of enormously complex cells specialized for different biological purposes. 

The Nobel Prize press release I am discussing gives us the extremely misleading visual below:

The diagram above misleads us badly in three different ways. First, it omits two different layers of organization, and gives us the profoundly misleading idea that cells are directly made from proteins. The truth is that cells are made from extremely complex components called organelles, which are built from extremely complex protein complexes, which are built from protein molecules.  Second, the diagram misleads us badly by giving us a visual suggesting  that cells are very simple. We see a cell that has only a few organelles.  The truth is that human cells typically contain very many thousands of organelles. Third, the diagram makes proteins look like very simple things with only a few parts. Human proteins have an average of about 450 amino acids each, which must be very specially arranged for them to perform their functions. 

Schematic diagrams of cells are constantly misleading us by depicting cells with only a few organelles. Specifically:

• A cell diagram will typically depict a cell as having only one or a few mitochondria, but human cells typically have many thousands of mitochondria, as many as a million.
• A cell diagram will typically depict a cell as having only only one or a few lysosomes, but human cells typically have hundreds of lysosomes.
• A cell diagram will typically depict a cell as having only a few ribosomes, but a human cell may have up to 10 million ribosomes.
• A cell diagram will typically depict one or a few stacks of a Golgi apparatus, each with only a few cisternae. But a cell will typically have between 10 and 20 stacks, each having as many as 60 cisternae.
• A cell diagram will rarely even depict a microtubule, although according to the paper here "cells can contain from just a few to many hundreds of microtubules (Aikawa, 1971; Osborn & Weber, 1976)." 
• The membranes of cells are extremely complicated structures, consisting of four layers, with each layer being populated by many types of proteins each consisting of hundreds of well-arranged parts.  Some of this complexity could easily be shown by a "closeup circle" in a cell diagram, showing a closeup of part of the membrane.  But we rarely see any such depiction of the complexity of the cell membrane,  and cell diagrams almost always have cell membranes depicted as featureless things looking as simple as the surface of a balloon. 
• The cytosol of a cell is typically depicted as if it were a simple fluid like water. But the cytosol is actually loaded with many types of complex protein molecules needed for cell function. 

There is no excuse for the continuation of misleading cell diagrams in the literature of biology. For the past twenty years it has been easy to use computer graphics to make very sophisticated high-resolution diagrams capable of properly representing the complexity of cells. But almost no one is creating such diagrams, and we continue to see most cell diagrams looking like something hand-painted in the 1950's.  

The type of cell diagrams we usually see in biology literature are misrepresentations as absurd as trying to depict gigantic skyscrapers like the Empire State Building or the 828-meter-tall Burj Khalifa tower  by using ridiculously simplistic diagrams like this:

We get more very misleading talk later in the Nobel Prize press release with this statement:

"Gene regulation by microRNA, first revealed by Ambros and Ruvkun, has been at work for hundreds of millions of years. This mechanism has enabled the evolution of increasingly complex organisms."

The word "enable" means "give (someone or something) the authority or means to do something." The biological and chemical requirements for complex organisms are endless and ubiquitous, and most involve things vastly more complex than microRNA molecules, which are very small molecules. So to claim that mere microRNAs  "enabled the evolution of increasingly complex organisms" is to misspeak badly.  A correct statement would be that microRNAs are some of the least complex of the enormously high number of things needed for the appearance of organisms as complex as humans. 

The diagram below correctly describes the levels of organization in the human body, and tells us what is not specified by DNA. 

We have in this Nobel Prize press release and its diagram a repetition of one of the most misleading claims of biologists between 1975 and 2024: the groundless claim that genes contain programs for development. DNA is not a program, and the genes that make up DNA are not any program that forms organisms. DNA does not have any of the control structures (such as if/then statements) found in computer programs. DNA does not specify the growth of an organism, and does not know or state anything about organisms or their cells. 

Professor Massimo Pigliucci (mainstream author of numerous scientific papers on evolution) has stated  that "old-fashioned metaphors like genetic blueprint and genetic programme are not only woefully inadequate but positively misleading." In the book Mind in Life by Evan Thompson (published by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press) we read the following on page 180: "The plain truth is that DNA is not a program for building organisms, as several authors have shown in detail (Keller 2000, Lewontin 1993, Moss 2003)."  Developmental biologist C/H. Waddington stated, "The DNA is not a program or sequentially accessed control over the behavior of the cell." On the web site of the well-known biologist Denis Noble, we read that "the whole idea that genes contain the recipe or the program of life is absurd, according to Noble," and that we should understand DNA "not so much as a recipe or a program, but rather as a database that is used by the tissues and organs in order to make the proteins which they need." A paper by cell biologist Stuart A. Newman states,  "It would be unfortunate if we find ourselves having emerged from a period of misconceived genetic program metaphors only to land in a brave new world captivated by equally misguided ones about self-organization."

Part of the press release helps reveal the utter inadequacy of anything discovered by the awarded scientists to explain the mountain-sized mystery of cell differentiation. We read this: "Ambros and Ruvkun performed further experiments showing that the lin-4 microRNA turns off lin-14 by binding to the complementary sequences in its mRNA, blocking the production of lin-14 protein."  These guys merely found 

an off-switch for a particular protein. That cannot be more than just the tiniest piece in a gigantic puzzle with thousands of missing pieces, since cells use 20,000+ proteins, and since off-switches can't explain 200 very diverse types of enormous organization as we see in cells. And since tiny little microRNAs don't even have as much information as found on a single sentence of this post, it's pretty laughable to be elevating them to be things explaining the variety of human cells, things far more complex than any blog post I've ever written. 

The false claim made by the Nobel Prize press release (that gene regulation or gene expression explains why we have 200 different types of cells with vastly different sizes, structures, locations and functions) has been stated by many sources. False information about genes and DNA is super-abundant in the literature of biology, where groundless fictions about DNA have been steadily told for 75 years. The main reason such misinformation has been passed around in my post here. The same post quotes dozens of scientists and doctors who told us the truth about such matters, telling us that DNA is no blueprint, recipe or program for building a body or any of its cells. 

A phrase such as "gene expression" or "gene regulation" is vacuous as an explanation for why cells have different structures and different locations and why they use different proteins. Gene expression refers to what proteins a cell uses and how often they are used. Rather than being an explanation for why different cells are different, the phrase "gene expression" is one aspect of how they are different.  Appealing to "gene expression" as an explanation for why two cells are different is as vacuous as answering a question of "how come a computer is arranged differently from a refrigerator" by saying "because they have different parts in different places." Similarly the term "gene regulation" refers to a large variety of different complicated factors that differ when different cells end up with different concentrations of proteins.  But as an explanation for why two cells are different, the phrase "gene regulation" is as vacuous as trying to answer the question of "how come a computer is arranged differently from a refrigerator" by using a phrase such as "part placement differences." Having within it no concept or specification of a cell, DNA has no "gene regulator" controlling how many proteins of different types go into particular cells. Instead of referring to one discrete thing, the term "gene regulation" refers to dozens of scattered little things that differ when different types of cells arise.  Appealing to "gene regulation" as an explanation is as vacuous as trying to explain why a cathedral looks different from a factory by appealing to "assembly differences"  or "construction methodology." When used as an attempted explanation, the obscure phrase "gene regulation" is an example of hand-waving. Different gene regulation in different cells is one aspect of different cells being different, not an explanation of why they are different. 

As shown by this post and a previous post of mine, the year 2024 has proven that we should have no great confidence in the claims made by press releases announcing Nobel Prize awards. Nobel Prize press releases should be treated with the same suspicion and critical scrutiny we should have for university press releases announcing science research. Such press releases are very often guilty of very bad groundless boasting and misleading claims. 

Earlier in this century a biologist spoke truthfully about how little biologists understand cells, stating this:

"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."

A year 2022 statement by Intel claims that some analysis technique is "beginning to unravel the mystery of cell differentiation." In general when scientists say that they are merely "beginning to unravel" some great mystery, it is a confession that the mystery is still very much not understood by them. Humans don't understand how different cell types arise in the human body, contrary to the boast of the Nobel Prize committee that this is explained by "gene regulation." In 2019 two scientists confessed, "We have little understanding of the processes that allow cells to become different"  (link).

In the Nobel Prize press release I have criticized, there is a link to some speech given describing the 2024 award for the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology.  The speech gives us a very clumsy analogy in which the construction of a cell is compared to the performance of some symphony, and individual genes are compared to instrument players. The analogy is inappropriate because musicians work with a musical score exactly specifying how a symphony should sound, but DNA and its genes are nothing like a specification of any cell or any organ or any adult body. We read this:

"MicroRNAs are conductors with a special ability. Instead of passionately making gestures to either amplify or dampen music intensity, microRNAs tell musicians only when to quiet down or take a break. ‘You there, play softer! You, take a break!’ "

It's obvious from this analogy that individual MicroRNAs are mere "bit players" or minor cogs in the gigantically complicated process by which enormously organized cells are originated and vastly organized organism bodies are constructed. The awarded discovery merely involves finding one piece in a gigantic jigsaw puzzle which has almost all of its pieces still undiscovered, as illustrated in the visual below. 

 

In many of these cases that are hailed as progress in understanding things, there may be no real progress at all, but just some explanatory "robbing Peter to pay Paul." For example, let us suppose that there is some gene which has its rate of expression slowed down at some particular point in some type of cell. Let us suppose that someone postulates that this occurred because some microRNA sent a message at some point telling the gene  to slow down.  That's just a mere speck of explanatory progress. We've simply gone from "how did the gene know to slow down at this particular time in this particular cell?" to the equally great mystery of "how did the microRNA know that it should signal the gene to slow down at this particular time in this particular cell?"  The problem is that DNA has no actual specification of cells or the organelles that make up cells. So from a mechanistic or reductionist standpoint, none of these chemicals should know anything about what it should be doing at a particular time to help achieve some grand result such as the construction of a particular type of vastly organized cell, or its placement in the correct position in a human body. 

Human Anatomy Structures and the Cell Types Each Requires

Biologists have misled us in many different ways. I describe dozens of those ways in my post here. One of the worst ways in which biologists have misled us is by again and again visually misrepresenting the degree of complexity and organization in cells.  Again and again in the books and articles and school lessons of biologists, we see phony cell diagrams that make cells look 1,000 times simpler than they are. Such diagrams give people the idea that cells contain only a few components called organelles.  Most of the more complex cells in the human body contain more than 100,000 organelles, of many different types.

Schematic diagrams of cells are constantly misleading us by depicting cells with only a few organelles. Specifically:

• A cell diagram will typically depict a cell as having only one or a few mitochondria, but human cells typically have many thousands of mitochondria, as many as a million.
• A cell diagram will typically depict a cell as having only only one or a few lysosomes, but human cells typically have hundreds of lysosomes.
• A cell diagram will typically depict a cell as having only a few ribosomes, but a human cell may have up to 10 million ribosomes.
• A cell diagram will typically depict one or a few stacks of a Golgi apparatus, each with only a few cisternae. But a cell will typically have between 10 and 20 stacks, each having as many as 60 cisternae.
• A cell diagram will rarely even depict a microtubule, although according to the paper here "cells can contain from just a few to many hundreds of microtubules (Aikawa, 1971; Osborn & Weber, 1976)." 
• The membranes of cells are extremely complicated structures, consisting of four layers, with each layer being populated by many types of proteins each consisting of hundreds of well-arranged parts.  Some of this complexity could easily be shown by a "closeup circle" in a cell diagram, showing a closeup of part of the membrane.  But we rarely see any such depiction of the complexity of the cell membrane,  and cell diagrams almost always have cell membranes depicted as featureless things looking as simple as the surface of a balloon. 
• The cytosol of a cell is typically depicted as if it were a simple fluid like water. But the cytosol is actually loaded with many types of complex protein molecules needed for cell function. 

There is no excuse for the continuation of misleading cell diagrams in the literature of biology. For the past twenty years it has been easy to use computer graphics to make very sophisticated high-resolution diagrams capable of properly representing the complexity of cells. But almost no one is creating such diagrams, and we continue to see most cell diagrams looking like something hand-painted in the 1950's.  

The type of cell diagrams we usually see in biology literature are misrepresentations as absurd as trying to depict gigantic skyscrapers like the Empire State Building or the 828-meter-tall Burj Khalifa tower  by using ridiculously simplistic diagrams like this:

It is easy to understand why such misrepresentations continue.  Addicted to socially constructed triumphal boasts that they understand biological origins, boasts that depict themselves as Grand Lords of Explanation, biologists do not want us to properly understand the mountainous degrees of organization and complexity in human bodies and all of the more complex types of human cells. The more we understand such stratospheric levels of organization and complexity, the less likely we will be to believe the claims of biologists that such things originated from blind accidental processes.  A very important relation you should remember is that the more functionally organized something is and the more hierarchically organized that thing is, the less credible is any claim of an accidental origin of such a thing.  For example, it is easy to construct a credible theory of how a "house of cards" consisting of only two cards diagonally leaning against each other might arise by accident, but impossible to construct a credible theory of how a triangular house of cards consisting of 18 well-arranged cards with three cards rows could ever arise by accidental processes such as someone throwing a third of a deck of cards into the air.

                    You can't get this accidentally 

On the day I started to write this post I read once again what I read many times every month: a glaring example of a biologist lying. The biologist who I won't name was attacking a very serious thinker who says that Darwinism is utterly insufficient to explain the origin of biological innovations. As part of his rebuttal, the biologist drew attention to a claim of the Darwinism critic, the claim that new anatomical structures require new cell types. The biologist told us that such a claim was false. But the biologist lied. In general, new types of anatomical structures do require some new cell types. Typically a new type of anatomical structure will require some combination of cell types used elsewhere in the body and also one or more cell types used only by that anatomical structure.  

To prove my point, I present the table below. In the left column, we see the main types of anatomical structures in the human body. In the right column we see only some of the cell types that are needed for such structures. Almost every type of anatomical structure listed requires at least one cell type used only by that structure. Most of the cell types that are listed are used by only one of the anatomical structures. My source for the information below is mainly the wikipedia.org article on human cell types, which you can read here.  The listing here is by no means comprehensive, and I'm sure a complete list would list many additional cell types in the "cell types required" column. 

Anatomical structure	Cell Types Required
Duodenum	Brunner's gland cell
Respiratory Tract	Insulated goblet cell, "ciliated, non-ciliated secretory cells, and basal cells" (link).
Digestive Tract	Insulated goblet cell, enterocytes, chief cells, enteric glial cells
Stomach	Foveolar cell, chief cell, parietal cell, Enterochromaffin cell, Enterochromaffin-like cell
Pancreas	Pancreatic acinar cell, Centroacinar cell, Pancreatic stellate cell, alpha cell, beta cell, delta cell, epislon cell
Small intestine	Paneth cell, tuft cells
Lungs	Type II pneumocyte, Club cell, Type I pneumocyte,  Kultschitzky's cells
Gall bladder	Gall bladder epithelial cell
Tongue	Von Ebner's gland cell, surface epithelial cell, taste receptor cells
Ear	Ceruminous gland cell, Planum semilunar epithelial cell, Organ of Corti interdental epithelial cell, Elastic cartilage chondrocyte, Inner pillar cells of organ of Corti, Outer pillar cells of the organ of Corti, Inner phalangeal cells of organ of Corti, Outer hair cells of vestibular system of ear, Inner hair cells of vestibular system of ear, Outer phalangeal cells of organ of Corti, Border cells of organ of Corti, Hensen's cells of organ of Corti
Nose	Bowman's gland cell,Olfactory epithelium supporting cells, Olfactory ensheathing cells
Cornea (eye)	Surface epithelial cell, Corneal fibroblasts
Iris (eye)	Smooth muscle cell, iris pigment epithelium, stroma
Retina (eye)	Retina horizontal cells, cone cells, rod cells, bipolar cells, ganglion cells, horizontal cells, amacrine cells
Adrenal gland	Chromaffin cells
Mouth	Surface epithelial cell, stromal cells, endothelial cells
Nasal cavity	Surface epithelial cell, squamous cells
Salivary glands	Striated duct cell, acinar cells, ductal cells, myoepithelial cells
Mammary glands, breasts	Lactiferous duct cell, myoepithetial cell
Central nervous system	Many types of neurons, stellate cell, microglial cell
Heart	White fat cell, cardiac muscle cell, SA node cell, Purkinje fiber cell
Ovary	Theca Interna cell, Corpus luteum cell, Granulosa lutein cells, Theca lutein cells
Male reproductive system (e.g. testes)	Leydig cell, seminal vessicle cell,Bulbourethral gland cell, duct cell, efferent duct cells, Epididymal principal cell, Epididymal basal cell, Spermatid, Spermatocyte,  Spermatogonium cell, Spermatozoon, Sertoli cell
Prostate gland	Prostate gland cell, duct cell
Female reproductive system	Oogonium/oocyte, granulosa cell,
Vagina	Bartholin's gland cell, basal cells, parabasal cells, superficial squamous flat cells
Uterus	Uterus endometrium cell
Urethra	Gland of Littré cell
Kidney	Macula densa cell, Peripolar cell, Principal cell, Mesangial cell, Kidney distal tubal cell, Intercalated cell, Interstitial kidney cells
Urinary system	Parietal epithelial cell,Podocyte, Proximal tubule brush border cell, Loop of Henle thin segment cell
Bladder	Transitional epithelium, urothelial cells,
Circulatory system	Endothelial cells, vascular smooth muscle cells, lymphatic endothelial cells
Tendons	Tendon fibroblasts,
Bones (including bone marrow)	Erythrocyte, monocyte,Bone marrow reticular tissue fibroblasts.Osteoblast/osteocyte, Osteoprogenitor cell, Megakaryocyte, osteoclast
Liver	Hepatic stellate cell, liver lipocyte, Kupffer cells, Cholangiocytes, progenitor cells, NK cells
Intevertebral disc	Nucleus pulposus cell
Adipose organ (fat system)	White fat cell, brown fat cell
Muscles	Red skeletal muscle cell (slow twitch), White skeletal muscle cell (fast twitch), Intermediate skeletal muscle cell,Nuclear bag cell, Nuclear chain cell
Endocrine glands	Myoepithelial cell
Immune system	Macrophages, dendritic cell, Epidermal Langerhans cell, Neutrophil granulocyte, Basophil granulocyte, Mast cell, Helper T cell, Regulatory T cell, Cytotoxic T cell, Natural killer T cell, B cell(/lymphocyte), Plasma cell, Natural killer cell
Skin and hair	Epidermal Langerhans cell, Keratinocyte, Epidermal basal cell, Melanocyte, Trichocyte, Medullary hair shaft cell, Cortical hair shaft cell, Cuticular hair shaft cell, Huxley's layer hair root sheath cell, Henle's layer hair root sheath cell, Outer root sheath hair cell
Thymus	Epithelial reticular cell,
Thryoid/Parathyroid	Thyroid epithelial cell, Parafollicular cell, Parathyroid chief cell
Peripheral nervous system	Schwann cells, Satellite glial cells,
Interneurons	Basket cells, Cartwheel cells, Stellate cells, Golgi cells, Granule cells, Lugaro cells, Unipolar brush cells, Martinotti cells. Chandelier cells, Cajal–Retzius cells, Double-bouquet cells, Neurogliaform cells
Pituitary gland	Corticotropes, Gonadotropes, Lactotropes, Melanotropes, Somatotropes, Thyrotropes

Pardon the imperfect formatting above, which is hard to avoid when doing so much copying from an external source which has this information in a table using a different format.  

We can see from the table above that our Darwin-defending biologist was telling us a big fat lie when he claimed that new types of anatomical structures do not require new cell types. In the great majority of cases, major new anatomical structures do require one or more specialized new cell types.  Probably many additional cell types could be listed in the second column of the table above. 

Our Darwinism-defending biologist told us a lie he needed to tell. I can understand exactly why a Darwinism-defending biologist would want to fool people into thinking that major new biological innovations do not require new cell types. The reason is that Darwinism has no credible explanation for the origin of new cell types. Darwinists claim that all the wonders of biology came from random mutations in DNA and its genes. One of the many gigantic problems with that idea is that DNA does not specify how to make a cell or any of the organelles that make up a cell. The diagram below tells the truth about what DNA does and does not specify. DNA does not specify how to make any cell or any of the organelles of such cells. DNA does not even specify how to make any of the protein complexes that are the constituent components of organelles. 

The fact is that Darwinism has no credible explanation for the origin of new cell types, which cannot be explained by imagining random mutations. Cells are enormously complex structures, and you could no more get a new cell type by random mutations than you could get a new type of well-functioning motor vehicle by random combinations produced when a tornado passed through an auto parts store. 

So what do you do if you are a Darwinist biologist faced with the problem of explaining the last seven rows in the pyramid shown above? You might feel the need to tell lies. One lie would be the lie that DNA and its genes are a blueprint or recipe or program for making a full human body. That lie has been told abundantly by Darwinist biologists for 70 years, although many other biologists and scientists confess it is false. Another lie might be one like I read on the day I started to write this post, in which a biologist attempted to claim that new types of  anatomical structures don't require new cell types. The table above shows how false such a lie is. 

The table below is derived from a table on this page of the Human Protein Atlas.  We see a list of the types of organelles in the cells of the human body, and how many types of proteins are needed to make up such organelles. The median number of amino acids in a human protein molecule is about 375.  The 2005 paper here gives numbers of 375 and 416 as the median number of amino acids in human proteins.  Each type of protein molecule is a fine-tuned special organization of hundreds or thousands of amino acids, which have to be arranged in a very special way for the protein to be functional, an arrangement as special as the arrangement of characters in a functional paragraph.  

By looking at the number in the second column, you can get an idea of how complex each organelle is. The larger the number in the second column, the more complex that organelle is. Lysosomes are relatively simple organelles, but organelles such as mitochondria and plasma membranes are vastly more complex. Each type of protein requires a special arrangement of hundreds of amino acids, which altogether involves a special arrangement of thousands of atoms. The more complex organelles in cells require a special arrangement of more than a million atoms. The arrangement involved is as special and as hard-to-achieve by chance as the arrangement of characters in a lengthy essay such as this blog post. 

ORGANELLE TYPE	NUMBER OF TYPES OF PROTEINS IN EACH ORGANELLE
Intermediate filaments	163
Actin filaments	237
Focal adhesion sites	138
Microtubules	262
Microtubule ends	6
Cytokinetic bridge	159
Midbody	53
Midbody ring	25
Cleavage furrow	1
Mitotic spindle	93
Centriolar satellite	194
Centrosome	396
Mitochondria	1121
Aggresome	19
Cytosol	4883
Cytoplasmic bodies	73
Rods & Rings	20
Endoplasmic reticulum	542
Golgi apparatus	1163
Vesicles	2238
Peroxisomes	23
Endosomes	17
Lysosomes	19
Lipid droplets	39
Plasma membrane	2074
Cell Junctions	330
Nucleoplasm	6166
Nuclear membrane	276
Nucleoli	1075
Nucleoli fibrillar center	311
Nucleoli rim	151
Nuclear speckles	493
Nuclear bodies	588
Kinetochore	6
Mitotic chromosome	74
Total number of types of proteins used in human cell organelles	13147

Pondering how many types of these organelles there are in human cells, and pondering how high the numbers are in the second column, you might then understand why authorities sometimes say that a human cell has a functional complexity comparable to that of a factory or a city.  Below is a relevant quote by physicist Anthony Aquirre, from page 338 of his book "Cosmological Koans":

"The most elaborate and sophisticated human-designed machines, while quite impressive, are utter child's play compared with the workings of a cell: a cell contains on the order of 100 trillion atoms, and probably billions of quite complex molecules working with amazing precision. The most complex engineered machines -- modern jet aircraft, for example -- have several million parts. Thus, perhaps all the jetliners in the world (without people in them, of course) could compete in functional complexity with a lowly bacterium."

A question closely related to the issue of whether new anatomy structures require new cell types is the question of whether new anatomy structures require new types of genes and new types of proteins.  Whatever answer we get to these questions sheds light on the topic of how easy or difficult it is for new useful anatomical structures to arise. In Table 1 of the paper "A comprehensive functional analysis of tissue specificity of human gene expression," we have the following list which tells us whether new anatomy structures require new types of genes and proteins.  In the paper the table has the same title as below.  The genes referred to are not the total number of genes used in a particular organ or body part, but the "tissue-specific genes" used only by that organ or body part. So, for example, there are apparently 22 genes used only by the liver, and 484 genes used only by the testis.  The "housekeeping" genes are genes not used only by one organ or body part. 

 

Table 1: Number of housekeeping and tissue-specific genes

Housekeeping 2374

Liver 22

Skeletal muscle 37

Fetal liver 16

Testis 484

Placenta 38

Bone marrow 63

Skin 75

Adrenal gland 13

Prostate 14

Trachea 16

Small intestine 35

Peripheral blood lymphocytes 49

Mammary gland 16

Tonsil 24

Thymus 4

Spleen 14

Fetal kidney 5

Thyroid 7

Brain 34

Heart 26

Lung 16

Salivary gland 17

Ovary 15

Pancreas 20

Fetal thymus 8

Colon 9

Spinal cord 24

Retina 190

Kidney 17

Uterus 12

Fetal brain 61

Average 43.8

Average, somatic tissues 30.9

It seems clear from the above table that most new body parts and anatomical innovations appearing in the history of life require multiple new genes, with a new type of body part requiring an average of about 30 new genes. Each new gene specifies a special very hard-to-achieve sequence of hundreds of amino acids needed to produce a new functional protein.  The average amount of new well-arranged genetic information required to make a new body part seems to be roughly equivalent to a special sequence of about 12,000 amino acids, which is about as hard to achieve by chance as 20 pages of functional well-written text, consisting of 30 paragraphs that each have about 400 characters or letters. And such a requirement is only a small fraction of the total innovation required, because the need for the new cell types (not specified in DNA or its genes) is a whole other requirement that is just as enormous. 

Clearly the Darwinist biologist I read was guilty of the most misleading language when he tried to insinuate that no enormous innovation is needed to get new types of anatomical structures. The mention in the table above of how merely one part of the eye (the retina) requires 190 genes used only by that part is a fact that helps to show the enormous failure of typical Darwinist discussions trying to explain the evolution of the eye by Darwinian explanations, discussions that fail to mention the number of eye-specific genes and eye-specific proteins and the complexity of such components.  

Information such as that given you in tables and bullet lists of this post give you the real scoop about the complexity of cells and body parts. Such "give you the real story" information is very hard to find by doing searches on the internet. It is as if for every writer trying to give you the most relevant facts revealing such complexity, there are twenty writers writing as if they were ignorant about such complexity, or were trying to hide such complexity from you.