In Your Body Every Day There's a Million Miracles of Warp-Speed Purposeful Assembly

The infographic below gives you the "big picture" on the stupendous  hierarchical organization of the human body. 

 A recent article in MIT News is entitled "Biologist Joey Davis explores how cells build complex structures." We read of a biologist studying how ribosomes get assembled in a cell. At this point the average reader may remember seeing a cell diagram, and the reader may say to himself something like, "Oh, yeah, ribosomes, I remember that there are a few of those little balls in a cell." But the truth is that a typical human cell has millions of ribosomes, and ribosomes are fantastically complex components, like little machines. Ribosomes have the enormously complex function of assembling a huge variety of protein molecules, which are very complex components built from hundreds or thousands of amino acids. 

How did the average person get such a wrong idea about ribosomes, the idea that there were only a few of them in the cell, and that they are simple little balls? It is because our biology authorities have done such a poor job of educating us about the vast complexity of cells. Again and again, our biology authorities published misleading diagrams of cells, making it look like cells have only a few parts. 

The Google Gemini diagram below discusses some of the great complexities of the work done in the cell by ribosomes. 

The diagram has two shortfalls: (1) at the bottom it depicts a cell as enormously less complex than a cell is; (2) at the top it makes ribosomes look vastly less complex than they are.  The diagram below helps to show how complex is the structure of ribosomes, which require the special arrangement of very many types of protein molecules:

We see in the diagram above how vastly organized ribosomes are. For  a ribosome to be constructed, very many types of proteins must be assembled in just the right way, to produce the "protein factory" that is a ribosome. How does such an assembly occur? Scientists lack any explanation for this miracle of organization. The structure of ribosomes is not specified in DNA or any of its genes. DNA and its genes only contain low-level chemical information, such as which amino acids make up a particular protein. 

As enormously complex as ribosomes are, their complexity is dwarfed by the complexity of the structures that surround them, the structures called endoplasmic reticulum.  A document makes a bungling attempt to explain how the very complex structure of the endoplasmic reticulum arises. It is the vacuous non-explanation of "self organization." The emptiness of the concept is clear from a quote on page 13, where we read, "Self-organization is an interesting concept, but how organelles self-organize is unclear." The last resort of a scientist lacking an explanation for some very high state of organization is to make a vacuous appeal to "self-organization."

Every day that you live, fantastically complex components are magically being assembled in your body, components with a structure that is not specified by DNA or its genes. How this can happen is a mystery a hundred miles over the heads of scientists.  They know of no chemistry or physics factors that can explain such assembly. 

The wonders seem all the more staggering when we consider the speed at which these miracles of assembly occur. In the MIT News article  we get a mention of that. Below is a quote:

"During ribosome assembly, RNA molecules fold themselves into the correct shapes, creating docking sites for proteins to attach. Then, more RNA molecules come in and fold themselves into the structure.

'It’s a beautifully coupled process by which the cell folds hundreds of RNA helices and binds on the order of 50 proteins, and it does it in two minutes from start to finish. E. coli does this 100,000 times per hour, and it’s amazing how rapid and efficient the process is,'  Davis says."

How do ribosomes (such fantastically complex components) ever get built? The MIT article offers us no clue, except for two misleading sound bites. 

The first misleading sound bite comes in the subtitle of the article, which says this about Joey Davis:  "His studies have shed light on the assembly instructions that govern ribosomes, the critical protein-building machines of the cell." That makes it sound as if Davis had studied some assembly instructions for building ribosomes. But no such assembly instructions have ever been discovered, and no such assembly instructions are discussed in the MIT article. DNA and its genes have no assembly instructions for building ribosomes or any other type of organelle.

The second misleading sound bite comes when Davis makes a mention of evolution, without giving any specifics.  He says, "It appears that evolution has selected pathways that aren’t strictly ordered in the way we would think about an assembly line, where you always put in one component, then the next, and then the next. "  All uses of the phrase "evolution has selected" are misleading, as Darwinian evolution is a mindless process, and only conscious entities can select things. And claims about Darwinian evolution long ago do nothing to explain how ribosomes could get assembled right now in your body. If DNA contained some instructions for how to build ribosomes, then you might be able to make some farfetched appeal to lucky DNA mutations long ago that somehow gave us instructions in DNA for how to build ribosomes.  But DNA and its genes do not contain instructions for how to build ribosomes or any other type of organelle in a cell. 

Darwinism and claims about evolution are useless in explaining the wonders of biochemistry. That is why Darwin and evolution get virtually no mention in biochemistry textbooks. I documented this reality in my post "The Negligible Presence of Evolutionary Explanations in Six Biochemistry Textbooks," which documents the almost complete lack of mention of evolution, natural selection and Darwin in several long biochemistry textbooks. 

Somehow all these marvelously fine-tuned components bigger than protein molecules get assembled in our body,  in a way that scientists cannot credibly explain. No assembly instructions for such components and systems have ever been discovered in the body. These miracles of assembly are sometimes very fast and sometimes slow. The progression from a speck-sized zygote to a full human body over the nine months of pregnancy is a miracle of organization, but one that is relatively slow. Conversely, in your body there is constantly occurring very fast miracles of assembly, such as the "two minutes" marvel of assembly mentioned in the quote above. 

Some of these miracles of assembly are the construction of protein complexes.  Protein complexes are teams of different types of proteins. Proteins somehow assemble into very complex components called protein complexes, which are sometimes so complex they are commonly called "molecular machines" by scientists.  Below are some quotes in which scientists confess their lack of understanding of how protein complexes form:

• "The majority of cellular proteins function as subunits in larger protein complexes. However, very little is known about how protein complexes form in vivo." Duncan and Mata, "Widespread Cotranslational Formation of Protein Complexes," 2011.
• "While the occurrence of multiprotein assemblies is ubiquitous, the understanding of pathways that dictate the formation of quaternary structure remains enigmatic." -- Two scientists (link). 
• "A general theoretical framework to understand protein complex formation and usage is still lacking." -- Two scientists, 2019 (link). 
• "Most proteins associate into multimeric complexes with specific architectures, which often have functional properties like cooperative ligand binding or allosteric regulation. No detailed knowledge is available about how any multimer and its functions arose during historical evolution." -- Ten scientists, 2020 (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.

Some such as Hume trying to discredit the idea of miracles have defined a miracle as a violation of the laws of nature. That is not a good definition of "miracle." Here is a good definition of "miracle": a miracle is something (not explained by known laws of physics or chemistry or common human agency) that occurs without visible or known agency, and which would be so improbable to occur by unguided chance that its probability of accidentally occurring is for all practical purposes zero. For example, if you were to take a pack of 52 playing cards, and throw such cards into the air, and all 52 cards became part of a triangular house of cards, that formation so perfect would be something so unlikely to occur that the probability of it occurring is for all practical purposes zero. 

Under this reasonable definition of "miracle," the assembly of every ribosome is a miracle, and the assembly of every other very complex and enormously organized organelle is a miracle, as is the assembly of every type of protein complex involving the "just right" arrangement of many types of proteins that assemble into "molecular machines" fine-tuned for some biochemical task.  There are no known laws of physics or chemistry that explain such wonders of organization.  The assembly of such components by a chance combinations of protein molecules has a probability that is negligible. Under the same definition of "miracle," the assembly of protein complexes as complex as the proteasome (described in this post's appendix) must also be called miracles. 

Every day within your body there are a million such miracles, very many of which involve a kind of warp-speed assembly in which parts magically assemble very, very quickly into functional components, in a way that is not predicted by anything we know about the laws of chemistry or physics, and that is not predicted by anything we know about what is in DNA and its genes.  The continual occurrence of such miracles is required for the continuation of your life.  The physical origin of your body (involving the nine-month progression from a speck-sized zygote to the vast organization of a full human body) was one miracle, but a slow, gradual miracle. The continuation of your body over the span of decades requires endless millions of other miracles,  in which purposeful cell components magically assemble in a way that is utterly beyond any explanation of physics, chemistry or genetics. 

I asked Google Gemini to produce an infographic visual explaining an example of a protein complex that assembles very quickly. It gave me the visual below. The nuclear pore complex (NPC) discussed is a very well-organized protein complex consisting of more than 30 types of proteins, arranged in just the right way to achieve a particular hard-to-achieve functional effect. Apparently this nuclear pore complex gets assembled within five minutes.   The bottom of the diagram has a few lines trying to explain the speed of assembly, but it is little more than the thinnest hand-waving. 

How there occurs such miracles of purposeful assembly at such stunning speeds is a mystery a thousand miles over the heads of scientists. When materialists claim that all of the processes of life "can be explained in terms of physics and chemistry," they are telling a lie as big as the sky. The continuation of your life requires the daily occurrence of these miracles of purposeful assembly. The progression from a speck-sized zygote to a vastly more organized full human body over nine months is a miracle of organization very far beyond the explanation of biologists. But it is not merely the origin of every human body that is beyond the explanation of materialists: it is also the continued living existence of an adult body that is a miracle beyond their explanation, because of the million microscopic miracles of warp-speed purposeful assembly that must occur every day for a human body to keep living.   

Postscript: Today while searching for some more quotes to add to my "Candid Confessions of the Scientists" post (the largest collection  anywhere of scientists confessing what they don't know), I found these two quotes. In one, scientists confess they don't understand how mammary glands arise in a developing body; and in the other scientists confess they don't understand how eyes arise in a developing body. 

• "A quarter of the way through the twenty-first century, we still lack basic knowledge regarding the formation and function of the organ that gives its name to all mammals, and which provides important health benefits for children and their breastfeeding parent through the creation and delivery of breast milk." -- 3 scientists (link). 
• "Despite increasing knowledge of pathways controlling the differentiation of many cell types in the eye, we still lack a basic understanding of the mechanisms controlling its morphogenesis." - 3 scientists (link).  

Also I read today a paper making it clear that contrary to boasts in the press, the AlphaFold2 software does not actually solve the protein folding problem, the problem of how protein molecules almost instantly acquire very complicated 3D shapes needed for their function. The year 2026 paper states, "The explanatory scientific understanding of the protein folding problem is thus

not directly advanced by AF2 [AlphaFold2]." Later the same paper says, "The protein folding problem remains unsolved." Instead, the AlphaFold2 software makes progress on a different problem, properly described as the protein structure prediction problem, which is the problem of predicting the 3D shape of a protein molecule from its amino acid sequence. Whenever one of the more complex types of protein molecules almost instantly takes the very complex 3D shape needed for its function, that is another example of a miracle of warp-speed purposeful assembly.  

Appendix A: The Proteasome Molecular Machine

Below is one example of the many types of protein complexes that seem to require miracles of assembly beyond the explanation of scientists. The wikipedia.org article on proteasomes tells us this:

"Proteasomes are protein complexes which degrade unneeded or damaged proteins by proteolysis, a chemical reaction that breaks peptide bonds...In structure, the proteasome is a cylindrical complex containing a 'core' of four stacked rings forming a central pore. Each ring is composed of seven individual proteins."

A paper on this topic is entitled "Gates, channels, and switches: elements of the proteasome machine." We read this:

"The proteasome has emerged as an intricate machine that has dynamic mechanisms to regulate the timing of its activity, its selection of substrates, and its processivity. The 19-subunit regulatory particle (RP) recognizes ubiquitinated proteins, removes ubiquitin, and injects the target protein into the proteolytic chamber of the core particle (CP) via a narrow channel."

Another paper is entitled "The 26S Proteasome: A Molecular Machine Designed for Controlled Proteolysis." A page on the site of the Theoretical and Computational Group tells us this:

"Recycling of unneeded protein molecules in cells is performed by a molecular machine called 26S proteasome (Figure 1), which cuts these proteins into smaller pieces for reuse as building blocks for new proteins. Proteins that need to be recycled are labeled by tags made of poly-ubiquitin protein chains. The 26S proteasome machine recognizes and binds to these tags, pulls the tagged protein close, then unwinds it, and finally cuts it into pieces. As the cell's recycling machinery, the 26S proteasome is vital for a variety of essential cellular processes, including protein quality control, cell cycle regulation, adaptive immune response, and apoptosis....The 26S proteasome recruits, unfolds, and degrades poly-ubiquitin tagged proteins through a complex interaction clockwork of over 60 known protein subunits that is driven through ATP hydrolysis."

A scientific paper tells us this:

"The 26S proteasome is a multisubunit complex that catalyzes the degradation of ubiquitinated proteins. The proteasome comprises 33 distinct subunits, all of which are essential for its function and structure." 

Below is a depiction of the human 26S proteasome structure, one that labels some of its protein parts. We see three different views of the same protein complex, with different protein parts labeled (the Greek letters used stand for alpha and beta parts mentioned in the table below):

Image credit: Xing Guo et. al, link.

Below are the number of amino acids involved in these parts, which I looked up using the UniProt online database (you can use the links to check the numbers I have given):

Protein	Number of amino acids	Comment
Proteasome subunit beta type-1	241	On Chromosome 6
Proteasome subunit beta type-2	201	On Chromosome 1
Proteasome subunit beta type-3	205	On Chromosome 17
Proteasome subunit beta type-4	264	On Chromosome 1
Proteasome subunit beta type-5	263	On Chromosome 14
Proteasome subunit beta type-6	239	On Chromosome 17
Proteasome subunit beta type-7	248	On Chromosome 20
Proteasome subunit alpha type-1	263	On Chromosome 11
Proteasome subunit alpha type-2	234	On Chromosome 7
Proteasome subunit alpha type-3	255	On Chromosome 14
Proteasome subunit alpha type-4	261	On Chromosome 15
Proteasome subunit alpha type-5	241	On Chromosome 1
Proteasome subunit alpha type-6	243	On Chromosome 14
Proteasome subunit alpha type-7	248	On Chromosome 20

The structure shown above clearly requires several thousands of amino acids that have to be arranged in just the right way. The structure shown above is not specified in DNA, which merely specifies which amino acids make up each of the protein parts. The amino acid information needed to make the structure above (insufficient to specify the total structure) is not at all contiguous in DNA. To assemble the structure above, among other wonders of construction a human body must magically gather genetic information scattered across many different chromosomes in the nucleus, like someone quickly finding just the right 60 loose pages hidden in random books of 46 tall, long bookcases in a library. The table above shows that at least eight of the 23 human chromosome pairs would need to be accessed: Chromosome 1, Chromosome 6, Chromosome 7, Chromosome 11, Chromosome 14, Chromosome 15, Chromosome 17, and Chromosome 20.

Appendix B: The Nuclear Pore Complex 

The nuclear pore complex or NPC is a large protein complex found in the "nuclear envelope" that is the outer boundary of the nucleus inside human cells.  A science research press release tells us this: 

"For structural biologists, the human NPC is a challenging yet exciting 3D puzzle, with around 30 different proteins each present in multiple copies. This amounts to around 1000 puzzle pieces, which form a round core with surrounding flexible parts."

The wikipedia.org article on this complex states that it consists of "456 individual protein molecules, and 34 distinct nucleoporin proteins." So the complex apparently requires 34 types of protein molecules. The article tells us that the "principal function of nuclear pore complexes is to facilitate selective membrane transportation of various molecules across the nuclear envelope." This mean that nuclear pore complexes have the extremely complex job of acting like gatekeepers, letting the right kind of molecules get into the nucleus of the cell, and keeping out the wrong type of molecules.  The article tells us that there are typically about 1000 of the nuclear pore complexes in every cell. We read of some impressive functionality of these nuclear pore complexes:

"Notably, the nuclear pore complex (NPC) can actively mediate up to 1000 translocations per complex per second. While smaller molecules can passively diffuse through the pores, larger molecules are often identified by specific signal sequences and are facilitated by nucleoporins to traverse the nuclear envelope."

The article (and also the Google Gemini infographic above) tell us that a nuclear pore complex has a molecular weight of about 110 megadaltons. A dalton is the mass equal to a twelfth of the mass of a carbon atom. A protein complex of 110 megadaltons would have the mass of about 9 million carbon atoms. Apparently the proteins that make up this complex are particularly complex proteins. Below are the exact numbers (we may assume that there are multiple instances of such proteins in a nuclear pore complex). 

Protein	Number of amino acids	Comment
NUP98_HUMAN	1817	On Chromosome 11
NU153_HUMAN	1475	On Chromosome 6
NUP93_HUMAN	819	On Chromosome 16
NU107_HUMAN	925	On Chromosome 12
NU205_HUMAN	2012	On Chromosome 7
NU160_HUMAN	1436	On Chromosome 11
NU214_HUMAN	2090	On Chromosome 9
NUP85_HUMAN	656	On Chromosome 17
NUP50_HUMAN	468	On Chromosome 22
NUP88_HUMAN	741	On Chromosome 17
NU133_HUMAN	1156	On Chromosome 1
NU155_HUMAN	1391	On Chromosome 5

The molecular machinery shown above clearly requires more than 12,000 amino acids that have to be arranged in just the right way, which amounts to a special arrangement of more than 100,000  atoms. The structure of the molecular machinery described above is not specified in DNA, which merely specifies which amino acids make up each of the protein parts. The amino acid information needed to make the structure above  is not at all contiguous in DNA. To assemble the structure above, among other wonders of construction a human body must magically gather genetic information scattered across many different chromosomes in the nucleus, like someone quickly finding just the right 34 loose pages hidden in random books of 46 tall, long bookcases in a library. The table above shows that at least nine of the 23 human chromosome pairs would need to be accessed: Chromosome 1, Chromosome 5, Chromosome 6, Chromosome 7, Chromosome 11, Chromosome 12, Chromosome 16, Chromosome 17 and Chromosome 22.

The nuclear pore complex (credit: Protein Data Bank, link)

Your Origin Is Light-Years Beyond Any Genetic, Mechanistic or Neural Explanation

 Every adult human being is two different miracles: a miracle of physical organization and a miracle of mental abilities.  Neither an adult human body nor an adult human mind can be explained by mechanistic science, genetics or neuroscience.

Upon hearing such a statement, the average adult might say, "I can explain how I came to be." If asked to supply explicit details, a person might say something like, "I originated because my mother and father had sex, and my mother's egg was fertilized by my father's sperm." But if you state such an account, you are not explaining how you originated. You are merely explaining how your mother got pregnant.  You should not confuse understanding how your mother got pregnant with understanding how you originated. Explaining how you originated is a task enormously harder than merely explaining how your mother got pregnant. 

There are two things we would need to explain before we can say that we understand the origin of an adult human being. The first thing we would need to explain is the origination of an adult human body,  a state of enormous hierarchical physical organization and also gigantically dynamic functionality. The second thing we would need to explain is the arrival of the mind of an adult human being. The second task should not be reduced to some mere "problem of consciousness," as if all that we need to explain is some mere awareness of any type.  The second task is the task of explaining all of the mental faculties and types of mental experiences of an adult human being. Such faculties include awareness, self-hood, thinking, memory creation, instant memory retrieval, and the preservation of memories for many years.  Scientists have no credible explanation for either the arrival of an adult human body or the arrival of an adult human mind.  Let's look at why existing explanations don't get the job done. 

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

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

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

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

The problem with this account is that while it has been told very many times, the story is just plain false. There is no such blueprint for a human being in human DNA. We know exactly what is in human DNA. It is merely low-level chemical information such as the sequence of amino acids that make up polypeptide chains that are the starting points of protein molecules. DNA does not specify anatomy. DNA is not a blueprint for making a human. DNA is not a recipe for making a human. DNA is not a program or algorithm for making a human. Not only does DNA not specify how to make a human, DNA does not even specify how to make any organ or appendage or cell of a human. There are about 200 types of cells in human beings, each an incredibly organized thing (cells are so complex they are sometimes compared to factories or cities).  DNA does not specify how to make any of these 200 types of cells. Cells are built from smaller structural units called organelles. DNA does not even specify how to make such low-level organelles. 

Here are a few relevant quotes by authorities:

• On page 26 of the recent book The Developing Genome, Professor David S. Moore states, "The common belief that there are things inside of us that constitute a set of instructions for building bodies and minds -- things that are analogous to 'blueprints' or 'recipes' -- is undoubtedly false."
• Biologist Rupert Sheldrake says this "DNA only codes for the materials from which the body is constructed: the enzymes, the structural proteins, and so forth," and "There is no evidence that it also codes for the plan, the form, the morphology of the body."
• Describing conclusions of biologist Brian Goodwin, the New York Times says, "While genes may help produce the proteins that make the skeleton or the glue, they do not determine the shape and form of an embryo or an organism." 
• Professor Massimo Pigliucci (mainstream author of numerous scientific papers on evolution) has stated  that "old-fashioned metaphors like genetic blueprint and genetic programme are not only woefully inadequate but positively misleading."
• Neuroscientist Romain Brette states, "The genome does not encode much except for amino acids."
• In a 2016 scientific paper, three scientists state the following: "It is now clear that the genome does not directly program the organism; the computer program metaphor has misled us...The genome does not function as a master plan or computer program for controlling the organism; the genome is the organism's servant, not its master.
• In the book Mind in Life by Evan Thompson (published by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press) we read the following on page 180: "The plain truth is that DNA is not a program for building organisms, as several authors have shown in detail (Keller 2000, Lewontin 1993, Moss 2003)."
• Developmental biologist C/H. Waddington stated, "The DNA is not a program or sequentially accessed control over the behavior of the cell."
•  Scientists Walker and Davies state this in a scientific paper: "DNA is not a blueprint for an organism; no information is actively processed by DNA alone...DNA is a passive repository for transcription of stored data into RNA, some (but by no means all) of which goes on to be translated into proteins."
• Geneticist Adam Rutherford states that "DNA is not a blueprint," a statement also made by biochemistry professor Keith Fox.
• "The genome is not a blueprint," says Kevin Mitchell, a geneticist and neuroscientist at Trinity College Dublin, noting "it doesn't encode some specific outcome."
• "DNA cannot be seen as the 'blueprint' for life," says Antony Jose, associate professor of cell biology and molecular genetics at the University of Maryland, who says, "It is at best an overlapping and potentially scrambled list of ingredients that is used differently by different cells at different times."  
• Sergio Pistoi (a science writer with a PhD in molecular biology) tells us, "DNA is not a blueprint," and tells us, "We do not inherit specific instructions on how to build a cell or an organ." 
• Michael Levin (director of a large biology research lab) states that "genomes are not a blueprint for anatomy," and after referring to a "deep puzzle" of how biological forms arise, he gives this example: "Scientists really don’t know what determines the intricate shape and structure of the flatworm’s head."
• Ian Stevenson M.D. stated "Genes alone - which provide instructions for the production of amino acids and proteins -- cannot explain how the proteins produced by their instructions come to have the shape they develop and, ultimately, determine the form of the organisms where they are," and noted that "biologists who have drawn attention to this important gap in our knowledge of form have not been a grouping of mediocrities (Denton, 1986; Goldschmidt, 1952; B. C. Goodwin, 1985, 1988, 1989, 1994; Gottlieb, 1992; Grasse, 1973; E. S. Russell...Sheldrake, 1981; Tauber and Sarkar, 1992; Thompson, 1917/1942)."
• Biologist B.C. Goodwin stated this in 1989: "Since genes make molecules, genetics...does not tell us how the molecules are organized into the dynamic, organized process that is the living organism."
• An article in the journal Nature states this: "The manner in which bodies and tissues take form remains 'one of the most important, and still poorly understood, questions of our time', says developmental biologist Amy Shyer, who studies morphogenesis at the Rockefeller University in New York City."
• Timothy Saunders, a developmental biologist at the National University of Singapore, says, "Fundamentally, we have a poor understanding of how any internal organ forms.” 
• In an essay pointing out the vast complexities and interlocking dependencies of even simpler aspects of biology such as angiogenesis (the formation of new blood vessels),  Jonathan Bard of Oxford University states, "It is pushing the boundaries of belief too far to believe that it is helpful to see the genome as holding a program." 
• A paper by Stuart A. Newman (a professor of cell biology and anatomy) discussing at length the work of scientists trying to evoke "self-organization" as an explanation for morphogenesis states that "public lectures by principals of the field contain confidently asserted, but similarly oversimplified or misleading treatments," and says that "these analogies...give the false impression that there has been more progress in understanding embryonic development than there truly has been." Referring to scientists moving from one bunk explanation of morphogenesis to another bunk explanation for it, the paper concludes by stating, "It would be unfortunate if we find ourselves having emerged from a period of misconceived genetic program metaphors only to land in a brave new world captivated by equally misguided ones about self-organization."
• Physics PhD Eric Heden states, "The molecular coding within DNA, rich and vast as it is, falls impossibly short of being able to supply the informational guidance needed to supervise the development and moment-by-moment cellular activities of living organisms."
• Referring to claims there is a program for building organisms in DNA, biochemist F. M. Harold stated "reflection on the findings with morphologically aberrant mutants suggests that the metaphor of a genetic program is misleading." Referring to  self-organization (a vague phrase sometimes used to try to explain morphogenesis), he says, "self-organization remains nearly as mysterious as it was a century ago, a subject in search of a paradigm." 
• Physician James Le Fanu states the following:

  
  

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

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

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

There is no blueprint or recipe or program for making a human in human DNA, and there is nothing intelligent enough in a human womb to read and execute such immensely complicated instructions if they happened to exist. So the physical origin of each full-sized human body is a miracle far beyond our understanding.  

We lack any understanding of how the supremely hierarchical organization of an adult human body arises. Consider all the different levels of organization. Subatomic particles are organized into atoms, which are organized into amino acids, which are organized into protein molecules, which are organized into protein complexes, which are organized into organelles, which are organized into cells, which are organized into tissues, which are organized into organs, which are organized into organ systems, which are organized into the human body.  There is nothing in a speck-sized human egg that explains how most of those different levels of organization could arise. 

We take for granted the miracle of a speck-sized egg growing into a human body a million times more organized than such a cell. Why is that? Mainly because it is something that happens most of the time. It seems that we will not be astonished by any transformation, no matter how inexplicable it may seem, as long as it happens most of the time.  Imagine if you lived on a planet in which you could plant acorns in the ground, and they would grow into three-story houses complete with electricity and running water. You would not think such a thing was very marvelous if it happened most of the times that acorns were planted in the ground, and if such a thing had been happening for as long as your species could remember.  The arising of a full-sized human body from a speck-sized fertilized egg millions of times less complex and organized is a marvel a million times more impressive than a three-story house with electricity and running water arising from an acorn planted in the ground.  We do not at all understand how this marvel happens. We do not understand the physical origin of any adult human body. In a section entitled  "Developmental Biology," a paper by a University of Oxford biologist confesses, "We...rarely understand what is going on in any detailed way."

The diagram below illustrates some of the things that must occur for there to exist an adult human body. Each of the  pillars is something that must go on for there to ever exist an adult human body. Each of these pillars is a wonder that scientists cannot mechanistically or genetically explain. 

Let us look at some of the pillars in the visual above.

Protein Folding

For an adult to live, there must constantly occur protein folding, under which linear chains of amino acids form into the complex three-dimensional shapes needed for protein molecule function. But the protein folding problem remains unsolved. We don't understand how three-dimensional protein molecules are constantly arising from one-dimensional polypeptide chains (mere chains of amino acids) that do not specify any three-dimensional shape. 

There has been some progress in protein structure prediction, the art of predicting the 3D shape of a folded protein molecule from its linear amino acid sequence. Although such progress is often mistakenly depicted as progress in solving the protein folding problem, it is no such thing.  The "protein structure prediction problem" (predicting the 3D shape of a protein from its amino acid sequence) is a different problem from the protein folding problem (the problem of how protein molecules get their 3D shapes within human bodies), and the two problems should not be confused or conflated (although some careless writers do that). Using deep-learning AI  "frequentist inference" (involving massive electronic databases created through analysis of countless thousands of proteins and their shapes), very fancy computer programs  such as AlphaFold2 can now predict fairly well 3D protein shapes from their amino acid sequence. But that does nothing to explain how linear sequences of amino acids are able to organize into folded 3D shapes needed for protein molecule function, in a body that does not have any such AI deep-learning software and the huge electronic database it requires. 

Genes specify which amino acids make up a protein. But genes do not specify the three-dimensional shapes of proteins needed for them to be functional. 

Here are two relevant quotes by scientists:

• "In real time how the chaperones fold the newly synthesized polypeptide sequences into a particular three-dimensional shape within a fraction of second is still a mystery for biologists as well as mathematicians."   -- Arun Upadhyay, "Structure of proteins: Evolution with unsolved mysteries," 2019.
• "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. 
• "How proteins fold remains a central unsolved problem in biology. While the idea of a folding code embedded in the amino acid sequence was introduced more than 6 decades ago, this code remains undefined. While we now have powerful predictive tools to predict the final native structure of proteins, we still lack a predictive framework for how [amino acid] sequences dictate folding pathways....Almost seven decades of experimental and theoretical inquiry have not revealed a 'folding code' at the amino acid level, i.e., rules endowed with the generality and predictive power required to connect amino acid sequence to how the protein attains its structure....Machine learning made it possible to identify weak correlations to generate the structure most likely to correspond to a sequence. This tour-de-force effort has largely solved the problem of predicting protein structure from sequence...but with a key limitation: the algorithm that predicts the structure is a complex black box of pattern recognition that casts little light on the process of folding and that tells us nothing about why only some sequences fold, or how physics and evolution are coupled." -- Five scientists in the year 2025 (link). 

Protein Complex Origination

Humans have more than 20,000 types of protein molecules, partially specified by about 20,000 genes, each of which lists the amino acid sequence used by a protein. Each protein uses a different sequence of amino acids. Different types of proteins combine to form teams of proteins called protein complexes.  Individual proteins might be called building blocks of protein complexes, although such a term might mislead you, because a building block such as a brick is very simple, while a protein typically consists of hundreds of well-arranged parts and thousands of well-arranged atoms.  So it's much better to call proteins "building components" of protein complexes. 

Although scientists have identified most of the proteins that exist in the human body, the task of identifying all the protein complexes and which proteins they are made up is a task that is very largely unfinished. The latest version of the CORUM database of protein complexes (version 4.0)  lists 5204 protein complexes, but that number is only a small fraction of the total number of protein complexes that exist.

Scientists do not understand how proteins are able to continually form very quickly into highly functional protein complexes. DNA does not specify any protein complexes. Nowhere in DNA is there anything like some specification saying that such-and-such a protein complex is made from Protein X, Protein Y and Protein Z.  Below are some quotes by scientists:

• "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). 
• "Most proteins associate into multimeric complexes with specific architectures, which often have functional properties like cooperative ligand binding or allosteric regulation. No detailed knowledge is available about how any multimer and its functions arose during historical evolution." -- Ten scientists, 2020 (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.

This week there was a press release about a protein complex, one saying, "Inside nearly every cell of your body, the tiny F₁ motor works non-stop to create adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the universal energy source that powers almost every action you take—from breathing to running."  We had some details describing how the microscopic motor spins "with maximum efficiency," but no explanation of how the protein complex ever arises. At least we have a good diagram showing how the "y-shaft" spins round and round like a motor. There's a link to a paper describing what it calls "nanomachines," which are examples of the most astonishing engineering effects existing on a microscopic level within your cells. 

From the press release here

Organelle Origination

In order for any human cell to ever form or to reproduce, there must occur very much origination of organelles, the building components of cells. Explaining the origination of organelles is made much harder by the facts that there are many greatly different types of organelles, and that some of these types exist in very great numbers in most human cell types.  Your idea about the number of organelles in a cell is probably shaped by those extremely misleading "Diagram of a cell" visuals, that show maybe fifteen organelles of about 7 types in a cell. The truth is that the average human cells has thousands of different 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. 

How do organelles originate? Scientists don't understand that. DNA does not specify how to make any organelles. The chart below illustrates what is not specified by DNA.  None of the seven higher levels of organization in the human body is specified by DNA, which contains only low-level chemical information. DNA contains no information on human anatomy and no information on cellular structure.  

Of the organelles in the human body, only the mitochondria have any DNA.  The DNA in mitochondria specifies only a small fraction of the protein molecules used by mitochondria. 

On page 2 of the document here we read this:

"Organelle biogenesis is the process by which new organelles are made. In a few cases, notably mitochondria and chloroplasts, some organelle proteins are encoded by the organelle’s own genome. However, the amount of DNA in such organelles can encode only a very small number of the many proteins required."  

The same document says this on page 10:  "Organelle biogenesis is not simply a question of delivering newly synthesized proteins and lipids to a specific intracellular site but may also require the establishment of a complex architecture."

The same document on page 63 tells of the structural complexity of one type of organelle, the endoplasmic reticulum:

"The endoplasmic reticulum (ER) adopts a number of structural forms that correlate with distinct functions. The differentiation, maintenance, and proliferation of these forms are only beginning to be understood....The endoplasmic reticulum (ER) is arguably the most dynamic and morphologically variable of all membranous organelles. The ER utilizes a cytoskeleton scaffold, associated motor proteins, and less well characterized mechanisms to undergo constant rearrangement while maintaining the characteristic forms of a continuous network of interconnected tubules, cisternae, and highly organized lamellar sheets. "

By "motor proteins" the quote is referring to protein complexes that look like tiny motors.  On page 69 the document says, "In living cells, a number of studies find clear evidence for a role of microtubules and the motor protein kinesin in formation and breakdown of branching ER tubule polygon networks." The wikipedia.org article on kinesin shows an animation of a kinesin protein complex "walking" down a microtubule, like some kind of microscopic robot. 

On the same page, the document offers an attempted explanation for how the very complex structure of the endoplasmic reticulum arises. It is the vacuous non-explanation of "self organization." The emptiness of the concept is clear from a quote on page 13, where we read, "Self-organization is an interesting concept, but how organelles self-organize is unclear." The last resort of a scientist lacking an explanation for some very high state of organization is to make a vacuous appeal to "self-organization." 

Cell Formation, Cell Reproduction

After studying the section above, you may get some idea about the very high amount of organization in human cells. Human cells are so complex they are sometimes compared to cities or factories. We do not understand how cells are able to form and reproduce. The answer is not that the body reads instructions in DNA or its genes telling how to build a cell. DNA and its genes do not have instructions on how to build any cell.  DNA and its genes do not even have instructions for how to build any of the organelles that are the building components of cells. A 2022 paper in the journal Science (one authored by more than ten scientists) says this: "Although the genome is often called the blueprint of an organism, it is perhaps more accurate to describe it as a parts list composed of the various genes that may or may not be used in the different cell types of a multicellular organism....The genome in and of itself does not provide an understanding of the molecular complexity of the various cell types of that organism."

On a web page entitled "The Mystery of Cell Division," a scientist confesses that scientists don't understand how cells -- with a complexity of "airplanes" -- could self-reproduce. 

"Scientists have been trying to understand how cells are built since the 1800s. This does not surprise us and, as scientists ourselves, we have always been puzzled at how cells, such complex structures, are able to reproduce over and over again. Even more astonishing is that, despite the frequency of cell division, mistakes are relatively rare and almost always corrected. According to Professor David Morgan from University of California, the complexity that we observe in cells can be compared to that of airplanes."

If you do a Google search for “why do cells divide,” you will get various answers referring to high-level causes. A web site may state that cells divide to replace old, dead or damaged cells, or that cells divide so that an organism can grow, or that cells divide so that an organism can reproduce. But these are all “grand purpose” reasons, and none of them is a low-level reason. What we do not understand is: what cell-level reason is it that cells divide into two? Considering only the cell itself, and not some higher purpose, what would cause a cell to reproduce by splitting into two?

Scientists do not understand such a thing. They have identified particular stages in the most common type of cell reproduction (called mitosis): stages such as prophase, metaphase, anaphase and telophase. But without referring to higher-level “grand purpose” reasons, scientists do not understand why (on the individual cell level) a cell would pass through such phases and reproduce. A university press release confesses, "there are many remaining mysteries about how cells perform this remarkable feat." The answer is not at all "the cells follow the instructions in DNA." DNA does not contain any instructions for making cells or any specification or blueprint of a cell. 

An M. Pitkanen (who has a PhD in theoretical physics) has written the following about cell division:

"Replication 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."

A university press release discusses scientific ignorance about the basis question of cell division. It states the following:

"When a rapidly-growing cell divides into two smaller cells, what triggers the split? Is it the size the growing cell eventually reaches? Or is the real trigger the time period over which the cell keeps growing ever larger?...'How cells control their size and maintain stable size distributions is one of the most fundamental, unsolved problems in biology,' said Suckjoon Jun, an assistant professor of physics and molecular biology at UC San Diego...'Even for the bacterium E. coli, arguably the most extensively studied organism to date, no one has been able to answer this question.' ”

Another aspect of cells that scientists are unable to explain is how cells ever end up in the correct positions. There are about 200 types of cells in the human body. Every type of cell needs to end up in the right position to serve its function. But there is no mechanistic explanation as to how any cell could ever find the right position to go to. Besides lacking any specification of how to build a cell, DNA has no information on where cells should go to. 

One of the many myths sometimes suggested in scientific literature is the myth that cells go to the right positions because they receive (by means of something called a morphogen gradient) a signal about which direction to move to. This myth does not hold up to scrutiny, for reasons I discuss in my long post here. People sometimes try to insinuate that Lewis Wolpert did something to help explain how cells find the right positions. But Wolpert has made confessions contrary to such a boast. For example, he confessed, "There is no good evidence for the quantitative aspects of any of the proposed gradients and details how they are set up." He also confessed, "It is terrible, but we still don’t have a molecular basis for it."

To help show how crucial it is that the right types of cells get to the right types of places in the human body, 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.

After studying the table above and studying the lack of any specification in DNA or its genes of where particular cell types should go to in the body, you may appreciate more strongly that there is an enormous explanatory problem involving not just how cells arise but how cells get to the right places in human bodies. Mechanistic science has no credible explanation for these wonders. Nor can mechanistic science or evolutionary biology explain how there ever appeared organs in the body which have so many dependencies on many different types of accidentally unachievable cells that the organs would be useless in their preliminary or incipient stages.

Organ System Formation

Below are the "major organ systems" in the human body, as listed on a page in the consumer edition of the famous Merck Manual. In some cases you have to make a rather arbitrary choice when listing such systems, because of a lack of a clear distinction. For example, you can distinguish between a respiratory system and a cardiovascular system; but the respiratory system is so dependent upon the cardiovascular system (and vice versa) that it might be better to refer to a cardiovascular-respiratory system. 

Cardiovascular system: heart, blood vessels (arteries, capillaries, veins).

Respiratory system: nose, mouth, pharynx, larynx, trachea, bronchi, lungs. 

Nervous system: brain, spinal cord, nerves

Integumentary system: skin, hair, nails.

Musculoskeletal system: muscles, tendons and ligaments,

bones, joints.

Digestive system:  mouth, esophagus, stomach,

small intestine, large intestine, rectum, anus, liver,

gallbladder, pancreas (the part that produces enzymes),

appendix.

Urinary system: kidneys, ureters, bladder,

urethra.

Male reproductive system:  penis,  prostate gland,

seminal vesicles, vasa deferentia, testes.

Female reproductive system:  vagina, cervix,

uterus, fallopian tubes, ovaries.

It seems that if we are listing the organ systems in the human body we should also be listing these systems not included on the Merck Manual page. Listing some of these systems requires that we discard the principle that every bodily system consists only of unique parts shared by no other system. 

Endocrine system: thyroid, parathyroid, pituitary, pineal, and adrenal glands.

Immune system: spleen, thymus, bone marrow, lymph nodes, antibodies.

Vision system: eyes, optic nerves, visual cortex. 

Auditory system: ears, auditory nerve, auditory cortex.

How do all of these wonderful systems arise? Scientists do not know. DNA and its genes do not specify how to make any of them. DNA does not even specify how to make any organ, any cell, or any of the organelles that are the building components of cells. A Duke University biologist and a Cornell University biologist have confessed this: " No information about the overall architecture of these body parts is present in the cells and tissues of the parts themselves, or in each organism’s genes."

Part of the reason why the explanation job is so impossible from a mechanistic standpoint is the interdependence of different organ systems. Such interdependence is shown in the diagram below. 

Because of such interdependence, there is typically no way to explain the appearance of two organs through any narrative in which first one organ appears and then much later another organ appears. 

Homeostasis Via Molecular Machinery

The Oxford Dictionary defines homeostasis as "the tendency toward a relatively stable equilibrium between interdependent elements, especially as maintained by physiological processes." Another way to define homeostasis is: all of the incredibly complex processes that dynamically occur within a human body simply so that the body can maintain a stable state.  Homeostasis involves much more than just maintaining stable temperatures and stable blood sugar levels. Homeostasis involves the extremely complex chores involved in breaking down cells and reusing their chemicals. Such a process is necessary because most types of cells in the human body last less than a year. 

There are many specialized protein complexes that help achieve homeostasis. An example is the extremely complex apoptosome protein complex shown below:

(Image credit:  Wikipedia Commons, derived from Yuan et al. 2010, Structure of an apoptosome-procaspase-9 CARD complex)

Shown above is the apoptosome protein complex involved in programmed cell death. Note the references in the chart to propellers, which remind  us how much the complex resembles a product of engineering. Humans have more than 20,000 types of protein molecules, and the average protein molecule is a very special arrangement of more than 400 different amino acid parts. The arrangement of amino acids in each protein is as hard-to-achieve by chance as 400 accidentally typed characters making a paragraph of grammatical and functional prose. Extremely complex engineering arises in the form of protein complexes, in which different proteins (often useless by themselves) work together as team members to achieve some dramatic functional result. We see that in the visual above, where multiple instances of several different types of protein molecules come together to form an extremely complex structure consisting of thousands of well-arranged amino acid parts, and consisting of a total of tens of thousands of well-arranged atoms. A page describes the action of these individually useless proteins coming together to form a functional protein complex:

"The process of programmed cell death, also known as apoptosis, is highly regulated, and the decision to die is made through the coordinated action of many molecules. The apoptosome plays the role of gatekeeper in one of the major processes, termed the intrinsic pathway. It lies between the molecules that sense a problem and the molecules that disassemble the cell once the choice is made. Normally, the many subunits of the apoptosome are separated and inactive, circulating harmlessly through the cell. When trouble occurs, they assemble into a star-shaped complex, which activates protein-cutting caspases that get apoptosis started."

Another site that includes a 3D rotating animation of the structure shown above says this:

"The apoptosome is revealed as a wheel-like complex with seven spokes. On top of the wheel is a spiral-shaped disk that allows for docking and subsequent activation of proteases, which then target cellular components. When active, the apoptosome is revealed to be a dynamic machine with three to five protease molecules tethered to the wheel at any given time."

The "Apaf 1" part of this complex (APAF_HUMAN ) involves 1248 amino acids.   

The apoptosome protein complex is only one of many protein complexes in the body involved in homeostasis. Many of these protein complexes are so complex and machine-like they are called "molecular machines." Does this mean there is some mechanistic explanation for such wonders of microscopic engineering? Not at all. 

The fact is that scientists have no explanation for how protein complexes are able to form. That is shown by the quotes  I gave in the section above entitled "Protein complex origination."  The fact that parts mysteriously form into a machine-like functionally effective well-engineered arrangement of parts does not at all mean that there is a mechanistic explanation.  Similarly, if a tornado were to blow some scattered branches so that they formed into a functional cart of wood with four working wheels and two axles, such a mechanistic output would have no mechanistic explanation. 

Every day throughout your body a great army of very many types of molecular machines are mysteriously forming, having just the right arrangements to perform maintenance feats necessary for the preservation of your body.  The configuration of such fine-tuned protein complexes is not specified by DNA. We know of no explanation for these marvels of fine-tuned formation that are constantly occurring in your body to preserve your life. 

Below are three examples of hierarchical organization: the Harry Potter book series, New York City, and the human body. I very roughly calculate an "organization index" by multiplying together some of the numbers in each column. The "organization index" gives a very rough idea of the amount of organization and special arrangement of parts to achieve the organized thing (a book series, a city or the human body). It seems that the construction of every human body requires far more organization and special arrangement of parts than are required to make New York City, and many times more organization and special arrangement of parts than is required to write a long book series such as the Harry Potter series. 

EXAMPLES OF HIERARCHICAL ORGANIZATION
A book series is made of books (for example, the Harry Potter series has 7 different books)	New York City is made of 5 boroughs (for example, Manhattan and Queens)	A human body is made mainly of a skeletal system and organ systems (about 10)
Books are made of chapters (about 30)	Boroughs are each made of about 20 neighborhoods (for example, Astoria and Corona)	Organ systems are made mainly of organs
Chapters are made of paragraphs (about 50)	Neighborhoods are made of about 100 city blocks	Organs are made of tissues
Paragraphs are made of sentences (about 5)	City blocks are made of about 50 buildings	Tissues are made of about 200 types of cells (about 100,000,000,000 per organ)
Sentences are made of words (about 10)	Buildings are made of about 5 floors	Cells are made of organelles of at least 10 types (about 100,000 per human cell)
Words are made of about 5 characters (letters)	Floors are made of  about 5 rooms	Organelles are made of proteins and protein complexes, more than 1000 per organelle
Characters are made of pixels, about 50	Rooms are made of construction components such as bricks, pipes, two-by-four boards and floorboards (about 300)	Human protein complexes are made of protein molecules (about 10 per protein complex)
		Protein molecules are made of amino acids (20 types), between about 200 and 2000 amino acids per protein molecule
Organization index = 7*30*50*6*12*5*50=131,250,000	Organization index = 5*20*100*50*5*5*300= 3,750,000,000	Organization index =10*100,000,000,000*100,000*1000*10*200= 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Minds and Memory Are Just as Mechanistically Inexplicable as Bodies

The paragraphs above help explain why your adult body is a miracle of fine-tuned organization beyond any genetic or mechanistic explanation.  In the sense that you have a body that is beyond any mechanistic or genetic explanation,  you may truly say that in one sense you are a miracle. But there is a whole other sense in which you are a miracle, which is that neither your mind nor your memory have any mechanistic or genetic or neural explanation. 

There is a belief community of neuroscientist dogmatists who claim otherwise.  They keep claiming that your mind and your memory are explained by your brain. But neuroscientists cannot credibly answer any of these questions:

• How is a human able to ever instantly learn all of the many different things that humans can learn?
• How is a human ever able to retain memories for decades, something that should be impossible from units such as synapses, which are built from proteins which have average lifetimes of only a few weeks or less?
• How could a brain ever store a memory when nothing in a brain seems to bear any resemblance to some component capable of writing information?
• How could a brain ever read a memory when nothing in a brain seems to bear any resemblance to some component capable of reading memory information?
• How could there possibly be memories stored in brains, when there has been the most careful microscopic examination of so many thousands of brains of very recently deceased people, and the most careful microscopic examination of so many thousands of chunks of brain tissue from living people, without any trace of learned memory ever being discovered from such examination? 
• How could there possibly be memories stored in brains, when no one has ever discussed any encoding system whereby episodic memories or learned knowledge could be converted to neuron states or synapse states? 
• How could a human ever instantly remember lots of relevant facts about a person, place or event as soon as he hears the name of such a person, place or event?

The claims of neuroscientists that brains can explain human memory abilities is unfounded, because of reasons such as these:

• As shown in the many examples given here, here, here, here and here, contrary to the predictions of "brains make minds" and "brains store memories" thinkers, human minds can operate very well despite tremendous damage to the brain, caused by injury, disease or surgery. For example, removing half of a person's brain in the operation known as hemispherectomy produces little change in memory or cognitive abilities. There have been quite a few cases of people (such as Lorber's patients) who were able to think and speak very well despite having lost more than 60% of their brain due to disease. Such cases argue powerfully that the human mind is not actually a product of the brain or an aspect of the brain, and is not a storage place of human memories. 

• Although it is claimed that memories are stored in the brain (specifically in synapses), there is no place in the brain that is a plausible storage site for human memories that can last for 50 years or longer. The proteins that make up both synapses and dendritic spines are quite short-lived, being subject to very high molecular turnover which gives them an average lifetime of only a few weeks or less. The 2018 study here precisely measured the lifetimes of more than 3000 brain proteins from all over the brain, and found not a single one with a lifetime of more than 75 days (figure 2 shows the average protein lifetime was only 11 days).  Both synapses and dendritic spines are a “shifting sands” substrate absolutely unsuitable for storing memories that last reliably for decades. Synapses are connected to dendritic spines, which have short lifetimes. A 2018 paper has a graph showing a 5-day "survival fraction" of only about 30% for dendritic spines in the cortex.  A 2014 paper found that only 3% of new spines in the cortex persist for more than 22 days. Speaking of dendritic spines, a 2007 paper says, "Most spines that appear in adult animals are transient, and the addition of stable spines and synapses is rare." A 2016 paper found a dendritic spine turnover rate in the neocortex of 4% every 2 days. A 2018 paper found only about 30% of new and existing dendritic spines in the cortex remaining after 16 days (Figure 4 in the paper). 

• It is claimed that memories are stored in brains, but humans are able to instantly recall accurately very obscure items of knowledge and memories learned or experienced decades ago; and the brain seems to have none of the characteristics that would allow such a thing. The recall of an obscure memory from a brain would require some ability to access the exact location in the brain where such a memory was stored (such as the neurons near neuron# 8,124,412,242). But given the lack of any neuron coordinate system or any neuron position notation system or anything like an indexing system or addressing system in the brain, it would seem impossible for a brain to perform anything like such an instantaneous lookup of stored information from some exact spot in the brain.

• If humans were storing their memories in brains, there would have to be a fantastically complex translation system (almost infinitely more complicated than the ASCII code or the genetic code) by which mental concepts, words and images are translated into neural states. But no trace of any such system has ever been found, no one has given a credible detailed theory of how it could work, and if it existed it would be a “miracle of design” that would be naturally inexplicable.

• If human brains actually stored conceptual and experiential memories, the human brain would have to have both a write mechanism by which exact information can be precisely written, and a read mechanism by which exact information can be precisely read. The brain seems to have neither of these things. There is nothing in the brain similar to the “read-write” heads found in computers.

• We know from our experience with computers the type of things that an information storage and retrieval system uses and requires. The human brain seems to have nothing like any of these things. 

• As discussed here, humans can form new memories instantly, at a speed much faster than would be possible if we were using our brains to store such memories. It is typically claimed that memories are stored by “synapse strengthening” and protein synthesis, but such things do not work fast enough to explain the formation of memories that can occur instantly.

• Contrary to the idea that human memories are stored in synapses, the density of synapses sharply decreases between childhood and early adulthood. We see no neural effect matching the growth of learned memories in human.

• There are many humans with either exceptional memory abilities (such as those with hyperthymesia or HSAM who can recall every day of their adulthood) or exceptional thinking abilities (such as savants with incredible calculation abilities). But such cases do not involve larger brains, very often involve completely ordinary brains, and quite often involve damaged brains, quite to the contrary of what we would expect from the “brains make minds” assumption.

• For decades microscopes have been powerful enough to detect memories in brains, if memories existed in brains. Very much brain tissue has been studied by the most powerful microscopes: both brain tissue extracting from living patients, and brain tissue extracted from someone very soon after he died. Very many thousands of brains have been examined soon after death.  Microscopes now allow us to see very clearly what is in the tiniest brain structures such as dendritic spines and synapse heads. But microscopic examination of brain tissue has failed to reveal any trace whatsoever of learned information in a brain.  No one has found a single letter of the alphabet stored in a brain; no has found a single number stored in a brain; and no one has ever found even a single pixel of something someone saw a day or more before.  If memories were stored in human brains, microscopes would have revealed decisive evidence of such a thing decades ago.  But no such evidence has appeared. 

• There is nothing in the brain that looks like learned information stored according to some systematic format that humans understand or do not understand. Even when scientists cannot figure out a code used to store information, they often can detect hallmarks of encoded information. For example, long before Europeans were able to decipher how hieroglyphics worked, they were able to see a repetition of symbolic tokens that persuaded them that some type of coding system was being used. Nothing like that can be seen in the brain. We see zero signs that synapses or dendritic spines are any such things as encoded information. 
• Many humans can remember with perfect accuracy very long bodies of text, such as hundreds of pages; but synapses in the brain do not reliably transmit information. An individual chemical synapse transmits an action potential with a reliability of only 50% or less, as little as 10%. A recall of long bodies of text would require a traversal of very many chemical synapses. A scientific paper says, "In the cortex, individual synapses seem to be extremely unreliable: the probability of transmitter release in response to a single action potential can be as low as 0.1 or lower." Moreover, the brain lacks any physical structure consistent with an ability to store very long sequences of information, as I discuss here.
• Humans often form vivid new memories while humans are having near-death experiences taking place during cardiac arrest, when the brain has shut down, showing only flatlines of electrical activity. That brain state is called asystole, and it occurs within about 10 to 20 seconds after the heart stops.  If memories are created by the brain, the formation of new memories should be impossible while the brain is electrically inactive. But we know that very vivid and detailed memories can form during such states of brain electrical inactivity. That would not be possible if memory formation is a brain activity. Moreover, during near-death experiences occurring asystole, people do not find themselves as minds without memories. They find themselves as the same selves with the same memories. There are endless accounts along the lines of this: "Suddenly I was floating outside of my body, and could see it beneath me. Later I saw my deceased mother." No such experiences would occur if a soul lacking memory powers were to persist after the heart stopped and brain waves stopped.  In that case there would be no memory recall, and no memory formation. 

Scientists cannot credibly explain either the origin of an adult body or the powers of an adult mind. There are no credible genetic or mechanistic or neural explanations for either the origination of your adult body or the origination of your mind and memory.  You are two different miracles: a miracle of physical organization and purposeful dynamism, and a miracle of mind and memory power beyond any mechanistic or genetic or neural explanation. To move towards credible ideas about the source of such wonders, we need to move towards ideas such as the idea of transcendent causation and the idea of the Global Organizing Activity of a Life-Force (GOAL), an idea discussed here. 

Any miracle beyond our explanation will always be "taken for granted," and thought of as nothing very wonderful, as long as humans keep seeing it happening throughout human existence. Imagine if we lived on a planet where you could always get your dinner by just going outside and clapping your hands twice, with each pair of claps being followed by the instant materialization of a floating silver platter in front of you, one containing a delicious four-course meal. If we had observed that all our lives, we would think there is nothing wonderful or miraculous about such a thing. We might call it "the Law of Convenient Dinner Deliveries" and think that such a law was nothing very special. Each time an enormously organized human body originates over nine months from a speck-sized zygote containing no specification of how to build a human body with such gigantic hierarchical organization and fine-tuned internal dynamism, it is something a million times more stupendous than the  "Law of Convenient Dinner Deliveries" I just imagined. And each time an adult human mind originates from a body that has nothing that can explain the main powers of such a mind, it is another miracle of origination incomparably more stupendous than water turning into wine or a person walking on water across a lake or sea. The return to physical life of a man like Lazarus (dead four days) would be "chicken feed" compared to the double miracle of your origination.