Not long after DNA was discovered about the middle of the twentieth century, scientists and science writers began spreading a false idea about DNA: the idea that DNA contains a specification for building an organism such as a human. There are various ways in which this false idea is stated, all equally false:
- Many described DNA or the genome as a blueprint for an organism.
- Many said DNA or the genome is a recipe for making an organism.
- Many said DNA or the genome is a program for building an organism, making an analogy to a computer program.
- Many claimed that DNA or genomes specify the anatomy of an organism.
- Many claimed that genotypes (the DNA in organisms) specify phenotypes (the observable characteristics of an organism).
- Many claimed that genotypes (the DNA in organisms) "map" phenotypes (the observable characteristics of an organism) or "map to" phenotypes.
- Many claimed that DNA contains "all the instructions needed to make an organism."
- Many claimed that there is a "genetic architecture" for an organism's body or some fraction of that body.
- Many claimed that DNA or its genes "guide," "direct" or "control" the nine-month process by which a zygote progresses to become a full-sized human baby.
- Using a little equation, many claimed that a "genotype plus the environment equals the phenotype," a formulation as false as the preceding statements, since we know of nothing in the environment that would cause phenotypes to arise from genotypes that do not specify such phenotypes.
Some of these claims are documented in Table 1 of the paper here, where some authors count (in only June and July of the year 2000, in a single newspaper) 10 claims that DNA is a draft or script, 6 that it is a software program, 8 that it is a blueprint, 6 that it is a cook book (a recipe), and 12 that is a map. The same table shows similar claims being made abundantly in the leading scientific journal Nature; and Table 2 and Table 3 of the same paper shows similar claims being made abundantly in 2001 and 2003 in both the newspaper and Nature.
There was never any justification for making any such claims. The only coding system that has ever been discovered in DNA is a system allowing only low-level chemical information to be specified. That coding system is known as the genetic code, and it is merely a system whereby certain combinations of nucleotide base pairs in DNA stand for amino acids. So a section of DNA can specify the amino acids that make up a protein molecule. But no one has ever discovered any coding system by which DNA could specify anything larger than a protein molecule.
Because of the lack of any justification for making the claims in the bullet list above, the biologists who have made such claims have been guilty of massive lying. Their deceits about DNA and genes have occurred over the course of 70 years. But now many scientists, doctors and science writers have confessed that there is no truth to the claims that DNA is a specification for making a human. A list of some of these confessions is found in the appendix of this post.
You can describe the strange situation like this: the left hand of biology keeps lying about DNA and genes, while the right hand of biology is telling the truth. In which of these camps should we put science writer Phillip Ball? It's a little hard to tell. In the very mainstream publication The Guardian, science writer Phillip Ball said this about the Human Genome Project that ended in 2003, noting the failure of science figures to clean up their old misstatements about DNA after they were debunked by the Human Genome Project:
"But a blizzard of misleading rhetoric surrounded the project, contributing to the widespread and sometimes dangerous misunderstandings about genes that now bedevils the genomic age. So far, there have been few attempts to set the record straight. Even now, the National Human Genome Research Institute calls the HGP an effort to read 'nature’s complete genetic blueprint for building a human being' – the 'book of instructions' that 'determine our particular traits'. A genome, says the institute, 'contains all of the information needed to build and maintain that organism'. But this deterministic 'instruction book' image is precisely the fallacy that genomics has overturned, and the information in the genome is demonstrably incomplete. Yet no one associated with genomic research seems bothered about correcting these false claims...Plenty remain happy to propagate the misleading idea that we are 'gene machines' and our DNA is our 'blueprint'.
But in a recent essay on Aeon entitled "We Are Not Machines", Ball fails to give us the plain truth on this matter. In the middle of telling us that the narrative of biologists about DNA is "at best a partial and at worst a misleading picture," he describes a narrative about DNA claiming that "the genome contains the information needed to make a human." He then says this:
"This story is (for the most part) not wrong. It’s plenty good enough to give students a rough notion of how biology works. But its elisions, omissions and simplifications can create serious misconceptions about what genes are and do."
No, the claim that "the genome contains the information needed to make a human" is very much wrong, because the genome (in other words, DNA and its genes) does not have even a tenth of the information needed to make a human. The genome only specifies low-level chemical information, and that is only a tiny fraction of what you would need to know to make a human. The genome does not specify how to make anything bigger than a protein molecule. DNA does not specify anatomy. In fact genomes only half-specify how to make protein molecules, because DNA does not specify how to make the 3D shapes of protein molecules vital for their proper function. Protein molecules are only the beginning of the vast hierarchical organization of a human body.
Let us imagine a man who goes to a special library that is dedicated to fully teaching about the complexity and organization of the human body. Suppose the person has been commanded that he has to study all of the details and complexity of the human body. He might start by looking through books that describe proteins. A full description of the average protein molecule would require maybe 5 to 10 pages of information in a large book. First there would be a listing of all the amino acids in the protein, which would require several pages. Then there would be a diagram showing the three-dimensional shape of the protein. A single book could not display all the details for more than about 100 types of protein molecules. So reading all of the protein books would require the man reading about 200 long books. This is because there are roughly 20,000 types of protein molecules in the human body.
But reading all of those books would only be the beginning of the man's chore. For we would also have to study protein complexes. This would require reading about the complexities of all the thousands of protein complexes that may consist of dozens of different types of proteins. So there would be many additional books the man would have to read. Then the man would have to read about all the different organelles in cells, and the structure of cells. This would not merely involve studying those phony childish cell diagrams like they have in biology books, those diagrams that depict cells as thousands of times simpler than they are. The man would have to study realistic cell diagrams.
Such diagrams would have to be huge. We can imagine some special books in the library made up of large pocket-pages, with huge folded diagrams in such pockets. Taking out the diagrams, the man might spread them out to the size of a huge table. Each diagram would show the position of many thousands of organelles. There would be endless such diagrams to be studied.
But the man's work would still not be done. Now he would have to study huge diagrams showing the unfathomable complexity of human biochemistry. We can imagine many special books in the library made up of pocket-pages, with huge folded diagrams in such pockets. Taking out the diagrams, the man might spread them out to the size of a huge table, and study many thousands of incredibly complex biochemistry diagrams, illustrating how fantastically hard-to-achieve functional results are achieved in the human body by the magnificently purposeful choreography of endless components acting together as smoothy and harmoniously as all the dancers and musicians in all the theaters of Broadway.
Then the man would have to study endless more details, how cells combine to make organs and organ systems. How long would the total job take of studying all these details at the library? It would seem to take thousands of hours.
In his Aeon essay Phillip Ball gives us no real sign that he understands the sky-high levels of organization and coordination and interdependent component teamwork needed to make a human body. But at least he seems to have perceived that there's something terribly wrong with biologists and the narratives they are telling. He describes them like this:
" Physicists are often keen to proclaim, at the drop of a hat, that ‘This changes everything!’ Biologists, on the other hand, while no slouches at drumming up media coverage for their own work, seem rather averse to big shifts in the discourse. ‘Well, we sort of knew that years ago,’ they will mutter – or alternatively: ‘That’s probably just a rare exception.’...Others said that, even if biology was indeed more complicated that we’d thought, what was to be gained by telling the public that? In other words: don’t upset the status quo....Finally, I suspect the narrative inertia reflects a general tendency in science whereby scientists get even more wedded to their metaphors than to their theories. Many biologists seem to have forgotten where the old metaphor of the genetic blueprint came from in the first place. The Harvard historian and philosopher of science Evelyn Fox Keller pointed out that it was never a notion compelled by the experimental evidence, but was merely a stopgap solution for our lack of knowledge about how the information in the genome (the genotype) was related to the visible traits of the organism (the phenotype)....Yet one can’t reasonably expect researchers to give up their metaphors unless they have others to replace them."
This quote only gives a part of the portrait Ball paints of biologists who keep telling us false claims, because they are clinging to misleading speech customs. The excuse given at the end of the quote is a lame one. It is misguided to claim that when scientists discover that a metaphorical explanation they have been using is untrue, they should be excused for continuing to lie by giving such an explanation, until they have some other more truthful metaphorical explanation they can give.
We may wonder whether Ball is suggesting a rule such as "stick to your narrative of how something arises because of a particular physical explanation, no matter how badly that explanation is failing, until you can replace that narrative with a different and more successful narrative of how something arises because of a particular physical explanation." That's a bad, dishonest rule.
There's a much better rule of proper scientific behavior: when you discover that the boastful claims you previously made about having a good physical explanation of the origin of something are not sound, then confess your ignorance of the origin of such a thing, and start telling people, "I thought I understood how this enormously complex reality arises, but now I see that my explanation is not credible, and that I don't understand how it arises." It is wrong and unethical to claim that boastful and failing claims of understanding something by some physical explanation must be maintained until they can be replaced by new boastful claims of understanding that thing by some new physical explanation. When the most popular explanation of something fails, healthy scientists should be saying things like, "We use to think we understood how this reality arose, but it's now clear that it's a complexity far over our heads, and that we don't understand at all how such a reality arises."
In the visual below, we see scientists who have placed themselves on pedestals. The pedestals were constructed by misleading statements. What are the first things such erring scientists should do? They should start by climbing off of their pedestals, and confessing all of the times they made statements and claims that were untrue or unbelievable. They should remove their self-devised crowns marked "Grand Lord of Explanation," and start confessing that their knowledge of nature is fragmentary.
Ball gives us another lame excuse for lying biologists who claim to understand things they don't understand, stating this: "It has also become much harder in recent years for scientists to admit to gaps in knowledge and understanding, which will be exploited by everyone ranging from creationists to climate-change deniers to anti-vaxxers as evidence that we shouldn’t believe a word they say." It is not a decent excuse for deception that if you stop such deception you will give some talking points to your opponents. Here Ball represents critics of Darwinism using the most misleading portrayal. He absurdly portrays them as people eager to say that we shouldn't believe a word that biologists say. To the contrary, intelligent design theorists are building their case very much on the truth of very many of the claims that biologists make, such as their claims about the many types of intricate molecular machinery inside our body, their claims about the vast organization of organisms, their claims about the gigantic functional complexity of cells, and so forth. A typical intelligent design theorist is constantly citing the low-level facts discovered by biologists, while doubting some of the high-level causal claims such biologists make.
Ball gives another excuse for science journalists continuing to tell false biology claims such as the "DNA is a body blueprint" claim: the very lame excuse that the reality is so complex that it cannot be fit into a short explanatory soundbite. He says this (very ridiculously insinuating that he understands "the real picture" of how human bodies arise, a miracle of organization that is actually a thousand miles over his head and the head of every biologist):
"But surely another reason for the near invisibility in the science media of the transformation in biology is that we now have a much harder story to tell. The idea that ‘genes make proteins, and proteins make us’ is easy to grasp. The real picture is far harder to capture in a sound bite. I suspect we hear so little about this new biology in part because many journalists (or their editors) take a look at the latest research on, say, gene regulation of chromatin remodelling or cell signalling and think: ‘I’m not going anywhere near that!’"
This is no excuse. It presumes that journalists have to have a nice little mechanistic explanation when writing a science story. They don't have to have any such thing. Rather than giving us some little sketch and saying, "That's how it happens," a science journalist can tell us about the vast organization and mountainously complex functional biochemistry in human bodies, and say, "We don't understand how such organization and vast functional complexity arises." There are all kinds of metaphors that can be used to give a correct idea about a state of knowledge that is merely fragmentary. For example, you can use Isaac Newton's classic analogy that he was like a little child at the seashore examining a few seashells, while the great ocean of truth lie undiscovered before him. Or you could give the analogy of some 1st century person transported to Times Square, seeing all kinds of engineering and technology beyond his understanding. Or you can give the analogy like the one in the visual below, in which the sitting figure represents the current state of modern science, compared to the unsolved mysteries of reality. There is no rule that science stories have to give neat little explanations of how something very complex works or how scientists are starting to understand how something very complex works.
Talking about metaphors used by scientists, Ball makes the very untrue claim that "metaphors aren’t the kind of thing you test at all." No, that's not true; there are all kinds of ways of testing whether a metaphorical statement is valid. For example, if someone says the brain is like a computer, I can test whether that metaphor is valid by listing some of the things a computer has, and checking whether the brain has such things. An example of trying such a test can be read here.
At the end of his article, Ball asks, "So how now should we be speaking about biology?" He starts out very strangely by quoting some biologist making the silly claim that the genome is "an organ of the cell." No, cells don't have organs; cells are the components of tissues, which are the components of organs. Saying the genome is an organ of the cell is every bit as silly as saying your distributor cap is the car inside your engine.
Ball then gives us a puerile little sound bite that sounds like "new nonsense to replace the old nonsense." Struggling for an explanation of how human bodies end up so vastly organized (something that cannot be explained by genes, genomes or DNA), Ball claims this: "Our biomolecules appear to make decisions not in the manner of on/off switches but in loosely defined committees that obey a combinatorial logic, comparable to the way different combinations of just a few light-sensitive cells or olfactory receptor molecules can generate countless sensations of colour or smell. " This is nonsense. Molecules don't understand things; they are not minds, they do not decide, and do not form committees. And if a molecule had a mind it could never understand the proper decisions it would need to make to help achieve the goal of creating the state of stratospheric organization that is a walking, talking, eating, grasping human, something the molecule had never observed and could never get the faintest notion of. What is going on when a body grows are endless examples on very many different scales of fantastically organized and functional arrangements of matter appearing. Giving some metaphor evoking the variety of different color combinations does nothing to explain such reaching of accidentally unachievable states of fine-tuned functional organization. The history of Darwinism is a history of people making very misleading biology metaphors, and Ball's metaphor quoted above is the latest in this long clown parade.
With the statement above, Ball ends up pitching some new "bottom-up" nonsense to replace the old bottom-up nonsense and lie of blueprint-containing genes building bodies. What he should have said at the end of his essay is something like: "We now know human bodies are gigantically more organized and exponentially more functionally complex than anyone ever dreamed a century ago, and no scientist understands how such vast heights of purposeful organization and fine-tuned functionality arise."
Misspeaking very badly, Ball tells us in his essay that "the more complex the organism, the fuzzier its molecular mechanisms have to be," because if "countless components interlock in precisely coordinated ways" our bodies would be "far too fragile." That sounds like complexity denialism and component coordination denialism. Enormously complex organisms such as humans have endless examples of the most precise molecular teamwork and coordination, and such organisms have endless examples of components that are interdependent in magnificently fine-tuned and precisely coordinated ways. An armchair argument that such results would leave you with organisms "far too fragile" cannot discredit the observed reality that such precise coordination and fine-tuned molecular teamwork really exists all over the place in the human body, in mountainous amounts, without humans being "far too fragile."
Ball has written a book with the title "How Life Works," and has another book that purports to tell us "how we are made," and another book that purports to tell us "how to understand ourselves and other beings, from animals to AI to aliens." With titles and subtitles so pretentious, it rather sounds as if Ball is trying to crown himself as a grand lord of biological explanation, which may be a bit of a stretch for someone having no biology or psychology degree. Ball has not learned the lesson of humility he should have learned from his studies: that the origin of human bodies and human minds are realities a thousand miles over his head, and a thousand miles over the heads of today's biologists, who do not have any credible physical explanation for human minds or human memory, do not have any credible explanation for the appearance of very complex biological innovations, and do not have any credible explanation for how there occurs the progression from a speck-sized zygote to the vast hierarchical organization that is an adult human body.
The long bibliography of Ball's "The Book of Minds" shows an "ignore everything spooky" filter-bubble reading list that includes very few or none of the 50 top books one should read before writing a book with such a title, many of which can be found here. The bibliography is the kind of echo-chamber reading list someone might have if he couldn't bear to ever read a word conflicting with materialist orthodoxy. People with parochial reading lists so very narrow should not be regarded as very diligent and very thorough scholars of human minds and human mental phenomena.
The deception that is committed by the advocates of materialism is several dozens of times greater than merely lying that human DNA (the human genome) contains a specification for how to make a human body. For a very long list of 60+ types of deceptions committed by such people, see my post here.
Appendix: Since the lie that DNA is a blueprint or program or recipe for building bodies has so often been told, I will need to cite again a list I have compiled of distinguished scientists and other PhD's or MD's who have told us such an idea is untrue. Below is the list:
- 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.”
- 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 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, 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."
- 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."
- Writing in the leading journal Cell, biologists Marc Kirschner, John Gerhart and Tim Mitchison stated, "The genotype, however deeply we analyze it, cannot be predictive of the actual phenotype, but can only provide knowledge of the universe of possible phenotypes." That's equivalent to saying that DNA does not specify visible biological structures, but merely limits what structures an organism can have (just as a building parts list merely limits what structures can be made from the set of parts).
- At the Stack Exchange expert answers site, someone posted a question asking which parts of a genome specify how to make a cell (he wanted to write a program that would sketch out a cell based on DNA inputs). An unidentified expert stated that it is "not correct" that DNA is a blueprint that describes an organism, and that "DNA is not a blueprint because DNA does not have instructions for how to build a cell." No one contradicted this expert's claim, even though the site allows any of its experts to reply.
- A paper co-authored by a chemistry professor (Jesper Hoffmeyer) tells us this: "Ontogenetic 'information,' whether about the structure of the organism or about its behavior, does not exist as such in the genes or in the environment, but is constructed in a given developmental context, as critically emphasized, for example, by Lewotin (1982) and Oyama (1985)."
- Biologist Steven Rose has stated, "DNA is not a blueprint, and the four dimensions of life (three of space, one of time) cannot be read off from its one-dimensional strand."
- Jonathan Latham has a master's degree in Crop Genetics and a PhD in virology. In his essay “Genetics Is Giving Way to a New Science of Life,” a long essay well worth a read, Latham exposes many of the myths about DNA. Referring to "the mythologizing of DNA," he says that "DNA is not a master controller," and asks, "How is it that, if organisms are the principal objects of biological study, and the standard explanation of their origin and operation is so scientifically weak that it has to award DNA imaginary superpowers of 'expression'” and 'control' to paper over the cracks, have scientists nevertheless clung to it?"
- An interesting 2006 paper by six medical authorities and scientists tells us that "biochemistry cannot provide the spatial information needed to explain morphogenesis," that "supracellular morphogenesis is mysterious," and that "nobody seems to understand the origin of biological and cellular order," contrary to claims that such order arises from a reading of a specification in DNA.
- Keith Baverstock (with a PhD in chemical kinetics) has stated "genes are like the merchants that provide the necessary materials to build a house: they are neither the architect, nor the builder but, without them, the house cannot be built," and that "genes are neither the formal cause (the blueprint), nor the efficient cause (the builder) of the cell, nor of the organism."
- Evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin stated, "DNA is not self-reproducing; second, it makes nothing; and third, organisms are not determined by it." Noting that "the more accurate description of the role of DNA is that it bears information that is read by the cell machinery," Lewontin lamented the "evangelical enthusiasm" of those who "fetishized DNA" and misspoke so that "DNA as information bearer is transmogrified into DNA as blueprint, as plan, as master plan, as master molecule." In another work he stated "the information in DNA sequences is insufficient to specify even a folded protein, not to speak of an entire organism." This was correct: DNA does not even specify the 3D shapes of proteins, but merely their sequence of amino acids.
- In 2022 developmental biologist Claudio D. Stern first noted, "All cells in an organism have the same genetic information yet they generate often huge complexity as they diversify in the appropriate locations at the correct time and generate form and pattern as well as an array of identities, dynamic behaviours and functions." In his next sentence he stated, "The key quest is to find the 'computer program' that contains the instructions to build an organism, and the mechanisms responsible for its evolution over longer periods." Since this was written long after the Human Genome Project had been completed, he thereby suggested that no such instruction program had yet been discovered in the genome (DNA).
- A 2024 article says, "MartÃnez Arias, 68, argues that the DNA sequence of an individual is not an instruction manual or a construction plan for their body...The Madrid-born biologist argues that there is nothing in the DNA molecule that explains why the heart is located on the left, why there are five fingers on the hand or why twin brothers have different fingerprints."
- 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."
