Trying to Solve One of the Hardest Problems of Biology, Physicists Sound "Lost in the Woods"

 Developmental biology is the branch of biology studying the process by which an organism progresses from a speck-sized state of a newly fertilized zygote to a full adult state that is vastly more organized and much larger. The Quanta Magazine article here tries to give us some sound bites suggesting that developmental biologists are making progress. But inadvertently the article is rather much a portrait of developmental biology in disarray, not getting much of anywhere, without any convincing story to tell for how marvels of biological organization occur. There's a little halfhearted mention of chemicals, a little halfhearted mention of physics, and nothing that adds up to a hundredth of an explanation of how vastly organized human bodies could arise from the tiny speck-sized simplicity of a newly fertilized zygote.  

Over the past few decades we have seen these common elements in these types of articles and the papers of developmental biologists:

(1) Again and again, words will be carefully chosen to try to make the problem of morphogenesis sound a billion times simpler than it is. For example, someone will talk about a problem of the origin of "form" or "shape." The problem is vastly bigger than that. It is the problem of explaining why fantastically organized structures appear, with so many levels of very high organization. That is a problem almost infinitely bigger than the problem of explaining how human-shaped bodies arise.

(2) Again and again, appeals are made to "patterns," as if an organism's body was a mere pattern. A human body is something almost infinitely more impressive than some mere pattern. A human body is a work of the most enormous dynamism, with endless continuous purposeful activity of the most vast complexity, much of it involving the breakdown of old cells and old proteins, and their continual replacement with new cells and new proteins.  Even the types of cells that last for decades continually have their components broken down and replaced, like some skyscraper being continuously remodeled. 

A Google Gemini infographic

(3) Again and again, dubious claims are made that some tiny little thing has been explained, often with some kind of mention of physics or chemistry. Almost all of the claims fail to be well-replicated scientific results.  An example is the unfounded claim that there are "morphogen gradient" chemicals that tell cells where to go to. For a long discussion of why this claim has no real explanatory value and is also not well grounded in observations, see my post here. 

(4) The explanatory sound bites given made are ever-changing. For decades  biologists told us the bogus story line that the human body arises because of a blueprint in DNA (despite the lack of any such anatomical blueprint in DNA). But the Quanta Magazine article ends with this statement, which sings a different tune:

“ 'We used to think if we just studied the genome with more and more depth and rigor, all of this would be clear,' Shyer said, but 'the answers to the important questions might not be at the level of the genome.' Once it seemed that developmental decisions were made through the interplay of genes and their products within cells, but the emerging truth is that 'the decision-making can be happening outside of the cell, through the physical interactions of cells with each other.' ” 

You do not explain how cells know where to go in the developing body or how to progress from vastly simpler states by using the vague wooly phrase "the physical interactions of cells with each other." If we don't understand how cells are able to go to the right places in the body (as if they had some target destination knowledge they do not have), we do not explain such a thing by imagining such cells are interacting with other cells that also should not have such knowledge of the proper destinations of cells. And you don't get "decision-making" from "physical interactions"; you get decision-making from a mind. 

(5) There is an abundant use of imprecise wooly phrases and poorly defined terms, such as "morphogens" (a term defined in many different ways) and "the physical interactions of cells with each other." 

(6) Again and again, we will read the use of spurious action verbs in which it is unreasonably claimed that mindless information-free things "guide" or "direct" things.  An example is when the Quanta Magazine article claims that "physical tensions within an embryo set up patterns that guide growth."  

(7) Again and again, we hear about meaningless unimpressive experiments that are described in glowing terms, as if some great insight was gained. An example may be found in the Quanta Magazine article here when we read about some silly experiment in which scientists "removed the skin from a chicken embryo and disintegrated the tissue to pull apart the cells," putting the cells into a petri dish, and adding some chemical. They then observed the cells form a shape that is described as a ring shape (even though it does not look like a ring at all). This unimpressive result is described in the most glowing terms in the Quanta Magazine article, as if it provides some great insight. We see three pictures, and the third picture hardly looks any more organized than the first. But the result is described glowingly as evidence for "self-organization." Scientists are deluding themselves if they get excited about such results. 

Another example of this is the Quanta Magazine article here. Besides the unsolved problem of how cells end up in the correct positions in the body (not at all solved by the socially constructed myth of morphogen gradients), there is the problem of how simple stem cells turn into 200 types of cells in the human body, most of which are many, many times more organized and complex than such stem cells. This is the problem of cellular differentiation.  The Quanta Magazine article above offers no answer to this great mystery. It merely discusses scientists fooling around with artificial methods of making cells change their color.  

To get some revealing glimpses of how "lost in the woods" efforts in developmental biology are, there's another place we can look other than Quanta Magazine. We can look in the grant query tool of the National Science Foundation, which you can find here. Using "morphogenesis" as the search term, we can find some of the projects that have been granted lots of money to research morphogenesis. 

One such project is the project described here. It has the very general title "General Mechanisms of Morphogenesis on Multiple Scales."  The project was awarded $924,000.  Below are some "lost in the woods" elements we read:

(1) Morphogenesis (properly defined as the process by which a speck-sized zygote progresses to become the full organizational reality of a new-born organism or adult organism) is senselessly described  in the project abstract as "the process of biological shape formation." When this kind of shadow-speaking nonsense occurs, someone is childishly trying to make the problem of explaining the progression from a one-celled zygote to a full organism look like a problem enormously simpler than it is. A human body is something almost infinitely more than just a shape. A human body is a state of vast hierarchical organization, in which fairly simple chemicals are organized into many thousands of types of very organized and functional protein molecules, different types of protein molecules are organized into very many types of protein complexes so complex they are often called molecular machines, protein complexes and individual proteins are organized into organelles, organelles are organized into 200 types of cells, cells are organized into tissues, tissues are organized into organs, and organs are organized into organ systems, with sky-high levels of fine-tuned biochemistry required everywhere for such things to work. Calling that level of organization "a shape" is like saying that a million-volume library is "some paper with ink marks on it." 

(2) The second sentence of the research project abstract has this piece of vacuous or misleading hand-waving: "Recent discoveries in this interdisciplinary field have established the importance of mechanical interactions that guide growing tissues into diverse shapes and forms of adult organisms." We do not know how the enormous organization of a full human body arises from a speck-sized zygote, and no real progress has occurred in solving this problem. Claiming that "mechanical interactions" are something that "guide" this process is as vacuous as trying to explain the origin of a 100-story skyscraper by saying that "construction actions guide the building of the building."  Equally vacuous hand-waving occurs later in the research project abstract when the claim is made that " patterns of tissue growth define the shapes of animal limbs," a claim as empty as the claim that "patterns of building define how the building arises." 

(3) The second paragraph of the research project abstract is just as bad and misleading. We have an appeal to "active mechanical self-organization of tissues"  (a vacuous hand-waving phrase) and an appeal to the false claim that developmental biologists have long told, the fiction that development occurs because instructions for how to build a body are read from DNA. This time that falsehood is told by the claim that there are "genetically encoded developmental signals that guide morphogenesis."  There is no robust evidence for such signals, and DNA and its genes do not have any specification of how to build a human body or any of its organs or any of its cells. DNA and its genes do not even have any specification of how to make any of the organelles from which cells are constructed. DNA contains only low-level chemical information such as which sequence of amino acids makes up a particular type of protein molecule. 

(4) By the third paragraph we learn that the project will try to make things a million times easier not just by defining morphogenesis as the mere arising of a shape, but also by restricting itself to a study of fruit flies, tiny creatures only 3 millimeters in size (one third of an inch). 

 When a  project abstract makes statements so misleading, oversimplified and self-contradictory,  showing such a childish notion of the mountainous problems of explaining morphogenesis, we should have no confidence at all that the allocated money will be wisely spent.  

We have the same kind of shadow-speaking nonsense in another project awarded more than $700,000 by the National Science Foundation. It's a project (described here) with the  dumb-sounding title "In-Vivo Analysis of Active Mechanical Mechanisms Driving Animal Morphogenesis."  Mechanical mechanisms?  That sounds like someone saying that his project is "scientifically scientific."  When scientists don't understand some mystery a hundred miles over their heads,  scientists often use vague and vacuous hand-waving phrases such as claiming that something is "guided" or "driven" by "mechanisms."  Such assertions don't really amount to saying anything. 

In the first paragraph of the project abstract, we have the same sins as the research project previously discussed.  Again, the problem of explaining the arising of the vast organization and dynamism of the full body of an organism is senselessly reduced to a mere problem of explaining "shape." Again, we have the telling of the favorite falsehood of developmental biologists, this time as the untrue claim that "genes instruct form."  Without giving any details, we are vaguely told that "experiments will be used to uncover the physical mechanisms of how 3D shape is dynamically encoded by 2D gene expression patterns." Again, we have the childish nonsense of trying to reduce the problem of explaining the origin of enormously organized organisms into a billion-times-easier problem of merely explaining a shape.  Neither the shape nor the structure of any human body is encoded in genes, nor is the shape or the structure of any organ system, any organ or any cell or any cell organelle.  "DNA as body blueprint" is the lie that many biologists keep telling, even though dozens of biologists, chemists and doctors have confessed that DNA and its genes are no blueprint or recipe or program for making a body or any of its organs or cells.  You can read a bullet list of the statements of such biologists, chemists and doctors in my long post here, entitled "Why We Were Told So Often the Huge Lie That DNA Is a Specification for Building Humans." 

$894,000 has been allocated to this project, which we should have little confidence in, based on the misstatements in its abstract.  Anyone who thinks that the problem of explaining the progression from a speck-sized zygote to a full human body (the problem of morphogenesis) is a mere problem of explaining a shape is someone  lost in the woods when it comes to understanding the unsolved problems of developmental biology. 

Each of of these projects involved almost a million dollars allocated to try to help solve one of the two hardest problems of biology, and senselessly both of the projects were awarded not to people in a department of biology but to people in a department of physics.  The people who wrote the abstracts for these research projects sounded  like people who had never adequately studied biology. 

I found one other example of this type of thing. It is the project entitled "Geometry, Genetics and Development" described on the page here.  The project description starts out with a huge falsehood by stating, "Developmental biology has been immensely successful in reducing the seeming miraculous self-organization of a fertilized egg to a fetus and adult to a list of genes and the instructions for their regulation in the noncoding genome. " Nothing of the sort has occurred.  DNA and its genes do not specify any of these things: how to make a full human body, how to make any organ system, how to make any organ, how to make any cell, how to make any of the organelles that make up a cell.  Developmental biology has utterly failed to explain the progression from a fertilized egg to a full organism. 

We are told that the research of this project will involve tiny little creatures such as C. elegans, a roundworm.  We can be rather sure that no real light will be shed on human morphogenesis.  No research plan is specified in any detail; but strangely the project has been awarded more than $750,000.  Once again, a huge sum has been awarded to try and solve one of the two hardest problems of biology; but the money was awarded not to a department of biology but to a department of physics.  Again, we have a research project abstract with a glaring falsehood, sounding like it was written by someone who had never decently studied biology. 

The links I have given above to these projects will take you to  pages that list scientific papers that were the end results of the millions that were allocated. An examination of those papers will be very unlikely to leave you with any feeling that physicists are capable of shedding much of any light on the great riddle of how the vast purposeful organization and ever-constructing dynamism of a human body arises from a speck-sized zygote having no specification of how to build such a body or any of its cells. 

Trying to Explain Human Development, Physicists Offer Only the Emptiest Hand-Waving

 The marvel of human development is a miracle of organization a thousand miles over the head of today's scientists. Somehow a speck-sized zygote existing just after impregnation progresses to become something a trillion times more organized: the internally dynamic structure of the human body. Scientists have long told a childish lie to try to explain this wonder so very far beyond their understanding: the tall tale that human bodies grow because there occurs a constant reading of a specification for how to make a human body, one stored in DNA or its genes. Such a specification has been called a blueprint, a recipe or a program. This tall tale is a lie because no such specification for how to make a human body exists in DNA or its genes. Instead of having a blueprint or recipe or program for building a body or any of its organs or any human cell, DNA and its genes merely have very low-level information such as which amino acids make up a protein. 

The very childish nature of the "DNA blueprints build bodies" tall tale may become clear to you once you realize that even if such a blueprint were to exist inside DNA, it would never explain how a human body gets built, for the simple reason that blueprints don't build things. Dump a blueprint for a house and the construction materials at a vacant lot, and that will never cause a house to get built. Things get built with the help of blueprints only when there are intelligent agents around smart enough to read blueprints and get ideas about exactly how to build things. A human body is so enormously organized and has such fantastically intricate biochemistry and internal dynamism that any blueprint for making a human body would be a specification so complex that only a superhuman mind could understand it. There is in the human womb nothing like a mind capable of interpreting and understanding instructions so complex, if they happened to exist in DNA and its genes, where there is no such specification for building a body or any of its organs or cells. 

There is therefore an ocean-sized explanation shortfall in explaining the physical origin of any full human body. Strip them of their lies about what is in DNA and its genes, and our developmental biologists stand empty-handed before us, "with their pants down." To make it look like the explanation shortfall is not so enormous, discussions of morphogenesis sometimes appeal to physics.  The maneuver is futile. Physics does pretty much nothing to explain the origin of a human body. 

In Quanta Magazine in late 2025 there was an example of one of the misleading articles we get when someone is trying to persuade us that physics does much of anything to explain human development. We have an article entitled "Genes Have Harnessed Physics to Help Grow Living Things." 

Early on the writer states this:

"Typically, biologists try to characterize growth, development and other biological processes as the result of chemical cues triggered by genetic instructions. But that picture has often seemed incomplete."

We get no explanation of why "that picture has often seemed incomplete." The reason is that genes do not give any instructions more complex than instructions for how to build a polypeptide sequence (a chain of amino acids) that is the beginning of a protein molecule. But constructing a human body requires many types of higher level organization such as building protein molecules into protein complexes, building protein complexes into organelles, building organelles into cells, building cells into tissues, building tissues into organs, and building organs into organ systems consisting of an organ and many other parts.  Genes cannot explain how such building occurs, because genes have no instructions on how to perform such operations. 

The writer's next sentence starts to tell us the very misleading story of "mechanical forces" that "steer" human development, saying, "Researchers now increasingly appreciate the role of mechanical forces in biology: forces that push and pull tissues in response to their material properties, steering growth and development in ways that genes cannot."  The story is baloney. You cannot explain any of the marvels of the construction of a human body by appealing to blind "mechanical forces" and the claim that such forces are "steering." Constructing a human body is a task almost infinitely harder than the simple task of steering a car.  And blind mechanical forces don't do steering anything like the steering that occurs when a driver with vision and an idea of a desired destination is steering a car. 

There is almost always the same kind of misleading word trickery in discussions of this type. They include the following:

(1) There is the extremely misleading trick of trying to shrink the problem of explaining the arising of a human structure to a mere problem of explaining a shape. Within a human body is the most enormous organization of matter, a degree of organization that dwarfs the level of organization inside an automobile or computer. The problem of morphogenesis or human development is the problem of explaining how so gigantically organized an arrangement of matter arises. Such a problem is more than a billion times greater than a mere problem of explaining a human shape. 

(2) There is the extremely misleading trick of trying to speak as if a mere "sculpting" or "shaping" could explain the origin of a human body, which is just another way of trying to make an explanation problem look a billion times easier than it is. Any action of "sculpting" or "shaping" could merely explain a shape, not an internal structure that is vastly organized.  So it is always misleading to speak as if some kind of "sculpting" or "shaping" action could explain the arising of a human body or any of its cells or organs.

(3) There is extremely misleading personification language in which mindless and blind mechanical forces are described as "steering" or "sculpting" as if such mindless and blind mechanical forces were intentional agents who could see and will.

(4) Here and there there are sprinkled a few references to mechanical forces such as pulling or pushing or stretching. Using "give me an inch and I'll take a mile" tactics, some attempt is made to make such references sound like mechanical forces are helping to explain the origin of a human body, something that is not true in any substantial way. 

The Quanta Magazine article employs all of those misleading tricks. Nothing of any real substance is discussed in explaining how blind mechanical forces can help explain the miracle of the arising of a gigantically organized human body having a special arrangement of parts far more impressive than the special arrangement of parts in an automobile or a jet aircraft. All that we have is the emptiest of hand-waving, combined with a few gossamer threads of speculation, which (even if true) would explain no more than a thousandth of the marvel of the origination of a human body. 

We have in the article scientist Alan Rodrigues engaging in very empty hand-waving by saying this: 

" 'What’s really amazed us is that you might be able to get by with a relatively simple amount of instruction from the genetic and molecular level,' said Rodrigues. 'Because you have additional emergent processes and properties happening at other levels.' ”

No, you can't "get by" with a "relatively simple amount of instruction" from DNA and its genes merely telling low-level chemical things like which amino acids make up a protein. Constructing something as enormously organized as a human body (with so many layers of organization and so many interdependent components) requires a causal reality enormously greater, which cannot be mere "instruction," because instructions don't engineer things. 

See here for more on this issue

In articles such as these in Quanta Magazine, we almost always see photos of smiling, confident-looking scientists, having some "I got this" look on their face. Were such scientists to be photographed with appropriate body language matching the limits of their knowledge, the photos would show them looking like this:

And were such scientists to give quotes matching how little they know, we would read quotes such as this:

I don't understand this stuff. It's all a mystery a thousand miles over my head. How do proteins ever form very complex three-dimensional shapes needed for their function, shapes not specified by DNA or its genes? I don't understand that. Why do proteins constantly form into just-right functional teams of proteins: protein complexes so well-engineered they are often called "molecular machines," complexes that sometimes use literal motors, forming the most astonishingly well-arranged machines? I don't understand that. How do organelles ever form from proteins and protein complexes? I don't understand that. How do cells of such enormous complexity ever form? I don't understand that. How do cells ever find the right positions in human bodies, with the right types of cells ending up in the right type of organs? I don't understand that. How do cells ever reproduce, something as astonishing as one automobile splitting up into two functional automobiles? I don't understand that. How do cells ever form into organs and organ systems as complex as the human cardiovascular system? I don't understand that. I don't understand these things, and neither do any other scientists. 

Very rarely we will get the truth on this matter from scientists, such as in the quotes below:

• "Yet while these are several examples of well-understood processes, our study of animal morphogenesis is really in its infancy." -- David Bilder and Saori L. Haigo1, "Expanding the Morphogenetic Repertoire: Perspectives from the Drosophila Egg." 
• "Fundamentally, we have a poor understanding of how any internal organ forms." -- Timothy Saunders, developmental biologist (link).
• "An adult human body is made up of some 30 to 40 trillion cells, all of which stem from a single fertilized egg cell. The process by which the right cells appear to arrive in their right numbers at the right time at the right place -- development -- is only understood in the roughest of outlines." -- Five scientists (link). 
• "Our understanding of how our organs form is still in its infancy" -- A research project abstract written by scientists (link). 
• "Biochemistry cannot provide the spatial information needed to explain morphogenesis...Supracellular morphogenesis is mysterious...Nobody seems to understand the origin of biological and cellular order."  -- Six medical authorities (link).  "
• "Understanding the rules underlying organismal development is a major unsolved problem in biology. Each cell in a developing organism responds to signals in its local environment by dividing, excreting, consuming, or reorganizing, yet how these individual actions coordinate over a macroscopic number of cells to grow complex structures with exquisite functionality is unknown." - Five scientists (link). 
• "However, our understanding of the molecular and physical basis of morphogenesis in plants or in any other eukaryotic system [e.g. mammals] is still in its infancy due to the complexity and non-linearity of processes involved in morphogenesis dynamics (or Morphodynamics)." -- A description of a 2017-2021 scientific project, presumably written by scientists (link). 
• "Understanding morphogenesis in vertebrate tissues in development and disease poses one of the most significant challenges in the life sciences. Despite the impressive technical advances aimed at cellular and subcellular characterization and manipulation over the past half century, a clear picture of how form is created still remains in its infancy." -- Four scientists in 2025 (link). 
• "We don't know what dark matter is, we don't understand how the brain works or consciousness, we don't understand morphogenesis, we don't understand the origin of life." -- Physics PhD Michael Nielsen (link). 
• "You start off as a sperm and an egg, and nine months later [your body has been built], through a magical process of morphogenesis, which we don’t understand." -- Donald Hoffman, Professor Emeritus of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine (link). 
• "We take it for granted that we go to bed with two sets of fully functional kidneys and that we wake up with them the next morning but we don't understand the fundamental processes that give rise to this very well choreographed maintenance of an organism's form and function." -- Scientist Sanchéz Alvarado (link). 

Postscript: It seems I am not the only one who realizes the severity of this Missing Specifications Problem.  On this day I read of a long essay  by developmental biologist Michael Levin, entitled "Platonic space: where cognitive and morphological patterns come from (besides genetics and environment)." Levin makes use of Plato's theory of the Eternal Forms (or a theory like it), claiming that physical systems are "pointers to patterns in that Platonic space."  Plato basically said that each man is an instantiation of an eternal Idea of a Man, and each  house is an instantiation of an eternal Idea of a House, and each rock is an instantiation of an eternal Idea of a Rock. Long ago I read every one of Plato's many dialogues, but I cannot recall him ever credibly explaining how such instantiations of transcendent forms could occur for anything that is as complex as a human body.  And we get the same failure in Levin's essay, which has some tangled metaphysics, but does not do anything to explain how cell specifications and protein complex specifications and organelle specifications and organ system specifications could ever have arisen in some "Platonic space" of eternal transcendent forms. In his essay, Levin makes the severe error of claiming that "we, ourselves, are patterns." While the behavior of someone can follow a pattern, you are not a mere pattern or a pointer, but something gigantically more, both physically and mentally. 

Exhibit B That Developmental Biologists Have No Credible Explanation of Human Morphogenesis

 In August 2024 I published a post entitled "Exhibit A That Developmental Biologists Have No Credible Explanation of Human Morphogenesis." I discussed an article in the online magazine Aeon by  a molecular biologist (John Wallingford) who is the past president of the Society for Developmental Biology.  I discussed how the article provided no credible tale to explain the marvel of how a speck-sized zygote (existing just after impregnation of a female) is able to progress to become the vast state of organization that is the human body.  In November 2024 the same magazine (Aeon) published another article by different biologists trying to explain how this marvel of organization occurs. The article (entitled "Elusive But Everywhere") is by Duke University professor of biology  Daniel W. McShea and  Gunnar O. Babcock, a lecturer at Cornell University. The article by McShea and Babcock tells a completely different tale from the one told by Wallingford.  McShea and Babcock very much fail to tell a credible tale to explain the marvel of human development. 

The article begins with a few paragraphs of misleading claims such as the claim that Darwin did something to reduce the need for teleological explanations in biology. No, he didn't; but I need not get into the failures of Darwinism in this post, but to simply point out that the problem of explaining what happens in a womb is an almost entirely different problem from the problem of explaining the origin of the human species.  Whatever ideas a person may have about so-called natural selection and the origin of humans are not of any use in explaining how a speck-sized zygote is able to progress over nine months to become something vastly more organized: a full human body. In trying to explain the "how" of human development, the problem is to explain how it could happen that some great marvel of construction could occur inside the body of a pregnant woman. Claims about events that happened thousands or millions of years ago are of no use in explaining such a thing.  An explanation would have to involve describing events that are happening this year within the bodies of pregnant women. 

McShea and Babcock discuss the failure of mechanistic explanations to explain the appearance of a human body. They then give this grand-sounding announcement:

"So, caught between modern science and our intuitions about teleology, we seem to have only two ways of explaining the apparent goal directedness in some systems: teleology or mechanism. Both are troublesome. Both are inadequate. In recognition of this problem, philosophers of biology and others have, in recent decades, been struggling to find an alternative. We believe we have found it: a third way that reconciles Aristotelian thinking about goal directedness with the mechanistic view of a Newtonian universe. This alternative explains the apparent seeking of all goal-directed entities, from developing acorns and migrating sea turtles to self-driving cars and human intentions. It proposes that a hidden architecture connects these entities. It even explains falling rocks.

We call it ‘field theory.' "

Unfortunately, what follows is nothing but the most empty hand-waving. No real theory is presented.  All that the authors have done is to sprinkle a little physics jargon while engaging in the most vacuous hand-waving.  The term 'field' is a term used by physicists. It refers to some area of space that is under the influence of a force. 

McShea and Babcock state, "Our proposal is that fields direct the action of all goal-directed entities."  They give us nothing specific to back up this wild claim, which makes no sense. In physics, fields are mindless things, things which do not contain any type of detailed instructions.  A magnetic field does not tell how to make anything complex.  But the human body is a marvel of the highest organization.  In a body atoms are organized into not-very-complex molecules such as amino acids, which are organized into extremely complex molecules such as proteins, which are organized into far more organized 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 organs systems.  How could you ever get such a marvel of organization from some mere field, which has no power to produce complex organizations, and no blueprint of the final state of organization to be achieved?  Initially the idea of evoking "fields" to explain how we get human bodies seems as silly as the idea that some magnetic field built a skyscraper. McShea and Babcock do nothing to make the idea seem credible. 

But at least the authors give us a little candor, in which they reject the false claims about a DNA body blueprint that have been told by so many lying developmental biologists in the past. Immediately correcting a false statement they make, McShea and Babcock state this:

"A more challenging case for field theory involves the development of embryos. To all appearances, embryos seek their adult form guided by internal genes, not an external field. Think of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, one of the most well-studied animals in scientific research. The mother fruit fly guides the earliest development of her growing embryos, but soon the process seems to proceed almost autonomously, as the embryo partitions itself into segments and then into body regions, with limbs, mouth, and other parts forming later. How does it do it? 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. Once again, the answer requires looking outside."

The statement that "to all appearances, embryos seek their adult form guided by internal genes, not an external field" is not true, because genes have no specification of how to make a body or any of its cells. The authors correct that false statement later in the paragraph, by confessing "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."

The correct relation between DNA and the different levels of organization in a human body is illustrated in the diagram below. The black bar makes it clear that none of the seven most complex levels of organization is specified by DNA or genes.

Explaining the arising of 200 types of cells in the human body (none specified by DNA or its genes) is a problem exponentially harder than the average person realizes, partially because cells are exponentially more complex than the average person realizes. The very imperfect diagram below fails to adequately depict such complexity, but at least helps to correct some of the misimpressions of typical cell diagrams that make human cells look a million times simpler than they are.  

The numbers in the diagram above are derived from a table on this page of the Human Protein Atlas.  We see a list of the types of organelles in the cells of the human body, and how many types of proteins are needed to make up such organelles

Later in the Aeon article, we get a paragraph that shows the "there's no there there" nature of  McShea and Babcock's explanation. They make it clear that they are not at all imagining some external force that directs human development, causing the huge marvel that is the construction of the human body.  Instead they are merely using the term "fields" to describe something that is purely internal to the human body. They state this:

"Guidance is external, but not in the way you might think. It is not external to the entire embryo, but external to each body part. Guidance comes from ‘morphogenetic fields’ that are set up by the embryo itself. It is these fields that supply the cells contained within them with guidance about what to do: where to move, what to secrete, when to divide. These fields are composed of molecules, produced by genes deep inside an embryo’s cells, but the genes are not the source of guidance. They are just factories. And the molecules they manufacture combine to produce a chemical field around the growing body parts, directing their behaviour."

There is nothing here in the way of any kind of substantive explanation. All that we have is the same old bottom-up baloney of "molecules built you," with the addition of a little jargon borrowed from physics. So the idea that your body arose from low-level mechanistic effects is being repackaged a bit, with lots of use of the physics term "field." There's nothing substantive that is being added to the explanation. And when the authors appeal to "fields" that are "composed of molecules," it is clear that their attempt to sound like physicists has gone off the rails.  The fields of physicists are not composed of molecules. This long article on "The Concept of a 'Field'  in Physics" tells us, "Quite generally, a field is defined as some quantity which can vary continuously in some domain (usually in the domain of space and time)."

"Genes guide your body to reach its final form" is a lie. Genes are inert mindless chemicals that have no specification of how to build anything bigger than a protein molecule. "Genes help make fields that guide your body to reach its final form" is just a variation on that lie. In the world of physics,  fields are mindless things that have no specification of how to build complex things.  So it makes no sense to imagine "morphogenetic fields" guiding the human body to reach its vastly organized state. 

In the final part of their article, McShea and Babcock take their hand-waving about fields into a different direction, speculating about fields generating mental effects in humans. Their speculation is all based on false ideas about the brain being the source of the human mind, an idea that is untenable because of many reasons explained in the posts of my blog here. The hand-waving of McShea and Babcock about fields controlling your mind is as vacuous and groundless as their talk about fields explaining the origin of human bodies during human development. 

How do human bodies arise, given the nonexistence of any blueprint, recipe or specification for how to make a human body (or any of its organs, cells or organelles) in DNA or its genes? Our biologists have no credible tale to tell to explain this miracle of organization. What they mainly do is lie to us very badly, by telling us fictions such as the lie that your DNA is a body blueprint.  Such a lie is a very childish lie, because even if the lie were true, it would not explain how there can arise a human body.  That is because blueprints don't build things. Things get built with the help of blueprints when intelligent agents read blueprints to get ideas on how to build things. 

There are many different versions of the "DNA is a body blueprint" lie, including the lie that genes "guide" or "direct" or "govern" the construction of a human body. Genes having no specification of a human body or any of its organs or cells cannot possibly be doing such a "guiding" or "directing" or "governing." 

Other than lying about DNA and genes, what developmental biologists mainly do is engage in empty hand-waving. And that is pretty much all that is going on in the article of McShea and Babcock. The progression from a speck-sized zygote to the vast organization of the human body is a miracle of coordinated construction a thousand miles over the heads of biologists.

Below are some relevant quotes by scientists and doctors:

• "Yet while these are several examples of well-understood processes, our study of animal morphogenesis is really in its infancy." -- David Bilder and Saori L. Haigo1, "Expanding the Morphogenetic Repertoire: Perspectives from the Drosophila Egg." 
• "Fundamentally, we have a poor understanding of how any internal organ forms." -- Timothy Saunders, developmental biologist (link).
• "An adult human body is made up of some 30 to 40 trillion cells, all of which stem from a single fertilized egg cell. The process by which the right cells appear to arrive in their right numbers at the right time at the right place -- development -- is only understood in the roughest of outlines." -- Five scientists (link). 
• "Our understanding of how our organs form is still in its infancy" -- A research project abstract written by scientists (link). 
• "Biochemistry cannot provide the spatial information needed to explain morphogenesis...Supracellular morphogenesis is mysterious...Nobody seems to understand the origin of biological and cellular order."  -- Six medical authorities (link).  "
• "Understanding the rules underlying organismal development is a major unsolved problem in biology. Each cell in a developing organism responds to signals in its local environment by dividing, excreting, consuming, or reorganizing, yet how these individual actions coordinate over a macroscopic number of cells to grow complex structures with exquisite functionality is unknown." - Five scientists (link). 
• "However, our understanding of the molecular and physical basis of morphogenesis in plants or in any other eukaryotic system [e.g. mammals] is still in its infancy due to the complexity and non-linearity of processes involved in morphogenesis dynamics (or Morphodynamics)." -- A description of a 2017-2021 scientific project, presumably written by scientists (link). 
• "Understanding morphogenesis in vertebrate tissues in development and disease poses one of the most significant challenges in the life sciences. Despite the impressive technical advances aimed at cellular and subcellular characterization and manipulation over the past half century, a clear picture of how form is created still remains in its infancy." -- Four scientists in 2025 (link). 
• "We don't know what dark matter is, we don't understand how the brain works or consciousness, we don't understand morphogenesis, we don't understand the origin of life." -- Physics PhD Michael Nielsen (link). 
• "You start off as a sperm and an egg, and nine months later [your body has been built], through a magical process of morphogenesis, which we don’t understand." -- Donald Hoffman, Professor Emeritus of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine (link). 
• "We take it for granted that we go to bed with two sets of fully functional kidneys and that we wake up with them the next morning but we don't understand the fundamental processes that give rise to this very well choreographed maintenance of an organism's form and function." -- Scientist Sanchéz Alvarado (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.