Why We Were Told So Often the Huge Lie That DNA Is a Specification for Building Humans

The Big Lie Repeatedly Told About DNA

Not long after DNA was discovered about the middle of the twentieth century, scientists and science writers began spreading a false idea about DNA: the idea that DNA contains a specification for building an organism such as a human.  There are various ways in which this false idea is stated, all equally false:

• Many described DNA or the genome as a blueprint for an organism.
• Many said DNA or the genome is a recipe for making an organism.
• Many said DNA or the genome is a program for building an organism, making an analogy to a computer program.
• Many claimed that DNA or genomes specify the anatomy of an organism. 
• Many claimed that genotypes (the DNA in organisms) specify phenotypes (the observable characteristics of an organism).
• Many claimed that phenotypes (the observable characteristics of an organism) are "expressions" of genotypes (the DNA in organisms). 
• Many claimed that genotypes (the DNA in organisms) "map"  phenotypes (the observable characteristics of an organism) or "map to" phenotypes.
• Many claimed that DNA contains "all the instructions needed to make an organism."
• Many claimed that there is a "genetic architecture" for an organism's body or some fraction of that body. 
• Many claimed that DNA or its genes "guide," "direct" or "control" the nine-month process by which a zygote progresses to become a full-sized human baby. 
• Using a little equation,  many claimed that a "genotype plus the environment equals the phenotype," a formulation as false  as the preceding statements, since we know of nothing in the environment that would cause phenotypes to arise from genotypes that do not specify such phenotypes. 

Some of these claims are documented in Table 1 of the paper here, where some authors count (in only June and July of the year 2000, in a single newspaper) 10 claims that DNA is a draft or script, 6 that it is a software program, 8 that it is a blueprint, 6 that it is a cook book (a recipe), and 12 that is a map. The same table shows similar claims being made abundantly in the leading scientific journal Nature; and Table 2 and Table 3 of the same paper shows similar claims being made abundantly in 2001 and 2003 in both the newspaper and Nature. 

There was never any justification for making any such claims. The only coding system that has ever been discovered in DNA is a system allowing only low-level chemical information to be specified.  That coding system is known as the genetic code, and it is merely a system whereby certain combinations of nucleotide base pairs in DNA stand for amino acids.  So a section of DNA can specify the amino acids that make up a protein molecule. But no one has ever discovered any coding system by which DNA could specify anything larger than a protein molecule. 

The Genetic Code

No one ever discovered any coding system in DNA by which parts of DNA can specify high-level anatomy such as the arrangement of parts in an organ, or a skeletal structure, or an overall body appearance.  No one has even discovered any coding system in DNA by which the structure of cells can be specified.  The human body has at least 200 types of cells, and the structure of none of these cell types is specified by DNA. DNA does not even specify the structure of organelles that are the building blocks of cells.

If you ponder the simple fact that blueprints don't build things, you can start to get an idea of how nonsensical is the claim that a human arises because a DNA blueprint is read.  Blueprints have no power of construction.  When buildings are built with the help of blueprints, it is because intelligent agents read the blueprints to get an idea of what type of construction work to do, and because intelligent agents then follow such instructions. But there is nothing in the human body below the neck with the power to understand and carry out instructions for building a body if they happened to exist in DNA. 

Consider what goes on when you read a web page at a complicated site such as www.facebook.com or www.buzzfeed.com.  What occurs is a very complicated interaction between two things: (1) a web page that is rather like a blueprint for how the page should look and act, and (2) an extremely complicated piece of software called a web browser, which is rather like a construction crew that reads the web's page blueprint (typically written in HTML), and then constructs very quickly a well-performing web page.  If the web browser did not exist, you would never be able to get a well-performing web page.  The construction of a three-dimensional human body would be a feat trillions of times more complicated than the mere display of a two-dimensional web page.  Just as it is never enough to have just a web page without a web browser,  having some DNA blueprint for building a body would never be enough to build a body.  You would also need to have some "body blueprint reader" that would be some system almost infinitely more complicated than a web browser, in order for a body to get built.  

We have no evidence that DNA contains any instructions for building cells or anatomy, and we also have no evidence for the existence of any such thing as a "body blueprint reader" in the human body, capable of reading, understanding and executing incredibly complicated instructions for building a human body. When you consider the amount of organization in a human body, you may start to realize the gigantic absurdity of thinking that a human specification can be found in some molecule merely listing low-level chemical information. 

The organization of large organisms is extremely hierarchical.  Subatomic particles are organized into atoms, which can be 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 organisms. 

Cells are so complex they have been compared to cities. The diagrams you see of cells are enormously misleading, making them look many  thousands of times simpler than they are.  A cell diagram will show 20 or 30 organelles in a cell, but the actual number is typically more than 1000.  A cell diagram will typically depict a cell as having only a few mitochondria, but cells typically have many thousands of mitochondria, as many as a million. A cell diagram will typically depict a cell as having only a few lysosomes, but cells typically have hundreds of lysosomes. 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.  There are about 200 different types of cells in the human body. 

Internally organisms are enormously dynamic, both because of constant motion inside in the body, and also because of a constant activity inside the body involving cellular changes. Just one example of this enormously dynamic activity is the fact that protein molecules in the brain are replaced at a rate of about 3% per day. A large organism is like some building that is constantly being rebuilt, with some fraction of it being torn down every day, and some other fraction of it being replaced every day.  The analogy comparing a cell to a factory gives us some idea of the gigantically dynamic nature of organisms.

When we consider this complexity, you may realize that the very idea of a blueprint for building a body is an absurdity. To have a visual specification for building a human body, you would need something more like a thousand-page textbook filled with color diagrams and tons of fine print.  Even if such a specification existed in the human body, it wouldn't explain morphogenesis: because the specification would be so complex it would require some super-genius to understand it all and build things according to such a specification. 

We may compare the idea that a human body arises because of the reading of a body blueprint in DNA to the myth of Santa Claus. Just as there is no evidence of a big toy workshop around the North Pole manned by toy-making elves and led by Santa Claus, there is no evidence of any such thing in DNA as a specification for making cells, organs or human bodies. And just as you would never explain the phenomenon of children getting Christmas gifts even if there were to exist Santa flying around in a sled filled with toys (who would have neither the time nor the toys to give more than a thousandth of the world's children their gifts on Christmas night), you could never explain the growth of a vastly organized full-sized human body from a speck-sized zygote even if there were to exist a blueprint for building humans in DNA (because of the simple fact that blueprints don't build things, and we know of nothing in a body capable of understanding a vastly complex human body construction blueprint if it happened to exist in DNA). 

Below are some examples of miniature languages, two of them involving artificial constraints, and the other matching what can be expressed in DNA:

MINIATURE LANGUAGES
NAME	LIST OF WORDS IN LANGUAGE	WHAT CAN BE SPECIFIED BY LANGUAGE	WHAT CANNOT BE SPECIFIED BY LANGUAGE
Sandwich Language	Bread, Turkey, Ham, Cheese, Lettuce, Tomato, Onion, Bacon	Various types of sandwiches	Anything that is not a sandwich
Exercise Language	Jump, Crouch, Stretch, Punch, Lift, Bend, Squat, Spin	Various types of exercises	Anything that is not an exercise
DNA Language	Alanine, Asparagine, Aspartic acid, Arginine, Cysteine, Glutamine, Glycine, Glutamic acid, Histidine, Isoleucine, Lysine,Leucine, Phenylalanine, Methionine, Serine, Proline, Tryptophan,Threonine, Tyrosine, Valine	Polypeptide sequences – a linear one-dimensional  sequence of amino acids	Anything that is not a polypeptide sequence, including the 3D shape of a protein, the shape of any body part, the structure  of any organism, or a behavior or instinct.

As for the idea that genes "guide," "direct" or "control" human development or morphogenesis, it is entirely fictional. A protein-coding gene is a mere list of amino acids.  Claiming that such genes "direct" or "guide" some enormously complex construction process is as silly as claiming that a list of building parts controls or guides how to construct a skyscraper. 

So how does a full-sized human body manage to arise from the tiny barely visible simplicity of a speck-sized egg existing just after human conception? This is a miracle of origination a thousand miles over the heads of today's scientists. 

Some of the Scientists Who Lied to Us About DNA

Let us now look at some of the prominent scientists who told us outrageous lies about DNA. An example of a Darwinist biologist shamelessly telling this gigantic lie is the utterly deceptive statement made below by French biologist Francois Jacob on page 313 in his 1970 book "The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity":

"The formation of a man from an egg is a marvel of exactitude and precision. How can millions of cells emerge, in specialized lineages, in perfect order in time and space, from a single cell? This baffles the imagination. During embryonic development, the instructions contained in the chromosomes of the egg are gradually translated and executed, determining when and where the thousands of molecular species that constitute the body of an adult are to be formed. The whole plan of growth, the whole series of operations to be carried out, the order and the site of syntheses and their coordination are all written down in the nucleic-acid message." 

The last two sentences were a huge fiction, written decades before the Human Genome Project had even started to analyze the contents of DNA. Jacob's ideological motivation in telling this lie is made rather clear by the quotation he gives at the very beginning of this book, where he quotes Diderot as saying this:

"Do you see this egg? With it you can overthrow all the schools of theology, all the churches of the earth." 

From this quote, you can infer what was going on in the mind of Francois Jacob, who scorned all religion as a "farce":

(1) He got the idea that if a blueprint for making humans was to be found in a human egg, that this might be a devastating blow against religion, one that might help to "overthrow all the schools of theology, all the churches of the earth" by somehow showing that the physical origin of each human was a purely mechanistic affair that required no special assistance (directly or indirectly) from some divine power. 

(2) Not content to wait for the discovery of such a blueprint in DNA, Jacob simply told us the lie that such a thing had already been discovered in a "nucleic acid message" (DNA) in the human egg. 

Another French biologist who told us gigantic lies about DNA was Jacques Monod. On page 104 of his 1971 book "Chance and Necessity; An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology," Monod told us the following grotesque lie about DNA:

"The universal components -- the nucleotides on the one side, the amino acids on the other -- are the logical equivalents of an alphabet in which the structure and consequently the specific associative functions of proteins are spelled out. In this alphabet can therefore be written all the diversity of structures and performances the biosphere contains."

The first sentence is a half-truth, and the second statement is a huge lie. Nucleotides specify amino acids, which merely specify the chemical chain that is the starting point of a protein, not its three-dimensional structure. Protein molecules are merely a low-level building block of organelles, which are building blocks of cells, which are building blocks of tissues, which are building blocks of organs, which are building blocks of organisms. Claiming that the DNA alphabet (merely spelling out amino acids) "can therefore be written all the diversity of structures and performances the biosphere contains" was a gigantic fiction. The lists of amino acids given in DNA do not and cannot spell out anatomical structures. DNA does not even specify the structure of cells. The fictional idea that DNA specifies the human structure was stated in various other ways by Monod. 

Like Francois Jacob, Monod gives away his ideological motivations in a quotation at the front of his book. Monod's quotation is some atheistic passage by Sartre. On page 171 Monod further gives away his ideological motivations by referring to the "disgusting farrago of Judeo-Christian religiosity, scientistic progressism, belief in the 'natural' rights of man, and utilitarian pragmatism." Monod's book is largely devoted to trying to combat what he calls "animist" thinking, by which he means any kind of spirituality or theism or belief in souls or spirits or human destiny. It seems the intensity of Monod's hatred towards all spiritual ideas was one of the things that led him to tell the lie that DNA was a specification for making a human. Such a lie was a linchpin of his anti-religious reasoning. On the next page Monod tells us that it "is perfectly true that science outrages values" and telling us (using italics) that science must ignore values. He expounds on this idea of ignoring values very emphatically in the next pages. 

Monod certainly followed his own "ignore values" suggestion, by ignoring the value of telling the truth, and telling the outrageous lie that DNA contained a program for constructing human bodies, telling this lie decades before the Human Genome Project for analyzing the contents of DNA had even begun. Another example of a scientist lying about DNA came from Francis Crick, who in 1988 told us the lie that "the growth of an organism is controlled by an elaborate program, written in its genes," followed later in the same book by the lie that "genes are units of instruction in an elaborate program that both forms the organism from the fertilized egg and helps control much of its later behavior."  DNA is not a program, and the genes that make up DNA are not any program that forms organisms. DNA does not have any of the control structures (such as if/then statements) found in computer programs. DNA does not specify the growth of an organism, and does not know or state anything about organisms or their cells. In the same book Crick tells us of his "strong inclination towards atheism," which helps explain his DNA misrepresentations.  The Human Genome Project had not even started when Crick told us these whoppers about DNA. 

Another example of a Darwinist biologist telling the appalling lie that DNA is a blueprint for building organisms may be found in the 1991 book "One Long Argument" by Ernst Mayr. On page 150 he falsely stated, "The genetic program does not by itself supply the building material of new organisms, but only the blueprint for making the phenotype." No such blueprint for making organisms exists in DNA. On page 99 we get a hint about the atheistic motivations of this lie, for Mayr tells us this:  "The conviction that the diversity of the natural world was the result of natural processes and not the work of God was the idea that brought all the so-called Darwinians together."

Carl Sagan was another prominent scientist who lied to us about DNA. On page 259 of a book, Sagan stated, "Molecular biologists are busily recording the sequence of the three billion nucleotides that specify how to make a human being." That job was finished in the year 2003 when the Human Genome Project was completed, and no such specification of "how to make a human being" was ever found in DNA or its nucleotide sequences. When Sagan wrote the words, we already knew why DNA could not possibly be a specification of "how to make a human being," because we knew that DNA only specifies low-level chemical information such as the amino acid sequences of proteins, not higher-level structural information such as how to make a cell or an organ or organ system or a human. Sagan's misrepresentations about DNA also occurred on page 16 of his book "The Dragons of Eden," where he claimed that DNA was a specification of how to make a human:

"It is clear, then, that the sequence of rungs on our DNA ladders represents an enormous library of information. It is equally clear that so rich a library is required to specify as exquisitely constructed and intricately functioning an object as a human being."

On page 253 of his book Billions and Billions, Sagan told us this  lying boast about DNA:  "The most significant aspect of the DNA story is that the fundamental processes of life now seem fully understandable in terms of physics and chemistry." To the contrary, scientists lack any credible explanation of so simple a thing as how human cells are able to reproduce; they lack any credible explanation of the most basic mental processes such as thinking and memory; and since DNA is not a specification for making a human, scientists lack any credible explanation for the progression from a speck-sized zygote to an adult human. Later on the same page, Sagan made clear his ideological motivations for the previous quote, making clear that it was all about asserting "no life force, no spirit, no soul." Sagan was guilty of quite a few severe misrepresentations about important scientific matters, as I document in my post "Misstatements and Dubious Claims of Carl Sagan." 

 

Erwin Schrodinger was a famous physicist who wrote a book about biology entitled What Is Life?  Schrodinger told a huge lie in that book. It came when he stated this:

"Let me use the word 'pattern' of an organism in the sense in be which the biologist calls it 'the four-dimensional pattern', meaning not only the structure and functioning of that organism in the adult, or in any other particular stage, but the whole of its ontogenetic development from the fertilized egg the cell to the stage of maturity, when the organism begins to reproduce itself. Now, this whole four-dimensional pattern is known to be determined by the structure of that one cell, the fertilized egg. Moreover, we know that it is essentially determined by the structure of only a small part of that cell, its large nucleus....It is these chromosomes, or probably only an axial skeleton fibre of what we actually see under the microscope as the chromosome, that contain in some kind of code-script the entire pattern of the individual's future development and of its functioning in the mature state."

No such knowledge existed when Schrodinger wrote these lying words in the 1940's. By now the cell, the cell nucleus and DNA have all been exhaustively studied, and no one has found in such things anything like a pattern specifying the structure of an adult organism or "the whole of its ontogenetic development from the fertilized egg the cell to the stage of maturity, when the organism begins to reproduce itself." All that is contained in DNA and the cell nucleus and genes is low-level chemical information such as which amino acids are in a particular protein molecule, and not even a specification of the structure of any cell. 

The only thing true about Schrodinger's statement is the insight that to specify a body you would need four-dimensional information. Human bodies are not just three-dimensional structures, but also things with constant internal dynamism, as internally active as a very active factory. To specify a human body and its enormously active metabolism and its development from a speck-sized zygote, you would need four-dimensional information, something that understood width, height, depth and also the element of time. 

But what we have in DNA is merely one-dimensional information. Schematically you can think of it like this:

Amino Acid #1--> Amino Acid #2 --> Amino Acid #3 ....

Here the "..." means "and so on and so forth." 

One of the sacred rituals of Darwinism is to endlessly quote a profoundly misleading statement by the geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky, one claiming that nothing makes sense in biology except in the light of evolution. Given that Darwinists lack any credible explanation for anatomy or human minds (neither of which are explained by DNA or its genes), and the fact that Darwinists lack any theory of biological organization that can explain the mountainous levels of organization and purposeful complexity in biological organisms, a more truthful statement would be to say that pretty much nothing in biology makes any sense in the light of the dogmas of Darwinist biologists such as Theodosius Dobzhansky. 

On page 242 of his 1955 book Evolution, Genetics and Man, Dobzhansky told us the following huge lie:

"What we do inherit is, instead, genes which determine the pattern of developmental processes. The fertilized egg is a single cell which becomes many cells; these cells become compounded into various organs and acquire various physiological functions; the body grows, reaches a stage when it is capable of reproducing its like, and finally becomes old and dies."

There was no evidence at the time that genes (parts of DNA) "determine the pattern of developmental processes." A similar lie was told by Dobzhansky in his 1975 book Mankind Evolving: The Evolution of the Human Species. On page 42 he stated this: "All the traits, characters and features of the phenotype are, of necessity, determined by the genotype and by the sequence of environments with which the phenotypes interacts." There is no specification of how to make a human body or any of its organs or cells in a organism's genotype (its DNA or set of genes), and such a specification is not to be found anywhere in "the sequence of environments with which the phenotypes interacts." Your life experiences do not make up any organizational effect that can explain the progression of a one-celled zygote to the vastly more organized state of a human body.  

On page 164 of the same book, Dobzhansky showed himself to be a very big liar by making the preposterous claim that "the differences between man and ape are quantitative and not qualitative." Anyone who makes such a claim (so contrary to all human experience) is a very big liar. 

Robert Sinsheimer was a biologist who described DNA as "the book of life." He told this big fat lie about such a "book of life": "In this book are instructions, in a curious and wonderful code, for making a human body." No such instructions have been found in DNA. We understand the simple code used by DNA, and it is a code for specifying low-level chemicals such as amino acids, not a code for specifying the structure of cells, organs or human bodies.  

On page 287 of his book The Strands of a Life: The Science of DNA and the Art of Education, Sinsheimer engages in some very serious miseducation by writing this:

"In the deepest sense, we are who we are because of our genes. Genes provide our physical framework, much of the specific basis for personality, and the raw material for intellect."

This was all a very big fiction. Genes do not specify any anatomical structures, and certainly do not "provide our physical framework." They also do not provide any basis for personality, and do any even specify how to build any of the neurons in the human brain (which are not actually the raw material for intellect).  We are who we are mostly because of things having nothing to do with genes, such as the experiences we have had. On the same page Sinsheimer told us this gigantic whopper: "Here in our genome is written in DNA letters the history, the evolution of our species over billions of years." DNA is not a history book, and the human species is only about 100,000 years old, making it impossible for anything to specify "the evolution of our species over billions of years." Such a statement is as absurd as claiming that you have a book detailing "the history of the United States government over millions of years." 

Sydney Brenner was a Nobel Prize-winning biologist. On page 159 of the book Mind, life, and universe : conversations with great scientists of our time, Brenner tells us a great big lie about DNA and genes:

"If you look at genes, they are a description of the final organism...Encoding of the entire organism in a molecular description (that we call DNA) allows indirect propagation."

Later on the same page, Brenner gives away his motivation for this fiction: it is back up his claim that "the wonderful feature about living systems is that they evolved without a designer."

Developmental biologist Lewis Wolpert was another major biologist who frequently lied about DNA and matters of developmental biology, making the untrue claim that "all the information for embryonic development is contained within the fertilized egg," and the equally untrue claim that "the fertilized egg contains a program of instructions for making the organism."  In the first page of a  book ("The Triumph of the Embryo") he made the false claim that "genes control development."  For many years, Wolpert taught the groundless tall tale that "morphogen gradients" contain positional information about where cells should go to in the body, but in a 2017 interview he confessed, " It is terrible, but we still don’t have a molecular basis for it." Wolpert's zealous atheism was no doubt a major factor driving his misrepresentations about such topics. 

On US government web sites such as www.genome.gov there still stands the false claims the US government made about DNA being a blueprint for building humans, which I list in the post here. I will skip a mention of the many living biologists (including quite a few famous names) who told lies exactly like the lies I have quoted above. One of these famous names told us the complete fiction that DNA is a set of instructions for life's assembly and also the utterly fictional claim that DNA is a screenplay spelling out the history of a person's life.

 

Some Scientists and Doctors Who Told the Truth About DNA

Since the lie that DNA is a blueprint or program or recipe for building bodies has so often been told, I will need to cite again a list I have compiled of distinguished scientists and other PhD's or MD's who have told us such an idea is untrue. Below is the list:

1. 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."
2. 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."
3. 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." 
4. 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."
5. Neuroscientist Romain Brette states, "The genome does not encode much except for amino acids."
6. 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.
7. 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)."
8. Developmental biologist C/H. Waddington stated, "The DNA is not a program or sequentially accessed control over the behavior of the cell."
9.  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."
10. Geneticist Adam Rutherford states that "DNA is not a blueprint," a statement also made by biochemistry professor Keith Fox. 
11. "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."
12. "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."  
13. 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." 
14. 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."
15. 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)."
16. 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."
17. 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."
18. Timothy Saunders, a developmental biologist at the National University of Singapore says, "Fundamentally, we have a poor understanding of how any internal organ forms.”
19. On the web site of the well-known biologist Denis Noble, we read that "the whole idea that genes contain the recipe or the program of life is absurd, according to Noble," and that we should understand DNA "not so much as a recipe or a program, but rather as a database that is used by the tissues and organs in order to make the proteins which they need."
20. A paper by Stuart A. Newman (a professor of cell biology and anatomy) discussing at length the work of scientists trying to evoke "self-organization" as an explanation for morphogenesis states that "public lectures by principals of the field contain confidently asserted, but similarly oversimplified or misleading treatments," and says that "these analogies...give the false impression that there has been more progress in understanding embryonic development than there truly has been." Referring to scientists moving from one bunk explanation of morphogenesis to another bunk explanation, the paper concludes by stating, "It would be unfortunate if we find ourselves having emerged from a period of misconceived genetic program metaphors only to land in a brave new world captivated by equally misguided ones about self-organization."
21. 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." 
22. Writing in the leading journal Cell, biologists  Marc Kirschner, John Gerhart and Tim Mitchison stated, "The genotype, however deeply we analyze it, cannot be predictive of the actual phenotype, but can only provide knowledge of the universe of possible phenotypes." That's equivalent to saying that DNA does not specify visible biological structures, but merely limits what structures an organism can have (just as a building parts list merely limits what structures can be made from the set of parts). 
23. At the Stack Exchange expert answers site, someone posted a question asking which parts of a genome specify how to make a cell (he wanted to write a program that would sketch out a cell based on DNA inputs).  An unidentified expert stated that it is "not correct" that DNA is a blueprint that describes an organism, and that "DNA is not a blueprint because DNA does not have instructions for how to build a cell." No one contradicted this expert's claim, even though the site allows any of its experts to reply. 
24. A paper co-authored by a chemistry professor (Jesper Hoffmeyer) tells us this: "Ontogenetic 'information,' whether about the structure of the organism or about its behavior, does not exist as such in the genes or in the environment, but is constructed in a given developmental context, as critically emphasized, for example, by Lewotin (1982) and Oyama (1985)."
25. Biologist Steven Rose has stated, "DNA is not a blueprint, and the four dimensions of life (three of space, one of time) cannot be read off from its one-dimensional strand."
26. Jonathan Latham has a master's degree in Crop Genetics and a PhD in virology. In his essay “Genetics Is Giving Way to a New Science of Life,” a long essay well worth a read, Latham exposes many of the myths about DNA. Referring to "the mythologizing of DNA," he says that "DNA is not a master controller," and asks, "How is it that, if organisms are the principal objects of biological study, and the standard explanation of their origin and operation is so scientifically weak that it has to award DNA imaginary superpowers of 'expression'” and 'control' to paper over the cracks, have scientists nevertheless clung to it?"
27. An interesting 2006 paper by six medical authorities and scientists tells us that "biochemistry cannot provide the spatial information needed to explain morphogenesis," that "supracellular morphogenesis is mysterious," and that "nobody seems to understand the origin of biological and cellular order," contrary to claims that such order arises from a reading of a specification in DNA. 
28. Keith Baverstock (with a PhD in chemical kinetics) has stated "genes are like the merchants that provide the necessary materials to build a house: they are neither the architect, nor the builder but, without them, the house cannot be built," and that "genes are neither the formal cause (the blueprint), nor the efficient cause (the builder) of the cell, nor of the organism."
29. Evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin stated, "DNA is not self-reproducing; second, it makes nothing; and third, organisms are not determined by it." Noting that "the more accurate description of the role of DNA is that it bears information that is read by the cell machinery," Lewontin lamented the "evangelical enthusiasm" of those who "fetishized DNA" and misspoke so that "DNA as information bearer is transmogrified into DNA as blueprint, as plan, as master plan, as master molecule." In another work he stated "the information in DNA sequences is insufficient to specify even a folded protein, not to speak of an entire organism." This was correct: DNA does not even specify the 3D shapes of proteins, but merely their sequence of amino acids. 
30. In 2022 developmental biologist Claudio D. Stern first noted,  "All cells in an organism have the same genetic information yet they generate often huge complexity as they diversify in the appropriate locations at the correct time and generate form and pattern as well as an array of identities, dynamic behaviours and functions." In his next sentence he stated, "The key quest is to find the 'computer program' that contains the instructions to build an organism, and the mechanisms responsible for its evolution over longer periods." Since this was written long after the Human Genome Project had been completed, he thereby suggested that no such instruction program had yet been discovered in the genome (DNA). 
31. Referring to developmental biologist Alfonso Martínez Arias, a 2024 article says, "Martínez Arias, 68, argues that the DNA sequence of an individual is not an instruction manual or a construction plan for their body...The Madrid-born biologist argues that there is nothing in the DNA molecule that explains why the heart is located on the left, why there are five fingers on the hand or why twin brothers have different fingerprints." In the article here, Arias says, "DNA cannot send orders to cells to move right or left within your body or to place the heart and the liver on opposite sides of your thorax. DNA cannot measure the length of your arms or instruct the placement of your eyes symmetrically across the midline of your face. We know this because each and every cell of an organism generally has the same DNA in it, with the same monotonous structure....The genome is not actually a blueprint for an organism or its architect."
32. Two scientists said this: "We see no valid use for definitions of the genotype and phenotype in terms of blueprints, programs, or sets of instructions, and their realizations or manifestation....The program/manifestation metaphor is factually misleading, because it suggests that the genotype uniquely determines an organism’s phenotype. However, as is well known, all it does is specify an organism’s norm of reaction to environmental conditions (Rieger et al., 1991,Lewontin, 1992)."
33. 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."
34. 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."  
35. 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."
36. In their book "The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin's Dilemma" (page 148)  biologists  Marc W. Kirschner and John C. Gerhart state, "DNA provides no instruction on where to place the proteins in the cell. There is no genetic information for large-scale cellular organization." 
37. In his PhD thesis "Using Genetic Algorithms to Evolve Microstructures," David Basanta states, "Cells contain their genetic material in long strings of DNA located in several places inside the cell but mainly in the nucleus. This DNA does not specify the features of the cell or the multicellular organism in which the cell is a constituent part." 
38. Anthropologist Ann Horsburgh states, "The metaphor of genes as blueprints is powerfully seductive but wholly inaccurate. Genes do not specify organismal morphology or behavior."
39. Werner A. Müller (chairman of the Department of Physiology at the University of Heidelberg)   on page 2 of his textbook on developmental biology states this: "It is commonly stated that the genome incorporates a Bauplan, an architectural plan or blueprint of the body. Actually, this is not the case; the genome is not a sketch or design of the finished body. The information capacity of DNA is simply too low to store blueprints of the very complex final pattern of an organism." On the same page after describing how limited is the information in DNA (the genome), he notes that "we do not yet understand in detail how a developing organism is created on the basis of such minimal information."
40. Physician James Le Fanu has stated,  "There is, in short, nothing in the genomes of fly and man to account for why a fly should have two wings, four legs and a dot-sized brain and we should have two arms, two legs and a mind capable of understanding the origins of the universe." 
41. In a scientific paper on heritability entitled "The Heritability Fallacy," David S. Moore (holder of a mathematics PhD from Cornell University) has stated this:" Our DNA, we now know, does not contain specific blueprint-like instructions about traits; rather, DNA segments merely contribute to the production of different kinds of RNA molecules. These RNA molecules can, in turn, regulate other DNA segments, or contribute to the production of proteins that are constituent parts of cells, cells that are assembled into systems that manifest identifiable traits." Later in the same paper he refers to "the demonstrably false notion that genes have some direct and isolated influence on traits."

In the very mainstream publication The Guardian, science writer Phillip Ball says this about the Human Genome Project that ended in 2003, noting the failure of science figures to clean up their old misstatements about DNA after they were debunked by the Human Genome Project:

"But a blizzard of misleading rhetoric surrounded the project, contributing to the widespread and sometimes dangerous misunderstandings about genes that now bedevils the genomic age. So far, there have been few attempts to set the record straight. Even now, the National Human Genome Research Institute calls the HGP an effort to read 'nature’s complete genetic blueprint for building a human being' – the 'book of instructions' that 'determine our particular traits'. A genome, says the institute, 'contains all of the information needed to build and maintain that organism'. But this deterministic 'instruction book' image is precisely the fallacy that genomics has overturned, and the information in the genome is demonstrably incomplete. Yet no one associated with genomic research seems bothered about correcting these false claims...Plenty remain happy to propagate the misleading idea that we are 'gene machines' and our DNA is our 'blueprint'.

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.

Why We Were Told So Often the Huge Lie That DNA Is a Specification for Building Organisms

Very clearly, when we were told so often that DNA is a specification for making an organism, we were told a lie. But why was this lie told so often? Is it because biologists or science writers just enjoy making up lies, for no particular reason? No.  The main reason why we were told so often the lie that DNA is a specification for building organisms is that this was a lie that Darwinists very much needed to tell. 

If a 16-year-old teenage female has a very strict and often angry father, and this daughter arrives home at 1:00 AM after a long romantic session with her boyfriend, why does the daughter say, "I'm late because the car broke down"? Because this is the lie she needs to tell in this situation.  If an unfaithful husband spends the evening with his mistress, and comes home to his wife at midnight, why does he say, "Sorry, honey, I had to work late at the office"? Because this is the lie he needs to tell in this situation.  If a politician is photographed taking a thick sealed manila envelope from a corporate polluter who has given him 500 new hundred-dollar bills, why does the politician say something like, "The envelope just had some suggestions on how to help people?" Because it's the lie he needs to tell in this situation.  People typically lie because they are trying to get themselves out of some difficult situation. 

That's the main reason why Darwinists started telling us the lie that DNA is a blueprint for building humans, a specification for making organisms: because it was a lie they very much needed to tell. The discovery of DNA was kind of a combined blessing and curse for Darwinist theorists. In one limited sense, such a discovery was a blessing, because Darwinists could now point to concrete examples of microevolution that were well understood. For example, a paper might be written describing how some DNA mutations might cause a virus to become more dangerous.  But there were two gigantic problems for Darwinism caused by the discovery of DNA. The first gigantic problem was that DNA contained a vast repository of low-level information, specified information that had to be just right. This presented a new explanatory problem as to how this huge repository of "had to be just right" information had arisen. Darwin had used the word "information" a total of 37 times in his two main works, never once using such a word to claim there was information stored in an organism.  The second gigantic problem was that DNA wasn't the anatomy specification that Darwinists needed.  The DNA molecule merely contained low-level chemical information.  

Darwinism has always maintained that mutations can accumulate to produce dramatic structural transformations, such as an ape-like or chimp-like species gradually changing into a human species, or fish species gradually changing into reptile species.  However enormously unlikely such a transformation might be,  it would at least be not utterly impossible if an organism carries inside it some genetic plan that specifies an anatomy; for such a plan might be changed by mutations. But what if the genetic material passed from one generation to the next contains no specification of anatomy, and fails to even have a specification of the structure of cells? That would be a fatal difficulty for Darwinism, a "show-stopper."  If DNA does not specify anatomy,  then one species gradually changing into some other species with a vastly different anatomy through random mutations is not just improbable, but seemingly downright impossible. 

For Darwinists the choice was pretty simple. They could concede that a fatal difficulty had been discovered in their theorizing, and that mutations in genetic material (DNA) could not possibly be the explanation for complex anatomical and cellular innovations occurring during Earth's history (an admission that would have destroyed the credibility of their boasts about understanding biological origins). Or they could start misleading people by telling them the fiction that DNA was some kind of blueprint for making an organism (against all the evidence). It was kind of a choice of "die or lie," "defeat or cheat," "retreat or deceit."  Many Darwinists chose the second of these options. 

Soon after the discovery of DNA, Darwinists began telling us all over the place the huge lie that DNA was a blueprint for building a human body. There were various different versions of this lie (some involving a metaphor of a recipe or a program or a map). They all involved planting in people's mind the utterly erroneous idea that DNA was a specification for making a human body. Again and again (contrary to all the facts), we were told the lie that Darwinists needed to tell: that DNA contains all the information to build a human body. 

Such statements were lies both before and after the Human Genome Project was completed in 2003.  Before the completion of the project, the situation was that we knew what parts of DNA did (which was merely specify the amino acid sequences of proteins), and there was no sign of any anatomical information in DNA.  Even if you don't know the complete contents of something, it is a lie to claim that such a thing contains something completely different from what you have discovered in it.  For example, if you know that a small child has 20 notebooks, and you have checked a few of them and found nothing but crayon drawings, it would be a lie for you to claim that the notebooks you haven't looked in contain symphony scores or novel astrophysical theories.  Similarly, before the Human Genome Project was completed, it was a lie to claim that DNA was a blueprint for making organisms, because no signs of anatomy instructions had been found in DNA, and also no signs of instructions for making cells had been found in DNA. 

After the Human Genome Project was completed in 2003, DNA had been exhaustively cataloged, and there was still no evidence of any anatomy specification in it, no evidence that DNA specified how to make any type of cell.  But the "DNA is a body blueprint" lies and the "DNA is a body construction program" lies continued full blast from Darwinists, who kept repeating the earlier lies told by earlier people like the biologists Jacob and Monod. 

Other than the reality that telling lies about DNA is necessary for Darwinist theorists to cover up a fatal difficulty in their theory, a lesser reason why Darwinists told such lies was to try to lend credence to their atheistic or anti-spiritual ideology (such a motivation is made rather clear in some of the cases cited above).  There were countless others who just mindlessly parroted the claim that DNA is a blueprint, kind of thinking to themselves that it must be true because someone else said it; and it is debatable whether such persons should be called liars or just extremely careless writers. 

Telling us huge lies about DNA is only one of many ways in which Darwinism enthusiasts have been "cheating for Charles" by making misleading statements. It is rather as if such people think they are soldiers in some kind of intellectual holy war, that the ends justify the means, and that the regular rules of honest speech may by violated, as long as it serves the grand purpose of assuring the global dominance of Darwinist ideology.  Misrepresentations and misleading language have been core features of Darwinist literature from its very beginning. Examples include the following:

• More than 160 years of using the misleading phrase "natural selection," which does not actually refer to any selection (selection is a word meaning a choice by a conscious agent). Darwin himself in a letter to Charles Lyell dated June 6, 1860 said, "I suppose  'natural selection' was a bad term ; but to change it now, I think, would make confusion worse confounded." Darwin wrote in 1869,  "In the literal sense of the word, no doubt, natural selection is a false term."
• The use of doubly-deceptive phrases such as "selection pressure," a reputed effect that does not actually involve either selection or pressure. 
• The use of enormously deceptive claims that there is no fundamental difference between humans and animals, or only quantitative differences.
• The frequent use of misleading language trying to make animals sound like they have minds rather like humans, and trying to make humans sound like beings who have minds like animals. 
• Misleading equivocations involving the word "evolution" that shift between four different definitions of evolution, switching between defining evolution as (1) mere gene pool variation; (2) macroevolution (dramatic anatomical transformations such as dinosaurs turning into birds); (3) common descent (the idea that all organisms are descendants of the same ancestor), or (4) the claim that all earthly organisms have natural accidental origins  (the factuality of the first definition being used to "prove" the correctness of the three vastly more presumptuous definitions, none of which involve things proven or observed). 
• Misleading equivocations involving the words "variant" and "variations" that switch around between mere assertions of variations in the size, weight and health of some organism to assertions that nature produces "variants" that involve dramatic new features (something not well-observed in the study of any generation of organisms).
• The frequent use of misleading cell diagrams that depict cells as being thousands of times simpler than they are. A Nature article says that "textbook depictions of the cell’s innards have changed little since 1896," and quotes a scientist saying, "Nothing is drawn the way the cell actually looks."
• Frequent misleading uses of the phrase "body plan," in which a body plan is strangely defined as the mere rough shape of all organisms in the same phylum, despite the term suggesting something vastly different: a blueprint for how to build the whole structure of an organism. 
• The very frequent use of misleading analogies, such as comparing Darwinian evolution to a tinkerer (a tinkerer is a conscious agent willfully attempting to improve something by trial and error, and evolution is no such thing). 
• Misstatements about the complexity of protein molecules,  such as documented here and here,  in which an author claims that a typical protein molecule involves only about 100 amino acids, when the median number of amino acids in a human protein molecule is about 431, exponentially harder to achieve than merely 100. 
• The frequent use of misleading language designed to "sweep under the rug" the vast levels of organization and purposeful molecular machinery in organisms, such as language describing humans as "bags of chemicals" or "star stuff." 
• Deceptive appeals to artificial selection (a purposeful guidance of breeding) to try to support claims about so-called "natural selection" (claimed to involve no purposeful agency).
• Frequent misleading uses of the term "early human" to describe long-extinct organisms without any evidence to show that such organisms had any of the defining characteristics of humans (such as language and the ability to use symbols). 
• Extremely misleading statements that Darwinian evolution is not random, evoking some special, uncommon definition of the word "random" different from the normal definition of that term: "happening, done, or chosen by chance rather than according to a plan."
• Misleading claims claims that "trees of life" (speculative social constructs of analysts made after countless arbitrary analysis choices) are "yielded" or "produced" by genomes, things that do not naturally tell any story about a "tree of life."  
• Extremely misleading language in which non-biological reactions in lifeless chemicals are referred to as "metabolism" (contrary to the definition of metabolism, which is chemical reactions required for the maintenance of living thing), used for the sake of deceptively blurring the difference between life and lifeless chemicals .
• Extremely misleading claims of universal acceptance of Darwinist dogma, something not well-established by secret ballot opinion polls (the only reliable way to determine scientific opinion).
• Misleading claims that when scientists say something is a theory, it means it is well-established (a claim that can be refuted by many examples, such as the common example of the term "string theory" to describe a completely unsubstantiated type of physicist speculation).
• Misleading characterizations of opponents, often involving attempts to insinuate people making no reference to scriptures are fundamentalists.
• Deceptive claims about chance protein evolution, such as the assertion by one authority that if you have "trillions" of random protein molecules you can get "any function you want" (because the average amino acid length of a human protein is more than 400 amino acids, and because there are 20 possible amino acids in each position of a protein, such a statement underestimated by about 10 to the 500th power the difficulty of getting by chance "any function you want"). 
• Misleading language about natural history, such as failing to describe enormous leaps of organization and complexity as very complex innovations, but merely describing them as "variants" or "diversification."
• Misleading language using the phrase "missing link," often referring to things that are not credible evolutionary missing links, such as claiming that a type of dinosaur is a missing link between dinosaurs and birds, because it has a triangular membrane on its front similar to a triangular membraine on the back of birds.
• Misleading claims that evolution might have occurred before life existed, claims evoking a special use of the word "evolution" very different from  normal definitions. 
• A massive repetition by Darwinists of a doubtful claim that human genomes and chimp genomes are 98% or 98.6% the same, ignoring a 2005 paper with the title "Eighty percent of proteins are different between humans and chimpanzees." A 2021 study found that "1.5% to 7% of the human genome is unique to Homo sapiens," suggesting the 98% claim may have been much in error.   
• Misrepresentations involving fossils, often including gluing together (using a mixture such as superglue and baking soda) fossil fragments not known to be from one organism and claiming they are from a single organism.
• Visual misrepresentations of organisms, such as a visual attempting to persuade us that giraffes could have easily evolved from okapi, and depicting okapi as being half the height of giraffes (they are actually only about a third the height of giraffes). 
• Misleading statements about the quality of evidence for spiritual and psychical phenomena that tend to contradict Darwinist explanations, typically made by people who have never seriously studied such evidence, combined with misleading sterotypical or gaslighting characterizations of the people who have reported such phenomena.
• Deceptive drawings of embryos such as used by Darwinist zealot Ernst Haeckel, to try to create some impression that a study of embryos supports Darwinist claims, and the use of such drawings in Darwinist literature to the present day, decades after they had been debunked.  
• Many decades of erroneous claims about origin-of-life studies, which have not made any substantial progress in explaining an origin of life from non-life. 
• Doubly-misleading language in which experiments involving deliberate continuous artificial selection by humans and producing mere disorganized clumps of cells are referred to as examples of "multicellularity evolution," when they are neither multicellularity (examples of organisms with many cells) nor natural evolution.  
• Misleading language about the origin of life, such as referring to amino acids as "seeds of life," which is misleading as saying bricks are the seeds of cathedrals. 
• Questionable research practices: a survey of evolutionary biologists and ecologists reported that "around 64% of surveyed researchers reported they had at least once failed to report results because they were not statistically significant (cherry picking); 42% had collected more data after inspecting whether results were statistically significant (a form of p hacking) and 51% had reported an unexpected finding as though it had been hypothesised from the start (HARKing)."
• The very frequent use by natural history museums of "fossil exhibits" that are entirely plaster or fiberglass, with countless visitors getting the idea that such things were real fossils.
• The evocation of enormously implausible tales such as the tale of monkeys rafting across the Atlantic oceans millions of years ago, with such wild tales described as facts. 
• Frequent evocation of an utterly fallacious principle which one Darwinist evoked by saying "let us suppose instead that each step made in the good direction provides a small advantage in terms of survival or fecundity to the being that makes it," a principle extremely erroneous because improvements in survival or fecundity (reproduction) almost always require many coordinated changes before any such advantage is achieved. 
• Passing off deliberately faked fossils as important evidence of evolution (such as the fraudulent Piltdown Man fossil which for forty years was hailed as a fossil of key significance). 

Once we have realized that the Great DNA Myth has been a huge lie, and that DNA does not contain any specification for building a human body, we can start to realize the truth about how little progress our biologists have made in explaining biological origins and the realities of the human body and mind. That lack of progress is summarized in the table below:

Question	Answer	Discussion
Did scientists credibly explain the appearance (in appreciable quantities) of the building blocks of the building blocks of one-celled life on the early Earth?	No.	What can be called the building blocks of the building blocks of one-celled life are chemical units such as amino acids and nucleotide base pairs. No such things have ever been produced in any experiment realistically simulating the early Earth. The widely discussed Miller-Urey experiment failed in multiple ways to be a realistic simulation of the early Earth.
Did scientists credibly explain the origin of any of the main building blocks of one-celled life on the early Earth?	No.	The main "building blocks" of one-celled life are functional proteins, with even the simplest one-celled life requiring hundreds of types of proteins. No functional protein has ever been produced in any experiment realistically simulating the early Earth.
Did scientists credibly explain the origin of one-celled life?	No.	Life has never been produced from non-life through any kind of laboratory experiment.
Did scientists credibly explain why life uses only left-handed amino acids, when laboratory experiments always produce equal numbers of left-handed and right-handed amino acids?	No.	This long-standing problem (called the homochirality problem) has never been credibly answered. Homochirality is accidentally unachievable.
Did scientists credibly explain the origin of eukaryotic cells?	No.	The most popular current explanation for the appearance of eukaryotic cells (cells many times more complex than the simplest types of cells) involves an unbelievable appeal to non-Darwinian "endosymbiosis" events that are basically "miracles of chance."
Did scientists credibly explain the origin of any of the thousands of types of proteins used by the human body?	No.	The average protein molecule has about 400 amino acids, well-arranged to achieve a particular biological effect. The chance appearance of a functional protein molecule is as improbable as typing monkeys producing a long, grammatical, functional paragraph. Because protein molecules do not fold correctly and are not functional if half or a third of their amino acids are missing, you cannot explain the origin of protein molecules by a gradual accumulation of many parts that were each useful.
Did scientists credibly explain how any cell in the human body is able to reproduce?	No.	Scientists have described various phases in cell reproduction such as anaphase and prophase, but scientists are unable to credibly explain how any eukaryotic cell is able to reproduce. Since cells in the human body are units with a complexity like that of  jet aircraft or automobiles, such a cell reproducing is no explicable than a car splitting into two different functional cars.
Did scientists credibly explain how protein complexes are able to form in the human body?	No.	As there are more than 20,000 types of proteins used by the human body, and DNA does not specify which proteins make up particular protein complexes, the formation of protein complexes in which proteins "find the right team to join" is a mystery, one not credibly explained by mere random combinations. A scientific paper notes that "the majority of cellular proteins function as subunits in larger protein complexes," but also notes that "very little is known about how protein complexes form."
Did scientists credibly explain the occurrence of protein folding continually occurring in the human body?	No	Scientists cannot currently explain how sequences of amino acids are able to continually fold to form the 3D shapes used by protein molecules. Success in the different task of protein structure prediction (using advanced AI software and huge “deep learning” databases) does nothing to explain how protein folding occurs in the human body.
Did scientists credibly explain how a human is able to instantly recall detailed facts when asked a short simple question such as "How did Lincoln die"?	No	We know how information can be instantly retrieved using books or computers: by the use of things such as sorting, addressing and indexing. Since there is no sorting, addressing or indexing in the human brain, the instant recall of learned information is inexplicable under prevailing assumptions of scientists. Finding the right answer to a question by looking in a brain that has no sorting, indexing or addressing should be as hard as finding a needle in a haystack.
Did scientists credibly explain how cells find the right positions in a developing human body?	No	Claims that “morphogen gradients” do anything to solve this mystery are unfounded, and such claims merely shift the mystery from one place to another, creating an equally great mystery of how such chemicals could know where cells should go to.
Did scientists credibly explain how protein transcription occurs so rapidly?	No	Protein transcription is part of the process by which new proteins are created when particular genes in DNA are read to help make a new protein. Protein transcription occurs almost instantly, but scientists are unable to explain why such a thing should not take a very long time, because finding the right gene would be like finding a needle in a haystack. I will describe this issue in a later post. In an article on Chemistry World, we read this: "How does the machinery that turns genes into proteins know which part of the genome to read in any given cell type?" The article makes rather clear that the answer has not yet been found.
Did scientists credibly explain the appearance of any adult human body?	No.	Human DNA merely specifies low-level chemical information such as which amino acids make up a protein. Since the "DNA as body blueprint" or "DNA as body recipe" or "DNA as body program" tales are all lies having no basis in fact, the progression from a speck-sized zygote to the vast organization of an adult human body is unexplained.
Did scientists credibly explain the fossil record?	No.	Scientists have never given a credible explain of the Cambrian Explosion, involving the appearance of all or almost all animal phyla within a relatively short period about 540 million years ago, contrary to what we would expect from Darwinist assumptions. Scientists have also failed to credibly explain the geographic distribution of fossils,  resorting to ridiculous explanatory tall tales such as the story of monkeys rafting across the Atlantic Ocean millions of years ago.
Did scientists credibly explain the appearance of any adult human mind?	No.	There are very many reasons why the human mind cannot be credibly explained as a mere product of the brain, or as the same thing as the brain.
Did scientists credibly explain the origin of the human species?	No.	The answer to this question could only be “Yes” if all  or almost all of the answers above are “Yes.” When all are answers are “No,” the answer to this question is “No” in the loudest voice.

On this blog I have been teaching you the truth about DNA since 2014, when I published a post noting the utter inadequacy of DNA as an explanation for human beings, and noting the need for some conceptual leap to postulate some explanatory reality far beyond anything known by biologists.

The lack of any specification for making a human body in DNA is a clue of the most gigantic importance. In my very long essay here, I list it as being one of what I call the Six Main Clues About Reality. If you study these six clues with sufficient diligence, you will be led to a worldview radically different from the views being taught by our materialist professors. The gigantic implication of the centrally important fact that our bodies lack any molecular specification of a human body or any human cell is this: that we are not at all organisms that arose in any "bottom up" way explicable through low-level chemistry, but must be organisms that arose in a "top-down" way from some unfathomable agency vastly greater than any of us. 

The grand climax is the "rabbit hole bunker" of the multiverse

"God Complex" Gene Splicers Say, "Full Speed Ahead!" (Like the Titanic Captain)

The Wiktionary defines a "God complex" as "an unshakable belief characterized by consistently inflated feelings of personal ability, privilege, or infallibility." It seems that virologists favoring "gain-of-function" pathogen research may suffer from such a "God complex" (like some other types of biologists).  

An article in USA Today is entitled "As COVID turns 3, experts worry where the next pandemic will come from – and if we'll be ready." We read some very scary stuff:

"Now, in addition to worrying about a virus that might jump from animals to humans, experts are concerned about research accidents and – what should be unthinkable – the possibility of someone intentionally unleashing a highly contagious and lethal pathogen. 

A pandemic has long been known to be far riskier for global security than conventional, nuclear or chemical warfare, said Lawrence Gostin, a professor of public health law at Georgetown University and a leading expert in global health."

What? The risk of a man-made pandemic is "far riskier" than the risk of nuclear warfare?  How could so terrifying a thing be "long known" without such a risk being known to the average man?

Next in the USA Today article we read these very troubling claims:

"The idea of engineering a deadly pathogen that sickens the world sounds like the stuff of science fiction or superhero movies. But it's no longer a fantasy.

Kevin Esvelt, an MIT biologist, said people in his own lab could theoretically assemble a dangerous virus from DNA ordered on the internet for under $1,000.

Once pandemic-capable viruses are identified, thousands of people worldwide have the scientific training to make them from mail-ordered synthetic DNA.

'Imagine a world where you can order weapons-grade plutonium in the mail,' he said, 'and there are thousands of engineers who have the skills to put together something that might be a bomb.' "

Then we read about virologists defending reckless "gain of function" research in which gene-splicing is done so that pathogens become more deadly:

"In 2012, the scientific community and others debated research in the U.S. and the Netherlands that explored five mutations making avian influenza more contagious to humans. Some in the virology community defended that research as essential for understanding naturally emerging risks. Yassif and others worry it made creating a global hazard one step easier."

Seeming to have quite a "God complex," many virologists are turning a blind eye to such risks. Two virologists have authored a "let's keep going full blast" editorial in which they claim,  "Science is society’s best defense against the existential threats we face."  No, the actual truth is that science gave us the hydrogen bomb, which has presented the most existential threat humans have ever faced. 

The editorial refers us to a paper in which 100+ virologists recklessly argue for a "full speed ahead" approach in regard gain-of-function research. We might call it a "full Frankenstein" approach, referencing the fictional scientist Frankenstein who tried "gain of function" research by electrifying a body built from a patchwork of corpses.  The virologists are urging us not to worry about all the Pandora's boxes they are opening. 

Concerning the origin of COVID-19, the virologist authors tell us that there are "two major camps arguing that the virus either originated from animal-to-human transmission (zoonosis) or by a laboratory leak "  The virologists say, "each of these possibilities is plausible." That doesn't make any sense, since "plausible" is a word meaning "likely."  You can't have two mutually exclusive explanations both be "plausible." The authors totally fail to see the implications of it being "plausible" that a global pandemic was caused by blundering gene-splicing scientists. The implications are that gene-splicing should be much more carefully regulated, and that laboratory safeguards should be greatly increased. Very lamely, the authors resort to a "we already have some regulations and safeguards" reasoning. 

The author's "full speed ahead" reasoning reminds you of the "full speed ahead" policy of the captain of the Titanic. But it's even worse. In the days before the Titanic sunk, there was no recent reason for suspecting that very many people had died because ocean liner captains were traveling too fast. 

A three-part series at TheIntercept.com highlights the grave risks of pathogen tinkering. In Part 3, we read about scientists seeming to sweep under the rug accounts of lab accidents, as efficiently as scientists sweep under the rug evidence for the paranormal that scientists should be diligently studying.  The links to the series have these headlines:

• Student Infected With Debilitating Virus in Undisclosed Biolab Accident

• Accident With 1918 Pandemic Virus Raises Questions About Pathogen Research

• Lab That Created Risky Avian Flu Had “Unacceptable” Biosafety Protocols

Some government board recently released a report entitled "PROPOSED BIOSECURITY OVERSIGHT FRAMEWORK FOR THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE." It's pretty much a joke. We have some "weak tea" recommendations that fail to include the type of physical safeguards needed to make a major improvement in security.  There's lots of bureaucratic shuffling and semantic fiddling that doesn't add up to  recommendations for major biosafety improvements. There's no mention of quarantines of researchers who fiddled with deadly pathogens, one of the needed improvements in biosafety. 

One day most of us may end up dead because our "God complex" gene splicers want to keep up their perilous fiddling without being inconvenienced by burdensome safety protocols. In a similar vein of "going full Frankenstein," a recent Daily Mail article is entitled, "Human CLONES purposely grown to give people 'spare parts' like hearts, lungs and livers could be the key to living forever, expert claims." We read of a nutty scheme proposing that people arrange for the appearance of full-grown but unconscious clones of themselves, to be used only for organ transplanting. Under this evil scheme, a "clone parent" person might keep down in his basement (or in some "warehouse of the damned") an unconscious clone of himself, fed through tubes for maybe 30 years, until one of the organs of the "clone parent" failed, at which point the clone would be robbed of an organ so that the "clone parent" could have his old failing organ replaced.  And when this cloned  human being was robbed of its brain early in its life, and later robbed of an organ without permission of the donor, would that be legally classified as murder? I guess those running this sinister scheme would have to arrange for the murder laws to be rewritten to tidy up this little difficulty. 

The Telepathy Results Were Stunning, But the Warmup Was Clumsy

In the major journal American Psychologist there was published in 2018 a paper  entitled "The Experimental Evidence for Parapsychological Phenomena: A Review." The author is psychologist Etzel Cardena, whose main work seems to be in regular psychology, although he did co-edit a handbook of parapsychology. The paper (which has been cited 192 times) discusses some powerful evidence for things such as ESP (extrasensory perception or telepathy). Before Cardena presents such evidence, he tries to kind of "pave the way" for his evidence presentation, to "soften the beaches" by "warming up" his audience. He must have been aware that very many or most of the people reading his paper may have been materialists who claim that telepathy is impossible. So we can see why Cardena would have taken an approach of trying to explain why telepathy is not impossible, and then present the evidence for telepathy. 

Why do materialists claim that things such as telepathy are impossible? The reason is mainly that their belief about the brain and the mind leads them to thinking that telepathy cannot occur. A materialist thinks that your mind is purely the product of your brain (or perhaps that the mind is merely something the same as your current set of brain states).  Now consider two people in different houses who are communicating telepathically. According to the belief that your mind is merely a product of your brain (or the same as your brain states), such a thing should be impossible. Under such an idea, the only way that telepathy could occur is by signal transmission from one brain to another. But a human doesn't have any kind of antenna that would allow him to transmit signals from his brain to another brain. And a human doesn't have any dish-like receiver that would allow him to receive signals transmitted by another human. 

Such at least was the argument that materialists would give against telepathy prior to the development of modern computer technology, back in the days before there were so many tiny devices that were communicating electronically without any visible receiver dishes or antenna. Now that we use so many tiny devices that communicate wirelessly without any visible antennae or receiver dishes, such as smartphones that use wi-fi, such an argument may seem less compelling even to the person who believes that the mind is merely the product of the brain. 

In his paper Cardena attempts to dispose of any such a priori rationale for refusing to even look at evidence for ESP and similar phenomena (broadly referred to as psi). There is a very good way of doing such a thing, but Cardena fails to use such a way.  He gives us instead a  clumsy attempt to warmup his audience for his presentation of ESP evidence.

Cardena starts out in a fumbling way by disparaging the term ESP, saying "ESP is a misleading term because it suggests perception as the mediating mechanism, although few if any psi researchers nowadays assume this to be the case." This claim makes no sense. The Cambridge English Dictionary gives us two definitions of perception:

1. "the quality of being aware of things through the physical senses, especially sight"
2. "someone's ability to notice and understand things that are not obvious to other people"

The term "extrasensory perception" is a perfectly good and honest term to be using, and the "extrasensory" part makes clear that the second definition of perception is being used.  It makes no sense to complain that the term ESP suggests sensory perception, because the "E" in that "ESP" clearly indicates that extrasensory perception (not involving the senses) is being referred to. 

Cardena then attempts to warmup his audience for a presentation of evidence for psychical abilities such as ESP by referring to physics. He states this:

"Quantum mechanics (QM) and Einstein’s theory of relativity have depicted a reality that differs substantially from commonsensical assumptions. Nobel laureate and pioneer of molecular biology Max Delbrück (1986) expressed it so: 'Modern science . . . has forced us to abandon absolute space and time, determinism, and the absolute object.' "

This is a poor strategy of attempting to warmup his audience for a presentation of evidence for psychical abilities such as ESP.  The nature of time and space is a question that is not closely related to the possibility of abilities such as ESP and clairvoyance. There is no need at all for people to change their beliefs about time and space in order to accept evidence of paranormal human abilities.  If makes no sense to ask  someone to "abandon absolute space and time" as a prerequisite to accepting ESP evidence. No such abandonment is required. 

Cardena then dives into a murky discussion of quantum mechanics, telling us this:

"In his interpretation of QM (and experts differ on how to interpret it, e.g., Schlosshauer, Kofler, & Zeilinger, 2013), the eminent physicist Bernard d=Espagnat (1979, 2006) discussed the implications of experiments showing that measuring/observing the property of a particle, such as its spin, instantaneously determines that of another particle entangled with it, no matter how distant. Entanglement means that the quantum states of such particles are not independent but part of a system, which can be produced in different ways. D’Espagnat concluded that such experiments falsify the local realist theory that effects cannot propagate faster than light and that objects far apart in space are relatively independent. For him, the world is not made of separate 'material' objects embedded in space-time, but of a nonseparable, indivisible field, a 'veiled reality,' with which consciousness interacts. He concluded that the implications of QM and 'transcendentalism-inclined thinkers'  (d’Espagnat, 2006, p. 429) have points in common, as did renowned physicist David Bohm (1986) in his theory of the implicate order or guiding field, which he applied to psi phenomena."

Cardena is here again following a fumbling approach at attempting to  warmup his audience for a presentation of evidence for psychical abilities such as ESP.  He has mentioned the very murky topic of quantum mechanics, and a particularly puzzling feature of quantum mechanics, a very baffling physical phenomenon called quantum entanglement. Neither quantum mechanics nor quantum entanglement has any clear and obvious relevance to the possibility of paranormal human abilities such as telepathy and clairvoyance. It is not at all necessary for you to have any particular interpretation or idea of quantum mechanics before having a credible belief in telepathy, and it is not necessary for you to believe that anything can travel faster than the speed of light. 

Cardena then gives us several more paragraphs discussing controversial interpretations of physics, including retrocausality, the idea that future events may affect past events.  The possibility of retrocausality may have some relevance to whether it is possible to have an anomalous knowledge of future events, called precognition. But no controversial interpretation of physics (such as a belief in retrocausality) is needed for anyone to believe in telepathy or clairvoyance. Whether retrocausality ever occurs is irrelevant to whether telepathy is possible. Cardena mentions a physicist who has postulated "additional dimensions beyond the temporal and three-spatial ones." The possibility of additional dimensions has some relevance to consideration of evidence for near-death experiences and life after death. But the possibility of additional dimensions has no direct relevance to whether telepathy or clairvoyance is possible. You do not need to believe in extra dimensions to accept evidence for telepathy and clairvoyance. 

After so clumsy an attempt to foster receptivity to evidence for paranormal psi abilities, Cardena does a fairly good job at presenting such evidence. But he fails to present the evidence in a way that will cause the layman reader to realize how strong the evidence is. We have in Table 1 an indication that there is evidence for "ganzfeld" which has a "P" of "< 10^-16."  What does that mean? Someone who has long-studied such topics will know that the word "ganzfeld" refers to a type of ESP or telepathy test, that the letter "P" refers to a p-value that can very roughly be considered the probability of getting a result through chance, and that < 10^-16  refers to "less than 1 in 10,000,000,000,000,000." But the average layman will not know all of these things, and may glance at Table 1 without having any understanding that very strong evidence has been presented for paranomal human abilities. 

Similarly, we have in Table 1 an indication that with something called "forced choice" there have been results of "P" of "< 6.3 X 10^-25."  But what does that mean? Neither the average layman nor a typical psychologist will know upon coming to Table 1, because Cardena hasn't yet explained the term. A few pages later he gets around to explaining the term (without explaining it very well):

"In forced-choice studies, the guessing possibilities are finite and the possibilities are known by the person, for instance cards in a randomized deck. The protocol measures whether the participant can guess correctly more often than would be expected by chance. This was a common design in the middle of the 20th century." 

What he's talking about by "forced choice studies" are things such as (1) telepathy tests in which one person tries to guess a randomly selected card that some unseen person has selected and observed; (2) clairvoyance tests such as card tests in which a random card is dealt face down, and someone has to guess what the card is, before anyone has seen it.  An average person making a causal reading of Table 1 will have no idea of what is meant by "forced choice," so Cardena has not very effectively presented the compelling evidence for ESP in a way that will cause most readers to understand how compelling it is.  So it goes again and again with parapsychologists. They have all kinds of incredibly compelling evidence they can present, but they are often very clumsy about presenting such evidence in ways that the average reader can easily understand.  Roughly speaking, the "forced choice" evidence listed in Cardena's Table 1 is evidence that in certain types of telepathy or clairvoyance tests, there have been results with a chance likelihood of less than about 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, which is roughly the same as p of "< 6.3 X 10^-25."

What would be an effective way of fostering receptivity for evidence for paranormal human abilities? It would be a strategy completely different from the approach Cardena took. An effective way of warming up an audience for a presentation of evidence for paranormal human abilities is to start out by discussing at considerable length the evidence of brain physical shortfalls, and the very strong evidence that nothing in the brain is capable of explaining any of the main mental capabilities that humans have. If you take this way of "paving the way" for evidence for paranormal human abilities, you will discuss things such as this:

1. As shown in the many examples given here, here, here, here and here, contrary to the predictions of materialism, 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 often  produces little change in memory or cognitive abilities, as I discuss here. 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.

2. 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. Both synapses and dendritic spines are a “shifting sands” substrate absolutely unsuitable for storing memories that last reliably for decades.

3. 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 should be  impossible for a brain to perform anything like such an instantaneous lookup of stored information from some exact spot in the brain.

4. 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.

5. Contrary to claims that minds are merely an aspect of brains or a product of brains, we know from near-death experiences that human minds can continue to operate even after hearts have stopped and brains have shut down. As discussed here, such experiences often include observations of hospital details or medical details that should have been impossible if a mere hallucination was the cause of the experience.

6. 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.

7. We understand how physical things can produce physical effects (such as an asteroid producing a crater), and how mental things can produce mental effects (such as how a belief can give rise to another belief or an emotion). But no one has the slightest idea how a physical thing could ever produce a purely mental effect such as an abstract idea. As discussed here, no one has any understanding of how a brain or neurons in a brain could produce anything like a thought or an idea.

8. 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. 

9. 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.

10. As discussed here, human brains do not show signs of working harder during thinking or memory recall, contrary to what we would expect if such effects were being produced by brains.

11. 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.

12. There are many humans with either exceptional memory abilities (such as those with hyperthymesia who can recall every day of their adulthood) or exceptional thinking abilities (such as savants with incredibly fast 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.

13. Results from the animal kingdom are inconsistent with claim that minds are made from brains and memories stored in brains. For example, animals such as crows with very small brains (and no cerebral cortex) perform astonishingly well on mental tests; elephants with brains four times larger than ours are not nearly as smart as us; and flatworms that have been taught things and then decapitated can still remember what they learned, after regrowing a head.

14. Well-documented evidence for apparitions provides evidence that the human mind is not merely the result of brain activity. Such evidence includes (1) more than 100 cases of people who saw an apparition of someone they did not know had died, only to very soon learn that the corresponding person had died (as discussed here, here, here and here); (2) many additional cases of apparitions seen by multiple observers, contrary to the explanation of hallucination (discussed here and here); (3) many other cases of death-bed apparitions as discussed here and documented by researchers such as Haraldsson and Osis. 

15. Contrary to claims that the brain is the source of human thinking and memory recall, a full analysis of the signal delaying factors in the human brain (such as synaptic delays and synaptic fatigue) shows that signals in the brain cannot be traveling fast enough to explain human thinking and human memory recall which can occur instantaneously.

16.  The human brain experiences extremely severe levels of signal noise, so much signal noise that we should not believe that it is the brain that is producing human memory recall that can occur massively and flawlessly for people such as Hamlet actors and Wagnerian tenors. 

These things all indicate that our minds and memory must be the result of some spiritual or immaterial aspect of man or some soul aspect of man, in direct contradiction to the position of materialism that such a thing does not exist. Why do such things help "pave the way" for the evidence of paranormal human abilities? Such things help to establish the likelihood that the human mind is some mysterious reality that cannot be explained by any known physical causes. Once we have reached such a conclusion, all talk of an impossibility of telepathy or clairvoyance collapses like a house of cards blown apart by a shotgun.  All of the talk of an impossibility of telepathy or clairvoyance was based upon the dogma that the mind is merely the product of the brain or the same as the brain. Once such dogmas are exposed as tenets inconsistent with what we know about the brain and its many severe physical shortfalls, "it's a whole new ballgame" and "all bets are off," to use two American colloquial expressions. If we don't understand how we got our minds, and cannot credibly explain the main common phenomena of minds by referring to brains,  then we don't understand the limits of our minds, and have no business claiming that some mental phenomenon is impossible because it cannot be neurally explained.  When we properly realize that we do not understand how our minds arise, then we are in a "whole new world" in which things such as telepathy, clairvoyance and life after death are very "live" possibilities rather than impossibilities.

 

"We're Like Deer in the Headlights": Physicists Learn No Lessons From Their Failed Wild Goose Chases

A theory called supersymmetry theory arose as a speculative attempt to explain away (or kind of sweep under the rug) a case of cosmic fine-tuning that bothered scientists. The issue of the fine-tuning of the Higgs mass (the mass of the Higgs boson) was skillfully explained by physicist Ben Allanach in a previous article at the Aeon site: 

"Behind the question of mass, an even bigger and uglier problem was lurking in the background of the Standard Model: why is the Higgs boson so light? In experiments it weighed in at 125 times the mass of a proton. But calculations using the theory implied that it should be much bigger – roughly ten million billion times bigger, in fact....Quantum fluctuations of ultra-heavy particle pairs should have a profound effect on the Higgs boson, whose mass is very sensitive to them....One logical option is that nature has chosen the initial value of the Higgs boson mass to precisely offset these quantum fluctuations, to an accuracy of one in 10¹⁶. However, that possibility seems remote at best, because the initial value and the quantum fluctuation have nothing to do with each other. It would be akin to dropping a sharp pencil onto a table and having it land exactly upright, balanced on its point. In physics terms, the configuration of the pencil is unnatural or fine-tuned. Just as the movement of air or tiny vibrations should make the pencil fall over, the mass of the Higgs shouldn’t be so perfectly calibrated that it has the ability to cancel out quantum fluctuations. However, instead of an uncanny correspondence, maybe the naturalness problem with the Higgs boson could be explained away by a new, more foundational theory: supersymmetry."

In an article in Symmetry magazine, we have a similar explanation:

"To understand what’s fishy about the observable Higgs mass being so low, first you must know that it is actually the sum of two inputs: the bare Higgs mass (which we don’t know) plus contributions from all the other Standard Model particles, contributions collectively known as 'quantum corrections.' The second number in the equation is an enormous negative, coming in around minus 10¹⁸ GeV. Compared to that, the result of the equation, 125 GeV, is extremely small, close to zero. That means the first number, the bare Higgs mass, must be almost the opposite, to so nearly cancel it out. To some physicists, this is an unacceptably strange coincidence."

How big a coincidence? The Symmetry article later quotes physicist Lawrence Lee Jr. as saying “the conundrum with the Higgs mass, which would require fine-tuning on the order of 1-in-10³⁴,” which is a coincidence like the coincidence of you correctly guessing the full phone numbers of three consecutive strangers. 

Scientists should have just accepted this case of very precise fine-tuning in nature.  But instead, many of them made a long, quixotic, futile attempt to overthrow it (like someone trying to overthrow the observation that the sun is hot, with some elaborate theory trying to explain how the sun isn't really hot).  Why did they do that? Because they had a motivation, an ideological motivation rather than the motivation of simply discovering truth. Their ideological motivation was related to a belief that the universe should not be anything that looked like a product of design. This ideological motivation is clearly stated in the Symmetry article by physicist Lee, who states it as follows: “In general, what we want from our theories—and in some way, our universe—is that nothing seems too contrived.” If you want for the universe to not "seem too contrived," then you may twist yourself into knots trying to explain away cases of apparent fine-tuning in the universe. 

An article makes it rather clear that the supersymmetry theory was mainly motivated by a desire to get rid of a case of fine-tuning, and make the universe look like it was a little less lucky, a little less  providentially blessed. We read this:

"For example, the small mass of the Higgs boson is notoriously difficult to explain—its calculation requires subtracting two very large numbers that just happen to be slightly different from each other. 'But if you add supersymmetry, this takes care of all these cancellations such that you can get a light Higgs mass without needing to have such luck,' says Elodie Resseguie, a postdoc at the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory."

All attempts to verify the theory of supersymmetry have failed.  The Large Hadron Collider failed to find any of the "superpartner" particles predicted by supersymmetry theory.  In a recent article in the New York Times, physicist Maria Spiropulu comments on the dismal failure of supersymmetry theory.  Referring to the "supersymmetrical particles" predicted by supersymmetry theory, which physicists wasted endless hours speculating about, without ever discovering, she says this:

"That has been a little bit crushing; for 20 years I’ve been chasing the supersymmetrical particles. So we’re like deer in the headlights: we didn’t find supersymmetry, we didn’t find dark matter as a particle."  

There was a very important lesson to be learned from all the vast amount of time physicists wasted on supersymmetry theory. The lesson is that when nature presents us with a case of very precise fine-tuning (such as we have in the Higgs Boson/Higgs Mass), then we should just accept that purposeful-seeming fine tuning in nature and maybe ponder the philosophical implications of such fine tuning, rather than wasting endless hours twisting ourselves into knots trying to explain away the fine tuning, and sweep it under the rug. There is no sign that our physicists have learned this important lesson.  

In the same article, we hear from emeritus professor of physics Michael Turner.  Turner shows zero signs of having learned any lessons from the gigantic failure of supersymmetry theory and string theory (which is based on supersymmetry theory, but has many more speculations). Between 1980 and 2020 physicists wrote many thousands of papers on supersymmetry theory and string theory. All evidence thus far suggests such efforts were a waste of time, and no evidence exists for such theories.  But when asked about string theory, Turner simply says this: "We will have to wait and see what comes from string theory, but I think it will be big."  No lesson has been learned here.  It's like an old person who wasted half of his life searching for the Abominable Snowman saying, "But one day we'll get some evidence for it!"

A recent article at the Ars Technica site gives us the real scoop on string theory. The article is entitled "Requiem for a string: Charting the rise and fall of a theory of everything." We read this:

"Despite decades of work, it [string theory] has failed to deliver on its promise. What went wrong, and where do we go from here?...The whole idea is on very shaky ground, with physicists beginning to have conferences with titles like 'Beyond Supersymmetry' and 'Oh My God, I Think I Wasted My Career.'  Where does that leave string theory? ....Without supersymmetry, string theory isn’t gone, but it’s certainly on life support."

The New York Times writer asks Turner about grand unification theories, one of the biggest failed wild goose chases of physicists. Thousands of scientific papers have been written on this topic, and no successful grand unification theory has emerged. The New York Times writer asks, "Where are we on unification?" Turner gives us a circuitous answer that shows no signs he is even aware of the grand flop that grand unification theories were. No lesson seems to have been learned here.  The New York Times writer later suggests how big the failure was by later asking, "If unification is the wrong question, what is the right one?"

Ideas such as grand unification theories and supersymmetry theory and string theory are ideas that all gained popularity because of what has been called a snowball effect: a sociological effect by which ideas in academia gain more and more acceptance for a while, picking up followers, funding and attention like a rolling snowball picks up snow as it rolls down a snowy mountain. The diagram below illustrates the idea:

A theory can greatly benefit from such a snowball effect, but the end result is usually nasty, as illustrated by the visual below:

The charts below (made using the Google Books Ngram viewer) shows the failure of grand unification theories and supersymmetry theory. We see a great spike of interest around 1985, with a steady decline: just what we would expect from theories that did not succeed.

Asked about the multiverse (the groundless speculation that there are countless other universes), Turner says this:

"I think we have to deal with it, even though it sounds crazy. And the multiverse gives me a headache; not being testable, at least not yet, it isn’t science. But it may be the most important idea of our time. It’s one of the things on the table. Headache or not, we have to deal with it. It needs to go up or out; either it’s part of science or it isn’t part of science."

That sounds very "deer in the headlights." But perhaps we should use a stronger phrase of disparagement to describe what string theorists did regarding the multiverse. They calculated there were maybe 10 to the 500th power "solutions" to their string theory equations, and then they started suggesting that maybe all these hypothetical universes really exist. It's like some Aquaman novelist calculating there are a quintillion different possible versions of his Aquaman story, and then concluding that this means there are a quintillion universes, each with its own different version of Aquaman. Reasoning like that is the opposite of science. 

Next in the article Turner is asked this:

"Why is it considered a triumph that the standard model of cosmology doesn’t say what 95 percent of the universe is? Only 5 percent of it is atomic material like stars and people; 25 percent is some other 'dark matter,' and about 70 percent is something even weirder — Mike has named it 'dark energy' — that is causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate."

Completely failing to see the failure of a theoretical program in which it is claimed that 95% of the universe is mysterious never-observed substances (dark energy and dark matter), corresponding to no known particles, Turner merely says this: 

"That’s a big success, yeah. We’ve named all the major components."

The New York Times writer then replies: "But you don't know what most of them are."  We again seem to get a "deer in the headlights" impression.  The New York Times article rather gives us the impression that today's particle physicists may be lost in the woods.  But at least there is one hopeful sign: the New York Times reporter is asking some tough questions, rather than just throwing the usual softball questions.

A story a few days ago on the www.phys.org illustrates some of the lamentable tendencies of modern theoretical physics and cosmology. We have a headline which is another example in which the wildest and most implausible of speculations is passed off as a discovery, the headline being "The bubbling universe: A previously unknown phase transition in the early universe."  We read this:

" 'But if we trust the observations and calculations, we must accept that our current model of the universe cannot explain the data, and then we must improve the model. Not by discarding it and its success so far, but by elaborating on it and making it more detailed so that it can explain the new and better data,' said Martin S. Sloth, adding, 'It appears that a phase transition in the dark energy is the missing element in the current Standard Model to explain the differing measurements of the universe's expansion rate.' "

So now they're speculating not just about dark energy, but bubbling dark energy that underwent a phase transition like liquid water turning into steam? It's like saying, "My zombie theory doesn't work, but I can fix it by making it a theory of shape-shifting zombies." A good lesson to learn from the failure to detect dark matter and dark energy and "superpartner" particles: spend more time studying things that can actually be observed rather than spending so much time on hypotheticals that no one has observed. 

Postscript: A search on the Inspire database shows more than 68,000 papers written on the topic of supersymmetry:

That's many millions or billions of dollars of federal funding, down the drain.  On the same site we can get some evidence that physicists are paying attention to the evidence for cosmic fine-tuning. A search for "fine-tuning" shows 4000+ papers. 

A more specific search for "cosmic fine-tuning" shows 400+ papers: