Evolution Does Not Explain DNA, DNA Does Not Explain Bodies, and Bodies Do Not Explain Minds

 Here (in a simple sketch) is a view of biological origins that has been repeatedly taught or suggested by biologists (although quite a few biologists have disputed some parts of it):

(1) "Evolution (a random, unguided process) has produced the DNA of each species, which consists mainly of units called genes."  

(2) "Each gene in DNA specifies how to make a particular type of protein molecule in an organism." 

(3) "An organism's DNA thereby explains why each organism has the body that it has." 

(4) "Part of an organism's body (its brain) is the cause of any mind that the organism may have, and the storage place of the organism's memories." 

The doctrine above can be condensed into a single sentence. The doctrine above is the teaching that evolution explains DNA, DNA explains bodies, and bodies explain minds. There are very strong reasons for rejecting each part of this doctrine. 

Evolution Does Not Explain DNA

First, let us look at reasons why it is not credible to maintain that evolution can explain DNA.  The first reason is that evolutionary theory has no credible explanation for the origin of the DNA molecule itself and the biological infrastructure needed within a cell for a DNA molecule to be useful. This is the unsolved problem of the origin of life.  Currently there is no evolutionary explanation for the origin of life, nor is there any credible natural explanation for the origin of DNA.  Scientists have been struggling with this problem for many decades, and have made extremely little progress towards resolving it.  The claimed progress that has been reported is basically all illusory progress (such as the matter discussed here). 

Even the simplest self-reproducing cell represents a state of organization that we would never expect to arise by chance processes given a billion trillion planets on which random chemical reactions could occur.  A recent report from scientists long attempting to estimate the simplest possible microbe is a report estimating that such a microbe would have 473 genes with 531,000 base pairs. This is information that all has to be exactly or almost exactly right for a cell to function properly and reproduce.  The amount of fine-tuned functional information involved is roughly the same as the amount of fine-tuned functional information in a well-written 300-page instruction manual.  Just as we would never expect a well-written 300-page instruction manual to arise by chance processes (even given a billion trillion planets for such accidental processes to occur), we would never expect all the required information in a self-reproducing cell to appear by chance. 

We can't get around this difficulty by imagining a gradual evolutionary origin of the first life, because Darwinian evolution requires life of some kind (and biological reproduction) as a prerequisite before evolution can occur.  The shortfall in evolutionary theory in regard to explaining life's beginning is shown by the fact that there are two main types of cells: prokaryotic cells (the simpler type) and the vastly more complex type of cells called eukaryotic cells; and nowadays biologists typically do not explain the origin of either one of these types of cells by evoking Darwinian evolution. To try to explain prokaryotic cells, biologists appeal to some fantastically lucky chance combination of molecules. To try to explain eukaryotic cells, biologists these days are appealing to some other fantastically lucky chance "endosymbiosis" event by which cells suddenly became vastly more complex by gobbling up less complex cells. Given that nowadays biologists are not trying to explain the origin of either of the two main types of cells by Darwinian evolution,  it certainly is not true that the origin of the DNA molecule is explained by evolution. 

Let me explain in the next several paragraphs another huge reason why evolution does not explain DNA. Each DNA molecule consists mainly of genes that specify which amino acids make up a particular protein molecule.  Each gene largely specifies how to make one particular complex invention: a particular type of protein molecule. In the DNA of humans, for example, there are roughly 20,000 genes, each largely specifying how to make one of the 20,000+ types of protein molecules in the human body. 

Protein molecules are sensitive, fragile things that do not function in half-forms or quarter forms.  Just as a human body cannot live if you saw a man off at his navel, a protein molecule will not function in half-form. And just as there are many ways to kill a human by sawing off a quarter of less of his body, there are many ways to make a typical protein molecule nonfunctional by removing only a small fraction of the molecule. A biology textbook tells us, "Proteins are so precisely built that the change of even a few atoms in one amino acid can sometimes disrupt the structure of the whole molecule so severely that all function is lost." And we read on a science site, "Folded proteins are actually fragile structures, which can easily denature, or unfold." Another science site tells us, "Proteins are fragile molecules that are remarkably sensitive to changes in structure." 

For example, the paper here estimates that making a random change in a single amino acid of a protein (most of which have hundreds of amino acids) will have a 34% chance of leading to a protein's "functional inactivation." Figure 1 of the paper here suggests something similar, by indicating that after about 10 random mutations (a change in only 10 of its hundreds of amino acids), the fitness of a protein molecule will drop to zero. Further evidence for such claims can be found in this paper, which discusses very many ways in which a random mutation in a gene for a protein molecule can destroy or damage the function or stability of the protein.  An "active site" of an enzyme protein is a region of the protein molecule (about 10% to 20% of the volume of the molecule) which binds and undergoes a chemical reaction with some other molecule.  The paper states, "If a mutation occurs in an active site, then it should be considered lethal since such substitution will affect critical components of the biological reaction, which, in turn, will alter the normal protein function." The paper follows that sentence with a mention of quite a few other ways in which random mutations can break protein molecules, making them nonfunctional. For example, we read that "an amino acid substitution at a critical folding position can prevent the forming of the folding nucleus, which makes the remainder of the structure rapidly condense," which is a description of how a single amino acid change (less than a 1% change in the amino acids in a protein molecule) can cause a protein molecule to no longer have the 3D shape needed for its function. As a biology textbook tells us, "Proteins are fragile, are often only on the brink of stability."

The median number of amino acids in a protein molecule is about 375.  A gene is a set of hundreds of DNA nucleotide base pairs specifying or symbolizing hundreds of amino acids arranged in just the right way to match the amino acid arrangement in  a functional protein molecule. There are twenty amino acids used by living things, just as there are 26 letters in the English alphabet. The probability of 375 random amino acids corresponding to a functional protein molecule is roughly comparable to the probability of 375 random characters being a functional English paragraph: a probability that is essentially zero.  The table below shows some of the combinatorial mathematics involved. There are many human protein molecules that have more than 700 amino acids. 

In general, with a few possible exceptions, there are no credible evolutionary accounts for the origin of the genes that are the most important parts of DNA. Because a protein molecule corresponding to a gene is not functional if only half of the protein molecule exists, there is no credible story to be told of the gradual origin of a gene because of some gradually improving protein molecule.  Neither a gene nor its corresponding protein molecule will be functional until the great majority of its structure is in place. 

The diagram below illustrates the point.  A gene has a median number of nucleotide base-pair parts equal to about 375 (since 375 is the median number of amino acids in a protein molecule). But a gene will not be functional unless the great majority of these parts are in place in the correct arrangement.  Such a minimal functionality requirement corresponds to the green line in the diagram below.  To imagine a new gene arriving, we must imagine the lucky appearance of 250 or more parts arranged in just the right way to produce a functional effect.  This would be a miracle of luck we would not expect to have happen by chance even once in the history of our planet, a miracle of luck very comparable in its improbability to typing monkeys producing a well-written useful functional paragraph of  250 characters or more. 

Were such a miracle of luck required just once, the difficulty would not be so bad. But for us to believe random mutations produced the human genome, we must imagine many thousands of such miracles of luck.  We cannot say we have an explanation for something when so many thousands of appeals are being made to miracles of luck. Clearly Darwinian evolution does not explain the information in our DNA. A few months ago a scientific paper by several scientists confessed, "Biological systems have evolved to amazingly complex states, yet we do not understand in general how evolution operates to generate increasing genetic and functional complexity."

So how did humans get in their DNA about 20,000 functional genes enabling humans to have 20,000+ different types of functional proteins, each serving a different purpose in the human body? Darwinian evolution does not credibly explain that. The issue is one that Darwin never understood, for in his time there was no understanding of the complexity of protein molecules, or the number of different types of protein molecules in the human body. Darwin thought that there are maybe twenty complex inventions in the human body, and he counted things like eyes and arms and legs as some of those. He had no idea that the number of complex inventions in the human body was a thousand times greater, since each different type of protein molecule is its own complex invention.  

Evoking the not-literally-accurate term "natural selection" does not get you out of such difficulties. The term is not-literally-accurate because no real selection is involved (selection being a word meaning choice by a conscious agent). Because natural selection only acts on innovations that have already appeared, the concept of natural selection does not explain most biological innovations. A famous biologist (Hugo de Vries) told us the truth about the limited power of natural selection when he stated this:

"Natural selection is a sieve. It creates nothing, as is so often assumed; it only sifts." 

As a quick-and-dirty analogy, you can think of natural selection as a mere sieve or filter that preserves lucky results. But perhaps a better analogy is if we think of natural selection as being like a computer printer.  Darwinists believe that a novel gene originates when some incredibly lucky random change occurs in a single organism, and that natural selection causes such a new gene to slowly spread across the gene pool of a species during multiple generations (because the gene produces  a survival benefit or reproduction benefit, causing an organism that has it to be more likely to spread its genes).  According to such a description, natural selection is acting like a computer printer that can make unlimited copies of some page or pages.  But it is a gigantic mistake to think that we can explain the origin of the gene by appealing to natural selection. At best natural selection is like a computer printer, and computer printers don't author things.

Within the context of explaining the origin of novel genes and novel  proteins, there is actually every reason to believe that the idea of natural selection is a very misleading one (beyond the mere fact that no real selection is occurring because agent is choosing). Why is that? Natural selection is basically the idea that nature preserves some great miracle of biological luck when it occurs. But let us imagine that random mutations were to produce a novel innovation by accidentally making a new type of functional protein molecule. With 99.999% likelihood such a thing would not be preserved in a gene pool for many generations, for the simple reason that it would only be one element when many other miracles of protein innovation or phenotypic innovation would be needed to actually produce a survival benefit or a reproduction benefit.  This is because the requirements for improvements in survival or reproduction are usually incredibly complicated, typically involving a requirement for quite a few coordinated and very complicated changes in different places. Such requirements are vastly underestimated by Darwinism enthusiasts who fail to study the gigantically diverse and complex requirements for successful biological improvements, which often involve multiple very complex "chicken or the egg" cross-dependencies. Just as inventing a CPU chip in 17th century France would not have got you anywhere (because countless other not-yet-invented things would also be needed for a computer), in general some accidental miracle of luck producing a functional new type of protein molecule would almost certainly be futile, because many other simultaneous (or nearly simultaneous) miracles of luck would be needed to produce a benefit in survival or reproduction.   

DNA is mainly a set of genes, each of which specifies the amino acid sequence of a particular type of protein. In this paper a Harvard scientist confessed, "A wide variety of protein structures exist in nature, however the evolutionary origins of this panoply of proteins remain unknown." That's right: evolution does not explain DNA. 

DNA Does Not Explain Bodies

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.  There are various ways in which this false idea is stated, all equally false:

• Many described DNA or the genome as a blueprint for an organism.
• Many said DNA or the genome is a recipe for making an organism.
• Many said DNA or the genome is a program for building an organism, making an analogy to a computer program.
• Many claimed that DNA or genomes specify the anatomy of an organism. 
• Many claimed that genotypes (the DNA in organisms) specify phenotypes (the observable characteristics of an organism).
• Many claimed that genotypes (the DNA in organisms) "map"  phenotypes (the observable characteristics of an organism) or "map to" phenotypes.
• Many claimed that DNA contains "all the instructions needed to make an organism."
• Many claimed that there is a "genetic architecture" for an organism's body or some fraction of that body. 
• 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. 

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 (shown below) 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. 

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 either the structure or the bodily position 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 page's 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 an internally dynamic  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 molecular merely listing low-level chemical information. 

The organization of large organisms is extremely hierarchical.  Subatomic particles are organized into atoms, which are organized into amino acids, which are organized into protein molecules, which are organized into protein complexes, which are organized into organelles, which are organized into cells, which are organized into tissues, which are organized into organs, which are organized into organ systems, which are organized into organisms. 

Cells are so complex they have been compared to factories or cities. The diagrams you see of cells are enormously misleading, making them look a thousand times simpler than they are.  A cell diagram will show maybe 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 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. 

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. 

Because 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 PhDs or MDs who have told us such an idea is untrue. Below is the list:

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

Very clearly, when we were told so often that DNA is a specification for making an organism, we were told a falsehood. DNA does not explain bodies. Your body did not originate because a DNA plan for making you was read from your body or from your mother's body.  

The magnificent hierarchical organization of the human body can be compared to a castle (although the human body is actually far more impressive an example of organization).  The claim that organization so immense arose from an accumulation of accidental DNA mutations is an example of what I call "crumbs into castles" thinking. 

Bodies Do Not Explain Minds

People love one-word explanations, because they are so convenient to evoke.  When asked to explain some very complex reality, nothing can top the convenience of being able to merely use a one-word term and pretend that you have an explanation, rather than going to the trouble of speaking or writing something like a very long nuanced paragraph  including realistic talk about aspects of the problem beyond your understanding. Besides fallaciously appealing to one-word explanations such as "evolution," and "DNA," the most common example of a dubious one-word explanation in scientific academia is when biologists try to explain minds by merely offering "bodies" or "brains" as an explanation. 

Nothing in your body or your brain explains the most basic facts such as consciousness or self-hood or understanding.  Romain Brette is a neuroscientist actively engaged in neuroscience research. He states in a post on his blog, "I have no idea why neural activity should produce any conscious experience at all." Neither does any other neuroscientist.   

Scientists have not made any progress in giving a credible explanation as to how a brain could generate any such thing as an abstract idea. An idea is a mental thing. We have some idea of how mental things can produce other mental things (such as how one idea can lead to another idea). We also understand how physical things can produce other physical things. But no one really has any idea at all how a physical thing could possibly produce a purely mental thing. 

Let us imagine an organism with a single neuron in its skull. We can think of no reason why such an organism would be capable of producing a thought.  If we then imagine an organism with 100 billion neurons in its skull, all unconnected,  then we can still think of no reason why thoughts should start coming from such a set of neurons.  Why would 100 billion neurons be able to think when a single neuron was not able to think? No one can say. If we imagine not just 100 billion neurons but 100 billion inter-connected neurons, there is still no reason why thought should be expected to flow out of such an arrangement of matter. If someone says that with such an  arrangement we would expect thoughts to pour forth, it is only because he has been told all of his life that thought comes from a brain that is billions of neurons connected with each other.  Similarly, if the person has been told all his life that thought is a product of liver secretions, then such a person would laugh very hard at the idea that thoughts can be produced by some arrangements of neurons, but he would tell you that we should expect thoughts to come from any organs that secreted fluids like the human liver does. 

Humans have no experience with any machine capable of producing thoughts, so humans cannot say that such and such a mechanical arrangement of matter should be expected to produce thoughts.  But humans do have experience in designing and building machines (computers) that are capable of storing information for years and also capable of instantly retrieving information.  From such work humans have got some ideas about the kind of characteristics a system has to have to be capable of permanently storing large amounts of information, and capable of instantly retrieving information.  Such things include: 

• some encoding system by which information can be transformed into the form in which it is stored;
• some writing capability by which information can be written at some particular spot;
• some capability by which information is permanently preserved  once it has been written;
• various capabilities (such as a reading component and indexing and a coordinate system or position notation system) which allow a specific piece of information to be instantly found and read;
• a decoding system by which information that had been stored in encoded form could be decoded so that it could be used.

The problem is that no sign of any such thing can be found in the human brain. No one knows of any capability by which a brain could translate human learned knowledge or episodic memories into brain states or neural states. No one knows of any capability by which a brain could write such information once it had been encoded.  No  one knows of any capability by which a brain could store learned information for decades.   No one knows of any capability by which a brain could read information that had been stored in it, and translate such encoded information into thoughts.  The brain has nothing like a position notation system, a coordinate system, an indexing system, a reading unit or a writing unit. Computers store information using a spinning disk, and what is called a read/write head, which can move to access various positions on such a disk. Nothing like that exists in the brain. There is no mobile unit in the brain that moves around to read or write from a particular spot, like the blinking cursor in a word processing unit.  When scanned during mental activities, brains never look like they are reading information from one particular spot, and never look like they are writing information to one particular spot. 

The fact is that our neuroscientists have done nothing to explain the wonder of human memory.  We know of nothing in a brain that is a credible candidate mechanism to explain human memory storage.  We know of nothing in a brain that is a credible candidate mechanism to explain instant memory retrieval.  The phrases that neuroscientists mutter when asked to explain human memory do not qualify as explanations.  Such neuroscientists mutter vague phrases such as "synapse strengthening," hoping that we overlook the fact that information is never written by some mere act of strengthening. 

With their left hands our neuroscientists have discovered facts that contradict the claims that neuroscientists write with their right hands.  Among these facts are the following:

• The fact that the average lifetime of the proteins that make up synapses is only a few weeks or less, 1000 times shorter than the maximum length of time that humans can reliably remember things (sixty years or more). 
• The fact that synapses are structurally entangled with or dependent upon units called dendritic spines we can observe with powerful microscopes, and that such dendritic spines have a half-life of roughly 120 days, and that there is no evidence any dendritic spines last for more than a few years (with dendritic spines in the hippocampus having particularly short average lifetimes of days rather than months). 
• The fact that within the brain there are many types of serious noise all over the place, the kind of thing which should prevent any reliable memory recall if memories were stored in brains.
• The fact that the great majority of synapses are chemical synapses subject to the very severe cumulative slowing factor of synaptic gaps, which should prevent anyone from being able to instantly recall any learned factual information.
• The fact that while humans such as Hamlet actors and Wagnerian tenors can flawlessly recall very large bodies of learned information,  each transmission across a chemical synapse occurs with less than 50% reliability, which should prevent any accurate recall of large bodies of information from synaptic storage locations. According to the paper here, "In the cortex, individual synapses seem to be extremely unreliable: the probability of transmitter release in response to a single action potential can be as low as 0.1 or lower."
• The fact that the brain is completely lacking in any kind of indexing system, coordinate system or position notation system, which should prevent any instant recall of learned information, preventing a brain from being able to instantly find the exact spot or spot where memory information was neurally stored. 
• The fact that the protein synthesis postulated by neuroscientists as a key factor in memory formation is something that requires minutes of time,  a length of time far greater than the instantaneous memory formation that humans routinely display.  

Besides failing to explain the ordinary facts of human mental performance, bodies and brains fail to explain extraordinary human mental experiences and extraordinary human mental performance, which are commonly described using the word "paranormal." It is sometimes said that the systematic scientific study of the paranormal began with the founding of the Society for Psychical Research in the late nineteenth century.  That is not correct.  We have nearly two hundred years of systematic scientific evidence for the paranormal, which dates all the way back to the second committee on Mesmerism (1825-1831) carried out by the Royal Academy of Medicine in France, a committee which resoundingly found in favor of the existence of clairvoyance (as discussed here).  Every decade of human experience since 1831 has provided abundant written evidence of human experiences and human capabilities that cannot be explained by any neural theory of memory and minds.  Some of the reasons why phenomena such as ESP cannot be credibly explained under any bodily explanation or brain explanation are discussed here. 

What goes on in neuroscience departments of universities is a kind of giant game of "wear the horse blinders" under which neuroscience professors pretend that a large fraction of the most important human observations never occurred.  The diagram below illustrates the situation. The "Prevailing Academic Dogmas and WorldView" in the diagram is maintained largely by customs of evidence censorship, in which evidence conflicting with prevailing academia dogmas is excluded from college textbooks and from university courses.  

Let's consider just one tiny fraction of this evidence censorship. Studies suggest that the phenomenon of deathbed apparitions (also called end-of-life visions) occurs to between 10% and 35% of the population. A survey of family members of deceased Japanese found that 21% reported deathbed visions. A study of 103 subjects in India reports this: "Thirty of these dying persons displayed behavior consistent with deathbed visions-interacting or speaking with deceased relatives, mostly their dead parents." A study of 102 families in the Republic of Moldava found that "37 cases demonstrated classic features of deathbed visions--reports of seeing dead relatives or friends communicating to the dying person."  A 1949 book states this: 

"It is a commonplace truth, observed by many physicians and clergymen, that a dying person, when conscious near the moment of death, acts or speaks as if he saw standing near loved ones who have already died. Dr. Russell Conwell told Bruce Barton in the interview quoted earlier in another connection, that he had witnessed this phenomenon 'literally hundreds of times.' "

But this very important observational phenomenon is completely ignored by the vast majority of psychologists and neuroscientists.  The type of evidence censorship that is going on is as great as it would be if the medical community were to deny the existence of migraine headaches, which we have reason to believe do not occur to a higher percentage of the population than deathbed apparitions or end-of-life visions (studies report migraine headaches occurring to between about 3% and 21% of the population). Deathbed apparitions and end-of-life visions make up only a tiny fraction of the evidence for the paranormal that neuroscientists and psychologists exclude from their papers and textbooks. 

When someone has to resort to massive evidence censorship, it is a symptom of a severe explanatory dysfunction.  For example, if someone maintains that all dogs are small and lap-sized, and he tries  to maintain that belief by allowing only the publication of books that refer exclusively to small dogs (or books suggesting that anyone reporting large dogs is hallucinating),  then something has gone very, very wrong in the thought process of such a person. Similarly, when neuroscience departments and psychology departments find it necessary to exclude from their courses and textbooks some of the most important experiences and observations humans have made, for the sake of excluding observations that do not fit with their prevailing dogmas of brains making minds,  then something has gone very, very wrong.  

But paranormal phenomena are just "icing on the cake" in regard to showing that bodies and brains do not explain minds. You can show that nothing in the body can explain a human mind and human memory by discussing only facts that are not disputed by neuroscientists: the neuroscience facts and case histories I discuss in the posts of this blog.