"There's a Genome Recipe for Brains" Is As False as "Brains Make Minds"

 About 1950 the DNA molecule was discovered inside chromosomes,  scientists began making an untrue claim about DNA, the claim that it specified how to make an organism. There were various ways in which this false idea was stated, all equally false:

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

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 nucleotides 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. Below is the genetic code, the only coding system ever discovered in DNA or its genes. The chemicals listed on the outer ring are types of amino acids. The A, T, C and G are types of nucleotides in a gene ( adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine).

The genetic code

A billion-dollar project was executed in the 1990's to completely map the human genome. Geneticists kept telling us that the project would reveal in DNA and its genes instructions for how to build a body. The project was completed around 2001. No instructions for building a body or any of its organs or cells or any of the organelle components of cells was ever found in DNA. 

Did our scientists then "fess up" and confess how they had been misleading us? Some of them started to tell the truth, but very many of them just stuck to their old lies about DNA being a body specification.  See the appendix of this post for a long list of scientists and doctors who told us the truth on this matter -- that DNA is not any kind of blueprint or recipe or program for making a human body. 

We see here a shocking case of a major group of scientists simply refusing to accept what nature was telling them -- that a human body does not arise from a reading of a specification in DNA or its genes telling how to build a human body. 

The latest example of a scientist continuing to teach the same old groundless falsehoods about DNA and its genes is the article "The genome offers a recipe, not a blueprint, for the brain" by neuroscientist Ila Fiete. Fiete tries to advance the old "recipe" version of the false claim that DNA is a specification for making a human body. 

When such a claim is made, a person will talk about "ingredients" being added. Whenever a person talks that way, he will sound like a biology ignoramus. Ingredients are simple things. The organs in human bodies are not built from simple things, but enormously organized components, components way, way too organized to be sensibly described as "ingredients."  Organ systems are built from organs and other very complex components; organs are built from tissues; tissues are built from cells so organized they are often compared to cities or factories; cells are built from many thousands of very complex and well-arranged organelles of many types; organelles are built from thousands of types of proteins and also protein complexes so complex they are often called "molecular machines"; protein complexes are built from very many types of protein molecules that each require special arrangements of hundreds or thousands of amino acids. None of these layers of organization larger than a protein molecule is specified by DNA or its genes. 

The diagram below specifies levels of organization in the human body. The black bar tells some of these levels that are not specified by a genome, not specified by DNA or its genes. 

Fiete makes this "starts out fairly true, but ends up false" statement: "Genes specify ingredients and a short list of directions, outlining which things to combine, in what quantity and when." No, genes do not specify "which things to combine, in what quantity and when," if you are talking about any level of complexity higher than a protein molecule. DNA and its genes (the genome) do not have any information about any "when." Fiete follow this statement with a true sentence and a groundless hand-waving sentence not matching anything that scientists have discovered. Referring to genes, she says:

"They don’t specify the border between the secondary visual cortex and its neighbor, or the wiring between each pair of neurons, or the precise size of the cortical sheet in each individual’s brain. Instead, these quantities emerge through the playing out of simpler processes that can lead to the self-organization of complex structures."

The reference to emergence and self-organization is just empty hand-waving. When scientists lack any explanation for how something in the body arises, they may refer to "emergence" or "self-organization," and when we hear such terms we should always be regarding such terms as indications that the person speaking has no substantial explanation. 

Fiete refers to "developmental biologist Lewis Wolpert’s 'French flag' model, in which a molecular gradient specifies locations in a tissue, activating downstream genes at specific concentration thresholds to determine what structure forms there."  There was never any good evidence to support this claim, and late in his career Wolpert confessed the lack of good evidence for it.  In 2015 he was asked this: "Where do you think the French Flag model fits with our current understanding of positional information, and what do you think are the exciting questions at the moment?" He answered this:

"There are problems we haven’t solved. It is terrible, but we still don’t have a molecular basis for it. If I still had an active lab, finding the molecular basis for positional information would be my objective, but would be quite tricky, since I’m not a biochemist or molecular biologist. There is one case of a molecule that might encode positional information, Prod 1, which is graded along the amphibian limb and was discovered by Jeremy Brockes. But it would be nice to find similar molecules in other systems."

This was the most damning confession. By saying "we still don't have a molecular basis for it," Lewis Wolpert pretty much confessed here that the "positional information" claim that he had encouraged innumerable times in his career was basically baloney or BS. He confessed that there was merely "one case of a molecule that might encode positional information," in one type of organism, making it sound like there was no general basis for thinking that molecules specify the positions that cells should go to.  The claim associated with Wolpert that "morphogen gradients" tell cells where to go is debunked in my post here. 

Trying to create an impression or suspicion in the reader's mind that genes specify the position of cells, Fiete states, "Thomas Gregor and his colleagues report that multiple gap genes together specify a cell’s position through lateral interactions better than a single gradient without interactions." The claim is untrue, and genes do not and cannot possibly specify the position of any cell. In the study referred to, a mere claim was made that "expression levels of the four gap genes can be jointly decoded into an optimal specification of position with 1% accuracy." The expression level of a gene is how often the gene is used at particular times and places, and is something very different from what information is inside a gene and what a gene specifies. Gene expression levels are something figured out by scientists using high-tech equipment. A gene does not have any information on its expression level, just as a word does not have any information on how often it is used or quoted. 

What was going on in the paper was something similar to analyzing how often a word is used in a book, to predict which paragraph or chapter in a book the word was found. Just as doing such analysis does nothing to show that a word specifies the structure of a paragraph, analyzing gene expression levels and correlating them with some cell positions does nothing to show that genes specify the positions of cells.  The paper authors confess that their analysis "contrasts with the traditional interpretation of the gap genes as forming 'expression domains' that are either on or off," sounding like they were doing some contrarian analysis conflicting with previous studies.  Their claims involve one brief stage in the development of only one species, a type of fly. No one has ever shown that in general genes specify the positions of cells in species. 

Below is a Google Gemini infographic explaining gene expression. We see how a small section of a gene (containing different combinations of the nucleotide chemicals adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine) specify a particular section of a protein (consisting of some amino acids).  There is no coding system by which any combinations of these chemicals in a gene (adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine) can represent anything other than an amino acid or a "stop" signal meaning the end of an amino acid sequence. Genes only specify low-level chemical things, not higher-level biology things such as how to build a cell or any of the organelles that make up a cell, or where to place a cell or where to place any of the proteins in a cell. 

In the following quote Fiete gives us a hint that the "genome as brain recipe" in her title is not actually true. She states this: "My colleague P. Robin Hiesinger notes that even the cake analogy may give genes too much credit; typical recipes specify ingredients, as well as the order and duration of steps, but in development, these can themselves be emergent, as seen in the assembly of the sorting plate that guides fly eye neurons into the brain." Genes do not specify where and when their corresponding proteins should be used. 

Brains are made mainly of neurons, and genes do not specify how to make any neuron or any of the organelles from which neurons are constructed. So the genome is not a recipe for building a brain, and is not a recipe of the neurons or synapses or axons that make up a brain. 

After saying nothing of any substance to back up her claim that the genome is a recipe for building brains, and nothing of any substance to back up her hand-waving claims of "self-organization," Fiete has a paragraph lecturing us about the type of scientists we need. On that topic I say: what we need are neuroscientists who do not tell us old wives' tales about DNA and genes, scientists who talk straight to us about the physical limitations of genomes and the physical limitations of brains. Straight talk about the physical limitations of genomes and their contents leads to the conclusion that genes cannot be any program, blueprint or recipe for constructing a human body or any of its organs or cells. Straight talk about the physical limitations of brains and their contents leads to the conclusion that brains cannot be the source of human minds and cannot be any storage place of human memories. The two conclusions are mutually reinforcing.  If (partially because of the vast levels of hierarchical organization in human bodies) we cannot credibly explain the physical origin of any adult human body (and we certainly cannot), then it is all the more plausible that we lack any physical explanation for the origin of any human mind and lack any physical organizations for the wonders of human memory. 

Appendix: Below are some quotes by scientists and doctors confessing that DNA and its genes are no specification for making a human body. 

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 (I will boldface underline the references to recipes):

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." Regarding the "DNA as body recipe" claim he has stated this: "The expression of specific genes in the course of development resembles nothing like the way a cook handles the ingredients of a recipe. Living organisms are also highly differentiated in a number of functional parts or components (cell types, tissues, etc.), in contrast with the homogenous cake that comes out of the oven. Moreover, the genome is not written in anything like a 'language,' as in the case of a recipe, and it certainly does not contain a description of the desired end product in any meaningful sense of the word 'description.’ "
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."
42. In a 2024 scientific paper two scientists confessed that "morphogenesis does not have a hardwired blueprint, it is not a linear readout of genetic information." Later they said, "The complex morphological patterns of organs emerge during development and cannot be deduced from its cellular and molecular constituents." As an alternative to "DNA as blueprint" myths, they offered this very vacuous-sounding explanation: "Instead, cells constantly adapt to surrounding cues to buffer against stochastic fluctuations and self-organise into a variety of macroscopic structures." That is a bit of empty hand-waving that fails to explain how there arises anatomy so fine-tuned and functional, and also fails to explain how so many types of enormously organized cells arise.
43. On page 94 of his book "What Genes Can't Do," former cell biologist Lenny Moss stated this: "The standard rationale for speaking of genes in the conflationary style -- as the 'information,' 'blueprint,' 'program,' 'instructions,' and so forth for building an organism -- is that DNA provides the template for synthesizing proteins and that proteins, as enzymes, regulate all of the chemical reactions of the cell. For this rationale to hold up it must be the case that either (1) spatial arrangements of enzymes in the cell are of no great consequence or (2) that spatial arrangement is somehow prefigured and predetermined by the one-dimensional array...in the genes. A principal objective of this chapter is to provide evidence and an argument to the effect that neither of these is the case." In the book's introduction, he stated, "The seemingly prevalent idea that genes constitute information for traits (and blueprints for organisms) is based, I argue, on an unwarranted conflation...held together by rhetorical glue."