The Lack of Bodily Addresses Crushes the Credibility of Mechanistic Biology and Mechanistic Psychology

 Accounts of the history of science love to follow a convention of discussing some important discovery, and then telling how that discovery led to some important new understanding about nature. For example, we are often told about the discovery of the red shifts of galaxies, and how this led to the important conclusion that the universe is expanding. But some of the most important insights about nature follow from observation failures -- cases when things were not observed.  

An example was Louis Pasteur's famous experiment regarding spontaneous generation. Pasteur took two goose flasks and filled them with broth. He heated them both to a high enough temperature to sterilize any microbes in them. One flask was left sealed, and the other other flask was left unsealed.  The flasks were left for months. After months, the unsealed flask had developed microbes inside the broth. But the sealed flask had no such microbes. Tending to discredit claims of spontaneous generation, the experiment at least showed something very important: that life cannot easily arise from non-life.  That was a very important insight. Now we understand some of the reasons why life cannot easily arise from non-life, such as the fact that even the simplest forms of life are extremely complex systems requiring a special arrangement of 100,000+ atoms, an arrangement so improbable that its chance occurrence would be like ink splashes writing many pages of well-written prose.

Another example of an important observational failure has been the failure of all attempts to receive radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations. Scientists have been trying to receive such signals for more than 50 years, but have not got anywhere. The failure of such a search tells us something important: that our galaxy is apparently not abundant in technological civilizations that are eager to communicate with strangers. Apparently we don't live in a Star Trek type galaxy in which there's a civilized planet in roughly every parsec.  

Another example of an important observational failure has been the failure of all attempts to detect in DNA anything like a blueprint, recipe or program for making a human body or any of its organs or any of its cells. DNA contains only low-level chemical information such as which amino acids make up particular proteins. The Human Genome Project was completed in 2003, and by now the genomes of more than 3000 species have been cataloged. No one ever found in any genome any such thing as a specification of anatomy or how to build an organ or even how to build a cell. 

The implications of this observational failure are vast. The lack of high-level anatomical information in DNA and the lack of DNA instructions on how to build cells means that the origin of every adult human body is a miracle of organization a thousand miles over the heads of today's biologists.  There is not a biologist in the world who can explain how it is it that a speck-sized zygote is able to progress to the state of vast hierarchical organization that is the human body, without telling us lies such as the lie that DNA has a blueprint or recipe or program for making the human body. The lack of anatomy information in DNA and the lack of cellular specifications in DNA is such a show-stopper for mechanistic biology that mechanistic biologists have dealt with the problem by lying to us for decades, telling us the phony myth that DNA has a blueprint or a recipe or a program for making a human body.  For a long list of biology and medical authorities who have told us the truth about this topic (saying that DNA is no such thing as a blueprint, a recipe or program for making a human body or any of its cells), read my post here. 

There is another observational failure of scientists that has the most gigantic implications: the failure of scientists to ever detect any such thing as addresses within the human body. The human body has no such thing as an internal coordinate system.  There is no part of the body that has any such thing as an addressing system.  There is no body addressing system. There is no brain address system. There is not even an addressing system within DNA. The lack of any address system in the human body has gigantic implications. 

One implication of the lack of any addressing system in DNA is that scientists are unable to give any credible mechanistic explanation for the origin of any protein molecule. 

Cells are constantly creating new proteins to replace proteins that disappeared because of the short lifetimes of proteins. The page here discusses the lifetimes of human proteins, and we see a reference to a scientific paper listing the average human protein as having a half-life of only 6.9 hours. A muscle protein might live for three weeks, but a liver protein might live for only a few days. To create new proteins, a cell uses a process called gene transcription. In this process a particular gene in DNA will be converted to a messenger RNA molecule that helps to build the new protein. 

Cell transcription occurs quickly. The source here lists a time of ten minutes for a gene to be transcribed by a mammal, but another source lists a speed of only about a minute. The great majority of that is used up by the reading of base pairs from the gene, with typically more than a 1000 base pairs being read each time a gene is transcribed. The finding of the correct gene to read in DNA seems to occur in only seconds, not minutes, or at most a few minutes. 

Descriptions of DNA transcription fail to explain a huge issue: how does a cell find the right gene in DNA so quickly? Human DNA contains more than 20,000 genes, each of which is just a section of the DNA. The DNA is like an extremely long necklace of many thousands of beads, and a typical gene is like a group of several hundred of those beads. We should actually imagine multiple such necklaces, because DNA is scattered across 23 different chromosome pairs. Now if genes had gene numbers, and DNA was a set of numbered genes in numerical order, it might be easy to find a particular gene. So if a cell knew that it was trying to find gene number 4,233, it could use a binary search method that would allow it to find that gene pretty quickly. Such a method might sound like Bob using a binary search method efficiently in the dialog below:

Jane: Okay, I picked a date in world history. Try to guess it. 

Bob: Was it after the first century AD?

Jane: Yes.

Bob: Was it in the past thousand years?

Jane: Yes

Bob: Was it in the past 500 years?

Jane: No.

Bob: Was it between 1250 and 1500?

Jane: Yes.

Bob: Was it between 1375 and 1500?

Jane: Yes.

Using such a binary search method, Bob will find the correct year within several more guesses. 

But no such method can be used within the human body. Genes do not have gene numbers that can be accessed within the human body, and DNA is not numerically sorted. DNA has no indexes that might allow a cell to find some particular gene that it was trying to find within DNA.  So we have an explanatory "needle in a haystack" problem.  Or we might call it a "needle in the haystacks" problem, because human DNA is scattered across 23 different chromosome pairs, as shown in the diagram below:

A scientific text tells us some information that makes this explanatory problem seem more pressing:

"One might have predicted that the information present in genomes would be arranged in an orderly fashion, resembling a dictionary or a telephone directory. Although the genomes of some bacteria seem fairly well organized, the genomes of most multicellular organisms, such as our Drosophila example, are surprisingly disorderly. Small bits of coding DNA (that is, DNA that codes for protein) are interspersed with large blocks of seemingly meaningless DNA. Some sections of the genome contain many genes and others lack genes altogether. Proteins that work closely with one another in the cell often have their genes located on different chromosomes, and adjacent genes typically encode proteins that have little to do with each other in the cell. Decoding genomes is therefore no simple matter. Even with the aid of powerful computers, it is still difficult for researchers to locate definitively the beginning and end of genes in the DNA sequences of complex genomes, much less to predict when each gene is expressed in the life of the organism. Although the DNA sequence of the human genome is known, it will probably take at least a decade for humans to identify every gene and determine the precise amino acid sequence of the protein it produces. Yet the cells in our body do this thousands of times a second."

We have here a very severe navigation problem. A cell is somehow able to find the right gene in only seconds or a few minutes when a new protein is made, even though DNA and chromosomes seem to have no physical organization that could allow for such blazing fast  access to the right information. 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? ‘To me that is one of the most fundamental questions in biology,’ says biochemist Robert Tjian of the University of California at Berkeley in the US: ‘How does a cell know what it is supposed to be?"

Biochemist Tjian has spoken just as if he had no idea how it is that a cell is able to navigate to the right place to read a particular gene in DNA. Later in the article we read this:

"For one thing, the regulatory machinery ‘is unbelievably complex’, says Tjian, comprising perhaps 60–100 proteins – mostly of a class called transcription factors (TFs) – that have to interact before anything happens. ....As well as promoters, mammalian genes are controlled by DNA segments called enhancers. Some proteins bind to the promoter site, others bind to the enhancer, and they have to communicate. ‘This is where things get bizarre, because the enhancer can sit miles away from the promoter,’ says Tjian – meaning, perhaps, millions of base pairs away, maybe with a whole gene or two in between. And the transcription machinery can’t just track along the DNA until it hits the enhancer, because the track is blocked. In eukaryotes, almost all of the genome is, at any given moment, packaged away by being wrapped around disk-shaped proteins called histones. These, says Tjian, ‘are like big boulders on the track’: you can’t get past them easily.... ‘Even after 40 years of studying this stuff, I don’t think we have a clear idea of how that looping happens,’ says Tjian. Until recently, the general idea was that the TFs and other components all fit together into a kind of jigsaw, via molecular recognition, that will bridge and bind a loop in place while transcription happens. ‘We molecular biologists love to draw nice model schemes of how TFs find their target genes and how enhancers can regulate promoters located millions of base pairs away,’ says Ralph Stadhouders of the Erasmus University Medical Centre in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. ‘But exactly how this is achieved in a timely and highly specific manner is still very much a mystery.’ "

Later in the article Tjian says he was shocked by the speed at which some of the process occurs. He expected it would take hours, but found something much different:

"The residence times of these proteins in vivo was not minutes or hours, but about six seconds!’, he says. ‘I was so shocked that it took me months to come to grips with my own data. How could a low-concentration protein ever get together with all its partners to trigger expression of a gene, when everything is moving at this unbelievably rapid pace?’ "

The rest of the article is just some speculation, which Tjian mostly knocks down, and the article itself calls "hand-wavy." We are left with the impression that no one understands how cells are able to instantly find the right gene. 

On page 100 of the very interesting work "Theory of Directed Evolution" scientist Alexey V. Melkikh asks this:

"How does a protein during genome regulation find its only place on the DNA molecule? If it is based on the key-lock principle, how does the protein not confuse its binding site with someone else's? How many erroneous attempts at linking should it make until it finds its site? Why does it not get stuck in someone else's deep potential hole? All these processes should drastically reduce the efficiency of genome regulation."

The question I raise in this section of this post is a question raised, but never answered, by the latest (32nd) edition of Harper's Illustrated Biochemistry, which states this:

"The question 'How does RNAP [RNA polymerase] find the correct site to initiate transcription?' is not trivial when the complexity of the genome is considered....The situation is even more complex in humans, where as many  as 150,000 distinct transcriptions sites are distributed throughout [three billion base pairs] of DNA."

The textbook gives us a very detailed discussion of things such as promoters, but the discussion fails to answer the question of how this "finding the needle in a haystack" could occur so quickly. 

The lack of any addressing system within DNA means that the fast  construction of a protein molecule is something beyond any mechanistic explanation. Furthermore, the lack of any addressing system within the body implies that the arrival of a protein molecule at a suitable place within a cell is beyond mechanistic explanation. 

Let us consider how fantastically complex human cells are. Humans cells are constantly misrepresented by profoundly misleading diagrams that make them look many thousands of times simpler than they are. A typical human cell has thousands of times more organelles than depicted  by a typical cell diagram.  A human cell is so complex it has been compared to a city. For newly constructed protein molecules to do their jobs, they must arrive at the right places. An analogy might be a worker who arrives at a city to start working.  He can't just start working anywhere. He has to arrive at the right place in the city, to do his specialized job. Workers can successfully arrive at the right place to their jobs because cities have addresses. So, for example, a worker may be told to start working at 353 Maple Street on August 8. 

But cells have no addresses, and no coordinate system. So it can't be that a protein molecule arrives at the right place in a cell because it was told to go to some particular address in a cell. So how do protein molecules arrive at the right places in cells? Mechanistic biology has no general explanation to offer. 

There's another similar problem of equal immensity: the problem of how newly constructed cells arrive at the right places in the human body. Consider the origin of a human body. The beginning of human development is a single cell called a zygote. That somehow progresses to become the vast state of hierarchical organization that is the human body. Along the way, something like 200 types of cells must originate, each in massive numbers. All those cells must find the right places to exist. It doesn't do a body any good, for example, if heart cells end up in the foot or liver cells up in the stomach. 

How do cells find the right place to go to? Mechanistic biology has no credible answer to offer. Part of the reason a mechanistic answer is impossible is the lack of any addresses in the body. 

We may consider some of the difficulties. On a two-dimensional surface, there are two ways in which addresses might work. In the first way, no map is needed, but the addresses must be numerically ordered. For example, in general (with some exceptions) you don't need a map to navigate around in Manhattan. That borough of New York City is sensibly organized so that streets are numbered in numerical order. So if you are on, say, 2nd Avenue and 14th street, you do not need a map to navigate to 5th Avenue and 22nd Street.  Conversely, a city may have streets in no numerical order. In that case, to find a particular house there must exist both street addresses and maps people can use to find a particular street.  You can't just use simple math to navigate your way to Roosevelt Avenue and Maple Street. 

Now, in a human body growing from a speck-sized zygote to a baby of ten pounds and eventually an adult of maybe 180 pounds, it would never be practical to use numerically ordered addresses; and such numerical addresses don't exist in the body.  So what you would need for a cell to navigate around in the human body would be something like both addresses that are not numerically ordered, and also a map storing all the addresses. But neither of these things exist in the body.  Organelles in cells don't have addresses; cells don't have addresses; and particular spots of the body don't have addresses. So how could a cell ever find the right place to go to in the body? Mechanistic biology has no credible answer. 

There are are two additional reasons why the problem of cells finding the right locations in the body and protein molecules finding the right locations in cells is actually far greater than I have suggested above:

(1) Instead of requiring merely navigation to the right place on a flat surface (like a person navigating to the right address in a city), the problem of navigating to the right place in a cell or the body is exponentially more difficult, because we are dealing with three-dimensional space rather than a flat two-dimensional space. 

(2) City streets are conveniently designed with sidewalks and streets allowing you to go anywhere you want, but cells and bodies are filled with existing matter blocking navigation, and existing flow pathways making it all the more harder for protein molecules and cells to find the right places. An analogy might be a city in which very heavy traffic, blocked roads and streets, and a raging flash flood makes it so much harder to get around to where you are trying to go. 

For reasons such as these, a lack of addresses in the body crushes the credibility of mechanistic biology as an explanation for the origin of the human body. The lack of addresses in the body also crushes the credibility of mechanistic psychology, the idea that human mind and memory can be explained as mechanistic brain processes. 

Humans routinely display the ability to instantly recall learned information, given a name, date or image. So, for example, if you say "death of Lincoln," I will instantly be able to recite various facts about the death of Abraham Lincoln, such as that it occurred because John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln through the back of his head at Ford's Theater on April 15, 1865.  If we believe that a memory is stored in some tiny little spot in the brain, such as storage spot 186,395 out of 950,000, then we have the problem: how was the brain able to instantly find that exact tiny spot where the memory was formed? This difficulty is a "show stopper" for all claims that a memory is stored in one exact spot of a brain, an insuperable difficulty.  

We cannot get around such a difficulty by imagining that a brain uses the type of things that a book or a computer use to allow instant retrieval.  Books and computers use information addressing, sorting and indexes to allow instant access of a particular data item.  The brain has neither addressing nor indexes nor sorting.  Unlike houses that have street addresses, neurons don't have neuron numbers or any other addressing system. Storing a memory in a brain would be like throwing a little 3" by 5" card into a giant swimming pool filled to the top with a million little 3" by 5" cards.  Just as it should take you a very long time to find a specific piece of information stored in such a swimming pool, it would take you a very long time to find in the brain some particular piece of learned information, if it was stored in one tiny spot, like a book stored in one spot on the shelves of a huge library.  

You do not at all get around this difficulty by suggesting the idea that a memory or a piece of learned information is scattered or distributed in multiple locations across the brain. The main difficulty is explaining instantaneous recall. If a brain has to search scattered storage locations in the brain, that would not be any easier than finding a single storage location; it would instead be harder. We would then have the same problem: how is it that those exact locations can instantly be found? Similarly, if  a family is somewhere in New York City, and you don't know their address, without an electronic device you won't be able to find the family very quickly; and it's not going to be any easier if the family is scattered across three different apartments in different parts of the city, which would make finding the family even harder. You do not solve a "how was the needle instantly found in the haystack" problem by converting it to the even harder problem of "how were just the right few needles instantly found in multiple haystacks?" Moreover, the idea of a brain instantly bringing together scattered fragments to instantly make a unified conceptual whole creates an "instant reassembly" problem that would be an additional explanatory nightmare, with such a thing being some miracle of instant assembly as implausible as someone instantly assembling cut-up pieces of a photo after the pieces had been scattered in pages of different books on different bookshelves.  

This "speed of human recall" problem becomes much worse when we consider that brain signals have an average transmission speed much slower than the "100 meters per second" figure that is commonly given (which is the fastest speed that any nerve signal can travel over any part of the brain)  A typical brain signal traveling from one part of a brain to another would have to pass across many chemical synapses, and each time that happens there would be a delay. The effect of cumulative synaptic delays would mean that brain signals must typically travel from one area of a brain to another at a sluggish speed of something like about one centimeter per second or less. Even if a brain somehow knew exactly where to find some information it needed, the retrieval of such information would be too slow to explain instant human recall. 

The failure to ever observe addresses in the brain is one of only two observation failures that crush the credibility of mechanistic psychology. The second failure is the failure to ever observe human learned information by microscopic observation of the brain. 

Despite microscopically studying more than 14,000 brains (a large fraction of which were cryogenically preserved within a day after death), scientists are unable to read any memory from any of these brains, and are also unable to find any evidence of some neural code that could be used to translate learned information into brain states. The brains are saying "storing memories is not something brains do," but our scientists refuse to listen to what the brains are telling them.  

Below is a diagram from the paper "Materials Advances Through Aberration-Corrected Electron Microscopy." We see that since the time the genetic code was discovered about 1953, microscopes have grown very many times more powerful. The A on the left stands for an angstrom, a tenth of a nanometer (that is, a ten-billionth of a meter). 

Currently the most powerful microscopes can see things about 1 angstrom in width, which is a tenth of a nanometer. How does this compare to the sizes of the smallest units in brains? Those sizes are below:

Width of a neuron body (soma): about 100 microns (micrometers), which is about 1,000,000 angstroms.

Width of a synapse: about 500 nanometers, about 5000 angstroms.  When you search for "width of a synapse," you will commonly get a figure of 20 to 40 nanometers, but that is the width of the synaptic cleft, the gap between two synapses or between a synapse and a dendrite. The full head is much wider, as you can see from the page here.

Width of a dendritic spine: about 50 to 200 nanometers, about 500 to 2000 angstroms.

Length of a dendritic spine: the site here says, "the thin spine neck, which connects the spine to the main dendritic branch, has lengths between 0.04 and 1 μm [microns] and has 'door knob'-shaped head structures with diameters that [are] between 0.5 and 2 μm [microns]." That length dimension is between 400 and 10,000 angstroms; and that head diameter is between 500 and 20,000 angstroms. 

The visual below (from the page here) shows an electron microscope image of a synapse. The width of the synaptic head is more than 500 nanometers (nm). We see nothing that looks like any kind of storage of human learned information. The neurotransmitters inside the spherical vesicles are short-lived chemicals that don't even last a week. 

Clearly the resolution of the most powerful microscopes is powerful enough to read memories stored in neurons or synapses, if such memories existed. And more than 14,000 brains have been microscopically studied in recent years. The failure to microscopically read any  memories from human brain tissue is a major reason for thinking that brains do not store human memories.  

Besides failing to find specific memories and items of learned knowledge by microscopically examining brains (such as the information that the New York Yankees belong to the American League of US baseball), scientists can find no evidence of a mechanism for storing learned information in brains.  If such a mechanism existed, its fingerprints would be all over the place. Since humans can learn and remember so many different types of things (sights, sounds, feelings, facts, beliefs, opinions, numbers, smells, tastes, physical pains, physical pleasures, music, quotations, and so forth), any brain mechanism for storing all of these things would have a massive footprint in the brain and in the genome. No sign of any such thing can be found. The workhorses that get things done in the body are proteins, and humans have more than 20,000 types of proteins. No one has ever identified a protein that helps to write a memory of experiences or numbers or words to the brain or neural tissue, in any kind of way that helps explain how memories or knowledge could be stored in brains.  Of course, you can find studies maybe showing that protein XYZ was used when someone learned something, but that does nothing to show a mechanism of memory storage. 

There is a very important lesson to be learned here. For insight into the true nature of things, pay the greatest attention not merely to what scientists have discovered, but also to what they have not discovered. 

Let's define "morphogenesis" as the process that leads from a tiny speck-sized zygote to the full organization of a human body. The topic of morphogenesis tends to be senselessly ignored by philosophers of mind. The topic of morphogenesis is of very great relevance to the issue of whether brains make minds. A hazard of making a deep study of the topic of morphogenesis is that the literature on the topic is infested with lies, mainly the lie that DNA (the human genome) is a blueprint or program or recipe for making a human body. DNA and its genes are no such thing. DNA merely specifies low-level chemical information such as which amino acids make up a protein. 

The diagram below gives us an idea of what DNA and its genes do and do not specify. The internal parts (but not the 3D shape) of a protein molecule is specified by a gene in DNA. 

Once we sweep away the "DNA is a body blueprint" myth, we get closer to the shocking truth: the physical origin of every adult human body is a miracle of organization a thousand miles over the head  of every scientist. Although the main reasons for thinking that our minds and memory cannot be explained by neural causes are separate from considerations of morphogenesis, the truth that our bodies are beyond any "bottom-up" mechanistic explanation helps to bolster the idea that our minds and memory are beyond any "bottom-up" neural explanation. For more on why that is so, read my post here. 

You were told for much of your life the lie that the gigantic wonders of bodily organization kind of "bubble up" from genes that are mere lists of amino acids. That was a big lie of biologists eager to crown themselves as grand lords of explanation. You were also told for much of your life the falsehood that the innumerable wonders of the human mind are caused by a kind of bubbling up of largely random electrical and chemical activity from mere noisy neurons. That was a big myth told by biologists eager to crown themselves as grand lords of explanation. When you understand how you were misled by the first of  these myths, you will be more likely to perceive how you were misled by the second of these big myths. It was a similar deal in both cases: scientists putting themselves on pedestals by peddling self-serving unwarranted achievement legends, telling socially constructed tall tales that do not hold up to critical scrutiny and the most careful pondering of the relevant facts. 

A Biochemist's Promissory Note About Explaining Minds Sounds Very Lame

 The site www.realclearscience.com calls itself the "Real Clear Science" site, but what it often gives us is not real clear science, but articles that are clearly ideology and propaganda pieces.  Occasionally the propaganda includes PR pieces written to serve the vested interests of the pesticide industry. On January 6 the site had an article written to defend the pesticide industry and to attack whistleblowers who point out the hazards of pesticides. On the same day the site had a link to an article in the Irish Times entitled "Will science be able to explain consciousness?" with the title subtitle "There is every reason to believe that consciousness will eventually yield to scientific analysis just as the general nature of life yielded."  The article is by emeritus biochemistry professor William Reville.  The article is a very lame promissory note.

Reville starts out by claiming that "science now understands the basic molecular basis of life" and then stretches this into the claim that science understands the "general nature of life." He attempts to use this triumphal boast as a kind of springboard to suggest that solutions to the mystery of mind will be forthcoming. It's kind of like someone saying, "I was able to finish the one-kilometer race, so you can bet that I will be able to finish the marathon race." 

But the claim that science understands "the general nature of life" is untrue. Scientists do not understand any such thing. In particular:

• Scientists lack any credible explanation of how cells in the human body are able to reproduce. Cells are fantastically organized units so complex they have been compared to factories. Scientists can describe various phases in cell reproduction, but do not understand how cell reproduction is able to occur. The reproduction of every eukaryotic cell is a marvel as hard to explain as a jet aircraft splitting up to become two working jet aircraft. One of the main reasons why scientists cannot explain how cells reproduce is that the DNA in the nucleus of cells does not contain any instructions for how to build a cell. Neither DNA nor its genes even specify how to make any of the organelles that are the main building components of cells. DNA merely specifies low-level chemical information such as which amino acids make up a protein.  So we cannot at all explain the reproduction of cells by imagining that a cell reads from DNA some blueprint on how to make a cell. 
• Scientists lack any credible explanation for the origin of any type of protein molecule. Living things require very many different types of protein molecules. In the human body there are more than 20,000 different types of protein molecules, each a different type of complex invention. Most types of protein molecules require hundreds of well-arranged amino acid parts, and that altogether requires thousands of very well-arranged atoms in an average protein molecule. How did so many types of protein molecules so organized originate? Scientists do not understand how this occurred. You do not have any credible explanation if you merely refer us to Darwin or natural selection or evolution. The problem is that the functional thresholds of functional protein molecules are very high, ruling out a Darwinian explanation for their origin.  Darwin knew nothing about the complexity of protein molecules, and certainly did not explain their origin. For a good explanation of why Darwinism fails to explain the origin of protein molecules, read computer scientist David Gelernter's widely discussed book review entitled "Giving Up Darwin."  I may note that in that  book review, Gelernter misstated the average amino acid length of a protein molecule, listing it as merely 250. For the type of cells humans have (eukaryotic cells), the average length of a protein molecule is about 472 amino acids, meaning the probability of evolution producing a successful protein molecule (estimated by Gelernter as basically zero)  is very, very many orders of magnitude smaller than Gelernter suggests.  As four Harvard scientists stated in a paper, "A wide variety of protein structures exist in nature, however the evolutionary origins of this panoply of proteins remain unknown."  
• Scientists lack any credible explanation for how protein molecules get the three dimensional shapes needed for their function.  DNA merely specifies which amino acids make up particular protein molecules, and does not specify the three-dimensional shapes that such molecules must have to function properly. How do protein molecules form into such shapes? That is the long-standing problem called the protein folding problem, and it has never been solved. Don't be fooled by false claims that some AlphaFold2 software solved the protein problem. Such software merely made progress on a different problem, called the protein folding prediction problem. The quotes below tell us the truth on this matter:  (1) "In real time how the chaperones fold the newly synthesized polypeptide sequences into a particular three-dimensional shape within a fraction of second is still a mystery for biologists as well as mathematicians."   -- Arun Upadhyay, "Structure of proteins: Evolution with unsolved mysteries," 2019. (2) "The problem of protein folding is one of the most important problems of molecular biology. A central problem (the so called Levinthal's paradox) is that the protein is first synthesized as a linear molecule that must reach its native conformation in a short time (on the order of seconds or less). The protein can only perform its functions in this (often single) conformation. The problem, however, is that the number of possible conformational states is exponentially large for a long protein molecule. Despite almost 30 years of attempts to resolve this paradox, a solution has not yet been found." -- Two scientists, "On a generalized Levinthal's paradox," 2018. 

• Scientists lack any credible explanation of how protein complexes  are able to form. This is the problem of why it is that protein molecules so often form into very organized protein complexes, teams of protein molecules needed for the protein molecules to be functional. Such complexes are often so organized they are called "molecular machines." We cannot explain their formation merely be referring to DNA. Neither DNA nor its genes specify which protein molecules belong to particular protein complexes, nor do they specify how the intricate arrangement should occur. Here are some relevant quotes: (1) "The majority of cellular proteins function as subunits in larger protein complexes. However, very little is known about how protein complexes form in vivo." --Duncan and Mata, "Widespread Cotranslational Formation of Protein Complexes," 2011. (2) "While the occurrence of multiprotein assemblies is ubiquitous, the understanding of pathways that dictate the formation of quaternary structure remains enigmatic." -- Two scientists (link). (3) "A general theoretical framework to understand protein complex formation and usage is still lacking." -- Two scientists, 2019 (link). (4) "Protein assemblies are at the basis of numerous biological machines by performing actions that none of the individual proteins would be able to do. There are thousands, perhaps millions of different types and states of proteins in a living organism, and the number of possible interactions between them is enormous...The strong synergy within the protein complex makes it irreducible to an incremental process. They are rather to be acknowledged as fine-tuned initial conditions of the constituting protein sequences. These structures are biological examples of nano-engineering that surpass anything human engineers have created. Such systems pose a serious challenge to a Darwinian account of evolution, since irreducibly complex systems have no direct series of selectable intermediates, and in addition, as we saw in Section 4.1, each module (protein) is of low probability by itself." -- Steinar Thorvaldsen and Ola Hössjerm, "Using statistical methods to model the fine-tuning of molecular machines and systems,"  Journal of Theoretical Biology.
• Scientists lack any credible explanation of how any adult human body is able to appear. The physical structure of an adult human being is a state of organization many millions of times more complex than a mere fertilized speck-sized egg cell.  (A human egg cell is about a tenth of a millimeter in length, but a human body occupies a volume of about 75 million cubic millimeters.) So you don't explain the physical origin of an adult human being by merely referring to the fertilization of an egg cell during or after sexual intercourse.  We cannot explain the origin of an adult human body by merely using words such as "development" or "growth." Trying to explain the origin of an adult human body by merely mentioning a starting cell and mentioning "growth" or "development" is as vacuous as trying to explain the mysterious appearance of a building by saying that it appeared through "origination" or "construction."  If we were to find some mysterious huge building on Mars, we would hardly be explaining it by merely saying that it arose from "origination" or by saying that it appeared through "construction." When a person tries to explain the origin of a human body by merely mentioning "growth" or "development" or "morphogenesis," he is giving as empty an explanation as someone who tells you he knows how World War II started, because he knows that it was caused by "historical events." The claim that you can explain the origin of a human body by imagining a reading of a DNA blueprint for making a human body is a lie long told by biologists and chemists. As many scientists have confessed, no such blueprint or recipe or program for making a human body exists in DNA.  As discussed here, not only does DNA not specify how to make a human, DNA does not even specify how to make any organ or appendage or cell of a human. There are more than 200 types of cells in human beings, each an incredibly organized thing (cells are so complex they are sometimes compared to factories or cities).  DNA does not specify how to make any of these hundreds of types of cells. Cells are built from smaller structural units called organelles. DNA does not even specify how to make such low-level organelles. 

• Scientists have made no real progress in understanding the origin of life. No experiments realistically simulating early Earth conditions have ever been able to produce life from non-life. No experiments realistically simulating early Earth conditions have ever been able to produce the building blocks of one-celled life (organelles) from non-life. No experiments realistically simulating early Earth conditions have ever been able to produce the building blocks of the building blocks of one-celled life (functional protein molecules) from non-life.  No experiments realistically simulating early Earth conditions have ever even been able to produce the building blocks of the building blocks of the building blocks of one-celled life (biologically relevant amino acids) from non-life.  It was widely claimed that the Miller-Urey experiment produced the building blocks of the building blocks of the building blocks of one-celled life (biologically relevant amino acids) from non-life. But such claims were false.The Miller-Urey experiment never realistically simulated early Earth conditions, for reasons explained here. 

So where does this leave Reville's claim that scientists understand "the general nature of life"? It leaves that claim as an unfounded boast. Scientists do not understand any such thing. As biologist Denis Noble recently said, "It’s time to stop pretending that, give or take a few bits and pieces, we know how life works." 

Given the complexities discussed above, we should laugh hard at this ridiculously lame statement by Reville trying to persuade us that scientists understand "the general nature of life":

"The hierarchical structure of the world, from the simplest to the most complex, is traditionally categorised as follows: mineral, vegetable, animal, human. Each level displays all properties of the simpler level beneath but in addition displays a property/properties not present below. Thus, the human body is made of matter, is living, conscious and self-aware. The animal body is similar but lacks self-awareness. The plant body is made of matter, is living but lacks consciousness and self-awareness. Minerals are made of matter but are not alive, conscious or self-aware."

No, that is not a correct description of the hierarchical structure of the world. That is an extremely ridiculous statement trying to make the hierarchical structure of biology sound enormously less complex and organized than it is. Below is a correct description of the  hierarchical structure of biology. 

HUMANS CONSIST OF HUMAN BODIES AND HUMAN MINDS.	Human minds have displayed a vast number of capabilities, many of which mainstream scientists fail to properly study.
HUMAN BODIES MAINLY CONSIST OF ORGAN SYSTEMS AND A SKELETAL SYSTEM.	The human skeletal system contains 206 bones.
ORGAN SYSTEMS CONSIST OF ORGANS AND SUPPORTING STRUCTURES.	Examples of organ systems include the circulatory system (consisting of much more than just the heart), and the nervous system consisting of much more than just the brain.
ORGANS CONSIST OF TISSUES.
TISSUES CONSIST OF VERY COMPLEX AND VASTLY ORGANIZED  CELLS	There are more than 200 types of cells in the human body, each a different type of system of enormous organization. Cells are so complex they have been compared to factories with many types of manufacturing devices.
CELLS TYPICALLY CONSIST OF VERY COMPLEX MEMBRANES AND THOUSANDS OR MILLIONS OF ORGANELLES.	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 a cell as having only a few ribosomes, but a cell may have up to 10 million ribosomes. A cell diagram will typically depict one or a few stacks of a Golgi apparatus, each with only a few cisternae. But a cell will typically have between 10 and 20 stacks, each having as many as 60 cisternae.
ORGANELLES CONSIST OF VERY MANY PROTEIN MOLECULES AND PROTEIN MOLECULE COMPLEXES.	There are some 100,000 different types of protein molecules in the human body, each a different type of complex invention. Protein molecule complexes are groups of different types of protein molecules that work together as team members to achieve a function that cannot be achieved by only one of the proteins in the complex. Very many protein complexes have so many parts working together dynamically that such complexes are now being called "molecular machines."
PROTEIN MOLECULES CONSIST OF HUNDREDS OR THOUSANDS OF WELL-ARRANGED AMINO ACIDS, EXISTING IN A FOLDED THREE-DIMENSIONAL SHAPE.	Small changes in the sequences of amino acids in a protein are typically sufficient to ruin the usefulness of the protein molecule, preventing it from folding in the right way to achieve its function.  See "The Fragility of Fine-Tuned Protein Molecules" section of the post here for quotes stating this.
AMINO ACIDS CONSIST OF ABOUT 10 ATOMS ARRANGED IN SOME SPECIFIC WAY.	Some amino acids have 20 atoms. Given 10+ atoms in amino acids, and an average of about 470 amino acids per human protein molecule, a human protein molecule contains an average of about 5000+ very well-arranged atoms. Amino acids in living things are almost all left-handed, although amino acids forming naturally will with 50% likelihood be right-handed.
ATOMS CONSIST OF MULTIPLE PROTONS, NEUTRONS AND ELECTRONS.	A carbon atom has 6 protons, 6 neutrons, and 6 electrons.

The visual below correctly describes the hierarchical nature of life, and it is a reality almost infinitely harder to explain than the "mineral-vegetable-animal-human" tiers that Reville claimed as a description of the "hierarchical structure of the world." 

We then have from Reville an extremely misleading triumphalist narrative in which he describes increasing scientific discoveries that 

"cumulatively explained the secret of life in the mid-20th century." No,  what was discovered in the mid-20th century was mainly just DNA (and its genes) and the enormous complexity of protein molecules.  Such discoveries raised many more questions than they answered.  Calling DNA "the secret of life" (as if biological life has only one secret rather than hundreds of deep unanswered questions) is one of the most misleading speech customs of biologists and chemists.  Reville gives us the groundless claim that "The entire history of science fully justifies expectation that analogous scientific investigations will eventually unveil how consciousness and self-awareness gradually developed through biological evolution and how these processes work at a molecular level." No, there is no basis for any hope that the human mind will be understood by further investigations at a molecular level. 

What Reville is attempting here is a fallacious kind of reasoning that someone might fallaciously but more effectively use by saying something like this:

"Isn't it amazing the progress science has made? In the twentieth century scientists learned how to blow up entire cities by splitting atoms. Scientists have made all kinds of amazing discoveries such as discovering the chemical composition of distant stars and the velocities of distant galaxies. Now scientists can view things as small as a billionth of meter.  Science is so very powerful, so surely it will be able to figure out how brains produce minds." 

This would be a fallacious argument for at least two reasons. First, successes in the past do nothing to justify optimism about successes at vastly difficult undertakings in the future. Second, successes in understanding the material do nothing to justify optimism about successes in understanding the immaterial, something like the human mind.  But at least the argument quoted above is one that appeals to real accomplishments. Scientists did actually figure out how to blow up entire cities by splitting atoms, and did discover the chemical composition of distant stars and the velocities of distant galaxies. Reville's argument has the same two weaknesses of the argument above, with an additional fallacy that he is appealing to supposed accomplishments of biologists that never actually occurred. Biologists never actually discovered "the basic nature of life" in the sense of understanding any of the unanswered questions in my bullet list above. There did not ever occur any discoveries that "cumulatively explained the secret of life in the mid-20th century."  Every major discovery that was made simply deepened the mysteries of how species could have originated, deepened the evidence for accidentally unachievable organization in the human body, deepened the mystery of how a human body can originate, and deepened the mystery of how a cell can reproduce. If you got the opposite impression, it was because boastful scientists constructed many a groundless triumphal legend, and made very many misstatements about what they had accomplished, very frequently claiming to understand deep mysteries a thousand miles over their heads. 

Reville then uses one of the most witless arguments of materialists: the claim that we can explain the human mind as an emergent property. The argument (so often used before) will typically give an example involving water, and that is just what Reville does.  Water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen, and neither has any such property as wetness. But when oxygen and hydrogen are combined to make water, then we have something with the property of wetness. It is claimed that such a property could never be predicted by just analyzing hydrogen or just analyzing oxygen.

According to Reville, this example shows that amazing new properties can arise when matter combines in different ways. He suggests that human consciousness is simply such a property, a property that just arises from certain complex combinations of matter such as we find in the brain.

But this reasoning is absurd.  The human mind is not a property of the brain or a property of the body. In general, a property is a simple intrinsic characteristic of something, which can be completely expressed by giving a single number. For example, the properties of a rock are hardness, weight, height, width, length, and depth. Each of these simple properties can be expressed by a single number. (You may not think hardness can be expressed by a number, but there is something called the Mohs scale used to numerically express the hardness of rocks). We might also think of the color of the rock as being a property, although that requires a simplification (since the rock will actually be multiple colors). If one makes such a simplification, then that color can also be expressed as a single number, such as a number on a color scale. Even wetness can be expressed by a single number (we might, for example, create a wetness scale of 1 to 10, and reasonably assign liquid water a value of 10, and a thick soup a value of about 5).

But the human mind is not a simple characteristic that can be numerically expressed by a number. When we consider all of the very many facets of the human mind (memory, intelligence, personality, emotions, will, self-hood, spirituality, creativity and dozens of other facets or functions), we certainly do not have anything like a simple characteristic that can be expressed by a number. The human mind is also something mental, something much different from a physical property such as width, weight, or wetness. Below are two images showing aspects of human mental experience, normal and anomalous.

So much more than just "consciousness" or "awareness of surroundings"

In light of such facts, the argument of the emergentist falls apart. It may sound persuasive to make this shallow, sketchy comparison:

"When we combine hydrogen and oxygen, we see the emergence of a new, unexpected property of 'wetness.'  This can help explain how our consciousness could suddenly arise from the combination of certain types of neurons."

But it does not at all sound convincing to make this deeper, more complete comparison.

"When we combine hydrogen and oxygen, we see the emergence of a new, unexpected property of 'wetness,' which is a simple, physical property that can be expressed by a single number. This can help explain how certain combinations of physical neurons could produce human mentality that is not physical, extremely diverse, and is enormously complex and multifaceted, and not capable of being expressed by a single number."

Obviously the latter argument does not work. Our minds are not at all a property. They are far too complicated, multifaceted, and multi-functional to be a property, which is a simple physical thing, like a single facet of something. And it makes no sense to use some analogy involving a tangible property of wetness to try to explain intangible aspects of minds. 

An additional reason for rejecting "mind is a property" reasoning comes from near-death experiences. In these experiences a person will often report floating above his body, and looking down on it. A property is something that cannot be separated from the object with which it is associated. So it would be absolutely nonsensical to say something like, “The rock is on the left side of the room, but the length of the rock is on the right side of the room,” just as it would be nonsensical to say, “I have your bicycle in my garage, but I have the weight of your bicycle in my kitchen.” But judging from near-death experiences, it is possible for a human mind to be separated from the brain, at least briefly. Since properties can never be separated from their associated objects, such experiences supply an additional reason for thinking that the human mind cannot be considered a property of the brain.

Reville makes a common mistake of reductionists at the beginning of his deliberation on such a topic: the mistake of posing a "problem of consciousness." Such a mistake involves bungling reductionist shrink-speaking in which the extremely multifaceted and enormously complex reality of the human mind is described using the minimalist word "consciousness," which serves to depict the human mind as a mere shadow of itself.  We do not have some mere problem of explaining why humans are aware of their surroundings. We have the almost infinitely bigger problem of explaining why there occurs all of the rich phenomena of human minds, which add up to being a reality enormously larger than mere "awareness of surroundings." Under any realistic consideration of the human mind, all attempts to explain the human as a property seem ridiculous in the extreme.  A property is a one-dimensional thing that can be described with a single number. The human mind is something enormously deeper and more diverse and more multifaceted than some mere property. 

"Consciousness" defined as mere "awareness of surroundings" would be a suitable term to use for the mental experiences of an ant. Purporting to explain human minds by describing them as mere things with awareness of surroundings (some shadow-like thing that might be a mere property) is as grotesque a trick and glaring a fallacy as purporting to explain human bodies by the shrink-speaking sophistry of describing them as mere "oblong shapes with protrusions" and claiming that it is real easy for nature to make such shapes, such as when such shapes arise from puddle splashes.  The person who depicts a human as "some consciousness" is like some person who describes World War II as "some noise."

The rest of Reville's article consists of some comments against panpsychism. Skepticism about panpsychism does nothing to justify optimism that neuroscientists will be able to explain minds. Reville gives us not one valid reason for being optimistic that further investigations into matter will be able to explain consciousness, self-hood or the human mind. His very field (biochemistry) actually gives us the strongest basis for doubting such a claim. 

What we see by deeply studying biochemistry are the most enormously impressive engineering effects throughout the human body. Inside your body is a vast army of chemical components so complex and so well-organized that mainstream scientists have for a long time been calling them "molecular machines." The extremely abundant existence of such accidentally unachievable molecular machines and countless other examples of extremely impressive engineering effects in the human body provide (with many other lines of evidence) an extremely strong basis for believing that the physical structure of every adult human body is something that will forever be unexplainable by bottom-down physical causes, and can only be the result of top-down causal agency.  If our bodies must have arisen from some mysterious top-down agency, then it is all the more plausible to assume that our minds must arise from some mysterious top-down agency. 

But the main reasons for suspecting that scientists will never be able to explain minds by studying brains comes not from biochemistry but from neuroscience itself. Neuroscientists have discovered many very serious brain physical shortfalls which exclude the brain as an explanation for the human mind and human memory, as discussed here.  Sadly, our neuroscientists are failing to pay attention to the implications of their own discoveries, and such scientists keep paying lip service to dogmas of their belief community that are excluded by the low-level findings of neuroscientists themselves. 

Notably, our biochemist makes not one single mention of anything in biochemistry that might explain minds or mental phenomenon.  That should surprise no one. Biochemistry involves equations like the one below, in which the things on the left of the arrow are material inputs, and the things on the right of the arrow are material outputs:

6CO2+6H2O→C6H12O6+6O2

But there could never, ever be any sensible chemical equation looking like this:

C12H18O12+6O2→ My thoughts about whether God exists

We should have little confidence in anyone claiming that the problems of human societies will be solved by scientists unless such a person is a scholar of human societies. Similarly, we should have no confidence in any person predicting that the problems of explaining humans minds will be solved by investigations into matter unless such a person is a scholar of the human mind and human mental experiences, a topic of oceanic depth. In general biochemistry professors such as Reville are specialists who are not scholars of human minds and human mental experiences.