The mystery of where is the total information to build living organisms

The information equivalent of the form and all other aspects of a living organism like a human being has a magnitude thousands or millions of times what can be encoded in the DNA. Where it is stored and how it is decoded to build an organism is an abiding mystery, one seldom if ever mentioned by Darwinists, who tend to assume the fantasy that it is in the DNA. To recognize the problem is to recognize one of the fatal flaws of Darwinism, and that of course is taboo.

Some actual estimates, from physicist Riccardo Sabatini's TED talk, “How to read the genome and build a human being.” Being a good Darwin believer he assumes that it is all in the DNA, but it is obvious that the amount of information is far too massive to possibly be encoded in the DNA.

He points out that the information to build a human infant, atom by atom, would take up the equivalent of enough thumb drives to fill the Titanic, multiplied by 2,000. Later he wheels out the entire genome, in printed form, of a human being, specifically fellow scientist Craig Venter: printed page-by-page, letter-by-letter it is 262,000 pages of information, 450 kilograms.  A lot of data, but microscopic compared to the total information storage required.

This is at https://youtu.be/s6rJLXq1Re0, discussed at https://evolutionnews.org/2017/11/in-a-t...y-not-ask/.

Needless to say, the detailed specification/blueprint for a human infant is a massive amount of positional and other information that is somehow coming into a developing embryo ‘from the outside’ by some ‘non-material’ method. Even to ask the questions of what is the nature of this information storage and how is it accessed and decoded by the developing embryo, is somewhat forbidden, since it points to how the reductionist materialist Darwinian paradigm is increasingly obviously bankrupt.

Okay, so this seems obvious to the layman (me! lol) after reading your post.  (Amazing to me I hadn't at least considered this before!)  Thus, what does the scientific mainstream have to say about it?  It mustn't be too troubling for them or we'd be seeing much more noise about it.

Okay, so this seems obvious to the layman (me! lol) after reading your post.  (Amazing to me I hadn't at least considered this before!)  Thus, what does the scientific mainstream have to say about it?  It mustn't be too troubling for them or we'd be seeing much more noise about it.

As I mentioned in the Op, this seems to be a well-kept forbidden not-to-be-mentioned secret amongst Darwinists. I think it is troubling to them, but they are well practiced at sweeping problems with their Darwinist ideology under the rug and depending on overwhelming career and social pressure to maintain the fiction. 

To my knowledge (other members please correct me if necessary) hardly any mainstream evolutionary biologists or other biologists have openly and publicly recognized this failure of the gene-centric ideology and the total ignorance of where almost all the information is really stored.

Another quote on this, by an of course non-mainstream ID-accepting biologist, Michael Denton:

"Yet by the late 1980s it was becoming obvious to most genetic researchers, including myself, since my own main research interest in the ‘80s and ‘90s was human genetics, that the heroic effort to find information specifying life’s order in the genes had failed. There was no longer the slightest justification for believing there exists anything in the genome remotely resembling a program capable of specifying in detail all the complex order of the phenotype. The emerging picture made it increasingly difficult to see genes as Weismann’s “unambiguous bearers of information” or view them as the sole source of the durability and stability of organic form. It is true that genes influence every aspect of development, but influencing something is not the same as determining it. Only a small fraction of all known genes, such as the developmental fate switching genes, can be imputed to have any sort of directing or controlling influence on form generation. From being “isolated directors” of a one-way game of life, genes are now considered to be interactive players in a dynamic two-way dance of almost unfathomable complexity, as described by Keller in The Century of The Gene."

From the compilation Uncommon Dissent (2004), pages 171-2

As I mentioned in the Op, this seems to be a well-kept forbidden not-to-be-mentioned secret amongst Darwinists. I think it is troubling to them, but they are well practiced at sweeping problems with their Darwinist ideology under the rug and depending on overwhelming career and social pressure to maintain the fiction. 

To my knowledge (other members please correct me if necessary) hardly any mainstream evolutionary biologists or other biologists have openly and publicly recognized this failure of the gene-centric ideology and the total ignorance of where almost all the information is really stored.

Another quote on this, by an of course non-mainstream ID-accepting biologist, Michael Denton:


From the compilation Uncommon Dissent (2004), pages 171-2

This fascinates me.  Again, until your post I hadn't been aware nor obviously thought about the implications.

Seems that if the genome actually contains the information necessary to be the sole instruction set for all things related to assembling life, then we clearly don't know a lot about data and data storage.  Further, if we can't see how its possible to store that much data (i.e., the instructions) on the genome then why would we believe that the genome is where said information resides?

I wonder what Dawkins, Coyne, etc would have to say here.  Would be entertaining I bet.

To my knowledge (other members please correct me if necessary) hardly any mainstream evolutionary biologists or other biologists have openly and publicly recognized this failure of the gene-centric ideology and the total ignorance of where almost all the information is really stored.

Not sure if this is the kind of thing you're looking for but this was in Aeon ->

It seemed Darwin had banished biological essences – yet evolution would fail without nature’s library of Platonic forms

For example, a library of every possible amino acid string that is 500 letters long would contain more than 10600 texts – a one with 600 trailing zeros. That vastly outnumbers the atoms in the visible universe.

The library is a giant space of the possible, encoding all the proteins that could be useful to life. But here’s the thing: evolution can’t simply look up the chemicals it needs in a giant catalogue. No, it has to inch its way painstakingly along the stacks. Imagine a crowd of browsers – each one representing an entire familial line – who must blindly explore the library, step by random step. This sounds like a party game, but there’s a grisly twist. A mutation that compromises an essential protein such as haemoglobin is punishable by death. On that ill-fated volume, the bloodline ends.

So nature’s libraries and their sprawling networks go a long way towards explaining life’s capacity to evolve. But where do they come from? You cannot see them in the glass lizard or its anatomy. They are nowhere near life’s visible surface, nor are they underneath this surface, in the structure of its tissues and cells. They are not even in the submicroscopic structure of its DNA. They exist in a world of concepts, the kind of abstract concepts that mathematicians explore.

Does that make them any less real?

The question whether we create or discover new concepts – especially of the mathematical kind – has occupied humankind for more than 2,500 years, at least since the Pythagoreans, Plato’s intellectual ancestors, declared that ‘all is number’. Some believe with the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein that mathematical truths are human inventions. But others believe with Plato that our visible world is a faint shadow of higher truths. Among them are many mathematicians and physicists, including Charles Fefferman, winner of the Fields medal, the equivalent of a Nobel Prize in mathematics. He expressed his experience when breaking new mathematical ground this way:

There’s something awe-inspiring. You aren’t creating. You’re discovering what was there all the time, and that is much more beautiful than anything that man can create.

 Even to ask the questions of what is the nature of this information storage and how is it accessed and decoded by the developing embryo, is somewhat forbidden, since it points to how the reductionist materialist Darwinian paradigm is increasingly obviously bankrupt.

I think that bioinformatic studies have been progressing and commanding the lead in biological evolution.  Find listed 40 top-flight academics who have declared the neoDarwinian paradigm clearly false via data-based conclusions. https://www.thethirdwayofevolution.com/people

Here is one of my favorites.

 Natural selection provides feedback through which information about the environment and its recurring challenges is captured, inherited, and accumulated within genomes in the form of variations that contribute to survival. The variation upon which natural selection acts is generally described as “random.” Yet evidence has been mounting for decades, from such phenomena as mutation hotspots, horizontal gene transfer, and highly mutable repetitive sequences, that variation is far from the simplifying idealization of random processes as white (uniform in space and time and independent of the environment or context).  This paper focuses on what is known about the generation and control of mutational variation, emphasizing that it is not uniform across the genome or in time, not unstructured with respect to survival, and is neither memoryless nor independent of the (also far from white) environment. We suggest that, as opposed to frequentist methods, Bayesian analysis could capture the evolution of nonuniform probabilities of distinct classes of mutation, and argue not only that the locations, styles, and timing of real mutations are not correctly modeled as generated by a white noise random process, but that such a process would be inconsistent with evolutionary theory.

https://nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com...nyas.12235

Perhaps the the code reveals more information as it used? Dunno. I do think the Biomorphic Field idea from Rupert Sheldrake May hold an answer. Perhaps additional information comes from the biomorphic field (assuming it exists). If you haven’t read The Science Delusion, I’d recommend it.

Not sure if this is the kind of thing you're looking for but this was in Aeon ->

It seemed Darwin had banished biological essences – yet evolution would fail without nature’s library of Platonic forms

The link doesn't work. Anyway, thanks for the research but based on the quotes I don't think this reference deals with or recognizes the problem at all, or at best barely hints at the problem. It apparently visualizes the beyond huge array of all possible different amino acid configurations as existing as a "library" in some sort of abstract platonic realm (maybe like the supposed platonic realm of mathematics that most mathematicians visualize). It imagines the Darwinian evolutionary process as somehow exploring this platonic realm via random mutations. No specifics of a hypothesized mechanism. The ideas seem rather vague and nebulous, substituting lyrical prose for specifics. Rather incoherent thinking it seems to me.

I think that bioinformatic studies have been progressing and commanding the lead in biological evolution.  Find listed 40 top-flight academics who have declared the neoDarwinian paradigm clearly false via data-based conclusions. https://www.thethirdwayofevolution.com/people

Here is one of my favorites.
https://nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com...nyas.12235

This is interesting but this reference of course doesn't address the mystery covered in the Op. Inherently it seems to accept the gene-centric Darwinian process concept, that simply assumes that the total data to build the organism is in the DNA, the genome.  And that therefore evolution consists of random mutations and many other types of genetic variation altering this DNA library followed by filtering or winnowing by natural selection and perhaps by other processes. The "other types of genetic variation" and the meaning of natural selection have been greatly expanded over what was known in the past.

Perhaps the the code reveals more information as it used? Dunno. I do think the Biomorphic Field idea from Rupert Sheldrake May hold an answer. Perhaps additional information comes from the biomorphic field (assuming it exists). If you haven’t read The Science Delusion, I’d recommend it.

DNA is not a thumb drive of static symbols.  Its part of an active and aggressive process.  DNA exists in this process with RNA (a number of kinds), ribosomes and proteins. The "mental" part of the process is the fact that the electrochemical processes have informational results.

The active communication systems are fed streams of data rich input from the environment. It is this constant feedback from the environment that provides the bulk of the information.