According to Wikipedia:
“DNA encodes the genetic instructions
used in the development..of all living organisms.”
and
“Genes hold the information to build and maintain an organism’s cells.”
– Some readers are old enough to recall a notorious phrase:
“Where’s the beef?” –
The sufficiently informed know nothing can rise to that challenge:
The linked articles discuss in considerable detail how the DNA code in genes
primarily determines the composition of proteins (especially enzymes).
The second article thus notes genes are associated with the color of eyes and tails,
blood type, antibiotic resistance (and also stem height in plants):
those are typical of all known relationships between a gene and the organism carrying it:
Virtually all known relationships between a specific gene and its organism are
how genes determine chemical compositions of substances (especially protein amino acid sequences).
(As the article also reports, a few substances coded by genes are known to impact growth rates.)
While changes in chemical composition can have profound consequences for an organism,
some beneficial, others detrimental:
Neither article provides even one detail nor a reference informing how DNA genes
“encode the genetic instructions used in the development..of all living organisms:”
That is, how a single egg gives rise to nearly countless cell types in dozens to hundreds of organs
(counting the many muscles and nerves).
Furthermore, Wikipedia’s articles describing in great detail how a single germ cell multiplies,
then the incredibly complex ways its trillions of progeny form all a body’s organs
contain not even one mention how DNA genes provide instructions for these incredibly wondrous,
utterly unexplained and mysterious, dumbfounding processes.
Their DNA “Central Dogma” is a far more apt term than most biologists dare acknowledge.
While numerous gene mutations are associated with diseases due to functionally deficient
or poisonous substances such genes encode..
The idea DNA genes contain blueprints and/or instructions to build and maintain
the mind-bogglingly complex forms of cells, tissues, organs and organisms
remains speculation at best, nothing more whatsoever.
Even the simplest independently living organism, the simplest of bacteria, its single cell contains
many hundreds of genes coding the hundreds of unique biochemical substances the cell requires.
There is thus a vast if not infinite chasm between no matter how diverse and complex
a collection of life substances biochemists could assemble in one microscopic container or pile,
in comparison to a viable living cell in any organism.. or one living independently like a bacterium.
Life only exists in intact organisms, capable of myriad functions all inter-dependent,
most functions absolutely essential to an organism’s existing, to living.
Contemporary speculations how chemical building blocks of life somehow arose from dead minerals
on a lifeless Earth billions of years ago, then somehow over eons formed themselves into an intact cell
are similarly mind-boggling as most everything else about current life forms.
Such ideas have no basis in fact, remain nothing more than wild, unfounded, baseless fantasies.
While recent centuries have greatly expanded human knowledge about life in particular,
what life is and whence it came remain at least as mysterious and inexplicable as ever.
Next: Is Life Just Physicis?
Note to Bio-Medical Professionals
Addressed to a wide audience, this site necessarily simplifies. While myriads of relationships are known
between genetic sequence and biochemical structures and functions, even the form of a mitochondrion
has no known genetic blueprint. Morphogenesis remains vastly mysterious, not least because who knows
even where to begin investigating most such questions.