I know that DNA encodes proteins. Truthfully, everything besides that (including ‘what are proteins’) mostly wooshes over my head, but that’s not relevant because whenever I search this question I never even find it addressed anywhere.
The human body has, among other things, two hands each with five fingers, with a very particular bone structure. How are things like that encoded in DNA, and by what mechanisms does that DNA cause these features to be built the way they are? What makes two people have a different nose shape? Nearly everyone in my family has a mole on the left side of their face, how does that come about from DNA?
I’m sure there are many steps involved, but I don’t see how we go from creating proteins to reproducibly building a full organism with all the organs in the right places and the right shapes. Whenever I try to look this up, all of these intermediate steps are missing, so it basically seems like magic.
As I said, any explanation will most likely go over my head and I won’t be able to understand it fully, but I at least want to see an explanation. I’ll do my best to understand it of course.
Richard Dawkins has an entire chapter on this exact topic in his book “The Greatest Show on Earth”. I highly recommend reading it, even just that one chapter! It doesn’t feel like a text book, and his writing is very easy to follow in my opinion.
It’s chapter 8, “You did it yourself in 9 months”. To summarize, many people mistakenly think of genes as a “blueprint”, but he suggests it’s better to think of genes as instructions for origami paper folding. Genes don’t know the whole creature, they just know what to fold next, what to duplicate, what to bend, and so on, kind of like that. It’s been a while since I read it. 😅
But I do remember, humans are so complex, we may never fully understand the complete embryo-to-adult growth process, BUT the author points out that there IS a creature, a very small worm, that we are able to understand everything.
That may not seem like a big deal at first, but think about it. Scientists understand the complete growth process of a living creature, from a single cell, every gene, every cell, everything, up to when it’s fully formed. So cool.
I think we will eventually understand it. It’s down to having enough processing power. We’re nowhere close to it, though.
I might have to read that. Thank you.