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It would help if you could elaborate your point here. How have you measured how much 'data' is required to build a human (or any other animal) body?

Here is a better question, why do we believe it is 3 billion polypeptides worth, which translates to 750mb, though we also hear that 99 percent is "junk", leaving a paltry 7.5 mb. It takes billions of bytes of data, inefficiently organized I admit, to build a car.

I love quantities and there are some amazing quantities involved, like the trillions of cells that make up the human body and the thousands of types of cells, the million of locations and the interconnections. If you know how much data was involved in controlling the communications between systems on the 787, which is a tinker toy compared to the human body, you'd understand why there is a serious problem with thinking DNA contains all the data needed to build a human body.

Here is a better question

Let's take care of the first question before we look at follow-ons. Your previous post made an interesting assertion, but I'm not yet persuaded that it is supported.

How are you measuring the amount of 'data' to 'build' a 'human body'? And how are you measuring how much 'data' (your term) is encoded in DNA?

"Trillions" of cells isn't the point (reiterations of a process do not entail significant additional 'data'); do you have a hard calculation here, or are you going on an intuitive supposition?

"I love quantities and there are some amazing quantities involved, like the trillions of cells that make up the human body and the thousands of types of cells, the million of locations and the interconnections. If you know how much data was involved in controlling the communications between systems on the 787, which is a tinker toy compared to the human body, you'd understand why there is a serious problem with thinking DNA contains all the data needed to build a human body.

You are quite correct. That is why no-one thinks the genome is just 'data'.

The genome isn't a 'list' of all the parts of the body. It an instruction set that can be arranged in multiple ways that describes how to build the body from raw materials. There is no one to one mapping of a gene to a feature, many genes will perform multiple functions and many functions are spread out between multiple genes.

Have you ever written a method/procedure/function that produces different outputs based on not just value but type of input? Have you ever written a function that takes another function as an input? If you have then you should realize how varied an output a function can produce just based on its input.

Now take those functions mentioned above and reduce them to nothing more than algorithms that can be applied to chemical interactions, taking into consideration of course those chemical's natural tendencies when in close proximity. The natural tendencies of chemical reactions reduces the number and size of the algorithms necessary to produce a specific result. This means that the genome is just a part of the 'recipe' (a recipe is just a set of algorithms and a list of raw materials) for a living organism.

During the construction of the organism, the recipe (DNA) not only relies on it's own algorithms and material lists but on the environments algorithms and lists. (Remember that the algorithms are written in terms of chemical reactions). In the case of humans, who are mammals of course, the developmental environment includes the mother, whose body is busy supplying raw materials and additional algorithms and inputs to augment those in the developing zygote.

you'd understand why there is a serious problem with thinking DNA contains all the data needed to build a human body

No. Not all the "data," but apparently (with some contributions from cytoplasmic elements in the germ cells) all of the instructions necessary to grow a human being. Your analogy to cars is inapt. Cars aren't grown, and (with trivial exceptions) their assembly is not effected by complex, interacting chemical reactions.

A better analogy than blueprints, as suggested by someone else upthread, is a recipe. Even the most complete, from scratch, cake recipe does not contain anywhere near enough data to characterize the resulting cake. Much of the cake's structural detail is produced because the proteins in the eggs, and the sugars, and etc, "know" how to behave and react with each other when combined in certain ways, heated to a certain degree for a certain period, and so on.

But we don't assume that the information to make a cake exists somewhere else besides the recipe along with the laws of nature (principally of chemistry) which are entailed in the process of making it.

Of course it's not entirely clear if you're claiming that the information to make a human exists "somewhere else" or not, but that's what seems to be implied.