DNA does a lot more than coding for proteins. It also controls how genes are expressed (how same gene does different things in different contexts) and how cells

DNA does a lot more than coding for proteins. It also controls how genes are expressed (how same gene does different things in different contexts) and how cells differentiate into different types (neurons, skin, muscle, etc) depending on location. In this way, DNA does control the blueprint for the brain, down to the initial generic wiring scheme of the cortex - six layers of differentiated neuron types, with a specific pattern of inter-connectivity. As a rough analogy, you could think of this DNA-controlled initial wiring scheme as something like an untrained transformer... the architecture is there, but won't do anything useful until it has been exposed to a lot of data, which will complete the wiring scheme (synapses = brain's model weights). The brain is going to start to learn as soon as it has sufficiently developed, which is certainly before birth, and newborn babies have been shown to already respond to things like their mothers voice which they were exposed to in the womb. Intelligence - ability to learn - is different from knowledge. A newborn baby has very little knowledge, but it does have intelligence since that comes from the brain architecture, hence ability to learn, that our DNA "encodes".