Disclaimer. I'm not a great biologist. Couldn't this be proven by growing mammals in petri dishes? If the entire information is encoded in DNA, then the fetus

Disclaimer. I'm not a great biologist. Couldn't this be proven by growing mammals in petri dishes? If the entire information is encoded in DNA, then the fetus would grow fine. If however, the fetus needs to be in a womb to develop, then there must be information (and resources) that need to be sent from the mother to the baby in a sort of quine fashion. Consider a Java compiler or python interpreter, they are themselves written in the target language, unless we are talking about early version. So you already need a java compiler to compile Java, the code for the compiler does not hold all of the necessary information, as you need a mother compiler to execute it. Which part of the target is in the code and which in the interpreter/compiler? A thought experiment would be a language where a built in statement compile() compiles code according to specifications. Thus the code for a compiler would simply be compile(). My best guess is that fetuses can only grow inside a functioning human, and that the information in DNA is not sufficient, you need a functioning specimen to grow another specimen.