Biology-Befuddled NASA Sounds Complexity-Clueless

Last summer I did a post on a press release NASA issued trying to whip up exobiology enthusiasm about some rock found on Mars by one of its robotic rovers. There was no logical basis for suggesting that the rock had any biological relevance. Analysis of the rock had not discovered any evidence of any of the building components of one-celled life in such a rock, because no evidence of any proteins had been found. Analysis of the rock had not discovered any evidence of any of the building components of the building components of one-celled life in such a rock, because no evidence of any amino acids had been found. What kind of tricks did NASA use to try to whip up some exobiology enthusiasm about the rock?  For one, they published a photo in which a tiny little feature on the spot was circled after the photo was taken, and the spot was called a "leopard spot." Talk about your strained efforts to make a dead thing sound a little biological. 

Since last summer, NASA has kept running its robotic rovers named Curiosity and Perseverance, looking for amino acids, the building components of the building components of one-celled life. NASA has failed to find any trace of any such things on Mars. So what do you do when don't have anything worthy of a boast? Maybe you brag about things that are not worthy of a boast.  Recently we had NASA making grand boasts about finding some biologically irrelevant molecules that were hardly worthy of a boast. It was like some young male suitor who did not have any car or house or apartment he could boast of owning, who tries boasting to his blind date that he has a nice TV set or video game device. 

NASA's unwarranted boasts on this topic have inspired a USA Today news story with the bogus headline "Mars rovers make separate finds pointing to past life: What Perseverance, Curiosity found." In the headline the word "separate" is misspelled. Neither of the items referred to "point to past life."

The article has a modus operandi we see abundantly these days in science news articles: an untrue clickbait headline followed by a "letdown" that kind of says, "Not really." I identified this pattern in a visual I made a long time ago:

In the USA Today story, we get "the letdown" very quickly, as the story quickly changes from "pointing to past life" to a "just maybe" in the first sentence of the story. Normally you don't get the "letdown" until later in the story, which better promotes ad-viewing.

First we get a description of a Perseverance rover find that is a big nothing from an exobiology standpoint: just a rock with lots of bubble-like spheres, which might have produced by any number of geological processes (such as bubbling hot molten rock) having nothing to do with life. Contrary to the story's claim, this does nothing at all to indicate that "ancient life may have once existed on the Red Planet." 

The second item mentioned by the USA story is the discovery of the molecules decane, undecane and dodecane. The writer of the USA story has got the wrong idea from this quote from this recent NASA press release:

"Scientists probed an existing rock sample inside Curiosity’s Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) mini-lab and found the molecules decane, undecane, and dodecane. These compounds, which are made up of 10, 11, and 12 carbons, respectively, are thought to be the fragments of fatty acids that were preserved in the sample. Fatty acids are among the organic molecules that on Earth are chemical building blocks of life."

Here we have some misleading sleight-of-hand designed to make us think that something biologically relevant was found. But no such thing occurred. Specifically:

• Decane is not in any sense a building block of life. The wikipedia.org article on decane says, "Although it is a component of fuels, it is of little importance as a chemical feedstock, unlike a handful of other alkanes."
• Undecane is not in any sense a building block of life. 
• Dodecane is not in any sense a building block of life. 

The building components of one-celled life are proteins and DNA and its genes.  The building components of such building components of one-celled life are: (1) the twenty types of amino acids that are the building components of proteins; (2) the four types of nucleobases (adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine) and the deoxyribose that are the building components of DNA and its genes. No protein or DNA or genes have been found on Mars, and none of these amino acids or nucleobases have been found on Mars. 

The statement quoted above from the NASA press release was not strictly speaking untrue, but just something that might give you the wrong idea. But the next part of the NASA press release ends up with a statement that is dead wrong.  We read the following:

"Living things produce fatty acids to help form cell membranes and perform various other functions. But fatty acids also can be made without life, through chemical reactions triggered by various geological processes, including the interaction of water with minerals in hydrothermal vents.

While there’s no way to confirm the source of the molecules identified, finding them at all is exciting for Curiosity’s science team for a couple of reasons.

Curiosity scientists had previously discovered small, simple organic molecules on Mars, but finding these larger compounds provides the first evidence that organic chemistry advanced toward the kind of complexity required for an origin of life on Mars."

The last sentence is the most egregious error.  It is gigantically untrue to claim that the simple chemicals of decane, dodecane and undecane are "the kind of complexity required for an origin of life on Mars." To get something like the origin of life you need something more than 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times harder-to-achieve: the creation of hundreds of types of functional protein molecules, most of which require hundreds of specially arranged amino acids. 

The image of the NASA press release shows how trivial from an information standpoint are the three molecules discovered:

There is nothing hard-to-achieve about such molecules. They are mainly just the same little section consisting of three or four atoms, repeated in a chain. From an information standpoint, this is as easy-to-get as this sequence of letters: 

 HHCCHHCCHHCCHHCCHHCCHHCC

What is required to produce a living cell is an amount of well-arranged functional information that is exponentially more improbable than getting so trivial a result as the simple chemicals of decane, dodecane and undecane.  The mathematical improbability of getting that result is discussed in my post "Why Accidents Cannot Produce Very Complex and Useful Instruction Information," which you can read here. 

Here's how someone could roughly go about calculating the likelihood of getting the type of organization and complexity needed for the simplest self-reproducing cell:

(1) First, he would study the likelihood of a random set of amino acids resulting in a functional protein, keeping in mind that proteins are very sensitive to small changes, and that the average protein requires hundreds of specially arranged amino acids. A key part of the calculation is that there are twenty possible amino acids used by living things. 

(2) Under a reasonable assumption that at least half of a functional protein's amino acid sequence is necessary for it to have any function, he would make a rough calculation that the probability of getting a functional protein by chance combinations of amino acids is roughly 1 in 10 to the hundredth power. 

(3) He would consider the minimum number of types of functional proteins in a self-reproducing cell, which is at least 100, each of these being a different type of complex invention. 

(4) Using the rule that you get the probability of independent events all occurring by multiplying their individual probabilities, he would calculate that the chance of amino acids accidentally forming into a collection of all the proteins needed for a self-reproducing cell is roughly 1 in 10 to the ten-thousandth power, or roughly 1 in ₁₀¹⁰⁰⁰⁰.

How hard is it to get such a result? Almost infinitely harder than to get the easy-to-get result of decane, dodecane and undecane. NASA's recent statement that "finding these larger compounds provides the first evidence that organic chemistry advanced toward the kind of complexity required for an origin of life on Mars" is therefore the most complexity-clueless misstatement. It's kind of like saying that your dog fetched a stick, and the stick makes the letter "I," so that shows your dog can produce the kind of complexity needed to write novels or technical manuals. The amount of just-right functional information needed to get even the simplest one-celled life is about the same as the amount of just-right functional information that you need to produce a 100-page well-written technical manual. 

Exhibit A That Biologists Have No Credible Explanation for How Anatomically Complex Organisms Ever Appeared

 At Quanta Magazine there was a long interview entitled "How Did Multicellular Life Evolve?" After some introductory discussion between Janna Levin and Steve Strogratz, Strogratz makes the claim that multicellular life evolved independently 50 different times. If that is true, then the explanatory shortfalls of Darwinism are vastly worse than most people think.  Thinking of times long before mankind appeared, the average person thinks of maybe three main miracles of innovation that biologists have trouble explaining:

(1) The origin of prokaryotic cells. 

(2) The origin of vastly more complex eukaryotic cells.

(3) The origin of multicellular life. 

But if, as Strogratz suggests, multicellular life appeared independently 50 different times, then the number of required miracles of innovation is multiplied many times.  The situation would be like this:

Miracle #1: The origin of prokaryotic cells. 

Miracle #2:  The origin of vastly more complex eukaryotic cells.

Miracles #3, #4,#5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10, #11, #12, #13, #14,#15, #16, #17, #18, #19, #20, #21, #22, #23, #24,#25, #26, #27, #28, #29,  #30, #31, #32, #33, #34,#35, #36, #37, #38, #39, #40, #41, #42, #43, #44,#45, #46, #47, #48, #49, #50, #51, #52:  Fifty independent origins of different types of multicellular life. 

But if so many independent origins of different types of multicellular life were required, why is it that this is so rarely mentioned? Probably because it's another of the endless cases of biologists sweeping under the rug their explanatory shortfalls. But Strogratz lamely suggests a different answer, saying this:

"Well, I think when we were in high school and they were teaching us biology, they didn’t know that. But it’s now understood that, you know, in all these different kingdoms or whatever they call them in biology — so whether it’s animals, plants, fungi — they all figured out their own way to do it, to go multicellular."

 Strogratz should be scolded here for using language suggesting that one-celled life can "figure out" a way to become multicellular life,  which is rather like suggesting that bricks figure out a way to become ten-story apartment buildings with plumbing and electricity. 

We get some introductory comments about biologist Will Ratcliff, who we are told "wants to induce a multicellularity transition in a single-celled organism," a yeast. It's some "getting a little cell clumping and calling it multicellularity" nonsense, like that shown in the visual below. 

Nonsense like that shown in the visual above leverages ambiguity in the word "multicellularity." When you are talking about the main problem of explaining multicellular life, multicellular  life should be defined as visible self-mobile organisms consisting of complex anatomy requiring many different types of cells and higher levels of organization such as appendages and organs. Or better yet, use the term "anatomically complex organisms" rather than "multicellular life," which makes it clear that you are talking about something vastly more than just clumps of cells.

I am stunned to find that we get a little critical thinking from one of the interviewers (given the history of the staff at Quanta Magazine acting like scientist bootlickers). Strogratz says this:

"But as we’ll hear from Will, it is controversial. There are colleagues of his who feel what he’s doing is irrelevant to the history of life on Earth, that he’s just doing something in the lab, and it may be telling us very little about what happened in real biology."

We then get biologist Ratcliff beginning to talk, and he starts speaking in self-contradictory ways. First, he calls cells "fantastic biological machines," speaking as if he understood their very high complexity and organization. But he then very quickly reverts to engaging in the shadow-speaking language that biologists love to use, in which vastly organized and enormously fine-tuned things are described as if they were mere shadows of what they are -- this being done to help make tall tales of their accidental origins sound less far-fetched.  Ratcliff says, "And once sort-of cells evolved, they really took off, and it has been the sort-of basic building block of life for the last three-and-a-half billion years." There is nothing "sort-of-basic" about a cell, and it is profoundly misleading to call a cell a "building block," as building blocks such as bricks are very simple things without any complexity or information, and cells are enormously organized information-rich units with very high functional complexity. There is no reason why such misleading "building block" language needs to be used. You can express a similar idea without misleading people by saying things such as "cells are building components of organisms." 

Ratcliff later continues his misleading use of shadow-speaking in which extremely organized and information-rich things are misleadingly described as mere shadows of what they are. He says, "All these basic building blocks of life, like DNA, which contains the, sort-of, code of the organism." DNA is an extremely complex molecule, and human DNA has billions of base pairs of information. So it is extremely misleading to refer to DNA as a "basic building block," a phrase suitable for describing simple things without complexity (such as a brick), but utterly misleading when used to describe DNA or cells. It is also not true that DNA "contains the, sort-of, code of the organism." DNA has no specification of how to make an organism or any of its organs or any of its cells or any of the organelles of such cells. The myth that DNA is a blueprint or recipe or program for making an organism is a deception that biologists have long been guilty of telling, even though many scientists have stated that such claims are false. Beware of any scientist using the words "sort of" or "basically" or "essentially," terms that they often use when they are making claims that are untrue. 

Ratcliff reiterates the previous claim about 50 different origins of multicellularity, saying, "There’s at least 50 independent transitions to multicellularity that we know of." Ratcliff then engages in the same "figure out" nonsense talk that  Strogratz had previously used. Ratcliff says that "animals...just start to figure out all of these innovations which are hallmarks of extant animals." This is not what evolutionary biologists claim about the origin of biological innovations. Instead they claim that there occurred accidental variations that luckily led to all kinds of wonderful biological innovations such as lungs and hearts and legs and wings.  But a person hearing such claims of accidental inventions may recognize that such claims are nonsensical, intuitively sensing correctly that accidents do not produce complex inventions. So biologists such as Strogratz may have luck in fooling people if they claim that "animals...just start to figure out all of these innovations which are hallmarks of extant animals." But evolutionary biologists don't believe that any biological innovations of animals arose from animals literally "figuring out" anything. 

We then have from Ratcliff this confession about the Cambrian Explosion about 540 million years ago, in which all or almost all of the animal phyla appeared rather suddenly in the fossil record: 

"Before the Cambrian explosion, things were soft and gelatinous and didn’t have eyes or skeletons. It’s questionable if they had brains. They don’t have any of these things. And then in a relatively short period of time, just a few tens of millions of years, all of these things show up. And we think it’s probably due to these, like, ecological arms races, where you have predators attacking prey. The prey start evolving defensive mechanisms. So, you know, you have just this explosion of animal complexity in what appears to be a very short period of time in geological terms."

What we have here from Ratcliff is a very bad attempt at an explanation. He's basically saying all these marvels of biological innovation appeared, because creatures needed stuff. "They needed it" is not a credible explanation of why miracles of incredibly-hard-to-achieve organization would occur. Similarly, if you are at a junk yard, and you watch as 1000 scattered auto parts magically assemble into a car, you don't explain that miracle of organization by saying, "Well, I needed a car." The "arms race" metaphor is just another of the endless bad metaphors and bad analogies used by evolutionary biologists. An arms race is something that occurs between nations led by humans, not something that occurs in animals or imagined predecessors of animals. 

Ratcliff then makes a very bad misstatement by claiming that multicellular life is 3 billion years old. There is no convincing record of any anatomically complex organisms existing before 1 billion years ago. Ratcliff may be referring here to a few cells clumping together in an unimpressive way, but that isn't real multicellular life, something like animals with complex anatomy. As a recent biology textbook told us on its page 9, "Complex multicellular animals appear rather suddenly in the fossil record approximately 600 million years ago." 

Ratcliff then gives us this vacuous hand-waving attempt at explaining how multicellular life appeared:

"And you know, I think we should not think of it as one process, but something where there are ecological niches available for multicellular forms, and there has to be a benefit to forming groups and evolving large size. That benefit has to be fairly prolonged. And most of the time, there isn’t, but occasionally there will be an opportunity for a lineage to begin exploring that ecology and not be inhibited by something else that’s already in that space."

This is more vacuous "they got because it was useful" nonsense, that does not explain how miracles of innovation could have occurred. 

A bit later we get more hand-waving vacuity from Ratcliff, more talk along the lines of "they got it because it was useful":

"But, once you start forming multicellular groups, you can participate in a whole new ecology of larger size. You might be immune to the predators that were eating you previously, or maybe you’re able to overgrow competitors for a resource like light. If you imagine that you’re, you know, an algae growing on a rock in a stream, single-celled algae will get the light but, hey, if something can form groups, now they’re intercepting that resource before it gets to you. They win, right? Or, you know, groups also have advantages when it comes to motility and even division of labor and trading resources between cells. So, there’s many different reasons to become multicellular. And there isn’t just one reason why a lineage would evolve multicellularity. But what you need for this transition to occur is those reasons have to be there, and that benefit has to persist long enough that the lineage sort of stabilizes in a multicellular state and doesn’t just go back to being single-celled or die out."

When evolutionary biologists lack any credible "how" in explaining biological origins (which is pretty much all the time), they start giving us "why" explanations like this, hoping that we don't notice that they are not addressing a "how" but only addressing a "why."  And it is very strange that these believers that life arose through blind, unguided processes keep talking as if they believed in "why" driving everything. 

Ratcliff then lets his guard down by confessing that evolutionary biologists do not really understand how multicellular life arose.  He makes this confession:

"Big picture, we want to understand how initially dumb clumps of cells, cells that are one or two mutations away from being single-celled, don’t really know that they’re organisms — they don’t have any adaptations to being multicellular, they’re just a dumb clump — how those dumb clumps of cells can evolve into increasingly complex multicellular organisms, with new morphologies, with cell-level integration, division of labor, and differentiation amongst the cells. Just like, we want to watch that process of how do these simple groups become complex. And this is, like, one of the biggest knowledge gaps in evolutionary biology. I mean, in my opinion....We don’t really know the process through which simple groups evolve into increasingly complex organisms"

Ratcliff's commendable humility here lasts for about one minute. It is then immediately demolished and replaced by some ridiculous groundless boasting. He says this: "So, what we’re doing in the lab is, we are evolving new multicellular life using in-laboratory directed evolution over multi-10,000 generation timescales, to watch how our initially simple groups of cells — dumb clumps of cells — figure out some of these fundamental challenges." It's an unfounded boast. He is referring to mere cell clumping in yeast. There is no type of new organism produced by such experiments. Each of the little least clumps is just a crowd of one-celled organisms, not a new organism.  You are no more producing "new multicellular life" by such laboratory work than you would be producing "new human life" by shouting "Free 100-dollar bills!" in Times Square to attract a flash mob. Crowds of one-celled organisms are not multicellular life.  

I can understand why the Quanta Magazine interview has no photos showing the result of the Multicellularity Long-Term Evolution Experiment that Ratcliff is talking about. Showing a photo would show how trivial Ratcliff's results are. But doing a Google image search for that phrase, I find a university press release that shows the result of the experiment. It is the nothing-to-brag-about result shown below, about as impressive as getting a little algae slime buildup in your backyard swimming pool. 

Laughably, Strogratz refers to this silly little result by saying, "That is incredibly ambitious. I mean, I hope the listeners get a feeling of the courage it takes." Equally laughable are some of the paragraphs we soon get, in which Ratcliff speaks all rapturously about these little disorganized clumps of yeast he got, as if he was trying to use every term he can think of to make them sound grand and glorious. Misleadingly, Ratcliff talks about the yeast producing "babies" when he merely means other cells. Misleading us, Ratcliff says this of his tiny yeast clumps: "They’re solving all these fundamental multicellular problems." But he gives away how little he has got when he says this: "You know, they’re bigger than fruit flies now. They’re large." Fruit flies are about three millimeters in size, which is about half the width of the nail on your pinky finger. Ratcliff's test tube clumps are not large. 

Later in the interview Ratcliff complains about getting criticisms from either scientists. He suggests that other scientists were accusing him of inflating the importance of his work, and he sounds offended or indignant about having to defend the relevance of his work in growing test-tube yeast clumps.  He gives us this confession: "Anytime you critique a paper in my field, you might think you’re critiquing the senior scientists on the paper, but they usually have a graduate student or a postdoc who wrote the thing." So senior biologists are very often putting their names on papers that were really written by graduate students without a PhD? That's another reason for distrusting papers in evolutionary biology and neuroscience. Ratcliff seems to make a kind of "let's not hurt the feeling of the tender graduate students" plea. Wouldn't it be better to  help make them better scientists by giving them an idea of what kind of experimental research studies attract criticism because of their flaws? 

Nowhere in the long interview with this multicellularity origin specialist do we get any reason for thinking that scientists understand how large mobile organisms with organs and limbs could have ever evolved from mere one-celled organisms. To the contrary, the interview suggests that scientists have no such understanding at all.  The failure of scientists to give a credible account of the origin of anatomically complex organisms is only one of very many reasons why their "evolution explains us" and "Darwin explained how we got life so complex" claims are unfounded and untrue. 

To show the untruth of big boastful claims that someone makes, make a collection of all the confessions that person makes that he would not make if his big boasts  were true. For example, by noting how someone confessed that he owes very much money on his credit card, you can document that he's making unfounded boasts if he claims that he's doing great financially. To help show the untruth of claims that scientists make that they understand the origin of humans and other large enormously organized organisms, you can document as many cases you can find of scientists confessing that they don't understand how there ever arose things such as the first cells, eukaryotic cells, protein molecules, protein complexes,  anatomically complex organisms, human minds, human memory, the origin of language, and the origin of a full human body during the nine months of pregnancy. To help show the untruth of claims that scientists make that they understand the origin of humans and other large enormously organized organisms, you can document as many cases as you can find of scientists confessing that they don't even understand things such as how proteins fold into the 3D shapes needed for their functions,  how cells (lacking any DNA specification for how to make a cell) are able to reproduce, and how sexual reproduction ever arose.  You can find an extremely long set of such confessions in my "Candid Confessions of the Scientists" post here.  

Postscript: On the science news sites today (April 1), we have coverage of an Emory University press release entitled "A New Clue to How Multicellular Life May Have Evolved." It's about a scientist observing a type of one-celled life clumping into tiny disorganized swarms. We have no clear explanation of what this "new clue" is, and we get more suspicions that scientists without any real clue as to how multicellular life arose are grasping at straws.   

Scientist Flubs and Flops, #1

 

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• "Biochemistry's orthodox account of how life emerged from a primordial soup of such chemicals lacks experimental support and is invalid because, among other reasons, there is an overwhelming statistical improbability that random reactions in an aqueous solution could have produced self-replicating RNA molecules."  John Hands MD, "Cosmo Sapiens: Human Evolution From the Origin of the Universe," page 411. 
• "The ongoing insistence on defending scientific orthodoxies on these matters, even against a formidable tide of contrary evidence, has turned out to be no less repressive than the discarded superstitions in earlier times. For instance, although all attempts to demonstrate spontaneous generation in the laboratory have led to failure for over half a century, strident assertions of its necessary operation against the most incredible odds continue to dominate the literature." -- 3 scientists (link).
• "I found that neo-Darwinism doesn't work very well as a description of real life. Several big things about life in general just don't add up in the context of neo-Darwinism: There's aging and death -- I'll try to show you in the coming chapters why I don't think you can account for the basic facts about aging within the framework of neo-Darwinism. But in addition, neo-Darwinism can't account for sexual reproduction or for the structure of the genome that seems actually 'designed' to make evolution possible; neo-Darwinism also does not have a place for the recently established phenomena of epigenetic inheritance or horizontal gene transfer."  -- biologist Josh Mittledorf PhD, "Cracking the Aging Code," page 31.
• "Natural selection cannot be observed in the wild, because it requires huge areas and thousands of years...But evolutionary biology today is a uniquely sick science, missing the vibrancy, the audacity, and the commitment to empirical truth that form the core of the scientific method."  -- biologist Josh Mittledorf PhD and Dorion Sagan, "Cracking the Aging Code," page 84.
• "In this article, I will show that all the central assumptions of the Modern Synthesis (often also called Neo-Darwinism) have been disproved." -- Biologist Denis Noble, "Physiology is rocking the foundations of evolutionary biology."
• "The OMS [original Modern Synthesis] is a clever theory when considered as a special case, but proposing it as a master theory was premature, and claiming that it was established empirically was an exaggeration bordering on delusion." --biologist Arlin Stoltzfus, "Why We Don't Want Another 'Synthesis.' " 
• "There is a growing sense of unease among biologists that there are serious shortcomings in the Neo-Darwinian framework, in particular that several of its central assumptions are wrong and that, as a result, it lacks explanatory power. The problems are many and likely fatal." --  Four scientists, "The CBC theory and its entailments," (link).

Physicists May Stop Sounding Like They Are Good at Math As Soon As They Discuss Extraterrestrials

 Physicists have a reputation for being very good at math. But when they discuss two different topics, physicists often sound like they are bad at math. The first topic I refer to is the topic of cosmic fine-tuning, the many ways in which our universe seems to have defied the odds so dramatically it is like someone firing ten arrows that each hit the center of ten bullseye targets 200 meters away. When discussing this topic, physicists sound as if they cannot put two and two together, as I discuss in my post here. 

There is one other topic that makes physicists sound like they are bad at math as soon as they begin discussing it: the topic of the probability of extraterrestrial civilizations arising by blind accidental causes. An example of their clumsy utterances on such a topic is found in the 2025 article "The existence of intelligent aliens is 'highly likely' — and they could await in our own galaxy" by biophysicist Maikel Rheinstadter. Rheinstadter goes wrong in quite a few places. 

He starts out with six paragraphs of triumphalist boasting that has nothing to do with the topic of his post.  Then he asks: what is life? He offers a very bad definition of life: "A more comprehensive definition considers life as a self-sustaining chemical system capable of processing information and maintaining a state of low entropy, with little disorder or randomness." That sounds like a definition of life that only a physicist would give. 

A decent definition of a living thing is: a very information-rich state of extremely high organization, requiring many types of protein molecules that each require a very special arrangement of thousands of atoms to achieve a functional end, with the information-rich state of organization being capable of reproducing itself or participating in its reproduction, either sexually or asexually.  That definition applies to everything from single-celled organisms to fish to mammals. 

Rheinstadter then proceeds to make the very serious error of stating the Great DNA Myth, the untrue claim that organisms have within their DNA instructions for building themselves.  He erroneously states, "DNA serves as the blueprint of life, containing the genetic instructions necessary for an organism's development, survival and reproduction."  No, DNA does not contain any instructions telling how to build a human or any of its organ systems or any of its organs or any of its cells, and DNA does not even have instructions on how to build any of the organelles that are the building components of cells. 

Rheinstadter then wastes paragraphs speculating about the possibility of silicon life, which has nothing to do with estimating the likelihood of chance processes producing intelligent extraterrestrials. He then makes a statement sounding like he has no idea about the astronomical odds against any accidental origin of life from non-life. He states this: "On the other hand, geochemical processes on early Earth, such as those occurring in warm little ponds or in hydrothermal vents deep in the ocean, could have also provided the necessary conditions and ingredients for life to emerge." Talking about "the necessary conditions and ingredients for life to emerge" is an extremely misleading way to talk. Even the simplest living thing is a state of physical organization as great as the state of physical organization in a book. You don't get life by just having some suitable conditions and ingredients, just as you don't get books spontaneously arising from ingredients of paper and ink. 

Rheinstadter then discusses homochirality, but in a very misleading way that is a kind of "censor the improbability" affair.  Homochirality is the fact that the amino acids in the proteins used in living things are all left-handed, even though naturally produced amino acids are left-handed and right-handed in equal numbers. Homochirality is one of several gigantic reasons for believing in the impossibility of natural abiogenesis.  There naturally would never occur a situation in which you got some very large pool of amino acids that were only left-handed. 

Failing to explain the homochirality issue, Rheinstadter inaccurately claims that  "recent analyses of meteorites have revealed a slight asymmetry, favouring the left-handed form by as much as 60 per cent."  No, reliable analytics have not revealed such a thing, and all analytics of amino acids in meteorites are extremely unreliable because of the very high chance of earthly contamination. 

Referring to the Drake Equation, Rheinstadter claims. "An optimistic estimate using this formula suggests that 12,500 intelligent alien civilizations might exist in the Milky Way alone"   He has a link to a Popular Mechanics page that has only a headline and not a story. 

Rheinstadter concludes with the statements below, which are all examples of a physicist sounding like he is bad at math:

"The primary argument for extraterrestrial life remains probabilistic: considering the sheer number of stars and planets, it seems highly improbable that life wouldn't have arisen elsewhere. 

The probability of humanity being the sole technological civilization in the observable universe is considered to be less than one in 10 billion trillion. Additionally, the chance of a civilization developing on any single habitable planet is better than one in 60 billion.

With an estimated 200 billion trillion stars in the observable universe, the existence of other technological species is highly likely, potentially even within our Milky Way galaxy."

The first of these statements is a statement guilty of the "many chances equals some successes" fallacy, a fallacy that might also be stated as "many chances equals at least one success."  It simply is not generally true that many chances will result in some successes, or that many chances will result in at least one success. If the chance of something is sufficiently low, it will not happen even if there are a huge number of chances of it happening. 

The correct way to calculate the chance of something happening by chance is to multiply two numbers:

(1) The chance of success on any one random trial.

(2) The number of random trials that occurred. 

If the resulting number is greater than 1, then at least one success is likely. If the resulting number is less than 1, then at least one success is unlikely. 

For example, the probability of throwing ten dice and having them all end up sixes is 1 in six to the tenth power, or 1 in 60,466,176. If you put ten dice in a cup, shake the cup,  and throw the dice on the ground a million times, you should not expect to ever see all ten dice landing as sixes.  If you try such a thing 100 million times, you should expect to see at least one such try produce ten sixes. The example illustrates the simple fact: many chances may not mean a likelihood of even one success.  

To sound like someone who was good at math, what Rheinstadter should have done is to have first made an estimate of the likelihood of life and a civilization appearing on a planet, and then referred us to the number of planets in the observable universe, telling us perhaps that given such an estimate of the chance of life and a civilization appearing, we should expect at least one extraterrestrial civilization to exist. But he did not do that. Instead he acted as if he believed in the erroneous "many chances equals some successes" idea, by saying, "The primary argument for extraterrestrial life remains probabilistic: considering the sheer number of stars and planets, it seems highly improbable that life wouldn't have arisen elsewhere."

But where Rheinstadter really fails to sound like someone good at math is in his statement, "The probability of humanity being the sole technological civilization in the observable universe is considered to be less than one in 10 billion trillion." Here he is completely misstating what was said by the article he refers to. The source he is referring to is one that merely said that if the likelihood of a technological civilization appearing on a planet is greater than 1 in 10 billion trillion, then we should expect that there exists at least one technological civilization in the universe. It is gigantically inaccurate to cite that source and say that it claimed that "the probability of humanity being the sole technological civilization in the observable universe is ... less than one in 10 billion trillion." In fact, the source refers to a paper whose co-author says, "We have no idea how likely it is that an intelligent technological species will evolve on a given habitable planet." 

Rheinstadter has mangled his math. He has referred to a study that did nothing to claim any likelihood, and he has incorrectly claimed that this is a study claiming near-certainty. The mistake that Rheinstadter made here is as clumsy as hearing David merely say, "If I get a 99 on the test, it will be probably the best score in the class," and then claiming, "David says there is a 99 percent chance that he got the best test score in his class." 

Nowhere in his article does Rheinstadter sound like someone who is good at probability math. In one of the sources that Rheinstadter cites, we hear another physicist (astrophysicist Adam Frank) who stops sounding like he's good at math as soon as he discusses extraterrestrials. On the page cited, we have this quote:

"By applying the new exoplanet data to the universe’s 2 x 10 to the 22nd power stars, Frank and Sullivan find that human civilization is likely to be unique in the cosmos only if the odds of a civilization developing on a habitable planet are less than about one in 10 billion trillion, or one part in 10 to the 22nd power. 'One in 10 billion trillion is incredibly small,' says Frank. 'To me, this implies that other intelligent, technology producing species very likely have evolved before us.' "

How very silly, to reason that we should be suspicious of a probability because it is "incredibly small."  There are more than 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 probabilities that you could correctly calculate as being "incredibly small" and having a likelihood as very much smaller than 1 chance in 10 the 22nd power.  There is no rule in the universe that probabilities cannot be incredibly small, or that most probabilities are more than incredibly small. 

How could a physicist sound like he is good at probability math when calculating the chance of extraterrestrial life? It would go something like this:

(1) First, he would study the likelihood of a random set of amino acids resulting in a functional protein, keeping in mind that proteins are very sensitive to small changes, and that the average protein requires hundreds of specially arranged amino acids. A key part of the calculation is that there are twenty possible amino acids used by living things. 

(2) Under a reasonable assumption that at least half of a functional protein's amino acid sequence is necessary for it to have any function, he would make a rough calculation that the probability of getting a functional protein by chance combinations of amino acids is roughly 1 in 10 to the hundredth power. 

(3) He would consider the minimum number of functional proteins in a self-reproducing cell, which is at least 100. 

(4) Using the rule that you get the probability of independent events all occurring by multiplying their individual probabilities, he would calculate that the chance of amino acids accidentally forming into a collection of all the proteins needed for a self-reproducing cell is roughly 1 in 10 to the ten-thousandth power, or roughly 1 in ₁₀¹⁰⁰⁰⁰.

(5) He would calculate the total number of chemical combinations that might occur on all of the planets in the observable universe, assuming a generous figure of maybe 10 to the seventieth power per planet, and an estimate of ten to the 23rd power planets in the universe.  

(6) Taking into account the numbers the numbers above, the result would be a likelihood of less than 1 in 10 to the hundredth power of the necessary combinations ever occurring anywhere in the observable universe, because of mere chance processes. 

(7) He would note that there are many other requirements for the origin of even the simplest life, such as homochirality requirements making the probability gigantically smaller, and also the requirement for the origin of a genetic code, also making the probability gigantically smaller. 

(8) He would end up by concluding that there is a negligible likelihood of chance processes ever producing a self-reproducing cell anywhere in the observable universe.

Some physicists or astrophysicists sounded like they did make the appropriate calculations. They are quoted below:

• "The transformation of an ensemble of appropriately chosen biological monomers (e.g. amino acids, nucleotides) into a primitive living cell capable of further evolution appears to require overcoming an information hurdle of superastronomical proportions (Appendix A), an event that could not have happened within the time frame of the Earth except, we believe, as a miracle (Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, 1981, 1982, 2000). All laboratory experiments attempting to simulate such an event have so far led to dismal failure (Deamer, 2011; Walker and Wickramasinghe, 2015)." -- "Cause of Cambrian Explosion - Terrestrial or Cosmic?," a paper by 21 scientists,  2018. 
• "The expected number of abiogenesis events is much smaller than unity when we observe a star, a galaxy, or even the whole observable universe." -- Scientist Tomonori Totani, "Emergence of life in an inflationary universe," a paper confessing we would not expect one natural origin of life (abiogenesis) even in the entire observable universe (link).

The situation in regard to extraterrestrial life is this: the universe may contain gigantic numbers of inhabited planets, but only if there is some causal reality increasing the odds (as there might well be). If only blind chance is at work, we should conclude that Earth is the only planet in the observable universe with living things. But since there are the strongest reasons for believing that something much more than blind chance is at work, we cannot draw any such conclusion about a likely nonexistence of extraterrestrials. 

The question of teleology and cosmic purpose is all-important in considering extraterrestrial life. But senselessly physicists and astronomers ignore such a question.