- "Fundamentally, we have a poor understanding of how any internal organ forms." -- Timothy Saunders, developmental biologist (link).
- "Biochemistry cannot provide the spatial information needed to explain morphogenesis...Supracellular morphogenesis is mysterious...Nobody seems to understand the origin of biological and cellular order." -- Six medical authorities (link).
- "Quite simply, scientists' supposed referred expertise about fields of science distant from their own is nearly always based on mythologies about science rather than science itself." -- H.M. Collins and R. Evans, "THE THIRD WAVE OF SCIENCE STUDIES: STUDIES OF EXPERTISE AND EXPERIENCE."
- "This is mostly in line with a sobering recent realization of NIH in the US that around 90% [of] all biology science results are NOT repeatable. Scientist publish what worked not a majority of experiments that do not, even if this is the same experiment." -- Boginslaw Stec PhD (link).
- "My experiences at four research universities and as a National Institutes of Health (NIH) research fellow taught me that the relentless pursuit of taxpayer funding has eliminated curiosity, basic competence, and scientific integrity in many fields. Yet, more importantly, training in 'science' is now tantamount to grant-writing and learning how to obtain funding. Organized skepticism, critical thinking, and methodological rigor, if present at all, are afterthoughts....American universities often produce corrupt, incompetent, or scientifically meaningless research that endangers the public, confounds public policy, and diminishes our nation’s preparedness to meet future challenges....Universities and federal funding agencies lack accountability and often ignore fraud and misconduct. There are numerous examples in which universities refused to hold their faculty accountable until elected officials intervened, and even when found guilty, faculty researchers continued to receive tens of millions of taxpayers’ dollars. Those facts are an open secret: When anonymously surveyed, over 14 percent of researchers report that their colleagues commit fraud and 72 percent report other questionable practices....Retractions, misconduct, and harassment are only part of the decline. Incompetence is another....The widespread inability of publicly funded researchers to generate valid, reproducible findings is a testament to the failure of universities to properly train scientists and instill intellectual and methodologic rigor. That failure means taxpayers are being misled by results that are non-reproducible or demonstrably false." Edward Archer PhD, "The Intellectual and Moral Decline in Academic Research," (link).
- "The images from a total of 20,621 papers published in 40 scientific journals from 1995 to 2014 were visually screened. Overall, 3.8% of published papers contained problematic figures, with at least half exhibiting features suggestive of deliberate manipulation....The results demonstrate that problematic images are disturbingly common in the biomedical literature and may be found in approximately 1 out of every 25 published articles containing photographic image data." -- Bik, Casadevall and Fang, "The Prevalence of Inappropriate Image Duplication in Biomedical Research Publications" (link).
- "I am merely pointing out that a large proportion of our scientists are being subsidized by the government in the name of might, and none, to my knowledge, in the name of right. Here we have science in an age of rampant nationalism and materialism." -- Harvard psychologist Henry Murray (link).
- "Can so many scientists have been wrong over the eighty years since 1925? Unhappily yes. The mainstream in science...is often wrong...Scientists are often tardy in fixing basic flaws in their sciences despite the presence of better alternatives. Think of the half century it took American geologists to recognize the truth of drifting continents, a theory proposed in 1915 by -- of all eminently ignorable people -- a German meteorologist." -- economist Stephen Thomas Ziliak (link).
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Our future, our universe, and other weighty topics
Sunday, July 6, 2025
Scientist Flubs and Flops #8
Thursday, July 3, 2025
SETI Scientist Misspoke Sagan-Style
Last year the New York Post had a misleading editorial by the chief scientist of the SETI Institute, Nathalie Cabrol. It was clumsily entitled "The possibility of life on other planets is more likely than we know," rather than the more concise "life on other planets is more likely than we know," which expresses exactly the same idea in three fewer words. Saluting Carl Sagan, the editorial gives us the same type of baloney and BS on this topic that we often got from Sagan, a scientist who often made very bad misstatements about very important topics.
Early on we have this bit of baloney: "We live in a golden age in astrobiology, the beginning of a fantastic odyssey in which much remains to be written, but where our first steps promise prodigious discoveries." No, actually we don't live in any such "golden age in astrobiology," because astrobiologists have done nothing to show that life exists on other planets; so astrobiology is current a science without a subject matter. And astrobiology (the search for life on other planets) has been going on for more than 60 years, so it certainly is not taking its "first steps." Astrobiology is 65 long years away from "beginning." The first SETI attempt to detect radio signals from extraterrestrials was the Project Ozma launched in 1960. The link here allows you to browse through a table showing all of the main searches for extraterrestrial intelligence, which have been occurring almost steadily since 1960.
Highlights include:
The SERENDIP I project, which from 1979 to 1982 surveyed a large portion of the sky, the portion depicted in Figure 4 of the paper here, a project which a Sky and Telescope article tells us surveyed "many billions of Milky Way stars."
The Southern SERENDIP project lasting 1998 and 2005, which surveyed for some 60,000 hours a large portion of the sky, the portion depicted in Figure 2 of the paper here.
The SETI project discussed here, surveying a significant portion of the sky, the portion depicted in Figure 2 of the paper here.
The all-sky SETI survey discussed here, which operated continuously for more than four years.
The two-year southern sky SETI search discussed here, which observed for 9000 hours and "covered the sky almost two times."
The five-year META SETI project discussed here, which between 1988 and 1993 spent about 80,000 hours of telescope time searching for extraterrestrials.
What would you think of an employee who was assigned some task, and who then said (when asked months later to report his progress) that he "had only just begun" the project, despite working on it for months? You might think that such a guy should not be trusted. But how much worse is it to claim around this year that scientists are "beginning" to search for extraterrestrial life, making "first steps," when such efforts have actually been going on pretty much full blast for 65 years?
We then have from Cabrol a repetition of some of the "we are star stuff" hogwash that Carl Sagan loved to spray. We read this:
"To begin with, the elementary compounds making life as we know it — carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur — are surprisingly common.
It is no accident that we humans are made of them.
This is the star stuff astronomer Carl Sagan always talked about — not the aliens of Hollywood’s imagination.
This is life — or the building blocks of life — ever-present, but invisible to the human eye."
Sagan would always repeat this "we are all star stuff" mantra, but it was a profoundly misleading claim. The word "stuff" implies a disorganized set of things or disorganized material. For example, if someone said to you, "Let me show you some metal stuff I have in my garage," you would be surprised if the person opened his garage door and pointed at a car. The word "stuff" implies some not-very-organized set of things. For example, someone may say, "I bought some stuff at the food store," referring to various items in a bag that are not any very organized arrangement.
And contrary to the overconfident claims of astronomers such as Sagan, we do not actually know that the heavy elements in our bodies came from stars. Calculations based on the number of supernova explosions in our galaxy (discussed here) suggest that fewer than .0002 of the galaxy should have received elements from supernova explosions. So the claim that the heavier elements in our bodies came from stars is questionable. Scientific accounts of the origin of all elements heavier than iron are shaky, as a recent Quanta Magazine article confesses.
A human being is not "some stuff." Physically a human being is a state of enormous organization, something so vastly organized it is the opposite of what you think of when you hear the phrase "some stuff." And a human is also a mind, something mental, which is not physical stuff.
I think I understand why scientists kept repeating Sagan's extremely misleading claim that "we are all star stuff." One reason is that it was a slogan that serves to dehumanize and depersonalize humans, and to make it sound like a human body is not organized. Scientists are embarrassed by the vast levels of functional organization in the human body. The credibility of all claims of an accidental or unguided origin of the human species are inversely proportional to the amount of functional fine-tuning, information richness, and hierarchical organization in human bodies. The more organized and fine-tuned our bodies, the less credible are claims of an unguided origin of humans. So, clinging to a groundless dogma they cherish (that humans are mere accidents of nature), scientists love to repeat phrases that make human bodies sound like nothing very special. One such phrase is the very misleading phrase "we are all star stuff."
People familiar with the utter inhabitability of the hell-world Venus (twice as hot as a busy pizza oven) may chuckle at these lines by Cabrol talking about a planet revolving around another star:
"This Earth-sized exoplanet, identified using NASA’s TESS satellite system, orbits a cool red dwarf star and shares intriguing similarities with Venus. Signs of habitability are seemingly everywhere."
"Signs of habitability are seemingly everywhere"? What actually happened is that projects such as Kepler and TESS spent years looking for habitable planets, and found only a very small number, probably fewer than 20. Instead of "everywhere," it was more like "1 in a 20,000." Kepler surveyed 500,000 stars, finding fewer than about 20 habitable planets.
Sounding like someone writing very carelessly, Cabrol says this of elements such as carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus and sulfur: "This is life — or the building blocks of life — ever-present, but invisible to the human eye." No, some carbon floating around in space is not life, nor is it a "building block of life." The phrase "building block of life" in reference to atoms or amino acids is profoundly misleading, for reasons explained in the visual below.
Multicellular life is built from incredibly organized components called cells, which cannot be properly compared to the simple clay things that are "building blocks." Even one-celled life is built from hundreds of different types of proteins, each a special arrangement of thousands of atoms that have to be organized just right, not something unordered like a building block.
We have this very misleading language by scientist Cabrol:
"This is life — or the building blocks of life — ever-present, but invisible to the human eye. Thanks to decades of astronomical research, we know these organic molecules and volatiles are found on Mars, in the plumes of Saturn’s tiny moon Enceladus, in the atmosphere of Titan, on comets and more."
The proteins required for life require very special arrangements of amino acids. But no amino acids have been found on Mars. This has been a giant investigative failure of astrobiologists, a flop. No building blocks of life have been found on Mars, but Cabrol sounds like someone attempting to insinuate that such things were discovered. Organic molecules are extremely rare on Mars, existing in only the scantiest amounts; and the only type of organic molecules found on Mars are not building blocks of life. The building components of visible life forms are cells; the building components of such cells are protein molecules; and the building components of protein molecules are amino acids. No one ever even found amino acids on Mars. So if you insist on using this term "building blocks," a correct statement would be: not even the building blocks of the building blocks of the building blocks of visible organisms have been found on Mars. There is no evidence of amino acids being found on Enceladus or Titan. Claims were made to have detected some amino acids in a sample retrieved from a comet, but the reported abundances were negligible, so low we can have no strong confidence in the claims, because of a high chance of earthly contamination (discussed here).
We then have these lines from Cabrol:
"Much farther away still, nearly 200 hundred types of prebiotic organic molecules have been detected over decades of astronomical observation in interstellar clouds near the center of our galaxy. They include the kinds of molecules that could play a role in forming amino acids — those building blocks of life."
Notice the "try to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear" language. We don't hear about the discovery of amino acids in interstellar clouds, but merely a mention of "molecules that could play a role in forming amino acids." It's like someone who doesn't have a best seller and doesn't have a finished book and doesn't have a first chapter and doesn't even have any paper saying that he has a tree in his back yard, and that the tree could be used to make paper.
We then have this utterly fallacious example of the "many chances equals many successes" argument that astrobiologists like to use:
"The sheer number of potential alien worlds adds to the probability that life could be abundant in the universe. Data received from Kepler space telescope missions since its launch in 2009 suggest that tens of billions of Earth-sized planets could be located in the habitable zone of sun-like stars in our galaxy alone.
Because the probability distribution in nature predicts more puddles than large lakes — more small buttes than Himalayas, more small planets than large ones and more simple life than complex life — the universe is likely teeming with planets harboring that simple life."
Such reasoning is completely fallacious. It is not at all true in general that "many chances equals many successes." It is also not at all true in general that "many chances equals some successes" or even that "many chances equals at least one success." If the probability of something happening is sufficiently low, then we should expect many chances to yield zero successes. So "many chances" does not necessarily equal "many successes," and "many chances" does not necessarily equal "some successes" or even one success. For example:
- If everyone in the world threw a deck of cards into the air 1000 times, that would be almost 10 trillion chances for such flying cards to form into a house of cards, but we should not expect that in even one case would the flying deck of cards accidentally form into a house of cards.
- If a billion computers around the world each made a thousand attempts to write an intelligible book by randomly generating 100,000 characters, that would be a total of a trillion chances for an intelligible book to be accidentally generated, but we should not expect that even one of these attempts would result in the creation of an intelligible book.
- If you buy a million tickets in a winner-take-all lottery in which the chance of winning is only 1 in 100 million, you should not expect that any one of those tickets will succeed in winning such a lottery.
- It is not necessarily true that many chances (also called trials) will yield many successes.
- It is not necessarily true that many chances (also called trials) will yield some successes or even one success.
- If the chance of success on any one trial multiplied by the number of trials gives a number less than 1, we should not expect that even one of the trials will produce a success.
- If the chance of success on any one trial multiplied by the number of trials gives a number greater than 1, we should expect that at least one of the trials will produce a success.
- "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.
- "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 interconnected nature of DNA, RNA, and proteins means that it could not have sprung up ab initio from the primordial ooze, because if only one component is missing then the whole system falls apart – a three-legged table with one missing cannot stand." -- "The Improbable Origins of Life on Earth" by astronomer Paul Sutter.
- "Even the simplest of these substances [proteins] represent extremely complex compounds, containing many thousands of atoms of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen arranged in absolutely definite patterns, which are specific for each separate substance. To the student of protein structure the spontaneous formation of such an atomic arrangement in the protein molecule would seem as improbable as would the accidental origin of the text of Virgil's 'Aeneid' from scattered letter type." -- Chemist A. I. Oparin, "The Origin of Life," pages 132-133.
- "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).
- "We now know not only of the existence of a break between the living and non-living world, but also that it represents the most dramatic and fundamental of all the discontinuities of nature. Between a living cell and the most highly ordered non-biological system, such as a crystal or a snowflake, there is a chasm as vast and absolute as it is possible to conceive." -- -- Michael Denton, MD and biochemistry PhD, "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis," page 250.
Monday, June 30, 2025
More Dreams, Visions or Spooky Events That Seemed to Foretell a Death or Disaster
In the series of posts below, I discussed dreams, visions or mysterious voices that seemed to foretell a death or disaster:
When Dreams or Visions Foretell a Death
More Dreams or Visions That Seemed to Foretell a Death
Still More Dreams or Visions That Seemed to Foretell a Death
Still More Dreams, Visions or Voices That Seemed to Foretell a Death
Some More Dreams or Visions That Seemed to Foretell a Death or Disaster
When the Future Whispers to the Present
When Dreams or Premonitions Seem to Act Prophetically
Let us look at some more cases of this type.
A 1906 news story tells this account:
"FALLS CITY, Neb., Feb. s.— When Dr. Kerr and his wife had seated themselves at the breakfast table this morning Mrs. Kerr commenced to relate the story of a dream she had in the night. She had dreamed that their house was on fire and was giving a vivid description of the excitement she had undergone and of the damage done to the house. Her story was interrupted by the unceremonious arrival of a neighbor's son who burst into the room, exclaiming that their house was in flames. The house had caught fire from a defective electric light wire.
Considerable damage was done to the house and the contents before the flames were extinguished. The psychic phenomenon presented by Mrs. Kerr's dream is causing much discussion."
You can read the account here:
Below is a sad account of a mother who seemed to have a dream of her son's death that occurred on the same day 90 miles away:

A woman in 1893 told of having a strange vision of the death of her cousin, one that matched the death of that cousin five years later:
You can read the account here:
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn94052989/1893-01-15/ed-1/seq-16/
Below is an account of a child who had an unusually vivid dream of his mother and father at a funeral, where there was a "beautiful little white coffin." On the same day he told his mother of the dream, he was killed by an automobile.
In the account below we have a man claiming to have a very explicit dream in which an angel tells him his wife will soon die. The wife did soon die in a freak accident.
The newspaper account can be read here:
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83016689/1911-05-04/ed-1/seq-1/
The newspaper account below dates from 1911. We have not exactly a vision of foretelling the disaster of a son being sick and without money, but instead a vision in which the father seems to perceive such a state existing thousands of miles away.
"LOS ANGELES, Jan. 10. —Walter Bulloch is in a local hospital to-day, anxiously awaiting word from his father, a wealthy retired linen merchant in Ireland, following the receipt by Chief of Police Sebastian of a cable from Bulloch senior, in which the father stated that he had a vision of his son, penniless and sick, and requested that the Chief of Police search for the young man. Sebastian had a notice inserted in local papers and young Bulloch saw it and notified the Chief that he was the son of the man whose dream had spanned the ocean separating them. Sebastian cabled the father that his son was ill and without funds here."
You can read the account here:
Below we have an account of a clairvoyant vision of a loss of life in some kind of wreck of accident involving the steamship Continental in 1870. The clairvoyant in San Francisco claimed the accident took place many miles away, at Cape St. Lucas (the same as Cabo San Lucas, a location at the tip of the Baja peninsula in Mexico, 1542 miles from San Francisco), with the vision supposedly occurring the same day as the accident. The newspaper account says a matching accident occurred to this ship, in just such a place.
You can read the account here:
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85033673/1870-12-27/ed-1/seq-1/
According to the wikipedia.org page here, the following accident occurred to the Continental on September 29, 1870:
"The steamship foundered 30 nautical miles (56 km) off Cabo San Lucas, Mexico with the loss of eight lives. She was on a voyage from Mazatlán, Mexico to San Francisco, California."
The "Cabo San Lucas" referred to is Cape St. Lucas ("Cabo" means "Cape" in Spanish, and "San" means "St." or "Saint.")
In the account below we hear of a rose that inexplicably begins to arise from a mirror. The appearance of each leaf in the rose seems to correspond to the death of a family member.
Friday, June 27, 2025
When Frustrated Scientists Make the Most Grandiose Boasts
A recent article by scientist Alexandra Amon is an example of very bad hubris by a scientist. It is an article with the doubly misleading title "The Dark Universe: Why we're about to solve the biggest mystery in science." The mystery referred to is the so-called mystery of dark matter. Contrary to the groundless boasting of the title, no progress is being made in solving this so-called mystery, which we should always call a so-called mystery because of the lack of a clear evidential basis for believing that dark matter exists. And this so-called mystery of dark matter is almost trifling and insignificant compared to other mysteries of science that are a million times bigger.
Right from the start, we have an indication that Amon has gone astray. She begins her article saying this:
"Tiny, fuzzy blobs. I’ve spent a lot of time in the last few years looking at images of tiny, fuzzy blobs. They’re only ever a few pixels wide, like smudges on a photo, but they could be the key that unlocks the mystery of dark matter."
It's a waste of time to ever spend much time on any image that is only a few pixels wide. For many years I've got photographs stranger than that of 99% of all photographers. One of my rules is: never publish any image smaller than about 70 pixels by 70 pixels. Below that size, it is is just too easy to get false alarms. So it is pretty nonsensical to think that images "only ever a few pixels wide" could every unlock some deep cosmic mystery.
Amon states, "Our theory of the Universe hinges on the existence of dark matter, and we have no idea what dark matter is." But a great rule is: in almost every case, with few exceptions, if you have no idea of what something is, then you do not actually know such a thing exists. And that rule holds true in this case. We do not know that any such thing as dark matter exists.
Amon is a member of a belief community, the tiny community of scientists that calls themselves cosmologists. The total number of cosmologists around the world is only a few thousand. In tiny groups this small, it is extremely common for groupthink to occur. Groupthink is typically when some belief tradition arises in a small community, and it becomes taboo for people in that little clique to challenge that belief tradition. People in the little clique may get wildly excited about ideas that are not warranted by observations.
The cosmologist belief community clings without warrant to several unproven and dubious belief traditions, all of which involve never-observed things. Those belief traditions include:
- A belief in the existence of dark matter.
- A belief in the existence of dark energy.
- A belief in the existence of primordial cosmic inflation, not to be confused with the more general belief in the Big Bang.