Scientist Flubs and Flops #8

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• "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).

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.  

But human bodies are not some disorganized stuff. Bodies are things that have an enormous degree of hierarchical organization.  In a body subatomic articles are organized into atoms, which are organized into simple molecules like amino acids, which are organized into vastly more complicated protein molecules consisting of hundreds of amino acids arranged in just the right way to produce a functional effect. Then such protein molecules are organized into protein complexes or organelles, which are organized into cells that may have thousands of such organelles. Then the cells are organized into tissues, which are organized into organs, which are organized into organ systems. "Stuff" is a misleading term to use about that type of organization. Using such a term for something as organized as the human body is like calling the Golden Gate Bridge "some metal stuff."  

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. 

Below are some very general observations about probability:

• 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.

Roughly speaking, if the chance of life accidentally appearing on the average planet is greater than 1 in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, we should expect that life exists on at least one other planet in the observable universe. But if the chance of life randomly appearing on the average planet is less than 1 in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, we should expect (given only chance) that no life exists outside of our solar system, in any planet in the observable universe. 

Unfortunately for extraterrestrial life enthusiasts, there is every reason for suspecting that the chance of life appearing on any random planet (because of accidental chemical combinations) is very, very much less than 1 in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.  Even the simplest microbe requires 100 or more types of functional protein molecules.  An average functional protein molecule consists of hundreds of amino acids arranged in just the right way to achieve a functional result.  It has been estimated that the probability of a functional protein molecule forming by chance is less than 1 in 10 to the hundredth power. 

Here the math tells a decisive tale.  It seems that by chance that nowhere in the observable universe would there form even one of the functional protein molecules needed for life. But more than 50 types of such molecules would be needed for even the simplest thing to exist. Even the simplest microbe is like a purposeful arrangement of many thousands of amino acids parts, just as a 50-page instruction manual is a purposeful arrangement of about 15,000 letters.  The odds against abiogenesis (the accidental origin of life) are prohibitive.  Life may be common in the universe, but only if there is some purposeful agency acting to overcome the prohibitive odds against the accidental origin of life. 

Below are some relevant quotes:

• "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.

As for Cabrol's claim that "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," nothing could be more fallacious.  The fact that it is harder to create complex multicellular life than one-celled life does not give you the slightest warrant for concluding that one-celled life is common in the universe. To make such an argument is every bit as fallacious as saying "it's much harder for accidents to produce aircraft carriers than for accidents to produce automobiles, so the moons of Jupiter must contain many automobiles." 

Cabrol works for the SETI Institute, an organization dedicated to search for life in space. The SETI Institute has prepared extensive educational materials.  On page 85 of one of their documents (the Volume 2 here), we have some material designed to be taught to school children. We read this:

"Nobody knows how life was created. One theory is that the first life-forms were created by chance combinations of complex molecules in tide pools or shallow seas, warmed by the Sun and energized by lightning. Another theory is that the first life was made by chance combination of complex molecules at places where hot volcanic vents heated the ocean on the sea floor." 

This is very poor education on the topic of the origin of life, the kind of materialist junk that Carl Sagan would push.  The above  sentences create the utterly erroneous idea that all you need for life to get started is a little energy -- maybe lightning, sunlight or heat. It's an idea as fallacious as the idea that all you need to write books is some process that accidentally splashes ink on paper pages. The 218-page document has no meaningful references to proteins, and utterly fails to serve as something that can educate school children about the complexity of life. 

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

Even More Dreams and Visions 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

Dreams, Visions or Premonitions That Seemed to Correctly Predict a Death

Sometimes Dreams, Visions or Premonitions Seem to Foretell a Death

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:

https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=LAH19060206.2.117.44&srpos=6&e=-------en--20--1--txt-txIN-%22strange+vision%22------

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:

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84026749/1907-11-28/ed-1/seq-1/

The account below from 1907 is similar to the one above, with a mother having a vision of the death of her son at the time he died, a vision that proves true. 

The account above can be read here. 

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. 

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn93055779/1907-04-17/ed-1/seq-1/

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:

https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=NWJ19110113.2.76&srpos=4&e=-------en--20--1--txt-txIN-%22strange+vision%22-------

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. 

Below is an incredibly strange newspaper account of rumors arising that a man had died in a car crash. The man drove to his friends to assure him the rumor was false. But on his way back he died in a car crash, just as the rumor had described. 

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn87078082/1909-06-25/ed-1/seq-6/

The account below is found on page 782 of the December 8, 1933 edition of the periodical Light, which you can read here:

"A painful impression has been produced in Sordevolo by the sudden death of Signora Cornella Piovano, aged thirty-eight. Signora Piovano dreamed that she had died suddenly, and awakened in great agitation. The next morning, still under the impression of her dream, she recounted it to her family, expressing the conviction that it would be verified. A few hours later the unfortunate woman, while putting her child to bed, was taken suddenly ill and died almost immediately".

The very interesting account below is found on page 171 of the May 29, 1920 edition of the periodical Light, which you can read here.

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.   

Cosmologists are very often guilty of egregious misstatements in which they claim to know grand and glorious things that they do not actually know. 

We have this goofy reasoning from Amon:

"Maybe dark matter is simply something we’ve invented out of a misinterpretation of the theory. Maybe it’s not really out there at all.

Sadly, not. Because one thing we do know is that something is out there. We can’t see it and we don’t know what it is, but since Dr Vera Rubin first observed the effects it was having on stars in the late 1970s, there’s no denying it’s there. Rubin set out to study the motions of stars in spiral galaxies, but her measurements suggested that the stars weren’t moving as expected."

Amon refers to the fact that textbook versions of gravitational theory do not correctly predict the orbital motion of stars around the centers of galaxies. But such a failure does not amount to an argument for the likely existence of dark matter. There are many possible theories that might explain such an anomaly, theories different from the dark matter theory. The "there's no denying it's there" claim is false. There is a substantial group of MOND theorists who very much deny that the "it" she refers to (massive amounts of invisible dark matter) is there. 

After describing that outer stars (farther away from the center of the galaxy) orbit the galaxy as quickly as inner stars (closer to the center of the galaxy), Amon claims that  "the only thing that could explain this finding would be if there is a tremendous amount of invisible matter in the outer regions of galaxies beyond the inner clump of visible stars." No, that is not true. There are quite a few different theories that have been created to explain this observational anomaly.  One of them is called MOND, which stands for Modified Newtonian Dynamics. 

Below is a post from one of the main sites of such a MOND theory, the site www.darkmattercrisis.wordpress.com:

Amon speaks above just as if the MOND theory does not exist. This is a common tactic of scientists: just pretend competing theories do not exist, and hope they go away. Amon incorrectly says this about dark matter: "So we know it’s there and that there’s a lot of it." No, we do not know that dark matter exists, and no one has ever observed it. 

Very strangely, referring to the so-called Standard Model of Cosmology, Amon states, "This ‘baby picture’ of the Universe supports the evidence that the cosmos is composed predominantly of dark matter." No, according to such a model the universe is composed predominately of something different from dark matter: dark energy. 

Misspeaking very badly about something never observed, Amon states this "Our observations tell us that dark matter is the invisible scaffolding of the cosmos: it forms a cosmic web of clusters and filaments, with enormous voids in-between, that guide the location of galaxies." To the contrary, there have been no such observations. Dark matter has never been observed. 

Neither dark matter nor dark energy has any place in the Standard Model of Physics, something that is on vastly sounder ground than the so-called Standard Model of Cosmology. Few claims are more laughable than Amon's groundless boast that " we're about to solve the biggest mystery in science." Despite decades of heavy funding, no progress has been made in either observing dark matter or substantiating a physics basis underlying the existence of dark matter.  Nothing currently being done offers much hope for progress on this topic. 

The alleged mystery of dark matter corresponds to what particle or particles make up dark matter, if dark matter exists. That is not a known mystery of the universe, but may well be merely a socially constructed artificial mystery that is the creation of speculating scientists. Ideas about dark matter arose from observations of why stars do not revolve around the center of a galaxy at the expected speed. Such a mystery is not even one of the hundred biggest mysteries of science. 

All of the mysteries below are mysteries a thousand times bigger than any mystery of dark matter:

(1) How are humans instantly able to retrieve lots of information after seeing a single sight or hearing a single name?

(2) How are the most complex cells able to reproduce?

(3) How did the 20,000+ types of protein molecules in the human body ever originate?

(4) How do protein molecules fold correctly to form into the 3D shapes needed for their function, and why do they form into just the right organized protein complexes so often needed for them to perform useful functions in the human body?

(5) How are humans ever able to learn new things, and form new memories that can last a lifetime?

(6) How is a speck-sized zygote ever able to progress to become the vast organization of an adult human body?

(7) How is a human able to think and understand? 

(8) How were the cells and anatomy of any complex visible organism ever able to originate?

(9) How was human language ever able to originate?

(10) Why does there occur the many well-established things that so many scientists senselessly refuse to believe in?

For a discussion of why each of these questions is very much unanswered,  read my post here. 

It's not that Amon is mostly wasting her time. She works on a project called the Dark Energy Survey which describes itself as "an international, collaborative effort to map hundreds of millions of galaxies, detect thousands of supernovae, and find patterns of cosmic structure that will reveal the nature of the mysterious dark energy that is accelerating the expansion of our Universe."  Such a project is actually doing some solid mapping work. It is simply that such a project has done nothing to prove the existence of either dark matter or dark energy, which was its grand ambition.  Scientists working on not-meeting-their-grand-goals projects should not be boasting so loudly, as Amon has done. 

If there were a monthly magazine on the search for dark matter, it might look like this: