Oops: Six-Year Project Flops, But Scientist Calls It "Transformative"

 So-called "science news" sites these days are undergoing a slow, sickening degeneration, with their quality being deteriorated by profiteers. The headlines are dominated by the most shameless clickbait trying to get you to click on enticing headlines that take you to pages filled with ads that make money for the science news profiteers. Some examples of the deterioration include these:

• When you click on a headline at the RealClearScience site, you will typically not go directly to an article page, but to some annoying popup ad that you will have to dismiss before going to the article page. 
• Clicking on the Phys.org science news site now will often be a futile click, as you will often be informed that you have hit some five-article limit. 
• Clicking on articles at the NewScientist site will typically be futile, unless you have subscribed. 
• When I clicked on a science news story at Vox.com, I got some "you can't read because you're not a subscriber" notification. 

You might call this the crapification of science news. Wading through such annoyances, including a popup annoyance trying to read an article at Space.com, I found news about the release of results from a six-year Dark Energy Survey. It's an article at Space.com with this headline:

Scientists just got the clearest picture of the dark universe yet: 'Now the dream has come true'

Wow, sounds like dark energy or dark matter has finally been observed, right? Wrong. All that happened is that the results of a six-year Dark Energy Survey have been released, and no dark energy was ever observed. 

We have the "sheds new light" rhetorical trick so commonly used by scientists when their research has failed to discover anything or failed to discover anything important. The trick works like this: no matter how insignificant your results are, you simply claim that your research "sheds new light" on some longstanding problem. The "shed new light" quote is the one below:

"These results from DES shine new light on our understanding of the universe and its expansion," Regina Rameika, Associate Director for the Office of High Energy Physics in the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, said in a statement. "They demonstrate how long-term investment in research and combining multiple types of analysis can provide insight into some of the universe’s biggest mysteries."

But reading further in the article, we fail to learn of any new light that was shed. We fail to read of any actual detection of dark energy. We read that the observations are compatible with the main theory of dark energy and dark matter (called LCDM), but also compatible with a different theory ( wCDM)  in which dark energy is described as evolving over time. We read, "The DES results conformed well to the LCDM, but also fit nicely with the wCDM."

Then we read what sounds like a confession that both of these theories are failing observation tests:

"But there is one parameter that these new results found to be off in comparison to both of these cosmic models: how matter in the modern universe is predicted to cluster based upon measurements of the early universe. These findings not only confirmed that modern galaxies don't cluster as either the LCDM or the wCDM predicts, but the difference between observations and theory became even more pronounced."

But such a confession sounds too troubling to be the article's ending. That confession has a "cosmologists don't understand what's going on, and are fumbling around and failing" ring to it. So the article ends on a happy note, with some scientist saying that this basically-found-nothing six-year Dark Energy Survey was "transformative." It's a claim as bogus as the "now the dream has come true" quote in the article's headline. The Dark Energy Survey would have been a "dream come true" if the scientists had actually observed some dark energy. 

The clustering explanation problem mentioned above involves the hierarchical organization of cosmic structure. Stars are organized into galaxies, which are organized into galaxy clusters, which are organized into gigantic clusters of galaxy clusters called superclusters. So many levels of organization are pretty much impossible to explain under current theories depicting only blind, purposeless things like dark matter and dark energy. And the dark energy used (unsuccessfully) to try to explain such organization is not even the dark energy predicted by quantum field theory, which predicts dark energy a gazillion or googol times stronger (as I discuss here). 

Postscript: Just after correcting a typo in this post, I read a new article at Quanta Magazine making this confession:

"The Standard Model doesn’t include particles that could comprise dark matter, for instance. It doesn’t explain why matter dominates over antimatter in the universe, or why the Big Bang happened in the first place. Then there’s the inexplicably enormous disparity between the Higgs boson’s mass (which sets the physical scale of atoms) and the far higher mass-energy scale associated with quantum gravity, known as the Planck scale. The chasm between physical scales — atoms are vastly larger than the Planck scale — seems unstable and unnatural."

At the same time we have got these groundless triumphal boasts about dark energy, our science news sites are reporting about a paper claiming to have produced a map of dark matter. The claim is groundless, and no dark matter was seen. All that was observed is gravitational lensing, the bending of light.  I'll discuss the related paper in an early February post.  It's a case of scientists saying "we saw" dark matter, when they should be saying "we inferred" or "we guessed" dark matter. 

Evolution Expert Confesses the Main Icon of Darwinism Is Misleading

Recently I read an article by evolution expert Prosanta Chakrabarty entitled "Is Our Picture of Evolution Still Stuck in the Past?" The article  discusses the most famous image used in Darwinist literature, an image that has been called "The March of Progress." The original version of the image was drawn by Rudolf Zallinger, and appeared on pages 47 to 49 of the 1965 book Early Man by F. Clark Howell, which was part of a series of books published and very widely sold by Time-Life Books. Below we see the original illustration as it appeared in that book, as an unusual multi-page "pull-out" requiring special work by the book printer.

Since 1965 variations of this image (usually much shorter, with only about 5 or 6 figures) have appeared endlessly in science literature, particularly in magazines and web pages. 

Shockingly, Chakrabarty  tells us that the image is misleading. He says this:

"Consider, for instance, Rudolph Franz Zallinger’s 1965 mural 'March of Progress.' This mural — which illustrates a linear progression of humankind from monkey to ape to man (redrawn in part in Fig. 2a) — is one of the most commonly used in popular culture today. But it’s incorrect. As Stephen Jay Gould explains in his 1996 book 'Full House,' evolution doesn’t lead to humans as shown. Rather, we share common ancestry with other great apes, such as our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees; we did not evolve directly from them."

Chakrabarty tells us that there is a "more accurate" way to describe evolution, and gives us the diagram below as what he thinks is the "more accurate" depiction. 

We should have great suspicion about a depiction such as the one above. One gigantic problem is the lack of any credible theory as to how there could occur a transition from the point marked as 2, one leading from a claimed common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans, all the way to humans. Evolutionary biologists lack any credible explanation as to how there could have arisen minds such as humans have, minds so rich in advanced mental capabilities that are of no use to creatures in the wild.  This failure was pointed out by Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-founder of the theory of evolution by natural selection, in his essay The Limits of Natural Selection as Applied to Man, which you can read here. 

Human Mental Capabilities, Mostly Useless to Cavemen

Another gigantic problem with the black diagram offered by Chakrabarty is its failure to specify what existed at the nodes marked 1 and 2 in the diagram. We have no mention of some discovered fossil species occupying either node 1 or node 2 in the diagram. 

The continued claim that humans and chimpanzees evolved from something vaguely called a "common ancestor" -- without any mention of what such a common ancestor was, or what fossils correspond to such a claimed common ancestor -- is a gigantically suspicious thing. It is as suspicious as someone claiming that he and Franklin Roosevelt have a common ancestor, while refusing to name who this common ancestor was. Such a failure would be a clue that the man was suggesting something untrue. And when scientists claim that humans and chimpanzees have a common ancestor, while failing to mention the name of any extinct species that they claim was that common ancestor, we should be extremely suspicious that this claim of a common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans is unfounded. 

Our suspicions about this matter should increase when we analyze how abundant have been the lies told by the very people who claim that humans and chimpanzees share a common ancestor. For many years they told us the false claim that the DNA of humans and chimpanzees are 98% similar, and used this false claim as their primary evidence for the claim that humans and chimpanzees have a common ancestor. Throughout the time this lie was told, it was always clear that such a claim was untrue by a large margin. A recent scientific study on this topic found there was about a 14% difference between the DNA of humans and the DNA of chimpanzees. The study is discussed here. 

Besides long telling the outrageous lie that human DNA and chimpanzee DNA differs by only 2%, the same Darwinism enthusiasts long engaged in the most outrageous lying by trying to depicts humans and chimpanzees as being mentally very similar. They were like the guy in the visual below:

It is rather obvious why we were so long deceived in this matter. Darwinists have always tried to make the ocean-sized gap between humans and chimpanzees and other apes look like a small gap, as a way of trying to make more credible claims of a natural evolution from an ape-like predecessor to humans. 

It is interesting that the type of graph offered by Chakrabarty as an example of "the real story of evolution" is a type of graph rejected by a paper in a scientific journal on human origins. The journal I refer to is the Journal of Human Evolution. In the paper here by anthropologist Lauren Schroeder and Rebecca Rogers Ackermann, we have the two diagrams below, labeled A and B. 

The chart marked A is a chart like the chart that Chakrabarty has offered as his "more accurate" evolution chart. But in the article above in the Journal of Human Evolution, chart A is criticized as a "commonly held view of evolution," and the suggestion is made that such an idea differs from "our contemporary understanding of human diversity (B)." 

Do you notice the huge difference between the charts? Chart A on the left (and Chakrabarty's diagram) presume that there are in the past particular common ancestors, represented in the diagram by unlabeled circles or unlabeled numbers. But the chart on the right (B) makes no such boasts of knowledge. Instead, it simply lists various types of species existing at various times, and the purple bars represent the range of times in which such species existed, according to the fossil or archeological evidence.  

Below is the diagram on the right. The scale on the left (labeled MA) refers to "millions of years ago." The grey figures are largely guesswork, and may not depict the way the corresponding organisms typically looked.  The third purple bar in the top left corner (marked H. sapiens) is our species. 

Why do the authors prefer diagram B above, rather than diagram A? Probably because the fossil evidence fails to convincingly suggest any specific story of ancestry, and fails to suggest any "tree of evolution." The facts of paleontology actually reinforce the idea that we have no business claiming to understand how the human species arose, and that the origin of humans is an unsolved mystery. 

Here is an annotated version of a short form of the "March of Progress" visual, one that highlights problems with the visual. 

A news story a few years ago made it rather clear that many experts have been telling us groundless stories about human origins. The news story was entitled "Most human origins stories are not compatible with known fossils."  We read the following: " 'When you look at the narrative for hominin origins, it's just a big mess -- there's no consensus whatsoever,' said Sergio Almécija, a senior research scientist in the American Museum of Natural History's Division of Anthropology and the lead author of the review."

The "March of Progress" visual constantly repeated (in shortened form) in Darwinist literature helped inspire my "Evolution of Materialism" visual below:

Below are some explanatory notes, some of which are discussed more fully in my post here: 

(1) In his De Rerum Natura, the ancient writer Lucretius advanced a materialist theory of human origins, speculating that humans arose from random combinations of atoms. Central to such a speculation was the idea that the universe had existed forever, with the idea that such an eternal span of time would allow the most improbable combinations of atoms to occur. The claim that the universe had existed forever was an error, and is now inconsistent with the standard Big Bang cosmology, maintaining the universe suddenly began about 13 billion years ago. 

(2) Charles Darwin advanced a vacuous theory of biological origins, based on a tiny-weight "random variations" idea very similar to the "random combinations" idea of Lucretius. Darwin's idea was even less credible, as he lacked the eternity of random combinations that Lucretius appealed to. But Darwin did have in his favor the misleading misnomer phrase "natural selection," which he used to describe a speculation which was no actual theory of selection, as "selection" means a conscious choice, and no such thing was postulated. Darwin's vacuous ideas "went viral" after they were embraced by biologists and other theorists eager to promote themselves as "grand lords of explanation" who could explain the great mystery of human origins. 

(3) The imprisonment, persecution and slaying of theists occurred massively in the Soviet Union between 1917-1950, and for many additional years in Russia and in other communist countries, which officially embraced atheism. 

(4) A key element in the late 20th-century propagation of Darwinism was the teaching of the false claim that DNA and its genes had a specification for making a human body and its organs and cells, something that was described as a blueprint, recipe or program for building a human. The lie was told not merely from 1960 to 1990, but for many additional years; and the lie continues to be widely told to this day (although more than than 38 doctors and scientists have confessed the claim is false). DNA and its genes actually have no specification of anything larger than a microscopic protein molecule, and do not specify how to make bodies, organs, cells or the organelles that make up such cells. The only coding system ever discovered in DNA and its genes is what is called the genetic code, a very simple coding system capable of expressing only low-level chemical information such as which amino acids make up a particular protein molecule. 

(5) After the clarification by physicists and cosmologists of how precisely fine-tuned our universe is, in a way that causes it (against the most enormous odds) to be habitable (permitting the existence of life), the theory of the multiverse was spread: the idea that there is some infinity or near-infinity of universes, each with different physical characteristics. The idea is pure fantasy, and does not actually do anything to explain the fine-tuned habitability of our universe, for reasons explained here and here. A nutshell explanation of such reasons would include a mention of the fact that increasing the number of random trials does not at all increase the likelihood of success on any one random trial. It is interesting that a few years ago a poll was made of philosophers, who were asked whether "design" or "multiverse" was the explanation for "cosmological fine-tuning." As discussed in my post here, the number of philosophers (144) who preferred the explanation of "design" was significantly higher than the number of philosophers (122) who preferred the explanation of "design." 

The NY Times' Lazy Look at Near-Death Experiences

 In a 2016 post I stated the following:

"During the past 30 years, the New York Times seems to have had the worst coverage of the paranormal given by any major newspaper. While it has outstanding coverage of politics, world affairs, sports, and entertainment, the paper will typically not cover important news about the paranormal. In the very rare cases when it does provide coverage of the paranormal, the New York Times almost always gives us coverage that is heavily biased, inaccurate, or uninformative."

In that post I gave many examples of the appalling shortfalls and glaring bias of the New York Times in covering claims of the paranormal.  While the paper has a slogan of "all the news that's fit to print," it would be more honest if the top left corner of the New York Times had a little square looking like the one below:

These days the New York Times is mostly behind a paywall. But we do sometimes get freely accessible articles showing how third-rate the paper's coverage is on topics such as anomalous psychic phenomena. An example was the "phone it in" article here by Jessica Grose, having the title "What I Saw When I Peeked Over the Edge of Consciousness." An archived alternate link is here.

The topic is near-death experiences. But we seem to get from Grose no signs  that she is any serious scholar of this very important topic, as well as some indication suggesting she has never seriously studied it. Instead of some decent scholarship, what Grose gives us is an example of what we can call "drive-by journalism."  Drive-by journalism can occur when someone forms an opinion on some topic by attending a single meeting or hearing a single speech by someone.  An example would be someone analyzing some church, based on only attendance of a single meeting of the church members. 

Grose does her drive-by journalism by attending a single weekend conference of a group called IANDS, which studies near-death experiences. IANDS stands for the International Association for Near-Death Studies. Showing zero signs that she has studied this topic in any depth, Grose gives us her impressions of the people she talked to. We have some photos that seem to have been selected to create the impression of emotion in the conference participants. The photographic impressions are misleading, because the IANDS group has long been devoted to the serious scholarly study of a topic of great intellectual significance. 

For many years the IANDS group has produced a website about near-death experiences, the website https://iands.org/. Besides scholarly articles, the website regularly publishes accounts of near-death experiences. Did Grose ever study any of these articles or accounts? She gives no evidence of doing that. Any serious scholar of this topic would have heard about IANDS years ago, but Grose makes it sound like she only recently heard about the organization after getting an email. 

After starting out her article with quite a few paragraphs showing no signs of any scholarship of near-death experiences, we get a taste of the depth of Grose's journalism on this weighty subject. It consists of comments about the clothes that people wore at the conference about near-death experiences. She writes this: 

"Then you had the experiencers and their spiritual fellow travelers, who appeared to be middle-aged. Some of them looked like stereotypical New Agers, wearing flowing boho skirts and bright colors. One young man rolled up his pant leg to show me a tattoo that said, 'Love.' But others looked aggressively normal. I saw a lot of people wearing graphic T-shirts, men in chinos attending light circles."

We have a paragraph discussing nineteenth century spiritualism and mediums. It is just the kind of paragraph we would expect in a New York Times article -- a paragraph failing to mention a single relevant  observational report. We hear not one word about topics such as how the London Dialectical Society did a long scientific investigation into the reports of paranormal phenomena so abundant at this time, and issued a long report finding resoundingly in favor of the reality of the phenomena.  We hear not one word about how the leading physicist William Crookes did a scientific investigation of the most famous medium of his time (Daniel Dunglas Home), and reported that he passed all tests very well, producing inexplicable paranormal phenomena. We get the old unhistorical suggestion that spiritualism arose to console those who had lost relatives in the American Civil War (1861-1865), a suggestion unhistorical because spiritualism had rose to great public prominence in the decade before that war started. 

Grose states: "From everything I heard at the conference and have read, the uniformity of people’s descriptions of their near-death experiences most likely has some kind of neurological explanation, even if technology isn’t sophisticated enough to account for all the details." There is no "uniformity of people’s descriptions of their near-death experience," and Grose's claim that there is such uniformity suggests that she has not decently studied this topic. Near-death experiences have a very great variety. But there are certain elements that recur over and over again, with a narrative element recurrence far greater than would be occurring if mere hallucination was the cause. 

According to four papers on the phenomenology of near-death experiences that I studied to make the table below, there are features that recur in a large fraction of near-death experiences.  The papers mentioned in the table below are these:

Study 1: The phenomenology of near-death experiences,” 78 subjects (link), a 1980 study, producing results similar to a smaller study group year 2003 in-hospital study by one of its co-authors. 

Study 2: "Qualitative thematic analysis of the phenomenology of near-death experiences,” 34 subjects (link), a 2017 study on people who survived cardiac arrest. 

Study 3: "Near-death experience in survivors of cardiac arrest: a prospective study in the Netherlands," a 2001 study of 62 subjects who were known to have suffered cardiac arrest and survived it, and who also reported a near-death experience (a subset that was 12% of a larger group of cardiac arrest survivors), link. The average duration of cardiac arrest was 4 minutes. 74% were interviewed within 5 days of their cardiac arrest. 

Study 4: "The Different Experience: A Report on a Survey of Near-Death Experiences in Germany," 82 subjects (link).

	Study 1	Study 2	Study 3	Study 4
Seeing a light or “unusual visual phenomena” such as lights or auras	48%	74%	> 23%	40%
Meeting other beings	55%	44%	32%	42%
Positive emotions or intense feeling of well-being	37-50%	29%	56%	50%
“Hyper-lucidity”		41%
ESP during the near-death experience	39%	12%
"Awareness of being dead" or awareness of dying		26%	50%
Distortion of time	79%	47%
Celestial landscape or other realm of existence	72%		29%	47%
Contact or communication with the dead	30%	23%	32%	16%
Out-of-body experience	35%	35%	24%	31%
Having some sort of nonphysical body separate from the physical body	58%
Passing through tunnel or similar structure	31%	26%	31%	38%
Life reviewed or relived	27.%	15%	13%	44%

We see here very much repetition of a core set of very distinctive features, but nothing that can be described as "uniformity of descriptions." And it makes no sense at all for Grose to be suggesting the idea that uniformity of descriptions (or strong similarity of descriptions) would be evidence that some mere hallucination was occurring. Instead, uniformity of descriptions or strong similarity of descriptions would be evidence that a hallucination was not occurring. 

Consider how erroneous Detective Smith is speaking in the conversation below:

Detective Smith: What did you see, John Davis?

John Davis: I saw Eddie Globermitt shoot the victim with a gun 

Detective Smith: What did you see, Mary Waters?

Mary Waters: I saw Eddie Globermitt shoot the victim with a gun 

Detective Smith: What did you see, Alan Bacon?

Alan Bacon: I saw Eddie Globermitt shoot the victim with a gun.

Detective Smith: Aha! Your descriptions are all similar ! That means you must have all been just hallucinating. 

Detective Smith here has got things backwards. The fact that all of the witnesses report the same thing is strong evidence for the objective reality that Eddie Globermitt shot the victim. And, similarly, if those having near-death experiences give very similar reports, that is evidence for the objective reality of what they are reporting, and evidence against any idea that a mere hallucination is occurring (a hallucination being something that can occur in an infinite number of ways). 

In the article Grose's faulty reasoning I just quoted has a link to an article. It is an article behind a paywall, one entitled "Psychedelic Experiences May Give a Glimpse Into Near-Death Experiences."  The idea is bunk. Skeptics have speculated that maybe humans have something like a cache of ketamine in their brains that might be released upon death. There is no evidence that any such cache of hallucinogenic substances exists in the brain, and no evidence that hallucinogenic substances are released upon death. And when people take hallucinogens, they have experiences not closely matching what is reported in near-death experiences. You can't explain experiences occurring when the brain flatlines (as it very quickly does during cardiac arrest) as psychedelic experiences, which require a brain that has not flatlined. 

Grose says, "It’s possible for patients to hear and see during resuscitation efforts." Near-death experiences are very often recorded during cardiac arrest, when brain waves very quickly flatline, within 15 to 30 seconds. Under materialist assumptions, no conscious experience should be possible in flatlining brains. Contrary to Grose's claim, there is no credible neurological explanation for near-death experiences and the out-of-body experiences they so often involve, and she provides no mention of any such explanation. When neuroscientists make their best attempts to explain near-death experiences, they often make misleading claims, and tend to give us full-of-errors papers like the one I discuss here. 

Sounding like dilettante dabbling and laziest reasoning from someone who never deeply studied the subject material, Grose's article is an example of the type of shoddy writing that the New York Times is typically guilty of when covering issues of the unexplained and anomalous. Sadly the New York Times rather often gives us equally poor journalism when writing about topics of biology, physics, cosmology, neuroscience and psychology, the main difference being that in those cases the paper's writers often take a "believe the weakest, flimsiest claims" attitude that is the opposite of the "reject strong observation claims" attitude the paper's writers typically take when covering the paranormal or anomalous. 

Not counting one little three-sentence quotation, we have in the article not a single quotation in which someone who had a near-death experience tells the full story of what happened. It is what we would expect from the New York Times, which is a kind of Pravda for materialists. For decades Soviet communists would read their daily edition of Pravda, which would always report that the world was working just exactly as a Soviet communist expected it to work. Similarly, the materialist reader of the New York Times always reads only stories that report the world working just exactly as a materialist expects it to work. 

Did the planning go like this?

We have an example of Grose's discarding of a clue in her statement below:

"A friend of mine died in a plane crash in the summer of 1996, right after we graduated from middle school. I remember being numb at her funeral. It felt impossible to accept that she and her lovely parents had met with such a horrible and sudden end. She started appearing in my dreams when I was in college, and I still dream about her at an irregular cadence.

The dream has the same contours every time. She is flying, birdlike, in the clouds above me, and she is whatever age I am when the dream happens. She says something like: You’re sad because you think I didn’t get to grow up. You think I didn’t get to go to college or fall in love or have children. But I want you to know that I’m in another place and I’m getting to do those things."

Rather than taking this recurring dream of high conceptual complexity as the important clue that it is, Grose says this: "My materialist explanation for these dreams is that I did not properly process my grief as a teenager and this is a way for my mind to work through the sadness of this loss." The explanation makes no sense. There is no robust evidence from materialist psychologists or materialist neuroscientists that recurring dreams serve any therapeutic effect such as alleviating sadness. 

Materialists such as Grose are ever-prone to throw away important clues whenever such clues annoy them. I am reminded of the materialist astronomer Carl Sagan, who stated, "Probably a dozen times since their deaths I've heard my mother or father, in a conversational tone of voice, call my name." Sagan threw away this  important clue, giving a silly explanation along the lines of "I hear their voices because I miss them." To read more about this tendency, read my post "Dogma-Doling Professors Discard or Ignore All Clues That Annoy Them," or my post "Poorly Reacting to Nature's Clues, Professors Act More Like Inspector Clouseau Than Lieutenant Columbo."

Problems With the Vickers Paper Polling Scientists About Extraterrestrial Life

 In 2025 there appeared the paper "Surveys of the scientific community on the existence of extraterrestrial life" by Vickers et. al. The paper had a survey on the topic of whether scientists believe in extraterrestrial life. Below are the results, from questions in which scientists were asked whether they think that on other planets there is life, complex life, or intelligent life. 

There are several problems with the paper and its survey, which I will now discuss.

Problem #1: A Voluntary Response Email Survey 

The survey worked this way: scientists were sent emails asking them to reply to the survey, and 44% of the scientists replied by answering the survey.  But it is known that surveys of this type tend to be unreliable measurements of opinion, particularly when they are about some controversial topic. The problem is that there may be a much higher tendency for people who believe in some controversial theory to respond to a survey that asks only about their belief in that theory, rather than ignore such a survey. 

For example, imagine you send a survey to scientists that is only on the topic of controversial Theory X, a theory which most scientists scorn or have no knowledge of. It could be that 80% of the scientists getting this email decide to ignore it, thinking to themselves something like this: "Theory X? To hell with that." But it might be very different for some small minority of scientists who believe in Theory X. After getting the email, they may recognize the survey as an opportunity to improve the status of Theory X in the scientific community; and they may therefore be much more likely to respond. 

I remember a time more than 40 years ago when I worked two full-time jobs for a period of months. My second full-time job was a temporary job working for the US Census Bureau in Boston. The US government wanted to find out what percentage of the population used the fishing and wildlife services supported by the US government.  Workers like me were given stacks of survey forms, each of which had the name of a randomly selected US citizen. My job was to call up such people, and insist that they answer the survey's questions over the phone, questions asking about how often they used the government-supported fishing and wildlife facilities. I would have to keep calling back later if someone claimed to be too busy to answer when I called.  I would very frequently get responses like this from annoyed people:

"Why are you bothering to ask me about such things? I have never gone fishing in my life, nor have I ever gone hunting. So the government shouldn't be asking me about such things!"

I had to explain to such people the concept of a survey of random people: that the only scientifically valid way to find out what percentage of people used the government's fishing and wildlife facilities was to ask randomly selected people about this topic, to keep asking until all of them answered the questions, and to be just as interested in getting "no" answers as "yes" answers.  The US Census Bureau knew how to do a scientifically valid survey. The people at that bureau knew that it never would have been valid to just advertise some survey about fishing and wildlife, and to record what percentage of people choosing to do the survey said that they used fishing and wildlife facilities.  If you did the survey that way, it might have been that most of the participants would have been those who loved to do fishing and hunting.  The survey might then have given very misleading results perhaps suggesting that most people in the US use the government's fishing and wildlife facilities, when in fact only a small minority of the population used such facilities.  

Too bad Vickers et. al. did not seem to have the same knowledge of the proper way to determine what percentages of scientists think a particular thing. You cannot find out what percentage of a scientist community believes in a theory by sending them a voluntary survey on only that theory, one that will tend to get more replies from those who believe in that theory.  For example, if you send physicists a survey about their belief in the controversial theory called string theory, there will tend to be a much higher response rate from people believing in string theory than those not believing in it. 

One way to reduce the problem mentioned above is to do a voluntary email survey asking about many different things, such as a survey asking 50 diverse questions. With such a survey there will not tend to be an effect in which believers in some controversial theory are much more likely to respond. 

Problem #2: A Slanting in the Questions

Professional pollsters know that the way that a survey question is asked can have a very great influence on what kind of response people give. For example, here are two questions about gun control you could ask people in the USA:

Question 1: Do you think people should give up their right to bear arms given them by the Second Amendment of the US Constitution?

Question 2: Do you support gun control to reduce all these terrible mass shootings that keep happening?

Question 1 is a question about gun control, one slanted to produce a "no" answer. Question 2 is also a question about gun control, but it is  slanted to produce a "yes" answer.

Now, what are the questions in the Vickers survey? The paper lists these survey questions:

(Statement S1 – ‘Life’): It is likely that extraterrestrial life (of at least a basic kind) exists somewhere in the universe.

(Statement S2 – ‘Complex Life’): It is likely that extraterrestrial organisms significantly larger and more complex than bacteria exist somewhere in the universe.

(Statement S3 – ‘Intelligent Life’): It is likely that extraterrestrial organisms with advanced cognitive abilities comparable to or superior to those of humans exist somewhere in the universe."

These set of questions are a terrible way to survey people about extraterrestrial life. The questions have a very strong bias, because they doubly-suggest the idea that the least complex extraterrestrial life  would be simple. Humans know of no type of life that is simple. Even one-celled bacteria are very complex organisms that require hundreds of types of protein molecules, each its own complex invention requiring a very special sequence of hundreds of very specially arranged amino acids. 

The first way in which the survey questions above slants things and introduces bias is by using the phrase "of at least a basic kind" in the line referring to Statement S1. The second way in which the survey questions above slants things and introduces bias is by using the phrase "complex life" in referring to Statement S2. This indirectly suggests that what is being talked about in Statement S1 is life that is not complex. But all known life is very complex. So we have a severely slanted set of questions in which subjects are being asked to whether they agree that life "of at least a basic kind" exist, with the very misleading insinuation that such life could exist without being complex. Using such phraseology is introducing severe bias, as if the scientists running the survey were trying to gin up a response as high as possible to the first question. 

Then there is the fact that the survey suggests a particular opinion rather than asking a neutral question. Instead of being asked neutral questions asking things like "is it likely or not likely that..." we have questions stating a particular belief and asking whether respondents agree. It is well-known by pollsters that questions asked that way tend to produce a higher agreement with the stated belief.  For example, if you have a survey stating "marijuana use is safe" and asking whether people agree with that statement, you will get a higher level of agreement than if you ask "do you agree or disagree that marijuana use is safe?"

What would an objective, well-designed survey have looked like? It might have neutral questions like this:

Question 1: What do you think about the chances that there is  microscopic life on some other planet? 

Answer 1: Likely

Answer 2: Unlikely

Answer 3: I don't know/no opinion

Question 2: What do you think about the chances that there is  visible multicellular life on some other planet, such as organisms with organs? 

Answer 1: Likely

Answer 2: Unlikely

Answer 3: I don't know/no opinion

Question 3: What do you think about the chances that there is  intelligent life on some other planet, life as intelligent as humans or more intelligent?

Answer 1: Likely

Answer 2: Unlikely

Answer 3: I don't know/no opinion

Problem #3: No secret ballot

As a general rule, we should pay little attention to any survey in which scientists are asked about whether they believe in something that allegedly most scientists believe in, whenever the survey is not a secret ballot poll. The reason is that when a poll is not a secret ballot survey, scientists may answer in some way that they think they are supposed to answer, fearing that they may get in trouble if they do not go along with the majority. 

We have no evidence that the survey in the paper "Surveys of the scientific community on the existence of extraterrestrial life" is a secret ballot survey. In this case the lack of a secret ballot is relatively minor, because there did not exist a common idea that scientists were expected to think one thing or another about whether extraterrestrial life exists. 

Problem #4: Describing the results with the word "consensus"

In my post "So Much Misleading Talk Occurs in Claims of a Scientific Consensus," I discuss the word games that scientists play when they use the notoriously slippery, problematic and ambiguous word "consensus."  The problem is that "consensus" is a word with a double meaning. The Merriam-Webster dictionary gives us two definitions of "consensus" that disagree with each other. The first definition is "general agreement; unanimity." The second definition is "the judgment arrived at by most of those concerned." The first definition specifies 100%, and the second definition merely means 51% or more. 

Scientists very frequently exploit this ambiguity in a misleading way, just as they very frequently exploit ambiguity in the word "evolution" (another term with different meanings). Scientists may brag about a "consensus" on some topic when there is no evidence that even 90% of scientists agree on the topic.  They thereby are trying to create the impression in many people's minds that scientists agree on some topic, when no such agreement exists. 

We have an example of this in the paper I am discussing. It ends up bragging of "a significant consensus that extraterrestrial life likely does exist," even though its poll shows a fair fraction of the responding astrobiologists failing to declare that they "agree" or "strongly agree" with the idea that extraterrestrial life exists, and about a third of the responding astrobiologists failing to declare that they "agree" or "strongly agree" with the idea that "complex" extraterrestrial life exists. Given the ambiguity in the word "consensus," and that half of the public interprets that word to mean "unanimity of opinion," such a belief level should not be described as a consensus; it should merely be described as a majority opinion. In fact, because of problems discussed above, we do not even have here any very strong evidence that most astrobiologists or biologists agree that extraterrestrial life probably exists.  A well-designed set of neutrally-worded poll questions without the question bias documented above might well have shown fewer than half of the respondents agreeing that visible  extraterrestrial life exists. According to the poll, the number of astrobiologists agreeing that intelligent extraterrestrial life exists was 58%. That level of belief should never be described as a consensus, but a mere majority opinion. 

A poll like this would not mean much