Biosphere Shouts From 100 Directions About Its Purposeful Agency, But Mainstream Stays Deaf to Such Clues

 When I read a previous article written by science writer Phillip Ball at Quanta Magazine, an article on DNA, I felt like writing a post in response that would be entitled "Pondering DNA, Phillip Ball Drops the Ball" (a reference to fumbling). Phillip Ball is a writer who has figured out that the long-told story about DNA and its genes simply isn't true. But he seems to have completely failed to realize the enormous implications of such a thing. 

As an explanation for how human bodies arise, "DNA as body blueprint" was always a childish myth, both because DNA has neither any body blueprint nor any cell blueprint, and also because blueprints have no power to build things (as explained below). 

Not long after DNA was discovered about the middle of the twentieth century, scientists and science writers began spreading a false idea about DNA: the idea that DNA contains a specification for building an organism such as a human.  There are various ways in which this false idea is stated, all equally false:

• Many described DNA or the genome as a blueprint for an organism.
• Many said DNA or the genome is a recipe for making an organism.
• Many said DNA or the genome is a program for building an organism, making an analogy to a computer program.
• Many claimed that DNA or genomes specify the anatomy of an organism. 
• Many claimed that genotypes (the DNA in organisms) specify phenotypes (the observable characteristics of an organism), or that the genotype is a "map" of the phenotype. 
• Many claimed that phenotypes (the observable characteristics of an organism) are "expressions" of genotypes (the DNA in organisms). 
• Many claimed that genotypes (the DNA in organisms) "map"  phenotypes (the observable characteristics of an organism) or "map to" phenotypes.
• Many claimed that DNA contains "all the instructions needed to make an organism."
• Many claimed that there is a "genetic architecture" for an organism's body or some fraction of that body. 
• Many claimed that DNA or its genes "guide," "direct" or "control" the nine-month process by which a zygote progresses to become a full-sized human baby. 
• Using a little equation,  many claimed that a "genotype plus the environment equals the phenotype," a formulation as false  as the preceding statements, since we know of nothing in the environment that would cause phenotypes to arise from genotypes that do not specify such phenotypes. 

All of these claims were false. DNA is no such thing as a blueprint, recipe or program for making an organism or any of its organs or any of its cells or any of the organelles that make up such cells.  At the post here I have a list of 40+ statements by 50+ experts (almost all scientists and doctors) who confess that DNA is no such thing as a program, blueprint or recipe for making an organism. 

Phillip Ball has realized that the long-told story about DNA and its genes simply is not true.  In the very mainstream publication The Guardian, Ball said this about the Human Genome Project that ended in 2003, noting the failure of science figures to clean up their old misstatements about DNA after they were debunked by the Human Genome Project:

"But a blizzard of misleading rhetoric surrounded the project, contributing to the widespread and sometimes dangerous misunderstandings about genes that now bedevils the genomic age. So far, there have been few attempts to set the record straight. Even now, the National Human Genome Research Institute calls the HGP an effort to read 'nature’s complete genetic blueprint for building a human being' – the 'book of instructions' that 'determine our particular traits'. A genome, says the institute, 'contains all of the information needed to build and maintain that organism'. But this deterministic 'instruction book' image is precisely the fallacy that genomics has overturned, and the information in the genome is demonstrably incomplete. Yet no one associated with genomic research seems bothered about correcting these false claims...Plenty remain happy to propagate the misleading idea that we are 'gene machines' and our DNA is our 'blueprint'."

So Ball has realized that the long-told "DNA as body blueprint" story is bunk. The subtitle of his article "Why the Human Genome’s Tangled Physicality May Confound AI" is "Our genetic heritage is not a blueprint or an algorithm, as many biologists have imagined, but something else entirely." Ball discusses some of the enormous complexity of the processes involving DNA.   But Ball has failed to realize the gigantic implications of the fact DNA and its genes don't tell how to make anything bigger than protein molecules.  The problem is that once you get rid of the old lie that DNA is a blueprint for building bodies, organs and cells, you have no mechanistic explanation for how bodies, organs and cells get built. That explanatory failure explodes the pretensions of today's biologists, showing that their boasts of understanding the origin of the human species are groundless legends.  The truth is that scientists understand neither the origin of the human species, nor the origin of any full human body, nor the origin of any human mind. 

Ball gives us a little new bunk to replace the old bunk, saying, "Our cells are, in effect, making complex decisions about how to use their genes — both the information they contain and the structure they assume."  Cells don't make decisions; people make decisions.  If a cell had understanding, it would have no understanding of anything beyond itself. So we can never explain how human bodies get constructed by some idea of cells making a decision. A stem cell would not have any idea of what type of cell to become and where in the body to go to in order to serve the grand final purpose of helping to construct a mobile perceiving organism with a cardiovascular system and a digestive system and arms and legs and a vision system. 

Ball fails to perceive what the main explanatory problem is regarding the origin of individual human bodies. That problem is what I call the missing specifications problem. The missing specifications problem is the problem that the arising of adult human bodies requires at least six extremely complex specifications that are nowhere to be found in the human body. 

DNA and its genes only specify low-level chemical information, such as which amino acids make up a particular protein. DNA and its genes do not specify how to make anything larger than a protein molecule. In fact, DNA and its genes fail to even fully specify how to make a folded protein molecule of any particular type. To be functional, protein molecules require complex special three-dimensional shapes. DNA and its genes do not specify how such shapes arise.  The problem of how the special three-dimensional shapes of proteins arise is the unsolved problem known as the protein folding problem (not to be confused with a different problem called the protein folding prediction problem, which deep learning software has made some progress on). 

3D shape of a folded protein molecule

The "sister problem" of the protein folding problem is the protein complex origination problem, the problem of how proteins form into complex special teams so well-engineered and fine-tuned they are often called "molecular machines." No substantial progress has been made on that problem, as some scientists confess in quotes at the end of this post. Below we see one such protein complex, consisting of hundreds of protein molecules teaming up to become a special functional component. 

The nuclear pore complex (credit: Protein Data Bank, link)

So how does there arise over nine months of pregnancy a full human body, consisting of so many layers of physical organization above the layer of mere protein molecules? How does a mere speck-sized zygote (existing just after impregnation) progress to become a state of organization a billion times more impressive, the full organization of a human body? Such an origination is a miracle of organization a hundred miles over the heads of today's scientists. Their failure to explain this problem (the problem of morphogenesis) is a failure that makes a mockery of all claims that they understand the origin of the human species. If you do not understand the origin of any individual human body, you do not understand the origin of the human species. 

Given the utter lack of anything in a speck-sized zygote or the surrounding mother's womb that can sufficiently explain the progression from such a speck-sized object to a full human body, and given the lack of any credible explanation for the more impressive phenomena of human minds and human memory (none of which are credibly explained by brains), reality compels the inference that every human being arises because of transcendent agency. Nature never told us or even suggested that the universe is self-explanatory; nature never told us or even suggested that biological life is self-explanatory; nature never told us or even suggested that human bodies are self-explanatory; and nature never told us or even suggested that bodies or brains explain human minds.  Nature never told us or even suggested that the laws of nature are even a hundredth of what is needed to produce a human being.  We must postulate a purposeful agency acting throughout the biosphere to produce the stupendous wonders of biology, which mechanistic science is light-years away from explaining. I sometimes have used the acronym GOAL for such a transcendent agency. GOAL stands for Global Organizing Activity of a Life-force. The pillars of such an inference are shown in the diagram below. For a long explanation of why the pillar clues compel the two inferences listed at top, read my post here. 

By "transcendent agency" I mean purposeful intelligent agency beyond anything currently understood by humans.  The nature of such agency is mysterious. 

In another Quanta magazine article, Phillip Ball considers the issue of biological agency. He fails to address the issue with much insight, but at least inadvertently documents how clue-blind today's biologists are on this topic. His subtitle immediately goes astray, referring to, "The idea of ‘biological agency’ — that life devises its own goals and behaves accordingly." That is not a sensible definition of "biological agency."

We can give three sensible definitions of "biological agency":

(1) Organismic agency: the ability of organisms to act in ways that they will or decide to act, something that is the same as volition. There are endless mysteries of organismic agency, including the basic mystery of how any organism is able to choose a particular action (something not explained by anything we know about brains), and also endless mysteries of why organisms choose the particular path that they do (such as endless mysteries involving hard-to-explain instincts). 

(2) Component agency: the tendency (throughout the biosphere) for components in all layers of biology to act towards the achievement of purposeful goals (such as organization and homeostasis) that make possible the origination and continuation of biological organisms. 

(3) Morphogenetic agency: the agency driving the progression (over nine months) from a speck-sized zygote to a full human body. 

Today's scientists have no credible material and mechanistic explanation for any of these three types of agency. For example, no neuroscientist can explain why a human being may choose one type of life direction or one type of career rather than another. Such things can be explained by referring to minds and persons and personalities, but cannot be explained in terms of brains or neurons. 

In regard to component agency and morphogenetic agency, the explanation failures of biologists are gigantic and everywhere. Scientists lack any credible explanation of so simple a thing as how human cells are able to reproduce; they lack any credible explanation of the most basic mental processes such as thinking and memory; scientists lack any convincing explanation of how proteins are able to fold into the 3D shapes needed for their function; scientists are unable to explain how so many useful protein complexes (often called "molecular machines") are able to form; and since DNA is not a specification for making a human, or any organ, cell or organelle, scientists lack any credible explanation for the nine-month progression from a speck-sized zygote to an adult human. For a long discussion of some of these huge mysteries that physics, chemistry and biology have gigantically failed to solve, read my post "Problems a Hundred Miles Over Our Heads" here, and also read my posts here and here. 

No one can understand how badly scientists have failed to explain organismic agency unless he makes a deep study of topics such as brain physical shortfalls, a topic Ball never seems to have studied. No one can understand how vast is the explanatory gap involving component agency and morphogenetic agency unless he makes a thorough study of the endless stupendous marvels of purposeful construction that occur during human development and also every day in the human body. No one can be properly informed about the topic of biological agency if a writer discussing that topic is failing to discuss the marvels of organization occurring on so many different levels within the human body. But Ball makes little or no mention of such a reality. Guys like him almost always do a very bad job of explaining the vast levels of organization and dynamism within the bodies of organisms such as humans, just as they do a very bad job of explaining the extent of human mental powers and human mental capabilities. The reason is that the better such things are explained, the less likely you will be to believe in hand-waving vacuous sound bites such as Ball's claim that there are  "decision-making circuits in the brain." 

Below are some relevant quotations by scientists:

•   Scientists Walker and Davies state this in a scientific paper: "DNA is not a blueprint for an organism; no information is actively processed by DNA alone...DNA is a passive repository for transcription of stored data into RNA, some (but by no means all) of which goes on to be translated into proteins."
• Geneticist Adam Rutherford states that "DNA is not a blueprint," a statement also made by biochemistry professor Keith Fox. 
• "The genome is not a blueprint," says Kevin Mitchell, a geneticist and neuroscientist at Trinity College Dublin, noting "it doesn't encode some specific outcome."
• "DNA cannot be seen as the 'blueprint' for life," says Antony Jose, associate professor of cell biology and molecular genetics at the University of Maryland, who says, "It is at best an overlapping and potentially scrambled list of ingredients that is used differently by different cells at different times."  
• "The majority of cellular proteins function as subunits in larger protein complexes. However, very little is known about how protein complexes form in vivo." Duncan and Mata, "Widespread Cotranslational Formation of Protein Complexes," 2011.
• "A general theoretical framework to understand protein complex formation and usage is still lacking." -- Two scientists, 2019 (link). 
• "The problem of protein folding is one of the most important problems of molecular biology. A central problem (the so called Levinthal's paradox) is that the protein is first synthesized as a linear molecule that must reach its native conformation in a short time (on the order of seconds or less). The protein can only perform its functions in this (often single) conformation. The problem, however, is that the number of possible conformational states is exponentially large for a long protein molecule. Despite almost 30 years of attempts to resolve this paradox, a solution has not yet been found." -- Two scientists, "On a generalized Levinthal's paradox," 2018. 
• "How proteins fold remains a central unsolved problem in biology. While the idea of a folding code embedded in the amino acid sequence was introduced more than 6 decades ago, this code remains undefined. While we now have powerful predictive tools to predict the final native structure of proteins, we still lack a predictive framework for how [amino acid] sequences dictate folding pathways....Almost seven decades of experimental and theoretical inquiry have not revealed a 'folding code' at the amino acid level, i.e., rules endowed with the generality and predictive power required to connect amino acid sequence to how the protein attains its structure....Machine learning made it possible to identify weak correlations to generate the structure most likely to correspond to a sequence. This tour-de-force effort has largely solved the problem of predicting protein structure from sequence...but with a key limitation: the algorithm that predicts the structure is a complex black box of pattern recognition that casts little light on the process of folding and that tells us nothing about why only some sequences fold, or how physics and evolution are coupled." -- Five scientists in the year 2025 (link). 
• "The real challenge—that remains unanswered after more than 50 years of research in the structural biology field—is understanding the mechanisms that lead proteins to fold into their native state. The reason for these difficulties is that the central question of the protein folding problem remains unresolved: specifically, how a sequence of amino acids encodes its folding pathways." -- Scientist Jorge A. Vila, 2025 (link). 
• "Yet while these are several examples of well-understood processes, our study of animal morphogenesis is really in its infancy." -- David Bilder and Saori L. Haigo1, "Expanding the Morphogenetic Repertoire: Perspectives from the Drosophila Egg." 
• "Fundamentally, we have a poor understanding of how any internal organ forms." -- Timothy Saunders, developmental biologist (link).
• "An adult human body is made up of some 30 to 40 trillion cells, all of which stem from a single fertilized egg cell. The process by which the right cells appear to arrive in their right numbers at the right time at the right place -- development -- is only understood in the roughest of outlines." -- Five scientists (link). 
• "Our understanding of how our organs form is still in its infancy" -- A research project abstract written by scientists (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).  "
• "Understanding the rules underlying organismal development is a major unsolved problem in biology. Each cell in a developing organism responds to signals in its local environment by dividing, excreting, consuming, or reorganizing, yet how these individual actions coordinate over a macroscopic number of cells to grow complex structures with exquisite functionality is unknown." - Five scientists (link). 
• "However, our understanding of the molecular and physical basis of morphogenesis in plants or in any other eukaryotic system [e.g. mammals] is still in its infancy due to the complexity and non-linearity of processes involved in morphogenesis dynamics (or Morphodynamics)." -- A description of a 2017-2021 scientific project, presumably written by scientists (link). 
• "Understanding morphogenesis in vertebrate tissues in development and disease poses one of the most significant challenges in the life sciences. Despite the impressive technical advances aimed at cellular and subcellular characterization and manipulation over the past half century, a clear picture of how form is created still remains in its infancy." -- Four scientists in 2025 (link). 
• "We don't know what dark matter is, we don't understand how the brain works or consciousness, we don't understand morphogenesis, we don't understand the origin of life." -- Physics PhD Michael Nielsen (link). 

Many Scientists Are Making False Statements in Grant Applications Asking for NSF or NIH Money

In my very long post here, I extensively documented misstatements and lies in the literature of materialism. Very many of the untrue statements that I list in that post are statements by scientists themselves. Nowadays very many scientists make untrue statements in interviews, in the articles they write, and in the science papers they write. It is not at all true that almost all scientists are careful to be rigorously truthful when writing scientific papers. Nowadays scientific papers very often have titles boasting that the described research showed some grand thing that it failed to actually show. 

But what about the grant applications that scientists write, in which they ask the US government to give them money for some type of research? Are almost all scientists careful to avoid misstatements in such grant applications? It seems not. While examining the abstracts of only a very small number of research projects approved by the National Science Foundation or the National Institute of Health, I found many misstatements. Such misstatements are a particularly serious matter, because when they occur it is an offense as bad as lying on your income tax return. A person who lies on his income tax (asking for a refund) is someone asking that the government give him money that he should not have. A person who lies on a research grant application is typically someone asking for research dollars from the US government that the person should not be given. Even if a research project may deserve a certain small amount of money (say, $100,000), a scientist is guilty of a crime as bad as lying on his income tax if the scientist makes false claims in his grant application, causing his project to look more necessary or important than it is, and leading to that project getting a higher amount of research dollars. 

I can give some examples of false statements I read after examining the abstracts of only a very small number of research projects approved by the National Science Foundation or the National Institute of Health. I got these examples by reading abstracts after doing queries on the search tools of the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Health, tools allowing you to look up particular research projects and how much money has been allocated to such projects. We can assume that the same false statements were made in any grant application made for the same projects. 

• The term "engram" refers to the theoretical idea of a specific location in the brain where a memory is stored. One research project claimed in its abstract that specific engrams had been located and activated. The claim has no basis in fact. Various studies have claimed to have located or activated engrams in rodents. But all of these studies are very low-quality studies guilty of poor research practices such as using way-too-small study group sizes and using unreliable techniques to try to judge whether fear recall occurred in rodents.  This research project received more than $200,000 in funding. Claims of "engram discovery" typically involve noise-mining in which someone looks for some place of higher neural firing when a rodent is learning or recalling. Because neurons fire randomly between about 1 and 200 times a second, some little places of higher neural firing can always be found, regardless of whether engrams exist or not. 
• Another study awarded much less money made the incorrect claim that engram cells in the brain can be tagged, and that fear memories can be artificially activated in some situation in which an organism has no source of fear. The claim is incorrect, and stems from claims made in poorly-designed junk science studies using way-too-small study group sizes. 
• One project awarded more than  $100,000 claimed in its abstract that the accelerating expansion of the universe is evidence for the multiverse, the idea that there are many universes. The expansion of our universe does nothing to suggest that there are other universes. 
• Awarded more than $200,000 in federal funding, another research project claimed in its abstract that memories had been transferred from one animal to another. The claim has no basis in fact. A study claimed to have transferred memory from one sea slug to another. But the study used a study group size so small and memory recall techniques so unreliable that it cannot be taken seriously as evidence for such a claim. 
• Awarded more than $1,000,000 in federal funding, another research project claimed that a particular small fraction of the brain encodes rewarding memories.  There is no adequate basis for any claim that any part of the brain encodes memories, and scientists lack any credible theory of how experiences or learned knowledge could be converted into brain states in some act that could be called an encoding of memory. Very much human brain tissue has been examined by very powerful microscopes, but microscopic examination of human brain tissue has never discovered any trace of anything humans learned. 
• Awarded about $1,000,000 in federal funding, another research project claimed that learning produces changes in extremely tiny  features in the brain called dendritic spines.  There is no robust evidence that this claim is true. Dendritic spines are short-lived  unstable things subject to rapid turnover, things too unstable to be a storage site of memories that can last for decades. You  can study some dendritic spines and watch them change over a period of time when some organism is learning something. But there is no reason for thinking that the learning did anything to produce the changes in the dendritic spines you observed. Similarly, you can track  changes in the flowers of your garden as you take a college course; but there is no reason for thinking your learning did anything to produce such flower changes.  
• One research project awarded a million dollars contained two terrible misstatements in the first two sentences of its abstract. One of these used the old deceit of defining morphogenesis as a mere problem of how the shape of an organism arises. Morphogenesis is properly defined as the process by which an organism develops from a speck-sized zygote to the full organization of a newborn or adult body, something that is a billion times more complex and more hard-to-explain than a mere origination of a shape. In its second sentence the research abstract repeated the Great DNA Myth, the lie that there is in DNA or  it genes a genomic program determining morphogenesis. As discussed here, DNA does not specify the full shape or form or structure of any organism, nor does it specify how to make any organ of an organism or any cell of an organism. 
• Another research project awarded about a million dollars was guilty of the same two deceptions described above. 
• Another research project awarded about a million dollars told us the huge lie that developmental biology has been hugely successful in reducing the seeming miraculous self-organization of a fertilized egg to a fetus and adult to a list of genes and the instructions for their regulation in the noncoding genome.  Nothing of the sort has occurred.  DNA and its genes do not specify any of these things: how to make a full human body, how to make any organ system, how to make any organ, how to make any cell, how to make any of the organelles that make up a cell.
• One research project awarded a large sum of federal money was all based on the claim that a certain subject had a type of memory failure that the subject did not actually have. 
• Another research project application abstract made the false claim that "sharp-wave ripples" are crucial for memory consolidation. The claim is an "old wives' tale" of neuroscientists, having no basis in sound science. As discussed here, studies trying to support the claim are typically very low-quality science studies using way-too-small study group sizes. 
• Another research project application abstract made the false claim that a particular lab had identified molecular mechanisms of memory consolidation. No molecular mechanisms of memory consolidation have ever been discovered, and any claims to have done that will not hold up to scrutiny. An example of a very low-quality paper claiming a relevant experimental result is the paper here. The only study group sizes used are way-too-small study group sizes such as only 4 or 5 rodents. 

What is going on in such grant applications is some lying and a great deal of recitation of dubious dogma, and repetition of groundless socially constructed triumphal legends of biologists, who exist in cloistered belief communities in which many "old wives' tales" are repeated, and many faulty speech customs are followed. 

There are various things that could be done to reduce the amount of money given to lying or misleading applicants. They include the following:

(1) None of the project abstracts I examined had any references to previously published science papers. A standard could be established that all abstracts for research proposals should have citations backing up any claims made that are not universally recognized. This would make it easier to check whether there exists a sound basis for some claim made to try to show that the suggested research is important. 

(2) Instead of granting very large awards such as $1,000,000 covering all funding for a multi-year project, funding could be provided on a yearly basis, with additional funding for that project based on an examination of whether the project was producing high-quality reproducible research following best practices. 

(3) Research grants could be denied for projects that did not supply a detailed research plan specifying the exact number of subjects to be used, the exact method of gathering and analyzing data, and so forth. This would help exclude cases in which huge amounts of money is awarded to Researcher X even though Researcher X has only a hazy or half-baked notion of how he will spend the money. 

(4) All research proposals (funded or not-yet-funded) should be viewable under some public interface allowing knowledgeable scholars to submit comments disputing the accuracy of statements in research proposals or comments criticizing the proposed methods or reported methods. 

(5) A system could be put in place where any individual can submit a "claw-back request" complaining that statements in the research proposal are inaccurate, or that the money spent did not result in credible high-quality research. Upon reviewing such "claw-back requests" US government officials might request some university or college granted a certain amount of project funding to repay that funding back to the US government. 

Postscript: A professor of neuroscience recently boasted that experimental science "has a powerful, century-old tool kit for limiting false inferences," one that includes "preregistered analyses." But the professor confesses that "preregistration remains rare in neuroscience." Oops, it looks like our neuroscientists are not doing what they need to do to avoid false inferences. 

• "False report probability is likely to exceed 50% for the whole literature. In light of our findings, the recently reported low replication success in psychology is realistic, and worse performance may be expected for cognitive neuroscience." --Denes Szucs and John P. A. Ioannidis, "Empirical assessment of published effect sizes and power in the recent cognitive neuroscience and psychology literature" (link). 
• "Cognitive neuroscience is far from relying on firm methodological grounds."  -- Stefan Frisch,  "The Tangled Knots of Neuroscientific Experimentation" (link). 
• "As Mark Twain is reported to have said: 'It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't true.' In contemporary neuroscience, the list of assumptions that just ain't true is long indeed, so patience is required as I expose each in turn." -- Henry Vin, neuroscientist and psychologist, "The Crisis in Neuroscience" (link). 
• "Exaggerated claims and low levels of reproducibility are commonplace in psychology and cognitive neuroscience, due to an incentive structure that demands 'newsworthy' results."  -- psychologist Richard Ramsey (link). 

They Said They Saw a Relative's Ghost or Materialization

In the newspaper article here, we read of a woman testifying in court that she saw the speaking apparition of her dead father:

Parents normally die before their sons or daughters, so cases of someone claiming to see the ghost of a son or daughter are much less common that cases of an offspring claiming to see the ghost of a parent. But there are quite a few cases to be found of parents reporting an apparition of their sons or daughters.  Below is one, from page 693 of the November 3, 1933 edition of the journal Light, which can be read here.  The narrator is Shirley Eshelby. 

"My son, who passed over on 12th July, 1933, after an operation for appendicitis, has visited me four times. I have seen him three times, and he has spoken to me in direct voice once. (I cannot see and hear [him] at the same time.) 

The first time he appeared was on 16th July, the day after he was buried, the fourth day after his death, at 7.15 in the morning. When I opened my eyes I saw a cloud over my bed filled with vibrating specks. As I watched it, the specks moved faster and faster until they looked like a spinning coil of wire which gradually became smaller until there was nothing left, but in the place where the ' spinning coil'   had diminished into nothing, the face of my son gradually appeared. The forehead and eyes came first, and then the rest of the face appeared. At first the eyes looked abnormally large and bulged a good deal, but they immediately became normal when the face was completely formed. He looked rather pale but strong and well. After a few seconds he vanished. 

He came again on 6th September and seemed to have less difficulty in 'getting through.' The cloud was there again, but the vibrating specks did not form into a 'spinning coil'  like wire, they simply darted about in the cloud for a second until the face was completely formed and perfect. His third visit was on 30th September. This time he had no difficulty in getting through. There was no cloud and no specks ; he was simply there, and then not there. Each time he came he looked more manly and stronger. 

At the time of his death he was very slim and rather over-grown looking, hut when he appeared the third time he had completely lost the overgrown look and had developed into a fine, strong, well-built man. A few days later he spoke to me in direct voice. This was his fourth visit. I could not see him, but could hear his voice, which was slightly raised so that I could hear every word clearly (I am rather deaf). He spoke right into my ear."

Then there are the cases of parents who report a materialization of a deceased relative. In such a case the witness may report being right in front of a form as solid and lifelike as a regular living human. Here is one such account written by E. G. Pierce of Fort Wayne, Indiana (USA), and appearing on page 132 of the document here. 

"In another seance my daughter materialized in the centre of a large room, not two feet from me and my wife, where the gas light was strong enough to distinguish anyone in the room. Starting with a small white spot upon the floor, slowly ascending like a column of mist to the proper height, the body consolidated itself, and I saw every feature of the face form as plainly as I could wish. When she spoke she told me what no one in the room knew but ourselves. She passed from me to my wife, through the strong gaslight, about four feet, several times. I had her in my arms ; she was as material as I. When she said she would have to go, I grasped her hand, determined that nothing material should escape me. She began to dematerialize, and as I bent forward toward the floor, still holding her hand, with a smile she disappeared through the floor, and my hand was empty."

The account below is told by a noted author, and can be read on page 3 of the document here. The author claims to have seen materializations of three of his relatives at a time when his mother was near death. 

Some of the most convincing evidence for the paranormal is evidence reported by those who have no sympathy for accounts of the paranormal. An example of such evidence appears on page 174 of Volume 41, Issue 242 of the Cornhill Magazine (1916), which you can read here. The very respectable author is Sir Laurence Gomme. He reports going to a seance not long after his father died. Gomme reports being unimpressed by what he saw. But upon returning home, his wife and other relatives reported seeing the apparition of his father, at the very hour the seance occurred. Here is the full account:

"About this time I was being pressed by an official friend to attend a meeting at his house, for the purpose of taking part in a spirit rapping ceremony, but had always declined, because I did not believe in the phenomenon. However he particularly pressed me to come on account of my father’s recent death, saying I should be certain to learn something. Perhaps my nerves had been worn by recent events. In any case I consented to come, and I remember wearing my father’s watch chain and seal for the first time, to attune me to the atmosphere. I told no one at my house that I was going for this particular purpose. They thought I was simply going out to dinner in the ordinary way. My object in this silence was obvious. It was not to disturb the minds of those at home.

On arrival at my friend’s house we had dinner and then adjourned to the drawing-room. The whole company sat round a largish table holding hands. Several members of the company described certain experiences and conducted conversations with spirit manifestations. But I was absolutely unmoved and looked upon the whole thing as unreal and made up. I left the house angry with myself for giving way to such nonsense.

Reaching home, not very late, I let myself in with my latch-key, and was immediately met by my wife, my mother and sisters having retired, who was strongly agitated and troubled. The explanation was that about ten o’clock she was working in the library as usual, and looking up from her seat she saw the form of my father seated in his usual way in his old chair. And ten o’clock was the time when I, an unbeliever in spirit manifestations, had been seated at the round table gathering of spirit believers. The coincidence is remarkable, and I have ever since been deeply impressed by it, but it has not made me a believer in spirit manifestations."

We have here an example of the incredible stubbornness of skeptics. Sir Laurence reports that at the very hour he was attending what was apparently the only seance he ever attended, his wife reported seeing the apparition of her father-in-law, Sir Laurence's dead father. But this does not convince our skeptic to become "a believer in spirit manifestations." I would imagine that nothing he could ever see would have. 

The 1875 newspaper account below by Isaac Kelso is one of very many accounts of materializations witnessed at a seance. The author uses the term "apparitions" for what he saw. But since he reports an event of the cutting off a lock of hair from one of these apparitions, it seems more appropriate to use the term "materialization" for what is reported -- or perhaps the term "materialized apparition."  We read an account of a type of wonder I cannot recall reported elsewhere. The account says a lock of hair was cut from an apparition. Later the lock of hair reportedly floats up to rejoin the apparition's hair, at the exact point where it was cut. 

You can read the account here:

https://books.google.com/books?id=q78yAAAAIBAJ&pg=PA3&dq=apparition&article_id=3540,2537826#v=onepage&q=apparition&f=false

The case of the apparition of James L. Chaffin appearing to his son is one of the best documented cases of an apparition appearing long after death. The case was first documented on page 517 in Part 103 of Volume 36 of the Proceeedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 1928, in the November 1927 article "CASE OF THE WILL OF MR. JAMES L. CHAFFIN," which can be read on page 517 of the document here.  The facts and narratives were all entered as testimony in a legal case. 

James L. Chaffin had four sons, and on November 16, 1905 made a will in front of two witnesses, giving his farm to his third son, Marshall, with his widow and other three sons getting nothing. On the 16th of January, 1919 James L. Chaffin made a new will, dividing his property up equally to his four sons, with instructions that his widow be taken care of.  The new will said that it was written "after reading the 27th chapter of Genesis."  James L. Chaffin told no one about the second will, which was placed in an old Bible of his father's. But James did put instructions sewed up in the lining of an overcoat, instructions telling where the second will could be found. James L. Chaffin died on September 7, 1921.  His son Marshall was granted possession of the farm on the basis of the first will, the second will being unknown to the wife or children.

One of the sons of James L. Chaffin (a son named James Pinkney Chaffin) gave this testimony in court about seeing an apparition of his father about four years after the father's death:

"Some time later, I think it was the latter part of June, 1925, he appeared at my bedside again, dressed as I had often seen him dressed in life, wearing a black overcoat which I knew to be his own coat. This time my father's spirit spoke to me, he took hold of his overcoat this way and pulled it back and said, ' You will find my will m my overcoat pocket,' and then disappeared."

James Pinkney Chaffin retrieved the coat from a brother twenty miles away, to whom the coat had been given. Inside the coat (sewed up in its lining) was a piece of paper in the handwriting of James L. Chaffin stating, "Read the 27th chapter of Genesis in my daddie's old Bible."  Accompanied by some witnesses, James Pinkney Chaffin retrieved the old Bible, in which was found (in a spot matching the 27th Chapter of Genesis) the second will of James L. Chaffin. James Pinkney Chaffin filed a court case, giving the testimony above, and demanding that the second will be declared as the valid will. In the middle of the case the opposition to this claim was dropped, and a jury found that the second will (the one found in the Bible, apparently found with the help of an apparition) was the valid will of James L. Chaffin.  The case stands as one of the best-documented cases of an apparition appearing long after someone died. 

The account is told in the 1930's newspaper story below, which draws upon the 1927 account on page 517 here. 

Below is a newspaper account from 1889:

At the link here you can read a newspaper account entitled "Ghost Tells Her." We read of a woman swearing under oath to have seen an apparition of her dead mother:

"Mrs. Lillian Higgins, the mother, startled the court by announcing that her dead mother's spirit came to her and told her of the boy's whipping. "It was half past eleven on the Wednesday night after Raymond was whipped that, as I lay awake on my bed, that my dead mother came to me and held up a card on which was
written: 'See what they have done to my boy's legs,' and when I asked who, the words "Ethel Barker' appeared on the card."

The article here from the Chicago Tribune has the arresting headline "Court Took Ghost's Word." We read of a man reporting the apparition of his brother. The latter part of the article is hard to read (being old print). But it seems that some authority found the testimony convincing. 

If the topic of this post interested you, you may want to check out my free 435-page book "Spookiest Years," now available on www.archive.org using the link here. The book discusses phenomena such as spiritual manifestations, seance phenomena, near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, apparition sightings, materialization reports, deathbed visions and precognitive visions.  Using the native www.archive.org file viewer in single-page mode,  you can conveniently read the whole book by finger swiping. Scholars who are interested in following the links may prefer to download the book as a PDF file, which will allow opening links by right-clicking on a link. 

The online book includes my account of spooky events in the year 1874.  I thought that post had "touched all the bases" regarding spooky reports in that year, but apparently in that year there were many more reports of spooky events that my post did not mention.  For example, a Chicago Daily Tribune article from 1874 discusses the following:

Science News BS Heat Map, July 4, 2026

                         

Recent Science News Article	BS Rating	Comment
"Perseverance rover finds even more signs of extinct life on Mars"		A very bad example of false clickbait from the British paper The Register.  The subtitle immediately recants, saying "Scientists remain skeptical." All that was found was some carbon compounds that can be formed through lifeless processes.
"Bacteria Can Learn and Form Memories Without a Brain"		What is going on is here mainly the kind of word trickery that would be going on if you claimed that snow can learn and form memories, on the grounds that snow forms a footprint memory of your feet passing over it.
"Mars Rover Spots Complex Carbon on the Red Planet, Marking Yet Another Detection of a Building Block of Life"		It has always been bunk to suggest that life is built from things so simple they can be called "building blocks." Even the simplest living thing is built from very complex components -- hundreds of types of protein molecules, each requiring a very special arrangement of hundreds of parts. The building components of such building components are amino acids. Neither protein molecules nor amino acids have ever been discovered on Mars. The discovery mentioned involved vaguely described carbon compounds that were not any of the known building components or chemical constituents of life.
"An 80-year-old woman with advanced Alzheimer’s regained speech and mobility after taking psilocybin."		This is an important case report that may cast doubt on claims that Alzheimer's patients suffer from a loss of physically stored memories, and may bolster a "haze" or "fog" model of dementia in which poor cognitive performance in such people is mainly the result of something rather like a state of drowsiness or stupor that can go away, with restoration of memory performance. Reports of terminal lucidity in those with severe dementia suggest the same thing.
"She Was Half Ape, Half Human—and She May Hold the Secret to What Makes Us Who We Are"		In this Popular Mechanics article, we read of a 4.4 million-year old skeleton called Ardi. No justification is given that this corresponded to any creature that was "half-ape, half-human." Such a phrase might be justified in describing a creature that had an ape as one parent, and a human as another parent; but no such creature has ever existed.  See the appendix for why the alleged "skeleton" is probably no such thing, but instead a set of bones gathered up from a wide area of about 20 square meters, and arranged to look like half a skeleton. The article has a fake large visual, which is not identified as the fake that it is. See the appendix for details. The visual is a work of "vector art" attributed to a Getty Images source of "Alexander Joe." A look at that artist's pages on Getty Images fails to show the image.
"Consciousness: how ‘working memory’ may mysteriously give rise to it"		The article suggests an idea that makes no sense  Working memory is one of the innumerable capabilities of conscious minds, and does nothing to explain consciousness itself.  Similarly, walking is one of the many capabilities of human bodies, but walking does nothing to explain the origin of human bodies.
"Your Brain Doesn’t Just Turn Off When You Die. What Really Happens Defies Our Understanding of Reality."		The headline is false -- your brain does  just turn off when you die, and does so very quickly (although conscious experience often continues in episodes recalled as near-death experiences, contrary to the dogma that minds are produced by brains). Within 10 to 30 seconds after the heart stops, the human brain turns off electrically, resulting in the flatlining state  called asystole, in which brain waves die off to become flat lines.  The Popular Mechanics article discusses a 2023 study simultaneously tracking brain waves and heart activity. Contrary to the very misleading statements that have been made about the patients in that study, statements debunked in my post here,  that study shows brain waves very quickly flatlining in the patients it tracked when they died.
"For The First Time, Scientists Say They've Built a Synthetic Cell From Scratch"		In a ScienceAlert press release, we have a scientist named Kate Adamala making grandiose boasts that are unfounded. There's no published paper backing up her boasts. There's merely an article at her company's site,  and a preprint. Far from being anything that was created chemically "from scratch" (a phrase wrongly used in press accounts of this research), what went on was cannibalization of components from E. coli cells. The article states, "SpudCell currently uses ribosomes from E. coli bacteria." So ribosomes (organelles much more complex than proteins) were stolen from an existing one-celled life form (E. coli), and then put in some sphere-like fatty unit, wrongly called a cell. That so-called cell was not actually capable of sustained natural reproduction, although some artificially-induced "division" is being sold to look like cell reproduction (many a lifeless blob may undergo division).  The ScienceAlert press release says, "According to Science magazine, SpudCell has met some hurdles in publication: apparently one reviewer at Cell, a prestigious science journal, said the project was not real biology."  An article in Science calls this SpudCell object "far from alive," while noting, "Some have also grumbled about Adamala’s efforts to draw attention to the work, which she says was rejected by Cell after one reviewer said SpudCells were not real biology." In another article, a scientist says of this research, "I don’t think it means we’re close to creating a fully synthetic cell.”
"Experts no longer think life began on Earth. Here's what convinced them."		There is no truth in the claim of the article that there has been some change in the opinion of scientists about whether life originated on Earth. No such change has occurred. The "what convinced them" part is nothing that should justify any opinion change -- the mere reported discovery (in miniscule trace amounts such as 1 part in 100 million) of nucleobases on an asteroid. As discussed here, the claimed result is not a reliable one, because the reported amounts were so tiny that the most likely result is that they resulted from earthly contamination. And even if nucleobases had been found on an asteroid, in the reported amounts, that would do nothing to make if more likely that the first life (or any of its components) had first existed in space (as the reported amounts are so small, we would still have Earth as the most likely place for the origination of such things). The BBC Science Focus article erroneously refers to "the discovery of nucleotides on an asteroid." The reported discovery was something much less: mere nucleobases. A nucleobase is a mere fraction of a nucleotide.
"Modern neuroscience is rediscovering an idea Freud had 130 years ago"		This press-release is the clumsiest attempt to sell a groundless theory of neuroscience trying to describe the brain as a "prediction engine." The theory has no warrant in physical realities of the brain. The press release tries an approach of "Freud thought of it first," which is silly, because the once-highly-regarded Freud is now generally regarded as an erring salesman of pseudoscientific nonsense.
"The Circuit that Lets Your Brain Think and See"		No actual explanation is given as to how a brain could think, and neuroscientists lack any credible explanation for human thinking. Appealing to "a circuit" is the laziest last resort when people lack an explanation of how a brain could do something. We have a discussion mainly of not what was observed in the brain, but in the behavior of some computer model. At least we get this neuroscientist confession contradicting a common tall tale of neuroscientists: "Back in 2015, I began working with patients who are missing the hippocampus, the region that lets us form and hold onto memories. If the brain were truly modular, losing that middle piece should leave you unable to do a great many things. But it doesn't. These patients can still do all sorts of tasks."  So why do neuroscientists keep groundlessly claiming that the hippocampus is "the region that lets us form and hold onto memories"?

Appendix:  The original source of the claim about the Ardi skeleton is the edition of Science you can read here. On page 77 we have the images below:

At right is the "skeleton"  corresponding to this so-called skeleton called  Ardi. It is some bones gathered from a rather wide area of maybe 20 square meters. Someone has arranged the bones into something looking like a third of a skeleton. But that could be a misleading act of social construction. We don't know whether there ever existed a single individual having the bones shown in the right part of the visual above. The bones could be fragments from different individuals of different species. So it is very dubious to claim that a skeleton was ever found. 

The Popular Mechanics article mentioned above has a large visual showing a fairly complete skull. The article does not match the so-called skeleton named Ardi, which (as you can see in the top right of the image above) merely has some fragments of a skull. So where does the skull image in the Popular Mechanics article come from? It is apparently just a fake image. A reverse image search shows the image has been used about 30 times since 2014, to adorn various stories about evolution. The use of fake images in articles about human evolution is  an ongoing scandal discussed in my post

"Visual Fakery Is a Pillar of Darwinist Propaganda," which you can read here.  Nowadays online articles about human evolution are massively making use of fake images.