8 Discoveries and Non-Discoveries That Should Shape Your Worldview

 A video by Nate Hagens has the title "11 Discoveries That Changed My Worldview."  He says at the beginning that what he will discuss are "really fundamental learnings, that over time developed and shaped my worldview." The list of things that he gives is a rather poor list. It is below:

1.  "The Power, Finiteness and Externalities of Oil." He basically gives us the Peak Oil thesis, which may be important to man's future. But it is not something very relevant to a person's philosophy about the fundamental nature of things. 
2. "Energy Primacy." No real discovery is discussed. 
3. "The Wanting Is Stronger Than the Having." No real discovery is discussed, just a debatable  generalization.  
4. "We Are All Made of Stars." This "discovery" is an incorrect claim. He claims incorrectly at the 13:42 mark to have realized that he is "recycled star matter," which is a misleading way to describe a human being, physically a state of the most enormous  organization. At the 14:11 mark he most incorrectly states "we are all made of stars." At the 14:40 mark he most incorrectly describes a human as "self-aware stardust." A human being physically is actually a state of vast hierarchical organization and information richness that is the exact opposite of unorganized information-free dust.  Physically, humans are made of cells, not stars. 
5. "Sexual/natural selection and evolutionary psychology." So-called natural selection is a dogma of scientists about a claimed survival-of-the-fittest effect that is not actually selection. Evolutionary psychology is one of the worst junkyards of unscientific and unfounded speculation in academia. Sitting on their armchairs, evolutionary psychologists spend endless hours making cheesy impossible-to-test speculations such as "you have such and such a mental trait because cavemen needed such and such a trait for such and such a reason," or "people still act in such and such a way because evolution made cavemen act in such and such a way for such and such a reason." We have that kind of unconvincing talk around the middle of Hagens' video.
6. "The Importance of Net Energy." There's no real discovery mentioned after this concept is mentioned. 
7. "Money is a CLAIM on Reality." There's no real discovery mentioned after this concept is mentioned. 
8. "Technology is a 'Straw.' " There's no real discovery mentioned after this concept is mentioned. 
9. "Competition and Cooperation." There's no real discovery mentioned after this phrase is mentioned, and after mentioning the phrase Hagens starts teaching the very dubious doctrine of group selection, which is rejected even by many evolutionary biologists. We have some talk about some chicken experiment, and we should chuckle when Hagen says this experiment "reshaped how I see human behavior and human systems." 
10. "Humanity Is the Ecosystem." There's a transition card that fails to have a title, but this claim is made at the 32:15 mark in the video. There's no real discovery mentioned.
11. "Humans, Humanity and the Superorganism." He claims that over time people in large groups behave more like a "mindless, unthinking economic superorganism" (33:51 mark). There's  no real discovery mentioned.

Hagens had a very good idea for a youtube.com video, one entitled "11 Discoveries That Changed My Worldview."  But his video is not very enlightening. In it we hear of no important discoveries that should change a person's worldview. 

Let me take that good title, and use it as an inspiration for a post entitled "8 Discoveries and Non-Discoveries That Should Shape Your Worldview." I will pay attention to both non-discoveries and discoveries, because some of the most important things that should shape your worldview are things that failed to be discovered; and observational failures can be as important as indicators of truth as observational successes. 

Item #1: The Big Bang

The claim that the universe had a sudden beginning in the Big Bang is not a mere claim that arose from armchair reasoning. The claim was forced on scientists by two actual discoveries. The first was the discovery that the universe was expanding, which came about from the measurements of galactic redshifts. If we "rewind the tape" on an expanding universe, you are forced to the conclusion of a sudden beginning of the universe. The second discovery was the discovery around 1964 of the cosmic background radiation, a type of radiation predicted by theorists of the Big Bang.  

The discovery of the Big Bang is very definitely one that should shape your worldview, in two different ways. First, the discovery is one that suggests that the universe was deliberately created. There is no theory of an eternal universe that is credible, given both the Big Bang and scientific conclusions that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. All attempts to fit the Big Bang into some theory of an eternal universe end up failing, because of reasons such as the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which dictates that entropy must increase over large spans of time. The entropy in our universe is sufficiently low for it to be clear that the universe has not existed forever. 

Another way that the Big Bang should influence your worldview is because it should open your door to the consideration of the most mind-boggling and fantastic possibilities. The Big Bang theory describes a universe which at its beginning was packed into a single infinitely dense mathematical point. This is the most paranormal and supernatural-seeming beginning we could imagine for any universe. If we are forced to believe in such a beginning, then our minds should be fully open to the possibility of a hundred other strange possibilities such as ESP, ghosts, out-of-body experiences and communication with the dead. Realizing that the universe apparently began in the strangest way imaginable, we cannot exclude such possibilities by thinking thoughts such as "that's too strange to consider seriously." 

Item #2: Cosmic Fine-Tuning

Below are some quotes by scientists relevant to the topic of cosmic fine-tuning:

• "Of all the universes that could exist, ours is spectacularly well configured to bring forth life....The universe’s biofriendliness, it turns out, concerns the laws of physics themselves. There are numerous features in these laws that render the universe just right for living things...But the density of vacuum energy seems to be 10¹²⁰ times lower than physicists expect based on theory. If the vacuum energy density of the universe were just a tad larger, however, its repulsive effect would be stronger and acceleration would have kicked in much earlier. This would have meant that matter was so sparsely distributed that it couldn’t clump together to form stars and galaxies, once again precluding the formation of life. The laws of physics and cosmology have many more such life-engendering properties. It almost feels as if the universe is a fix – a big one." -- Physicist Thomas Hertog (link).
• "We conclude that a change of more than 0.5 % in the strength of the strong interaction or more than 4 % change in the strength of the Coulomb force would destroy either nearly all C [carbon] or all O [oxygen] in every star. This implies that irrespective of stellar evolution the contribution of each star to the abundance of C or O in the ISM would be negligible. Therefore, for the above cases the creation of carbon-based life in our universe would be strongly disfavoured." -- Oberhummer, Csot, and Schlattl, "Stellar Production Rates of Carbon and Its Abundance in the Universe."
• "From 1953 onward, Willy Fowler and I have always been intrigued by the remarkable relation of the 7.65 Mev energy level in the nucleus of ¹²C [Carbon 12 isotope] to the 7.12 Mev level in ¹⁶O [Oxygen 16 isotope]. If you wanted to produce carbon and oxygen in roughly equal quantities by stellar nucleosynthesis, these are the two levels you have to fix, and your fixing would have to be just where these levels are actually found to be. Another put-up job? Following the above argument, I am inclined to think so.  A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature."  -- Astronomer Fred Hoyle, "The Universe -- Past and Present Reflections" (link). 
• "The cosmological constant must be tuned to 120 decimal places and there are also many mysterious ‘coincidences’ involving the physical constants that appear to be necessary for life, or any form of information processing, to exist....Fred Hoyle first pointed out, the beryllium would decay before interacting with another alpha particle were it not for the existence of a remarkably finely-tuned resonance in this interaction. Heinz Oberhummer has studied this resonance in detail and showed how the amount of oxygen and carbon produced in red giant stars varies with the strength and range of the nucleon interactions. His work indicates that these must be tuned to at least 0.5% if one is to produce both these elements to the extent required for life."  -- Physicists B.J. Carr and M.J. Rees, "Fine-Tuning in Living Systems." 
• "The Standard Model [of physics] is regarded as a highly 'unnatural' theory. Aside from having a large number of different particles and forces, many of which seem surplus to requirement, it is also very precariously balanced. If you change any of the 20+ numbers that have to be put into the theory even a little, you rapidly find yourself living in a universe without atoms. This spooky fine-tuning worries many physicists, leaving the universe looking as though it has been set up in just the right way for life to exist." -- Harry Cliff, particle physicist, in a Scientific American article.
• "If the parameters defining the physics of our universe departed from their present values, the observed rich structure and complexity would not be supported....Thirty-one such dimensionless parameters were identified that specify our universe. Fine-tuning refers to the observation that if any of these numbers took a slightly different value, the qualitative features of our universe would change dramatically. Our large, long-lived universe with a hierarchy of complexity from the sub-atomic to the galactic is the result of particular values of these parameters." -- Jeffrey M. Shainline, physicist (link). 
• "The overall result is that, because multiverse hypotheses do not predict the fine-tuning for this universe any better than a single universe hypothesis, the multiverse hypotheses fail as explanations for cosmic fine-tuning. Conversely, the fine-tuning data does not support the multiverse hypotheses." -- physicist V. Palonen, "Bayesian considerations on the multiverse explanation of cosmic fine-tuning."
• "A mere 1 percent offset between the charge of the electron and that of the proton would lead to a catastrophic repulsion....My entire body would dissolve in a massive explosion...The very Earth itself, the planet as a whole, would crack open and fly apart in an annihilating explosion...This is what would happen were the electron's charge to exceed the proton's by 1 percent. The opposite case, in which the proton's charge exceeded the electron's, would lead to the identical situation...How precise must the balance be?...Relatively small things like atoms, people and the like would fly apart if the charges differed by as little as one part in 100 billion. Larger structures like the Earth and the Sun require for their existence a yet more perfect balance of one part in a billion billion." -- Astronomy professor emeritus George Greenstein, "The Symbiotic Universe: Life and Mind in the Cosmos," pages 63-64. 
• "What is particularly striking is how sensitive the possibility of life in our universe is to a small change in these constants. For example, if the constant that controls the way the electromagnetic field behaves in a vacuum is changed by four percent, then fusion in stars could not produce carbon....Change the cosmological constant in the 123rd decimal place and suddenly it's impossible to have a habitable galaxy." --  Marcus Du Sautoy, Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, "The Great Unknown," page 221. 
• "The evolution of the cosmos is determined by initial conditions (such as the initial rate of expansion and the initial mass of matter), as well as by fifteen or so numbers called physical constants (such as the speed of the light and the mass of the electron). We have by now measured these physical constants with extremely high precision, but we have failed to come up with any theory explaining why they have their particular values. One of the most surprising discoveries of modern cosmology is the realization that the initial conditions and physical constants of the universe had to be adjusted with exquisite precision if they are to allow the emergence of conscious observers. This realization is referred to as the 'anthropic principle'...Change the initial conditions and physical constants ever so slightly, and the universe would be empty and sterile; we would not be around to discuss it. The precision of this fine-tuning is nothing short of stunning. The initial rate of expansion of the universe, to take just one example, had to have been tweaked to a precision comparable to that of an archer trying to land an arrow in a 1-square-centimeter target located on the fringes of the universe, 15 billion light years away!" -- Trinh Xuan Thuan, Professor of Astronomy, University of Virginia, “Chaos and Harmony”  p. 235.

The reality of cosmic fine-tuning is one that should shape your worldview. You can let this reality sensibly influence your worldview, or stupidly influence your worldview. An example of letting cosmic fine-tuning stupidly influence your worldview would be if you believed that because of cosmic fine-tuning we should believe there is an infinity or near-infinity of universes.  Such a belief about a multiverse actually does nothing to help explain why our universe is fine-tuned, mostly because you do not increase the chance of success on any one random trial by imagining a greater random number of random trials. Read here and here for why the multiverse concept fails to explain cosmic fine-tuning. 

Item #3: The Vast Organization of Human Bodies

The table below explains the vast hierarchical organization of a human body. 

HUMANS CONSIST OF HUMAN BODIES AND HUMAN MINDS.	Human minds have displayed a vast number of capabilities, many of which mainstream scientists fail to properly study.
HUMAN BODIES MAINLY CONSIST OF ORGAN SYSTEMS, THE MUSCULAR  SYSTEM  AND A SKELETAL SYSTEM.	The human skeletal system contains 206 bones. The human body has over 600 muscles.
ORGAN SYSTEMS CONSIST OF ORGANS AND SUPPORTING STRUCTURES.	Examples of organ systems include the cardiovascular    system (consisting of much more than just the heart), and the nervous system consisting of much more than just the brain. Other organ systems in the human body include the  digestive system,  the respiratory system, the reproductive system, the endocrine system, the urinary system, the immune/lymphatic system and the integumentary system.
ORGANS CONSIST OF TISSUES.
TISSUE CONSISTS OF CELLS.	There are roughly 200 types of cells in the human body, each a different type of system of enormous organization.
CELLS TYPICALLY CONSIST OF COMPLEX MEMBRANES AND THOUSANDS OF ORGANELLES.	A cell diagram will typically depict a cell as having only a few mitochondria, but cells typically have many thousands of mitochondria, as many as a million. A cell diagram will typically depict a cell as having only a few lysosomes, but cells typically have hundreds of lysosomes. A cell diagram will typically depict a cell as having only a few ribosomes, but a cell may have up to 10 million ribosomes. A cell diagram will typically depict one or a few stacks of a Golgi apparatus, each with only a few cisternae. But a cell will typically have between 10 and 20 stacks, each having as many as 60 cisternae.
ORGANELLES CONSIST OF VERY MANY PROTEIN MOLECULES AND PROTEIN MOLECULE COMPLEXES.	There are some 100,000 different types of protein molecules in the human body, each a different type of complex invention. Protein molecule complexes are groups of protein molecules that work together to achieve a function that cannot be achieved by only one of the proteins in the complex.
PROTEIN MOLECULES CONSIST OF HUNDREDS OF WELL-ARRANGED AMINO ACIDS, EXISTING IN A FOLDED THREE-DIMENSIONAL SHAPE.	Small changes in the sequences of amino acids in a protein are typically sufficient to ruin the usefulness of the protein molecule, preventing it from folding in the right way to achieve its function.
AMINO ACIDS CONSIST OF ABOUT 10 ATOMS ARRANGED IN SOME SPECIFIC WAY.	Some amino acids have 20 atoms. Given 10+ atoms in amino acids, and an average of about 470 amino acids per human protein molecule, a human protein molecule contains an average of about 5000+ well-arranged atoms. Amino acids in living things are almost all left-handed, although amino acids forming naturally will with 50% likelihood be right-handed.
ATOMS CONSIST OF MULTIPLE PROTONS, NEUTRONS AND ELECTRONS.	A carbon atom has 6 protons, 6 neutrons, and 6 electrons.

There are several kinds of ways in which the vast organization of a human body should influence your worldview. The reality of the vast organization of the human body should make you more inclined to believe in a purposeful causal reality beyond material explanations, one that helped to produce fantastically organized biological states of matter (extremely abundant in interdependent fine-tuned very complex components) that materialist theories fail to credibly explain. 

Item #4: Brain Physical Shortfalls

The table below explains some of the main physical shortfalls of brains, and their implications. 

BRAIN FACT	IMPLICATION, RELATED FACT OR OBSERVED CONSEQUENCE	SHORTFALL OF ALL BRAINS	IMPLICATION
Neurons, synapses and dendrites are physically rooted in  fixed spots in the brain, like trees rooted in one spot in a forest	There can be no physical sorting in the brain
Neurons have no addresses and no neuron numbers	There can be no indexing in the brain, as indexes require addresses or position numbers	Brains have no sorting, indexing or addresses	Brains cannot explain instant detailed recall, when someone instantly recalls lots of relevant information when hearing a name or seeing a face. Instantly finding just the right information in a brain would require sorting, indexing or addressing in the brain; but the brain has no such things.
Synapses and dendritic spines are made of proteins with short average lifetimes (< 2 weeks)	Synapses are attached to dendritic spines, observed to be unstable, lasting for less than years	Synapses are not a stable medium for storing human memories that can last reliably for 50+ years	The synaptic theory of brain memory storage is untenable
There is no place in the brain capable of stable information storage for decades, except for the DNA in neurons	DNA has been exhaustively analyzed by big, well-funded projects, and no one has ever found any evidence of episodic memories or school -learned knowledge inside DNA.	Brains do not have any place where episodic memories or school-learned knowledge can be stored for decades	The school-learned knowledge and episodic memories held for 50 years by old people cannot be knowledge stored in brains
There are no moving anatomical parts in the brain	There are no moving anatomical parts in the brain that can be called a writing mechanism or a reading mechanism	Brains have no mechanism for writing learned information or reading learned information	Learning of conceptual knowledge cannot be explained by brain mechanisms, nor can the recall of learned conceptual knowledge
Trans- mission of signals between neurons requires passing through endless chemical synapses (typically hundreds of chemical synapses for every neuron)	An individual chemical synapse does not reliably transmit brain signals (action potentials), transmitting it  successfully only 10% to 50% of the time. Brains have no structure supporting the storage of large learned sequences.	Large amounts of precise sequential information (such as large bodies of text) cannot be reliably transmitted across brain regions	A feat which many humans can perform (the exact retrieval of very large bodies of text such as hundreds of pages) cannot be achieved by a retrieval of stored information in a brain.
Each time a nerve signal (action potential) passes over a chemical synapse, there is a delay of about 5 milliseconds, called a synaptic delay.	Signal transmission over every centimeter of brain tissue requires very many  transmissions over many chemical synapses. The cumulative delay caused by very many transmissions across chemical synapses should result in a very significant delay in brain transmission speed. Moreover dendrites (making up 90% of brain tissue) transmit signals at only about 1 meter per second, or as little as one tenth of a meter per second.	The average signal transmission speed in brain areas such as the cortex must be a speed very many times lower than the "100 meters per second" often quoted: a "snail's pace" speed of roughly 1 centimeter per second.	Brains cannot transmit signals at a speed great enough to explain instant human recall of much relevant information, such as when someone is asked to describe some historical figure, and the person instantly starts describing many details of that person's life.
Every neuron in the brain is connected to many other neurons, by means of dendrites and synapses. For any neuron, there is no "next neuron," but instead multiple nearby connected  neurons that are roughly equidistant.		Unlike DNA (which has a linear structure supporting a sequential retrieval of information), brains do not have any structure allowing a sequential retrieval of information	When humans retrieve very large bodes of memorized text in correct sequential order, this cannot be occurring because of a retrieval of information stored in a brain

The physical shortfalls of brains should very greatly influence your worldview. Such shortfalls are some of the largest reasons for rejecting all claims that brains make minds and that brains store memories. The person who adequately studies such shortfalls will tend to realize that he is a soul, not a brain. 

Item #5: The Lack of Any DNA Blueprint, Recipe or Program for Building a Human Body or Any Of Its Cells

This item is not a discovery, but a non-discovery. It is a non-discovery with the most enormous implications. 

After DNA was discovered, scientists eagerly hoped that by analyzing it they might discover some kind of blueprint or program for making a human body. They thought this might help solve the great mystery of how their occurs the progression from a speck-sized zygote (existing just after impregnation) to the vastly more organized complexity of a full human body.  The human genome was exhaustively analyzed by the Human Genome Project, a highly-funded multi-year project which finished in the year 2003. Nothing like any  blueprint, recipe or program for building a human body was discovered. All that was found in DNA and its genes was low-level chemical information such as which amino acids make up particular proteins. 

Before the Human Genome Project had completed, scientists were making groundless claims that a specification for making human bodies would be found in DNA. Once the project completed, without the discovery of any such thing, many scientists just kept on telling the lie that DNA had a body blueprint. But many other scientists confessed that DNA and its genes had no such thing. You can read quotes by 40+ such scientists and medical doctors in my post here. 

The claim that human bodies get built because cells read a body blueprint for building bodies was always a very childish lie, for the simple reason that blueprints do not build things. Things get built with the help of blueprints only when intelligent agents such as construction workers read blueprints, and get ideas about how to build things. 

The non-discovery in DNA of any blueprint, recipe or program for building a human body or any of its cells is a non-discovery with the most gigantic implications. What it implies (along with Item #3 in this list) is that every adult human body is a miracle of organization utterly beyond any mechanistic explanation, a wonder of organization that requires a transcendent explanation.  

Item #6: The Discovery of Paranormal Phenomena

The discovery of paranormal phenomena has occurred steadily over the past two centuries. The observational evidence includes the items listed below, and very much more:

• The accounts of very many thousands of reliable witnesses who had near-death experiences, often reporting the most vivid and life-changing experiences at a time when their heart had stopped and their brain waves had shut down, something that should have prevented any experience according to "brains make minds" dogmas. 
• The accounts of very many people reporting out-of-body experiences in which they observed their own bodies from a position meters away (discussed here, here, and here). 

• The many cases in which medical personnel who did not have such experiences verified the medical resuscitation details recalled by people who had near-death experiences, who recalled medical details that occurred when such people should have been completely unconscious because their hearts had stopped.
• Abundant cases of dying people who reported seeing dead relatives.
• Very many cases of people who saw an apparition of someone they did not know had died, with the witness soon learning the person did die at about the time the apparition was seen (discussed in the 18 posts here). 
• Very many cases when multiple witnesses reported seeing the same apparition (discussed in my series of posts here). 
• A great abundance of reports in the nineteenth century of spiritual manifestations such as mysterious raps that spelled out messages, tables moving when no one touched them, tables half-levitating when no one touched them, and tables fully levitating when no  one touched them (discussed in the series of posts here).  
• Spectacular cases in the history of mediums, with paranormal phenomena often being carefully documented by observing scientists, as in the cases of Daniel Dunglas Home, Eusapia Palladino, Leonora Piper, and Indridi Indridason.
• Two hundred years of evidence for clairvoyance in which people could observe things far away or observe things when they were blindfolded or observe things in closed containers such as locked boxes. 
• Abundant photographic evidence for mysterious orbs, including 800 photos of mysterious striped orbs, orbs appearing with dramatically repeating patterns, and orbs appearing with dramatically repeating patterns while falling water was being photographed. 
• Abundant reports of mysterious orbs being seen with the naked eye, described in the 120+ posts here.
• A great abundance of anecdotal evidence for telepathy, with large fractions of the human population reporting telepathic experiences. 
• More than a century of solid laboratory evidence for telepathy, including cases discussed here, here, and here.  
• A great abundance of evidence for a phenomenon of materialization, involving the mysterious appearance of tangible human forms. 
• Extremely numerous cases in which living people report hard-to-explain events and synchronicity suggesting interaction with survivors of death.

Paranormal phenomena help to clarify the utter failure of "brains make minds" explanations, and help to clarify the reality that each of us is a soul beyond the explanation of physical science. 

Item #7: The Non-Discovery of Extraterrestrial Radio Signals

Around 1960 scientists with a materialist and Darwinist worldview were very confident that within a few decades radio signals would be picked up from extraterrestrial civilizations. Such confidence was based on materialist and Darwinist assumptions, such as the assumption that life would arise from non-life on any planet with the right conditions, and the assumption that once life had arisen on a suitable planet, there would almost inevitably be an evolution to intelligent life that could build radio transmitters.  By now the search for extraterrestrial radio signals has gone on for about 65 years, and has been lavishly funded, with many millions of stars and very many galaxies checked for radio signals. No such radio signals have been found. 

The non-discovery of extraterrestrial radio signals is something that should shape your worldview, by causing you to suspect that some of the assumptions that fueled optimism about SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) are incorrect assumptions. In reality, there is no scientific basis for thinking that even the simplest life (a state of very high organization) would ever arise accidentally from non-life; and there is no scientific basis for thinking that if such microscopic life existed, it would ever be some seed eventually leading to the appearance of intelligent life capable of building radio transmitters. We still lack any credible theory explaining the unguided origin of minds and bodies as complex as humans have. 

Below are the links that held up the SETI optimism of around 1970. The non-discovery of extraterrestrial radio signals suggests that some of these links are false assumptions. 

Don't be fooled by the phony clickbait headline recently at BBC Sky at Night Magazine, one falsely boasting of "radio signals" from another planet. What was detected was mere natural radio waves. The term "radio signals" should only be used for deliberate signals coming from an intelligent source. 

Item #8: The Non-Discovery of Learned Information by Microscopic Examination of Brain Tissue

The failure of scientists to find any memories by the microscopic examination of brain tissue is one of the strongest reasons for rejecting claims that the human brain stores memories. There is encoded genetic information in the nucleus of most cells, information which is pretty much the same in every cell, and is not memory information. That information was discovered around 1953. Since 1953 our technology has grown enormously. But there is still not a single case of anyone ever reading a memory from any brain (human or animal) outside of his own body. Scientists have never been able to read a memory by scanning with a microscope a living person's brain, or scanning some brain tissue. Do not be fooled by press accounts that sometimes grossly exaggerate scientific experiments, and give us headlines such as “Scientists invent mind-reading device.” Such experiments (typically trying to read neural correlates of visual perception) do not actually involve thought reading, and do not at all involve a reading of stored information in the brain.

When reminded of the non-existence of claims to have read memory information from human tissue by microscopic methods, someone might respond like this: 

"Well, the problem is that scientists don't have time to study a brain after someone dies, because the body is buried or cremated. If scientists were able to spend lots of time studying the brains of people who had just died, they would probably be able to find memories in the brains of dead people."

But this claim is not correct. There actually exists an institute of scientists devoted to studying the brains of dead people. And they have had over 4000 brains to study, mostly cases of brains that were donated very soon after someone died, and quickly preserved. 

The institute is called the Lieber Institute, and its web site is here. The site says that the  Lieber Institute has 48,000 square feet of laboratory space at Johns Hopkins University.  The Lieber Institute claims to have a repository of about 4000 brains.  On another page of the institute, we are told, "Each brain is donated by a bereaved family just hours after the loss of their loved one."

But microscopic examination of these brains has failed to produce any sign of stored memories in human brains. Elsewhere in the world is an even bigger collection of brains, one that also has failed to substantially support claims of a brain basis for memory storage. The Japan Times tells us this:

" Countless shelves line the walls of a basement at Denmark's University of Odense, holding what is thought to be the world's largest collection of brains. There are 9,479 of the organs, all removed from the corpses of mental health patients over the course of four decades until the 1980s. Preserved in formalin in large white buckets labeled with numbers, the collection was the life's work of prominent Danish psychiatrist Erik Stromgren...The brains were collected after autopsies had been conducted on the bodies of people committed to psychiatric institutes across Denmark. Neither the deceased nor their families were ever asked permission."

We hear not one word about any discovery that came from studying these brains. A web page of the University of Odense describes the collection of brains, but fails to mention any progress that has come from studying the brains.  There is no link to any papers that were produced using such brains. 

There is another brain collection called the Human Brain Collection Core (HBCC). The collection is described here. The collection seems to consist of about 1000 brains, 700 from people who were diagnosed with mental illness. 300 of the brains are from normal people. We seem to have the same kind of method as used by the Lieber Institute. The families of people who recently died are asked to donate the brain of a family members, with a time pressure element of "we must act fast." 

Related to this collection is a "Selected Publications" page, apparently listing the best results obtained from studying these brains. None of the 46 papers reports anything like a discovery of memories by analyzing brain tissue. None of the papers has a title referring to either memory or engrams. 

Despite microscopically studying more than 14,000 brains (a large fraction of which were cryogenically preserved within a day after death), scientists are unable to read any memory from any of these brains, and are also unable to find any evidence of some neural code that could be used to translate learned information into brain states. The brains are saying "storing memories is not something brains do," but our scientists refuse to listen to what the brains are telling them.  

Below is a diagram from the paper "Materials Advances Through Aberration-Corrected Electron Microscopy." We see that since the time the genetic code was discovered about 1953, microscopes have grown very many times more powerful. The A on the left stands for an angstrom, a tenth of a nanometer (that is, a ten-billionth of a meter). 

Currently the most powerful microscopes can see things about 1 angstrom in width, which is a tenth of a nanometer. How does this compare to the sizes of the smallest units in brains? Those sizes are below:

Width of a neuron body (soma): about 100 microns (micrometers), which is about 1,000,000 angstroms.

Width of a synapse: about 20-30 nanometers, about 200-300 angstroms.  

Width of a dendritic spine: about 50 to 200 nanometers, about 500 to 2000 angstroms.

Clearly the resolution of the most powerful microscopes is powerful enough to read memories stored in neurons or synapses, if such memories existed. And more than 10,000 brains have been microscopically studied in recent years. The failure to microscopically read any  memories from human brain tissue is a major reason for thinking that brains do not store human memories.  

Besides failing to find specific memories and items of learned knowledge by microscopically examining brains (such as the information that the New York Yankees belong to the American League of US baseball), scientists can find no evidence of a mechanism for storing learned information in brains.  If such a mechanism existed, its fingerprints would be all over the place. Since humans can learn and remember so many different types of things (sights, sounds, feelings, facts, beliefs, opinions, numbers, smells, tastes, physical pains, physical pleasures, music, quotations, and so forth), any brain mechanism for storing all of these things would have a massive footprint in the brain and in the genome. No sign of any such thing can be found. The workhorses that get things done in the body are proteins, and humans have more than 20,000 types of proteins. No one has ever identified a protein that helps to write a memory of experiences or numbers or words to the brain or neural tissue, in any kind of way that helps explain how memories or knowledge could be stored in brains.  Of course, you can find studies maybe showing that protein XYZ was used when someone learned something, but that does nothing to show a mechanism of memory storage. 

The rationalizations given to explain failures of this type are amusing. It is sometimes claimed that the brain must use some "secret code" to store information, one that humans have not been able to crack. For comparison, the Bletchley Park analysts in England were able in the 1940's to crack the Enigma code used by the Nazis to transmit secret information. That was a code specifically designed to be impossible to decipher by anyone who did not know the secret code. The Bletchley Park analysts were able to crack the Enigma code using only the most primitive predecessors of modern computers.  Can we really imagine that today's scientists would fail to unravel a code used by the brain to store memories,  even though they have microscopes vastly better than those that unraveled the Genetic Code discovered around 1953, and even though they have computers a million times better than the Bletchley Park analysts had? 

It is much more logical and credible to believe that no such memories have been found by examining brains microscopically simply because brains do not store human memories. Nature never told us that brains store memories. It was merely overconfident scientists who told us that, scientists who never had any justification for such a claim. 

The non-discovery of memories or any learned information by the microscopic examination of brain tissue is a non-discovery that should help shape your worldview, by giving you further evidence that you are a soul beyond any neural explanation. You need not worry about the loss of your memories when you die. Such memories never existed in your brain, and will not perish when your brain rots away. 

Nature's Known Laws Are Too Simple to Explain Vast Levels of Organization and Functional Complexity in Organisms

 Occasionally materialists will tell a lie as big as the sky, by claiming that all of the phenomena of life can be explained by the laws of physics and chemistry. You could hardly state a bigger falsehood. The truth is that the main discovered laws of nature are laws that are simple, and that laws so simple are utterly incapable of explaining either the vast levels of organization and fine-tuned functional complexity that we see in living organisms or the vast levels of diverse functionality and capabilities that we observe in the minds and behavior of such organisms. 

Let's take a look at the main laws of nature. The Google Gemini infographic below discusses some of the most important laws of nature: the law of gravitation, Coulomb's law of electromagnetism, the Pauli Exclusion Principle, and the laws of thermodynamics. 

The law of universal gravitation (often called Newton's law) is a law that can be expressed by the very simple equation shown above, an equation so brief if could be written on the slip of paper inside a fortune cookie. The law is stated like this:

In the equation, F means the force of gravitational attraction between two bodies, m1 means the mass of the first body, m2 means the mass of the second body, and r² means the square of the distance between the bodies. The G stands for a fundamental constant of nature called the gravitational constant. 

This law of gravitation is a law following a very simple rule stated in Section 1 of the infographic above. The law of gravitation helps explain the formation of planet Earth. But this law does almost nothing to explain why our planet is  habitable. The law of gravitation also does nothing to explain any of the wonders of biology. The gravitational force within a living body (and between nearby living bodies) is negligible. 

The law of electromagnetism (Coulomb's law) is a law following a very simple rule stated in Section 2 of the infographic above. It's a law that (when stated in an equation) has a look very similar to the law of gravitation stated above. The law is twice as complex as the law of gravitation, because while gravitation involves only a force of attraction, electromagnetism can involve either attraction or repulsion. The rules here are simple:

(1) Each proton in the universe has the same positive charge equal to 1.602176634 times 10^-19 Coulomb.

(2) Each electron in the universe has exactly the same charge as each proton, the only difference being that the charge on every electron is negative, while the charge on every proton is positive. (The equality of the absolute value of these two types of charges is a dramatically stunning example of cosmic fine-tuning.)

(3) Between any positive charge and a negative charge, there is a force of attraction, inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. 

(4) Between any two charges of the same sign (such as two positive charges or two negative charges), there is a force of repulsion, inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. 

While significantly more complicated than the law of gravitation, Coulomb's law (the fundamental law of electromagnetism) is still very simple, simple enough for a guy like me to easily explain. Coulomb's law (the law of electromagnetism) has the most supreme relevance to the existence of life. A human can exist in a zero-gravity spaceship, without getting any benefit from gravitation. Conversely, no human being would last even an hour without Coulomb's law (the law of electromagnetism), which is necessary for all biochemistry. 

But while being absolutely necessary for biochemistry, Coulomb's law does almost nothing to explain the origin of life or the origin of visible organisms or the origin of the human species; nor does  Coulomb's law do much of anything to explain the nine-month progression from a speck-sized zygote to the vast organization of the human body. Such marvels of fine-tuned complexity and hierarchical organization cannot be explained by simple mechanical principles such as attraction or repulsion. 

Another law mentioned in the infographic above is the Pauli Exclusion Principle. The Pauli Exclusion Principle is explained in my story "When I Trained to Be an Electron." I could explain the principle by expounding on the explanation in the infographic above, but I would much rather you read my story to hear an explanation of the principle. The Pauli Exclusion Principle is a very simple law of nature that is necessary for the existence of elements such as carbon and oxygen. But the principle does nothing to explain how such elements get organized into the fantastically complex and fine-tuned organizations of matter that are the bodies of humans.

There's another very important law of nature, one that scientists seem to have never given a name to. I can call it the Strong Nuclear Force law. This is the law that when nucleons (either protons or neutrons) get very, very close to each other, then they bind together as if they were bound by the strongest superglue. This very simple law is absolutely necessary for the existence of complex elements such as carbon and oxygen. But this law does nothing to explain how such elements get organized into the fantastically complex and fine-tuned organizations of matter thar are the bodies of humans.

The infographic above also mentions the very simple law that goes under the name of the Law of the Conservation of Energy or the Law of the Conservation of Mass-Energy. This is simply that mass-energy (which can exist as either mass or energy) cannot be created or destroyed. This law does nothing at all to help explain the wonders of life. 

The infographic above also mentions what is called the second law of thermodynamics, often described as the law that entropy (a measure of disorganization) always increases over time. This is a simple law, and it does nothing at all to explain how we ever got the wonders of life on Earth. To the contrary, many have argued that the progression of life on Earth seems to have acted in a way contrary to the second law of thermodynamics. 

An important law of nature not mentioned in the infographic is Boyle's Law, which holds that the pressure and volume of a confined gas are inversely proportional when temperature and mass are held constant. This does nothing to help explain the wonders of life on Earth. Another important law of chemistry is Avogadro's Law, which states that equal volumes of all gases, at the same temperature and pressure, contain an equal number of molecules. This very simple law does nothing to help explain the enormous complexity and organization of living things. 

Other important laws of physics include Newton's laws of motion. They are important in the preservation of life, but do not do much of anything to explain life's organization and complexity. Newton's laws of motion are also very simple (for example, one has the simple formula of f=ma, where m is a mass, a is an acceleration, and f is the force caused by the acceleration of such a mass). 

A very important law of nature that is not needed today is the law of the conservation of charge. This is the simple law that whenever charge is created, there must be an equal number of positive and negative charges created.  So if two high-speed and high-energy photons collide, they may create positively charged protons and negatively charged electrons -- but only in a way that the amount of positive charge created is equal to the amount of negative charge created. The law of the conservation of charge was supremely important in the early moments of the universe, when the universe was super-dense. Because of such a law, we ended up with a universe that  seems to be electrically neutral, one in which the number of protons is apparently equal to the number of electrons. But nowadays the law of the conservation of charge never comes into play, except in relation to what is going on in big expensive particle accelerators. In any case, the law is a very simple law. 

So above I have given a discussion of the main laws of nature. Have I left out any big law? What about a "law of evolution"? Is there any such thing?

No, there is not. To the great embarrassment of those wishing to explain evolution as an explanation for life's wonders, there does not exist in nature any such thing as a "law of evolution." Nor does there exist any such thing in nature as a "force of evolution." Things such as electromagnetism and gravitation are real forces that push and pull matter around. There is no "law of evolution" that pushes matter around or pulls matter in some direction. The organization of matter cannot be explained by such a law. There is no real force associated with evolution, and when Darwinists refer to a "force of evolution" they are using language loosely and metaphorically. 

What about a "law of development" or a "law of morphogenesis"? Is there any such thing that might explain the nine-month progression from a speck-sized zygote (existing just after impregnation) to the vastly more organized state of a full human body? There is not. We know of no laws of nature that can explain such a thing. 

So when materialists occasionally claim that all of the phenomena of life can be explained by the laws of physics and chemistry, they are telling a lie as big as the Pacific Ocean. The only laws of nature we know of are laws way too simple to explain the sky-high levels of functional complexity, purposeful dynamism and hierarchical organization we see in organisms such as humans. 

When it comes to explaining minds and memory, we find no laws of nature that are of any real help. Electrical transmission between neurons does not actually explain human cognition, despite common claims to the contrary. Is it perhaps a law of nature that the transmission of electricity gives rise to minds? No, it certainly is not. In thunderstorms there is electricity transmission with vastly more voltage than anything going on in the human mind; but all that electricity passing around does not give rise to the slightest bit of cognition. You could create some dramatic electrical gizmo like Tesla experimented with, and let it run all day. This would not produce the slightest amount of consciousness. 

 There is a state in which the human brain starts transmitting electricity much more dramatically than normal. This state is the tonic-clonic epileptic seizure (also called a grand mal seizure), which has been very roughly described as a lightning storm in the brain. This state does not produce higher levels of cognition, but produces unconsciousness.

Contrary to claims that electrical transmission between neurons is an explanation for human consciousness, we know that many people undergoing cardiac arrest have very vivid near-death experiences, when their brains have flatlined, becoming electrically inactive, as the brain does within 5 to 20 seconds after the heart stops. This is the opposite of what we would expect if minds are produced by electrical transmission in the brain. 

Below are some quotations in which scientists confess that they don't really understand morphogenesis, contrary to claims that known laws of physics or chemistry explain how a speck-sized zygote progresses to become a full human body.  

• "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). 
• "You start off as a sperm and an egg, and nine months later [your body has been built], through a magical process of morphogenesis, which we don’t understand." -- Donald Hoffman, Professor Emeritus of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine (link). 
• "We take it for granted that we go to bed with two sets of fully functional kidneys and that we wake up with them the next morning but we don't understand the fundamental processes that give rise to this very well choreographed maintenance of an organism's form and function." -- Scientist Sanchéz Alvarado (link). 
• "A quarter of the way through the twenty-first century, we still lack basic knowledge regarding the formation and function of the organ that gives its name to all mammals, and which provides important health benefits for children and their breastfeeding parent through the creation and delivery of breast milk." -- 3 scientists (link). 
• "Despite increasing knowledge of pathways controlling the differentiation of many cell types in the eye, we still lack a basic understanding of the mechanisms controlling its morphogenesis." - 3 scientists (link).  
• "The remarkable amount of data we now possess regarding genes, gene expression, and molecular epigenetics still has not enabled a clear conceptual understanding of the emergence of biological form during vertebrate morphogenesis." -- "Epigenetics Beyond the Cell: Supracellular Organization of Fate and Form in Morphogenesis " paper by four scientists in the year 2025 (link). 
• "The molecular mechanisms that control the three-dimensional forms of animal organs remain poorly understood." -- M.A. Krasnow (link).
• "In most instances, the molecular basis of morphogenesis in the eye is poorly understood." -- Donald F. Ready (link).
• "Many organs form globular structures, but how this is achieved is poorly understood." -- Two scientists in the year 2026 (link).
• "It is poorly understood how, in complex tissues, cells self-organize in a robust manner." -- Karl H. Palmquist, 2024 (link). 
• "Developmental morphogenesis reliably builds species-specific large-scale anatomies....The algorithms that guide growth and form are still poorly understood." -- Two scientists, 2023 (link).
• "How tissues develop distinct structures remains poorly understood." -- Two scientists, 2024 (link).

AlphaFold Software Did Not Solve the Protein Folding Problem, and Is Not Great at Predicting Protein Structure

Materialists are always spreading unfounded socially constructed triumphal legends. Materialists have spread the groundless triumphal legend that Charles Darwin explained the origin of species. The more scientists discover about the oceanic depths of hierarchical organization and functional complexity in living organisms and the endless numbers of interdependent fine-tuned components in living organisms, the less credible such a boast seems. Materialists have also  spread the groundless triumphal legend that neuroscientists have explained minds and memory. The credibility of such a boast will dissolve once you have made an adequately deep study of topics such as the physical shortfalls in all brains, medical case histories defying "brains make minds" dogma (discussed here), and the defective research practices of today's neuroscientists. 

The latest example of a groundless socially constructed triumphal legend spread by materialists is the claim that some software called the AlphaFold software (existing in forms such as AlphaFold, AlphaFold2 and AlphaFold3) solved the long-standing problem of biology called the protein folding problem. 

The human body contains 20,000+ protein molecules, and most protein molecules have a sequence of hundreds or thousands of amino acids specified by some particular gene.  But a protein molecule is not a mere chain of amino acids. Protein molecules have folded three-dimensional shapes necessary for their functions. 

Simplifying things, you can think of it this way:

Gene --> Polypeptide sequence (amino acid chain) --> Protein

How is it that a protein molecule gets the three-dimensional folded shape needed for its function? Does it read instructions on how to make such a shape from a gene? No, it does not. Nowhere in DNA or its genes is there any such thing as a specification for how to make the three-dimensional shape of a protein molecule. 

Ignoring possible cases of shape duplication, you can say that within the human body there are very roughly 20,000+ different protein molecule structures assumed by very roughly 20,000+ different types of protein molecules. The problem of how these folded shapes arise is the unsolved problem called the protein folding problem. 

We should avoid getting confused between the protein folding problem and the protein folding prediction problem, which are two separate problems. The protein folding prediction problem is the problem of predicting the three-dimensional shape of a protein molecule using that protein's amino acid sequence. The protein folding problem is the very different problem of why proteins assume the three-dimensional shapes that they have. Some progress has been made on the protein folding prediction problem by some AlphaFold software using machine-learning and massive databases storing information on genes and the shapes that proteins have. But that progress is merely progress on the protein folding prediction problem, not progress in solving the protein folding problem. The protein folding problem is still unsolved. Scientists do not understand how proteins are able to form into the three-dimensional shapes that they have, the shapes needed for their function. A scientific paper notes that "AlphaFold2 (AF2) revolutionized protein structure prediction, yet it is often conflated with the protein folding problem," thereby noting the confusion that is occurring between a protein structure prediction problem and a separate and distinct protein folding problem. 

Below are some quotes by scientists confessing that the protein folding problem has not been solved.

•  "In real time how the chaperones fold the newly synthesized polypeptide sequences into a particular three-dimensional shape within a fraction of second is still a mystery for biologists as well as mathematicians."   -- Arun Upadhyay, "Structure of proteins: Evolution with unsolved mysteries," 2019.
• "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). 
• "One of the most puzzling and unsolved challenges in molecular biology is understanding how proteins fold. " -- Scientist Jorge A. Vila, 2026 (link). 
• "The origin of functional proteins remains a fundamental biological enigma...The physical principles governing protein genesis itself, from prebiotic condensation to functional protein emergence, remain unresolved."  -- Nine scientists, 2026 (link). 

A year 2026 paper makes it clear that contrary to boasts in the press, the AlphaFold2 software does not actually solve the protein folding problem, the problem of how protein molecules almost instantly acquire very complicated 3D shapes needed for their function. The year 2026 paper states, "The explanatory scientific understanding of the protein folding problem is thus not directly advanced by AF2 [AlphaFold2]." Later the same paper says, "The protein folding problem remains unsolved."

A paper published in the year 2026 throws some cold water on triumphal boasts about the AlphaFold software, while reiterating that the protein folding prediction problem (a "what" problem) is very different from the protein folding problem (the "how" problem of how proteins fold into the shapes needed for the biological function):

"AlphaFold only works some of the time.... However, true single sequence structure prediction has remained elusive. The cautious old guard who initially responded to AlphaFold by highlighting the difference between protein structure prediction (the what) and protein folding (the how), correctly saying that the second remains an open problem, has surprised nobody by not going on to work on protein folding."

How well does the AlphaFold series of software predict the structure of a protein, given its amino acid sequence?  According to one recent paper, the "official" answer to this question is to be found in the 2026 paper "CASP16 Protein Monomer Structure Prediction Assessment" which you can read here. Below I'll call this the CASP16 wrap-up paper. Over many years, there have been a series of CASP competitions, in which competitors using different types of software have tried to predict the 3D shape of a protein molecule, given an input of its amino acid sequence. The latest of these competitions which has published results was the CASP16 competition held in 2024, and its results are described in the paper above. (A CASP17 competition has just recently completed, but it will be quite a few months before we have a scientific paper publishing its results.) 

In a previous post I did discussing the CASP14 competition, I noted that there are two different ways of calculating the accuracy of a protein shape prediction: a GDT_TS measure and a more stringent GDT_HA measure. Using the more stringent GDT_HA measure, Figure 2B of the CASP16 wrap-up paper gives us the graph below showing prediction accuracy of the latest versions of the AlphaFold software (AlphaFold2 and AlphaFold3). AF2 refers to AlphaFold2. AF3 refers to AlphaFold3. 

Each little dot represents a particular prediction (or maybe a set of predictions). The vertical position of the dot represents how accurate the prediction was. Dots near the the top of the graph (near the 100 mark) are very good predictions. Dots in the blue areas of the graph are not very good predictions, predictions only about 70% correct. Dots below the blue areas of the graph are poor predictions. 

Anyone who has read the hype about the AlphaFold series of software may be surprised by the result above. The graph seems to show an average prediction accuracy of only about 70%, with the accuracy ranging from only about 40% to as high as almost 98%.  But didn't we read again and again science news articles making it sound like the AlphaFold series of software had mastered the problem of predicting the structure of proteins from their amino acid sequences? Such articles were very misleading. 

We read this: "Overall, [predictive] performance on monomer targets in CASP16 showed minimal improvement compared to CASP15." The reference is to the CASP16 competition held in 2024 and the CASP15 competition held in 2022.  The statement I just quoted contradicts the impression that we have got from the press of skyrocketing progress in this area. 

A key issue in evaluating the predictive effectiveness of the AlphaFold series of software is the issue of target size.  The target size refers to the amino acid length of a protein which AlphaFold software attempted to describe using its structure prediction methods. The wrap-up paper mentioned above does a bad job of describing these target sizes. To find the target sizes, you must go to the page here  (the page for the CASP16 competition) and then click on the "Target List" link, which takes you to the page here. 

The page isn't well-designed in terms of presenting information in a way that the average reader will understand. Under the heading of "Multimers" we have a cryptic column heading of "Res" which gives numbers. Those numbers are the "residue length" of the proteins that were used as prediction targets, and these "residue lengths" were the number of amino acids in the proteins. If you click on the "Res" column, the column will sort by the lengths of the amino acid sequences in the proteins. When you see a number above about 450, you are looking at more difficult prediction targets.  When you see a number above 1000, you are looking at the most difficult prediction targets.  When you see a number below 400, you are looking at the easiest prediction targets.  

Scrolling down the page, I see that the selected prediction targets were mostly not very challenging. Very many types of human proteins have more than 1000 amino acids, and more than 500 types of human proteins have more than 3000 amino acids each.  But out of 150 prediction targets of the CASPR16 competition, only 29 had amino acid lengths greater than 1000. About 35 of the 150 or so prediction targets had an amino acid length between 1000 and 600. 38 of the prediction targets had an amino acid length between 600 and 450. About 49 of the 150 or so prediction targets had an amino acid length less than 450, which is less than the average amino acid length of a human protein.  

So given this not-very-challenging set of prediction targets that has less-complex-than-average types of proteins about as frequently as more-complex-than-average types of proteins, we should not be too impressed by Figure 2B showing a prediction accuracy of about 70%. It would seem that if the prediction targets had been proteins with above-average complexity as often as targets with average complexity, that the reported prediction accuracy of about 70% would have been something much smaller, such as maybe 60% or 50%. 

From the graph above, it is clear that the AlphaFold family of software does not very well predict the structure of protein molecules, using the amino acid sequence as an input.  Its performance accuracy should not be described as "very good" but merely as perhaps "fair-to-somewhat-good."

There is a site called the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database which you can reach here. The average person will be puzzled by how you can use this site to check the quality of predictions by the AlphaFold software.  I can describe one way.  You can get a list a protein names by going to the UnitProt database site here, and typing in a query like this:

(length:[1000 TO 50000]) AND (organism_name:"Homo sapiens")

This will give you a result of thousands of rows, showing human proteins that have more than 1000 amino acids. You can then type in some of the data from that result set into the search box of the page for the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database which you can reach here.

Doing that, I got some results from that page, and the results were not very impressive. For example, I typed in the phrase "Transcription factor TFIIIB component B'' homolog" using a phrase I had got from the UniProt result set using the query above. I got these results from a few queries using the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database:

Protein Name	Gene	UniProt ID	Amino Acid Length	Global Quality (How Well Alpha Fold Predicts the Struc- ture)
Transcription factor TFIII    B component B'' homolog	BDP1	A6H8Y1-4	1372	46.75 (Very Low)
AT-rich interactive domain-containing protein 1A	ARID1A	O14497-2	2068	48.75 (Very low)
Centrosomal protein of 290 kDa	CEP290	O15078	2479	60.53 (low)
Zinc finger protein 292	ZNF292	O14497-2	2578	46.91 (Very Low)
Photoreceptor cilium actin regulator	PCARE	A6NGG8	1288	43.78 (Very Low)
Transcription initiation factor TFIID subunit 4	TAF4	O00268	1085	52.78 (Low)

I did not have to do much work to find these examples of low-quality predictions by the AlphaFold software.  I had to only search through a random list of about 15 or 20 proteins with an amino acid length greater than 1000.  When I searched for proteins with an amino acid length between 500 and 700 (only somewhat more complex than an average human protein molecule), I quickly found some examples that the AlphaFold software performed poorly on when analyzing. For example, its prediction about the TANK-binding kinase 1-binding protein 1 of 611 amino acids was not very good, being rated as only "63.62 (Low)." And the AlphaFold software's prediction about a Nucleolar protein 4 of 536 amino acids was not very good, rated as only "60.91 (Low)."

I may note that the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database site which you can reach here uses quality-rating adjectives that are way too positive-sounding. The database routinely describes predictions that are only about 70% accurate as being "high" in quality. In few other fields would ratings be so charitable. For example, if a car assembly team assembled only 70% of the car's parts correctly, it would make no sense to claim its assembly skill was "high." And if someone predicting the outcome of mixing particular quantities of particular chemicals had an accuracy rating of only 70%,  people would not rate his accuracy as "high," but complain that he was poor at predictions.  You would hardly claim that your physician was "high" in proficiency if he prescribed the right medicine only 70% of the time. In field such as physics, any theory of gravitation would be subject to the most scornful derision if it made predictions that were only 90% accurate, and its proponents claimed that this was "high" accuracy.  In fields such as physics, a rating of "high" quality tends to go to only predictions that are at least 99% accurate. 

An example of the grotesque misinformation being stated in the popular press about the AlphaFold software is this claim in an article:

"DeepMind started developing AlphaFold in 2018. In 2020, it was recognized as a solution to humanity's 50-year-old 'protein folding problem,' which sought to answer how amino acids automatically fold into complex 3D shapes. "

The AlphaFold software did nothing to solve the "50-year-old 'protein folding problem,' which sought to answer how amino acids automatically fold into complex 3D shapes." All that the AlphaFold software did was to make some progress on a different problem, the protein folding prediction problem. And the progress that the AlphaFold software made was very limited. The graph above with the blue areas shows that it is still impossible to accurately predict the structure of most proteins from their amino acid sequences. 

It wasn't just the writer quoted above who misinformed us on this topic. It was the organization that runs the CASP competition, which issued a highly misleading press release in 2020. One of endless science press releases with unfounded boasts, the press release quoted a Professor Dame Janet Thornton as saying the following: 

" One of biology s biggest mysteries is how proteins fold to create exquisitely unique three-dimensional structures. Every living thing   from the smallest bacteria to plants, animals and humans   is defined and powered by the proteins that help it function at the molecular level.  So far, this mystery remained unsolved, and determining a single protein structure often required years of experimental effort. It s tremendous to see the triumph of human curiosity, endeavour and intelligence in solving this problem. A better understanding of protein structures and the ability to predict them using a computer means a better understanding of life, evolution and, of course, human health and disease." 

Here Thornton bungled badly by confusing two different problems: the protein folding prediction problem (the problem of predicting the structure of proteins from their amino acid sequence) and the protein folding problem (the problem of how proteins are able to form their three-dimensional structures from amino acid sequences that do not specify such structures). It was a goof as bad as someone getting all mixed up and conflating and confusing the problem of how to play the card game called bridge, and the problem of how to construct a bridge. At the time this quote was made, and even so today, nothing had occurred to justify this boast about "solving this problem," as nothing had been done to solve the protein folding problem; and no software existed that very accurately and reliably predicted protein structure. And no such software exists even today. 

Referring to the AlphaFold3 software using the phrase AF3, a year 2026 paper states this: "We conclude that AF3 is a poor predictor of D-peptide chirality, fold, and binding pose."

We are reminded here that materialism is a giant myth-making machine.  Materialism grinds out example after example of unfounded socially constructed triumphal legends, particularly when such legends serve the ideological needs of materialists. The protein folding problem is a great thorn in the side of materialists. Somehow proteins in our bodies are constantly forming into the three-dimensional shapes needed for their biological function, just as if some purposeful intelligence of vast power was acting to achieve such effects.  This reality is troubling to materialists, and we can understand why they would wish to construct an analgesic legend to ease their discomfort over this matter.  But the claim that AlphaFold family of software programs solved the protein folding problem is as unfounded as the claim that Darwin explained the origin of species. 

At about this time (September, 2026) the latest in the CASP series of competitions has completed, a competition called CASP17. It will be quite a few months before there is published a paper that details the predictive accuracy of competitors in this competition. In December 2026 there will be a conference announcing preliminary results of the CASP17 competition. Given the misleading content in the November, 2020 CASP press release, we should be suspicious of boasts of any press release announcing results of the CASP17 competition, and subject such a press release to critical scrutiny. 

A major contributor to the social construction of unfounded triumphal legends is the Nobel Prize organization, which sometimes gives undeserved Nobel prizes, or publishes unfounded or misleading claims when awarding Nobel prizes, as I document in my post here. When it awarded a Nobel prize in chemistry to two people who had worked on protein structure prediction, the claim was modest. Officially the award is merely going "for protein structure prediction."  But the announcement page links to biographies of the two scientists awarded, and in both cases the pages have remarkably misleading statements. On the pages here and here, we have this very misleading statement:

"In 2020, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper presented an AI model called AlphaFold2. With its help, they have been able to predict the structure of virtually all known proteins."

No such accurate prediction occurred, as my text above documents; and AlphaFold2's accuracy as measured in the graph above is only about 70%. Someone trying to defend this statement quoted above would sound pretty duplicitous. He might say, "We just said predict, we didn't say predict accurately."