A Physicist's Intellectually Empty Explanation of Why He Is an Atheist

For ages humans have looked up at the stars, and have got a kind of feeling that they were somehow important, for some reason. Speaking rather metaphorically, we can say that the stars do tell us something very important, but too few scientists are listening to what the stars are saying.  (At the end of this post, I'll clarify what I mean by that.) 

Liller 1 star cluster (credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, F. Ferraro)

In a recent interview, physicist Carlo Rovelli says one of the silliest things I have ever heard someone say. He says, "There's no fundamental difference between natural objects and mental objects, between culture and nature, between living beings and dead beings, between men and women -- this is the equality of all things." Rovelli has written a book pitching this idea, one entitled The Equality of All Things.

On page 228 of his book "There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness," Carlo Rovelli has a short essay entitled "Why I Am an Atheist." It's an essay remarkable for its extremely vacuous content. Rovelli fails to give any reason that has any intellectual weight. 

Let's discuss how you could state bad reasons and good reasons for being a theist or being an atheist. By "bad reasons" I mean reasons that are relatively unpersuasive or that have little intellectual weight. By "good reasons" I mean reasons that are relatively persuasive or that have relatively high intellectual weight.  Let's start with bad reasons you could state for being a theist. A bad reason might be something like the reason that your friends are theists, or that your parents told you to be a theist, or that you enjoy the music and the architectural grandeur of the church you go to. Another bad reason (from an intellectual or philosophical standpoint) you might give for being a theist is that you were emotionally moved by reading some text long ago that some people claim was inspired by God. But if you had some convincing argument that such a text or scripture was inspired by God, that might be a better argument. 

It is easy to think of some good reasons that a person could give for being a theist. For example, a person might argue that the sudden unexplained origin of the universe suggests the existence of a deity that caused such an event. Or a person might argue that the enormous hierarchical organization, fine-tuned functional complexity, enormously high information richness and component interdependence within living organisms such as humans could only have arisen if there were a supernatural designer helping to bring about the appearance of such organisms so rich in complex systems made of complex systems made of complex systems made of complex systems.  Or a person might argue that the enormous amount of precise fine-tuning in the universe's fundamental constants and laws argue strongly that we live in a universe that must have been fine-tuned by a supernatural designer. Or a person could argue that the wonders of the human mind and human memory are things almost entirely beyond any explanation involving an appeal to brains and their neurons, dendrites and synapses. Endless facts of neuroscience and endless neuroscience case histories and medical case histories could be brought up to support such an argument. The argument would be that since the human mind and its powers absolutely cannot be explained by anything we know about the human brain, it must therefore be that every human is a soul that must originate from a divine source. 

Making equally weighty reasoning, a person could argue that we absolutely cannot explain the natural physical origin of any adult human being, because of the failure of physical science to explain the progression from a speck-sized zygote (containing no specification of how to build a human body or any of its cells) to the vast state of hierarchical organization that is the full human body. This argument could be powerfully combined with the previous argument.  The combined argument would be that we do not have any credible natural explanation for how either the mind or the body of any adult human arises, and that therefore the very existence of adult humans with fantastically organized bodies and enormous depths of mental powers requires something like transcendent causal agency. 

What kind of arguments might theoretically qualify as relatively weighty arguments for atheism? You might give some argument trying to show that biologists have done a great job of explaining all the wonders of the human mind and the human body, and the wonders of the biosphere, and therefore there is no need to postulate something supernatural to explain the origin of such things. You might also give some argument that there is a natural reason why the universe might have originated in an event like the Big Bang, without any purposeful agency being involved in such an event. You might also try to give some type of speculative argument trying to show that it is not so improbable that there could have accidentally existed a universe as fine-tuned for the existence of life as our universe. Making such arguments in any compelling way and honest way would be very difficult. 

Does Rovelli give anything like such arguments in his "Why I Am an Atheist" essay? He does not. He acts just as if no such arguments can be given. 

He starts out his essay with the weak reason that he does not like people who are virtuous because they fear post-mortal punishment. We have this laughable "false dilemma" piece of reasoning: 

"I don't like those who devote themselves to others and to justice, thinking that in this way they will please God. I like those who instead devote themselves to others because they feel love and compassion." 

This is an example of the fallacy of a false dilemma. You can do good for both of the reasons stated. And the line of reasoning is fallacious, because what type of people a person likes or dislikes has nothing to do with whether he should believe in a God. Humans make all kinds of mistakes, and have all kinds of faults. If it were true that those who believe in God tend to be unlikable people, that would not be any good reason for disbelieving in God, if there were adequate reasons for holding such a belief. Similarly if most of those who believe in UFOs are unlikable, that would be no reason for disbelieving in UFOs. 

Rovelli's next paragraph is equally vacuous. He states this:

"I've never liked feeling in communion with a group of people standing in silence inside a church listening to a service. I like to feel in communion with a group of friends, talking with them, looking into their eyes and their smiles."

This is pretty much the worst reason ever for being an atheist. It's another false dilemma. Being a theist does not stop you from feeling "in communion with a group of friends, talking with them, looking into their eyes and their smiles." And it makes no sense to bring up what you enjoy when you are explaining why you are a theist or an atheist. I may note that the silence of students in a lecture hall listening to an atheist professor such as Rovelli is very similar to the silence of church attendees during a church service. 

The next paragraph is equally ridiculous from the standpoint of nonbelief justification. It features only more irrelevant "what I like" talk by Rovelli, such as him saying "I don't like shutting myself away in silence to pray to God." Prayer is not a requirement for belief in God, and what you like has no weight when you are trying to justify whether you believe or disbelieve in God. 

The next paragraph is equally ridiculous from the standpoint of nonbelief justification. It consists only of Rovelli maintaining that theists are dogmatic because they claim that God created the universe. A contrast is drawn between such claimed dogmatism and an "I don't really know" attitude. The line of reasoning has no weight. While a belief in organized religions such as Christianity and Islam typically involves a great deal of dogmatism, theism by itself does not require any great dogmatism. And atheists like Rovelli tend to be just as dogmatic as anyone claiming that God created the universe. Atheists such as Rovelli dogmatically assert all kinds of unproven and extremely dubious claims, such as the groundless claim that Darwin showed that all species have a common ancestor (a claim Rovelli makes in his chapter on Darwin), and the claim that brains produce minds and store memories (a claim inconsistent with a host of observations, as discussed in the posts of my site here). So it is not actually true that atheists are less dogmatic, as Rovelli tries to suggest. 

The second-to-last paragraph is more "what kind of people I like" reasoning that is featherweight from an intellectual standpoint. It has absolutely zero weight from the standpoint of justifying a philosophical position. For example, Rovelli say he does not like people who say that they know what is good and what is evil. 

We then have the grand climax of Rovelli's "Why I Am an Atheist" essay. It starts out in the least convincing way imaginable, by saying this:

"I like talking with friends, trying to help them when they are in trouble. I like talking to plants, and giving them water to drink when they need it. I like being in love. I like gazing in silence at the sky. I like stars. I have an infinite liking for stars." 

What on Earth does that have to do with whether we should believe or disbelieve in God? 

After gushing passionately that he has "an infinite liking for stars," Rovelli tells us more about how he does not like theists, speaking as if he strongly dislikes people who "seek refuge in the arms of religion when they feel lost, when they are suffering." He ends his "Why I Am an Atheist" essay with this sentence that sums up his whole essay: "And since I want to be like those I like and admire, and not like those I don't like and am not impressed by, I do not believe in God."

Adoring all the stars while hating many people?

I have never read an attempted justification for atheism that sounds as vacuous as this one. There is zero intellectual weight and zero argumentative force in anything Rovelli has said in this essay. Rovelli's essay sounds very much like something that a thirteen-year-old might write, but only if the thirteen-year-old was a clumsy reasoner.

Rovelli should do more studying of biology, which might cause him to stop making extremely misleading claims such as the claim that we are made of stardust. Physically humans are made of enormously well-arranged organ systems which are made of gigantically organized organs which are made of vastly organized cells which are made of extremely organized organelles which are made of proteins and protein complexes so well-organized (and with so many well-arranged parts) that they are often called molecular machines, even by materialist scientists. Physical organization so fine-tuned and hierarchical (and with so very many interdependent very complex components) is the opposite of dust (something utterly unorganized), and also something that would be fantastically improbable to ever arise in the godless universe Rovelli believes in. 

I suspect that Rovelli has spent too much time gazing adoringly at the stars, and not enough time studying how stars like the sun require the most precise fine-tuning of physical laws and fundamental constants for them to exist, fine-tuning that would be enormously improbable in the godless universe he believes in. Studying that topic would have been easy for a high-IQ physicist such as Rovelli. Below are some relevant quotes in which scientists are talking about stars and how they require very precise fine-tuning:

• "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). 
• "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." 
• "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 64-65.
• "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 values of some fundamental physical constants are considered to be finely tuned and balanced to give our observable world. Examples include finely tuned balance between quark masses needed to produce protons and neutrons ...and production of heavy nuclei in stars, which depends on the finely tuned balance between the fine structure constant ...and the ratio of the proton mass ..and electron mass...These and other examples suggest a narrow 'habitable zone' in parameter space...where essential biochemical elements can form... For this reason, fundamental constants are referred to as 'biofriendly' or 'biophilic' ....We need to tune the same fundamental constants setting α and β (ℏ, e, c, me, mp) that, importantly, involves tuning, which is additional and different to tuning involved in fixing α and β....We can conjecture that multiple independent tunings were involved. This includes tuning fundamental constants to produce heavy nuclei and additional tunings needed for other observed sustainable structures to emerge." -- Kostya Trachenko, "Constraints on fundamental physical constants from bio-friendly viscosity and diffusion" (link).
• "If we extend the model back to nucleosynthesis, about 1 second after the beginning, then the density of the universe must be within one part in 10¹⁵ of the critical density in order to still be close to critical today. The further we push back, the closer the constraint: at the Planck time, it is one part in 10⁵⁵...The contribution to the vacuum energy is ∼ 1, 123 orders of magnitude larger than the observed value. This is a fine-tuning problem. Quantum field theory and general relativity can explain the small observed value of the cosmological constant, but only by supposing that the different (positive and negative) contributions to the vacuum energy from each quantum field happen to cancel each other to 123 decimal places. This requires an unmotivated but suspiciously precise coincidence between a number of independent factors. As an example of fine-tuning for life, the cosmological constant problem is a near perfect storm...Make the cosmological constant a few orders of magnitude larger and structure formation freezes before anything has formed. The universe will be a thin, uniform hydrogen and helium soup, a diffuse gas where the occasional particle collision is all that ever happens. A very simple way to make a universe lifeless is to make it devoid of any structure whatsoever. Alternatively, a negative cosmological constant causes the universe to recollapse. If the cosmological constant were −10⁻⁶⁸, then the universe would recollapse ...10⁻¹⁰ seconds after the big bang...Weaken the strong force by a few more percent, or increase the strength of electromagnetism, and carbon and all larger elements are unstable (Barrow & Tipler, 1986). The parameters of the standard model must walk a tight-rope in order to form stable nuclei and support stable stars." -- Physicist Luke Barnes, "The Fine-Tuning of the Universe for Life" (link). 
• "It is commonly argued... that if the fine-structure constant α were off by a few percent, the shift in the resonance energy would inhibit stellar production of ¹²C [main type of carbon] required for the emergence of carbon-based life."-- Four scientists (link).
• "Now, there are a few aspects of this situation that appear fine-tuned. First, the average density of the Universe—the average density around which you have these part-in-100,000 variations—is quite special. If it had been larger, the force of gravity would have caused the whole Universe to stop expanding very early on and it would have collapsed in on itself. For instance, if it had been just 1% denser one second after the big bang, the Universe would have collapsed, effectively coming to an end, less than seven minutes later. On the other hand, if it had been a bit smaller, the reduced gravitational attraction would have allowed the Universe to expand much more quickly, making it far too diffuse for stars, or any sort of complex structure, to ever form. To have a Universe that lasts as long as ours, the initial density had to be extremely fine-tuned....The amplitude of the tiny, part-in-100,000 variations in this average density also appear fine-tuned....Furthermore, there are a number of other properties of our Universe that appear 'selected' for life....Fine-tuning is striking because a number of seemingly disparate aspects of the early Universe and of physics have conspired together to enable a universe like ours to develop. It has the quality of a statistical residue, since the physical conditions of the early Universe together with the values of the parameters of physics constitute a concrete pattern that is not predicted by the big bang theory per se nor by the structure of our (current) laws of physics per se. However, this pattern turns out to be just the right one such that particular, complex structures can emerge, like galaxies and stars and planets and a periodic table of elements that can form complex molecules and eventually life." -- Adam D. Hincks, holder of a Physics PhD from Princeton University (link). 

Why We Should Have No High Confidence in Astronomy Professors Estimating the Number of Extraterrestrial Civilizations

Nowadays academia professors tend to be people with limited knowledge concentrated in one particular field. It is a mistake to assume that people who have concentrated their studies in one narrow area are knowledgeable about many related topics. For example, a professor of medieval history may have little knowledge of modern history. 

Google Gemini infographic on scientist overspecialization

People often make the mistake of assuming that some very complex question involving many fields of knowledge will be well-handled by some person who specializes in only one of those areas of knowledge. Consider the important question: how high will the temperature grow later in this century because of global warming? It is a mistake to think that someone is well-equipped to answer that question merely because he calls himself a climate scientist. This is because the question involves many questions involving things other than just  earth science and the atmosphere, including these:

(1) How high will the human population be later in this century? Fossil fuel use may be proportional to the number of people, but it is hard to predict the future population because of factors such as falling birth rates in many countries. 

(2) How much progress will humans make in reducing fossil fuel use, by using alternate technologies such as solar power, wind power and nuclear power?

(3) Will there be some nuclear fusion breakthrough that greatly reduces the amount of fossil fuel use?

(4) Will fossil fuel use tend to dramatically drop off not mainly because of human concerns over global warming, but because of a Peak Oil scenario under which it becomes more and more expensive to extract oil from underground?

(5) Will there be technological breakthroughs that allow geoengineering efforts to roll back the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere?

A climate scientist may have no expertise allowing him to give good answers to these questions very relevant to judging how high the average temperature will be later in the century. Expertise in one narrow subject does not mean you will give a good answer on a question involving very many subjects. 

 A type of article that pops up in the press every now and then is an article in which some astronomy professor tries to estimate the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy or in our universe. The average person probably thinks that an astronomy professor can be trusted to give a reliable answer on that question. But such an opinion may be misguided, because the question involves so much more than just astronomy. 

The question of the likelihood of extraterrestrial civilizations appearing involves all of these questions, almost all of which are outside of the domain of astronomy:

(1) How many planets not-too-big and not-too-small exist in the habitable zones of stable long-lived stars?

(2) What is the chance of life accidentally appearing on some suitable planet?

(3) What is the chance of life with simpler cells (prokaryotic cells) ever progressing to become life with far more complex cells (eukaryotic cells)?

(4) What is the chance of one-celled life ever progressing so that there exists on a planet large organisms with limbs and organs?

(5) What is the chance that there ever would appear on some planet with life some species with limbs capable of manipulating tools?

(6) What is the chance that a planet with life would ever produce intelligent creatures smart enough to use language and build a civilization?

(7) What is the chance that a technological civilization would destroy itself before long, so that it would not be available to communicate with other planets?

(8) Is it true that mere brain evolution explains the appearance of intelligence, or are there reasons for thinking that the existence of thinking, reasoning, and instantly recalling conscious creatures such  as us cannot be explained by mere brain activity?

(9) Do we have reasons for thinking that we already have evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence, in the form of UFO sightings that cannot be explained without assuming extraterrestrial spacecraft?

(10) Are there reasons for believing that there exists some cosmic designer who might be interested in having intelligent life exist on many planets, so that the chance of extraterrestrial civilizations appearing might be greatly increased?

How many of these questions involve astronomy? Only one. So why do we think that astronomy professors are well-qualified to be addressing such questions?

The record of astronomy professors in estimating the number of extraterrestrial civilizations is a poor record. Moreover, in discussing some of the questions relevant to such an estimate, astronomy professors have long been guilty of misspeaking about some of the relevant factors in making such an estimate. 

An example of such an astronomer who made great mistakes at such a task was Carl Sagan. Eager to promote the idea that extraterrestrial cultures were abundant  in our galaxy, Sagan again and again misled his readers and those who listened to him in interviews.  Making a grotesque misrepresentation of the complexity of the bodies of human beings, Sagan endlessly repeated the slogan "we are all star stuff." Human bodies are enormously organized marvels of fine-tuned functional complexity that are the opposite of "stuff" (a word meaning something disorganized). Sagan also repeatedly misled his readers and listeners by making the false claim that "the stuff of life" is scattered throughout the universe. The truth is that the lowest building components of living things are amino acids, which have been found in only the tiniest trace amounts in outer space, such as 1 part per billion on comets or interstellar molecular clouds. 

In his book Intelligent Life in the Universe, Sagan dogmatically proclaimed on page 418 that "The number of extant civilizations substantially in advance of our own in the Galaxy today appears to be perhaps between 50 thousand and one million." The claim was as arbitrary and poorly established as Senator McCarthy's claims about there being 205 registered communists in the US State department. Just as McCarthy kept changing his estimate about the number of communists in the State Department, Sagan kept changing his estimates of the number of civilized planets in our galaxy. He would repeatedly claim that there were a million civilizations in our galaxy, and many of the times he made such estimates, he would try to suggest that whatever estimate he made was the estimate made by most astronomers, although he never gave any evidence to back up such a claim about a  majority of astronomers agreeing with him, and never even backed up any claim that a large fraction of astronomers agreed with him. 

A Scientific American article appearing a while ago gives us another example of why we should have little confidence in astronomy professors estimating the number of extraterrestrial civilizations. The astronomy professor author starts out by making the fallacious "many chances equals some successes" argument, the reasoning that extraterrestrial life must exist because there are so many chances for it to arise. There are maybe a billion trillion planets in the observable universe, but if the chance of the accidental origin of life on any planet is less than 1 in a billion trillion, it should be unlikely that life would ever accidentally appear elsewhere in the observable universe. And there are strong reasons for thinking that the chance of life accidentally appearing on any particular planet is less than 1 in a billion trillion, because of the very great organization needed for even the simplest self-reproducing cell.  It is not generally true that many chances equals some successes or even a single success in any case where the probability of success per trial is very low. 

The same astronomer gave no sign at all that he understands the huge levels of functional complexity, component interdependence and information richness in organisms such as humans. It's par for the course. The astronomer seemed to show no grasp of how fine-tuned a hierarchical organization of matter a human body is, but why should we think that he would?  Astronomy is not biology. 

A thorough study of all of the factors relevant for estimating the chance of extraterrestrial intelligence would include the study of whether brains are a credible explanation for human mental phenomena. Such a study would involve a very thorough study of the human brain and its physical shortfalls suggesting it cannot be the source of the human mind and human memory, and also a very thorough study of the human mind and human mental experiences, both common and extraordinary. That would be a type of study that few astronomers have done. 

A New Study Fails to Fix the Problem of Few Signs of Impressive "Positive Selection" in Humans

According to Darwinist dogma, lucky random mutations occur and cause "classic sweeps" or "classic selective sweeps" in which some new trait (offering a survival or reproduction advantage) becomes more and more common in the gene pool, eventually so common that most organisms in the population have that trait. The idea is illustrated in the visual below, which illustrates an example of the type of evolution called "positive selection" (which is a misleading term because "selection" means a choice by a conscious agent, and no actual selection is involved when so-called "positive selection" occurs).  The visual depicts a white-color trait offering a camouflage advantage, with the trait becoming more and more common over a timespan of many generations. 

The idea of "selective sweeps" can credibly explain very simple changes in a species such as a color change. But the idea of selective sweeps fails to explain the origin of components, capabilities and systems requiring a great organization of many parts. 

Claims about the power of "selective sweeps" (also called "classic sweeps") have mostly struck out at the plate, as more sensitive scans of the human genome have found little evidence of  such classic sweeps. A scientific paper was entitled "Classic Selective Sweeps Were Rare in Recent Human Evolution." By "recent human evolution" the paper meant the past 250,000 years.

Another scientific study in 2014 found there was virtually no sign of adaptive evolution in the human genome. The paper published in a mainstream science journal looked for traces of natural selection by looking for something called “fixed adaptive substitutions” in human DNA. The paper stated, “Our overall estimate of the fraction of fixed adaptive substitutions (α) in the human lineage is very low, approximately 0.2%, which is consistent with previous studies.”  It's rather hard to imagine a bigger fail or flop for Darwinian explanations. If such explanations were correct, we would have expected to find such signs of adaptive evolution in a large fraction of the human genome, not a fifth of one percent. 

In the 2018 book Who We Are and How We Got Here by David Reich, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, the author makes this revealing confession on page 9: “The sad truth is that it is possible to count on the fingers of two hands the examples like FOXP2 of mutations that increased in frequency in human ancestors under the pressure of natural selection and whose functions we partly understand.” Judging from this statement, there are merely 10 or fewer cases where we know of some mutation that increased in the human population because of natural selection. The scientific paper “The Genomic Rate of Adaptive Evolution” tells us “there is little evidence of widespread adaptive evolution in our own species."

In the study here, an initial analysis found 154 positively selected genes in the human genome -- genes that seemed to show signs of being promoted by natural selection. But then the authors applied something they called "the Bonferroni correction" to get a more accurate number, and were left with only 2 genes in the human genome showing signs of positive selection (promotion by natural selection).  That's only 1 gene in 10,000. Call it the faintest whisper of a trace -- hardly something inspiring confidence in claims that we are mainly the product of natural selection. 

Recently some claimed this dismal situation has brightened, calling attention to a recently published paper entitled "Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia." An article on the Smithsonian site gives us lots of information about it. You can read the article here. 

Immediately the article tells us something that seems to confirm the "missing-in-action human adaptive evolution" story suggested at the beginning of this post. We read this:

"Previously, many scientists suspected that modern humans experienced relatively little evolution after arising in Africa around 300,000 years ago. They arrived at the idea by examining directional selection, a type of natural selection in which a specific variant of a gene, called an allele, provides an extreme version of a trait that is very beneficial to survival or reproduction. It continues getting passed to more offspring, and other forms of the gene appear less often in the population. Before the new study, only around 21 occurrences of directional selection had been identified."

Humans have more than 20,000 genes  The 21 occurrences referred to is a reference to only 21 genes. Such a picture of about "1 gene in a thousand" is a dismal picture for anyone wanting to claim evidence of adaptive evolution in humans. That is a "virtually no sign of adaptive evolution" type of picture. 

But the article then discusses that the new "Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia" paper claims to have detected more evidence of adaptive evolution in humans than the previously cited figure. We read the paper claims to have found "479 alleles that had been subjected to directional selection." 

But then the article gives us a reason for distrusting the new paper. We read this:

"However, 'the findings still require a leap of faith,' says Sasha Gusev, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School who was not involved in the work, to the Times. He is cautious about the vast natural selection the researchers say they’ve identified and takes issue with some of their statistical methods."

Also, the Smithsonian article fails to discuss any compelling examples of survival-improving adaptive evolution documented by the new study. The article headline has a mention of only trivial differences that do not improve human abilities or survival value. The headline is this:

Humans Are Still Evolving. Natural Selection Has Favored Genes Linked to Red Hair and Less Male-Pattern Baldness, a Study Suggests.

The article gives us only this listing of examples of human evolution claimed by the new paper: "Some of the alleles that natural selection has strongly favored are associated with traits including light skin tone, red hair, increased risk of celiac disease, lower chance of male-pattern baldness and lower risk of alcoholism." This does not seem to paint any picture conforming to ideas about natural selection as an explanation for the human race. Three of the five things mentioned are trivial and superficial things. One of the other things is something decreasing survival, and the other is one increasing survival (if we assume that alcoholic cavemen would be less likely to survive). We have no mention of any big important thing that fits in with some "this helps explain how you humans arose from ape-like ancestors" narrative. 

We read this: 

"Why were some alleles selected more often than others? 'My short answer is, I don’t know,'  Akbari tells the New York Times’ Carl Zimmer."

This sounds like odd little changes here and there, for reasons unknown, rather than any substantial confirmation of Darwinian claims about evolution being the cause of humanity.  And we don't even know whether the confusing story will stand up to scrutiny,  as the Harvard guy says the methodology is suspect.  

I looked at references to "positive selection" in the "Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia" paper.  The only specific references were these, none of which has any real relevance to explaining the origin of humans and their many unique mental powers:

• A claim of positive selection in some gene used by blood cells. 
• A claim of positive selection for some gene affecting tuberculosis risk. 
• A claim of positive selection for some gene affecting multiple sclerosis risk. 
• A claim of positive selection for some other gene relating to some iron buildup disease. 
• "Positive selection at an allele conferring immunity to HIV-1 infection."
• A claim of positive selection for some gene affecting cystic fibrosis risk. 
• A claim of "nominal evidence of positive selection" for something relating to years of schooling, although we should not take the claim seriously because "nominal" means "existing or being something in name or form only."

Figure 3 of the paper (shown below) gives us some reason for doubting the strength of the data and analysis in the paper. We have a figure showing lots of little line graphs supposedly showing "allele frequency trajectories." But each graph involves only 3 data items, meaning that claims of an increase or decrease in the alleles is not very solid. In general, line graphs plotting only 3 data points tend to be suspicious; but line graphs plotting 7 or 10 data points tend to be more reliable. 

So we seem to be left with no real evidence that there occurred selective sweeps or so-called "positive selection" that can explain the gigantic leap in intellectual function that mysteriously occurred around 50,000 years ago. We have some evidence for microevolution, but nothing that validates claims that Darwinian processes can produce macroevolution (dramatic evolutionary changes involving big leaps in functional capabilities). 

Regarding the study "Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia", evolutionary geneticist Arbel Harpak says, “The study is best viewed as offering amazing data and provocative hypotheses that will require much further scrutiny, rather than a settled account of recent adaptation in Eurasia."

The 3021 paper here is entitled "Two decades of suspect evidence for adaptive molecular evolution—negative selection confounding positive-selection signals." Using two species, the authors tested 100 genes that were identified by two of the main types of tests used to try to find genetic evidence of evolution.  They found " the >100 genes identified by the two tests do not overlap beyond random expectation."  This suggests that at least one of the tests was inaccurate, and also gives us reason for thinking that maybe both of the tests were inaccurate. 

No one should be too surprised about a lack of any genetic explanation for the origin of human minds (in the sense of some explanation involving so-called natural selection). In the 19th century the co-founder of the theory of natural selection (Alfred Russel Wallace) had very clearly explained why that  theory is incapable of explaining the wonders of human minds, in his essay here. That essay should be required reading in every class teaching the theory of evolution.

Biologists love to make unfounded boasts about the power of their explanations. But sometimes they are candid and tell us about how little their explanations work. For example, I recently discovered this quote by Cornell University evolutionary biologist Leslie S. Babonis: "The emergence of novel traits ─ traits that are unique to a group of organisms ─ is an important driver of organismal diversity, yet our understanding of how novel traits arise is still in its infancy." In the same year two biologists (James T. Stroud and William C. Ratcliff) confessed the lack of an evolutionary explanation for the original origin of multicellular organisms bigger than microbes. In a scientific paper they stated, "The evolution of multicellularity is among the most important transitions in the history of life, yet the processes that lead to it remain unresolved as all known transitions occurred more than 250 million years ago." Notice the "it was so long ago" excuse for the lack of an explanation, which sounds odd, given that similar guys have for so very long claimed to divine just what happened eons ago.  In a similar vein, a 2026 paper by several scientists confessed, "How animals evolved complex multicellularity from their unicellular ancestors remains unanswered."

Scientists tell us that the first three great leaps in the history of life were:

(1) The origin of prokaryotic cells (i.e. origin of life)

(2) The origin (eons later) of vastly more complex eukaryotic cells.

(3) The origin (eons later) of multicellularity (organisms with many cells arranged into an anatomy).

So-called natural selection and "selective sweeps" and "positive selection" fail to explain any of these things. The main scientist speculation about the origin of eukaryotic cells is not at all a Darwinian explanation. 

Intriguing Claims of Alexis Didier, Master Clairvoyant

Some of the most astonishing nineteenth century evidence for ESP comes in accounts involving Alexis Didier.  The original accounts can be read in the pages of the nineteenth century journal The Zoist, which can be read here.  At the link here you can read an account of many pages describing very compelling evidence for the clairvoyance of Alexis Didier. My post "Still More Nineteenth Century Evidence for ESP" has many quotes from this account, one entitled "Reports of Various Trials of the Clairvoyance of Alexis Didier, Last Summer, in London." 

Alexis Didier was by trade an engraver and artist, but also a skillful writer who produced a work in French describing his experiences with clairvoyance. The book has some very striking and beautifully written passages that I will quote in English. I used the Google Translate utility to produce the translations. 

Alexis Didier

Didier's displays of clairvoyance would often occur after he was hypnotized into a trance-like state. On page 15 Didier discusses being hypnotized. Hypnotism originally went under names such as animal magnetism and artificial somnambulism.  The "magnetic fluid" Didier refers to below is a speculative idea about some invisible fluid that can be manipulated by a hypnotist. We read this complex assertion, which must be one of the most remarkable claims I have ever read:

"When I feel invaded by the magnetic fluid, something indefinable happens within me that delights me, transports me, tenses and convulses my nerves, twists my limbs, upsets my entire inner being, seizes me, possesses me and painfully tears me away from the realities of earthly life that surround me, to open before the inner eye of my mind, endless horizons; this first sensation, always painful, is succeeded by a feeling of well-being; material obstacles becoming more transparent than crystal, no longer block my vision. The entire Universe is before me, and I can transport myself from one pole to the other with the speed of lightning; I can converse with the Kaffirs, walk in China, descend into the mines of Australia, enter the harem of the Sultan in less than an hour, without fatigue; for the soul, daughter of God, has only to will in order to be, like her father, everywhere; this power which triumphs over space and allows the soul to transport itself from one place to another, is nothing in comparison with that which makes it victorious over time and which makes all the centuries present to my sight. The vanished generations, which, more numerous than the grains of sand of the sea, have lived on earth, appear at my will or at the evocation of the consultant, in their perfect individuality, having the costumes, the features, the morals, the habits, the character which distinguished them during their stay here below. The past for me is not dead, it is living. There is a pious belief that makes one religiously preserve, enshrined in gold and precious stones, the relics of the saints, and that makes one believe that there remains something of their soul, their spirit; of their heart, in a word, of their personality, in these fragments of their dead body. For me, I see them, re-existing entirely in body, in soul, in spirit, in holiness, under the smallest particle of an object that they touched during their life, and I enjoy their real presence, as if they were still on this earth."

On page 20 Alexis tells us this:

"When I touch, I feel, I breathe, I see this vital essence, it is the man or woman from whom it emanates and that it contains only by an electrical contact that incorporates me so to speak to them, that I touch, that I feel, that I breathe, that I see; it is this that makes me enter into direct communion of thought, of feeling, of sensation with those who are in relation with me; with the help of a simple lock of hair or a letter, I touch them, I feel them, I see them, I hear them, they live in me their life, I feel myself suffering from their pain, enjoying their enjoyment, loving their love; my soul, freed from the bonds of the flesh, touches them unites in spirit with them."

One of the strangest phenomena reported under hypnotism is a phenomenon called the transposition of the senses. When the phenomenon occurs, a hypnotized person may report receiving sensations from parts of the body other than the eye. He may report seeing through the epigastrium (the upper central part of the abdomen), or seeing through his fingertips. You can read accounts of this strange "transposition of the senses" phenomenon in my seven posts here.  Using the term "lucidity" to mean clairvoyance, and the term "sleepwalker" to mean a hypnotized person, Didier reports the following on page 22:

"In the state of upheaval in which lucidity occurs, the sleepwalker no longer has recourse to the ordinary organs of sight. Thus, I sometimes read with the epigastrium, when I feel that my soul, removed from the empire of the flesh, radiates spiritually through this organ. This sight is painful, it only operates with jolts and electric tremors. It is called second sight, because it appears second place and that it is only the privilege of a few beings on earth, who owe it to a certain unhealthy disposition."

On page 38 Didier tells us this, using the term "sleepwalkers" for hypnotized subjects obtaining clairvoyance, which he calls "lucidity":

"The soul is an immaterial though substantial being, created by God in each man at the moment of his birth, of the nature of the angels and immortal like them; it is invisible to the senses and can only be seen by sleepwalkers gifted with a very high lucidity; it is enclosed in the body as in a prison...The soul is therefore a simple being emanating from God, without participating in its nature and without proceeding from it. It is sovereignly, actively and essentially intelligent, from the moment when, returned so to speak to itself, it is separated from the body; because then it knows everything, sees everything, flies from one end of the universe to the other, walks in time as in its domain, and reanimates at will the vanished generations; nothing is hidden from him any more, because what limits the faculties of man is the imperfection of the material organs, limited, finite and often altered, which serve him in the usual operations of life."

On page 54 Didier speculates about a kind of spiritual fluid or energy that permeates nature, rather sounding like Obi-Wan Kenobi talking about the Force: 

"There exists spread throughout the world a subtle, luminous, imponderable fluid, which mysteriously animates all the parts of creation where it maintains movement and to which it gives invisible life to the eye of the senses; we feel its presence, but we see it only in the state of lucidity where it appears a breath of light taking in turn all the colors of the rainbow; it is it which makes plants vegetate, it is it which makes animals and men live. This spiritual fluid is one, but it modifies its nature differently according to the body which it animates; its absence produces death in the parts where its presence maintained life."

On page 68 Didier talks about what it is like to be clairvoyant when hypnotized: 

"For me, under the convulsive action of the magnetic fluid, I feel, so to speak, completely transformed: it seems to me that life has withdrawn within me and has awakened an inner being who enjoys infinitely more extensive faculties; I feel myself endowed with organs infinitely more exquisite and more perfected than in the waking state, and the most audacious enterprises seem to me child's play, for I feel a force, a light which act powerfully in me and allow me to accomplish, without hesitation, the most extreme desires of my consultants.

As soon as I have in my hands a lock of hair impregnated with the vital fluid of an individual living here below, with the electric rapidity with which the sensation operates, my spirit finds itself carried away in space and reunited with that of this individual; I have sought a name to describe this astonishing marvel which instantly unites me in spirit with the persons whose clothing is given to me or a lock of hair, and I have not found one more expressive than that of communion. Indeed, my spirit, triumphing over space with incalculable rapidity, will unite with the one whose fluid I feel in the part of the world where he is at the moment when I am put in contact with him, and I am so well present in spirit in the same place as him, that I hear the language of the people who surround him without understanding it, if the language is unknown to me, and that I am able to describe, in their most minute details, the beauties or the particularities of the sites or monuments which surround him.

If I like, to paint this miraculous union of spirits across space with an electric instantaneity, to use the word communion, it is because I feel completely identified with the individual with whom I am in contact; my presence, although invisible, is so real, that not only can I look through the windows of the apartment he lives in, hear what is said to him and what he answers, see what he does, read what he writes, but also because I suffer from the illness from which he suffers, I am worried by his worries, happy with his joys; my face sometimes takes on the air of his face, and my writing becomes his writing. I know perfectly well that everything I write here is so magical in appearance, although true in reality, that if I had not witnessed these phenomena and convinced the most intelligent men of this century of their reality, I would not dare to have it printed."

Later a medical doctor named Joseph Bodes Buchanan would publish  a long book called Manual of Psychometry: Dawn of a New Civilization, a book which claimed to document many examples of what is described by Didier above: an ability of someone to obtain information about someone in an anomalous way merely by touching something the person had once owned or worn, or perhaps touching a lock of the person's hair. For example, he claims on this page: "Thus, a lock of hair, or an article of clothing, may be made the means of forming a correct diagnosis." 

On page 84 Didier tells about clairvoyance (which he calls "lucidity") obtained by hypnotized subjects, which he refers to as magnetized subjects ("animal magnetism" being the word used for hypnotism before the word hypnotism came into common use):

"The first characteristic of lucidity is to allow magnetized subjects to see distinctly, with closed eyes and even blindfolded, the objects which are presented to them, with the epigastrium or the tips of the fingers. The second consists in penetrating the most opaque bodies, in seeing what a closed box contains, in reading in an uncut book which is totally unknown to them, the page which is indicated to them, in perceiving objects through a piece of furniture or a wall, as if the walls of the wall and the piece of furniture had become transparent to them like a sheet of glass; in going in spirit to all the countries of the world, to enter into communion with the individuals with whom they have been put in contact, so that they can give news of them. Lucidity has as its characteristic the faculty that we have just enumerated. It is certain that with such powerful means of informing oneself, the somnambulist must enjoy an intelligence and a science as profound as superior. "

On page 158 Didier discusses some of the philosophical relevance of the displays of clairvoyance he so successfully produced on so many occasions. Again, the term "lucidity" is used for clairvoyance:

"These facts, some of which I have cited, have been repeated often enough for my name to enjoy, in public opinion, a great reputation for lucidity. I take advantage of this celebrity to make known to man, not the dogmas of a new philosophy, but to explain to him one of the most elementary truths of all religions, the existence and immortality of the soul. There is no doubt that, if I did not possess within me an immaterial principle, I could not launch myself into space, to an immense distance, and contemplate what takes place in the most distant countries. There is, moreover, no doubt that this principle, being immaterial, is indecomposable, and must resist and survive this crisis of decomposition that we call death."

Below is a 19th-century newspaper article about Alexis Didier:

An 1875 newspaper account complains about the failure of spiritualists to find a missing person named Charley Ross. We read this reference to a feat of clairvoyance by Alexis Didier:

"If the spiritualists wish to secure believers they should find Charley Ross. That is a magnificent opening for clairvoyance, or mediumship, or whatever it may happen to be. We are the more surprised at their utter failure in that case for the reason that  professional clairvoyants, such as Alexis Didier, have actually solved much more difficult problems than that. He once really discovered a child who had been abducted, murdered, and the body conveyed to a distant province (it was in France) and concealed at the bottom of a disused dry well."

At the link here you can read an account of many pages describing very compelling evidence for the clairvoyance of Alexis Didier. On pages 158 to 162 of Edwin Lee's 1866 book Animal Magnetism and Magnetic Lucid Somnambulism, you can read five pages of description of the clairvoyance of Alexis Didier.  We are told that Alexis could play cards "while his eyes were padded over and bandaged." We read Lee state this:

"Alexis also described my room in the hotel, and stated that there was something white on the night table close to the bed, which I denied, believing there was nothing of the kind ; but on my return I found a large piece of the white bed-curtain covering  the top of the night-table. On another occasion he described minutely the  particulars of my apartment in London, even to two engravings (representing the story of Mazeppa)."

On another page of Lee's book we read this:

"During his sojourn at Brighton, Alexis gave numerous proofs of his extraordinary clairvoyant and perspective power as regarded his being able to designate cards while with their faces to the table, to read lines from any book opened at random, the opened page being placed on his forehead, on the top or back of his head. He was frequently requested by one or other of the company assembled at the seances to read some words or lines at ten, fifteen, or any stated number of pages further on than where the book was opened. He then took a pen or pencil, drew a line at some part of the page, saying that the words which he wrote down would be found at the corresponding level of the page indicated, and he was seldom wrong as to the words, though he was not unfrequently as to the precise number of pages ; the words, though on the same level, being sometimes found a page or two nearer or further on than that specified. On one occasion the trial was made with a book, the leaves of which were uncut, and which had to be cut open to ascertain the accordance of the printed words with those which the clairvoyant had written."

I have never heard anyone mention the relevance of HSAM (Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory) to the topic of clairvoyance. The first topic is quite relevant to the second. Cases of  HSAM (Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory) are cases of rare humans with the most astonishing ability to recall details of almost every day of their adult life. Evidence for such cases is documented in my posts here. From HSAM subjects such as Jill Price, we know that small numbers of humans have memory powers very dramatically beyond those possessed by the average human. Given such a HSAM reality (not disputed by scientists), it seems all the more reasonable to believe that some humans have powers of clairvoyance beyond anything experienced by the great majority of humans -- particularly given that the evidence for clairvoyance is vastly deeper than the evidence for  HSAM (Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory). I can recall only one HSAM case from the nineteenth century (the very well-documented case of Daniel McCartney described here). But well-documented cases of clairvoyance from the 19th century are very many (and you can read about some of them in my series of posts here). 

Powers such as HSAM and clairvoyance are unthinkable if you are a brain, but powers we can believe in, because you are a soul, not a brain. We know various physical limits and physical shortfalls of all brains (limits which should actually prevent anyone from ever being able to instantly recall using a brain or instantly learn by means of a brain). We understand no physical limits of souls.