Biological Variations Can't Even Yield a Tenth of a Complex Survival-Improving Biological Innovation

It is amazing how little honest progress has been made in the thinking of scientists about evolution.  Since the time of Darwin in the 19th century, there has occurred basically no honest progress in the explanation that evolutionary biologists give to explain the more impressive wonders of biology. 

There did occur quite a lot of what can be called "dishonest progress" in the narrative of evolutionary biologists. The "dishonest progress" occurred  around the middle of the twentieth century by the creation of a phony story that each human has within each of his cells a DNA blueprint for how to build the human body.  Such a thing might have been called a recipe or a program or a specification for making the human body. The bogus story that started to be told around the year 1950 was that each human has in his DNA a specification for making the human body. This idea was linked in to evolution theory.  We were told that evolution occurs by the modification of such a DNA blueprint. So, according to this story, the reason why some chimp-like species changed gradually to become our species is that over many years there was a gradual change in DNA. 

The "DNA as body blueprint" story was all a big lie, one of the most appalling lies that human beings have ever told.  There never was the slightest evidence that DNA has a blueprint, a recipe, a program or a specification for making a human body.  All that ever was discovered in DNA was low-level chemical information, such as which amino acids are contained in particular protein molecules.  By now the contents of DNA have been very thoroughly analyzed by major multi-year projects such as the Human Genome Project, and no one ever found in DNA or its genes anything like a blueprint, a recipe, a program or a specification for making a human body or any of its organs or cells. The fact that DNA is not any blueprint, recipe or program for making a human body has been confessed by dozens of biology and chemistry authorities I quote at the end of my post here.  

The idea that human bodies get built by the reading of a DNA blueprint was always a very childish lie, for the simple reason that blueprints don't build things.  Things get built using blueprints only when intelligent agents use blueprints to get ideas about how to build things. Why did so many of the population buy the childish myth that human bodies arise from the reading of a DNA blueprint? Because nowadays scientists are the priests of our culture, and people will believe the most childish myths when such stories are told by scientists. 

Excluding the lie that the bodies of organisms arise from the reading of DNA blueprints, a narrative that can be called "dishonest progress," there has been no appreciable honest progress in the story that biologists tell when trying to explain how evolution could produce the wonders of biology.  I could insert here quotes from the writings of many biologists attempting to explain how evolution could have produced the wonders of biology, quotes in which they are attempting to use explanations that are basically the same as Charles Darwin offered in 1859.  Human knowledge of the facts of biology has made the most dramatic leaps forward since 1859, but biologists are still using an 1859 explanation for how we got here.  It's kind of like the situation that would exist if you went into a modern hospital feeling very sick, and the doctors said, "You have too much blood -- we will get leeches to suck out some of your blood," as doctors might have done hundreds of years ago. 

The original Darwinian explanation of evolution relies very much on a vague use of the word "variations." The explanation goes like this:

"(1) When new members of a species are born, there are variations, with some members being different. 

(2) If a member of a species is born with a useful variation that increases his chance of survival and reproduction, that member will be more likely to survive and reproduce.

(3) Therefore useful variations will tend to be preserved, and a species may gradually accumulate useful variations that gradually occurred over many years. 

(4) By the accumulation of such variations, nature produces new species that have new features and nature produces new wonders of biology such as new types of organs and new types of appendages."

There are certain key features that we almost always find in these types of explanations:

(1) Almost always the person giving the explanation fails to describe the enormous organization and functional complexity of organisms.  We will not be told the all-important truth that substantive innovation in biological organisms requires new types of very complex inventions which typically require a special arrangement of very many parts. 

(2)  Almost always the person giving the explanation fails to speak precisely about biological variations, and uses that term in the wooliest and vaguest way. 

Let us take a precise look at biological variations. The idea can be best understand using the modern mathematical idea of a bell-shaped curve. A bell-shaped curve (also called a normal distribution) is a curve plotting variations from an average.  Below is a graph roughly representing variations in human male height.

You could create similar graphs for various human attributes: weight, speed, intelligence, vision ability and so forth. When a new member of a species is born, it may have some particular attribute that is somewhere on such a bell-shaped curve.  Such things can be called biological variations. 

Do such variations help to explain the appearance of new wonders in biology? No, they don't. The reason is that new wonders of biology require complex biological innovations, or what can be called complex biological inventions.  Complex biological inventions require very special new arrangements of very many parts, to achieve some particular end. Such things cannot be yielded by mere biological variations. 

Let us look at some of the types of biological inventions that have appeared in the history of our planet:

(1) One major type of biological invention is a new type of protein molecule. Within the human body are more than 20,000 different types of protein molecules, each a separate type of very complex invention requiring a special new arrangement of thousands of atoms. 

(2) Another major type of biological invention are protein complexes which may consist of quite a few different types of protein molecules arranged in a special way to achieve some biological end. Many of these protein complexes are so complex and machine-like that nowadays the term "molecular machines" is being widely used for them.

(3) Another major type of biological invention is a new type of organelle.  Organelles are the major functional components of cells 

(4) Another major type of biological invention is a new type of cell. The human body has more than 200 types of cells, each an extremely complex type of biological invention. Cells are so complex that they are often compared to factories. 

(5) Another major type of biological invention is an anatomic innovation, such as a new type of organ or a new type of functional appendage. 

Such complex biological innovations would be necessary for any major type of evolution. But can biological variations in one generation explain such complex biological inventions? Not at all. You never get a new type of complex biological invention from random variations in a single generation.  Complex biological inventions require very special arrangements of thousands of atoms, and such things do not occur from random variations, just as ink splashes never produce functional paragraphs or even functional sentences. 

So, for example, let us imagine that there is a species that does not have a particular type of functional protein molecule that the world has never seen. It is inconceivable that by some random variation in one organism of that species there would occur the first appearance of such a protein molecule.  Such a thing would have an improbability as great as the improbability of an ink splash producing a well-written grammatical and functional paragraph of text. 

Similarly, since cells involve organizations of matter that involve special arrangements of enormously more atoms than are required to make proteins, it is inconceivable that some mere random biological variation would create a new type of cell.  If the improbability of a new type of functional protein arising from some random variation is like the improbability of a functional well-written paragraph arising from an ink splash, the improbability of a new type of cell arising from a random variation is like the improbability of an ink splash producing a long well-written essay of many pages. 

But could we imagine a smaller result from random biological variations -- something such as perhaps a tenth of a complex biological innovation? Even this idea becomes unbelievable when we consider the complexity of complex biological innovations. Complex biological innovations that add to the survival value of an organism require a huge number of changes that must be coordinated. Consider, for example, the addition of a useful new limb or appendage on an organism, such as an arm, a leg or a wing. That requires very many bone changes and muscle changes and very many changes on the level of very complex biochemistry such as proteins, protein complexes, organelles and cells. Getting even a tenth of what is needed for a complex biological innovation is something that would never occur from mere random variations. That would be as improbable as an ink splash producing a tenth of a book or a tenth of a well-written essay of many paragraphs.

And if such a tenth of a complex biological innovation were to somehow be produced by some miracle of chance, as a random change in an individual organism of a species, no improvement in reproduction or survival would occur.  So the tenth-of-a-biological-invention would never tend to spread throughout the population of the species. 

The chart below helps to clarify the situation. If a random variation were to produce a tenth of a complex biological innovation, that would be equivalent to merely getting one tenth of the red line at bottom.  Being very far from meeting the functional threshold (the minimum number of parts and coordination of those parts needed for a survival benefit), no benefit would be produced. So the tenth-of-a-biological-innovation would not tend to spread from the organism where it occurred to a significant fraction of the population. 

Complex biological innovations that improve survival of an organism require many hundreds or thousands of changes in genes, proteins, and cells, changes that must be coordinated for a benefit to result. Generically, random biological variations are useless in explaining the origin of such innovations. 

Part of the reason why biological variations in one generation cannot even yield a tenth of a complex survival-improving biological innovation is because of the gigantic amount of interdependence within the bodies of organisms.  In 99% of cases, the first-time origination of a new type of protein will do nothing by itself to improve survival in an organism. In 99% of cases a new type of cell will do nothing by itself to improve survival in an organism.  Survival-improving biological innovations almost always require a coordination of innovations in multiple places. The diagram below illustrates the point. 

The diagram below illustrates the same point. A biological variation might produce a fraction of one of the components in such a system (represented below by a single circle), but that would not produce by itself a survival improvement. What is needed is a whole system filled with interdependent components working together. 

So how is it that so many were fooled into believing that the origin of complex new survival-improving biological innovations could be explained by random variations and random mutations? The answer is that people were fooled because they allowed writers to get away with using "conceal the complexity" kind of language. Instead of being described as extremely complex innovations requiring a very special organization of many hundreds or thousands of parts,  writers described new features in organisms as mere "variations."  Those who were fooled by these accounts failed to "throw a flag" on such writers by pointing out their failure to accurately describe the vast levels of organizational and functional complexity and component interdependence in biological organisms.  

Recently some article appeared in some scientific magazine trying to sell the silly doctrine of panpsychism, the idea that all matter is conscious. It seems that quite a few "mainstream thinkers" in the scientific community posted bitter comments denouncing the article. There is a rich irony in that, because the tricks of language involved in arguing for panpsychism are very similar to the tricks of language involved in arguing for the Darwinism that is so beloved by "mainstream thinkers" in the scientific community. 

Arguments for panpsychism almost always sound the same, as if every writer was copying the original argument, making only minor variations. A typical argument for panpsychism will start out by presenting a ridiculously diminutive description of the human mind and human mental experiences, which will be described as merely "consciousness." It will be said that humans have a "property" of being conscious, something that neuroscience fails to explain. It will then be argued that this "property" of consciousness is a property of all matter, just as things such as height, width, depth, volume and mass are properties of matter.       

Such argumentation involves the most grotesque oversimplification and the most glaring diminutive misrepresentation, a kind of shadow-speaking in which realities of oceanic depth are described as if they were mere shadows of themselves, something as bad as describing a huge library as "some paper with ink marks" and as bad as describing World War II as "some noise that went on."  Human minds and human mental experiences are a reality of oceanic depth, something almost infinitely more rich and complicated than mere "consciousness."  Once we properly describe the human mind and human mental experiences, we can see how pathetic and ridiculous is the idea that we can explain the human mind by describing it as a mere "property."  The explanatory shortfall of today's neuroscientists is not merely that they have failed to credibly explain some mere fact of humans being conscious.  Their explanatory shortfall is a million times larger, being that they have failed to credibly explain a hundred undisputed aspects and capabilities of the human mind (such as memory creation, memory recall, life-long memory preservation, insight, spirituality, imagination, self-hood and thinking), as well as countless other disputed but well-documented aspects and capabilities of the human mind (such as ESP and out-of-body experiences), none of which are credibly explicable as being the result of brain activity. 

Just as arguments for panpsychism involve the most grotesque oversimplification and the most glaring diminutive misrepresentation, a kind of shadow-speaking in which realities are described as if they are mere shadows of themselves, the standard explanation of Darwinism requires a kind of shadow-speaking that relies on very misleading misrepresentations in which things are described as if they are a trillion times simpler than they are. Trying to explain the most impressive biological innovations that typically involve as many well-arranged parts as found in an automobile engine, the Darwinist refers to such things as mere "biological variations." We seem to never get in such expositions of Darwinist theory an accurate description of the realities of biological organization and biological complexity.  We are never told about how complex biological innovations require many hundreds or many thousands of well-arranged parts.  Just as the panpsychist uses the crudest, laziest "crayon sketch" in describing human minds, the Darwinist uses the crudest, laziest "crayon sketch" in describing biological innovations, utterly failing to realistically describe the vast amount of organization, coordination and fine-tuning needed to produce such marvels of innovation. 

They Spent Little Time on Epstein's Island, But Wasted Decades on Guth's "Cosmic Inflation" Dead End

There is a recent article in the news about how some leading scientists made a visit to Jeffrey Epstein's notorious pedophilia island where underage children were for years apparently raped and sexually trafficked. An NPR article tells us about a 2006 scientific conference funded by Jeffrey Epstein, who loved to mingle with scientists. It was a week-long conference called "Confronting Gravity." It was held in the Virgin Islands, and according to the article it was attended by "20 of the world's top physicists, including three Nobel laureates and three more who would later receive the prestigious prize." We read that the conference included a short trip to Epstein's notorious island:

"Along with the submarine, the scientists took a short boat ride for a barbecue picnic on Epstein's 70-acre island. Epstein had purchased Little St. James, or 'Little St. Jeff's' as he liked to call it, in 1998. It is a place that prosecutors say was used by Epstein to sexually abuse women and girls. But the physicists who visited the island say they saw none of that during their short stay.

The boat dropped off the scientists at the beach. Peebles said he remembers being met at the island by someone he described as 'a guide,' who cautioned the physicists, 'Don't go wandering off into the island.'

The group had its picnic near the Caribbean Sea. Guth said some scientists went inside Epstein's house just to use the bathroom."

The reference to Guth is a reference to  MIT physicist Alan Guth. In the article we see a big picture of him.  Some of my more suspicious readers may scoff at Guth's claim that the scientists only went to Jeffrey Epstein's house  to use his bathroom. 

I don't know what happened during the visit of these scientists to Jeffrey Epstein's house on Jeffrey Epstein's island that is now very widely regarded as being a site of sex trafficking and pedophile child abuse. But I do know that the NPR article is stating a half-truth when it describes Guth as "the physicist who first proposed the theory of cosmic inflation, a concept that has become a pillar of modern cosmology." Guth did first propose the theory of cosmic inflation. But that theory is not at all a pillar of modern cosmology. It is instead a dead-end never-well-supported theory that for 46 years has caused cosmologists to waste endless man-years of time. 

Around about 1978, cosmologists (the scientists who study the universe as a whole) were puzzled by a problem of fine-tuning. They had figured out that the expansion rate of the very early universe (at the time of the Big Bang) seems to have been incredibly fine-tuned, apparently to about one part in ten to the fiftieth power. This dilemma was known as the flatness problem. It seems that if the universe's initial expansion rate had differed by less than 1 part in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, there would not have arisen a habitable universe with galaxies and stars. 

Around 1980 Alan Guth (an MIT professor) proposed a way to solve the flatness problem. Guth proposed that for a tiny fraction of its first second (for less than a trillionth of a trillionth of a second), the universe expanded at an exponential rate. The universe is not expanding at any such rate, but Guth proposed that after a very brief instant of exponential expansion, the universe switched back to the normal, linear expansion that it now has. This was the cosmic inflation theory (not to be confused with the more general Big Bang theory), a theory which has since taken on hundreds of different forms.  

The theory was devised to get rid of some fine-tuning, but it turned out that the theory required fine-tuning of its own in multiple places. So we had a kind of "rob Peter to pay Paul" situation in which it was unclear that the need for fine-tuning had been reduced. A scientific paper says this: "It actually requires much more fine-tuning for the Universe to have inflated than for it to have been placed in some low-entropy initial state (Carroll & Chen 2004)." The paper also refers to "the highly fine-tuned initial conditions required for inflation to work."

 For many decades cosmologists have been lost in a strange little world of fantasy whenever they dealt with this cosmic inflation theory. As different versions of the theory have kept failing, cosmologists have kept producing new versions of the theory; and by now there are hundreds of versions of it, making predictions all over the map.  All attempts to provide empirical support for cosmic inflation theory have failed.  

The main prediction of cosmic inflation theories have been that there would be observed something called primordial gravitational waves, gravitational waves coming from the very early history of the universe, possibly something that would have a feature called "b-modes." Although non-primordial gravitational waves have been detected (arising from times when the universe was already billions of years old), nothing has come from decades of searches for primordial gravitational waves, which have gone on for years with ever-more-fancy and ever-more-expensive equipment.  A 2019 article states, "Models such as natural and quadratic inflation that were popular several years ago no longer seem tenable, says theorist Marc Kamionkowski of Johns Hopkins University."  A late 2021 article (based on this paper) is entitled "Primordial Gravitational Waves Continue to Elude Astronomers." But rather than discarding a theoretical approach that isn't working, our  cosmologists keep tying themselves into knots by spinning out more and more speculative ornate versions of the cosmic inflation theory (which already has many hundreds of different versions).  This has all been a giant waste of time and money, without any real success. 

It is utterly false that Guth's cosmic inflation theory is a pillar of modern cosmology. Cosmology is the study of the origin of the universe and the large-scale structure of the universe. That study can get along just fine without Guth's utterly unnecessary theory about exponential expansion occurring during the first second of the universe's history. The Big Bang theory does not need the theory of cosmic inflation, which is an utterly superfluous addition to that theory. 

Within the study of cosmology, cosmic inflation theory has long been a money-draining "white elephant," a scheme allowing cosmologists to keep draining many millions of research dollars without ever producing any compelling observational results. The advocates of cosmic inflation theory have tried to justify their money-wasting and time-wasting activities by appealing to a bandwagon effect.  Such people keep telling us that pretty much all the cosmologists agree about the truth of cosmic inflation theory.  This is not true at all. In fact, according to a poll of cosmologists taken in 2024, not even half of cosmologists believe in the cosmic inflation theory. 

In the scientific paper, on page 9 we have the result of a 2024 poll of cosmologists attending a scientific conference. Here is the result of a question that does the equivalent of asking cosmologists: what percent of you believe in the cosmic inflation theory? The result is that only 44% of cosmologists endorse the theory. 

Page 8 of the paper (discussing the result above) says that the cosmic inflation theory "does not command majority support." We have no claim in the paper that this was a secret ballot survey. A secret ballot poll might have shown even smaller support. 

For 40 years cosmic inflation theorists have been making groundless boasts that almost all cosmologists believe in the cosmic inflation theory. An example is page 3 of the paper here, in which a zealous proponent of the theory assures us that a "vast majority" of cosmologists endorse such a theory, without offering any evidence to back up such a claim. The poll above indicates that not even a majority of cosmologists endorse such a theory. Never trust any proponent of a theory who claims that the theory is supported by the great majority of specialists in some scientific field, unless such a claim is backed up by a well-designed secret ballot poll of scientists, a poll substantiating such a claim.  Scientists routinely make groundless or unfounded assertions claiming or insinuating that some theory cherished by them is supported by an overwhelming majority of people in their field.  

The lesson of the cosmic inflation theory misadventure is exactly the same as the lesson of the supersymmetry misadventure.  A search on the Cornell Physics Preprint Server for physics papers with "inflation" in the title produced 7457 results, almost all papers on the cosmic inflation theory.  A search on the Cornell Physics Preprint Server for physics papers with "supersymmetry" in the title produced 4601 results.  Both the cosmic inflation theory and the supersymmetry theory involved elaborate speculative attempts to "sweep under the rug" dramatic cases of very precise fine-tuning that had been discovered in nature. All of these papers were wastes of time and exercises in futility. Neither of these theories was ever supported by observational evidence, although endless millions were spent trying to get evidence for both of them. 

The cosmic inflation theory misadventure and the supersymmetry misadventure both teach the same lesson: when nature presents some very dramatic case of fine-tuning, do not waste huge amounts of time trying to devise elaborate theories designed to explain away such fine-tuning, and trying to sweep such fine-tuning under the rug; but instead accept such examples of cosmic fine-tuning, look for other examples of fine-tuning both in the universe and in biology, and ponder the implications of such fine-tuning that can be found so very abundantly throughout nature. The point I discuss here is discussed more fully in my post here, which explains the type of fine-tuning that supersymmetry attempted to sweep under the rug and explain away. 

A futile maneuver

Gerard Croiset's Clairvoyance Was Well Documented in 1960's Newspaper Articles

 At the link here you can read a very long excerpt from a recent book by Tricia J. Robertson, an excerpt documenting the case of Dutch clairvoyant Gerard Croiset. We read this:

"Croiset was sometimes called upon by the Dutch police to determine the whereabouts of a missing person whether they were presumed alive or dead, or to gain information about them. Croiset was also utilised by the Dutch police over many years to solve cases of theft and murder by using his amazing abilities."

We read that Croiset was a Dutch grocer who never charged money for his services. In the excerpt from Robertson's book, we read of what sounds like a case of the most astonishing clairvoyance from Croiset. It is a 1959 case involving a professor with a missing daughter. We are told that the professor arranged a telephone conversation with Croiset, who provided details that proved to be exactly correct. 

Robertson's account sounds very convincing, but there are a couple of problems with the account as she has written it. First, Robertson fails to give us the name of the professor with the missing daughter (the professor's name was Walter Sandelius). Second, she fails to give links to any source from around 1959 reporting the account she has given. It is just such things that help to build high confidence in accounts of the paranormal. 

I cannot emphasize too strongly how important it is to always track down the earliest versions of any report of the paranormal, and to look for things such as exact dates, the exact names of the witnesses, the exact source that made the earliest report, and so forth.  For example, a dated newspaper account giving exact names, dates and quotes from witnesses has a much higher value as evidence than some book written 60 years later saying that such and such happened 60 years ago to some person, without naming who the person was.  

Luckily there is a way to overcome the problems in Robertson's narrative. Using the Chronicling America web site that allows you to search old newspaper accounts, we can search for the name of Gerard Croiset. Using that technique, I found contemporary newspaper articles referring to the exact case Robertson discusses. 

The first such article I found was a February 26, 1961 article in the Evening Star. My first job ever was delivering this newspaper when I was a boy, and I know that around 1961 the Evening Star was one of the two most respected newspapers in Washington, D.C., the other being the Washington Post. Below is the 1961 newspaper article that appeared on this case involving Gerard Croiset, an article you can read using the link here:

The account is found in the bottom corner of the page, and it carries over to the next page, shown below, which you can read using this link:

Here is the part of the article that matches Robertson's account. The reporter Jack Harrison Pollack says he double-checked the account. 

"Croiset is also consulted in many missing-person

cases some of them thousands of miles from

Utrecht. One I was able to double-check in the U.S.

On October 18, 1959, Carol, the 24-year-old

daughter of Dr. Walter Sandelius, a political-science

professor at the University of Kansas, disappeared

from a hospital in Topeka where she had been a

patient. Police were unable to find her.

'After a month and a half I was ready to try

anything,' recalls Sandelius, a former Rhodes

scholar. 'In the course of my reading I had learned

about Tenhaeff. On December 11, I phoned him in

Utrecht, and he set up a three-way conversation

with Croiset.'

Croiset first asked, 'Is there a river near the

hospital where your daughter had been?'

'Yes,' answered her father, 'the Kansas River

runs close by.'

'I see her running over a large lawn and then

crossing a viaduct,' said Croiset. 'She’s now at a 

place where there are shops and a large body of

water with many small boats. She was driven there

in a truck and a big, red car.'

'Is she still alive?' asked her father anxiously.

'I’m not sure,' Croiset answered, 'but you’ll

hear something definite in six days.'

Six days later, as he was coming downstairs in

the morning to place another call to Dr. Tenhaeff

and Croiset, Sandelins was astonished to find his

daughter sitting on the sofa!

He told me recently that his daughter’s story

corroborated Croiset’s amazing vision: She had left

the hospital, running across the front lawn, and had

crossed the river at a viaduct. Making her way to

a highway, she hitched a ride with two soldiers from

the Topeka Air Base. Later she was picked up by an

elderly couple in a truck. At the time her father was

speaking to Croiset, she was at a carnival in Corpus

Christi, Texas, bordering on the Gulf of Mexico

where there are many speedboats.

“I had long suspected there was something to

extrasensory perception,'  says Dr. Sandelins.

'But now I'm sure of it.' "

So now the two problems with Robertson's account are resolved. We have the name of the professor with the missing daughter (Walter Sandelius). And we have an account written about a year after the described events, one in which the Evening Star reporter says that he double-checked (presumably by interviewing Sandelius, who he quotes). As evidence, this is not as good as a report giving all of the relevant details, which was written very soon after the events described (such as only a few days later). But it is something much better as evidence than Robertson's account the way she wrote that account. 

In the same newspaper account above we have this astonishing account regarding Croiset's clarivoyance:

"Dr. Tenhaeff in 1947 devised what he calls the

'chair experiment' for Croiset. The test has been
successfully conducted over 350 times by Dr. Tenhaeff 

and scientists in other European countries
under rigid controls. Tenhaeff, or his assistant Nicky Louwerens, select at random a chair number from a seating plan for
a meeting a week to ten days away. Croiset is told
the number. Then he describes the person who
will sit in the chair, in some cases before the person
himself even decides to attend the meeting!

Once Tenhaeff picked Chair 18 for a meeting in
Rotterdam. Croiset said, 'I see nothing.' Tenhaeff
was perplexed. Until then, Croiset had achieved
near-perfect results. Tenhaeff tried another, Chair
3. Croiset smiled: 'This is the wife of a neurologist.
Recently her face was scarred in an auto accident
in Italy.' 

On the night of the meeting it snowed in Rotterdam. Of 30 who were to be there, one person couldn’t attend. The empty chair? Number 18.

In Chair 3 sat the lady who had a scar on her face.
'Why, yes,' she said. 'I was in an accident in
Italy two months ago. But how did you know?' "

The Evening Star reporter (Jack Harrison Pollack) says he did his due diligence in checking out the reality of Croiset's clairvoyance. He mentions spending six weeks in Croiset's home city of Utrecht in the Netherlands. The reporter states this:

"I was able to check the documents in case after case transcripts, dated and signed by witnesses, letters and statements from police. All attest to Croiset’s accurate vision."

Gerard Croiset

At the beginning of the same February 26, 1961 Evening Star news story, we have another account of Croiset's clairvoyance, which you can see using the link here (or the first image above).  We read this account (in which the "paragnost" is used to mean a clairvoyant):

"An early success is this case I checked in the Parapsychology Institute and Dutch police files.On December 5, 1946, a pretty, blond, 21-year-old girl was returning home at 5:45 p.m. along a quiet country road near Wierden, Holland. Suddenly, a man leaped out from behind a stone storehouse, and assaulted her, hitting her on the neck and arms with a hammer. Before he disappeared into the dark, she was able to wrench the hammer away from him.

Police contacted Dr. Tenhaeff, who came to the
station, bringing Gerard Croiset, one of his team of
paragnosts. Because the girl was in the hospital,
Croiset didn’t see her. Instead he picked up the
hammer, his large hand squeezing the handle as
police watched skeptically. Croiset concentrated.

'He is tall and dark, about 30 years old, and has
a somewhat deformed left ear,' said the paragnost.
'But this hammer doesn’t belong to him. Its owner
was a man of about 55 whom the criminal visits
often at a small white cottage near here. It is
one of a group of three cottages, alt the same.' 

The deformed left ear was a key clue. Several
months later the police picked up a tall, dark 29-
year-old man on another morals charge. His badly

scarred and swollen left ear led to questioning about
the first attack. Finally, he admitted assaulting the
girl with the hammer. He said he had borrowed it
from a friend, who, the police discovered, lived in a
white cottage on the edge of town, with two others
just like it on either side."

Notice the exact match of the details. Croiset had not merely correctly identified the assailant as a man of about 30 with a deformed left ear. Croiset had also correctly stated that the man had got the hammer from a man living in a white cottage that was the second of a group of three white cottages close to each other. 

We read this in the article: 

"Dr. Tenhaeff's files bulge with such cases. Each
is documented with a recording or stenographic
transcript of the prediction, and with statements
confirming its accuracy from witnesses and police.

The Evening Star newspaper article quoted above was Part 2 of a two-part series by the same author. You can read Part 1 of the series using the link here, which takes you the story the Evening Star published on February 19, 1961. 

On the first of these two pages, the page here, the reporter (Jack Harrison Pollack) tells an astonishing story. He says he was in the living room of Gerard Croiset,  with Dr. W. H. C. Tenhaeff, when a call came from 50 miles away, with someone in Eindhoven reporting that a 4-year-old child had been missing for 24 hours. Croiset said "in about three days the child's body will be found in the canal close to the bridge." The reporter left feeling skeptical. But he says this:

"Three days later, I checked up.  The police of Eindhoven had just found the child’s body next to one of the piers of the bridge over the canal -- exactly as Croiset had predicted." 

The reporter says that at the Parapsychology Institute, "thousands of cases of ESP have been uncovered and documented." At the page here we read these claims:

The Confessions of Scientists Burst Their Boasts

Scientists are always claiming to understand big important things that they do not actually understand, things such as the origin of the human race and how there arises human minds. Over and over again we read statements claiming "scientists know" some grand thing, and the statements are very often profoundly misleading. 

One way to get a good understanding of how relatively little scientists know is to study confession statements by scientists in which they state things inconsistent with their grand boasts of knowledge. Often the same scientist who makes in one place some grand boast of scientists understanding things will in some other place make a confession inconsistent with such a claim.  In other cases, knowledge boasts made by one scientist will be contradicted by statements of other scientists in the same field. 

My very long post "Candid Confessions of the Scientists" (which you can read here) is probably the most extensive collection anywhere of such scientist confessions.  I have been updating the post after its publication date. I try to add to the post whenever I read a good confession of knowledge limits by a scientist. 

Below are some recent additions to the post. I'll start with some quotes using the phrase "in its infancy." Whenever scientists confess that something is "in its infancy," they are effectively admitting they do not have good knowledge about such a topic.

• "Despite recent advancements in identifying engram cells, our understanding of their regulatory and functional mechanisms remains in its infancy." -- Scientists claiming erroneously in 2024 that there have been recent advancements in identifying engram cells, but confessing there is no understanding of how they work (link).
• "Study of the genetics of human memory is in its infancy though many genes have been investigated for their association to memory in humans and non-human animals."  -- Scientists in 2022 (link).
• "The neurobiology of memory is still in its infancy." -- Scientist in 2020 (link). 
• "The investigation of the neuroanatomical bases of semantic memory is in its infancy." -- 3 scientists, 2007 (link). 
• "Currently, our knowledge pertaining to the neural construct of intelligence and memory is in its infancy." -- Scientists, 2011 (link). 
• "Our understanding of how organelles physically interact and use cellular signaling systems to coordinate functional networks between each other is still in its infancy."  -- Two biologists (link).
• "As Mark Twain is reported to have said: 'It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't true.'  In contemporary neuroscience, the list of assumptions that just ain't true is long indeed, so patience is required as I expose each in turn." -- Henry Vin, neuroscientist and psychologist, "The Crisis in Neuroscience" (link)

By making such confessions, scientists are admitting that they do not actually understand how a brain could store or retrieve memories. The reason for such ignorance (despite billions of dollars on funding to try to answer such questions) is almost certainly that the brain does not actually store memories and is not the source of the human mind.  Very much brain tissue has been microscopically examined at the highest resolution, and such microscopic examination has never found any trace of learned information. As discussed here, there is no plausible explanation of how a brain could store a memory for decades; and I discuss here how the brain is lacking in anything that could explain the wonder of instant human relevant recall when someone is asked a question (as brains lack indexes, addresses and sorting, the three things that allow quick recall using devices humans make). 

In the paper here, a neuroscientist interviewed by the paper author makes this anonymous confession: "We still don't understand how molecules contribute to consciousness or the mind.”

Below is a juicy addition to the "Candid Confessions" post, in which a biologist specializing in the origin of multicellularity confesses that scientists do not understand how multicellular organisms arose:

"Big picture, we want to understand how initially dumb clumps of cells, cells that are one or two mutations away from being single-celled, don’t really know that they’re organisms — they don’t have any adaptations to being multicellular, they’re just a dumb clump — how those dumb clumps of cells can evolve into increasingly complex multicellular organisms, with new morphologies, with cell-level integration, division of labor, and differentiation amongst the cells. Just like, we want to watch that process of how do these simple groups become complex. And this is, like, one of the biggest knowledge gaps in evolutionary biology. I mean, in my opinion.....We don’t really know the process through which simple groups evolve into increasingly complex organisms."

-- Biologist Will Ratcliff (link). 

The addition below to the "Candid Confessions" post gives us some scientists confessing their utter inability to solve the cosmological constant problem. This is the problem that according to the predictions of quantum mechanics, empty space should be more than 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times denser than steel, something that would make the universe utterly uninhabitable. The problem is discussed in my widely read post "' Vacuum Catastrophe'   Should Be Called the Vacuum Miracle," which you can read here. The confession of the scientists is below, and is stated in dense jargon:

"There are no robust predictions for the CC [cosmological constant] value within the standard QFT [Quantum Field Theory] paradigm that account for all existing vacuum contributions from quantum field dynamics (i.e. condensates) at various scales – ranging from the quantum qravity scale, MPl ' 1.2 · 1019 GeV, to the quantum chromodynamics (QCD) confinement scale, MQCD ' 0.1 GeV. The well-studied quark-gluon and Higgs condensates alone (responsible for chiral and gauge symmetry-breaking in the SM respectively) have contributions to the ground state energy of the Universe that far exceed the observed absolute CC value today [5]. Regardless of how the observed CC is explained, these huge quantum vacuum contributions must be eliminated [to explain a habitable universe such as ours]. Any consistent solution of this problem, known as the 'vacuum catastrophe', must rely on a compensation of short-distance vacuum fluctuations by the ground state density of the Universe to many tens of decimal digits. A dynamical mechanism for such gross cancellations (without a major finetuning) is not known, and should be regarded as a new physical phenomenon anyway.....There is still no real consensus in the community on what the resolution to the CC [cosmological constant]  problem is or should be. This is quite an unusual situation in physics, where traditionally there has tended to be a consensus on at least a general direction to look in. " --  A 2016 confession by scientists (link, p. 21).  The reference to "many tens of decimal places" refers to a fine-tuning such as a coincidental perfect balance to 1 part in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

Below are some other recent additions to the "Candid Confessions of the Scientists" post:

• "But when it comes to our actual feelings, our thought, our emotions, our consciousness, we really don't have a good answer as to how the brain helps us to have those different experiences." -- Andrew Newberg, neuroscientist, Ancient Aliens, Episode 16 of Season 14, 6:52 mark. 
• "Dr Gregory Jefferis, of the Medical Research Council's Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge told BBC News that currently we have no idea how the network of brain cells in each of our heads enables us to interact with each other and the world around us."  -- BBC news article (link). 
• "It is now evident that genes play only a minor role in evolution....We now know that the gene-centered Modern Synthesis was quite wrong (see especially Shapiro 2011, 2022; Noble 2012, 2013; Noble and Noble 2023; Corning 2018, 2020). Over the past few decades there has been a growing body of contradictory evidence."  -- Scientist Peter A. Corning, "Cooperative genes in smart systems: Toward an inclusive new synthesis in evolution" (link). 
• "We have addressed a large body of evidence related to transitions (micro- and macro-) in proteins that have a pre-existing globular 3D-structure (and function), but how does structure and function evolve in de novo [new] proteins? ...Overall, the evolution of MIPSs, the recruitment of first enzymes, and de novo emergence of proteins are aspects where our knowledge is still at infancy." -- Scientists confessing in 2022 that we don't know how new proteins originate (link). 
• "How did science become so unscientific? To make a long story short, we have been sold a triple pseudo-intellectual flimflam for decades: if you want to be a respectable homo academicus, then you must embrace the unholy trinity of mechanistic reductive materialism, plus skepticism in its most dogmatic declination, and finally secularism in the mode of viciously naive atheism. In a word, scientism has been institutionalized in the name of science. But, in the end, scientism is more dangerous than pseudoscience because it is an inside job. Error, bias, and hype are minor sins compared to scientific hubris....Future scientists are the most indoctrinated of all, since most check-points in the stairway to academic heaven –from undergraduate students to postdoctoral researchers to tenured professors– select for such failings and implant us with an operating system stuck in our 19th century understanding of the world. The problem is deep, as it is entrenched in the triangular industrial complexes of academia, journalism, and education. In sum, scientistic televangelism is alienating genuine truth-seekers, eroding public trust in science, and indoctrinating young minds. Let us reject such terms of disservice and reverse the dead-ending of science from within and without. The truth is that true experts don’t know 'the truth.'  Nobody really knows what is going on. We live in a wild, weird, wonderful world....Preaching dogma in the name of science is a dagger at the heart of society."  -- Àlex Gómez-Marín, physicist and neuroscientist (link). 
• "It’s maddening when you see people cheat. And even if it involves grant money from the NIH, there’s very little punishment. Even with people who have been caught cheating, the punishment is super light. You are not eligible to apply for new grants for the next year or sometimes three years. It’s very rare that people lose jobs over it.” -- Scientist Elizabeth Bik (link).
• "Little is known on how the complexity of multicellular organisms evolved by elaborating developmental programs and inventing new cell types." -- Two scientists, 2021 (link). 
• "While a lot of studies have focused on memory processes such as memory consolidation and retrieval, very little is known about memory storage" -- scientific paper (link).
• "Little is known on how the complexity of multicellular organisms evolved by elaborating developmental programs and inventing new cell types." -- Two scientists, 2021 (link). 
• "The most fascinating thing about eukaryotes is that we still don’t understand how they came about." -- Evolutionary biologist Toni Gabaldon, referring to the type of cells found in human bodies (link). 
• "Cell biology is a mystery for many reasons one
  of which is the lack of basic knowledge. This may
  be the fault of scientists or simply a failure in basic
  information at the level of common contemporary
  knowledge. The well known sentence of Socrates:
  'I know that I know nothing' is as true in cell
  biology as in other scientific fields. This sentence
  was modified by Lloyd in 1986 who claimed: 'The
  closer we look, the less we see'. I would like to
  modify this sentence yet again as a cell biologist and
  microscopist: 'The closer we look, the less we know
  about.' ... Everyone involved in cell
  biology, is surprised how limited is our knowledge
  about the various cell compartments....It should now be mentioned that our knowledge even of basic cell organelles, including their various functions, is very limited....We know something about cell organelles, including various nuclear compartments, but most of their functions are waiting for further and better clarification....Depending on conditions, selected genes may be repressed or derepressed and activated giving to rise to the particular cell lineage with characteristic cell structures and functions. On the other hand, such transformations, including the homing of the transformed cells are also very mysterious although both these processes are empirically used in clinical medicine."  Karel Smetana, cell biologist, "To the Mystery of Cell Biology," (link). 
• "As for the explicit types of memory, the biological underpinning of this very long-lasting memory storage is not yet understood." -- Neuroscientist Cristina M. Alberini in a year 2025 paper (link). 
• "The distinguished Parisian Professor of Medicine, Rostan, gave at the time his corroborative testimony to the existence of this power in the article ' Magnetisme,' in the ' Dictionnaire de Medecine,'  wherein he remarked : 'There are few facts better demonstrated than clairvoyance' ....Innumerable instances are recorded of the possession of the faculty of clairvoyance by persons in the normal state, in sleep [hypnotism], and in some abnormal conditions of the system, " -- Edwin Lee, MD, "Animal Magnetism and Magnetic Lucid Somnambulism" page 103 and page 133.
• "It remains unclear where and how prior knowledge is represented in the brain." -- A large team of scientists, 2025 (link). 
• "How memory is stored in the brain is unknown." -- Research proposal abstract written by scientists, 2025 (link). 
• "The trends we expose forecast serious risks ahead for the scientific enterprise. Large groups of editors and authors appear to have cooperated to facilitate publishing fraud (Fig. 1). Networks of linked fraudulent articles suggest industrial scale of production (Fig. 2). Organizations selling contract cheating services anticipate and counter deindexing and other interventions by literature aggregators (Fig. 3). The literature in some fields may have already been irreparably damaged by fraud (Fig. 4). Finally, the scale of activity in the enterprise of scientific fraud already exceeds the scope of current punitive measures designed to prevent fraud (Fig. 5)." -- "The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly," a 2025 scientific paper by four scientists (link).

The "Candid Confessions of the Scientists" post has a new section dealing with galaxy formation and star formation. The newly added quotes are these:

• "Probably, a lot of people are impressed by these beautiful images that we get from Hubble Space Telescope, and they think that we must, by now, understand how galaxies work.  But the fact is that we don’t.  We don’t even understand how stars form.  There’s many different classes and theories of how stars form, and we don’t even know which class is right.  And if we don’t understand star formation and evolution, we can hardly understand how galaxies form."  -- Joel R. Primack, professor of physics and astrophysics (link).
• "It means we don’t understand, kind of fundamentally, how galaxy formation works.” -- Pieter von Dokkum, Yale astronomer (link). 
• "We don’t understand how a single star forms, yet we want to understand how 10 billion stars form." -- Cosmologist Carlos Frenk (link). 
• "We don't understand how stars form!" -- Matt Lehnert (link). 
• "We don't understand how supermassive black holes could have grown so huge in the relatively short time available since the universe existed." -- Günther Hasinger, science director at the European Space Agency, 2021 (link). 
• "There is much about the evolution of a typical galaxy we don’t understand, and the transition from their vibrant star-forming lives into quiescence is one of the least understood periods.” -- astronomer J. D. Smith (link). 
• "I got hooked on trying to figure things out; the fact that we don't understand how stars form is pretty mind-boggling considering we want to study things like galaxies."  -- Shari Breen, described as "an expert on star formation"  (link, page 24). 

I added these quotes discussing the low sensitivity of the brain to tissue removal, tissue loss or brain tumors (contrary to the dogma that the brain makes the mind):

• "Taken as a whole, the mean I.Q. of 95.55 for the 31 patients with lateralized frontal tumors suggests that neoplasms [tumors]  in either the right or left frontal lobe result in only slight impairment of intellectual functions as measured by the Wechsler Bellevue test." -- Aaron Smith (link). 
• "One more bizarre thing the researchers noticed was the bigger the lesions on the cortex, the better the mice performed. 'It was a strange result…' says Hong, who hesitates before adding: 'I wouldn't say that we're confident that if we [tested] a lot more animals we would see it. It was sort of a trend that we noticed. I guess the answer is, we don't know. Basically, it implied that the less the cortex is active, the better the animal is doing and the cortex was somehow interfering with the animal's ability to learn.' " -- Science article in Forbes magazine, quoting a scientist named Hong (link). 
• “O'Connor and colleagues reported that after diffuse brain injury, female rats performed better than males on the rotarod test of motor coordination and also incurred a slight advantage on the Barnes maze test of learning and memory.”  -- A paper by several scientists (link). 

Three of four quotes below are additions relating to the very low evidence of adaptive evolution in humans. Scientists claim that the human race arose through a process of so-called "natural selection." If that happened, you should be able to find a huge fingerprint of such "natural selection" by studying the human genome. No such thing can be found. Humans have about 20,000 genes. When scientists look for genes that show evidence of so-called "positive selection" in the human genome, they are only able to find a tiny number such as fewer than 10 or fewer than 20.  

• "There is little evidence of widespread adaptive evolution in our own species...Hominids appear to have undergone very little adaptive evolution." -- Biologist Adam Eyrie Walker, 2006, "The Genomic Rate of Adaptive Evolution.
• "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." -- A paper by scientists finding that only 1 gene in 500 showed signs of being promoted by so-called "natural selection" (link). 
• "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.” -- Who We Are and How We Got Here by David Reich, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, page 9.
• "The proportion of PSGs [positively selected genes]  in the genome is 233/13,888 = 1.7% for the chimp lineage, significantly greater than that (154/13,888 = 1.1%) for the human lineage (P < 10−4, χ2 test). Because 13,888 statistical tests were conducted for each lineage, it is necessary to control for multiple testing. Under Bonferroni correction, two human genes and 21 chimp genes remain statistically significant (see SI Table 8). ....In sharp contrast to common belief, there were more adaptive genetic changes during chimp evolution than during human evolution."  -- Paper by scientists finding good evidence for "positive selection" in only two out of roughly 20,000 genes (link).