Exhibit A Hinting That Evolutionary Biologists May Be Worshipful Devotees

At the Undark web site (www.undark.org) we sometimes get first-rate examples of science journalism. But a recent article at that site is just an insight as to how bad is the malfunction in a certain branch of academia. It is an article by an evolutionary biologist (C. Brandon Ogbunu), one entitled "What I Learned From Teaching Darwin." 

Throughout the article Ogbunu makes clear that he is a devotee of his 19th century overlord.  The impression of ardent devotion is created very quickly, as we see a photo of a set of six books on a shelf. Instead of being varied, diverse books that would give us broad knowledge, each one of the books on the shelf is "The Origin of Species" by Darwin. It's kind of like what we might expect to see when visiting a fundamentalist, who had a shelf containing nothing but copies of the Bible. 

A properly thinking biologist might write an essay with a title such as "What I Learned From Studying Organisms" or "What I Learned From Studying Cells" or "What I Learned From Studying Anatomy." But evolutionary biologists instead write articles with worshipful titles such as "What I Learned From Teaching Darwin." 

Ogbunu makes these very laughable speculations about what Darwin would say and do if he were living today:

"He would care about the misinformation crisis, climate science, and have opinions about how to live in a world being upended by artificial intelligence and threats to democracy....His computer desktop would have dozens of folders, some with machine-learning papers, others full of ornithology monographs. And he'd read them all."

This is hilarious. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are examples of engineering, being products of software engineering. Darwin had zero interest in engineering. His complete failure to consider matters of engineering are part of the reason he went so badly wrong in his attempt to explain the wonders of the biological world. What we see in the world of biology is endless examples of purposeful engineering. 

A very important principle is that accidents don't engineer things. But Darwin maintained that all of the stupendous wonders of the biological world were the result of accumulations of accidents (unguided random mutations). His deceptively titled book "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life" did not actually postulate a theory of selection, because "selection" means conscious choice, and Darwin did not postulate conscious choice as an explanation for the wonders of biology.  If Darwin had honestly titled his main work, he would have given it a title such as "On the Origin of Species by Means of Accident Accumulations." That would have correctly described his theory. "The Origin of Species" used the words "accumulation," "accumulate" or "accumulating" 35 times. 

The problem, of course, is that an accumulation of accidents cannot credibly explain stunning engineering results with a great coordinated wealth of fine-tuned interdependent components, such as we see so very abundantly in the world of living organisms. Darwin swept under the rug this problem by never paying any attention at all to the topic of engineering. So it is  absurd to suggest that Darwin would be interested in today's wonders of technological engineering. 

Ogbunu errs in his attempt to persuade us (in the quote above) that Darwin was an eager scholar of everything relevant to his claims. Darwin seemed to spend zero time studying probability mathematics (so relevant to the credibility of his claims). And he also seemed to pay zero attention to all of the very many reports of paranormal or supernatural  phenomena happening in England while he lived, reports also very relevant to the credibility of his claims. The British scientists of his time who paid attention to such reports included Alfred Russel Wallace and Sir William Crookes, both asserting the authenticity of some of these phenomena. 

Near the end of the article, Ogbunu says, "What I aspire to be, more than anything, is an intellectual child of Charles Darwin."  What an unhealthy-sounding statement that is. You can compare it to healthy-sounding statements a person might make, statements such as these: 

• "What I aspire to be, more than anything, is someone who correctly describes reality and someone who speaks the truth and advises wisely."
• "What I aspire to be, more than anything, is a good person who helps others." 
• "What I aspire to be, more than anything, is someone who teaches the facts of nature correctly, and someone who informs people about the most important facts scientists have learned." 

Guys like Ogbunu think they are walking in the path of Darwin, but they are not really doing that. Darwin was no parroting devotee of any authority. Darwin made conclusions based solely on what he had learned about nature and his own analysis and reasoning, instead of appealing to the authority of any previous thinker.  Those who keep  parroting Darwin's outdated conclusions are not following such a path of independent analysis of nature, but are instead following the "devotion to an old authority" path that is antithetical to the true spirit of science. 

Well-functioning science ends whenever fervent Darwinism begins. 

Trump's "Sleeping" During Official Events May Be Cardiogenic Syncope Involving Cerebral Hypoperfusion

Recently there have been quite a few different days in which the press reported US president Donald Trump "falling asleep" during televised events in the White House. In the typical event that has occurred, Trump will be seen sitting at a desk, and behind him will be various people talking. As someone else talks, Trump will close his eyes for quite a few consecutive seconds.  Incidents of this type have reportedly occurred quite a few times.  The March 24 article here claims that there have been 13 such events. There have been multiple reports of Trump falling asleep at official events in the weeks since March 24.The latest report has a headline of "Trump, 79, Falls Asleep Seconds After Speaking in White House Event."

The press seems to have been uniform in its coverage of these events, describing them as cases of Trump "napping" or "falling asleep." But let me suggest a novel hypothesis about the cause of these events, one I have not read anyone else suggest. These events may be something more serious. Rather than mere napping, these events may be short events of fainting, caused by a drop in blood pressure. Syncope is the medical term for fainting. There is a type of problem called cardiogenic syncope, and the older a person is, the more likely it is to occur. When cardiogenic syncope occurs, blood pressure may undergo a sharp temporary drop because of some malfunction in the heart, often a heart arrythmia or a temporary deviation from the heart's normal sinus rhythm, or some heart pumping problem. The drop in blood flowing to the brain results in a state called cerebral hypoperfusion, which results in fainting or loss of consciousness. 

The infographic visual below (modified from one generated by Google Gemini) explains how cardiogenic syncope involves a short-lasting dip in the flow of blood to the brain. 

If a person is standing and has an episode of cardiogenic syncope, the result may be a very noticeable collapse. But a person sitting and having such an episode may merely appear to be napping for a short time. I asked Google this: "Can cardiogenic syncope look like napping?" I get this answer from an AI overview: "Yes, cardiogenic syncope (fainting caused by a heart condition) can sometimes look like someone is 'napping,' dazed, or in a deep sleep, particularly if the episode is very brief or occurs while they are already sitting or lying down."

By itself a tendency towards cardiogenic syncope does not have any very grave short-term prognosis. Typically the fainting episodes are brief, and do not cause any permanent brain damage. An old person with such a tendency may well continue to live for years, and may function well. But his chance of sudden cardiac death or heart failure death during those years will tend to be much higher. Whether such a person can continue to do a job well depends on the frequency of the episodes, and what type of job the person does. 

If a very old president were to be having occasional episodes of cardiogenic syncope (fainting uncontrollably now and then), he might well be able to get by without people noticing, particularly if he was careful to avoid events involving prolonged standing, and instead mainly did Oval Office events while seated. Such a president might be  able to do his job well on most days. The problem would be that the cardiogenic syncope would tend to create rare days in which the president was pretty much incapacitated, and incapable of doing his job well.

In Caucasian people cardiogenic syncope involving cerebral hypoperfusion tends to temporarily create a rather white-looking face, a pale face color.  The word for that is pallor. If you do a Google image search for photos of Trump sleeping in the Oval Office, you will not typically see a pale-looking face. But that does not discredit the possibility discussed here, simply because it is widely believed that Trump applies colored makeup all over his face, often leaving his face with a rather orange-looking or bronze-looking appearance. If Trump ever fails to apply that makeup, and there arises TV footage of him "napping" in the Oval Office while having a pale-looking face, that will tend to corroborate the hypothesis suggested in this post. 

Quite a few articles claim to show pictures in which Trump appears to have swollen ankles. Swollen ankles involving edema are a symptom of heart failure, and cardiogenic syncope and heart failure are strongly associated. I asked Google this: "Is cardiogenic syncope associated with heart failure?" I get this answer from an AI overview: 

"Yes, cardiogenic syncope is strongly associated with heart failure. It is a dangerous form of fainting caused by heart-related issues, such as severe arrhythmias or impaired pumping function, and is a major, independent predictor of sudden death in patients with advanced heart failure."

The latest report with a headline of "Trump, 79, Falls Asleep Seconds After Speaking in White House Event" may be particularly suggestive of the hypothesis I here propose. The likelihood of falling asleep is inversely related to a person's alertness and state of mental interest or engagement, with the act of falling asleep much more likely to occur in someone bored or not doing anything important.  So it seems very unlikely that a person would ever fall asleep "seconds after" publicly speaking. Conversely, cardiogenic syncope occurs unpredictably, with its timing having no connection to a person's level of alertness or how socially engaged he was in the past minute. 

They Said They Left Their Bodies

 In general professors are extremely poor about studying reports of paranormal phenomena, reports of extraordinary human abilities and reports of extraordinary human experiences. In the rare cases when a professor attempts to research such matters, he or she will typically use some incompetent search strategy.  A professor will typically search for some topic using only a search of published scientific papers. That is not a very good strategy when searching for reports of the three types of things mentioned above, because most reports of such things do not end up in scientific papers, but appear in publications such as newspapers, books and periodicals. 

It is not true that reports published in scientific papers are in general more reliable than reports published in newspapers, books and periodicals. I can think of endless reports I have read in newspapers and periodicals that met very good standards of evidence, by giving first-person accounts of experiences that occurred a short time ago, with named witnesses, named dates of observations and named places of observations. Conversely, scientific papers typically fail to follow good standards for reporting observations, because they tend to use a passive voice without mentioning specific observers, and they usually fail to specify exactly where and when an observation occurred. When reading some scientific paper, you may ask: who was the person who made some crucial hard-to-get-right observation that an entire paper hinges upon -- some professor who has used some fancy piece of equipment many times, or merely some newly admitted graduate student who may have been fumbling around when using the equipment the first time? We can't tell, because scientific papers are always using the passive voice, in a way that no specific observer is mentioned. For example, in scientific papers we do not read sentences such as,  "On July 18, 2024 in Room 203 of the Cornell Neuroscience Lab, John Jacobsen tested the mice using a Morris water maze."  Instead we read passive voice sentence such as "The mice were tested using the Morris water maze."

Let us look at some periodical accounts of out-of-body experiences, reports that were obtained using the search phrase "out-of-the-body experience." Before about 1975, this phrase was more popular than the term "out-of-body experience," which has become the more common phrase in the past several decades. 

In the 1965 newspaper account here, TV personality Hughie Green says this about his experience in a car crash:

In the 1963 account here, a baron (Lord Ogmore) recalls an out-of-body experience:

The 1971 newspaper account below (which you can read here) discusses research by a South African researcher named J. C. Poynton. The terms "astral travel" and "astral projection" are terms for out-of-body experiences. Click on the image to read it better. 

On page 62 of the January 26, 1934 edition of the periodical Light, which you can read here, we have the account below of an out-of-body experience:

"A correspondent, Mrs. F. Shepherd, sends us an account of the following out-of-the-body experience. ' I had had a severe shock,' she writes, ' when I suddenly noticed that I was breathing in a strange way, and with the last conscious breath I found myself slipping out of the top of my head. I was an exact counterpart of the body that lay upon the bed. I could see that it had its eyes and mouth closed, and that I was connected with it by some kind of cord. I tried in vain to make myself known to the people in the room, who took no notice of me whatever. My mind was very active; I wished to recover the use of my body, and knew that in order to enter it again I must get round to the foot end of the figure. Movement was difficult in what appeared to be a very heavy atmosphere, but eventually I reached the right position ; whereupon I seemed to dissolve into a quick-silver-like fluid and slipped into my body by the toes. I advanced until I reached the centre of the body where the cord was fixed, after which I was my corporeal self once more.' "

In the 1977 article here, Joan Kron reports on research into out-of-body experiences. She states that she had several herself, stating this:

In the 1968 article here, we read of a large study of many people who had out-of-body experiences. 

At the link here, we have a speaker claiming that when she asks her audience how many have had an out-of-body experience, she gets about one third of the audience raising their hands. 

In 1968 there appeared the book Out-of-the-Body Experiences by Celia Green, the Director of the Institute of Psychophysical Research at Oxford University. Registered users at www.archive.org can read the book here. In 1966 an appeal had been made by radio for accounts of people who had such experiences. About 400 responses were received. Two questionnaires were sent to these people, and 326 replied to the first, with 251 to the second. 

On page 22 we have these statistics: about 70% reported only one out-of-body experience, about 9 percent reported 2 such experiences, about 5%  reported three such experiences, about 2% reported four such experiences, and about 21% reporting six or more such experiences. On page 24 we have a striking account by someone put in a glass cubicle in a hospital while suffering from a high fever. She reports being out of her body for 8 or 9 days, feeling no pain. She says, "I was no longer in my body but up in the corner of the cubicle watching the nurses flitting about." 

On page 39 Green says, "Many subjects comment on their feelings of well-being and reality in their new position apart from their physical body, and there are no counter-instances, that is to say, no subjects remark on having felt incomplete, unsubstantial or unreal in their new position."

The Mistakes and Myths of Milner's Manifesto

Yuri Milner is a super-rich scientist, entrepreneur and investor who has donated millions to various projects such as the Breakthrough Prize and the Breakthrough Listen project, one of many SETI projects searching for radio signals for extraterrestrial civilizations. Milner has published a philosophical manifesto he calls the Eureka Manifesto. You can access it by reaching the page here. 

You would think that someone with so many millions would be able to put up a bug-free web site that made it real easy for people to read his manifesto. But when I go to the site using a PC, I experience some difficulties. The manifesto is introduced on a short page with a Read button at the bottom. Clicking on that button takes me to a blank page with nothing to read. 

There is a Download button that takes me to a page that offers four download choices. Clicking on PDF, I do not get sent to a web page of his site displaying a PDF file I can read. All that has gone on is that a PDF file has been downloaded to my Documents folder. If I remember to look at some list I can get in the top right corner of my Chrome browser, I can read that download. But how many potential readers, we may wonder, simply give up in frustration?  

Let's look at some of the mistakes and myths in Milner's Eureka Manifesto.

Page 20: "The journey from the little sphere to the mind that imagines it – and beyond – is the story of everything. The Universal Story. The beats of this story are a series of 'phase transitions': critical changes of state, as when water freezes to ice. These transitions shaped order out of chaos."  

Here we have an introduction to the utterly lame explanation attempts that Milner will give. He will be attempting to explain great leaps of biological organization and mental capabilities by appealing to the physics concept of "phase transitions."  A phase transition is a change of state like what goes on when water freezes or ice melts. It makes no sense to try to explain great leaps of biological organization by describing them as phase transitions. Frozen water is not very more impressively organized than liquid water; and neither liquid water nor frozen water have any functional information.  So you don't do anything to credibly explain some great biological transition requiring a huge amount of new functional information (such as the transition from non-life to life) and a huge leap in organization by saying that it was a phase transition.  

Phase transitions

Page 22: "And now, on the third planet out, a new phase transition begins. Deep in an ocean or on some ancient shore, spiral-shaped ribbons of molecules, sealed inside bubbles, have found a way to copy themselves. As the bubbles – the first cells – move through their environment, they do something that’s never been done before, possibly anywhere in the Universe. Reacting to the conditions around them, absorbing nutrients and avoiding hazards, they develop an ability to model the outside world."

 We have here neither an accurate description of the first living cell nor a credible description of how it could have originated.  The language is very misleading language making a self-reproducing cell sound billions of times simpler than it is. And a cell does not have an ability to model the outside world. A self-reproducing cell is something exponentially more complex than a mere bubble with DNA. Even the simplest self-reproducing cell requires hundreds of types of protein molecules, each its own separate complex invention. The origin of something that complex would be something hugely too complicated to be described as anything like any of the "phase transitions" known to physicists. 

Milner is a physicist. I could make a joke here along the lines of: "To a carpenter, everything is a hammer or a nail; and to a physicist everything is a phase transition."  

 Page 23: "The cell, tiny and simple as it is, holds a sliver of knowledge."

Even the simplest self-reproducing cell is something of very great functional complexity, not something "simple." The amount of genetic information required to have the simplest self-reproducing cell is equal to the functional information in about 100 pages of text, each having hundreds of words. That is much more than "a sliver of knowledge."

Page 23: "For over a billion years, there are only single cells. Then comes a leap in complexity – another phase transition: one cell gets inside another and joins forces with it."

This passage refers to the origin of eukaryotic cells, vastly more complex than the simplest type of cells, called prokaryotic cells. Darwinists and materialists have no credible story to explain such a huge leap in complexity, which has been compared in the leap in complexity of making an upgrade from a tiny shack to the mansion of a multi-millionaire such as Milner. Such a huge leap forward in organization and information cannot be credibly explained by the idea that "one cell gets inside another." 

Page 23: "Colonies of cells begin to cohere, acting as single organisms."

Referring to the origin of multicellular life, this is the most vacuous hand-waving. The origin of visible multicellular organisms is something trillions of times too hard to explain by such "the cells started to stick together" explanation. Currently biologists have no credible explanation for how there could have occurred a transition from microscopic life to large visible organisms with complex anatomy. 

Page 23: "Organisms comprising trillions of cells develop sensory organs and nervous systems, then eventually brains – organs that can build and update more sophisticated models and select the ones with the best predictions."  

We have here here no explanation as to how such wonders of biological innovation could have occurred. There is no evidence that brains "can build and update more sophisticated models and select the ones with the best predictions." We merely know that humans can create models that predict things.  No neuroscientist has a credible explanation of how a brain could create such models or make predictions. 

Page 23: "The next phase transition occurs when intelligent animals find ways to communicate, spreading models beyond the individual brain."  

The reference is to the origin of language, something that Darwinists have no credible explanation for. Describing it as a "phase transition" does nothing to explain it. 

Page 30: "The simplest cell already had part of the Story to tell, written in its genes. A tiny part, true – a fragment of a sentence, describing a droplet of ocean on a primeval planet. But as genes built brains and brains built cultures and cultures built a shared store of knowledge, more and more fragments became legible."

The description of the information content in the simplest cell is wrong by a factor of about 10,000 times. The amount of functional information in the simplest cell is equivalent to about the information content in a book of 100 pages -- vastly more than "a fragment of a sentence." The claim that "genes built brains" is false. As discussed here, DNA and its genes do not specify how to make any human organ,  do not specify how to make up  any of the tissues that make up organs, do not specify how to make up  any of the cells that make up tissues,  do not specify how to make up  any of the organelles that make up such cells, and do not specify how to make up any of the protein complexes that are crucial to the construction and maintenance of cells. 

Page 31: "In the dance of chance and time, we found ourselves in a form that can explore and understand. This is our gift. Our precious birthright. To be awake. To have minds formed from matter. To look out at the world and understand." 

Chance and time are not credible explanations for human bodies, and nothing Milner has said bears any resemblance to a credible  explanation for human bodies or any type of simpler life. A mind is an immaterial thing, and is not "formed from matter."  

Page 32: "We have the opportunity to embody that extraordinary transformation, to embrace it and carry it forward into the future. To stay awake. To explore and understand our Universe. That means all of us."

Because of all of the many ocean-sized shortfalls in our current understanding of matter, life and mind, it is  overconfidence to claim that we currently can "understand our universe." 

Page 32: "Without our commitment to the Mission, the Universe could close its eyes and drift back into sleep."

This statement makes no sense at all. 

Page 36: "It seems inevitable that evolution will, over time, create life, minds, and civilizations that will keep expanding the scope of their discoveries."

Nothing in the manifesto justifies such a statement, nor does anything in the explanation of Darwinists or materialists. Darwinian evolution cannot occur until life exists, so evolution does not "create life" from nonlife. Nor does evolution create minds or civilizations. Human minds are not credibly explained by human brains, for reasons very abundantly discussed at my site here.  Human minds are not credibly explained by the theory of evolution by so-called natural selection.  This shortfall was explained at length by the co-founder of that theory (Alfred Russel Wallace) in his essay "The Limits of Natural Selection as Applied to Man," which you can read here and here.  Milner donated  many millions to the Breakthrough Listen project, which spent quite a few years searching thousands of stars looking for signs of extraterrestrial life. No such signs were found. This is the opposite of what we would expect to happen if "it seems inevitable that evolution will, over time, create life, minds, and civilizations."

Page 37: "Let’s step back to that moment on primeval Earth when two cells merged together. That union, which was the genesis of all complex life, came most likely over a billion years after the appearance of the first cells." 

This is a reference to the origin of eukaryotic cells, things a million times too complex and organized to be explained by some mere story that "two cells merged together." The claim that the origin of eukaryotic cells was "the genesis of all complex life" is hugely mistaken. Even the simplest type of cell (a prokaryotic cell) is an enormously complex system. 

Page 46: "Jill Tarter, a pioneer in the search for intelligent life, famously compared the searches undertaken in the decades since the Green Bank conference to dipping a single glass into the ocean and wondering why you don’t catch a fish." 

The history of SETI searches is by now very extensive, with very many thousands of observation hours. The entire sky has been searched multiple times by large expensive projects. So it is very misleading when SETI enthusiasts try to make us think that the search for radio signals has only just begun. To the contrary, it has been well-funded for more than 50 years. You can read my post here for a list of many of the main searches that have occurred. 

Page 53: "We now have a glimpse of the bounty of worlds the Universe has to offer. Even beyond the Earth-like planets identified so far, we know there are super-Earths, water worlds, probably planets made of diamond."

Here the manifesto incorrectly claims that there have been Earth-like planets discovered. No such discovery ever occurred. A planet should never be called Earth-like unless life has been discovered on it, and life has not been discovered on any other planet. 

Page 68:

On this page we have a Plan of Action which consists of these items:

• "invest resources into fundamental science and space exploration
•  enable artificial intelligence to drive scientific progress 
•  celebrate scientists as heroes 
•  focus education on the universal story and use the power of art to tell it 
•  spark a new enlightenment in which everyone can contribute to a shared culture of knowledge"

The "universal story" that Milner has told is one that makes no sense. Nowhere does it provide any credible explanations for any of the main wonders of biology or mind. So it would be a huge mistake to "focus education" on so bad and unbelievable an origins story. Huge problems with so-called artificial intelligence systems is that they do not really understand anything, and that such systems worsen echo-chamber effects, by making frequentist judgments of truth, in which the most common answers are treated as true. The use of such "the most common claim is true" assumptions by AI systems make them unsuitable for the job of driving scientific progress in an intelligent way. "Follies of the herd" mistakes in dogma-clinging scientist belief communities tend to be worsened by so-called artificial intelligence systems.

As for the bullet list item that we should "celebrate scientists as heroes," and the similar claim on page 69 that we should "raise their profiles and prestige," it sounds like more of what we have already too much of: the placing of scientists atop pedestals, and the crowning of scientists as Grand Lords of Explanation. Such hero worship is an obstruction to scientific progress, and a stumbling block. The placing of Charles Darwin on some high pedestal has been a gigantic mistake, blinding people to critically examining all the flaws and fables of his error-ridden effort to explain the origin of species. Instead of putting scientists on pedestals and making them the objects of idol worship, we should be subjecting the utterances of every scientist to the same critical scrutiny we apply to politicians. 

In the culture of Darwinist materialism there has been too much deceit and conceit. The deceit occurred through the nearly 100 types of deception I list in my post here. The conceit occurred when people went ego-tripping by wrongly crowning themselves as Grand Lords of Explanation, without ever deserving such a crown. 

Page 68 -- 69: "There is ultimately only one field of inquiry: the Universal Story, which contains the history of our Universe, our planet, and our civilization, including the realm of the social sciences and humanities."

This is very bad nonsense. There are very many fields of inquiry. If Milner had studied more of these fields of inquiry, he might understand some of the mistakes he has made in his manifesto. 

Based on what I read about him on wikipedia.org, Milner seems like a fine fellow who is very well-meaning and generous. It's a shame that his manifesto seems lacking in original and noteworthy thought. He sounds like someone who is much better at technological innovation and making money and philanthropy than at philosophical innovation or philosophical insight. A second effort by him might well yield much better results. Good original work in philosophy related to origins or grand questions tends to require diligent effort over long periods of time, along with a willingness to make a deep study of many fields of inquiry.