In Your Body Every Day There's a Million Miracles of Warp-Speed Purposeful Assembly

 A recent article in MIT News is entitled "Biologist Joey Davis explores how cells build complex structures." We read of a biologist studying how ribosomes get assembled in a cell. At this point the average reader may remember seeing a cell diagram, and the reader may say to himself something like, "Oh, yeah, ribosomes, I remember that there are a few of those little balls in a cell." But the truth is that a typical human cell has millions of ribosomes, and ribosomes are fantastically complex components, like little machines. Ribosomes have the enormously complex function of assembling a huge variety of protein molecules, which are very complex components built from hundreds or thousands of amino acids. 

How did the average person get such a wrong idea about ribosomes, the idea that there were only a few of them in the cell, and that they are simple little balls? It is because our biology authorities have done such a poor job of educating us about the vast complexity of cells. Again and again, our biology authorities published misleading diagrams of cells, making it look like cells have only a few parts. 

The Google Gemini diagram below discusses some of the great complexities of the work done in the cell by ribosomes. 

The diagram has two shortfalls: (1) at the bottom it depicts a cell as enormously less complex than a cell is; (2) at the top it makes ribosomes look vastly less complex than they are.  The diagram below helps to show how complex is the structure of ribosomes, which require the special arrangement of very many types of protein molecules:

We see in the diagram above how vastly organized ribosomes are. For  a ribosome to be constructed, very many types of proteins must be assembled in just the right way, to produce the "protein factory" that is a ribosome. How does such an assembly occur? Scientists lack any explanation for this miracle of organization. The structure of ribosomes is not specified in DNA or any of its genes. DNA and its genes only contain low-level chemical information, such as which amino acids make up a particular protein. 

As enormously complex as ribosomes are, their complexity is dwarfed by the complexity of the structures that surround them, the structures called endoplasmic reticulum.  A document makes a bungling attempt to explain how the very complex structure of the endoplasmic reticulum arises. It is the vacuous non-explanation of "self organization." The emptiness of the concept is clear from a quote on page 13, where we read, "Self-organization is an interesting concept, but how organelles self-organize is unclear." The last resort of a scientist lacking an explanation for some very high state of organization is to make a vacuous appeal to "self-organization."

Every day that you live, fantastically complex components are magically being assembled in your body, components with a structure that is not specified by DNA or its genes. How this can happen is a mystery a hundred miles over the heads of scientists.  They know of no chemistry or physics factors that can explain such assembly. 

The wonders seem all the more staggering when we consider the speed at which these miracles of assembly occur. In the MIT article we get a mention of that. Below is a quote:

"During ribosome assembly, RNA molecules fold themselves into the correct shapes, creating docking sites for proteins to attach. Then, more RNA molecules come in and fold themselves into the structure.

'It’s a beautifully coupled process by which the cell folds hundreds of RNA helices and binds on the order of 50 proteins, and it does it in two minutes from start to finish. E. coli does this 100,000 times per hour, and it’s amazing how rapid and efficient the process is,'  Davis says."

How do ribosomes (such fantastically complex components) ever get built? The MIT article offers us no clue, except for two misleading sound bites. 

The first misleading sound bite comes in the subtitle of the article, which says this about Joey Davis:  "His studies have shed light on the assembly instructions that govern ribosomes, the critical protein-building machines of the cell." That makes it sound as if Davis had studied some assembly instructions for building ribosomes. But no such assembly instructions have ever been discovered, and no such assembly instructions are discussed in the MIT article. DNA and its genes have no assembly instructions for building ribosomes or any other type of organelle.

The second misleading sound bite comes when Davis makes a mention of evolution, without giving any specifics.  He says, "It appears that evolution has selected pathways that aren’t strictly ordered in the way we would think about an assembly line, where you always put in one component, then the next, and then the next. "  All uses of the phrase "evolution has selected" are misleading, as Darwinian evolution is a mindless process, and only conscious entities can select things. And claims about Darwinian evolution long ago do nothing to explain how ribosomes could get assembled right now in your body. If DNA contained some instructions for how to build ribosomes, then you might be able to make some farfetched appeal to lucky DNA mutations long ago that somehow gave us instructions in DNA for how to build ribosomes.  But DNA and its genes do not contain instructions for how to build ribosomes or any other type of organelle in a cell. 

Darwinism and claims about evolution are useless in explaining the wonders of biochemistry. That is why Darwin and evolution get virtually no mention in biochemistry textbooks. I documented this reality in my post "The Negligible Presence of Evolutionary Explanations in Six Biochemistry Textbooks," which documents the almost complete lack of mention of evolution, natural selection and Darwin in several long biochemistry textbooks. 

Somehow all these marvelously fine-tuned components bigger than protein molecules get assembled in our body,  in a way that scientists cannot credibly explain. No assembly instructions for such components and systems have ever been discovered in the body. These miracles of assembly are sometimes very fast and sometimes slow. The progression from a speck-sized zygote to a full human body over the nine months of pregnancy is a miracle of organization, but one that is relatively slow. Conversely, in your body there is constantly occurring very fast miracles of assembly, such as the "two minutes" marvel of assembly mentioned in the quote above. 

Some of these miracles of assembly are the construction of protein complexes.  Protein complexes are teams of different types of proteins. Proteins somehow assemble into very complex components called protein complexes, which are sometimes so complex they are commonly called "molecular machines" by scientists.  Below are some quotes in which scientists confess their lack of understanding of how protein complexes form:

• "The majority of cellular proteins function as subunits in larger protein complexes. However, very little is known about how protein complexes form in vivo." Duncan and Mata, "Widespread Cotranslational Formation of Protein Complexes," 2011.
• "While the occurrence of multiprotein assemblies is ubiquitous, the understanding of pathways that dictate the formation of quaternary structure remains enigmatic." -- Two scientists (link). 
• "A general theoretical framework to understand protein complex formation and usage is still lacking." -- Two scientists, 2019 (link). 
• "Most proteins associate into multimeric complexes with specific architectures, which often have functional properties like cooperative ligand binding or allosteric regulation. No detailed knowledge is available about how any multimer and its functions arose during historical evolution." -- Ten scientists, 2020 (link). 
• "Protein assemblies are at the basis of numerous biological machines by performing actions that none of the individual proteins would be able to do. There are thousands, perhaps millions of different types and states of proteins in a living organism, and the number of possible interactions between them is enormous...The strong synergy within the protein complex makes it irreducible to an incremental process. They are rather to be acknowledged as fine-tuned initial conditions of the constituting protein sequences. These structures are biological examples of nano-engineering that surpass anything human engineers have created. Such systems pose a serious challenge to a Darwinian account of evolution, since irreducibly complex systems have no direct series of selectable intermediates, and in addition, as we saw in Section 4.1, each module (protein) is of low probability by itself." -- Steinar Thorvaldsen and Ola Hössjerm, "Using statistical methods to model the fine-tuning of molecular machines and systems,"  Journal of Theoretical Biology.

Some such as Hume trying to discredit the idea of miracles have defined a miracle as a violation of the laws of nature. That is not a good definition of "miracle." Here is a good definition of "miracle": a miracle is something (not explained by known laws of physics or chemistry or common human agency) that occurs without visible or known agency, and which would be so improbable to occur by unguided chance that its probability of accidentally occurring is for all practical purposes zero. For example, if you were to take a pack of 52 playing cards, and throw such cards into the air, and all 52 cards became part of a triangular house of cards, that formation so perfect would be something so unlikely to occur that the probability of it occurring is for all practical purposes zero. 

Under this reasonable definition of "miracle," the assembly of every ribosome is a miracle, and the assembly of every other very complex and enormously organized organelle is a miracle, as is the assembly of every type of protein complex involving the "just right" arrangement of many types of proteins that assemble into "molecular machines" fine-tuned for some biochemical task.  There are no known laws of physics or chemistry that explain such wonders of organization.  The assembly of such components by a chance combinations of protein molecules has a probability that is negligible. Under the same definition of "miracle," the assembly of protein complexes as complex as the proteasome (described in this post's appendix) must also be called miracles. 

Every day within your body there are a million such miracles, very many of which involve a kind of warp-speed assembly in which parts magically assemble very, very quickly into functional components, in a way that is not predicted by anything we know about the laws of chemistry or physics, and that is not predicted by anything we know about what is in DNA and its genes.  The continual occurrence of such miracles is required for the continuation of your life.  The physical origin of your body (involving the nine-month progression from a speck-sized zygote to the vast organization of a full human body) was one miracle, but a slow, gradual miracle. The continuation of your body over the span of decades requires endless millions of other miracles,  in which purposeful cell components magically assemble in a way that is utterly beyond any explanation of physics, chemistry or genetics. 

I asked Google Gemini to produce an infographic visual explaining an example of a protein complex that assembles very quickly. It gave me the visual below. The nuclear pore complex (NPC) discussed is a very well-organized protein complex consisting of more than 30 types of proteins, arranged in just the right way to achieve a particular hard-to-achieve functional effect. Apparently this nuclear pore complex gets assembled within five minutes.   The bottom of the diagram has a few lines trying to explain the speed of assembly, but it is little more than the thinnest hand-waving. 

How there occurs such miracles of purposeful assembly at such stunning speeds is a mystery a thousand miles over the heads of scientists. When materialists claim that all of the processes of life "can be explained in terms of physics and chemistry," they are telling a lie as big as the sky. The continuation of your life requires the daily occurrence of these miracles of purposeful assembly. The progression from a speck-sized zygote to a vastly more organized full human body over nine months is a miracle of organization very far beyond the explanation of biologists. But it is not merely the origin of every human body that is beyond the explanation of materialists: it is also the continued living existence of an adult body that is a miracle beyond their explanation, because of the million microscopic miracles of warp-speed purposeful assembly that must occur every day for a human body to keep living.   

Postscript: Today while searching for some more quotes to add to my "Candid Confessions of the Scientists" post (the largest collection  anywhere of scientists confessing what they don't know), I found these two quotes. In one, scientists confess they don't understand how mammary glands arise in a developing body; and in the other scientists confess they don't understand how eyes arise in a developing body. 

• "A quarter of the way through the twenty-first century, we still lack basic knowledge regarding the formation and function of the organ that gives its name to all mammals, and which provides important health benefits for children and their breastfeeding parent through the creation and delivery of breast milk." -- 3 scientists (link). 
• "Despite increasing knowledge of pathways controlling the differentiation of many cell types in the eye, we still lack a basic understanding of the mechanisms controlling its morphogenesis." - 3 scientists (link).  

Also I read today a paper making it clear that contrary to boasts in the press, the AlphaFold2 software does not actually solve the protein folding problem, the problem of how protein molecules almost instantly acquire very complicated 3D shapes needed for their function. The year 2026 paper states, "The explanatory scientific understanding of the protein folding problem is thus

not directly advanced by AF2 [AlphaFold2]." Later the same paper says, "The protein folding problem remains unsolved." Instead, the AlphaFold2 software makes progress on a different problem, properly described as the protein structure prediction problem, which is the problem of predicting the 3D shape of a protein molecule from its amino acid sequence. Whenever one of the more complex types of protein molecules almost instantly takes the very complex 3D shape needed for its function, that is another example of a miracle of warp-speed purposeful assembly.  

Appendix A: The Proteasome Molecular Machine

Below is one example of the many types of protein complexes that seem to require miracles of assembly beyond the explanation of scientists. The wikipedia.org article on proteasomes tells us this:

"Proteasomes are protein complexes which degrade unneeded or damaged proteins by proteolysis, a chemical reaction that breaks peptide bonds...In structure, the proteasome is a cylindrical complex containing a 'core' of four stacked rings forming a central pore. Each ring is composed of seven individual proteins."

A paper on this topic is entitled "Gates, channels, and switches: elements of the proteasome machine." We read this:

"The proteasome has emerged as an intricate machine that has dynamic mechanisms to regulate the timing of its activity, its selection of substrates, and its processivity. The 19-subunit regulatory particle (RP) recognizes ubiquitinated proteins, removes ubiquitin, and injects the target protein into the proteolytic chamber of the core particle (CP) via a narrow channel."

Another paper is entitled "The 26S Proteasome: A Molecular Machine Designed for Controlled Proteolysis." A page on the site of the Theoretical and Computational Group tells us this:

"Recycling of unneeded protein molecules in cells is performed by a molecular machine called 26S proteasome (Figure 1), which cuts these proteins into smaller pieces for reuse as building blocks for new proteins. Proteins that need to be recycled are labeled by tags made of poly-ubiquitin protein chains. The 26S proteasome machine recognizes and binds to these tags, pulls the tagged protein close, then unwinds it, and finally cuts it into pieces. As the cell's recycling machinery, the 26S proteasome is vital for a variety of essential cellular processes, including protein quality control, cell cycle regulation, adaptive immune response, and apoptosis....The 26S proteasome recruits, unfolds, and degrades poly-ubiquitin tagged proteins through a complex interaction clockwork of over 60 known protein subunits that is driven through ATP hydrolysis."

A scientific paper tells us this:

"The 26S proteasome is a multisubunit complex that catalyzes the degradation of ubiquitinated proteins. The proteasome comprises 33 distinct subunits, all of which are essential for its function and structure." 

Below is a depiction of the human 26S proteasome structure, one that labels some of its protein parts. We see three different views of the same protein complex, with different protein parts labeled (the Greek letters used stand for alpha and beta parts mentioned in the table below):

Image credit: Xing Guo et. al, link.

Below are the number of amino acids involved in these parts, which I looked up using the UniProt online database (you can use the links to check the numbers I have given):

Protein	Number of amino acids	Comment
Proteasome subunit beta type-1	241	On Chromosome 6
Proteasome subunit beta type-2	201	On Chromosome 1
Proteasome subunit beta type-3	205	On Chromosome 17
Proteasome subunit beta type-4	264	On Chromosome 1
Proteasome subunit beta type-5	263	On Chromosome 14
Proteasome subunit beta type-6	239	On Chromosome 17
Proteasome subunit beta type-7	248	On Chromosome 20
Proteasome subunit alpha type-1	263	On Chromosome 11
Proteasome subunit alpha type-2	234	On Chromosome 7
Proteasome subunit alpha type-3	255	On Chromosome 14
Proteasome subunit alpha type-4	261	On Chromosome 15
Proteasome subunit alpha type-5	241	On Chromosome 1
Proteasome subunit alpha type-6	243	On Chromosome 14
Proteasome subunit alpha type-7	248	On Chromosome 20

The structure shown above clearly requires several thousands of amino acids that have to be arranged in just the right way. The structure shown above is not specified in DNA, which merely specifies which amino acids make up each of the protein parts. The amino acid information needed to make the structure above (insufficient to specify the total structure) is not at all contiguous in DNA. To assemble the structure above, among other wonders of construction a human body must magically gather genetic information scattered across many different chromosomes in the nucleus, like someone quickly finding just the right 60 loose pages hidden in random books of 46 tall, long bookcases in a library. The table above shows that at least eight of the 23 human chromosome pairs would need to be accessed: Chromosome 1, Chromosome 6, Chromosome 7, Chromosome 11, Chromosome 14, Chromosome 15, Chromosome 17, and Chromosome 20.

Appendix B: The Nuclear Pore Complex 

The nuclear pore complex or NPC is a large protein complex found in the "nuclear envelope" that is the outer boundary of the nucleus inside human cells.  A science research press release tells us this: 

"For structural biologists, the human NPC is a challenging yet exciting 3D puzzle, with around 30 different proteins each present in multiple copies. This amounts to around 1000 puzzle pieces, which form a round core with surrounding flexible parts."

The wikipedia.org article on this complex states that it consists of "456 individual protein molecules, and 34 distinct nucleoporin proteins." So the complex apparently requires 34 types of protein molecules. The article tells us that the "principal function of nuclear pore complexes is to facilitate selective membrane transportation of various molecules across the nuclear envelope." This mean that nuclear pore complexes have the extremely complex job of acting like gatekeepers, letting the right kind of molecules get into the nucleus of the cell, and keeping out the wrong type of molecules.  The article tells us that there are typically about 1000 of the nuclear pore complexes in every cell. We read of some impressive functionality of these nuclear pore complexes:

"Notably, the nuclear pore complex (NPC) can actively mediate up to 1000 translocations per complex per second. While smaller molecules can passively diffuse through the pores, larger molecules are often identified by specific signal sequences and are facilitated by nucleoporins to traverse the nuclear envelope."

The article (and also the Google Gemini infographic above) tell us that a nuclear pore complex has a molecular weight of about 110 megadaltons. A dalton is the mass equal to a twelfth of the mass of a carbon atom. A protein complex of 110 megadaltons would have the mass of about 9 million carbon atoms. Apparently the proteins that make up this complex are particularly complex proteins. Below are the exact numbers (we may assume that there are multiple instances of such proteins in a nuclear pore complex). 

Protein	Number of amino acids	Comment
NUP98_HUMAN	1817	On Chromosome 11
NU153_HUMAN	1475	On Chromosome 6
NUP93_HUMAN	819	On Chromosome 16
NU107_HUMAN	925	On Chromosome 12
NU205_HUMAN	2012	On Chromosome 7
NU160_HUMAN	1436	On Chromosome 11
NU214_HUMAN	2090	On Chromosome 9
NUP85_HUMAN	656	On Chromosome 17
NUP50_HUMAN	468	On Chromosome 22
NUP88_HUMAN	741	On Chromosome 17
NU133_HUMAN	1156	On Chromosome 1
NU155_HUMAN	1391	On Chromosome 5

The molecular machinery shown above clearly requires more than 12,000 amino acids that have to be arranged in just the right way, which amounts to a special arrangement of more than 100,000  atoms. The structure of the molecular machinery described above is not specified in DNA, which merely specifies which amino acids make up each of the protein parts. The amino acid information needed to make the structure above  is not at all contiguous in DNA. To assemble the structure above, among other wonders of construction a human body must magically gather genetic information scattered across many different chromosomes in the nucleus, like someone quickly finding just the right 34 loose pages hidden in random books of 46 tall, long bookcases in a library. The table above shows that at least nine of the 23 human chromosome pairs would need to be accessed: Chromosome 1, Chromosome 5, Chromosome 6, Chromosome 7, Chromosome 11, Chromosome 12, Chromosome 16, Chromosome 17 and Chromosome 22.

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

Pathologizing Psychologists Fail to Explain Apparition Sightings

In my widely-read post "Pathologizing Scientists May Try to Stigmatize Witnesses of the Spooky," I described the bungling methods of a pair of scientists who have attempted to spread insinuations of psychological problems in people reporting that they saw spooky things. The latest example of bungling work of this type by a pathologizing scientist comes in the form of an article at "The Conversation" site, an article by psychologist Melissa Maffeo. The article is entitled " Is my brain wired to never see a ghost? A psychologist on three factors that make a paranormal experience more likely." We get more evidence of mudslinging weaponized psychology,  resembling the folly depicted below. 

In the article Maffeo shows no evidence of having studied apparition sightings. She cites not one single report of anyone who claimed to see an apparition. A look at her papers on Google Scholar shows no papers showing signs of scholarship of reports of apparition sightings. 

Maffeo offers three very lame explanations for why people may see apparitions. Her first attempt at an explanation (which she called "Haunted Factor #1") is the extremely lame explanation of "environmental stimuli." She starts out by referring to electromagnetic fields, which can be measured by a portable EMF detector sometimes marketed as a "ghost detector."  

EMF fields might explain why you might get a higher-than-expected reading on an EMF device. But EMF fields are worthless in explaining apparition sightings. I have published 85 posts describing apparition sightings, which you can read here (continue to press Older Posts at the bottom right to read them all). Not one of the many hundreds of apparition sightings I describe involved a case in which someone got a high EMF reading while reporting seeing an apparition about the same time. 

Maffeo describes a scientific study in which people were put in a special room, and bombarded with infrasound and complex electromagnetic fields (EMFs). The study's paper found that "although many participants reported anomalous sensations of various kinds, the number reported was unrelated to experimental condition."  The paper mentions subjects reporting "mildly anomalous sensations," but does not mention any subject reporting seeing an apparition. The paper says, "The results reported do not support the idea that complex EMFs play a role in inducing anomalous experience."  So Maffeo's "Haunted Factor #1" is a flop as an explanation for people seeing apparitions. 

Maffeo lists "Neurological Mixups" as "Haunted Factor #2." She refers to a study involving an epilepsy patient who had electrodes implanted in her brain. After an electrical current was sent to her brain, the female supposedly reported a "creepy feeling that somebody is close by."  The study fails to qualify as good evidence, because we do not have any transcripts of interviews in which this effect was reported. We merely have some short quotes from a subject, quotes which are not full sentences; and we do not know whether these quotes are in response to leading questions designed to elicit particular types of anomalous reports from the subject. In any case, what was reported was not an apparition sighting, and the case is of no value in explaining apparition sightings in people who do not have electrodes implanted in their brains, people with brains not being artificially stimulated by electricity sent into the brain from an outside source. 

Maffeo also refers to the 2002 paper "Stimulating illusory own-body perceptions." This 2002 paper has some quotes by a subject who the authors had brain-zapped with electricity, by inserting electrodes in her brain. The authors have attempted to portray this as evidence of an artificially induced out-of-body experience. But the only sentence that the paper quotes from the subject is one that does not indicate a full out-of-body experience. That sentence is this: "I see myself lying in bed, from above, but I only see my legs and lower trunk." That sounds like some weird electricity-induced perception anomaly that is not properly described as an out-of-body experience. During an out-of-body experience a person will typically report leaving his body and seeing his entire body (not just the legs and lower trunk) from outside of the body. Eager to report some experimental induction of an out-of-body experience, our authors seem to have taken some account that does not match those of out-of-body experiences, and called that an out-of-body experience. The authors make this claim: "Two further stimulations induced the same sensation, which included an instantaneous feeling of 'lightness' and 'floating' about two metres above the bed, close to the ceiling." Since this is not an actual full-sentence quote from the subject, it has very little value as evidence. A second-hand account of a person's weird experience during brain zapping (by some other person who did not have that experience) is pretty worthless as evidence. What would we have read from a transcript of what the subject said, one including any questions the subject was asked? We have no idea. 

The paper did nothing to explain out-of-body experiences, since such things occur in people who do not have electrodes in their heads, and are not receiving inputs of electricity from an outside source. And the paper does nothing to explain apparition sightings. 

The final part of Maffeo's discussing of her "Haunted Factor #2" is a discussion of the rare phenomenon of sleep paralysis. This does nothing to explain 95% of apparition sightings and 95% of out-of-body experiences, which do not occur during any such sleep paralysis. 

Maffeo then offers a "Haunted Factor #3" of "Personality Traits." Maffeo now moves into pathologizing mode, playing the game of "stigmatize the witnesses." She claims, "There’s a growing body of research that suggests people with certain personality traits are more likely to believe in the paranormal." She links to a page that has the journal Nature as its source, but strangely has no listed author.  It's an "AI overview" page that reads like AI slop. 

Maffeo then refers to the very dubious socially-constructed concept of "schizotypy." She states this:

"There’s a growing body of research that suggests people with certain personality traits are more likely to believe in the paranormal. For instance, some people are hyperaware of unconscious perceptions and ideas, which then permeate their consciousness. Often, these traits are associated with magical thinking, distorted or unusual thoughts, disorganized behavior and, sometimes, trouble forming close relationships. Psychologists refer to this set of traits as schizotypy. They’re related to schizophrenia, although being high in schizotypy doesn’t mean you will be diagnosed with the disorder of schizophrenia. People with high levels of schizotypy are more likely to believe in the paranormal."

I quote in the appendix of this post how Peter C. Gøtzsche, MD discusses this concept of "schizotypy," and states that "This test for schizotypy is bogus." The term "schizotypy" seems to have been hoisted as a smear word to stigmatize and shame various nonconformists or believers in things that materialists rather that you not believe in. In the appendix of this post Gøtzsche describes a checklist for "schizotypy" characteristics, which he says is similar to one on a page of the Mayo Clinic website. He does not mention that one of the items on that Mayo Clinic checklist is "belief in special powers, such as mental telepathy." And looking at the paper here and the paper here offering a "scale" to assess "schizotypy," I see in both a checklist in which anyone reporting experience with ESP or a sixth sense would be judged to have a "symptom of schizotypy." So Matteo's claim that "people with high levels of schizotypy are more likely to believe in the paranormal" is pretty meaningless,  given that schizotypy has been defined so that anyone who believes in telepathy will score higher on a "schizotypy checklist." 

What is going on here is weaponized psychology involving circular reasoning.  A particular psychiatric-sounding term of abuse "schizotypy" was invented, without anyone giving a cohesive definition of such a term. Some alleged "characteristics of schizotypy" were arbitrarily listed, including "odd beliefs or magical thinking that’s inconsistent with cultural norms,"  "odd thinking and speech patterns," and "belief in special powers, such as mental telepathy."  Now anyone who fails to speak like a materialist would (and anyone who deeply studies the two hundred years of evidence for ESP) can then be conveniently shamed and stigmatized as being guilty of "schizotypy." This seems like very bad psychology bungling by pathologizing psychologists eager to attach badges of shame on sane well-functioning people. The nebulous term "schizotypy" is a not-really-scientific term of abuse similar to the equally nebulous and not-really-scientific term of abuse "transliminality" discussed here. 

Because the experimental evidence for ESP includes very well-replicated results such as the Ganzfeld experiments and extremely convincing results such as reported by professors Rhine and Riess, we should note that when psychologists include belief in telepathy as a symptom on a checklist of a socially constructed syndrome they call "schizotypy" (consisting of an arbitrary disjointed potpourri of unconnected "symptoms"), such psychologists have gone very far astray. It's kind of like someone inventing a checklist of 10 "symptoms" of something he decides to call "Wilkinson's Syndrome," and listing belief in the reality of social injustice as one of the symptoms. 

A recent paper ("Personality Facets Systematically Relate to Nonordinary Experiences") attempted to look for a relation between personality characteristics and reports of paranormal experiences. Contrary to Matteo's claim of a link between personality traits and reports of the paranormal, the paper failed to find any strong evidence of such a link. 

Maffeo seems to be engaging in the type of mudslinging that goes on when someone vaguely tries to tar someone by suggesting "associations" or "similarities" between that person and some other unsavory-seeming or despised type of person. She lists no real evidence of a correlation between this "schizotypy" and schizophrenia, no evidence that people who reported apparitions have this "schizotypy," and no evidence that people who see apparitions have schizophrenia.  The type of hallucinations typically occurring in schizophrenia are auditory hallucinations, in which people hear voices, rather than seeing human forms. 

Wrapping things up, Maffeo offers the lamest attempt to explain apparition sightings, the kind of explanation that would probably only be offered by someone who had failed to decently study reports of such sightings. She states this:

"Consider a person who believes in paranormal phenomena who experiences a natural change in electromagnetic fields or an episode of sleep paralysis. Those experiences induce unusual sensations that this person cannot explain. Searching for meaning in ambiguity, this person distorts their distinction between internally and externally generated sensations. They settle on the only explanation that makes sense to them – that this strange feeling they experienced was a ghost."

This fails miserably as an explanation for apparition sightings. There is zero evidence that people reporting apparition sightings ever experienced any such thing as "a natural change in electromagnetic fields"; and goofy, reckless experiments bombarding people with electromagnetic fields fail to ever produce apparition sightings. The vast majority of reports of apparition sightings (more than 95%) occur in people who are not experiencing any such thing as "sleep paralysis"; and probably 90% of them are reports from people who were not lying down when the reported event occurred. And very few of the rare people who report "sleep paralysis"  report seeing apparitions. Also, in reports of apparition sightings there is only rarely a claim of an unusual sensation before the apparition was seen. 

Maffeo's final reference to a paper is a reference to a paper in which some 22 people were taken to a building, with half of them being told that the location was haunted. The paper authors say "our model predicts that demand characteristics such as the mere suggestion that a location is haunted are also sufficient to induce poltergeist-like perceptions such as reports of a 'sensed presence,'  apparitions, or other anomalous sensations." But contrary to such a prediction, none of the 11 people told that the house was haunted reported seeing an apparition. So the paper gives no support for Matteo's insinuation that belief in the paranormal helps explain apparition sightings. 

Maffeo hasn't done anything at all to explain apparition sightings. All that she has given is another sad example of weaponized psychology in which psychologists seem to be eager to pathologize healthy witnesses of the spooky.

Maffeo ends her article with these "holier than thou" sentences trying to suggest her superiority to the witnesses she has tried to stigmatize:

"I’m pretty sure I don’t have personality traits like schizotypy. I don’t believe in the paranormal. And I don’t think I’ll ever see a ghost."

But this smug assertion of superiority may be inappropriate at the end of an article that fails so badly to explain what it is trying to explain. 

One of the reasons why apparition sightings cannot be explained by anything Maffeo mentions is that there are very many cases of people who saw an apparition of someone they did not know had died, with the witness soon learning the person did die at about the time the apparition was seen (discussed in the 18 posts here). Also not explained by anything Maffeo mentions is the fact that we often get reports of multiple witnesses seeing the same apparition. To read about such reports, see my posts below:

When an Apparition Is Seen by Not Just One

When Apparitions Get Observed by Not Just One

When an Apparition Is Seen by Multiple Observers: 17 Cases

When an Apparition Is Seen by Multiple Observers: 17 More Cases
More Apparitions Seen by Multiple Observers
Many an Apparition Is Seen by More Than One
Still More Apparitions Seen by Multiple Observers

More Apparitions Seen by Multiple Witnesses

When Multiple Witnesses See the Same Apparition

Yet More Apparitions Seen by Multiple Witnesses

When Apparitions Get Multiple Witnesses

When Apparitions Are Seen by Multiple Witnesses

Many Said They Saw Nelly Butler's Apparition

While materialists would like to dismiss apparitions as a relic of the past, a look at the frequency of the term "ghost" using the Google Ngram viewer shows no sign that references to ghosts or apparitions are fading away. To the contrary, as shown below, the 21st century is showing a strong uptick in references to ghosts. 

Appendix: Gøtzsche on Schizotypy

In a page at the Mad in America website (which has many great articles exposing the overconfident errors of psychiatrists), Peter C. Gøtzsche, MD  refers to "schizotypy" as "a very vague and highly dubious concept." Below is a quote from an article at the Mad at America site, an article in which  Peter C. Gøtzsche, MD discusses this dubious socially constructed term "schizotypy", which does not correspond to any distinct thing in human minds. I'll quote almost all of what he says, although I suspend judgment about some of his complaints about psychiatrists. He states this:

Schizotypy is a very strange construct. I came across this diagnosis because a Danish filmmaker I worked with who made the film “Diagnosing Psychiatry,” got the diagnosis when she became stressed over a difficult divorce.

She jokes about this diagnosis in her film, and I looked it up on the Internet where there was a screening test for schizotypal personality disorder. The test reflects quite well how this construct is described on the Mayo Clinical website and by the DSM. There were nine questions and you should reply true or false, or yes or no, to each one.

1. “Incorrect interpretations of events, such as a feeling that something which is actually harmless or inoffensive has a direct personal meaning.” This is a very vague question, and many people interpret events incorrectly or take them personally.
2. “Odd beliefs or magical thinking that’s inconsistent with cultural norms.” That’s an interesting one. In Denmark, a young psychiatrist disagreed with the odd cultural norm at the department, which was to institute preventative treatment with neuroleptics for schizotypy. Is this psychiatrist then abnormal?
3. “Unusual perceptions, including illusions.” Most psychiatrists would need to say yes to this question. Just think about the illusion called the chemical imbalance.
4. “Odd thinking and speech patterns.” Surely, most psychiatrists display odd thinking, maintaining the lie about the chemical imbalance and many other lies, and also denying totally what other people see clearly, including their own patients, e.g. that psychiatric drugs do more harm than good.
5. “Suspicious or paranoid thoughts, such as the belief that someone’s out to get you.” If you are detained in a psychiatric department, such a reaction is normal and understandable. The staff surely is out to “get you,” namely to treat you forcefully with neuroleptics against your will. When psychiatric leaders use terms about their opponents such as “antipsychiatry” and “conspiracy,” can it then be considered a “yes” to item 5?
6. “Flat emotions, appearing aloof and isolated.” This is what psychiatric drugs do to people, so if they weren’t abnormal to begin with, the psychiatrists will ensure that they become abnormal.
7. “Odd, eccentric or peculiar behaviour or appearance.” One definition of madness is doing the same thing again and again expecting a different result, which is what psychiatrists do all the time. I would call that an odd, eccentric and peculiar behaviour.
8. “Lack of close friends or confidants other than relatives.” This is what psychiatric drugs do to people, particularly neuroleptics.... 
9. “Excessive social anxiety that doesn’t diminish with familiarity.” If you are detained in a psychiatric department, such a reaction is normal and understandable.

There was no explanation about the number of points needed for a diagnosis, so I tried the test a couple of times. If you have 5 out of 9 positive replies, you are told: “You are suffering from Schizotypal Personality Disorder … You must talk with a professional mental health expert.”

If you have 4 out of 9, the message is: “You have some symptoms and might be suffering from this disorder. You have got few points but according to DSM if you agree with three or four questions on this test, you might have developed this personality disorder. Please check with your mental expert.”

This test for schizotypy is bogus. Amusingly, many psychiatrists would be suspected of having this disorder because they test positive for items 3, 4 and 7, and they would then need to consult a “mental expert” who would likely also have 3 positives if tested. What is less amusing is that the test provides circular evidence for the patients who, even if they are normal, might test positive when they have been treated inhumanely by psychiatrists, including being forcefully treated with neuroleptics.

No, AI Is Not a "Darwin Moment," and Darwinism Flunked the Software Test

 Yesterday I read an opinion piece in the Washington Post entitled "The Next Darwin Moment Has Arrived." Although the article by John MacCormick was part of some newsletter called Superintelligent, the essay did not sound superintelligent, but sounded rather the opposite of superintelligent.  Containing many misstatements, the article attempted to convince us that advances in so-called "artificial intelligence" constitute a "Darwin moment" doing something to bolster the claims of Charles Darwin about an origin of species by blind, unguided processes. 

John MacCormick is a professor of computer science at the small little-known Dickinson College in Lehigh, Pennsylvania, a professor who has written four books, none of them on topics outside of the field of computer science. Looking at his papers on Google Scholar, I fail to find any evidence of scholarship by MacCormick on topics such as biological origins, biology, neuroscience, physics, biochemistry, philosophy or psychology; and you can get a PhD in computer science without studying any of the topics I just mentioned. So when I cite below enormous errors that MacCormick makes when making the most sweeping and dogmatic pontifications on some of these topics, we can charitably attribute his huge blunders to ignorance rather than deliberate deception. 

MacCormick starts out with this false claim: 

"Can computer programs emulate the entire range of human thought, including creativity and intuition? There are good reasons to believe the answer is yes, especially given the recent progress in artificial intelligence."

No, there are not any good reasons to believe any such thing, and so-called artificial intelligence does not actually have any such thing as intuition or intelligence. Human minds do many things that so-called artificial intelligence completely fails to do, such as understand things. No computer understands anything. If you got the impression that a computer understands anything, it is because so much of human-written words have been collected by computers doing web-crawling activity in which online text written by humans is gobbled up by computers, and put in computer databases, databases that are queried to get the smart-sounding answers given in things such as "AI overviews."

The Cambridge Dictionary defines intelligence as "the ability to learn, understand, and make judgments or have opinions that are based on reason." Because computers do not actually understand anything, they do not have any real intelligence. The term "artificial intelligence" is a misnomer not correctly describing what is going on is so-called AI systems. 

MacCormick boasts about "PhD level performance in physics and chemistry." Nowadays the corruption of scientific literature by AI slop is actually a very bad problem. More and more scientific papers contain AI-generated paragraphs that often contain false statements. Here is what an "AI overview" tells us about this problem:

"The proliferation of 'AI slop'  in scientific papers is recognized as a major crisis in academic publishing. It refers to LLM-generated text, fake datasets, and fabricated citations flooding peer-reviewed journals and preprint servers. The issue is largely driven by a 'publish-or-perish' culture and content mills." 

A recent article by Ross Andersen in The Atlantic is entitled, "Science Is Drowning in AI Slop." 

A Google Gemini infographic on AI slop

MacCormick makes this incorrect claim:

"Computer scientists have known since the 1950s that computer programs can, in principle, emulate any aspect of human thought. This is because the digital calculations inside a computer can emulate the inputs and outputs of the neurons in a human brain."

No, computer scientists have never known any such thing.  There is no robust evidence that the understanding and thought that human minds display are produced by brains. The claim that thoughts and understanding are produced by brains is simply a groundless old speech custom of professors such as MacCormick, similar to the groundless old speech custom of claiming that Charles Darwin explained the origin of species. No biologist has any understanding of how a brain could produce thought or understanding.  There are actually very many good reasons for believing that the brain cannot possibly be the source of the human mind. They include these and very many others:

• the fact that there are many dramatic cases in the medical literature of people who had more or less normal minds even though large fractions of the brain (or most of their brains) were destroyed due to injury or disease, including super-dramatic cases of people with good minds but less than 15 percent of their brains;
• the fact that human brains (all very severely handicapped by a lack of any addresses and indexes, cumulative synaptic delays and unreliable synaptic transmission) are way too slow and way too noisy to explain the wonders of human best mental performances, which include endless wonders of blazing fast calculation, blazing fast precise recall, blazing fast memorization,  and the recitation with perfect accuracy of very long bodies of text consisting of hundreds of pages;  
• the fact that there is no understanding of how brains could achieve the instantaneous recall of distant, obscure memories that humans routinely show, given the lack of any coordinate system or addressing or indexing in a brain that might allow some exact position of a stored memory to be very quickly found;
• the fact that there is no understanding whatsoever of how concepts, visual information, long series of words, and episodic memories could ever be physically stored by a brain in any way that would translate all these diverse types of information into synapse states or neuron states;
• the fact that the microscopic examination of very many thousands of brains of recently deceased people (and the microscopic examination of endless samples of brain tissue extracted from living people) has never produced the slightest trace of learned information, something that would have been discovered in brains 50 years ago if brains stored memories and brains are the source of the human mind;
• the fact that for more than 50 years numerous people have reported vivid near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences occurring after their hearts stopped and their brains were inactive, during times when their brains had flatlined, and they should have had no consciousness at all (under "brains make minds" assumptions), with many of the observation details they reported seeing during such brain-inexplicable should-have-been-utterly-unconscious experiences being independently verified (as described here).

MacCormick's  reasoning is something along the lines that artificial intelligence will be so brilliant that it will make us think that we are nothing very special, and therefore make us more likely to believe in Darwinism, the idea that humans and all other life forms arose because of unguided natural processes. This is all very bad sophistry, a case of utterly fallacious reasoning. Artificial intelligence is the result of deliberate purposeful engineering by humans. Getting an impressive result from deliberate purposeful engineering by humans does nothing to show the credibility of claims that stunning results in biology all occur from accidental unguided processes that do not involve deliberate purposeful engineering.

MacCormick is using fallacious reasoning similar to the appeals to artificial selection long made by Darwinists.  An example of such an appeal is documented in my post here. I describe how Neil deGrasse Tyson described an artificial selection by which human dogs arose from wolves, due to the purposeful intervention of humans over many thousands of years, humans interested in getting domesticated dogs. Tyson used this as evidence of the power of natural evolution, saying it helped show that natural evolution can produce "all the beauty and diversity of life." The reasoning was fallacious. The domestication of dogs was an example of purposeful, deliberately directed artificial selection. You do not do anything to show the power of unguided, undirected natural evolution by showing something that occurred by  purposeful, deliberately directed artificial selection. 

Similarly, you do not do anything at all to substantiate Darwinism (a theory that biological organisms all arose from unguided natural events) by referring to some impressive results coming from so-called artificial intelligence (the result of purposeful engineering by humans). Impressive results coming from AI server farms manufactured by humans do not do anything to show the power of unguided Darwinian evolution to produce impressive results in biology. 

In his article MacCormick makes some of the false claims that occur so commonly in the articles of Darwinists. He states this:

"First, life itself was once thought to have a unique quality that distinguishes it from inanimate matter. This theory, known as vitalism, died out in the early 20th century and today has no scientific credibility. Modern biochemistry has revealed that all life can be explained in terms of physics and chemistry." 

The claim about life having no "unique quality that distinguishes it from inanimate matter" is very false. Life has many qualities that distinguish it from from inanimate matter. The claim that vitalism "died out in the early 20th century" is equally false. Vitalism survived, and still has many adherents.  The claim that "modern biochemistry has revealed that all life can be explained in terms of physics and chemistry" is enormously false. To the contrary, there are endless mysteries of life that physics and chemistry utterly fail to explain. 

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

Next MacCormick parrots the worst falsehood told by Charles Darwin, the claim that there are no qualitative differences between animal minds and human minds. Darwin told that enormous lie on page 99 of The Descent of Man when he stated, "My object in this chapter is to shew that there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties."  MacCormick perpetuates this glaring falsehood by stating this:

"Second, humans were once thought to be qualitatively distinct from nonhuman animals. But since the 19th century, Darwinism has gradually eroded that view."

MacCormick makes the false insinuation that scientists are unanimous in their belief in Darwinism, an insinuation as false as his claim that vitalism went extinct.  He senselessly states "humans must relinquish another supposedly special attribute: the notion that our minds are qualitatively different from other information-processing systems."  As it is perfectly obvious that human minds are in very many ways qualitatively different from all other information-processing systems, I need merely ask: why do Darwinism enthusiasts  continue to make so very many statements like this that are so obviously false?

Instead of computer technology doing something to show the validity of Darwinism, the opposite occurred. What actually happened is that Darwinism flunked the software test. 

There is a way of testing Darwinian claims: by trying to create software that makes use of so-called natural selection and random mutations, trying to achieve software engineering effects by "the preservation and accumulation of successive slight favorable variations," which is how Darwin defined natural selection. When computer programmers started to try this decades ago, some of them were very optimistic. There were quite a few people who thought along these lines:

“Why think of how much natural selection and random mutations have produced in the natural world: all the very complex innovations of biology such as eyes, ears, wings and brains! If we only put natural selection and random mutations to work inside the computer, we can unleash vast forces of creativity. It will be a software revolution. Instead of manually creating programs through human design and human labor, we will be able to evolve software in a Darwinian fashion.”

For decades, many programmers have attempted to get natural selection to work inside the computer. How successful have they been? We can find the answer in a paper by Roman V. Yampolskiy entitled 'Why We Do Not Evolve Software? Analysis of Evolutionary Algorithms.”

Yampolskiy examines attempts to create software by using Darwinian methods. He points out that there is a great deal of hype about such attempts that does not match the meager results. Talking about evolutionary algorithms (EA), Yampolskiy states the following:

"It is interesting to do a thought experiments and try to imagine what testable predictions Charles Darwin would have made, had he made his discovery today, with full knowledge of modern bioinformatics and of computer science. His predictions may have included the following: (1) simulations of evolution will produce statistically similar results at least with respect to complexity of artifacts produced and (2) if running EAs for as long as possible continued to produce nontrivial outputs, scientists would run them forever. Likewise, he would be able to make some predictions, which would be able to falsify his theory, such as (1) representative simulations of evolution will not produce similar results to those observed in nature, (2) researchers will not be able to evolve software or other complex or novel artifacts, and (3) there will not be any projects running EAs long term because their outputs would quickly stop improving and stabilize. With respect to the public and general cultural knowledge, it would be reasonable to predict that educated people would know the longest-running EA and the most complex evolved algorithm. Similarly, even schoolchildren would know the most complex digital organism ever evolved."

Later, after reviewing work in this area, Yampolskiy states that both of the predictions that should have proven true if Darwinism is correct have not proven true. He also states that all of the listed events to falsify Darwinism have occurred. Specifically, representative simulations of evolution have not produced similar results to those observed in nature; researchers have not been able to evolve software or other complex or novel artifacts; and there have not been any projects running evolutionary algorithms long term. Moreover, no one can list the name of the longest-running evolutionary algorithm or the most complex evolutionary algorithm; and no one can name any complex digital organism that ever evolved. "Evolved" here does mean going through purposeful improvements directed by a software development team. 

It is now the year 2026, and the “Darwinian revolution” predicted for software development simply hasn't occurred. Computer programs are still being produced by human design and human labor, and by computer programs that do not use any type of evolutionary algorithm.  There has been some progress in automatic programming by means of code generators, but such code generators don't use anything like so-called natural selection. 

The results of programs running “evolutionary algorithms” are rather trivial things that aren't very complex – things such as character strings. There is no very complex commercially successful computer program that was produced through any type of evolutionary algorithm.  Computer programs using a Darwinian scheme can accomplish some useful things, but it is generally true that such programs could accomplish just as much with fewer lines of code if they were not to use a Darwinian scheme.  Our software engineers have not been able to mine any useful engineering principles from studying the ideas of Darwin, who seems to have had no knowledge of engineering or any interest in it. 

I was a full-time software developer for decades, working for some very large corporations.  I never made use of any Darwinian method while doing software development, and I also never heard of anyone at any company I worked for making use of anything resembling a Darwinian method. I never heard anyone at such companies ever even suggest the possibility of using a Darwinian method.  

A good software developer can probably think rather easily of why a tool such as a random character generator (analogous to Darwinian random mutations) or a random character changer would be worthless in developing useful software products. The reason is that useful software products require very special purposeful arrangements of a huge number of characters, which must be purposefully organized to achieve a useful result.  And it is not true at all that you can do something like accumulate your way to a beneficial result by following methods such as "just save the good characters and discard the bad characters" or "just save the good words and discard the bad words."   That is because being beneficial in not some early-in-the-game attribute possessed individually by tiny things such as characters or words, but a late-in-the-game quality possessed by purposeful organizations of very many tiny things arranged in just the right way to have a beneficial effect. 

Work in so-called artificial intelligence does not involve any type of evolutionary algorithm anything like so-called natural selection.  The truth is that software engineering applied a major test to Darwinism, and Darwinism flunked that test. Darwinian ideas are worthless in generating useful very complex software inventions.  And Darwinist ideas are worthless in explaining the origin of very complex and enormously organized biological systems containing an abundance of interdependent parts. The  reasons why a Darwinian approach fails to work at creating software inventions are largely the same reasons why Darwinism fails as an explanation for biological organisms that are more complex and more organized and more fine-tuned than any software application ever written. 

I may note the glaring  contradiction involved when MacCormick makes the hugely untrue claim that "all life can be explained in terms of physics and chemistry," while also trying to perpetuate the "Darwin explained the origin of species" myth.  Darwin's ideas were appeals to claimed realities of biology, and were neither physics explanations nor chemistry explanations.  In this regard, MacCormick can't get his story straight. We might ask him: so who was it you think explained life -- was it physicists and chemists, or was it instead a biologist (Darwin) who pretty much never mentioned  physics or chemistry? When making such a claim, guys like MacCormick conveniently fail to mention what these "terms of physics and chemistry" are that they claim explain "all life."  That's because they do not know of any such physics or chemistry explanations.  

There are no physics or chemistry explanations that explain the origin of life from nonlife, which cannot be reproduced in any realistic experiment, with all realistic simulations of the early Earth failing to even "get to first base" in explaining the origin of life. There are no physics or chemistry explanations that explain the nine-month progression from a speck-sized zygote to the full complexity of a newly born human being. People attempting chemistry explanations for such a miracle of organization typically appeal to falsehoods such as the untrue claim that DNA is a blueprint for making a human body (DNA and its genes actually fail to even specify how to make any cell in the body and fail to even specify how to make the organelle components of such cells).  There are no credible physics or chemistry or biology explanations for any of the main phenomena of human minds, such as selfhood, thinking, instant memory creation and instant memory recall.  There are not even any physics or chemistry factors that can explain the reproduction of any of the more complex cells in a human body, which are so organized and rich in interdependent components that the reproduction of such a cell is a feat as stupendous as a working automobile splitting up to become two working automobiles. 

Beware of AI slop, and beware of narrow-focus didn't-study-enough professors spitting out materialist slop. 

A silly old answer