When Scientists Speak Inaccurately in Their Zeal to Show Some Theory Is "Beyond Doubt"

There are in academia quite a few highly intelligent thinkers who have widespread doubt about the reliability of most scientific theories. Such thinkers are often philosophers of science. Philosophers of science have often said that most scientific theories are underdetermined. A theory is said to be underdetermined if there is not sufficient evidence to establish its truth. A scientific theory is said to be underdetermined when there are no observations allowing us to tell that such a theory is true rather than other rival theories that can explain observations equally well. Such theories are called “empirical equivalents.” You can find out more about this topic by doing a Google search for “underdetermination of scientific theory.” The article here gives a detailed discussion of the topic.

In many cases, we can readily think of alternate theories to explain the things that a scientific theory was created to explain. For example, we can easily imagine a rival to the theory that man appeared by evolving from lower species : a theory that humanity was specifically introduced to our planet with help from visiting extraterrestrials. In other cases, we may not be able to readily think of a rival theory to a scientific theory. But in such a case there are typically five or ten possible theories that could be imagined by someone willing to expend enough time thinking up alternatives. When we can't think of some rival theory that might be an empirical equivalent to some popular scientific theory, this usually just reflects the weakness of our imagination, not a lack of possible alternatives.

The current theory of the origin of the universe is the Big Bang theory, which postulates that the universe began expanding from an infinitely dense point at a time nearly 14 billion years ago. There are two strong reasons for thinking that the theory is true. The first is that what are called the redshifts of galaxies suggest that the universe is expanding. An expanding universe seems to imply that the universe was once long ago in some state of extremely high density. Another reason for believing in the Big Bang is that it seems to explain something called the cosmic microwave radiation. 

However, like so many other major scientific theories, the Big Bang theory is underdetermined.  We lack any observations that prove the Big Bang theory beyond any doubt. There are also two major reasons why the Big Bang theory fails to be a predictively successful theory. The first reason is rather small: the Big Bang theory does not correctly predict the level of  ⁷Li (one of the isotopes of the element lithium) that now exists in the universe. This is known as the primordial lithium problem. According to the 2024 paper here, "there is still a disparity of ⁷Li abundance overestimated by a factor of ~2.5 when calculated theoretically." Successful scientific theories are supposed to make predictions that "hit the bulls-eye." Being wrong by a factor of 250% is not hitting the bulls-eye, but is instead missing the target entirely. 

A much larger problem is that the Big Bang theory does not actually predict a universe like the universe we live in. It instead predicts a universe that is either 50% matter and 50% antimatter, or a universe that is pure energy. The problem is illustrated in the infographic below. 

Experimenting with very high-speed particle collisions occurring in particle accelerators, scientists observe that when two very high-energy photons collide, they produce equal amounts of matter and antimatter; and they also observe that when matter collides with antimatter, it is converted into high-energy photons. Such collisions are observed in particle accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider, where particles are accelerated to near the speed of light before they collide with each other. But such observations about matter, antimatter and photons leads to a great mystery as to why there is any matter at all in the universe.

Let us imagine the early minutes of the Big Bang about 13 billion years ago, when the density of the universe was incredibly great. At that time the universe should have consisted of energy, matter and antimatter. The energy should have been in the form of very high energy photons that were frequently colliding with each other. All such collisions should have produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter. So the amount of antimatter should have been exactly the same as the amount of matter. As a CERN page on this topic says, "The Big Bang should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter in the early universe." But whenever a matter particle touched an antimatter particle, both would have been converted into photons. The eventual result should have been a universe consisting either of nothing but photons, or some matter but an equal amount of antimatter. But only trace amounts of antimatter are observed in the universe.

It would be incredibly inconvenient if matter and antimatter were equally distributed. So much energy is released when matter makes contact with antimatter that if there were trace amounts of antimatter lying about, you'd have “oops, someone blew up Europe because he stepped on a tiny piece of antimatter” situations all over the place. We know that there is very little antimatter in the universe because of the great rarity of high-energy events observed through telescopes. If there was lots of antimatter in outer space, we would be observing very frequently extremely high-energy events in space; because whenever matter came into contact with antimatter, enormous amounts of energy would be released. 

A scientific paper puts it this way: 

"In theory, a matter [amount] will be immediately annihilated if it meets with its antimatter, leaving nothing unless energy behind, and the amounts of matter with that of antimatter should be created equally in the Big Bang. So, none of us should exist in principle but we are indeed existing."

So the Big Bang theory does not actually predict a universe like ours. It instead predicts a universe that is either half-matter and half antimatter, or a universe with only energy (because all of the matter and antimatter made contact with each other in the early Big Bang, leaving nothing but photons). This shortfall of the Big Bang theory is called the matter-antimatter asymmetry problem or the baryon asymmetry problem. The problem is still unsolved. Do not be fooled by occasional speculative papers that appear claiming to provide a "solution" to such a problem. All such papers will involve extremely wild speculation that no one has verified. 

Another very severe limitation of the Big Bang theory is that it can never be proven true, given what the theory itself describes. The theory says that during the first 300,000 years of the universe's history, the density of matter was so great that all radiation coming from the universe's beginning must have been hopelessly scattered, because of innumerable collisions of particles in a very dense universe. So even though telescopes can in effect "look back in time" by looking at galaxies billions of light years away, there is no hope that telescopic observations will ever allow us to "look back in time" far enough to observe the very beginning of the universe, given the assumptions of the Big Bang theory. 

If our scientists were to honestly describe the Big Bang theory, they would describe it very humbly, saying something like this: 

"The Big Bang theory is our best guess about the universe's beginning, and there are some reasons for believing in it. But the Big Bang theory cannot be the full story. The theory does not actually predict a universe like ours. And we can never prove that the Big Bang actually happened, given the theory's assumptions. The early density was too great to ever observe what happened in the first 300,000 years. "

Instead of honestly speaking in such a way, some scientists have recently been speaking in a very misleading away about the Big Bang theory. For example, on the site The Conversation we have a long article by cosmologist Konstantinos Dimopoulos. It is reprinted on the Science Alert site with the title "The Big Bang is Beyond Doubt. An Expert Reveals Why." But that wasn't the original title of the article, so we can't use that title as evidence of a scientist claiming certainty where there is no certainty. 

However, reading the article we soon find evidence of just such a thing: a scientist claiming certainty where there is no certainty.  For in the article Konstantinos Dimopoulos says this: 

"The 14 billion year story of our universe begins with a cataclysmic explosion everywhere in space, which we call the Big Bang. That much is beyond reasonable doubt." 

No, such a thing certainly can be reasonably doubted, because no one ever directly observed such a thing, and also the Big Bang has two predictive failures, one of which is fairly small (the failure to correctly predict the abundance of one lithium isotope), and the other one extremely gigantic (the failure to predict a universe like ours, in which matter is very many times more abundant than antimatter). 

What does Dimopoulos say about the matter-antimatter asymmetry problem? He fails to even mention it. He does not even use the word "antimatter." He also fails to mention the problem that the Big Bang theory fails to correctly predict the level of  ⁷Li (one of the isotopes of the element lithium) that now exists in the universe. He says only one thing about predictions, and it is a very false claim. Referring to the theory of primordial cosmic inflation, a kind of offshoot of the Big Bang theory, he claims, "Precision observations of the cosmic microwave background in recent decades have spectacularly confirmed the predictions of inflation." No, that isn't true at all.

The theory of primordial cosmic inflation is actually a large family of theories, consisting of hundreds or dozens of theories. Each one of these theories can predict any of a million different things, based on what you supply as input parameters to the equations of the theory. The result is that the predictions of the theory of primordial cosmic inflation are "all over the map," as some cosmologists have confessed. The main prediction of cosmic inflation theories has been that there would be observed something called primordial b-modes. Huge amounts of money have been spent looking for such primordial b-modes, without any success. 

Dimopoulos has erred.  He has claimed that the basic idea of the Big Bang theory is "beyond reasonable doubt," but it is no such thing. He has claimed predictive success for a "cosmic inflation" offshoot of the Big Bang, a success that never occurred because there are so many versions of such a "cosmic inflation" theory that its predictions are all over the map (and because the primordial b-modes predicted by the theory were never found).  Dimopoulos has also ignored two predictive failures of the Big Bang theory (one very gigantic), which together mean that we have no warrant for claiming that the Big Bang theory is "beyond reasonable doubt." 

As bad as the misstatements by Dimopoulos are, they are nowhere near as bad as the grotesque fiction stated by astrophysicist Pablo G. Pérez González. He makes this huge misstatement:

"The first three minutes of the universe determined the current composition of the universe, along with all of its subsequent evolution. In other words, what we are today — everything that exists, everything that will exist, everything that does not exist and will not exist — was decided in just three minutes!"

Nonsense. Nothing that happened during the Big Bang did anything to guarantee that life and humans would one day exist. No one observing the first three minutes of the Big Bang would ever predict that the results billions of years later would one day include living things or beings as intelligent as humans. To the contrary, what they would predict from observing the first three minutes of the Big Bang is either a universe with 50% matter and 50% antimatter (which would be uninhabitable), or a universe in which all of the matter had combined with antimatter, leaving only energy photons left (which would be even more uninhabitable). 

What does Gonzalez say about this central problem with the Big Bang theory? Nothing at all. He does not even use the word "antimatter." 

There is a lesson to be learned here. The lesson is:  when a theory beloved by scientists has not been proven and when the theory has some gigantic problem that has not been resolved, scientists may speak as if so huge a problem does not even exist, and falsely claim that the theory is "beyond reasonable doubt" or "beyond doubt." It seems that scientists are very good about ignoring "the elephant in the room." 

Goofs When She "Chucksplained" Homosexuality

 The English word "mansplaining" means to attempt to explain something to someone, typically a woman, in a manner regarded as condescending or patronizing, typically in a way that is unconvincing. I can coin a similar term: the term "chucksplaining." Chucksplaining can be defined as to attempt to explain something using Darwinist assumptions, typically in a way that is unconvincing. "Chuck" is a nickname for Charles, and Charles Darwin was the father of Darwinist thought. 

We had an example of chucksplaining in a recent post at the Daily Kos site, a post you can read here. It is a post entitled "Evolutionary Biology-Homosexuality as Necessary Species Adaptation." The author (a user with the user name of FarWestGirl) attempts to explain the existence of homosexuality. The existence of homosexuality has always been one of many thorns in the side of Darwinists, because explaining the phenomenon is very challenging under Darwinist assumptions. 

Darwinism is centered around the idea that evolution slowly increases the prevalence of traits which tend to increase an organism's likelihood to survive until reproduction (and also the likelihood of the organism's reproduction). So suppose there were two genes (or set of genes) in different organisms of a species, one which caused very strong sexual interest, and another which caused complete lack of sexual interest. According to conventional evolutionary theory, the first gene (or set of genes) would cause more reproduction, which would cause the gene (or set of genes) to become more and more common (all other things being equal), as the gene (or set of genes) was inherited more and more often; but the second gene (or set of genes) would cause less reproduction, which would cause the gene (or set of genes) to become less and less common, because the gene (or set of genes) would be inherited much less frequently.

How, then, can we account for homosexuality using such principles? Surveys indicate that between about 2% and 6% of the population are gay or bisexual. Given that very many gay people would never answer “Yes” when asked if they are gay, the actual percentage may be even higher.

Today homosexuality is generally believed to be an inherent tendency, not a choice; so under Darwinist assumptions we have little choice but to assume that homosexuality has a strong genetic component. It has been estimated that homosexuals reproduce at only 20 percent of the rate that heterosexuals reproduce. It would seem that a straightforward calculation using Darwinian conventions lead us to the conclusion that homosexuality should have died out long ago. Whatever genetic basis might be behind homosexuality should have become less and less common, because of the vastly lower reproduction rate of homosexuals. It would seem, therefore, under Darwinist assumptions that homosexuality shouldn't exist, at least not in its current prevalence of perhaps 5% of the population.

Biologist J.B.S. Haldane imagined a case in which 99.9 percent of the population had one gene, and only .1 percent of the population had a second gene. If there was some reason why the second gene was 1% more likely to be inherited, then within 4000 generations, things would completely switch around so that 99.9 percent of the people would end up with the second gene, and only .1 percent would end up with the first gene. The example illustrates how strongly evolution tends to get rid of genes that are less likely to be passed on to descendants.

So how can we account for homosexuality under conventional Darwinian assumptions? Some theories have been suggested, but they haven't been very convincing.

Just like all the other Darwinists trying to explain homosexuality, the Daily Kos writer FarWestGirl flounders. Referring to homosexuals, she offers this explanation:

"If 10 to 20% of the group had little or no interest in the type of activity that results in offspring, the benefits to the group’s long term survival are threefold- fewer children born for the tribe to support, so decreased competition for resources, more adults contributing to the support of the offspring that are produced- a concentration of resources, increasing the per capita survival rate for offspring significantly. And finally, it prolongs the time it takes to overpopulate an otherwise desirable territory."

This reasoning makes no sense. It is an attempt to convince us that if a population has fewer children, that would be beneficial for the population's survival prospects. The opposite is the truth. The more offspring produced by a population, the higher its survival prospects. 

Notice the "heads I win, tails you lose" kind of reasoning here. I guess it kind of works like this: if something in biology increases the reproduction rate of a species, the theorist says that was an adaption caused by evolution; and if something in biology decreases the reproduction rate of a species, the theorist also says that was  caused by evolution, to prevent overpopulation problems. (What is being imagined here: a wise old Mother Evolution with powers of foresight?)  Similarly,  evolutionary biologists offer so-called natural selection as their explanation of enormous bursts of rapid biological innovation such as the Cambrian Explosion. But when you point out all the species which have not changed in eons, they make opposite-sounding statements such as the statement by one evolutionary biologist that "there is no evidence that natural selection is in relentless pursuit of more complex molecules, cells, or organisms."  

Although the DailyKos writer (FarWestGirl) does not use the term "group selection," it is just such a concept she is appealing to. There is an internal war within evolutionary biology over whether group selection is a credible concept. That war is described in the wikipedia.org article on group selection, which you can read here. That article notes, "The vast majority of behavioural biologists have not been convinced by renewed attempts to revisit group selection as a plausible mechanism of evolution."'

The average person may be surprised to hear of so bitter a fight within evolutionary biology over the existence or nonexistence of group selection.  He may say, "Huh? These are the guys always boasting about their consensus!"

Along the way in her attempted explanation, the Daily Kos writer repeats one of the worst false claims of Darwinists: the myth that DNA or its genes specify anatomy and behavior traits.  She repeats that myth when she says, "In straightforward genetics the genome is contained in our DNA, it’s the code book or template for development and maintenance of the organism." She repeats that falsehood when she states things like this: "So our genome, our DNA, codes for hands with four fingers and a thumb," No, our genome (our DNA) does not do any such thing as coding for our hands (that is, specifying the structure of our hands).  DNA does not contain any anatomy specifications. DNA and its genes only contain low-level chemical information such as which amino acids make up a protein. DNA and its genes (the genome) is not a blueprint, recipe, program or template for the building of a body, and is not "a  template for development and maintenance of the organism." 

The reason why Darwinists keep on repeating the appalling lie that DNA is a specification for building bodies is explained in my widely read post "Why We Were Told So Often the Huge Lie That DNA Is a Specification for Building Humans," which you can read here. In that post I quote more than 40 scientists, doctors and PhD's who all deny that DNA and its genes are any such thing as a blueprint, program or recipe for building a human body. By claiming that "our genome, our DNA, codes for hands with four fingers and a thumb," the DailyKos writer FarWestGirl  has repeated one of the worst "old wives' tales" of Darwinist literature, a groundless myth that Darwinists keep senselessly repeating, even though many authorities have pointed out its untruth. 

Once we realize the truth about DNA, genomes and genes, any Darwinist explanation of homosexuality becomes all the more obviously untenable. The truth is that very few of the instinctive behaviors of organisms can be explained using genetic or Darwinist explanations. DNA and its genes do not specify the anatomy of organisms, and also do not specify high-level behaviors or mental capabilities of organisms. So no credible story of the origin of the human race can be centered around the idea of a gradual accumulation of random beneficial changes in an organism's DNA, genome or genes. 

Sexual attraction is an example of an instinct. As I discuss in my post of five years ago "A Soul Might Explain Instincts, but DNA and Brains Cannot," the world of biology is full of all kinds of astonishing instincts, which are very often beyond any credible explanation involving brains or genes.  Given how DNA and its genes specify merely low-level chemical information, we can imagine no credible genetic explanation why some humans would be sexually attracted to their own sex rather than the opposite sex. Attempts at neural explanations of instinct are in general unbelievable, particularly given that the most astonishing examples of instinct often are seen in insects with the tiniest brains.  Commenting on the failure of evolutionary explanations for how there arose instincts, the physician Gustave Geley put it this way:

"It is well known that the instincts of animals are as innumerable as they are marvellous... Thanks to instinct, an animal of any given species always acts conformably to the genius of its kind, sometimes in a very complex manner, for attack, defence, subsistence, reproduction, and so forth. The essential instinct is identical in all the individuals of the same species, and seems as refractory to variation as the species itself. For each species it constitutes a psychical characteristic as well defined as the physical. Now the origin of instincts is no more explicable by natural selection or by the influence of the environment than the formation of species. This can be best observed in the insect."

Geley was referring to wonders of instinct such as the hive building of honeybees and the most astonishing and extraordinarily complex multi-stage migration instincts of the monarch butterfly, involving a 4000-mile annual migration divided up among four generations. An account of that migration (one of nature's most stupendous wonders) can be read here. 

We might move towards a credible-sounding speculation of why homosexuality exists by using that old computer programmer's phrase, "It's not a bug -- it's a feature" (a term meaning that what you thought was a defect was something deliberately put in the program).  Homosexuality is so widespread that we can reasonably suspect that it is an intended feature of our world, a part of the Grand Design for planet Earth and the spiritual journey of some of its inhabitants. 

A reasonable speculation is that part of the reason we are here on this troubled planet is so that we can face a variety of difficult challenges.  Why we would benefit from facing such challenges is a tough question, but part of the answer might be that there is no glory in doing easy things, but only glory in doing hard things.  So maybe we are here partly to win eternal glory for ourselves, by undergoing many hard and difficult challenges. Such challenges may come in a thousand different forms. One of those challenges might be living as a member of a minority group in a society in which your minority is unliked or maybe even despised. Those who face such a challenge may win special glory for themselves that they will enjoy in some afterlife that follows this life. 

That may be part of the reason there are things such as different sexual orientations and different skin colors and different levels of physical and mental fitness -- because it is part of the Grand Plan that some people may face the challenge of living despite disadvantages or living as a member of a disliked or hated minority, a challenge that may have an eventual payoff (within an afterlife) exceeding the earthly pain endured. Or there may be any number of reasons why people might (in the long run of eternity) benefit from undergoing any of a thousand types of difficult challenges here on Earth, with living as a member of an unliked minority being only one of very many types of such challenges. 

The Greatest Examples of Photographic Memory

So-called neural signals travel across synapses, which are as abundant in the brain as stop signs and traffic lights in the city of New York (much more abundant, actually). The great majority of synapses in the brain are chemical synapses, and chemical synapses in the brain do not even reliably transmit signals. Scientific papers say that each time a signal is transmitted across a chemical synapse, it is transmitted with a reliability of 50% or less.  (A paper states, "Several recent studies have documented the unreliability of central nervous system synapses: typically, a postsynaptic response is produced less than half of the time when a presynaptic nerve impulse arrives at a synapse." Another scientific paper says, "In the cortex, individual synapses seem to be extremely unreliable: the probability of transmitter release in response to a single action potential can be as low as 0.1 or lower.")  So the more examples we have of prodigious human memory skills (memory so powerful it might be called photographic memory), the stronger is the case against the claim that memory is caused by brains -- particularly given the lack of any credible detailed theory of how a brain could instantly store or instantly retrieve memories.  The more evidence we have of very accurate and very capacious learning and recall (what a computer expert might call high-speed high-throughput retrieval), the stronger is the evidence against the claim that memory recall occurs from brain activity. 

Photographic memory

The cases that we have of such very fast and reliable and capacious learning and recall are very many, including these:

• A newspaper account states, "That Italian prodigy of learning, Ignatius de Rosal, made the boast that if any one could repeat a line from any of the four great poets of Italy he would follow it by reciting 100 lines following in due order of succession, and on a trial being made be actually accomplished the feat."

• A subject ND was tested using "randomly selected calendars from the last 300 years with the help of a computer program," being asked  the "weekdays of randomly selected calendar dates."  He "correctly answered all questions with a mean delay of 1 s [one second]" which means he instantly answered correctly all the questions such as which day of the week was October 23, 1745.  The patient reported that he did not do any calculations in his mind, a claim consistent with photographic memory of calendar images. 
• Below is a quote from page 53 of the book The Mind and Beyond published by Time-Life Books: "As reported in the 1990 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records, in 1967, one Mehmed Ali Halici of Turkey recited from memory 6,666 verses of the Koran in six hours. And in 1989, Englishman Tony Power memorized in correct order a random sequence of thirteen packs of shuffled playing cards – 676 cards in all – after looking at them only once. But the world record for a single eidetic memory feat may be held by Bhandanta Vicitasara of Rangoon, Burma who in 1974 correctly recited from memory 16,000 pages of Buddhist canonical texts."  Mehmed Ali Halici's recitation rate was so fast it was faster than a normal person speaking as fast as he can.

• Steven Wiltshire has repeatedly shown the ability to accurately draw an entire skyline after seeing it only one time. 

• Describing both high recall capacity and very quick speed of recall, a 1914 newspaper account tells us that the boy Cleo Smith of Denver, Colorado "has accomplished the unbelievable task of being able to give from memory—'right off the reel'—the population of all the cities in the world having more than 90,000. the names of all the capital cities of the world, giving their altitudes; the population of every county seat in the United States; the altitude of every city in the United States, and of every mountain peak in the world; the number of miles of railroad in each state in the United States and in every country in the world; the number of farms in every state; the population of every city of more than 100,000, both in the United States and Canada; the length of every principal river in the world; the population of every country in the world; the foreign population in every city and in every state, telling the number of Indians, Chinese, Japanese, etc.; the total number of foreigners in every state; the number of counties in each state; the date of admission to the Union of every state; the number of manufactories in every state and in Canada, and in every principal city in the United States."

• Mathematician and computer scientist Herman Goldstine wrote this about the legendary mathematician John von Neumann: "One of his remarkable abilities was his power of absolute recall. As far as I could tell, von Neumann was able on once reading a book or article to quote it back verbatim; moreover, he could do it years later without hesitation."

• According to an article in the LA Times, Kim Peek could recall the contents of 12,000 books he had read, even though his brain was severely damaged, and he lacked most or all of the corpus callosum fibers that connect the two hemispheres of the brain. 

• Stephen Powelson of Amherst, USA memorized 14,800 lines of the Iliad, almost the entirety of this work of 15,693 lines.

• According to one book, "John Fuller, a land agent, of the county of Norfolk, could correctly write out a sermon or lecture after hearing it once; and one, Robert Dillon, could, in the morning, repeat six columns of a newspaper which he had read the preceding evening. More wonderful still was George Watson, who... could tell the date of every day since his childhood and how he had occupied himself on that day."

• The mathematician Leonhard Euler could recite the entire Aeneid from beginning to end, a work of 9896 lines.  Another mathematician (Alexander Aitken) also memorized the whole Aeneid, and could recite the first 1000 digits of pi. 

• Between age 59 and age 67 a person memorized all 10,565 lines of Milton's Paradise Lost, recalling the entire work over a three-day period.

• A scientific paper says, "Rajan S. Mahadevan ...was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records (McWhirter, 1983) for reciting pi to 31,811 places."  The same paper says that after about three minutes of study Rajan can perfectly recall all numbers in a grid of 50 random numbers, recalling not just the numbers but also their positions in the grid. The newspaper article here tells us all about this person. The article notes that in 1987, Mahadevan's record was broken by Hideaki Tomoyori of Japan, who recited pi to 40,000 decimal places. 

• Solomon Shereshevsky was called "S" in the book The Mind of a Mnemonist by Alexander Romanovitch Luria. A scientific paper says this about Shereshevsky: "According to Luria, Shereshevsky could' 'easily remember any number of words and digits' and 'equally easily he memorizes whole pages from books on any subject and in any language.'  He could accurately quote information from a decade earlier, including tables of numbers and strings of nonsense words....What Luria learned was that Shereshevsky’s memory differed from that of the vast majority of individuals; time did not erode his memories. Neither did a new stimulus affect his memory of an earlier one." On page 17 of Luria' s book we are told that when asked to memorize a table of 50 random single-digit numbers, Shereshevsky reproduced the table perfectly, in 40 seconds, after only three minutes of studying it.

• Mezzofanti could speak very well thirty different languages. 

• A four-year-old girl demonstrated on TV her ability to speak seven different languages. 

• An article in the New Yorker describing such people is entitled "The Mystery of People Who Speak Dozens of Languages." We read about Luis Miguel Rojas-Berscia, who can supposedly speak "fluently" 13 languages, while having a "command" of 22 languages. We read of "Corentin Bourdeau, a young French linguist whose eleven languages include Wolof, Farsi, and Finnish; and Emanuele Marini, a shy Italian in his forties, who runs an export-import business and speaks almost every Slavic and Romance language, plus Arabic, Turkish, and Greek, for a total of nearly thirty."

• A scientific paper refers to: "Rasmus Kristian Rask, who is believed to speak 25 languages and can read in 35 languages," and also says that "Professor Andrew Cohen, an expert on learning strategies in the field of second language acquisition (SLA), is also an authentic hyperpolyglot who is proficient in 13 foreign languages including Chinese through self-study. "

• According to the scientific paper here, "The record for memorizing the sequence of cards in shuffled deck of 52 playing cards was two minutes in 1993 and is now 12.74 seconds by Shijir-Erdene Bat-Enkh set in 2018."

• Numerous Muslim scholars have memorized all 6000+ lines of their holy book, and some did this as early as age 10. 

• According to a book, "The great thinker, Pascal, is said never to have forgotten anything he had ever known or read, and the same is told of Hugo, Grotius, Liebnitz, and Euler. All knew the whole of Virgil's 'Aeneid' by heart." 

• A 1902 newspaper story said that Professor Asa Gray claimed to be able to name 25,000 types of plants. It also says that thousands of Hindu Brahmins have memorized 10,000 verses of the Rig Veda. 

• The famous conductor Toscanini was able to keep conducting despite bad eyesight, because he had memorized the musical scores of a very large number of symphonies and operas. According to the 1920 newspaper article here, he had so well-memorized 150 opera scores that he "never even glances at a score when conducting." At the site here, we read this about Toscanini: "It is believed that he conducted 117 operas and 480 concert pieces by memory, both during rehearsals and concerts." An average opera is hours in length. The Encyclopedia Britannica article on Toscanini says, "His phenomenal memory stood him in good stead when, suffering from poor eyesight, he was obliged always to conduct from memory."

• It has been estimated that the Babylonian Talmud contains roughly 1,860,131 words. According to page 4 of the document here, "Stromeyer mentions Luria’s famous mnemonist and the case of the 'Shass Pollaks,' who memorized all 12 volumes of the Babylonian Talmud, and Oliver Sacks has reported a similar case of a person who among other things knew by heart all 9 volumes and 6000 pages of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians."

• According to a book, a waiter in San Francisco could recall exactly what any customer had previously ordered, even if the customer had not visited the restaurant in years. 

• Placido Domingo memorized 151 singing roles in French, German, English, Spanish, Russian and Italian, including many long opera roles. 

• Salvatore Baccaloni memorized 168 opera roles. George Vogan de Arrezo memorized the entire text of Virgil's Aeneid (consisting of 9,896 lines). Aitken and JB  performed similar feats when they memorized epic poems of about 10,000 lines. Leste May Williams memorized 12,000 verses of the Bible, including the entire New Testament. The New Testament has about 180,000 words, so the feat of Leste May Williams would seem to be far more impressive than the memorization of Virgil's Aeneid, which has only 63,719 words. The same feat of memorizing the New Testament was achieved by a male minister (Henry M. Halley).

• While still a very young child, Gertie Cochran did years of public displays in which she showed the most astonishing ability to recall facts. Some reports claimed she never forgot anything she had read or heard. 

• A news article claimed that a young man named Terry working at Harvard could recognize 10,000 faces.  This is twice as good face recognition as the average person, since according to an article in the journal Science, the average person can recognize 5,000 faces. The paper here tested 25 random subjects, and estimated that the face recognition per person varied between 1000 and 10,000, the latter matching the face recognition ability attributed to Terry. 

• According to a page on Guinness Book of World Records, "The most decimal places of Pi memorised is 70,000, and was achieved by Rajveer Meena (India) at the VIT University, Vellore, India, on 21 March 2015."

• The artist Franco Magnani (famed as "the Memory Artist") was able to draw "photographically accurate" drawings of his hometown that he had not seen in more than 30 years. 

• G. C. Leland says: " It is recorded of a Slavonian Oriental Sect called the Bogomiles, which spread over Europe during the middle ages, that its members were required to memorize the Bible verbatim. Their latest historian, Dragomanoff, declares that there were none of them who did not memorize the New Testament at least; one of their bishops publicly proclaimed that, in his own diocese of four thousand communicants, there was not one unable to repeat the entire scriptures without an error." 

• Akira Haraguchi was able to recite correctly from memory 100,000 digits of pi in 16 hours, in a filmed public exhibition. 

• Zafrullah Khan recited to a newspaper reporter 28 different roads he had taken and all the places they had passed through, while describing a long auto trip he took in 1954, just as if he had a photographic memory of a map of the very complex route.

• The scholar and librarian Antonio Magliabechi of Florence, Italy was legendary for his memory.  According to the source here, " He not only knew all the volumes in the library, as well as every other possible work, but could also tell the page and paragraph in which any passage occurred."  The wikipedia.org article on him says, "Many stories are told of his marvelous memory that was 'like wax to receive and marble to retain.' "

• According to the page here, Pericles Diamandi was able to memorize 50 random digits in 7 minutes, 100 random digits in 25 minutes, and 200 random digits in 2 hours and 15 minutes. On that page, we are told Diamandi repeated the sequence of 200 random digits without any error.

• The fascinating 47-minute video here "The Boy Who Can't Forget" documents cases of Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM), also called hyperthymesia.  According to the article here a scientist named McGaugh "is adamant that the super memory demonstrated by the small number of people he and others have identified represents a genuine phenomenon." People with such a Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (including Jill Price and Aureilien Hayman) can recall what happened to them every day in the past ten years. You can read all about the case of Jill Price here. Her case is documented in the scientific paper here, which includes details of tests demonstrating her exceptionally powerful recall of events occurring over a 24-year period, recall very much greater than 99% of the population. 

•  A 2022 paper here is entitled "Individuals with highly superior autobiographical memory do not show enhanced creative thinking." The paper gave a Random Dates Quiz to 14 subjects with  Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM).  We are told this: "Participants were asked to retrieve the date of a given significant public (national or international) event (e.g., 'Please give the day of the week and precise date with day, month and year of when Federica Pellegrini, the famous Italian swimmer, won the gold medal at the Olympic game in Beijing'); the remaining fifteen questions requested participants to associate a given date with a highly significant public event (e.g., 'What happened on the 25th of June 2009?')."  The 14 subjects with  Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM) scored 25 times better on this Random Dates Quiz than a dozen control subjects. The paper verifies that some people have memory about the past that is radically superior to that of the average person.  

• A book tells us this: "The geographer Maretus, narrates an instance of memory probably  unequalled. He actually witnessed the feat, and had it attested by four Venetian nobles. He met in Padua, a young Corsican who had so powerful a memory that he could repeat as many as 36,000 words read over to him only once. Maretus, desiring to test this extraordinary youth, in the presence of his friends, read over to him an almost interminable list of words strung together anyhow in every language, and some mere gibberish. The audience was exhausted before the list, which had been written down for the sake of accuracy, and at the end of it the young Corsican smilingly began and repeated the entire list without a break and without a mistake. Then to show his remarkable power, he went over it backward, then every alternate word, first and fifth, and so on until his hearers were thoroughly exhausted, and had no hesitation in certifying that the memory of this individual was without a rival in the world, ancient or modern." 

• Encyclopedia.com refers to the "miraculous photographic memory" of Thomas Babington Macaulay. 

• According to an article on bbc.com, "Ask Nima Veiseh what he was doing for any day in the past 15 years, however, and he will give you the minutiae of the weather, what he was wearing, or even what side of the train he was sitting on his journey to work."

• Derek Paravicini was born 25 weeks early, with severe brain damage, but he has reliably demonstrated countless times the ability to very accurately play back on a keyboard any song that is played to him, note for note, even if he has never heard the song before. 

• A child (identified only as "Prodigy 1" in the paper here) was born seven weeks early, but still has a working memory in the 99.9 percentile, and "reproduced complicated musical pieces such as The Entertainer after only one or two hearings at age four," eventually scoring 149 on a test of nonverbal IQ. 

• The paper "The Possibility of Eidetic Memory in a Patient Report of Epileptogenic Zone in Right Temporo-Parietal-Occipital Cortex" reports the astonishing of a young woman with very severe and unmanageable epilepsy who has a photographic memory despite suffering from frequent seizures. We read this: "This research protocol instead of using short word lists used 300 paired associates. Interestingly, the patient’s recall was at 99% (298 out of 300). The task itself involved being asked to study a list of word pairs and then were later cued with one word from each pair, selected at random. The patient was then instructed to vocalize the partner of each cue word."  For comparison, you can look at the result here, in which 28 ordinary subjects were asked to memorize 218 word pairs, and were only able to identify an average of about 35 words given one item from the pair. 

• A nineteenth century work describes an ability in a prodigy known as Blind Tom: "The doctor then called for some one of the audience to come and play a piece of music for the first  time in Tom's hearing, promising a very faithful imitation ; Miss Jones was persuaded to play a piece of her own composition, and hence unknown to Tom and the audience....When the lady was through and escorted from the stage, Tom sat down and played it through perfectly. " The next page states, "Tom executes some of the most difficult pieces of Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Bach, Gottschalk, Thalberg and others, and these he learnt by hearing them played."

• According to a page on the site of the Guinness Book of World Records, "The fastest time to memorize and recall a deck of playing cards is 13.96 seconds, achieved by Zou Lujian (China) at the 2017 World Memory Championships held in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, China, on 6-8 December 2017." Memorization speeds this fast utterly discredit claims that learning occurs by synapse strengthening, which would require the synthesis of new proteins, something which would require many minutes. 

• Page 158 of the document here quotes a 19th century newspaper report told of a young girl (Ethel Carroll) with exceptional memory: "The first time that the child showed her phenomenal gift was at the age of eleven months. At that time she was taken to see one of Hoyt's plays at the Macdonough Theatre. Upon returning to her home she surprised every one by repeating, word for word, one of the popular songs. From that time until now little Ethel has been a regular playgoer. Now, at the age of four, her memory has developed so remarkably that it is a common thing for her after seeing a new play to sing, without a mistake or the least sign of hesitation, song after song that she had never heard before. She can also repeat the lines of the play with wonderful correctness. The child has a retentive memory for names and dates. In spite of the fact that large numbers of people see her daily, drawn by curiosity, she never forgets the name of any one who is introduced to her, and can tell even the exact day when she first met them, though it may be months after. Recently her wonderful memory was put to a severe test at a concert recital in Oakland. After the performance she was asked if she remembered a certain recitation on the programme, remarkable alike for its length and peculiar phrasing. She had never heard it before, but with a confident smile and a certain enchanting carelessness of manner she recited the entire piece without a break."   

• Ryu Song I was able to recall 4620 decimal numbers memorized in an hour-long  period (WMSC World Championship 2019). 

• A scientific paper tells us this about the autistic savant Daniel Tammet:  "DT [Daniel Tammet] speaks 10 languages, including Estonian and Finnish, has invented his own language (Manti) and learnt Spanish in one weekend... As mentioned earlier, as part of a formal competition he recited Pi to 22,514 decimal paces, earning the title of European champion."

• In the paper "Remarkable Cases of Memory" by W.D. Henkle in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 5, No. 1 (January, 1871), we read many accounts of people with memories far greater than that of the average man. The paper documents the most extraordinary memory and math ability in the subject Daniel McCartney. Quizzing him with many randomly selected dates from the past twenty years, Henkle asked McCartney about his personal recollections about what day of the week it was on each of the randomly selected days, along with anything he remembered about public events on such days. There was apparently a stenographer present to record his exact words. McCartney gave almost exactly the same answers (using different words) when asked the questions on two different days, although he was not told that he would be asked about the dates the second time. Giving the same answers is strong evidence that McCartney had HSAM or Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory, in which a person can remember details of what he was doing almost every day in his adult life. Henkle verified that the days of the week McCartney gave were correct, as were the recollections of public events (such recollections being almost perfectly accurate). Henkle also verified that McCartney had astonishing math calculation abilities, such as being able to instantly state the correct sum of 26, 67, 43, 38, 54, 62, 87, 65, 53, 44, 77, 33, 84, 56 and 14.  McCartney also seemed to have something like a photographic memory, because when asked about what are the borders of Tennessee, he correctly answered, "It is bounded on the north by Kentucky and a small part of Virginia, on the east by North Carolina, on the southeast by Georgia, on the south by Alabama and Mississippi, and on the west by Arkansas and a small portion of Missouri."  For a longer summary of the case see here. 

•  Katie Kermode was able to recall the names of 224 previously unseen people from their images, having had only 15 minutes to memorize their names (IAM World Championship 2018). Similarly, the scientific paper here says someone identified as SM1 "memorized 215 German names to the corresponding faces within 15 minutes at the Memoriad in 2015 in Istanbul." (The paper stated that the super-memorizers it studied did not have increased hippocampal volumes.) Several Mongolian or Chinese contestants were able to recall the names of more than 600 previously unseen people from their images, having had only 15 minutes to memorize their names (2021 World Memory Championships). 

•  Kim Su Rim memorized 2530 cards in 60 minutes.  

• Munkhshur NARMANDAK memorized 981 cards in five minutes, and several others memorized more than 600 cards in five minutes. 

• Tenuun Tamir and several other Mongolian or Chinese contestants were able to recall more than 600 decimal digits that had been read at a rate of one per second. 

•  Wei Quinru was able to recall 642 digits memorized in a 5-minute period (Korea Open Memory Championship 2024). Four  people were able to each recall more than 800 digits memorized in a 5-minute period (2021 World Memory Championships).

• Six competitors in 2021 were able to recall more than 600 binary digits memorized in a 30-minute period. Ryu Song I was able to recall 7485 binary numbers memorized in a 30-minute period (WMSC World Championship 2019).
• It was reported in the scientific paper here that two twins  "can recall almost any day and state accurately whether it was cloudy, sunny or rainy," and that one could instantly tell the day of the week for any given day in the past 500 years. 
• The page here tells this of someone with exceptional biographical memory: "It is only necessary to mention to him the name of any prominent personage in early or ancient history, and out there flows in a steady, unhesitating stream a full and detailed account of his birth, life, and death."
• According to a scientific paper, a subject called SM1 "memorized 215 German names to the corresponding faces within 15 minutes at the Memoriad in 2015 in Istanbul."

Accounts such as these are a "thorn in the side" for neuroscientists claiming that memory is a brain phenomenon. Such accounts seem to document memory abilities so fast and so efficient and so voluminous that they destroy the credibility of any explanation involving our  noisy, signal-mangling brains built from proteins that keep being replaced every few weeks -- brains that are relatively slow because of a variety of signal-slowing factors such as the relatively slow transmission speed of dendrites and the very large cumulative slowing factor of synaptic delays.  

So what do you do if you are a neuroscientist trying to account for cases such as these? You may employ a series of misleading tricks that have the purpose of making people misunderstand how good human memory capabilities are. It is just such tricks that are used by neuroscientist Dean Burnett in a long recent article that has the untrue title "Experts no longer believe in photographic memory. Here's what convinced them." The truth is that the capability in some people of photographic memory (correctly defined as being able to remember visual details roughly as well as if you had a photograph in front of you) is a well-established fact, as many of the examples above show. 

Burnett's first misleading trick is to incorrectly define photographic memory. He attempts to define it like this:

"A photographic memory is generally assumed to be the ability to remember, well, everything. If you’ve perceived or experienced something, you can remember it, no matter how much later, with 100 per cent accuracy."

No, that is not a correct definition of photographic memory. A photographic memory is typically defined as simply the ability to remember something you saw in very great detail, about as well as if you had a photograph in front of you. 

For example, a wikipedia.org article says this: "Eidetic memory (/aɪˈdɛtɪk/ eye-DET-ik), also known as photographic memory and total recall, is the ability to recall an image from memory with high precision—at least for a brief period of time—after seeing it only once and without using a mnemonic device. Although the terms eidetic memory and photographic memory are popularly used interchangeably, they are also distinguished, with eidetic memory referring to the ability to see an object for a few minutes after it is no longer present and photographic memory referring to the ability to recall pages of text or numbers, or similar, in great detail." Later the same article states the utterly false claim that "true photographic memory has never been demonstrated to exist." It certainly has been demonstrated many times that photographic memory (defined as the same article does) has existed in many people, as quite a few of the items in my bullet list show. The wikipedia.org site is notorious for its frequent inaccuracies whenever it deals with extraordinary human abilities. 

The misleading trick Burnett has used (defining photographic memory as if it meant absolutely perfect memory) is what we can call the trick of straw-man definition. It is the trick of defining something in some very extreme way, using a definition that no believer in that thing would use. The "straw man" fallacy is one of the major fallacies of reasoning, one in which you define your opponent's view in some distorted way that is a misleading caricature. 

Burnett's use of a straw-man definition of photographic memory is like the trick someone might make if he does not want you to believe in global warming, so he then defines global warming as "the idea that our planet is burning up and will very soon become a lifeless cinder." That is not the correct definition of global warming, just as Burnett's description of absolutely perfect memory is not a correct definition of photographic memory. 

Burnett also performs the misleading trick of claiming that "according to established science, there's no such thing as a photographic memory." This is a bogus appeal. No such thing is a fact established by science. To the contrary, we have many good cases in the literature of photographic memory. And Burnett himself cites one:  the case of Stephen Wiltshire, who was able to draw the entire Mexico City skyline after a helicopter trip. 

The trick of saying "according to established science, there is no such thing as" such and such a thing is a rhetorical trick we should hold in contempt. Typically the claim is made without anything cited to back up the claim, which is what goes on in Burnett's article. Of course, you in general cannot provide scientific evidence showing there is no such thing as X or Y. Science can generally only establish the existence of things, not their nonexistence. 

We should laugh hard at Burnett when he refers to exceptional memory described as photographic, and says, "In fact, what we understand about how the brain works suggests it shouldn’t be neurologically possible."  Exactly the same argument could be used with equal force to try to show the nonexistence of any type of memory ability. That is because nothing in the brain bears any resemblance to a device for storing or instantly retrieving memories, or a device for preserving memories for decades; and the brain has all kinds of physical shortfalls which seem to rule out memory activity as having a brain explanation. Such shortfalls are discussed in my post here. 

Below are some of these shortfalls:

• There is no place in the brain suitable for storing memories that last for decades, and things like synapses and dendritic spines (alleged to be involved in memory storage) are unstable, "shifting sands" kind of things which do not last for years, and which consist of proteins that only last for weeks.

• The synapses that transmit signals in the brain are very noisy and unreliable,  in contrast to humans who can recall very large amounts of memorized information without error.

• Signal transmission in the brain must mainly be a snail's pace affair, because of very serious slowing factors such as synaptic delays and synaptic fatigue (wrongly ignored by those who write about the speed of brain signals), meaning brains are too slow to explain instantaneous human memory recall.

• The brain seems to have no mechanism for reading memories.

• The brain seems to have no mechanism for writing memories, nothing like the read-write heads found in computers.

• The brain has nothing that might explain the instantaneous recall of long-ago-learned information that humans routinely display, and has nothing like the things that allow instant data retrieval in computers.

• Brain tissue has been studied at the most minute resolution, and it shows no sign of storing any encoded information (such as memory information) other than the genetic information that is in almost every cell of the body.

• There is no sign that the brain or the human genome has any of the vast genomic apparatus it would need to have to accomplish the gigantic task of converting learned conceptual knowledge and episodic memories into neural states or synapse states (the task would presumably require thousands of specialized proteins, and there's no real sign that such memory-encoding proteins exist)

• No neuroscientist has ever given a detailed explanation of how such a gigantic translation task of memory encoding could be accomplished (one that included precise, detailed examples). 

In his long article Burnett gives us what seems like the laziest of efforts, sounding like he has scarcely lifted a finger to search for cases of photographic memory or eidetic memory. His article at the BBC Science Focus site is the kind of third-rate work that site so often publishes these days. BBC Science Focus is now a notorious purveyor of misleading science-flavored clickbait articles, such as the examples from that site I discuss here. 

Photographic memory denialists (who we can also call eidetic memory denialists) have much in common with ESP denialists. Both type of denialists are characterized by their utterly lazy scholarship about the things they are claiming there is no evidence for. There is a mountain of good evidence for the existence in many people of exceptional human memory very far exceeding typical human memory ability, memory that is very often so powerful that it can be called photographic memory under the most common definition of that term. There is also a mountain of good evidence for psi, a term referring to abilities such as extra-sensory perception (ESP), which is also called telepathy, and abilities such as remote viewing and clairvoyance. Neuroscientists typically fail to discuss such evidence. In the rare times that they do, they usually tend to show a lack of decent scholarship on these topics.