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

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

Google Gemini infographic on scientist overspecialization

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We read this: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Intriguing Claims of Alexis Didier, Master Clairvoyant

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

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

Alexis Didier

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

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

On page 20 Alexis tells us this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Once Again, the Nobel Prize Organization Blunders

 My 2018 post "'Nobel's Razor' as a Rule of Thumb for Judging Science Claims" rather naively suggested a "rule of thumb" for judging whether something is top-notch well-established science, a rule based on whether some scientific claim or research has won a Nobel Prize. At the time I wrote that post in 2018, I was not aware of some cases of the Nobel Prize committee bungling in its granting of awards, and bungling in its statements announcing awards, cases I have since learned about, some of which I describe in my 2024 post here and my 2025 post here. I have now added at the end of that 2018 post a statement retracting my claim that we should trust any research that has won a Nobel Prize, and modifying my recommendation, suggesting that such a "Nobel's Razor" principle works as only a very rough rule of thumb, with there  being notable exceptions. 

I now regard the awarding the Nobel Prizes with significantly greater skepticism than I had in 2018. I have come to realize that the awarding of a Nobel Prize (along with the announcements of such prizes) may often be part of the social construction of some unfounded triumphal legend that serves the misguided agenda of materialists. Let us look at some Nobel Prize awards that should not have been awarded, or that were accompanied by incorrect statements by a Nobel Prize committee when the award was made. 

• In 2014 a Nobel Prize committee made the big mistake of awarding a Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology to John O'Keefe, May-Britt Moser and Edvard I. Moser "for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain."  There is no robust evidence that any such positioning system exists in the brain. The reference to cells is a reference to cells that are wrongly referred to as "place cells" (a catchy cell nickname that went viral).  My post here discusses how the research of these three failed to provide any good evidence for place cells or a navigation system in the brain. The original "place cell" papers of John O'Keefe are badly guilty of Questionable Research Practices such as the use of way-too-small study group sizes. For example, a 1993 paper co-authored by O'Keefe was entitled "Phase Relationship Between Hippocampal Place Units and the EEG Theta Rhythm." The paper used way-too-small study group sizes of only three rats and two rats.  No blinding protocol was used, and the paper was not a pre-registered study. We have some wavy-line analysis that seems extremely subjective and arbitrary. To give another example, a 2008 paper co-authored by O'Keefe was entitled "The boundary vector cell model of place cell firing and spatial memory." The paper used a way-too-small study group size of only two rats. No blinding protocol was used, and the paper was not a pre-registered study. Scientists claiming "place cells" in the brain are guilty of "see what you hoped to see" pareidolia that is a kind of "seeing Jesus in the toast" affair. 
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• A Nobel Prize organization made the big mistake of giving Christian Anfinsen the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1972.  The 2022 paper "The Anfinsen Dogma: Intriguing Details Sixty-Five Years Later" tried to reproduce Anfinsen's experiment that got him that prize, but was unable to reproduce them.  That paper tells us about some of the false claims made about Anfinsen's work. We read, "The statement reported in many textbooks that Anfinsen removed denaturing and reducing agents by means of dialysis has no confirmation in the literature."  The authors state flatly that the main research result claimed by Anfinsen (a claim that got him the Nobel Prize) -- the result that "RNase refolds spontaneously into correct secondary and tertiary structures" is a result that "must be completely refused" (in other words, a result that is dead wrong). 
• In 1999 a Nobel Prize committee bungled by awarding a Nobel Prize to Gunter Blobel, "for the discovery that proteins have intrinsic signals that govern their transport and localization in the cell." We do not know how protein molecules end up in the right places in a cell, and do not know how the right type of cells end up in the right positions in a body. No one has ever discovered signals that "govern" such a transportation. The verbs "govern," "regulate" and "guide" are words that are enormously misused in the fields of biochemistry and biology, to try to suggest that little things such as genes have powers of control or guidance or construction that they do not have. Engaging in "give me an inch, and I'll take a mile" nonsense, a page on the Nobel Prize web site makes this untrue claim: "In 1975 Günter Blobel showed that in certain cases amino acids in a protein serve as an address label that determines where a protein is to be delivered." Cells have no addressing system, and proteins do not have any addresses or address labels. Claims to the contrary based on very limited studies of yeast cells are "give me an inch and I'll take a mile" examples of pareidolia and wishful-thinking speculation. In a very interesting long and deep 2011 science article with multiple authors, we have a section entitled "How Does the Cell Position Its Proteins?" The section makes it rather sound as if the Nobel Prize organization "jumped the gun" by giving the prize to Blobel. We read this: " 'The Blobel hypothesis in a sense kept blinders on people for a long time,'  notes developmental biologist Henry Krause of the University of Toronto in Canada." The same article states, "Biologists stress that the mystery of how cells place their protein repertoire [i.e. the very many types of proteins that cells make]  is far from solved."

• In 1995 a Nobel Prize committee made an inappropriate award to Edward B. Lewis, Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard and Eric F. Wieschaus “for their discoveries concerning the genetic control of early embryonic development." A gene merely specifies low-level chemical information such as which amino acids make up a protein. Genes do not have any specification of anything larger than a protein molecule, and it was incorrect to claim "a genetic control of early embryonic development." 

On the website of the Nobel Prize organization, there is a list of prize winners in each category. The list has prize descriptions that tend to be very concise, consisting of a single sentence. Such descriptions are mostly unobjectionable. But if you click near the description of an award for a particular year, you will go to other pages on the site that contain incorrect information, which may be in either a press release or some biography of one of the prize winners. 

So, for example, the entry for the Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology for the year 2000 has the sparse claim that the prize was awarded to Arvid Carlsson, Paul Greengard and Eric Kandel “for their discoveries concerning signal transduction in the nervous system.” That's a modest claim. But each of these names has a link to a biography, and clicking on the link for Eric Kandel takes you to a dogma-infected page on the Nobel Prize site. We have the untrue claim that brain signals "control our bodies and behavior." That's wrong; we control our bodies and behavior. We have the false claim that "short-term and long-term memories are formed by different signals," and the assurance that this is true "in all animals that learn, from molluscs to man." Scientists do not have any understanding of how a brain could cause a human to learn, and they do not at all understand how a signal could cause memory storage in a brain.

Kandel's work on snails did nothing to prove that learning occurs by the modification or strengthening of synapses. Synapses randomly change in strength and size and number, partially because they are made of proteins with average lifetimes of only a few weeks and are attached to dendritic spines that tend not to last for months. So it is always possible to examine a few synapses and claim that they strengthened when learning occurred; but such claims are never robust evidence that the learning caused the change in some synapses. And the tiny size of a synaptic cleft (about 1000 times smaller than a neuron soma width) makes it all-but-impossible to reliably measure the strength of synapses. 

Now let me finally explain why this post has the title "Once Again, the Nobel Prize Organization Blunders." The latest blunder I am referring to is mainly the awarding of the year 2026 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology. That award went to Peter Hegemann, Georg Nagel and Karl Deisseroth for some research that used a light-zapping technique called optogenetics.  The choice was a poor one. The research of these figures was not very important research; and although widely used these days, optogenetics has done very little to substantially increase our understanding of brains or minds. 

I can give some background information. Optogenetics is some technique in which a tiny wire is inserted into an organism, to send light to some part of an organism (often an organism that has been genetically modified to be more sensitive to such light manipulation). The technique has been used for a wide variety of research, much of it very low-quality research guilty of procedural sins such as the use of way-too-small study group sizes. 

In their press release on the latest Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology, the Nobel Prize organization has made the very bad mistake of failing to distinguish between good research using optogenetics and bad research using optogenetics. The very first sentence of the press release is this bogus boast: "The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2026 is awarded for optogenetics — a method that makes it possible to show how nerve cells shape memories, feelings and behaviours in the living brain." No robust research using optogenetics did anything to show that "nerve cells shape memories, feelings and behaviors in the living brain."

Neuroscience research using optogenetics has tended to be very low-quality research. Some examples of such poorly-designed experiments are discussed in my posts here and here. The Nobel Prize press release makes this groundless claim: "Using optogenetics, researchers have been able to reveal neural circuits governing specific memories, feelings, and behaviours relevant for neurological and psychiatric disorders." No such thing occurred. The Nobel Prize press release fails to link to any scientific papers that back up such a claim  A Google search or Google Scholar search will reveal various memory-related papers using optogenetics, but such papers tend to be low in quality. 

I can give a sketch of a typical optogenetics experiment. A small number of mice fewer than 20 (sometimes genetically modified to be more sensitive to light zapping) will be trained to fear a shock plate. A little optogenetic wire will be inserted into the brains of these mice, with the scientists guessing about where the memory of the shock plate was stored.  Then these mice will be put in a cage. and some energy will be sent down the optogenetic wire. The mobility of the mice (how often they move during some arbitrary time unit) will be measured, and compared to the mobility of mice in a similar cage, who were not brain-zapped using optogenetics. If lesser mobility is seen in the brain-zapped mice, this will be claimed as evidence that the optogenetic stimulation caused the mice to remember the shock they received, so that they "froze in fear."  This is the idea of artificial memory reactivation. An example of a very low-quality paper using a method like this can be found here. The study group sizes are 5 and 12, way-too-small for any strong evidence to be claimed. The paper fails to report any sample size calculation, a failure typical in junk science experimental studies. 

This research design is nonsensical. First of all, you would have no good evidence of an artificial elicitation of a memory unless the experiment used at least 15 or 20 rodents per study group; but experiments of this type usually use only a way-too-small study group size maybe half as large as that (with the expense of optogenetics used as an excuse for the tiny study group size). Second, you do not show that a fearful memory is being recalled by showing that some group of mice getting optogenetic stimulation was less mobile than some other group not getting such stimulation. This "freezing behavior" technique is a worthless technique for judging whether a rodent remembered something, for reasons I explain at length in my post here. Third, it is unreliable to a particularly strong degree to be combining the unreliable "freezing behavior" method with optogenetic stimulation, as the very act of stimulation may itself be causing an increase in "freezing behavior," because mice being brain-zapped may be more likely to be immobile (i.e. "freeze"), regardless of what they are recalling. 

What often goes on is that optogenetics is being used as a kind of hi-tech gloss, a "glamor spray" to give an aura of respectability to crappy-design studies that we should not respect because they are guilty of multiple forms of Questionable Research Practices, such as the use of way-too-small study groups, and the use of unreliable techniques for measuring fear or recall in rodents. 

What the Nobel Prize organization has done this year is to issue the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology for a method of research (optogenetics) that is by now thoroughly entangled with junk science research and very highly associated with bad methods, Questionable Research Practices and poor design in experiments. That does not make sense, because in the fields of medicine and physiology there are so many researchers who follow good practices, researchers who produced important results so much better than almost anything that has come from the soggy swampland that is optogenetics research, which is a kind of "play around by zapping cells" sandbox or playground that is fun for zapping-fixated neuroscientists, but of little clear value to the advancement of medicine or physiology. 

There are hundreds of types of things scientists should be doing that are far more useful in understanding brains and minds than zapping parts of the brain with optogenetics or zapping particular cells with optogenetics. One of those things is adequately studying medical case histories that contradict "brains make minds" dogma and "brains store memories" dogma. Another of those things is adequately studying cases of exceptional human mental performance (discussed here, here, here and here), and pondering whether such cases are compatible with "brains make minds" dogma and "brain store memories" claims, given all of the many physical shortfalls in all brains, which neuroscientists fail to adequately study and pay attention to. 

This year the Nobel Prize in Physics went to Francis Halzen  "for decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin." This was another poor choice by the Nobel Prize organization. No very important discovery has come from such an observatory. Neutrinos are particles of no significance to the current existence of life or Earth's habitability, in the sense that all of us would get along just fine without neutrinos. We have long known that neutrinos constantly flow very abundantly from the sun, and the IceCube Neutrino Observatory discovered a few dozen cases of neutrinos coming from high-energy sources outside of the solar system. Such a not-at-all-surprising discovery is of no great significance. It has been known for several decades that there are rare places beyond our solar system that are high-energy sources of intense radiation, so being able to detect some neutrinos from a few sources beyond the solar system is a "just what we expected" type of thing. Most of these claimed neutrino detections from outside the solar system are mere "statistical significance" things that are not solid proof, and apparently only a handful of these detections are "solid proof" type of things.  

There were hopes that much grander things than run-of-the-mill neutrinos would be discovered by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, things such as "sterile neutrinos" or the direct detection of dark matter of maybe some evidence for string theory. But such hopes have not been realized. Given such a shortfall  and given "count on the fingers of your hands" observational results (counting only the firmly established observations), it is puzzling that  Halzen got a Nobel Prize. 

Postscript: I will give another example of a low-quality research paper that uses optogenetics. The paper is "Labelling and optical erasure of synaptic memory traces in the motor cortex," a paper that (like so many neuroscience papers) has a title that makes a groundless boast of doing something that was not done. Examining mice, the authors claim to have identified some dendritic spines that changed during a learning activity. Because mice have billions of dendritic spines, and because most such dendritic spines have short lifetimes and are constantly changing in size, there is zero reason to believe that the few dendritic spines the authors chose are any such things as "synaptic memory traces" or memory traces of any kind. The authors used optogenetics to zap their selected spines, and claim that following this, there was a weakened memory performance. There is no reason to assume any causal relation between such an activity and the claimed decrease in memory performance, particularly since the number of cells and dendrites involved was very small (less than 20).  The number of mice used is never clearly specified in the paper, and when that occurs there is typically a high probability that the study group sizes were some way-too-small number such as less than 10 mice. My best guess looking at the figures was that the study groups had an average size of only about six mice (way too small for the author's claims to be taken seriously). No claims of a sample size calculation is made. No use was made of a blinding protocol, and no use is made of a control group. The graphs provide no clear evidence of a significant change in memory produced by the optogenetic zapping. This is very low-quality science. 

Instead of fancy new zap-the-brain technology such as optogenetics, what neuroscience needs is good old-fashioned best practices and methodological rigor -- things such as adequate study group sizes, adequate statistical power, high reproducibility, proper blinding protocols, pre-registration, and sound methods for measuring things such as memory and recall. Such things are very badly missing in a large fraction of all neuroscience studies today, which are written by investigators who seem more interested in increasing their citation counts (by making unwarranted but sensational claims) than in following sound scientific methods for revealing truth.