NASA's Diminished Credibility on the Topic of Extraterrestrial Life

We hear these days quite a bit about "AI slop," error-containing output from AI programs. But it seems that an even worse problem is what we can call "science slop," and define as unbelievable news stories showing up on web sites or web pages claiming to give "science news." 

In September 2025 NASA made an utterly groundless boast of having discovered "potential biosignatures" on Mars. NASA had a press conference that received the most massive press coverage, even though it announced nothing new. All that was being discussed was the same utterly unimpressive find announced the previous year.  

The NASA press conference was devoted to trying to get people excited about the unimpressive-looking rock below, called the Cheyava Falls rock, which has no visual signs of life. The spot circled and called a "leopard spot" looks nothing like a leopard spot, and could have been formed by any of 1001 lifeless processes. 

Credit: NASA

The press conference was called to publicize a scientific paper about the Cheyava Falls rock and nearby rocks scanned in 2024. That paper has the dull title "Redox-driven mineral and organic associations in Jezero Crater, Mars." We hear no mention of any amino acids being found. Trying to boost excitement about something that is very probably no indication of life, the paper states, "In summary, our analysis leads us to conclude that the Bright Angel formation contains textures, chemical and mineral characteristics, and organic signatures that warrant consideration as ‘potential biosignatures’, that is, 'a feature that is consistent with biological processes and that, when encountered, challenges the researcher to attribute it either to inanimate or to biological processes, compelling them to gather more data before reaching a conclusion as to the presence or absence of life.' " 

The building components of one-celled life are many types of protein molecules, and the building components of protein molecules are twenty types of amino acids. Protein molecules used by living things are built from long sequences of twenty types of amino acids. Most types of protein molecules require a very special sequence of hundreds of amino acids. No amino acid used by life has ever been found on Mars.  It is therefore extremely misleading and arguably deceptive to be referring to something not looking like life found on a planet without any discovered amino acids, and to be calling such a thing a potential biosignature. 

I can give an analogy for how deceptive the use of such language is. Suppose you sent a spacecraft to orbit around some moon of a planet such as Jupiter and Saturn. Suppose you saw a little crater-like hole in the surface of the planet, something looking rather like this:

There would be three possibilities here:

(1) The feature might have been caused by some meteorite hitting the surface, the most common cause of craters. 

(2) The feature might be a sinkhole, caused by a sinking in of a little bit of the surface, as often is observed on our planet. 

(3) Or, maybe the feature was created by intelligent beings who were trying to start building a house, and were excavating as part of building the foundation of the house, and maybe the feature is a "potential signature" of purposeful engineering. 

In order to consider whether item (3) is a reasonable possibility, you would need to ask questions like this:

(1) Is this moon a place that can reasonably be postulated as a place where intelligent agents live, agents who might be starting to build a house for themselves?

(2) Are there any signs of building materials around or construction equipment around, things like shovels, bricks, pipes or boards?

If the answer to both of these questions is no, then there would be no reasonable chance that the observed feature is a potential signature of purposeful engineering. In that case anyone calling the feature a "potential signature of purposeful engineering" would be a deceiver, someone whose word should not be trusted. 

The situation I have described is analogous to what went on with the NASA press conference. Specifically:

(1) Just as the moon described in my analogy is a place profoundly hostile to life, Mars is a place profoundly hostile to life. 

(2) Just as the crater feature described in my analogy is at a place where there are no construction materials around lending credence to the possibility of a deliberate construction job, Mars is a place where no amino acids have ever been found, a place where none of the construction components for life have ever been found. 

The scientists and NASA personnel trying to persuade us that a "potential biosignature" had been found seemed as misleading as a scientist getting a photo of a mere crater, and describing it as potential signature of extraterrestrial intelligence. 

What has happened is predictable. The clickbait-hungry "science news" infosystem has followed their usual "give us an inch, and we'll take a mile" policy in its treatment of the NASA press conference. Now the Internet is filled with bogus stories groundlessly claiming or insinuating that life was discovered on Mars. 

Almost certainly NASA knew this would happen. The bogus stories are presumably exactly what it wanted, so that a Mars sample return mission would be funded. 

Without any warrant at all, NASA and some scientists have claimed "potential biosignatures," thereby misleading us very badly. If they had been honest they would have said something like this:

What we found could have been caused by life, but also could have been caused by lifeless geological processes. Given that we have searched hard for the lowest building components of life on Mars, and never found them, failing to ever find amino acids on Mars, we must reluctantly assume that almost certainly what we found is not any sign of life.

But they did not say that. Instead they used misleading language trying to cause people without any good warrant to believe or suspect that life had been found on Mars. This is not at all the first time this happened. NASA was involved in a similar affair of "crying wolf" during the 1990's, when it got the US President at that time (Bill Clinton) to do a press conference issuing a false claim that life had probably been found on Mars. 

So we should no longer regard NASA as an authority that has great credibility on the topic of extraterrestrial life. If the Mars sample return mission is funded, and NASA announces that the returned samples contain traces of life, we should be skeptical about what they tell us. We should instead suspect that anything found is the result of earthly contamination, or pareidolia by overeager NASA scientists. Ditto for NASA's missions to moons of Jupiter or Saturn. If NASA scientists ever announce they find life from any such missions, we should just roll our eyes, and say to ourselves, "On this topic you can't trust these guys as far as you can throw them." 

I now read that the Mars sample return mission has apparently lost its funding. NASA's attempt to whip up interest in the mission has failed to yield the desired funding. The failure to obtain the funding suggests that executive powers may have realized the "potential biosignatures" boast was unfounded.  Scientists have voiced relatively little protest about the cancellation. We can be rather sure that if scientists thought there was a good chance of detecting life by returning the Mars samples, that the scientific community would "scream bloody murder" about the cancellation. But the protest of the cancellation seems to have been faint, rather as if scientists realized the "potential biosignatures" boast was unfounded.  

Meanwhile, while an immoral and illegal war of aggression is raging in the Middle East courtesy of an unprovoked attack by the White House, NASA has a Big New Task it is eagerly working on: an Artemis II mission to have  astronauts go in orbit around the moon. This is something that was already accomplished quite a few times more than 50 years ago, when US astronauts not only orbited the moon, but walked on the moon, and drove around the moon in a little vehicle rather like a golf cart. The question we must ask about this  new Artemis II mission is the same question we must about the Iran war misadventure: why the hell are they doing that? 

In a 2022 post I pointed out that NASA's web page promoting the Artemis program miserably failed to articulate a convincing rationale for the program. But at least there was a page on the NASA site entitled "Why We Are Going to the Moon."  It was a fumbling, bungling attempt to explain a sound basis for the program -- but at least it was an attempt. Looking at the latest versions of the NASA pages promoting the Artemis program, I can't seem to find such a "Why We Are Going to the Moon" page. It seems that these days the guys in the Executive Branch of the US government are not very good at explaining reasons for their behavior.

Seeing that we cannot have much faith these days in the credibility of proclamations coming from the horribly-renamed US Department of War, should we have great faith in any proclamation of metaphysical significance coming from NASA? 

Don't Trust a Science News Story Just Because You Read It At Some Prestigious Source

" The job of the NYT [New York Times]... is to protect the status quo and the ruling class by marginalizing anyone who seriously challenges it and its enabling institutions." -- Bruce Levine (link). 

The clickbait epidemic has hopelessly compromised the integrity of science news sites. More and more, we see so-called "science news" sites tending to look like the bogus clickbait monstrosity imaginatively depicted below:

Untrustworthy "science news" sites may look like this

Some of the economic and professional factors that encourage misstatements in science papers, science press releases, and science news articles are shown in the diagram below. 

Some of the players in this profit complex include major respected institutions such as  NBC, CBS, Apple,  and the New York Times.  No doubt such institutions profit from all of the clickbait and shoddy "news stories" that are floating about on sites such the New York Times web site, the science news page of Google News, and science sections of Apple News.  

Today's so-called "science news" articles very often contain falsehoods, groundless hype and shameless exaggeration, largely because of economic motivations charted in the diagram above. It is a huge mistake to think that an article is probably correct or respectable because you see it on Apple News, the websites of CBS News or NBC News,  or the New York Times.  These sources often contain information that is unreliable or erroneous. 

Let's look at some recent examples of the junk that sometimes appears on such sources.  On the day I am writing this, one of the leading Science News pages is shamelessly and brazenly  passing off as "Science News" a phony old claim that a "humanzee" was made by mating a chimp with a human.  The claim comes from a Darwinism enthusiast Gordon Gallup (an evolutionary psychologist) who provides no evidence to back up the claim other than his assertion that some professor of his thought some rumor he heard about this was true. 

Gallup's assertion appears in a story in the Sun in which he says this, while failing to name the professor referred to: 

"Gallup said the professor worked at Yerkes before the research centre moved to Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia in 1930.

He added: 'He told me the rumour was true. And he was a credible scientist in his own right '.”

What is called second-hand evidence or hearsay evidence is  something not  directly observed by the person who saw it, but a claim by someone that he heard someone else say that he saw something.  When all we have is second-hand evidence reported by a single person, we have no good evidence that something occurred.  Much of the evidence for apparition sightings is good evidence, because there are very many first-hand accounts in the words of the people who claim to have seen apparitions, and who very often provided freshly written reports of what they had very recently seen.  A report from Gordon Gallup of something he claims to have heard long ago from someone else of what happened decades earlier has very little value as evidence, particularly given the failure of Gallup to name the person, and the fact that Gallup is someone with a strong motivation to be spreading the rumor, which would tend to bolster the dogmatic claims he likes to make.  Gallup has not even provided a second-hand claim of someone seeing something. He has merely given a claim that someone said that a rumor was true.   

If someone had actually mated a chimpanzee and a human, it would be something that Darwinists would be extremely eager to report, and it is very hard to imagine something like that being kept secret.  With very great likelihood, the rumor is groundless.  What we have on this day at a major Science News page is very old Fake News being passed off as Science News.  Shame on those controlling such a page for passing on such a groundless old rumor as Science News, not merely on one day, but on two consecutive days. 

The wikipedia.org page on the topic of "humanzees" (hypothetical man-chimp hybrids) fails to even mention Gallup, and states, "There have been no scientifically verified specimens of a human–chimpanzee hybrid, but there have been substantiated reports of unsuccessful attempts to create one in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, and various unsubstantiated reports on similar attempts during the second half of the 20th century."

Also on the same Science News page on the day I wrote this post is a link that is entitled "How Our Brain Produces Language and Thought, According to Neuroscientists."  It's one of those fake link title deals, in which the link title does not match the title of the article you reach upon clicking on the link.  We are getting such fake link titles very frequently these days on Science News sites. A link may say "Stunning New Evidence of Life on Mars," and the link may take you to some story with a much less interesting title such as "Scientists Think Mars May Have Been Wetter Long Ago." In this case the "How Our Brain Produces Language and Thought, According to Neuroscientists" link takes you to a New York Times story that does not match such a headline.  

In the story we get New York Times science reporter Carl Zimmer acting as he too often does, by falling "hook, line and sinker" for some poorly designed Questionable Research Practices brain scan study that does not use a decent study group size.  The study group size used was only four subjects.  It's a study involving people who were brain-scanned when reading real words and nonsense words, and Carl attempts to insinuate that it gives some evidence for brains being involved in word recognition.  Given the way-too-small study group size, it does no such thing. I discuss at length problems with this paper and the type of tricks that it uses in my post here. 

We read in Carl's article no mention of a study on the same topic, using a much higher sample size, 24 subjects. That study found no appreciable difference between brain scans of subjects being read real words and pseudowords, and being asked "Does it sound like a real word?"  The only differences were negligible differences of about 1 part in 500, differences we would expect from mere random variations. 

The image below from a New Scientist article states, "Most studies that have used MRI machines to find links between the brain's structure or function and complex mental traits have used fewer than 23 subjects, but thousands are needed to find reliable results."  So why are sources like the New York Times  still peddling poorly designed studies using way-too-small study group sizes, trying to pass them off as research telling us something about brains? 

Carl Zimmer's writings are almost entirely to be found behind paywalls, and books you have to pay for. But using Google Scholar, I can find some of his articles, which sometimes make false claims about very important topics. An example is his 2013 Scientific American article "The Surprising Origin of Life's Complexity." The article has a misleading title, and has nothing credible to say about the origin of life's complexity. Zimmer discusses the complexity of the eye, and tells us this untrue story consisting of a first sentence that is false, a second sentence that is true and important, and a third sentence that is false or unbelievable:

"Darwin’s musings on the origin of complexity have found support in modern biology. Today biologists can probe the eye and other organs in detail at the molecular level, where they find immensely complex proteins joining together to make structures that bear a striking resemblance to portals, conveyor belts and motors. Such intricate systems of proteins can evolve from simpler ones, with natural selection favoring the intermediates along the way."

To the contrary, Darwin's armchair musings about the origin of biological complexity are discredited by the facts of modern biology, something very different from the belief traditions of evolutionary biologists. Twentieth century biologists discovered endless oceans of biological organization on the microscopic level that Darwin never dreamed of.  Evolutionary biologists have no credible tales to tell about the origin of the 20,000+ types of protein molecules in the human body, each its own complex invention. The problem is that protein molecules require thousands of well-arranged atoms, and are so easily damaged by small changes that they are not functional in half-forms.  There is therefore no credible Darwinian tale that can be told to explain the origin of the 20,000 types+ of protein molecules in the human body. Gradualism fails to explain very high states of biological organization, because of reasons such as nonfunctional intermediates and the uselessness of early stages. The functional thresholds of protein molecules are too high to be explained by Darwinist explanations, a reality that evolutionary biologists ignore because they senselessly fail to pay attention to the topics of functional thresholds and interdependent components, topics that are of supreme importance in any realistic discussion of biological origins.  As some Harvard scientists stated not long ago, "A wide variety of protein structures exist in nature, however the evolutionary origins of this panoply of proteins remain unknown." 

Zimmer refers to "immensely complex proteins joining together to make structures that bear a striking resemblance to portals, conveyor belts and motors." This is a reference to protein complexes, extremely complex and fine-tuned arrangements of proteins, arrangements so complex and fine-tuned and precisely arranged for specific functions that scientists these days routinely call them "molecular machines," partially because they sometimes include components acting like real motors. Your body has thousands of different types of protein complexes, and your existence dependence on the continual formation of such fine-tuned teams of proteins.  The structure of protein complexes is not specified in DNA or its genes, which don't tell how to make any protein complex.  So there is no conceivable random mutations of DNA that can explain the origin of protein complexes. So-called natural selection promoting lucky DNA mutations is worthless in explaining protein complexes, because DNA has no specification of the structure of protein complexes.  So no conceivable "way back when" luck involving DNA or glacially slow so-called natural selection can explain the formation of protein complexes, which can only be explained by something going on every hour within your body. 

With protein complexes we have the reality that they very often require the combination of protein molecules that are individually worthless until they become team members of protein complexes that are systems of different types of proteins. It is a reality completely contrary to Zimmer's claim that "such intricate systems of proteins can evolve from simpler ones, with natural selection favoring the intermediates along the way." There would be no so-called natural selection favoring the formation of a protein molecule which only became functional "late in the game" after it became a team member of a protein complex requiring a special arrangement of several different types of proteins.  And since protein molecules are extremely sensitive-to-small-changes structures that only fold properly when almost all of their amino acid sequence exists, half-stages and quarter-stages of the individual protein molecules would be useless; so there would be multiple ways in which the intermediate stages would fail to be functional, and fail to be favored or explained by so-called natural selection. This is the issue of nonfunctional incipient stages and nonfunctional intermediates, which is a "show-stopper" for all gradualist Darwinian explanations of the most impressive types of complexity we see in the human body, as I explain at length in my post "Anatomically Uninformative DNA, Nonfunctional Intermediates and Useless Early Stages Are Why Gradualism Does Not Work." 

A protein complex with 2 microscopic motors, described here

 Below are some relevant quotes:

•  "The majority of cellular proteins function as subunits in larger protein complexes. However, very little is known about how protein complexes form in vivo." Duncan and Mata, "Widespread Cotranslational Formation of Protein Complexes," 2011.
• "While the occurrence of multiprotein assemblies is ubiquitous, the understanding of pathways that dictate the formation of quaternary structure remains enigmatic." -- Two scientists (link). 
• "A general theoretical framework to understand protein complex formation and usage is still lacking." -- Two scientists, 2019 (link). 
• "Protein assemblies are at the basis of numerous biological machines by performing actions that none of the individual proteins would be able to do. There are thousands, perhaps millions of different types and states of proteins in a living organism, and the number of possible interactions between them is enormous...The strong synergy within the protein complex makes it irreducible to an incremental process. They are rather to be acknowledged as fine-tuned initial conditions of the constituting protein sequences. These structures are biological examples of nano-engineering that surpass anything human engineers have created. Such systems pose a serious challenge to a Darwinian account of evolution, since irreducibly complex systems have no direct series of selectable intermediates, and in addition, as we saw in Section 4.1, each module (protein) is of low probability by itself." -- Steinar Thorvaldsen and Ola Hössjerm, "Using statistical methods to model the fine-tuning of molecular machines and systems,"  Journal of Theoretical Biology.
• "It seems clear that even the smallest change in the sequence of amino acids of proteins usually has a deleterious effect on the physiology and metabolism of organisms." -- Evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin, "The triple helix : gene, organism, and environment," page 123.
• "Proteins are so precisely built that the change of even a few atoms in one amino acid can sometimes disrupt the structure of the whole molecule so severely that all function is lost." -- Science textbook "Molecular Biology of the Cell."
• "To quantitate protein tolerance to random change, it is vital to understand the probability that a random amino acid replacement will lead to a protein's functional inactivation. We define this probability as the 'x factor.' ...The x factor was found to be 34% ± 6%."  -- 3 scientists, "Protein tolerance to random amino acid change." 
• "Once again we see that proteins are fragile, are often only on the brink of stability." -- Columbia University scientists  Lawrence Chasin and Deborah Mowshowitz, "Introduction to Molecular and Cellular Biology," Lecture 5.
• "We predict 27–29% of amino acid changing (nonsynonymous) mutations are neutral or nearly neutral (|s|<0.01%), 30–42% are moderately deleterious (0.01%<|s|<1%), and nearly all the remainder are highly deleterious or lethal (|s|>1%).” -- "Assessing the Evolutionary Impact of Amino Acid Mutations in the Human Genome," a scientific paper by 14 scientists. 
• "An analysis of 8,653 proteins based on single mutations (Xavier et al., 2021) shows the following results: ~68% are destabilizing, ~24% are stabilizing, and ~8,0% are neutral mutations...while a similar analysis from the observed free-energy distribution from 328,691 out of 341,860 mutations (Tsuboyama et al., 2023)...indicates that ~71% are destabilizing, ~16% are stabilizing, and ~13% are neutral mutations, respectively." -- scientist Jorge A. Villa, "Analysis of proteins in the light of mutations." 2023.
• "Proteins are intricate, dynamic structures, and small changes in their amino acid sequences can lead to large effects on their folding, stability and dynamics. To facilitate the further development and evaluation of methods to predict these changes, we have developed ThermoMutDB, a manually curated database containing >14,669 experimental data of thermodynamic parameters for wild type and mutant proteins... Two thirds of mutations within the database are destabilising." -- Eight scientists, "ThermoMutDB: a thermodynamic database for missense mutations," 2020. 

On August 21, 2024 the University of  Houston issued a nonsensical press release with a title of "Life From a Drop of Rain." It was one of the worst examples that year of a university press release trying to make something out of nothing, a type of event that occurs almost every day.  Anyone familiar with the huge functional complexity and information richness of even the simplest type of life would tend to laugh hard at the nonsense stated in the press release, the idea that mere rainwater would somehow help explain how we got self-reproducing cells requiring hundreds of types of protein inventions, involving a total of more than 40,000 very well-arranged atoms, in an arrangement as unlikely to occur by chance as ink splashes creating a well-written book of 100 pages.  

What was going on was another example of the old deplorable  trick of creating or describing some utterly unimpressive liquid with bubbles, and then calling such bubbles "protocells," which is rather like gathering up some branches from a forest and calling those branches a "proto-novel" or a "proto-encyclopedia," on the grounds that paper may be made from wood pulp.  But Carl Zimmer wrote a New York Times news story that sounded as if he had fallen for the nonsense "hook, line and sinker."  It seemed like a rather typical effort from Zimmer, who seems to very often have a credulous trust towards scientists making the most unfounded triumphal boasts relevant to origins mysteries, and who seems to too rarely apply critical scrutiny to such boasts, no matter how silly,  groundless or mathematically untenable they may be.  

In a 2003 article in the journal Science, entitled "How and Where Did Life Arise?" Zimmer made a true statement, followed by a false statement:

"Today, many scientists argue that the early atmosphere was dominated by other gases, such as carbon  dioxide. But experiments in recent years have shown that under these conditions, many building blocks of life can be formed."

To the contrary, there have been no experiments realistically simulating the early Earth that ever produced any of the simplest building components of life, such as amino acids.  The much-touted Miller-Urey experiment was no such thing, as it failed to realistically simulate early Earth conditions, for reasons discussed here. The failures of experiments trying to produce such chemicals is discussed in my post here. An example of the type of experiments sometimes cited is the one here, which produced only the simplest of the 20 types of amino acids used by living things, and by means of some ridiculously artificial use of "the large laser facility at the terrawatt Prague Asterix Laser System," something which does not at all qualify as a realistic simulation of early Earth conditions. 

Anyone swallowing Zimmer's line about " natural selection favoring the intermediates along the way" should study the image below. Generically speaking, the intermediate stages of a complex biological component produce no benefit by themselves; and it is also typically true that such a complex biological component produces no benefit by itself until it becomes part of some much more complex system requiring many other components working as team members. 

The Mounting Evidence for Terminal Lucidity

In my October 2025 post "Terminal Lucidity Helps to Discredit Claims That Brains Make Minds" (which you can read here) I discussed dramatic cases of terminal lucidity.  The term "terminal lucidity" can be defined in two different ways:

(1) a case in which someone who had seemed to largely lose his mental faculties suddenly regains such faculties very near the end of his life, typically on the last day of his life;

(2) a case in which someone with extremely high brain damage retained his mental faculties to the end of his life. 

Reports of terminal lucidity appeared as early as 1936, as shown in the 1936 article below (from page 603 of the September 17, 1936 edition of the journal Light).

In my post I discussed the first six of the 13 reports of terminal lucidity I will discuss in this post (some of which involve multiple cases):

(1) On page 603 of the September 17, 1936 edition of the journal Light, which you can read here,  we read this: "The Rev. Cruwys Sharland related how a one-time pupil of his, after suffering for many years from disintegration of the brain, when approaching his death, suddenly recovered complete mental control and gave those present a long circumstantial account of a walking tour he had undertaken when quite a boy, in company with Mr. Sharland, then his tutor. Every detail was correct, every fact rightly placed, as Mr. Sharland himself testified. "

(2) On the same page 603 of the September 17, 1936 edition of the journal Light, which you can read here,  we read this: "M. G. W. Surya writes of a friend of his who was summoned to the asylum in which his brother had for years been confined with complete softening of the brain. He found his brother perfectly normal and anxious to make certain suggestions to him. He died the same day, and autopsy revealed that the brain had entirely disintegrated.....Similarly, the well-known Berlin anatomist, Benecke, assured his students that Schinkel, the architect, died in possession of all his faculties, in spite of the fact that his cranium was subsequently proved to have been, ' so to speak, empty.' ” 

(3) At the bottom of page 79 of the book you can read using the link here, we have an account by a person who says this about her grandmother: "An hour before she passed, this old lady suddenly woke up from the stupor that she had been in for six long years." We then hear an account of the grandmother speaking well, and acting as if she saw apparitions of the dead (a common occurrence for the dying, even those without any brain problems). 

(4) On page 410 of the book Irreducible Mind we read this:  

"Myers (1892b) had referred to the 'sudden revivals of memory or faculty in dying persons' (p.316)...The eminent physician Benjamin Rush...observed that 'most of mad people discover a greater or less degree of reason in the last days or hours of their lives' (p. 257). Similarly, in his classic study of hallucinations, Brierre de Boismont (1859) noted that 'at the approach of death we observed that ... the intellect, which may have been obscured or extinguished during many years, is again restored in all its integrity' (p. 236). Flournoy (1903, p. 48) mentioned that French psychiatrists had recently published cases of mentally ill persons who showed sudden improvements in their condition shortly before death. In more recent years, Osis (1961) reported two cases, 'one of severe schizophrenia and one of senility, [in which] the patients regained normal mentality shortly before death' (p. 24)." 

(5) The paper "End-of-Life Experiences and the Dying Process in a Gloucestershire Nursing Home as Reported by Nurses and Care Assistants" is one that  asked questions of workers at  Kingsley House, a small facility handling no more than 31 persons at a time, and reporting only about 13 deaths per year. We read of these results, coming from the ten who responded: "7 reported unconscious or confused residents who unexpectedly became lucid enough just before they died to interact with relatives and carers," a phenomena sometimes called 'terminal lucidity.' "

(6) The year 2021 scientific paper "Spontaneous Remission of Dementia Before Death: Results From a Study on Paradoxical Lucidity" discusses many cases of terminal lucidity.  We read this:

" Detailed case reports of 124 dementia patients who experienced an episode of paradoxical lucidity were received. In more than 80% of these cases, complete remission with return of memory, orientation, and responsive verbal ability was reported by observers

of the lucid episode. The majority of patients died within hours to days after the episode..... More than 80% of the patients in this study appeared to have experienced a full, albeit brief, reversal of often profound cognitive impairment in advanced and end-stage dementia."

In the paper we read this: "Macleod (2009) observed 100 consecutive deaths in a hospice in New Zealand and found six cases of unexpected, spontaneous return of cognitive functions and verbal ability within 48 hr before the death of the patient."

(7) Recently there was published the paper "Terminal Lucidity in a Pediatric Oncology Clinic," which reported some similar cases of terminal lucidity. You can read the full paper here. One or more of the  authors interviewed the physicians involved in the cases.  Before discussing its fascinating account of terminal lucidity in a patient identified as Patient One, I should mention that the term "encephalopathic" typically refers to a severe brain pathology, most often involving a brain infection or a failure of the immune system to protect the brain from infection. In the paper we read this about this Patient One:

"The patient was a three-year-old Hispanic female with prolonged medical treatment history for her diagnosis of hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis (HLH), a complex and often life-threatening medical condition resulting from an uncontrolled and ineffective immune response, leading to extreme inflammation in many organs/tissues. After over a year of intense treatments, she underwent an umbilical cord blood transplant, which is the only known cure for this condition. Unfortunately, the transplant was rejected, and while attempts were made to find another option for a second transplant, she had a re-emergence of her HLH and was admitted to the hospital for chemotherapy and immunotherapy. Despite some initial improvements, she developed progressive organ damage and deterioration over the next several weeks, prompting transfer to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), with worsening liver and pulmonary failure. She became severely jaundiced and encephalopathic, and was no longer speaking, eating, or responding to parents/providers. The ICU physicians were worried that she was an aspiration risk, prompting intensification of Do Not Resuscitate/Do Not Intubate (DNR/DNI) conversations with her parents. As all the known treatments available were exhausted and her condition worsened, the focus shifted to providing palliative care. Although initially resistant, after nearly two weeks of intense conversations with parents (including family members and a Catholic priest) and further deterioration in their daughter’s condition, a DNI and modified DNR status change was agreed. That evening, the patient awoke and asked for her usual comfort items (i.e., Lion King movie, parents, toys) and food. She showed no indication of mental impairment and regained the ability to sit up in bed and participate in coloring and other simple age-appropriate tasks. She spoke using logical, organized full sentences, and had multiple conversations with her parents that evening, which they and the bedside nurse described as 'like a miracle.' During the conversations with her parents, she reviewed all the important people in her life and prayed for them. She indicated awareness of transitioning to death and reassured loved ones of the need not to be concerned about her. She also seemed to be communicating with people who were not visible to others. After several hours, she asked to 'go to bed' and returned to her comatose state. During the next 24-48 hours, she never awoke again, and she ultimately died peacefully of cardiac arrest in her parents’ arms."

(8) In the same paper we read of a Patient Three:

"The patient was a 19-month-old boy who underwent a bone marrow transplant at 16 months of age for ill-defined immune deficiency. He was recovering with typical transplant complications until he developed fevers and progressive neurologic symptoms with loss of ability to communicate, loss of motor function, and loss of cognition.... Prior to the lucid event, he was not responding to healthcare providers and was giving parents only minimal response/eye contact. Three days prior to his death, he became much more alert and interactive, in stark contrast to his steady decline of the prior three months, which was preceded by his parents having decided they would not proceed with further life-saving medical interventions (i.e., surgeries, intubation, etc.). He was noted to be able to move, talk, eat, and communicate for 24-48 hours prior to a rapid decline and death. On the night before his death, he communicated with his parents that he 'was ready to go home' and that 'he and parents would be OK' using verbal and sign language. He talked about joining his brother who was a still-birth, and he told his parents he was going to be fine. Subsequently, he returned to severe mental impairment and died within 24 hours."

A new paper was recently published providing some additional examples of terminal lucidity.  The paper (which you can read here) is entitled "Terminal Lucidity in Children: A Contemporary Case Collection." The paper's cases include these cases:

(9) Case #2 of the paper was a 9-year-old male who had suffered from leukemia for 1-2 years, which had resulted in "severe" mental impairment (apparently much worse than the "mild" mental impairment reported for Case #1). In his last 1 or 2 hours, he experienced a big change from his long previous state of being semicomatose, nonresponsive and mumbling. He "regained awareness of surroundings," "regained ability to speak with others in logical, organized sentences," had "awareness of impending death, but no fear," and "reassured loved ones and said “ 'goodbye.' " His mental impairment suddenly improved from "severe" to "none,"  He also acted as if interacting with deceased loved ones not visible to others. This lasted between 10 to 59 minutes, and within 2 hours of the start of such lucidity, he was dead. 

(10) Case #3 of  the paper was a 7-year-old female who had suffered from leukemia. In her last hour or two her mental impairment improved from "severe" to "none."  Shaking off a semicomatose state, she "regained awareness of surroundings," "regained ability to recognize and interact with others," "regained ability to speak in logical, organized, complete sentences," and had "awareness of impending death." She also acted as if interacting with deceased loved ones not visible to others. This lasted between 10 to 59 minutes, and within an hours of the start of such lucidity, she was dead. 

(11) Case #6 of  the paper was a 16-year-old male suffering from chronic kidney failure, and also very bad seizures. In the 2-5 days before death his mental impairment went from "severe" to "none." He "regained awareness of surroundings," "recognized and interacted with others," "seemed to have a sense of peace and acceptance of his situation," "demonstrated greater clarity" and acted as if he had "met deceased others." We read this: "One week after going into the coma, he returned to a waking state and appeared to have full consciousness. My parents and the medical staff were completely taken aback by his clarity."

(12) Case #7 of  the paper was a male child suffering from chronic kidney failure. At some point in the hour before death (for about an hour) his mental impairment went from "severe" to "none." He "regained awareness of surroundings," "recognized and interacted with others," "regained ability to understand spoken language," and acted as if he had "communicated with deceased others." 

(13) In the paper here, we read of a case of terminal lucidity:

"The person had a diagnosis of mixed Alzheimer’s disease and Cerebrovascular Accident with severe cognitive impairment. The lucidity episode was observed by the therapist and family and lasted 1–3 minutes. The person was reported to have been noncommunicative with restricted or no speech and could not convey her needs. Her limited verbal responses were completely off-point. During a visit by family, the person was suddenly able to communicate and respond appropriately. She talked about significant people, places, and life events that family remembered, both positive and negative. There was an increase in clarity of thought and the person suddenly remembered how to play an instrument. The person died one week later."

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The paper here studied 92 patients with severe dementia and difficulties with verbal communication, and found that 57% of them displayed "episodes of lucidity" or EL. 

A phenomenon related to terminal lucidity is the phenomenon of deathbed visions, often involving someone on his deathbed claiming to see an apparition or vision of a deceased person, or such a person experiencing a vision of some otherworldly realm or landscape.  The recent paper on terminal lucidity notes a high overlap between terminal lucidity and deathbed visions. It states this:

"An intriguing feature that many children reported, which is also consistent with descriptions of lucidity in adult samples, is the presence of and communicating with nonvisible entities, a phenomenon known as deathbed visions (Barbato, 2024; Claxton-Oldfield, 2024; Fenwick & Fenwick, 2008; Fountain & Kellehear, 2012; Houran & Lange, 1997). Ten of our child cases appeared to experience deathbed visions as part of their TL [terminal lucidity] episode, suggesting a synchronous relationship between these phenomena."

The following account of a deathbed vision was published in 1921:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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