Goofs and Futile Rhetoric of an Evolutionary Biologist

In a previous post I quoted an evolutionary biologist who recently gushed, "But what I aspire to be, more than anything, is an intellectual child of Charles Darwin." Statements such as that may have given you the impression that evolutionary biologists are people fixated on the teachings of one idolized hero, people who fail to properly study many deep topics that should be studied before anyone boasts of understanding human origins -- kind of like the fellow schematically depicted below. 

The 2025 paper "Complexity myths and the misappropriation of evolutionary theory" by evolutionary biologist Michael Lynch is a paper that may tend to corroborate negative ideas you may have about evolutionary biologists. It is a paper full of hubris and crowing, combined with the clumsiest attempts to sweep under the rug or rhetorically minimize the ocean-sized reality of fine-tuned biological complexity. Along the way, the author makes some confessions that help discredit the central claims that dogmatists of his type like to make. 

After its abstract the paper starts out by stating, "Enormous strides have been made in the biological sciences over the past century, and no subdiscipline has experienced greater advancements on the theory side than evolutionary biology." To the contrary, evolutionary biology is still chained to the clueless armchair-reasoning ideas of the nineteenth century biologist Charles Darwin. Evolutionary biologists have made very little progress beyond such erring ideas, and we should not count it as progress when such biologists strayed into the giant deception of making the false claim that DNA or its genes are a recipe, blueprint or program for making an organism or its cells. 

Lynch takes the briefest of lame slaps at something called the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis or EES. The term is an umbrella term for a grab bag of ideas by not-very-contrarian scientists who have noticed how miserably bad today's evolutionary biologists are at explaining the vast complexity and organization in living organisms. Lynch's rebuttal consists only of the name calling of referring to the supporter of this EES as "a small but vocal group of proselytizers," combined with the claim that "virtually every point identified as ignored has been thoroughly evaluated in prior research."  This is almost as lame as saying "you can't say I fail to explain biological complexity, because I mentioned biological complexity." 

Lynch offers a criticism of a recent theory called assembly theory. Some of his points about the weaknesses of that theory are valid. I criticized the same theory in my post here. 

Along the way, Lynch makes some confessions damaging to his cherished dogmas. He states that "there is no evidence that natural selection is in relentless pursuit of more complex molecules, cells, or organisms." But has not so-called "natural selection" been offered for roughly 179 years as the primary explanation for biological complexity, by evolutionary biologists such as Lynch? It almost sounds like Lynch is now hinting that such an explanation was incorrect. 

In the very next sentence, Lynch offers what sounds like the lamest explanation ever for biological complexity, a "only one direction to go in" explanation. He states this: "Of course, today’s organisms are more complex than prior to the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA), but there was only one direction to go four-billion years ago at the first dawn of cells." Similar reasoning might claim that well-built tall moon rockets can be built by tornadoes passing through junk yards, and claim that we should not be surprised by this on the grounds that "there was only one direction to go," the direction leading up towards the sky.  

The claim of "only one direction to go" is false. Once organisms arise with a dependency on a huge library of chemical information in genes, there are two directions that can be traversed, one leading to greater functional complexity, greater organization and more impressive biological functionality, and the other leading to less functional complexity, less organization and worse biological functionality. Random mutations occur all the time, and a large fraction of such mutations tend to cause illness and dysfunction. 

We then have this paragraph by Lynch:

"Microbes have been around for this entire period [4 billion years], and yet have not expanded in complexity. Given their enormous population sizes and short generation times, there were clearly adequate opportunities for the emergence of genomic, molecular, and cellular complexity should it have been at a selective premium. Yet, the origin of morphologically complex cells leading to eukaryotes was a singular event, and the vast majority of the Tree of Life remains prokaryotic. There are roughly 10³⁰ prokaryotic individuals on Earth, three orders of magnitude more than unicellular eukaryotes, and ten orders of magnitude more than the total number of metazoan individuals (reviewed in ref. 19), hardly an observation in support of a determined march toward complexity."

The first statement is false, according to the standard account of biologists. According to their account, there first existed prokaryotic calls much more simple than the vastly more complex type of cells in human bodies, called eukaryotic cells. So, according to the standard account, there was an enormous leap in the complexity of microbes. So why is Lynch claiming "microbes...have not expanded in complexity"? Later in the same paragraph, he contradicts his earlier assertion by referring to the origin of eukaryotic cells. He has no Darwinian or gradualist explanation for this event, referring to it as "a singular event." The standard story among biologists is that this vast leap in organization occurred as a "once in the planet's history" event due to some fantastically improbable accident.  

Ponder how ridiculous the last sentence is in the italicized quote above. Lynch states, "There are roughly 10³⁰ prokaryotic individuals on Earth, three orders of magnitude more than unicellular eukaryotes, and ten orders of magnitude more than the total number of metazoan individuals (reviewed in ref. 19), hardly an observation in support of a determined march toward complexity." This is cover-up-the-complexity talk along the lines of "the microbes vastly outnumber the mammals, so we should not think life is so complex."  Similar nonsense would claim that failed writers vastly outnumber writers such as Shakespeare, so we should not be too impressed by the works of Shakespeare.

The next paragraph is more cover-up-the-complexity nonsense. In one sentence Lynch makes the lame suggestion that we should not be too impressed by bursts of gene innovation in large animals, on the grounds that microbes had bigger bursts of gene innovation. Lynch also makes the false claim that large organisms only required "one new gene per 100,000" years. The claim is utterly unbelievable. Animal life is divided into about 30 phyla. Almost all of these phyla arose around the same relatively short era, during the Cambrian Explosion about 540 million years ago. The origin of such phyla must have required the origin of new genes at a rate many times greater than "one new gene per 100,000" years. The graph below shows the narrative of today's biologists about the origin of phyla during the past billion years, and how many arose during each part of that time. It's a narrative that is inconsistent with Darwinian gradualist explanations.

There follows more "coverup-the-complexity" nonsense from Lynch, such as these sentences below:

"For example, despite their added complexity for DNA replication and repair pathways, metazoans and land plants have substantially higher deleterious mutation rates than do prokaryotes. Despite their substantially more complex ribosomes and mechanisms for assembling them, eukaryotes do not have elevated rates or improved accuracies of translation, and if anything, catalytic rates and degrees of enzyme accuracy are reduced relative to those in prokaryotes (with simpler homomeric enzymes). Eukaryotes have diminished bioenergetic capacities (i.e., growth rates) relative to prokaryotes (21, 22), and this reduction is particularly pronounced in multicellular species (23)."

What is the motive of an evolutionary biologist such as Lynch in making these kind of "mammals are not so impressive" statements? The motive is a complexity coverup. Evolutionary biologists are profoundly embarrassed by the endless stupendous wonders of fine-tuned biological innovation and staggering heights of organization everywhere in the biosphere, which Darwinism does such a very crappy job of explaining. The greater the organization and functional complexity of an organism, the less credible it is to claim that the organism arose from unguided processes like those imagined by evolutionary biologists. So we see in the writing of evolutionary biologists and Darwinists a continual failure to properly describe the vast levels of organization, component interdependence,  information richness and fine-tuned functional complexity of living organisms. And we may read evolutionary biologists writing a paragraph like the one quoted above, saying something that sounds like "mammals are not much better than  microbes" nonsense. 

A silly microbiologist

Lynch makes this claim: "The peculiar details of life’s structures and functions are legacies of historical contingencies, laid down prior to LUCA, which dictate all aspects of molecular assembly and breakdown." The LUCA he is referring to (Last Universal Common Ancestor) is something evolutionary biologists claim existed a billion years ago or earlier.  So the structures and functions of human beings were "laid down prior to LUCA,"  "laid down" a billion years ago?  That's baloney. You could write a very long book describing only human and mammalian functions and structures unlike anything that existed a billion years ago. 

Instead of understanding any such thing as something that dictates "all aspects of molecular assembly and breakdown," today's scientists have no explanation for how the most complex molecules perform the way they do. Scientists cannot explain how it is that a protein molecule is able to form into the folded three-dimensional shape required for its function (a shape not specified in DNA or its genes). And scientists have no explanation for how proteins form into the protein complexes (teams of proteins) so often required for a protein to be useful. Below are some relevant quotes:

• "In real time how the chaperones fold the newly synthesized polypeptide sequences into a particular three-dimensional shape within a fraction of second is still a mystery for biologists as well as mathematicians."   -- Arun Upadhyay, "Structure of proteins: Evolution with unsolved mysteries," 2019.
• "The problem of protein folding is one of the most important problems of molecular biology. A central problem (the so called Levinthal's paradox) is that the protein is first synthesized as a linear molecule that must reach its native conformation in a short time (on the order of seconds or less). The protein can only perform its functions in this (often single) conformation. The problem, however, is that the number of possible conformational states is exponentially large for a long protein molecule. Despite almost 30 years of attempts to resolve this paradox, a solution has not yet been found." -- Two scientists, "On a generalized Levinthal's paradox," 2018. 
• "How proteins fold remains a central unsolved problem in biology. While the idea of a folding code embedded in the amino acid sequence was introduced more than 6 decades ago, this code remains undefined. While we now have powerful predictive tools to predict the final native structure of proteins, we still lack a predictive framework for how [amino acid] sequences dictate folding pathways....Almost seven decades of experimental and theoretical inquiry have not revealed a 'folding code' at the amino acid level, i.e., rules endowed with the generality and predictive power required to connect amino acid sequence to how the protein attains its structure....Machine learning made it possible to identify weak correlations to generate the structure most likely to correspond to a sequence. This tour-de-force effort has largely solved the problem of predicting protein structure from sequence...but with a key limitation: the algorithm that predicts the structure is a complex black box of pattern recognition that casts little light on the process of folding and that tells us nothing about why only some sequences fold, or how physics and evolution are coupled." -- Five scientists in the year 2025 (link). 
• "The real challenge—that remains unanswered after more than 50 years of research in the structural biology field—is understanding the mechanisms that lead proteins to fold into their native state. The reason for these difficulties is that the central question of the protein folding problem remains unresolved: specifically, how a sequence of amino acids encodes its folding pathways." -- Scientist Jorge A. Vila, 2025 (link). 
•  "The majority of cellular proteins function as subunits in larger protein complexes. However, very little is known about how protein complexes form in vivo." Duncan and Mata, "Widespread Cotranslational Formation of Protein Complexes," 2011.
• "While the occurrence of multiprotein assemblies is ubiquitous, the understanding of pathways that dictate the formation of quaternary structure remains enigmatic." -- Two scientists (link). 
• "A general theoretical framework to understand protein complex formation and usage is still lacking." -- Two scientists, 2019 (link). 
• "Most proteins associate into multimeric complexes with specific architectures, which often have functional properties like cooperative ligand binding or allosteric regulation. No detailed knowledge is available about how any multimer and its functions arose during historical evolution." -- Ten scientists, 2020 (link). 
• "Protein assemblies are at the basis of numerous biological machines by performing actions that none of the individual proteins would be able to do. There are thousands, perhaps millions of different types and states of proteins in a living organism, and the number of possible interactions between them is enormous...The strong synergy within the protein complex makes it irreducible to an incremental process. They are rather to be acknowledged as fine-tuned initial conditions of the constituting protein sequences. These structures are biological examples of nano-engineering that surpass anything human engineers have created. Such systems pose a serious challenge to a Darwinian account of evolution, since irreducibly complex systems have no direct series of selectable intermediates, and in addition, as we saw in Section 4.1, each module (protein) is of low probability by itself." -- Steinar Thorvaldsen and Ola Hössjerm, "Using statistical methods to model the fine-tuning of molecular machines and systems,"  Journal of Theoretical Biology

In his zeal to criticize "assembly theory," Lynch makes this damaging confession: "To sum up, all evidence suggests that expansions in genomic and molecular complexity, largely restricted to just a small number of lineages (one including us humans), are not responses to adaptive processes." What? So we don't get expansions in complexity as part of an adaption storyline? That contradicts endless thousands of previous claims by evolutionary biologists that evolution occurs as an adaption to the environment. As a scientific paper states, "The vast majority of biologists engaged in evolutionary studies

interpret virtually every aspect of biodiversity in adaptive terms." 

Lynch's next statement is pure hogwash: "Instead, the embellishments of cellular complexity that arise in certain lineages are unavoidable consequences of a reduction in the efficiency of selection in organisms experiencing high levels of random genetic drift." There is nothing "inevitable" about cells becoming more complex, and Darwinists don't have any credible explanation as to how cells could have increased so enormously in complexity. 

But it seems that Lynch at least has a tiny bit of insight about his own hubris, because he says, "Some readers, probably including the authors of the above-mentioned papers, will argue that there is excessive hubris in the preceding paragraphs," referring to his own claims. Yes, Lynch has indeed been guilty of very bad hubris, groundless boasting, and a very silly attempt to coverup the stratospheric heights of dazzling innovation and information-rich organization in mammals and humans. Such coverups are like a child at the edge of the seashore, trying to push back the ocean by thrusting his palms against  incoming waves.

Lynch's paper has some very bad hubris, particularly at the end when he makes the suggestion that evolutionary biologists may have little more left to do other than "stamp collecting." In an earlier paper he spoke as if the exact opposite was true, confessing that "the mechanisms by which complex cellular features evolve constitute one of the great unsolved problems of evolutionary biology." Two other biologists  in 2006 made a similar confession in the quote below, making a confession that is the exact opposite of the boasts we so often hear from evolutionary biologists:

"Evolutionary biologists assert that variations must be sufficient, though they lack a general explanation for the origin of complex novel structures." -- Biologists  Marc W. Kirschner and John C. Gerhart, "The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin's Dilemma," 2006, page 4 (link).  

Science News BS Heat Map, June 19, 2026

 

  

Recent Science News Article	BS Rating	Comment
"Experts now think ageing can be reversed. Here's what convinced them."		Very bad clickbait from the BBC Science Focus site that is now one of the Internet's worst purveyors of clickbait bunk. The only discussion of biology is a discussion of jelllyfish, and it has no relevance to human aging.
"NASA Study Challenges Theories on Where the Ingredients for Life Came From."		The title and most of the story are not objectionable. But the beginning is way off. The writer says, "The question of how life began here on Earth... remains a bit of a mystery." To the contrary, the origin of life is the most gigantic mystery, which scientists have made no progress on solving. The writer then makes the untrue claim that scientists have confirmed that life began near hydrothermal vents. The claim that life began in such a way is a mere speculation, without any evidence to support it.
"Why 'reprogramming' is the buzziest approach in reversing aging right now"		This MIT Technology Review article starts out with a good description of how some previous excitement about reversing aging approaches failed to live up to the hype. The article then tries to raise excitement about a "cell reprogramming" approach, by claiming,  "It seems to improve tissue healing, restore vision, and even improve learning and memory." The claim about improvements in memory and learning is groundless. When that claim is made, the article has a link to a very low-quality paper failing to show any such thing.  It's a junk paper guilty of the same old Questionable Research Practices so predominant in neuroscience memory research, such as the use of way-too-small study group sizes, the lack of any blinding protocol, and the use of the utterly unreliable "freezing behavior" method of trying to judge how well a rodent remembered (a worthless method for reasons discussed at length here). The paper also uses the Morris Water Maze test to try to measure memory in mice. While that test is fairly reliable when used on rats, it is not a reliable test when used on mice, for reasons explained in the appendix at the end of my post here.
"Metal-driven chemical reaction in deep sea may explain origin of life"		The title of this article in the journal Science is an example of very bad misleading clickbait, which we often get these days in even the most prestigious science publications. The idea that life (something of enormously high complexity even in its simplest form) could be explained by a mere chemical reaction is nonsensical. All that is mentioned is speculation about the origin of phosphorus in living things, and even the simplest living thing is vastly more than mere phosphorus. The main problem in explaining the origin of life is explaining the origin of hundreds of types of proteins required for even the simplest cell. Such proteins do not even use phosphorus.
"Newfound ‘Switchboard’ Helps the Brain Form New Memories Without Forgetting Older Ones."		We have here another example of the tendency of university press offices to produce hugely misleading press releases boasting grandly about low-quality work done at their university. The paper being promoted is the very low-quality paper here, which used way-too-small study group sizes such as only 2 mice, 4 mice and 6 mice. No study like this should be taken seriously unless it used 15 or 20 animals per study group.  The boasts of the press release are utterly groundless. Given the switchboard-resembling structure of the brain and the continuous firing of neurons, anyone can monitor some brain cells during some animal's learning, and say he found a "memory switchboard," even if the cells monitored have no relation to memory.
"How the brain builds sentences, neuron by neuron."		The article in Nature is promoting another low-quality study involving reckless endangerment of epilepsy patients, one in which very sick epilepsy patients have microelectrodes unnecessarily implanted in their brains. While larger electrodes are often implanted to help determine where in the brain to do epilepsy surgery, a scientific paper tells us, "Sixty-five years after single units were first recorded in the human brain, there remain no established clinical indications [i.e. medical justification] for microelectrode recordings in the presurgical evaluation of patients with epilepsy (Cash and Hochberg, 2015)." We read, "These micro-arrays (used for research) were placed within the cortex in tandem with the surface cortical grids (used for clinical monitoring)," which suggests the microarray or microelectrodes were not necessary for surgical evaluation. The implantation of microelectrodes into brains has health risks, and here very sick epilepsy patients were  unnecessarily endangered. Nothing of any real scientific value resulted from this experiment. All that is going on is pareidolia correlation-fishing noise-mining, in which scientists identify some neurons that fired more often before some word was spoken. Because neurons fire randomly between 1 and 200 times per second, you would always be able to identify such neurons, even if brains do nothing to produce speech, and even if you were tracking neurons that had no involvement in speech. The sample size was too low (only 8 humans) for any robust result to be claimed. Tragically such reckless endangerment of very sick epilepsy patients in poorly designed experiments is an ongoing scandal of neuroscience research. Typically in the "informed consent" documents of such studies, epilepsy patients are not even informed (in any language a suffering epileptic patient would be likely to understand) of the most basic fact of what will occur, that tiny wires will be planted deep in their brains. This study fails to publish any informed consent document the subjects agreed to. Why was that?
"Benzene reaction may explain how DNA and RNA building blocks formed on early Earth."		The press release starts out badly, by making the very untrue claim that DNA and RNA are "the molecules that encode all of life's functions." That is not true. Neither DNA nor RNA tells how to make a cell or any of its organelles; and neither molecule tells how to make a human body or any of its organs; and neither molecule does anything to explain the mental functions of humans. The press release discusses some mere speculation about how we might have got precursors of the first RNA or DNA molecules. There is no discussion of a lab experiment substantiating this speculation, as shown by the statement, "The team next plans to demonstrate that these reactions can occur in the laboratory."
"Ancient fire record rewritten: Researchers push earliest evidence of human fire use back to over a million years"		The article discusses claimed evidence of "fire use" in a cave in South Africa, "fire use" supposedly occurring between 1 and 1.7 million years ago. The claim is extremely dubious, being based on some "new method" by which scientists claim to analyze fossil bones and find evidence that some burning occurred, involving evidence "subtle and difficult to detect."  We read that this is evidence not of man-built fires but of the use of "naturally occurring fires." The evidence is extremely weak and doubtful, and the use of the term "human fire use" is inappropriate. No species existing a million years ago should ever be called human. A hallmark characteristic of humans is the use of symbols. When you are discussing creatures existing very long before any symbols were created, such creatures should not be referred to as "human."
"Decoding the Genetic Blueprint Behind Our Three-Dimensional Body."		Another telling of the "genes as body blueprint" deceit that materialists have been telling for decades, because it's a lie they need to tell. Genes actually specify only low-level chemical information, and do not specify how to make any anatomical structures and do not even specify how to make cells or any of the organelles that make up cells. Contrary to the title mentioning our bodies, the study discussed involved only comb jellies (looking like jellyfish).

1. On page 26 of the recent book The Developing Genome, Professor David S. Moore states, "The common belief that there are things inside of us that constitute a set of instructions for building bodies and minds -- things that are analogous to 'blueprints' or 'recipes' -- is undoubtedly false."
2. Biologist Rupert Sheldrake says this "DNA only codes for the materials from which the body is constructed: the enzymes, the structural proteins, and so forth," and "There is no evidence that it also codes for the plan, the form, the morphology of the body."
3. Developmental biologist C/H. Waddington stated, "The DNA is not a program or sequentially accessed control over the behavior of the cell."
4.  Scientists Walker and Davies state this in a scientific paper: "DNA is not a blueprint for an organism; no information is actively processed by DNA alone...DNA is a passive repository for transcription of stored data into RNA, some (but by no means all) of which goes on to be translated into proteins."
5. Geneticist Adam Rutherford states that "DNA is not a blueprint," a statement also made by biochemistry professor Keith Fox. 
6. "The genome is not a blueprint," says Kevin Mitchell, a geneticist and neuroscientist at Trinity College Dublin, noting "it doesn't encode some specific outcome."
7. "DNA cannot be seen as the 'blueprint' for life," says Antony Jose, associate professor of cell biology and molecular genetics at the University of Maryland, who says, "It is at best an overlapping and potentially scrambled list of ingredients that is used differently by different cells at different times."  
8. Sergio Pistoi (a science writer with a PhD in molecular biology) tells us, "DNA is not a blueprint," and tells us, "We do not inherit specific instructions on how to build a cell or an organ." 
9. Michael Levin (director of a large biology research lab) states that "genomes are not a blueprint for anatomy," and after referring to a "deep puzzle" of how biological forms arise, he gives this example: "Scientists really don’t know what determines the intricate shape and structure of the flatworm’s head."

The Faulty Figures in an Astrobiology Paper

 The 2022 science paper "Life beyond Earth: How will it first be detected?" by Chris Impey has some figures designed to cause us to be hopeful about the chances of detecting extraterrestrial life before the year 2035. But the figures are misleading, and the prospects of detecting such life before the year 2035 are dim. 

Let us look at some of these figures, and why they mislead us. Figure 1 in this paper is this cheerful visual:

Below are comments on some of the circles in the diagram.

• "Evidence that organic molecules form easily and readily." The trick of appealing to a supposed widespread existence of "organic molecules" is the oldest trick of astrobiologists. Saying there are  lots of "organic molecules" in outer space makes people think that outer space is life-friendly. But when scientists use the term "organic molecules" they merely mean molecules containing carbon. Most of these "organic molecules" are not components of life or any indicators of life. 
• "Evidence that planet and moon habitable locations are abundant." Before there was launched telescopes such as the Kepler telescope and the James Webb telescope, the hope was that many earth-sized planets would be found in the habitable zones around other stars. By now more than 5000 extrasolar planets have been discovered revolving around other stars. Only very few Earth-sized planets have been detected revolving around sun-like stars in habitable zones. When I ask Google how many, an AI overview lists only three (Kepler-452b, Kepler-1606b, and Kepler-1649b). So rather than using the phrase "abundant" here it might be better to use the term "rare." 
• "Evidence that Earth life can survive under a wide range of conditions." Such evidence does not tell us anything very important about the likelihood of an accidental appearance of life on another planet. 
• "Evidence that ingredients for life are widely available in time and space." It would be fallacious to argue that books can accidentally be printed in a book manufacturing plant,  on the grounds that "ingredients" for books (such as paper and ink) are widely available at such a spot. Similarly, even the simplest one-celled life is a state of very high organization, something requiring a very special engineering, not merely "ingredients." The amount of information and organization needed for even the simplest life is comparable to the amount of information and organization needed to produce a 100-page technical manual. 
• "Evidence that life appeared early in the history of the earth."  We do not know that life appeared very early in the history of the earth. Our planet is 4.6 billion years old, and claims are made that there are geological signs of life dating back to 3.5 billion years. But such claims are doubtful, as they rely on what are called stromatolites, unusual-looking geological features which some claim were formed by bacteria. We see no cells or biological structures in the oldest stromatolites. The claim that very old stromatolites (older than 3 billions years) are signs of ancient life relies on a rather complicated and debatable line of reasoning. It's quite possible that they are not signs of early life, and that there are alternate geological explanations. This scientific paper says the evidence for life older than 2.5 billion years is “meager and difficult to read.” If you were to prove that life arose on Earth in the first billion years that it could have arisen, that would not tell us anything about the unlikelihood of life accidentally arising. Extremely unlikely things that might happen in any of ten time periods often occur in the first of those time periods. For example, someone may be killed by lightning during the first of ten decades that he might have been killed by lightning. But that does not tell us anything about the likelihood of being killed by lightning. 

Later we have a Figure 5 which attempts to persuade us that there is a "basic foundation" for "biomarkers" on Enceladus and Titan, two moons of Saturn.  Biomarkers have not been detected on either of these moons. Later there is a Figure 9 which has a large title of "SETI Success." So far SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) has been a dismal failure. 

Later we have this as Figure 10:

The figure predicts that life would be detected by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) using "IR Spectroscopy" (infrared spectroscopy) by the year 2024. This discovery is judged to be something that would occur with "high" probability. It is now the year 2026 and no such detection has occurred. There was a false alarm announcement by a glory-seeking astrobiologist in the year 2025, but other scientists said the announcement was groundless. 

There is also no reason to think that the GMT (Giant Magellan Telescope) or that the ELT (Extremely Large Telescope) will have a "high" chance of detecting extraterrestrial life, as Impey assumes in the figure above. These GMT and ELT telescopes will be observatories in Chile that will be subject to distortion caused by Earth's atmosphere, something that the James Webb Space Telescope avoids. 

It seems the underlying  assumptions of astrobiologist author Chris Impey are very wrong. Making an equally bad blunder, Impey predicted that a Mars sample return would have "high" odds of life detection. There is no basis for such optimism. Life requires many types of protein molecules, and most types of protein molecule require a very special special arrangement of hundreds of amino acids. Amino acids have never been detected on Mars, and the surface of Mars is extremely inhospitable to life. Given such facts, there is no basis for thinking that a Mars sample return mission would be likely to detect life. 

It seems that astrobiologists such as Impey are people who are very  overoptimistic. A central tendency of materialists has been a tendency to vastly underestimate the complexity of living things and the complexity of minds. This tendency has led materialists to make bad predictions about when the origin of life would be understood and when extraterrestrial life would be discovered. 

So in the year 2006 on the page here chemist Robert Shapiro predicted that the origin of life would be understood within five years, this being a prediction that the origin of life would be understood by the year 2011.  Twenty years later the problem of explaining the origin of life is still a problem 100 miles over the heads of scientists. Even the simplest self-reproducing one-celled organism is a state of organization so high that we should never expect it to arise by chance anywhere in the universe. 

In the year 2015 Ellen Stofan (a chief scientist at NASA) predicted, “I think we are going to have strong indications of life beyond Earth within a decade, and I think we're going to have definitive evidence within 20 to 30 years.” It's now the year 2026, and the prediction of finding "strong indications" of extraterrestrial life by the year 2025 failed. In 2025 NASA tried to get people excited about some rocks found on Mars, using the term "potential biosignatures"; but it was purely verbal trickery and groundless hype. Nothing like any decent evidence for life had been discovered. 

In a 1964 report of the Rand Corporation a large group of  experts (largely Darwinist materialists) were asked when there would occur "creation of a primitive form of artificial life (at least in the form of self-replicating molecules)." Many of these experts gave estimates between 1980 and the year 2000. It is now the year 2026, and no such thing has happened. 

The experts were blinded by their allegiance to materialism. A proper study of the mountainous degree of organization and fine-tuned complexity in even the simplest thing would have led you to estimate that scientists would never be able to create artificial life from chemicals. But the experts did not make such a study, because they wanted to believe that self-reproduction is relatively easy to achieve. 

It is quite possible that the universe has very many other forms of intelligent life, but the chance of that seems very slim if unguided material processes are all that's going on. 

A Table Comparing 5 Studies of Near-Death Experiences

Sudden cardiac arrest is a major cause of death, suddenly killing about 350,000 each year in the United States alone. Of those who experience sudden cardiac arrest outside of a hospital, few survive. 

A big recent study on what goes on in near-death experiences is now available in preprint form. It is the study "Psychometric evaluation of the Danish Near-Death Experience Content scale in a sample of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest survivors," which you can read here. 

The study by Tobias Anker Stripp MD and someone else used as its starting point 2,785 people who survived out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. They were asked, "A life-threatening situation or illness (such as an accident, cardiac arrest, or cancer) can cause some people to lose or experience an altered sense of consciousness. Some may subsequently recount memories from the time when they had lost, or experienced an altered state of consciousness, whereas others cannot remember anything. Do you have any memories from such an experience?” Those responding "yes" or "don't know" were sent out a survey about near-death experiences, and according to page 10 of the preprint, 738 answered this survey. This gives a response pool much larger than the other surveys summarized in the table below, as those other surveys all involve fewer than 100 respondents. 

Let's compare the results of this study with the results of similar studies. The papers mentioned in the table below are these:

Study 1: The phenomenology of near-death experiences,” 78 subjects (link), a 1980 study, producing results similar to a smaller study group year 2003 in-hospital study by one of its co-authors. 

Study 2: "Qualitative thematic analysis of the phenomenology of near-death experiences,” 34 subjects (link), a 2017 study on people who survived cardiac arrest. 

Study 3: "Near-death experience in survivors of cardiac arrest: a prospective study in the Netherlands," a 2001 study of 62 subjects who were known to have suffered cardiac arrest and survived it, and who also reported a near-death experience (a subset that was 12% of a larger group of cardiac arrest survivors), link. The average duration of cardiac arrest was 4 minutes. 74% were interviewed within 5 days of their cardiac arrest. 

Study 4: "Different Kinds of Near-Death Experience: A Report on a Survey of Near-Death Experiences in Germany," 82 subjects (link).

Study 5: "Psychometric evaluation of the Danish Near-Death Experience Content scale in a sample of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest survivors," 738 subjects (link).  This involved a scale in which you could answer between 1 and 5, with "0 – not at all; none”, “1 – slightly”, “2 – moderately”, “3 – strongly; equivalent in degree to any other strong experience”, and “4 – extremely; more than any other time in my life."  Only responses of 2 or greater are included in the percentages listed in the "Study 5" column below. So in the "Study 5" column below I give the mathematical sum of the right-most 3 columns of particular rows in Table 1 of this study, which appears after the main text of the paper. 

In the table below, blank squares occur whenever the survey had no question corresponding to the question on the left side of the row. Blank squares do not mean that 0% answered "yes" to a question.  

The recent study described in the Study 5 column gives results similar to those of previous studies on near-death experiences. (Those reading this page on a smartphone will need to finger swipe to the right to see the columns for Study 4 and Study 5.)

	Study 1	Study 2	Study 3	Study 4	Study 5
Seeing a light or “unusual visual phenomena” such as lights or auras	48%	74%	> 23%	40%	17%
Meeting other beings	55%	44%	32%	48%	14%
Positive emotions or intense feeling of well-being	37-50%	29%	56%	50%	40%
“Hyper-lucidity” or thoughts speeded up		41%			36%
ESP during the near-death experience	39%	12%			23%
"Awareness of being dead" or awareness of dying		26%	50%		23%
Distortion of time	79%	47%			38%
Celestial landscape or other realm of existence	72%		29%	51%	19%
Contact or communi-cation with the dead	30%	23%	19%	16%	14%**
Out-of-body experience	75% (27%?)*	35%	24%	31%	20%
Having some sort of non- physical body separate from the physical body	58%
Passing through tunnel or similar structure	31%	26%	31%	38%	13%***
Reaching a border or point of no return	57%		8%		12%
Life reviewed or relived	27%	15%	13%	44%	13%

*Study 1 says, "The impression or feeling of seeing oneself to be out-side the physical body, an 'out-of-the-body experience,’ was reported by 75% of our respondents." But the study's Table 1 gives a different figure of only 27%. 

** In Survey 5 the question was, "You encountered a presence and/or an entity (who might be deceased)."

*** In Survey 5 the question was, "You saw or entered a gateway (for instance a tunnel or a door)."

The recent study (Study 5) getting results for so many survivors of sudden cardiac arrest provides powerful new evidence against all attempts to naturally near-death experiences. During sudden cardiac arrest, the electrical system of the heart malfunctions, and the result is a stopping of the heart that produces a flatlining of brain signals (called asystole) within 15 or 20 seconds after the heart stops. We cannot explain near-death experiences in such people by imagining that they were hallucinating. A flatlining brain that has electrically shut down cannot hallucinate. 

Below is part of Figure S1A from the supplemental information of a 2023 paper. We see the brain waves of the dying Patient One in blue (EEG readings), and we see in the last row a red ECG reading that is a  measure of heart activity.  The brain waves flatline very quickly after the heart stops beating. 

The term "isoelectric" or iso-electric in reference to brain waves means a flat-lining equivalent to no electrical activity in the brain, as measured by EEG readings. The paper here states, "Within 10 to 40 seconds after circulatory arrest the EEG becomes iso-electric." Figure 1 of the paper here says that such an isoelectric flat-lining occurred within 26 seconds after the start of ventricular fibrillation, the "V-fib" that is a common cause of sudden cardiac death, with "cortical activity absent." Also referring to a flat-lining of brain waves meaning a stopping of brain electrical activity, and using the term "ischemia" meaning a lack of blood to the heart, another scientific paper says, "several studies have shown that EEG becomes isoelectric within 15 s [seconds] after ischemia without a significant decrease in ATP level (Naritomi et al., 1988; Alger et al., 1989)."  Another paper tells us this about brain waves and infarction (obstruction of blood flow), using CBF to mean cerebral blood flow, and the phrase "the EEG becomes isoelectric" to mean a flat-lining of brain electrical signals:

"When normal CBF declines, the EEG first loses the higher frequencies (alpha and beta bands), while the lower frequencies (delta and theta bands) gradually increase. When the CBF decreases further towards an infarction threshold, the EEG becomes isoelectric." 

Similarly, another paper refers to blood pressure, and tells us, "When flow is below 20 mL/100 g/min (60% below normal), EEG becomes isoelectric," meaning that brain electrical activity flat-lines. The 85-page "Cerebral Protection" document here states, "During cardiac arrest, the EEG becomes isoelectric within 20-30 sec and this persists for several minutes after resuscitation." Another scientific paper states this, using the term "isoelectric" which means flatlining. 

"Of importance, during cardiac arrest, chest compliance is not confounded by muscle activity. The EEG becomes isoelectric within 15 to 20 seconds, and the patient becomes flaccid (Clark, 1992; Bang, 2003)."

Attempts to naturally explain near-death experiences tend to ignore this reality that such experiences typically occur during cardiac arrest when the brain has flatlined, a reality excluding a hallucination explanation. 

I normally think of The Conversation as being a materialist web site, given the type of articles it so typically publishes. So I was surprised to recently read an article at that site favorably covering near-death experiences and candidly discussing some of their currently inexplicable features. In the article we read this:

"A subset of out-of-body experiences involve verifiable perceptions. In other words, the patient recalls perceiving something they should not have while unconscious (beyond simple memory reconstruction). The International Association of Near Death Studies published a compilation of more than 100 cases in the second edition of The Self Does Not Die in 2023. These include descriptions of objects in places that were out of reach to those in the room, even if they were trying to look. For example, 'a 1985 quarter lying on the right-hand corner of the eight-foot-high cardiac monitor,' which a physician found upon climbing a ladder. Another example is a 12-digit serial number on top of a seven-foot respirator, referred to by a patient with obsessive-compulsive disorder. In this case, the serial number was confirmed by a technician."

My post here summarizes many of the best cases of this type published in that book.