In 1923 an Editor of Scientific American Confessed the Reality of Telepathy and Mind Over Matter

Nowadays it seems that whenever the leading publication Scientific American discusses the topic of telepathy, we get statements by ESP denialists, despite centuries of evidence for the reality of psi phenomena such as extrasensory perception (ESP) and clairvoyance. But it wasn't always this way. In earlier years the editors of Scientific American confessed that telepathy was proven. 

In my post "In 1941 the Editors of Scientific American Confessed That Telepathy Was Proven," which you can read here, I documented how the editors of Scientific American had publicly confessed that telepathy was a proven fact. 

On this same page of the April 1941 Scientific American, we had a box describing an offer of the magazine to pay $15,000 for proof of the paranormal. Here is part of that box:

Note well item 6 in the list of conditions. We read, "Since experiments by Dunninger and others have proved telepathy to an acceptable degree, demonstrations of this nature are not eligible for the award."  That is a confession that the reality of telepathy had been proven. At the time this was written, the person who had done the most to prove telepathy was Duke University professor Joseph Rhine (whose laboratory experiments are discussed here), and other researchers such as Professor Riess (whose enormously convincing experiment is discussed here). Later researcher Louisa Rhine documented very many cases of telepathy outside of laboratory settings, in her book Hidden Channels of the Mind, which may be read here. Sally Rhine Feather documented very many other cases of telepathy outside of laboratory settings, in her book The Gift: ESP, the Extraordinary Experiences of Ordinary People, which can be read here.

So why in so quite a few decades after the 1940's have Scientific American writers and Scientific American editors misled us by claiming that there is no good evidence for ESP? Nothing happened to warrant such a change. To the contrary,  experiments after 1941 using the Ganzfeld protocol provided extremely well-replicated evidence for the reality of ESP. A paper on the Cornell Physics Paper server gives this summary of the telepathy evidence from the ganzfeld experiments run in recent decades, in which the success rate expected by chance is 25%:

"From 1974 to 2018, the combined ganzfeld database contained 117 studies. Of those, studies using targets sets with 4 possible targets included 3,885 test sessions, resulting in 1,188 hits, corresponding to a 30.6% hit rate. With chance at 25%, this excess hit rate is 8.1 sigma above chance expectation (p = 5.6 × 10^-16). Analysis of these studies showed that similar effect sizes were reported by independent labs, that the results were not affected by variations in experimental quality, and that selective reporting biases could not explain away the results. The Bayes Factors (BF) associated with the last 108 more recently published ganzfeld telepathy studies was 18.8 million in favor of H1 (i.e., evidence favoring telepathy). Given that BF > 100 is considered 'decisive' evidence, this outcome far exceeds the 'exceptional evidence' said to be required of exceptional claims.[48,49] By comparison, in particle physics experiments effects resulting in 5 or more sigma are considered experimental 'discoveries.' ”

The probability of 1 in 5.6 × 10^-16  cited is a likelihood of less than 1 in a quadrillion. 

Researching old newspaper articles, I found an earlier confession by an editor at Scientific American that telepathy had been proven.  The confession occurs in the 1923 newspaper article you can read here. 

In an article entitled "Spirit Messages Declared Frauds," we read the opinion of J. Malcolm Bird, who the article describes as "editor of Scientific American."  Bird declares that he does not believe in messages or manifestations from spirits after investigating them. But he casts doubt upon his qualifications as an objective judge of this topic, by confessing that he has an "emotional preference against the idea that spirits come back and produce physical effects upon our physical plane.”

But later in the article we read this confession from Bird:

"He concedes, first, that what scientists call subjective phenomena, under the head of which come hypnotism and telepathy, do occur, and he cites instances in support of the belief. He concedes, also that he has been impressed with objective phenomena, such as objects moving about at high velocity, weaving themselves, in dark rooms, in and out of chandeliers and other furnishings without contact. His theory is that, with the brain giving off energy, with other brains as the receiver, it is possible also to reach the point of concentration where physical objects may also be the receivers and may be controlled by the brain. If such is true, he holds, It is an entirely human process and not spirits working through the medium."

The underlined part of the statement is a confession of the reality of telepathy. The other part of the statement amounts to a confession of the reality of mysterious movements of matter seeming to be what is called psychokinesis, telekinesis or mind-over-matter. The Scientific American editor Byrd attempted to account for these incredibly spooky movements of matter (including "objects moving about at high velocity, weaving themselves, in dark rooms, in and out of chandeliers and other furnishings without contact") by advancing a theory that remote objects can be moved around by brains giving off energy. 

We know of no energy from a brain that can explain mysterious movements of matter outside of a person's body. We should have a low opinion of Byrd's attempt to create a mechanistic theory to account for the spooky movements of matter he saw. But at least we got from Byrd a confession of the reality of mind over matter, something like psychokinesis or telekinesis. 

In the news article we then read this statement from the Scientific American editor:

"In support of his admission that telepathy is existent, Mr. Bird points to the case of a Scottish woman. Her husband was a seafaring man and at the time was at sea and not expected home for several weeks. She was observed to rush out of the door of her house, with her arms extended, and to walk thus a distance of about one hundred yards on the moor In front of her cottage. She suddenly folded her arms as if about an object and fell In a faint. When she revived, she said, 'my husband is dead.' It was later established that at about that exact moment her husband had been drowned at sea."

We then read in the newspaper article about Bird's interaction with a British medium of the early twentieth century (Gladys Osborne Leonard), who seemed to produce psychic or paranormal results so impressive she was often called "the British Leonora Piper."  (Piper's prowess is discussed here.) The most impressive existing record of the results of Gladys Osborne Leonard is the 1916 book Raymond, or Life After Death by Sir Oliver Lodge, which can be read online for free here. The book is a meticulous account of interactions Lodge had with mediums after the death of his son Raymond, which occurred on September 14, 1915. The book has transcripts of quite a few sessions Lodge had with mediums such as Leonard.  

We read this about how the Scientific American editor Bird had two seemingly paranormal encounters with Gladys Osborne Leonard:

"In one of his sittings with the clairvoyant medium, Mrs. Leonard, she told him that he had booked passage on two separate ships when he left America for England. Mr. Bird had told no one in England of this, but as a matter of fact, he had done so as a precaution.

Through her 'control' (the spirit working through the medium’s
mouth), she told him also of the existence of a picture of three women, taken by the seashore. One of the women, now a spirit, was supposed to be communicating with him through the medium. Mr. Bird recalled no such picture at the time, but upon his return to America his mother verified its existence. It was a picture of his grandmother and two of his woman relatives taken by the seashore. He attributed this to the workings of telepathy, the explanation being that the medium had taken in through this source the workings of his subconscious mind."

Here Bird is not merely assuming the reality of telepathy, but actually assuming the existence of a kind of super-super-telepathy, in which a mind reader cannot merely detect what you are thinking at the current moment, but also kind of dive into your memories, extracting things you may have seen, but are not currently thinking about, and cannot even currently remember. We have here an example of the infinite explanatory flexibility of those trying to explain away evidence of some mysterious spirit beyond their ken. It kind of goes like this. 

Cannot explain what you saw? Try to explain it as thought-reading and maybe also brain-caused telekinesis.

That still is not enough? Explain the results as super-telepathy involving the ability of someone to read not just your current thoughts but also your memories. 

That still is not enough? Explain the results as super-super-telepathy involving the ability of someone to read not just your current thoughts and also your memories but also something locked in your subconscious mind that you cannot remember if you try. 

Bird seems to have failed to ever convincingly back up his claim that one of the mediums he investigated was involved in fraud.  You can read about the case using the links here, here and in another account you can read below. 

What seems to have happened is that Bird and his Scientific American committee got baffling results while testing Josie K. Stewart, results that originally impressed them (as described in the article above). Later Bird and his men devised a theory of fraud to explain away the results. But none of the later news stories seem to discuss any convincing evidence to back up such a theory of fraud. The accusation was vigorously denied by Stewart.  

We read in the article here some claim of a measurement backing up the claim of fraud. But it does not sound like very reliable evidence at all, as it hinges upon a supposed difference of paper thickness reported as being merely two ten-thousandths of an inch. With a difference that small, the possibility of measurement error is too high, particularly when someone making a measurement may be motivated to get some particular result. 

Postscript: On the morning of this post's publication, I observed a spooky effect I have seen more than 28 times, which I discuss in my post here. The effect may suggest some "mind over matter" interaction going on. 

Technofascism and Materialism Will March Arm-in-Arm

Advances in high technology create a new possibility of oppression: the specter of technofascism. 

A recent article you can read here is entitled "How Epstein Channelled Race Science and ‘Climate Culling’ Into Silicon Valley’s AI Elite." It is based largely on emails very recently released as part of the release of documents of Jeffrey Epstein. The subtitle of the article says, "The Epstein files expose how racial hierarchy, genetic 'optimisation' and even climate-driven population culling circulated inside Big Tech circles." 

Here are some excerpts from the article, which includes references to ideas about "population thinning" or "population culling," apparently ideas that certain groups regarded as "inferior" or "less useful" should be allowed to die, for the sake of improving humanity's genetic stock. The article also references an Edge.org web site and series of books I discuss in my post here.  

"Taken together, the Bach correspondence and the longtermist ideas circulating in this environment show that human hierarchy, population thinning and genetic destiny were not fringe provocations, but part of the ambient intellectual air inside the circles designing the next generation of AI....As previously reported in Byline Supplement, Bostrom would go on to openly advocate in utero selective breeding to enhance population IQ; total global surveillance by artificial intelligence to prevent human extinction; and the idea that sacrificing a billion lives today might be worth it to improve the chances that ten to the fifty-fourth power (septendecillion) people exist in the future.

In 2009, the same year he joined Edge and became a regular contributor to the network, Bostrom co-founded the World Transhumanist Association (now known as Humanity+). Two years later, Jeffrey Epstein donated a total of $120,000 to Bostrom’s organisation....Epstein’s underwriting of Edge gave him extraordinary access and trust with men who were already building the systems – cloud platforms, AI architectures, digital-asset networks – that now underpin political and economic power.

Threaded through that infrastructure was a worldview that Epstein helped architect: the elevation of a self-defined cognitive aristocracy; rising scepticism toward democratic accountability; an obsession with racial and gender hierarchy, and genetic 'optimisation'; machine intelligence as the inevitable future of humanity, if it survives extinction; the legitimacy of population culling to root out inferior groups; all rooted in a hyper-reductionist, technocratic (and arguably unscientific) view of existence as a computer simulation in an amoral multiverse of simulations.

It was a worldview Epstein not merely recognised but was actively cultivating, as it conformed to his own horrific moral choices."

You could use the term "technofascism" to describe such ideas, and you could get quite a lot of justification for the use of that term from the long paper "Technofascism: AI, Big Tech, and the new authoritarianism" by Mark Coeckelbergh, which you can read here. Coeckelbergh describes quite a few parallels between the activities of some players in Big Tech and the activities of fascism. Here is an excerpt from that article:

"The leaders of Big Tech and their advisors spread ideologies that say that the development of AI will accelerate dramatically: artificial general intelligence (AGI) and superintelligence are around the corner and will radically transform society and humanity. Influenced by thinkers such as Bostrom and MacAskill, Big Tech further promotes narratives about the long-term, cosmic future of intelligence. MacAskill (2022) has argued for longtermism: the long-term future takes priority, ethically speaking. This future is imagined as one in which humanity spreads to other planets: trillions of people living with advanced AI. But transhumanists such as Bostrom (2014), Kurzweil (2005), Yudkowsky, and Sanders go further and imagine a vast number of superintelligence beings as mergers of humans and AI. These narratives invite and support the self-regulated development of AI in the hands of Big Tech and puts tech kings such as Musk and Altman (and the thinkers who advise them) in the role of heroes and leaders in a longer term narrative of cosmic proportions: they will lead humanity on the way to the new Brave New Future, in which AI transforms everything. And this has consequences for ordinary mortals such as you and I. We might not matter so much anymore in the light of the New Brave World in the making. Today, we better follow the tech leaders. And in the future, we might well become obsolete. As Torres (2021) has warned, Silicon Valley is influenced by, and spreads, ideologies that are apocalyptic and predict doom: ends times are near and current humans might no longer be needed on the way to a transhumanist and longtermist future, where we will make way to superintelligent entities. Like the ideologies of historical forms of fascism, these tech ideologies spread a death cult and a leadership cult."

You may be baffled by these references to simulation theory and longtermism. I explain how they are related in my post "Longtermism Is Fueled by a Goofy Belief in Computer-Generated Lives," which you can read here. Simulation theory started out as Nick Bostrom's very silly speculation that we may all be merely parts of a simulated reality created by extraterrestrials. It is an enormously stupid idea based on false materialist assumptions.  What is called "longtermism" is a futurist philosophy centered upon speculations that in the future humans will be able to create gigantic numbers of artificial human lives by using computers to artificially generate something like human lives. 

Such ideas are pretty much the worst kind of nonsense, and it is all totally dependent on the false assumptions of materialism. If you believe that a human mind arises solely from a brain, you may believe that there is some way for a computer to recreate a "brain makes mind" mechanism, opening the door to computers creating something like human lives. But if you have done enough study of the endless very strong reasons for rejecting "brains make minds" ideology, reasons discussed at the greatest length in the posts of my blog here, you will reject such a possibility. 

The reasons for rejecting materialism (and the simulation theory and longermism that are based on materialism) are many, including these:

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

In the opinion article here, the Émile Torres mentioned above has some pointed criticisms of the thought of Nick Bostrom. Torres says, " Many of the same racist, xenophobic, classist and ableist attitudes that animated 20th-century eugenics are found all over the longtermist literature and community."  Torres also says, "It should be clear at this point why longtermism, with its transhumanist vision of creating a superior new race of 'posthumans,' is eugenics on steroids." 

If technofascism arises to stomp a boot of oppression on our heads, such technofascism will march arm-in-arm with materialism. There was a previous form of fascism that marched arm-and-arm with the materialist ideology of Darwinism: the twisted horror that was Nazism. 

Back in the Nazi days

The famed British medical journal The Lancet created a commission to examine the role of medical professionals in the Holocaust. The commission issued a long report entitled "The Lancet Commission on medicine, Nazism, and the Holocaust: historical evidence, implications for today,teaching for tomorrow." You can read the report here. The report details that medical professionals were some of the key players in the Nazi slaughter of millions. Below is an excerpt from the report:

"The obsession with race and heredity helps to explain why Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess could describe National Socialism as applied biology, and why medicine came to occupy such a significant place in Nazi Germany, which has been described as a biopolitical dictatorship.  Medicine’s role was to purify and strengthen the German national body (Volkskörper) and to prepare it for its historical mission to build an empire that would last a thousand years (a concept borrowed from Christian theology). The creation of a Nazi version of medical ethics was part of this endeavour. A core element of medicine’s role was so-called race hygiene (Rassenhygiene). Developed in the early decades of the 20th century and based on darwinian terms of selection and struggle and Herbert Spencer’s concept of survival of the fittest, race hygiene describes a set of assumptions, ideological beliefs, and practices that were intended to create a strong national body by fostering the procreation of desirable elements and eradicating those considered racially undesirable or genetically unfit. Implementation of race hygiene, which overlapped considerably with the field of eugenics, became the central pillar of public health during the Nazi period."

On the beginning of page 5 of the same commission report, we read about how natural  selection ideas were at the core of eugenics ideology. The Lancet commission report is 73 pages of double-column fine print, detailing in the most explicit detail how the medical and biology authorities of Nazi Germany were enormously complicit in the immense crimes of the Nazis, providing enthusiastic crucial support at every stage. The reported results are of the greatest importance to anyone who has ever doubted mainstream biology claims about unguided evolutionary origins and "brains make minds" tenets, while asking, "Could it really be that the majority of medical and biology authorities in my country might be wrong about an important teaching?" The answer to that question (as demonstrated by the Lancet commission report) is: not only can the leading medical and biology authorities of a nation be wrong in some of their main teachings,  but they can also be enthusiastic co-participants in the most horrible crimes slaughtering millions. 

Totalitarianism uses "ends justify the means" apologetics to try to justify its crimes. Under Nazism people would say that bloody horrors of mass human slaughter were justified because they would help achieve the glorious result of a thousand-year empire. Under Soviet communism, people would say that bloody horrors of mass human slaughter were justified because they would help achieve the glorious result of the worldwide triumph of communism or the establishment of a worker's paradise. Technofascism theorists are now claiming that "population culling" may be justified in order to help achieve the glorious result of a future in which trillions or quadrillions of artificial lives are generated by computer server farms (maybe solar-powered computer server farms floating in space or existing on the moon). 

It's all the craziest kind of nonsense, and once you adequately study brains and minds you may realize why it is simply impossible. Minds like humans have can only arise from top-down causation such as transcendent causation. Nothing in the slow, very noisy, address-free and index-free high-molecular-turnover meat of a brain and nothing in any electronics of a computer can ever give you a thinking, knowing, believing, loving, caring, planning, questioning, seeing, hearing, creating, imagining, willing, speaking, reading, aspiring, instantly learning, instantly recognizing, striving, enjoying, suffering and comprehending unified self like yourself, a person capable of insight, compassion, morality, self-introspection, instant recall, philosophical inquiry, appreciation and spirituality. 

Bostrom-inspired ideas have always hinged on the silliest word trick unworthy of any serious thinker. It's a word trick in which you start out by claiming that computers can simulate lives (referring to reality such as video games in which human actions are simulated). You then leap to the utterly unwarranted claim that human lives can be produced by computers, using the same term "simulation" to refer to such a production, switching the definition of "simulation" without announcing your switch. It's the same type of equivocation sophistry and word trickery nonsense that would be going on if you first referred to the fact that Taylor Swift is a star, and then said that this proves that Taylor Swift can heat our planet if the sun disappears, because stars are huge luminous bodies emitting enormous heat. (In English the word "star" has a double meaning, referring to popular entertainers and also objects like the sun.)

Once we move towards intelligent ideas about how we got here -- by the action of a causal reality enormously greater than ourselves -- we can move beyond the morally toxic "survival of the fittest" ideas of Darwinism, and embrace a moral viewpoint in which each human mind and each human body is to be treasured and respected, a viewpoint in which humans are never regarded as some animals to be culled. 

Astronomers May Sometimes Fail to Speak With Accuracy and Candor

We tend to think of astronomers as people who speak and write very accurately, maybe because astronomy is a business requiring great precision. But it seems that astronomers sometimes fail to speak with accuracy and candor. 

A recent CBS News story has the incorrect title "Mysterious dark matter seen in new high-resolution map of distant galaxies." No actual dark matter was seen. All that was observed was gravitational lensing, a "bend light" phenomenon that can be produced by any type of matter, either regular matter or so-called dark matter. The scientific paper makes clear that the boasts are all based on observations of "weak gravitational lensing," which involves seeing a bending of light, not seeing dark matter. 

In the article  we read this:

"Wherever we see a big cluster of thousands of galaxies, we also see an equally massive amount of dark matter in the same place. And when we see a thin string of regular matter connecting two of those clusters, we see a string of dark matter as well," said astrophysicist Richard Massey, a coauthor of the study."  

No actual dark matter was observed. Massey is simply inferring dark matter based on some theory of dark matter, and observations that failed to show any dark matter, which (according to scientists such as Massey) is invisible. Using the term "we see" in the statement above rather than "we infer," Massey has failed to speak with accuracy and candor. The same misstatement is made by  Diana Scognamiglio on a NASA page. Scognamiglio boasts about "seeing the invisible scaffolding of the universe in stunning detail," a statement that is obviously untrue, because you cannot see things that are invisible.  What Scognamiglio should have said is that she inferred something that she failed to see. 

The scientific paper of these claimants is entitled "An ultra-high-resolution map of  (dark) matter."  The title is inaccurate. The paper has figures, and none of them is labeled as a map of dark matter. The term "dark matter" is not even used in any of the captions of the paper's figures. We have here another case of what is so common these days in science literature: citation-hungry scientists giving their papers titles that do not match what is in the paper. 

During much of my life the most well-known US astronomer was Carl Sagan, a man who was guilty of many very misleading statements about very important topics, as I document in my post here. Here is a quote from that post:

"Sagan frequently spoke and wrote on the topic of the origin of life, but seemed to never deal with it candidly or honestly by discussing the fantastically intricate fine-tuned arrangements of matter needed to get life started.  His 'just add energy' idea that so gigantically improbable an arrangement of matter was 'spurred by ultraviolet light from the sun and lightning' was goofy talk, like saying that a lightning storm or wind storm could cause the scattered pebbles on a beach to assemble into a long meaningful message....On page 253 of his book Billions and Billions, Sagan told us this gigantically grotesque lying boast about DNA:  'The most significant aspect of the DNA story is that the fundamental processes of life now seem fully understandable in terms of physics and chemistry.' To the contrary, scientists lack any credible explanation of so simple a thing as how human cells are able to reproduce; they lack any credible explanation of the most basic mental processes such as thinking and memory; and since DNA is not a specification for making a human or any organ, cell or organelle, scientists lack any credible explanation for the progression from a speck-sized zygote to an adult human."

Astronomer Adam Frank seems to be a more careful speaker than Sagan was, although at times his posts seem to display shortfalls of candor and accuracy. An example is a post Frank wrote in November, 2024 discussing some US Congress hearing on strange unidentified things in the sky (UFOs and UAP).  Frank describes science as "organized skepticism." That is not a candid and accurate description of today's science academia. An accurate description would be to say that nowadays science academia consists of organized skepticism about anything that scientists do not want to believe in, combined with organized credulity about anything that scientists wish to believe in. So whenever they are dealing with their cherished beliefs such as the belief that life and humans arose accidentally and their belief that minds are made by brains, scientists leave their skepticism at the door, and display the most childlike trusting credulity. 

Another misstatement in Frank's post comes at the end. Inaccurately insinuating that the investigation of UFOs and UAPs (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena) is not "real action," Frank states this: "Meanwhile, the public will miss the real action — the action starting right now as astronomers begin searching distant alien worlds for hard evidence, evidence that all can see, of distant alien life."  Frank makes the untrue claim that the search for distant alien life is "starting right now." To the contrary, it has been going for on more than 60 years, without any success. 

I could see how Frank would want to make this huge misstatement, the same type of misstatement made by astronomer David Kipping who falsely claimed "SETI has been woefully underfunded and has only scratched a tiny fraction of the sky." It is very embarrassing for astronomers that the very well-funded 60-year search by astronomers for extraterrestrial life has produced no successes. So it is very convenient for an astronomer to tell the whopper that such a search is just beginning, so contrary to the facts listed in this post's appendix.  Similarly, if you are a husband who has spent 40 years of married life in a fruitless attempt to create a perpetual motion machine, then if your wife complains about the waste of time and money, it would be convenient to tell the lie that you are "just beginning" your efforts. 

Somehow Adam Frank won a $25,000 prize for his essay "The Second Copernican Revolution," an essay which features lots of crowing Sagan-speak, along with lots of mentions of a not very well-established Gaia theory. The essay makes numerous appeals to an inaccurate concept of "planetary intelligence." Planet Earth is not intelligent, and the billions of intelligent people on this planet do not make up any such thing as a "planetary intelligence." The essay makes inaccurate claims such as this: "Thus, a mature technosphere would be autopoietic. In becoming so, it must manifest what the supporting biosphere established billions of years earlier: planetary intelligence." There is no "planetary intelligence" today, and it is even more obvious there was not "planetary intelligence" billions of years ago.

Talking about biology, the essay has frequent appeals to "self-organization."  When scientists have no decent explanation for how wonders of biological organization arose, their last resort is to make conceptually empty appeals to "self-organization."  Theorists have been speculating about  theories of self-organization for quite a while, but no one has come up with any substantial theory of self-organization explaining impressive degrees of functional order (although the term "self-organization" is sometimes applied to minor things we already knew about such as crystallization). 

Frank gives us this not-at-all candid statement:

"Complex adaptive systems are built from nested hierarchies of smaller subsystems. Think of an animal built from organs that are built of cells that are built from proteins and so on down to the 'fundamental' units of their atoms and constituents. Through these hierarchies of organization, complex systems manifest their most important feature: They self-organize. They create the processes and products necessary for their own ongoing existence."

Rather than making so vacuous an appeal to "self-organization," what Frank should have said is something like this: "Living organisms such as humans have the most enormous fine-tuned hierarchical organization featuring complex systems built of complex systems built of complex systems built of complex systems, with an abundance of interdependent components everywhere; and we don't understand how so many layers of interdependent organization arose." 

Frank fails to clarify things when he says this about the membranes of cells:

"But these processes and products are the very means by which they produce themselves. A concrete example is the cellular membrane. It is the membrane that allows the cell to endure. Needed chemicals are let in while harmful compounds are kept out. This is what allows the membrane itself to be assembled and maintained. Thus, it is the membrane that allows for the existence of a membrane." 

How vacuous and circular such an account is. It's as vacuous as trying to explain the manufacture of cars by saying, "Well, parts are let into the cars, and this is what allows the cars to be assembled." The membranes of human cells are enormously complex systems. According to this page of the Human Protein Atlas, there are more than 2000 different types of proteins used in the membranes of human cells. Each of these proteins is its own complex invention requiring hundreds or thousands of well-arranged parts. Some of the complexity is shown in the diagram below, but the actual complexity is enormously greater than what we see in the diagram. 

Frank might instead have pointed us in the right direction here by saying something like "the vast complexity of cell membranes gives us an inkling of how vast is the organization of human cells."

Astronomer Carl Sagan made many misstatements suggesting structural components of life are common in outer space, something that is not at all true.  Sagan-style baloney and BS on this topic continues. Quanta Magazine had a story with the groundless headline "The Cosmos Teems With Complex Organic Molecules," with the false subtitle of "Wherever astronomers look, they see life’s raw materials."  

The article gives the asteroid Ryugu as an example of such claimed abundance. The truth is that amino acids (the smallest components of living things) have only been detected in space in the tiniest trace amounts.  The only biologically relevant amino acids reportedly found in Ryugu were some of the simplest amino acids (such as glycine, alanine and valine), which were reportedly found at a level of only about 1 part per billion; and whenever levels that small are reported, the reported detection is very questionable (partly because of the very high chance of earthly contamination of retrieved samples). Senselessly the Quanta article describes molecules containing only 20 atoms as "very complex." That isn't a complex molecule from the perspective of biology.  A typical protein molecule has about 8000 very well-arranged atoms in it.  No protein molecule has ever been found in space. 

Those wishing to push unbelievable ideas of accidental biological origins engage in different types of misspeaking.  Most commonly they engage in a kind of misspeaking in which great marvels of vast organization are described as if they are things not complex. So, for example,  they may falsely describe a human body (something with sky-high levels of organization) as a mere "bundle of atoms." But when it comes time to sell the groundless notion that life can accidentally originate, then their language is entirely different. Suddenly they are trying to persuade us that molecules of merely 20 atoms are "very complex."  

In the article we have a quote by an astronomer speaking in a misleading way. Referring to an interstellar cloud, Harvard astronomer Alice Booth says, "You can build complexity without much going on in just a cold, dark cloud."  But why not speak honestly and candidly? Why not tell people that the "complexity" you are talking about is something like an almost-never-arising molecule with only about 20 atoms, which is much less than a hundredth as complex as the complexity of the protein molecules needed for life?  And why not tell people the truth, that such protein molecules require such a special arrangement of amino acids that we would never expect to get even one functional protein molecule from all the random interactions of molecular clouds occurring throughout all of the universe's galaxies over the entire course of the universe's history? 

Perseus molecular cloud (credit: NASA/JPL)

Appendix: Below are some of the SETI searches that have occurred over the past 65 years (some of the observation time figures are taken from the source here):

• The SERENDIP I project, which from 1979 to 1982 surveyed a large portion of the sky, the portion depicted in Figure 4 of the paper here, a project which a Sky and Telescope article tells us surveyed "many billions of Milky Way stars."

• The Southern SERENDIP project lasting 1998 and 2005, which surveyed for some 60,000 hours a large portion of the sky, the portion depicted in Figure 2 of the paper here.

• The SERENDIP II project from 1986 to 1988, involving some 17,000 hours of observations. 

• The All-Sky Search at Ohio State University from 1989 to 1996 (Childers, Dixon and Bolinger), involving 60,000 hours of observations, 

• The Astropulse and Fly's Eye SETI projects surveying a significant portion of the sky, the portion depicted in Figure 2 of the paper here. 

• The SETI@Home project, which according to the source here covered 20% of the full celestial sphere, and 67% of the sky area observable from the Arecibo observatory. 

• The Harvard BETA all-sky SETI survey discussed here, which operated continuously for more than four years (1995-1999), scanning the whole part of the sky observable from Massachusetts, USA, and doing 35,000 hours of observations. 

• Years of SETI searches using the Allen Telescope Array, involving 12 hours a day of SETI searches, 7 days a week, for years (such as 2007 to 2010), resulting in 95,000 hours of observations (discussed here). 

• An optical search for extraterrestrial intelligence, searching 577 nearby stars that might have habitable planets, looking for laser signals.

• All of the optical searches for extraterrestrial intelligence listed on the three pages you can view here, including three searches each involving more than 7000 hours of telescope time, and one search involving 200,000 objects and other searches involving thousands of stars. 

• The two-year southern sky SETI search discussed here, which observed for 9000 hours and "covered the sky almost two times."  

• The five-year META SETI project discussed here, which between 1988 and 1993 spent about 80,000 hours of telescope time searching for extraterrestrials. 

• A META II SETI project between 1990 and 2010, involving 9000 hours of observations of the southern sky.

• All of the radio telescopes searches listed on the seven pages of search results you can review at the link here, including a Dixon, Ehman and Raub search from 1973 to 1986 involving 100,000 hours of telescope time, 

• A failed search of 10 million stars using what in 2009 was the latest and greatest technology.

• A SERENDIP III project from 1992 to 1997, involving 40,000 hours of observations, and surveying 30% of the sky. 

• Extensive SETI searches carried out by the 500-meter FAST radio telescope in China. 

• The ASTROPULSE project discussed here, involving 21,000 hours of observations from 2006 to 2010. 

• The SETI-Italia project discussed here, involving 30,000 hours of observation from 2006 to 2010.

• The Breakthrough Listen project described here, which began in 2015, and has run for 10 years with 100 million dollars in funding, involving thousands of hours each year of dedicated SETI searching, on two of the world's largest radio telescopes.

• A failed search of 1300 galaxies, reported in 2024, using low frequencies and the  Murchison Widefield Array (MWA).

Postscript: For a look at various failures of accuracy, logic and candor in the statements of astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson, read my posts here and here. Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb has provided glaring examples of failing to speak with accuracy and candor, such as when he often tried to persuade us that comets and a meteor seen in recent years were alien spacecraft. 

Astronomer Ethan Siegel (specializing in the cosmology branch of astronomy) has written a recent stuffed-with-baloney post entitled "Carl Sagan’s 9 timeless lessons for detecting baloney." The idea of such a post is laughable, given how often Sagan spoke very bad baloney himself. And the nine quoted principles are not actual statements made by Sagan. Principle #2 is the very bad principle that debate on a topic should be limited to experts on such a topic. Following such a rule, there would have been no protests of the Vietnam War, and everyone would have just accepted the lies that the Pentagon experts on the war kept telling us in the 1960's. I could give a hundred similar examples showing the folly of such a rule. For some weighty examples, read my post "Disastrous Blunders of the Experts" here. 

Siegel claims that because there is "widespread expert consensus" on "the natural origins of SARS-CoV-2, debate only serves to sow doubt about well-established facts." It is not a well-established fact that SARS-Cov2 (the COVID-19 virus) had a natural origin, and there is no consensus on this topic. Three US government agencies (the CIA, the FBI and the Department of Energy) concluded that the virus probably arose from a lab leak rather than a natural origin, the CIA making that conclusion with "low confidence," and the FBI making the conclusion with "moderate confidence." 

In Episode 3 of Season 8 of the TV series "How the Universe Works" we are given yet another example of an astronomer failing to speak with accuracy and candor. Around the 4:24 mark the astronomer (Grant Tremblay) says this:

"And now we think that there are quite literally more planets than stars than there are stars in the universe. So even if life is really rare, there are an enormous number of chances for it to take hold in the universe. And for this reason it is very likely that there is life relatively abundant in the universe, including an uncountable number of advanced alien civilizations. This isn't science fiction. It's just basic probability." 

Here we have a bungling example of the fallacious "many chances equals some successes" argument, presented in its most fallacious form, an extremely erring form of "many chances equals many successes."  Whenever a probability is sufficiently low, then many chances for success will yield zero successes. And we have every reason for suspecting that just such a probability is involved with the chance of life arising from non-life, because of the very high organization required for even the simplest life. Life could be very common in the universe, but only if there is some teleological factor driving such an appearance, something vastly more than the dismal chance of life ever arising from non-life by blind, unguided processes. 

Tremblay is one of very many astronomers who have used the same fallacious "many chances equals some successes" argument when talking about extraterrestrial life, failing to speak with accuracy and candor. Other examples of astronomers misspeaking just as badly can be found here. 

At the same episode around the 8:48 we have astronomer Phil Plaitt saying, "If you go through Drake's equation, and find this number of 10,000 intelligent civilizations out there...." The Drake Equation does not give any such answer about the number of intelligent civilizations that exist.  Filled with some extremely unknown parameters, the equation actually can give any number between 0 and a very large number, depending on what numbers you plug into it. 

Scientist Flubs and Flops #15