Common Ancestry Is a Severe Example of a Missing-Pillars Theory

There is a type of theory we can call a missing-pillars theory. A missing-pillars theory is a theory that lacks pillars of observation that should exist before the theory is asserted. To explain the idea, let me give a schematic diagram of a theory with a strong basis in observations:

Each one of the pillars is some observation that supports the theory. Here is an example. Imagine you are a prosecuting attorney, and your theory is that Johann Schmitzenkoler killed his wife by shooting her at her work. Observation Pillar #1 is a video showing the wife being fatally shot at work by a masked man the same height as the husband. Observation Pillar #2 is a witness saying Johann said he was going to kill his wife the day before the murder, to collect insurance money. Observation Pillar #3 is a video showing Johann approaching the wife's workplace just before the murder, and putting on a mask like the mask the killer wore.  Observation Pillar #4 is that you found buried in Johann's garden a gun that the ballistics division says is the same gun that killed the wife. 

A theory like the one just described is well-supported by evidence. But imagine a very different situation. Your theory is that Walter Willtowsky killed his wife Wilma. The wife has not been seen in a few days, but no one has found her body. In fact, it has not even been proven that the wife is dead.  When Walter is questioned, he says that his wife is just visiting her mother, and will be back before long.  You do not know any "when" involving the wife's murder. You do not know any "why" involving the wife's murder, and you do not know any "how" involving the wife's murder. In fact, you do not even know an "if" regarding the wife's murder, because you do not even know she is dead. In this case we have an example of a missing-pillars theory. The situation is illustrated below. Missing-pillars theories are like the two theories in the bottom row. 

I will give another example of a missing-pillars theory. Imagine Dave married his wife four weeks ago. Since then, Dave has never been apart from his wife. He was with his wife on a honeymoon for two weeks, and the next weeks they worked together at their business, and lived together. Dave for some reason develops the theory that his wife is being unfaithful to him. The problem is that he lacks a "when" and lacks a "where" and lacks a "how" to support this theory. He cannot think of when or where or how his wife could have been unfaithful since marrying him. All that Dave has is a "why." He speculates that maybe his wife is being unfaithful in order to have better sex with some other man. 

Lacking a "when," a "where" and a "how," Dave's theory of his wife's infidelity is a missing-pillars theory. Because all that Dave has is a "why" speculation, his theory is like the structure shown at the bottom right of the diagram above, a structure with only one pillar.  A structure so wobbly will not hold up well. 

Are there missing-pillars theories in the science departments of academia? There are many. In theoretical physics there are the various theories called string theory, all of which are completely lacking in any observational pillars. There is also a theory called supersymmetry theory that is lacking in any observational pillars. Theoretical physicists have written thousands of papers and spent endless thousands of man-hours on these dead ends. In cosmology there is a missing-pillars theory called the cosmic inflation theory (not to be confused with the Big Bang theory). There seems to be at least observational pillars of the Big Bang theory (the expansion of the universe and the observation of the cosmic microwave background). But there are no observational pillars supporting the cosmic inflation theory. 

In the field of astrophysics, there are at least two major missing-pillars theories: the theory of dark matter and the theory of dark energy. Neither has ever been supported by direct observations. The believers in these theories are reduced to appealing to claims of indirect evidence for such theories. 

Are there missing-pillars theories in the biology departments of academia? There are quite a few. One big example is the theory that the brain is the source of the human mind and the storage place of memories.  

To analyze whether a theory is a missing-pillars theory, we should not first look for things we can call pillars of the theory, but instead look for pillars of observation that should exist before someone asserts the theory. In the case of the theory that the brain is the source of the human mind and the storage place of memories, such missing pillars are "all over the place," pretty much everywhere. Below are some of the missing pillars of such a theory. 

• Neuroscientists have microscopically examined many thousands of brains of the recently deceased, and also microscopically examined very much tissue recently removed from living people who had operations such as operations in which brain tissue was removed to reduce seizures. Such microscopic examination has often been done with microscopes which should have been powerful enough to find learned knowledge if it existed in human brains. But such microscopic examination has never discovered the slightest trace of learned information. By microscopic examination no one has ever found a single word someone learned or even a single letter or character stored in a brain. By microscopic examination no one has ever found a single image someone ever saw, and no one has ever found a single pixel of such an image. 
• Neuroscientists lack any credible theory of how a brain could store a record of experiences someone had or how a brain could store something someone learned in school. When they are asked to discuss how such a thing could occur, neuroscientists merely engage in the vaguest hand-waving, such as muttering something about "synapse strengthening" (not a credible theory of how learned information could be stored in brains). 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Despite frequent misleading claims that the brain is like a computer, no one has ever discovered in a brain most of the things that are used by computers to compute. The brain has nothing like a CPU, nothing like an operating system, and nothing like software. No neural foundation has been discovered for human thinking abilities, and neuroscientists are unable to credibly examine how a human could think or reason. 

• Neuroscientists are so lacking in an explanation of how a brain could hold a belief or store an idea or principle or rule that there does not even exist a term used by neuroscientists to describe a belief or idea or principle or rule that is stored in a brain. There exists the word "engram" to describe the idea of a memory stored in the brain, but there does not exist a similar word to describe a belief or idea or principle or rule stored in a brain. 

• It is nowadays widely confessed by neuroscientists that they lack any neural explanation for the basic reality of consciousness or experience. 

• Neuroscientists lack any explanation for how the chemical and electrical activity of the brain could give rise to a strong experience of a single unified self, an experience that persists even when the two hemispheres of the brain fail to be joined by the connecting fibers of the corpus callosum, and even when such fibers are severed in operations to reduce seizures. 

You can read in the most abundant detail about all of these missing pillars by reading the posts of my site here. All of these things are missing pillars of the theory that the brain generates the mind and that the brain stores memories. That theory is a very severe example of a missing-pillars theory. But there may be an even more extreme example of a missing-pillars theory in the world of biology: the theory of common ancestry, also called the theory of common descent. 

The theory of common ancestry is the theory that all life on Earth descends from a common ancestor.  The theory of common ancestry is one that is staggering in its presumptuousness.  You might realize this when we compare the theory of common ancestry to the neuroscientist's theory that brains make minds and that brains store memories. That neuroscientist theory is a theory that merely attempts to offer an origin for what goes on in the minds of humans. There are two basic problems in explaining any particular human: 

(1) how did he get his body?

(2) how did he get his mind?

The neuroscientist attempts to answer the second of these questions, but not the first. The great mystery of how a speck-sized zygote progresses to become the vast state of organization that is a human body is not one addressed by neuroscientists. 

But instead of being limited to trying to explain the mere mental side of humans (a single species), the theory of common ancestry is something that struts around like some biological Theory of Everything. That theory of common ancestry attempts to offer a theory of explanation for all species that now exist, both in the physical sense and the mental sense. It also claims that the same explanation explains every species that has ever existed. Instead of limiting itself to explaining the earthly biology that now exists, the theory of common ancestry promulgates a grand, sweeping dogma that it claims applies to every species that has ever existed: that they all are descendants of a common ancestor. It is hard to imagine any theory that could be more presumptuous, short of some general abstract Theory of Existence applying to everything that exists, living or dead. 

The bigger the theory, the more observational pillars that it requires. Here we should remember some basic principles along the lines of "you cannot run unless you can first walk" and also "you cannot walk unless you can first stand." Specifically:

• It makes no sense to claim that you understand the origin of all species unless you understand in full the origin of the human species. 
• It makes no sense to claim that you understand the origin of the human species unless you understand the origin of the human mind and all human mental capabilities. 
• It makes no sense to claim that that you understand the origin of the human species unless you understand both the physical origin and the mental origin of individual human beings. 
• It makes no sense to claim that that you understand the physical origin of an individual human being unless you can give a credible theory explaining the progression from a speck-sized zygote to a full adult body. 
• It makes no sense to claim that that you understand the mental origin of an individual human being unless you can give a credible theory or theories explaining such phenomena as human self-hood, imagination, thinking, the phenomenon of instant learning, the phenomenon of the lifelong persistence of memories, and the phenomenon of the instant recall of detailed correct answers when someone is asked a question. 
• It makes no sense to claim that that you understand the origin of all species unless you can credibly explain how there could have occurred a progression from one type of organism to some other type of organism with a vastly different structure and vastly different mental capabilities. 
• It makes no sense to claim that you have some grand theory explaining the natural origin of all species if you cannot explain the origin of life itself; because if the origin of life requires a miracle or purposeful intervention, then "all bets are off" and miracles or purposeful intervention cannot be excluded elsewhere in the history of life. 
• It makes no sense to claim that you have some grand theory explaining the natural origin of all species if you cannot explain a progression from microscopic life to macroscopic life in the form of large visible organisms. 
• If makes no sense to claim that you have some grand theory explaining the natural origin of all species if you cannot explain basic matters of biology a million times simpler, such as how a eukaryotic cell is able to reproduce. 

Realizing such things, we can start to make a list of the missing pillars of the theory of common ancestry. They are "all over the place" and pretty much everywhere. We can start by listing every single missing pillar of the theory that the brain is the source of the human mind and the storage place of memories. This is the 14-item bullet list that was the first bullet list of this post.

Why are all of these missing pillars of the theory of common ancestry? Such a theory makes no exclusions, making a claim about all species on Earth. If we do not understand the origin of human minds, we are not entitled to claim that we understand the origin of the human species. And if we do not understand the origin of the origin species, we are not entitled to claim that all species have a common ancestor. 

Below are some of the very many other missing pillars of the theory of common ancestry.

• There does not exist any credible theory explaining the natural origin of any very complex innovation in biology. Darwinism is no such theory, because it fails to credibly explain the vast leaps in organization and fine-tuned functional information needed for biological innovations. Such leaps cannot be explained by any gradualist theories, for reasons explained in my post "Anatomically Uninformative DNA, Nonfunctional Intermediates and Useless Early Stages Are Why Gradualism Does Not Work," which you can read here. 
• There does not exist any credible theory explaining the natural origin of any  complex anatomy innovation. The claim that such innovations are explained by random mutations in DNA is not tenable, largely because DNA does not specify the anatomy of any organism, contrary to the misstatements so often made by Darwinists. DNA only specifies low-level chemical information such as which amino acids make up a protein. 
• There does not exist any credible theory explaining the natural origin of any  type of very complex cell. The claim that such innovations are explained by random mutations in DNA is not tenable, largely because DNA does not specify the structure of any cell, and also does not specify the structure of any of the organelles that are the building components of cells. 
• Far from being able to explain the origin of any cell type, biologists are unable to even explain the reproduction of any of the more complex cells in human bodies. The total number of well-arranged parts in a eukaryotic cell (the type of cell that humans have) is greater than or roughly the same as the total number of well-arranged parts in an automobile. Every time a typical eukaryotic cell reproduces, it is a marvel as hard-to-explain as an automobile splitting into two working automobiles. 
• Scientists lack any credible explanation for the origin of new types of genes and new types of protein molecules. Requiring a very special arrangement of hundreds of amino acid parts (or a special arrangement of hundreds of nucleotide base pairs specifying such parts), the origin of a new type of gene or a new type of protein from accidental events is as unlikely as an ink splash producing a new paragraph of functional text that is well-written, well-spelled, useful and grammatical. One of the reasons why new types of genes and new types of protein molecules cannot be credibly explained by accidental natural processes is that they are both very sensitive to small changes and have very high functional thresholds, being non-functional in half-form. See my three posts marked "protein sensitivity" for a discussion of some of the scientific studies indicating that protein molecules are very sensitive to small changes. 

Does the common ancestry theory have any pillars at all? It has often been claimed that the fact that all life uses the same genetic code is a pillar of the common ancestry theory. But such a universal genetic code is not something that we would expect to occur only under a theory of common ancestry. If earthly species appeared because of purposeful action by some divine agency or superhuman power (perhaps some visiting extraterrestrial spaceships), we might well expect that earthly organisms would have a common genetic code. Pretty much the entire US internet uses the ASCII code for information storage and information transmission, a scheme of encoding that can be represented on a single page, just as the genetic code can be represented on a single page. But that is not a sign of common natural ancestry. It is a sign of deliberate standardization.  So the fact that all earthly life uses the same genetic code is not any real pillar of the theory of common ancestry. 

It is also claimed that the fossil record is a pillar of the theory of common ancestry. But fossils do not tell us whether one species descended from some other species. And it can be reasonably argued that the fossil record conflicts with the theory of common ancestry. The most dramatic feature of the fossil record is a sudden explosion of fossils that have been dated to about 540 millions ago. Such a sudden explosion in the appearance of fossils is known as the Cambrian Explosion. Almost all of the major groups of animals types (known as phyla) date back to the time of the Cambrian Era, where they suddenly appear in the fossil record.  For almost all of the animal phyla to have appeared with such relative suddenness is not what we would expect under the theory of common ancestry. So the fossil record is no real pillar of the theory of common ancestry. 

Not at all what we would expect under common ancestry

Claims have been made of a genetic similarity between one species and some other species. Such claims could never show anything more than a likelihood that one species was descended another species; and if that is done, it never proves that all species are descended from a common ancestor.  Similarly, you may show that you are descended from some US president of the nineteenth century; but that would never show that everyone in your town was descended from that president. Claims of a genetic similarity between one species and another should be received with skepticism. Darwinists long matter-of-factly claimed that the human genome and the chimpanzee genome are 98% similar. But (as discussed here) a recent paper suggests that the human genome and the chimpanzee genome differ by something like 14%. 

How can a missing pillars theory such as the common ancestry theory stay in circulation? What happens is that each new generation of scientists keeps getting recruited to hold up the socially constructed theory, by promoting it in their books and papers. So the theory stays hoisted up by a "keep the faith" process of the regimented perpetuation of dogma by a conformist belief community that  stigmatizes and sanctions all who deviate from its mandated speech conventions. 

The confessions below by scientists shed light on some of the missing pillars of the common ancestry theory. 

• "A wide variety of protein structures exist in nature, however the evolutionary origins of this panoply of proteins remain unknown."  -- Four Harvard scientists, "The role of evolutionary selection in the dynamics of protein structure evolution." 
• "Tawfik admits the issue of a first protein is 'a complete mystery' because it reveals a paradox: enzymatic function depends upon the well-defined, three-dimensional structure of a protein scaffold, yet the 3D structure is too complex, too intricate, and too coordinated to arise without simpler precursors and intermediates....Tawfik soberly recognizes the problem. The appearance of early protein families, he has remarked, is 'something like close to a miracle.'....'In fact, to our knowledge,' Tawfik and Tóth-Petróczy write, 'no macromutations ... that gave birth to novel proteins have yet been identified.' " -- Tyler Hampton, quoting Dan  S. Tawfik, professor in a Department of Biological Chemistry (link). 
• "We have addressed a large body of evidence related to transitions (micro- and macro-) in proteins that have a pre-existing globular 3D-structure (and function), but how does structure and function evolve in de novo [new] proteins? ...Overall, the evolution of MIPSs, the recruitment of first enzymes, and de novo emergence of proteins are aspects where our knowledge is still at infancy -- Scientists confessing in 2022 that we don't know how new proteins originate (link).    
• "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.  
• "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). 
• "Comparative genome analyses indicate that every taxonomic group so far studied contains 10–20% of genes that lack recognizable homologs in other species...It is surprising that orphans have been completely ignored by most comparative genomics studies." -- Several scientists, "More than just orphans: are taxonomically-restricted genes important in evolution?" 
• "Neo-Darwinism can't account for sexual reproduction."  -- biologist Josh Mittledorf PhD, "Cracking the Aging Code," page 31.
• "It is not sufficient to postulate an amazing feat of mis-copying that contrived to produce a highly beneficial structural change. We have to postulate the simultaneous occurrence of three miracles. Whatever miracle occurs to a male, say, there must be the even greater miracle that just the same structural change occurs, by a chance mis-copying to a female, and furthermore, that the two miracles must happen in the same place at much the same time, otherwise the changed male will not find the changed female. Mathematically, this means that the probability of an appreciable change being successfully propagated is the product of these three small numbers, making the result negligibly small." -- Scientist Fred Hoyle (link).  

• "Replication [of cells] is one of the deepest mysteries of biology. It is really something totally counterintuitive if cell is seen as a sack of water plus some chemicals. We have a lot [of] facts about what happens in the replication at DNA level but how this miracle happens is a mystery. At cell level the situation gets even more complex." -- M. Pitkanen, physics PhD, "Getting philosophical: some comments about the problems of physics, neuroscience, and biology."

• "How cells control their size and maintain stable size distributions is one of the most fundamental, unsolved problems in biology...Even for the bacterium E. coli, arguably the most extensively studied organism to date, no one has been able to answer this question."  --Suckjoon Jun, an assistant professor of physics and molecular biology (link).
• "Cell biology is a mystery for many reasons one
  of which is the lack of basic knowledge. This may
  be the fault of scientists or simply a failure in basic
  information at the level of common contemporary
  knowledge. The well known sentence of Socrates:
  'I know that I know nothing' is as true in cell
  biology as in other scientific fields. This sentence
  was modified by Lloyd in 1986 who claimed: 'The
  closer we look, the less we see'. I would like to
  modify this sentence yet again as a cell biologist and
  microscopist: 'The closer we look, the less we know
  about.' ... Everyone involved in cell
  biology, is surprised how limited is our knowledge
  about the various cell compartments....It should now be mentioned that our knowledge even of basic cell organelles, including their various functions, is very limited....We know something about cell organelles, including various nuclear compartments, but most of their functions are waiting for further and better clarification....Depending on conditions, selected genes may be repressed or derepressed and activated giving to rise to the particular cell lineage with characteristic cell structures and functions. On the other hand, such transformations, including the homing of the transformed cells are also very mysterious although both these processes are empirically used in clinical medicine."  Karel Smetana, cell biologist, "To the Mystery of Cell Biology.," (link). 
• "Despite the centrality of multicellularity and cell differentiation to animal biology, their origins are little understood." -- Two cell biologists (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.
• "The greatest twentieth century paleontologist, George Gaylord Simpson, in midcentury had to admit to a reality of the fossil record: 'It remains true, as every paleontologist knows, that most new species, genera, and families, and that nearly all new categories above the level of families, appear in the record suddenly, and are not led up to by known, gradual, completely continuous transitional sequences.' " --"Lamarck's Revenge” by paleontologist Peter Ward , page 43. 
• "The first eye, the first wing, the first placenta. How they emerge. Explaining these is the foundational motivation of evolutionary biology. And yet, we still do not have a good answer. This classic idea of gradual change, one happy accident at a time, has so far fallen flat.”  -- Biologist Armin Moczek.
• "Considering that the total number of known fossil species is nearly one hundred thousand, the fact that the only relatively convincing morphological sequences are a handful of cases like the horse, which do not involve a great deal of change, and which in many cases like the elephant may not even represent phylogenetic sequences at all, serves to emphasize the remarkable lack of any direct evidence for major evolutionary transformations in the fossil record." -- Michael Denton, MD and biochemistry PhD, "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis," 1986, page 185. 
• "Major transitions in biological evolution show the same pattern of sudden emergence of diverse forms at a new level of complexity. The relationships between major groups within an emergent new class of biological entities are hard to decipher and do not seem to fit the tree pattern that, following Darwin's original proposal, remains the dominant description of biological evolution. The cases in point include the origin of complex RNA molecules and protein folds; major groups of viruses; archaea and bacteria, and the principal lineages within each of these prokaryotic domains; eukaryotic supergroups; and animal phyla. In each of these pivotal nexuses in life's history, the principal 'types' seem to appear rapidly and fully equipped with the signature features of the respective new level of biological organization. No intermediate 'grades' or intermediate forms between different types are detectable." -- Biologist Eugene Koonin, "The Biological Big Bang model for the major transitions in evolution" (link).
• "This is the basic story of evolution, as recounted in countless textbooks and pop-science bestsellers. The problem, according to a growing number of scientists, is that it is absurdly crude and misleading." --Stephen Buranyi, science writer, "Do We Need a New Theory of Evolution?" in The Guardian. 
• "I may challenge the adherents of the strictly Darwinian view, which we are discussing here, to try to explain the evolution of the following features by accumulation and selection of small mutants: hair in mammals, feathers in birds, segmentation of arthropods and vertebrates, the transformation of gill arches in phylogeny, including the aortic arches, muscles, nerves, etc.; further, teeth, shells of mollusks, ectoskeletons, compound eyes, blood circulation, alternation of generations, statocysts, ambulacral system of echinoderms, pedicellaria of the same, cnidocysts, poison apparatus of snakes, whalebone, and, finally, primary chemical differences like hemoglobin vs. hemocyanin, etc. Corresponding examples from plants could be given." -- Biologist Richard Goldschmidt, "The Material Basis of Evolution," pages 6-7. 
• “While scientists are still working out the details of how the eye evolved, we are also still stuck on the question of how intelligence emerges in biology.” -- Scientists Rafael Yuste and Michael Levin, an article in Scientific American. 
• "Biological systems have evolved to amazingly complex states, yet we do not understand in general how evolution operates to generate increasing genetic and functional complexity." -- four scientists, "Adaptive ratchets and the evolution of molecular complexity."
• "I should like to critically object that this model has not been supported by an affirmative estimate of probabilities so far. Such an estimate of the theoretical time scale of evolution as implied by the model should be compared with the empirical time scale. One would need to show that, according to the assumed model, the probability of de facto existing purposeful features to evolve was sufficiently high on the empirically known time scale. Such an estimate has nowhere been attempted though." -- Eminent physicist Wolfgang von Pauli, discoverer of the biologically crucial Pauli Exclusion Principle (link).
• "Until  reading  an  able  and valuable  article  in  the  North  British  Review  (June,  1867),  I did not  appreciate  how  rarely  single  variations,  whether  slight  or strongly  marked,  could  be  perpetuated." -- Charles Darwin (link).
• "The higher the organization, whether of an entire organism or of a single organ, the greater is the number of the parts that cooperate, and the more perfect is their cooperation ; and consequently, the more necessity there is for corresponding variations to take place in all the cooperating parts at once, and the more useless will be any variation whatever unless it is accompanied by corresponding variations in the cooperating parts; while it is obvious that the greater the number of variations which are needed in order to effect an improvement, the less will be the probability of their all occurring at once....There are improbabilities so great that the common-sense of mankind treats them as impossibilities. It is not, for instance, in the strictest sense of the word, impossible that a poem and a mathematical proposition should be obtained by the process of shaking letters out of a box ; but it is improbable to a degree that cannot be distinguished from impossibility ; and the improbability of obtaining an improvement in an organ by means of several spontaneous variations, all occurring together, is an improbability of the same kind." -- Joseph John Murphy, biology scholar, author of a massive biology tome (link). 
• "What gambler would be crazy enough to play roulette with random evolution? The probability of dust carried by the wind reproducing Durer's 'Melancholia' is less infinitesimal than the probability of copy errors in the DNA molecule leading to the formation of the eye...There is no law against daydreaming, but science must not indulge in it." -- Biologist Pierre-Paul Grasse (link). 
• "Natural selection acting on populations is incapable of guiding evolution." -- Biologist Pierre-Paul Grasse (link). 
• "Big picture, we want to understand how initially dumb clumps of cells, cells that are one or two mutations away from being single-celled, don’t really know that they’re organisms — they don’t have any adaptations to being multicellular, they’re just a dumb clump — how those dumb clumps of cells can evolve into increasingly complex multicellular organisms, with new morphologies, with cell-level integration, division of labor, and differentiation amongst the cells. Just like, we want to watch that process of how do these simple groups become complex. And this is, like, one of the biggest knowledge gaps in evolutionary biology. I mean, in my opinion.....We don’t really know the process through which simple groups evolve into increasingly complex organisms."-- Biologist Will Ratcliff (link). 
• "How animals evolved complex multicellularity from their unicellular ancestors remains unanswered." -- A 2026 paper by several scientists (link).
• "The evolutionary divergence of a single species into two has never been directly observed in nature, primarily because speciation can take a longtime to occur." -- Irwin, Bensch, and Price, "Speciation in a Ring," Nature, 2001.
• "Genetics might be adequate for explaining microevolution, but micro-evolutionary changes in gene frequency were not seen as able to turn a reptile into a mammal or to convert a fish into an amphibian. Microevolution looks at adaptations that concern only the survival of the fittest, not the arrival of the fittest. As Goodwin (1995) points out, 'the origin of species — Darwin's problem — remains unsolved." "Resynthesizing Evolutionary and Developmental Biology," Gilbert, Opitz and Raft, 1996.

Some types of experts acting as information overlords

Clearly the theory of common ancestry is a severe example of a missing-pillars theory. There does not exist a fifth of the pillars that would be needed for someone to convincingly advance such a theory that all organisms have a common ancestor. Consequently the theory of common ancestry is not one that you should feel right about advancing if you are a serious scholar of biological complexity and biological organization and the human brain and its severe physical shortfalls and the vast depths and staggering wonders of human mental experiences and human mental capabilities.  Far better for you to say: I do not understand how Earth's species arose, and I do not understand how the human species arose. Far better for you to say that such matters are mysteries a hundred miles over your head. 

Authorities Keep Gaslighting Those Having Out-of-Body Experiences

 In my July 2025 post "When Gaslighting Psychiatric Mudslinging Defames Healthy NDE and OBE Observers" (which you can read here) I documented some appalling gaslighting by authorities trying to shame, defame and pathologize healthy witnesses of the paranormal. The American Heritage Dictionary defines the word "gaslight" to mean this: "To psychologically manipulate (someone) so that they question their memories, perception, or sanity." 

Below is an infographic on gaslighting, one I modified from an output of Google Gemini:

Sociologist Paige Sweet defines gaslighting as "making someone seem or feel unstable, irrational and not credible, making them feel like what they’re seeing or experiencing isn’t real, that they’re making it up, that no one else will believe them.” The visual below shows two examples of gaslighting:

The visual below shows two other examples of gaslighting:

The latest example of gaslighting of witnesses of the paranormal is an article by neuroscientist Marina Weiler entitled " 'Am I Crazy?' Understanding Out-of-Body Feelings." Weiler attempts to reframe the well-documented fact of out-of-body experiences (a type of anomalous visual perception) as a mere "feeling." Instead of referring to out-of-body experiences, her title refers to "out-of-body feelings." Of course, there is a world of difference between an experience and a perception (on one hand), and a mere feeling (on the other hand). You may go to a reputed haunted house, and get a spooky feeling; but that counts for very little. If, on the other hand, you actually see a translucent apparition floating about, that is a perception, and it counts for very much as evidence. 

Are out-of-body experiences mere "feelings"? No, they are not. They are something much more than mere feelings: they are perceptions and observational experiences. In my post "Neuroscientists Cannot Credibly Explain Any of These 11 Features of Out-of-Body Experiences" which you can read here, I describe nine common features of out-of-body experiences, giving abundant examples of cases in which each of the features was reported. The features were these:

1. Feature #1: observing one's own body from outside it, typically from a horizontal position, at a distance of about two meters above it, or from a location near the ceiling.
2. Feature #2:  a strong feeling of euphoria or exaltation during an out-of-body experience
3. Feature #3:  an experience of being able to pass-through matter while having an out-of-body experience.
4. Feature #4:  an experience of having enhanced senses during an out-of-body experience, which may include the ability to see through walls or look inside the body as if you had x-ray eyes, or the ability to see a 360 degree view.
5. Feature #5: an experience of being connected to the body while outside of it, sometimes with there being a cord-like or elastic structure between the observer outside of the body and his own body.
6. Feature #6:  an experience of encountering one or more spiritual or non-physical entities (or deceased people) while having an out-of-body experience.
7. Feature #7:  an experience of completely leaving the location of the body, while traveling to other earthly locations or unearthly locations.
8. Feature #8:  an out-of-body experience experience that includes observations of things that should have been impossible for a person to observe, giving his physical position.
9. Feature #9:  an experience of having an exalted intellect or speeded-up mind during an out-of-body experience.

Only one of these nine features can be called a "feeling." So it is grossly misleading to be calling out-of-body experiences "feelings," and to try to reframe out-of-body experiences as "out-of-body feelings." 

Engaging in some psychiatric mudslinging, Weiler claims, "People who'd had a disembodiment feeling showed more mental health diagnoses, more treatment history, and higher dissociation and childhood trauma." This statement includes a reference to a paper of hers hidden behind a paywall. The abstract of the paper makes no such claim, and we read no numerically specific claim of such an effect in the snippets of the paper you can read here. Should we bother to pay money paying for such paper? No, much better to just assume that no strong evidence was found of any such effect, because of the failure to report numerical specifics of any such effect in the paper's abstract or snippets. Almost always when scientists get noteworthy results giving decent evidence of an effect, they mention the specifics of such results in the abstracts of their paper. 

Gaslighting is a game of "shame, blame and defame the witness." Weiler seems to play some of that game when she tries to associate  having out-of-experiences with shame. She says, "In my inbox, I regularly hear from people carrying enormous shame around disembodiment feelings like hers, afraid to tell even those closest to them." You get her drift? It sounds kind of like: "Did you have an out-of-body experience? Be ashamed. Be very ashamed!" There is actually no reason why anyone should be ashamed of having a psychic experience, and surveys show that a large fraction of the population have such experiences.  You can read about such surveys here. 

It sounds like gaslighting when Weiler states this: "The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition (DSM-5) defines depersonalization/derealization disorder as persistent episodes of feeling detached from one's own body, thoughts, or surroundings—a description sitting uncomfortably close to out-of-body experiences." But typically an out-of-body experience is a one-shot affair, happening only one time in someone's life; and typically that one time is when someone had a close encounter with death such as a cardiac arrest. There is no legitimacy in Weiler's attempt to compare such once-in-a-lifetime events with " persistent episodes of feeling detached from one's own body, thoughts, or surroundings."

A site with the title of "The Brains Blog" can be found at the URL of https://philosophyofbrains.com/.  It has a byline of "Since 2005, a leading forum for work in the philosophy and science of mind." Searching for the term "out-of-body experience" using the search tool at the site, I get only one article using that term in its title. It's an article with the gaslighting title "What do out of body experiences tell us about self-consciousness; Or, Disorders of Self-Consciousness Part 5." The psychologist author makes a bad description of the conditions under which out-of-body experiences occur, failing to mention that they occur during close encounters with death such as cardiac arrest. I am left with the impression that the brain experts long writing at the Brains Blog have failed to do their homework in adequately studying this topic of out-of-body experiences so relevant to "the philosophy and science of mind."

Beware of gaslighting authorities who act like the guy below, who tries to gin up a personality defect from some one-shot observational report, while getting all confused between "something someone saw" and "something someone felt":

Postscript: I looked up some of the papers of Marina Weiler on Google Scholar. She has some papers on out-of-body experiences, which are mostly behind paywalls. Her paper "Distinguishing out-of-body experiences from lucid dreaming: a phenomenological analysis" is a paper that seems to gaslight those having out-of-body experiences, by trying to conflate out-of-body experiences with a type of vivid dreaming. Saying things like "maybe you were just dreaming" is a common type of gaslighting. The most prominent cases of out-of-body experiences occur during cardiac arrest, when the brain has shut down in a state of asystole, with brain waves appearing only as flat lines. Neither hallucinations nor dreams are possible during such a state, a fact which cripples Weiler's attempted explanations of out-of-body experiences. 

In that paper by Weiler we have this very bad misstatement: "Nonetheless, some have found that only a small percentage (4.5%) of reported OBEs occur during awake states (Green, 1968b), indicating that the majority of OBEs occur during sleep states." The reference is to the 1968 book "Out-of-the-body Experiences" by Celia Green, which you can read here. The book describes a major survey of out-of-body experiences conducted by Green, in original research.  Searching for that figure of 4.5% in the text of that book, I cannot find it. But I do find statements in that book stating the opposite. On page 85 the book states, "Of the subjects of single cases, 56.5 per cent actually claimed to have been more awake and keenly observant than usual." On page 20 the book states, "Twelve per cent of the 'single' cases studied were initiated while the subject was asleep." 

On page 61 of Green's book we read this: "Sixty-one percent of subjects report having had only one ecsomatic experience."  The book earlier defined "ecsomatic experience" as an out-of-body experience. This data is consistent with my claim earlier in this post that "typically an out-of-body experience is a one-shot affair, happening only one time in someone's life," a reality that discredits Weiler's attempt to link out-of-body experiences and types of psychiatric phenomena happening more than once in a lifetime. 

On page 42 of Green's book she states this: "Eighty-one percent of the subjects of 'single' ecsomatic [out-of-body experience] cases stated that, while they were apparently out of their bodies, they seemed to see their physical bodies from outside." So it makes no sense at all when Weiler states in her paper that "our proposed definition suggests that OBEs [out-of-body experiences] should not be defined by the subject’s ability to perceive their own body from a third-person perspective."

Weiler's paper "Neuroimaging studies of extra-sensory perception: A systematic and critical review" has the wrong title, as the studies reviewed are almost all EEG brain-wave studies that do not involve the creation of any images. But quite foolishly, some neuroscientists have started to say that EEG studies that involve no images are examples of "neuroimaging." It's just another of endless examples of defective assertions by today's neuroscientists.  

Such a paper causes me to wonder: why would someone focus on the tiny number of studies involving attempts to get neural correlates of extra-sensory perception, rather than seriously studying the vastly larger body of ESP tests that were done when a subject was not being brain-scanned and was not connected to an EEG device?  The very idea of looking for a neural correlate of extrasensory perception (ESP) makes little sense. ESP is a particularly clear example of a mental capability that cannot be explained by brain activity. That's why so many neuroscientists refuse to seriously study the 200 years of evidence for ESP and psi -- because such evidence conflicts with their "brains make minds" dogma.

The Ten Silliest Claims of Materialists

Despite thinking of themselves as Men of Reason, materialists make some of the goofiest and most ridiculous claims that humans have ever made. Below is a "top 10" list of the most glaringly false or absurd assertions of materialists. 

Claim #1:  The origin of species was explained by a man 167 years ago, before scientists knew anything about the complexity of cells, genes and protein molecules. 

This claim is the triumphal legend that Charles Darwin explained the origin of species such as our species. You can start to realize how absurd this claim is by considering the vast organization of the human body. 

A human body consists of a skeletal system and organ systems; organ systems  are made up of one or more organs and other components; organs are made up of tissues; tissues are made up of cells; cells are made up of many organelles of many types; organelles are made up of protein complexes and proteins; protein complexes are made up of many different types of proteins;  proteins consist of special well-arranged sequences of hundreds or thousands of amino acids, folded into 3D shapes; amino acids consist of atoms; and atoms consist of protons, neutrons and electrons.  The infographic below illustrates some of this hierarchical organization:

How much of this organization complexity did Darwin know about? He only knew about the anatomical complexity of the human body. Darwin knew nothing about the complexity of cells, nothing about the complexity of protein molecules, and nothing about the complexity of genes. So claiming that Darwin explained the origin of the human species (or any other species) is as silly as claiming that the ancient philosopher Plato explained the origin of smartphones.  Plato knew nothing about smartphones, and Darwin knew nothing about 90% of the information-rich complexity and organization of the human body. 

Claim #2:  Life (a state of very high organization and very great information richness, requiring hundreds of different complex inventions) arose from chemistry accidents billions of years ago. 

This silly claim is the doctrine of abiogenesis, that life arose accidentally from accidents of chemistry. Robust science provides not the slightest warrant for this dogma, which has no basis in observations or relevant experiments. Even the simplest self-reproducing cell is a very high state of organization and information richness, requiring hundreds of types of complex inventions. Those inventions are the hundreds of types of protein molecules and genes required for even the simplest one-celled life to exist and reproduce. Experiments realistically simulating the early Earth have never produced any of the protein molecules needed for life. Experiments realistically simulating the early Earth have never even produced any of the amino acid components that are the building components of such protein molecules. There was a widely discussed Miller-Urey experiment that produced some amino acids. But the experiment was not a realistic simulation of the early Earth, as it required a very special glass apparatus unlike anything that would have naturally existed in the early Earth, as well as a degree of electrical bombardment vastly greater than any volume of space would have ever naturally received. 

The paper "Fundamental behaviors emerge from simulations of a living minimal cell"  describes "a genetically minimal bacterial cell, consisting of only ... 493 genes on a single 543-kbp circular chromosome with 452 genes coding for proteins (Breuer et al., 2019 ), some of which are subunits of multi-domain complexes." Each of those genes is a complex invention with hundreds of fine-tuned parts that almost all have to be just right. The total number of amino acids that have to be arranged just right in the proteins partially specified by these genes is roughly 150,000, which is roughly the same as the number of characters or letters that have to be well-arranged to produce a 100-page technical manual. 

The amount of functional information required for even the simplest one-celled life is roughly equivalent to the amount of functional information in a hundred-page technical manual.  This shows all ideas of the accidental origin of life to be claims that are absurd, as absurd as the claim that you could get a well-written novel by throwing gobs of ink onto paper pages and collecting the luckier ink splashes. 

Claim #3:  Cells many times more organized than the simplest cells first appeared when there suddenly occurred a lucky accident in which one cell gulped up other cells, with all of the lucky cell's offspring having the characteristics of the original and the gulped up cells. 

The claim I refer to is the ridiculous tall tale known as endosymbiosis.  Human cells are a type of cell called a eukaryotic cell. A eukaryotic cell is vastly more organized than the simplest type of cell, called a prokaryotic cell. How did we ever get eukaryotic cells? Materialists have in recent decades developed a speech custom of claiming that eukaryotic cells first arose by some lucky accident involving one prokaryotic cell gulping one or more other prokaryotic cells, with the offspring of this gulping cell being vastly more complex. It's as silly a tale as the idea that a woman might eat a bird like a flying eagle, and then have flying children as her offspring. 

There are several reasons for thinking that such a thing is far too improbable to have ever happened. Among these are the following:

1. No one has ever observed any type of event like the supposed event in which prokaryotic cells combined to become a eukaryotic cell. Microbiologists have done innumerable experiments with prokaryotic cells, and have never observed any combination of prokaryotic cells become anything like a eukaryotic cell.
2. A prokaryotic cell injected with the DNA of a eukaryotic cell will not start producing eukaryotic cells as its offspring.
3. Nowhere in human DNA does it specify the overall shape of a human body, the structure of a human organ system, the structure of a particular human organ, the structure of a tissue, the structure of a cell, or even the structure of any organelle of a cell. Although genotypes influence phenotypes, genotypes do not specify phenotypes. Genotypes merely list chemicals used by an organism.  DNA does not specify the physical structure of an organism. We can therefore imagine no conceivable event by which some lucky combination of prokaryotic DNA could result in a cell that produced eukaryotic offspring, because the structure of a eukaryotic cell is not even specified in DNA.

  In the book Aliens, biologist Matthew Cobb gives a description of current thinking on this topic, emphasizing the improbability of it:

"What happened on Earth – known as eukaryogenesis – was not the product of random mutation and the subsequent sifting of acquired characters that have differential fitness (the essence of natural selection). Instead there appears to have been a single event of mind-boggling improbability, for it involved two life forms interacting in a most novel way....Prior to that moment, all life had consisted of small microbes with no cell nucleus and no mitochondria. Everything changed when one unicellular life form, known as an archaebacterium, ended up inside another, called a eubacterium."

On another page Cobb says this:

"We could in principle calculate the probability of the appearance of eukaryotes, but we would soon run out of zeros...That weird hybrid was our ancestor, and its existence – and therefore ours – was incredibly improbable. As far as we are aware, no such event happened before or since."

Obviously we have here a fairy tale, an "old wives' tale."  Scientists have no credible tale to tell of how eukaryotic cells originated, just as they have no credible tale to tell of how prokaryotic cells originated. 

Claim #4: Monkeys rafted across the Atlantic Ocean millions of years ago. 

There are many similarities between Old World monkeys and New World Monkeys.  Committed to the assumption that such similarities must be because of common descent, Darwinist professors maintain that the New World monkeys are descendants of the Old World monkeys, and that such an ancestry was able to occur because some Old World monkeys rafted across the Atlantic ocean something like 40 million years ago, arriving in the New World.  Such an idea is supremely unbelievable for several reasons: (1) the incredible improbability of a sea-worthy raft appearing accidentally from logs or vegetation; (2) the almost equally great improbability that any monkeys would ever swim out to sea and jump on such a raft; (3) the almost equally great improbability that such monkeys could ever survive a voyage across the Atlantic. 

Claim #5:  Iguanas rafted 5000 miles across the Pacific Ocean millions of years ago. 

The story below was one day the lead story on the ScienceNews.org site.

An unbelievable "just-so" story

The story above is the most laughable nonsense, asserting that iguanas (a type of lizard) made a 5000-mile rafting trip across the Pacific Ocean millions of years ago. Such is the nonsense that Darwinists are forced to spout to maintain their doctrine of common descent, the dogma that all species came from a common ancestor.  

In the article we read of the biological reality that was the seed of this nutty tale:

"All members of the iguana evolutionary family are found in the Americas, with one glaring exception: the Fijian iguanas (Brachylophus). The origins of the four living iguana species in Fiji have been a mystery for researchers, considering all the reptiles’ closest relatives are an ocean away."

The Fijis are a group of islands fairly close to Australia, so the distance between the Fijis and the Americas (North and South America) is roughly 5000 miles or 8000 kilometers.  The article then tries to tell us this crazy tale of a 5000-mile journey by rafting iguanas:

"These genetic results, combined with the geography of where iguana fossils have previously been found, point to ancestral iguanas rafting across the ocean from the shores of North America. The team thinks the lizards set sail between 31 million and 34 million years ago, possibly causing the evolutionary split between Brachylophus and Dipsosaurus."

The source of this laughable nonsense is a scientific paper. The title of the paper is a perfect example of scientists matter-of-factly asserting the factual truth of the most unbelievable claims. The paper is entitled "Iguanas rafted more than 8,000 km from North America to Fiji." In the article we have this example of witless reasoning from an evolutionary biologist:

"For Gyllenhaal, the findings illustrate how an incredibly rare, chance event — like iguanas successfully floating across an ocean — are more likely to play out as long as millions of years of time are available. 'When you’re dealing with evolutionary time, you’ve got a lot of opportunity for these very small probability things to occur.' ”

It's the same old witless reasoning that Darwinist biologists keep making over and over again: the claim that the most gigantically improbable things would happen as long as there were millions of years to happen. The claim is false. Given sufficiently low improbabilities, you can confidently say: that would not happen in a million years; that would not happen in a billion years; and that would not happen in a trillion years.

Claim #6: There is no fundamental difference between the minds of animals and the minds of humans. 

O page 99 of The Descent of Man. Charles Darwin made this hugely misleading claim: "My object in this chapter is to shew that there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties." That statement shows that Charles Darwin was either a very big liar or someone who was enormously self-deluded. It is a very obvious fact of human experience that there are the most gigantic fundamental differences between the mental faculties of man and other higher mammals.  So, for example, when I recently read a book by an astrobiologist saying that "humans are not exceptional, even on Earth," I said to myself: this is a crazy materialist speech custom that should cause me to have no confidence in anyone who parrots it.  

A very silly thing to say

Claim #7:  Millions of types of very complex inventions in the animal kingdom and the plant kingdom arose from an accumulation of random mutations. 

Scientists like to make various types of big boasts about their knowledge of things, such as the boast that they understand the basics of how the human species appeared. But various types of unsolved problems act as antagonists to such boasts. It's kind of like this:

Scientist: I understand how life originated.

Boast antagonist problems: No, you sure as hell do not.

Scientist: I understand how a human mind arises.

Boast antagonist problems: No, you sure as hell do not. 

Scientist: I understand how the human species arose.

Boast antagonist problems: No, you sure as hell do not.

In regard to biological origins,  these boast antagonist problems include the problems of the origin of DNA, the origin of the genetic code, the origin of genes, the origin of the first protein molecules, and the origin of homochirality.  In regard to the origin of large organisms, the boast antagonist problems include the problems of the origin of eukaryotic cells, the origin of most of the proteins used by mammals, the origin of protein complexes, the origin of multicellular life and the origin of bipedalism.  In regard to the origin of man, the boast antagonist problems include the problems of explaining morphogenesis, the origin of language, the origin of higher abstract reasoning, and the problems of explaining instantaneous memory creation, instant memory recall and the persistence of memories for 50 years. 

The problem of the origin of protein molecules is one of the boast antagonist problems I referred to above. Inside each human body there are more than 20,000  different types of protein molecules, each a different type of complex invention requiring a very special arrangement of thousands of atoms.  Scientists lack any credible theory for the origin of protein molecules. 

Protein molecules require very special arrangements of amino acids, arrangements as hard-to-achieve by chance as it is hard for ink splashes to produce useful functional paragraphs. Because protein molecules are in general very sensitive to small changes, with their functionality typically being broken if you change only 10% or less of their amino acids, protein molecules have very high organization thresholds for them to be functional, meaning that they are not credibly explained by gradualist ideas such as Darwinism. The difficulties in explaining the origin of protein molecules is one of the biggest reasons for rejecting boasts that biological origins are successfully explained by ideas of Darwinian evolution. The issue is discussed at much greater length here and here. 

When materialists attempt to explain the origin of different types of protein molecules by claiming an accidental accumulation of tiny random mutations, they are advancing an idea as silly as the claim that there arose functional, well-written paragraphs by ink splashes.  It's kind of like the conversation below, in which James fails to tell a credible tale. 

Mary: Wow, I see your living room wall has a large paragraph on it telling how to make a particular useful structure. 

James: Yes, that writing on my wall arose purely by accidental ink splashes.

Mary: You expect me to believe that some ink splash wrote that paragraph all at once?

James: Of course not. It was just hundreds of little ink splashes, occurring on different days, gradually over years. 

By appealing to gradual accumulation, James has not actually done anything to make his ridiculous claim any more credible. 

Below are quotes from a recent paper by a mathematics PhD, a paper I read today:

"The contemporary synthesis of biological evolution holds that the variety of life on Earth is mostly the outcome of random genetic changes sifted via the deterministic sieve of natural selection. Over the last century, this framework has served as the fundamental framework for biological sciences. However, mathematicians, biologists, and computer scientists have increasingly questioned the statistical and probabilistic mechanisms behind these assertions....Within this defined scope, we investigate the mathematical barriers that prevent gradual, step-wise mutations from traversing the vast fitness landscapes without falling into fatal functional degradation...We have demonstrated that the probability of random genetic mutations generating novel, functional structures is mathematically negligible....Ultimately, the mathematical constraints that govern complex systems cannot be bypassed by appealing to vast scales of cosmological time. The combinatorial explosion associated with biological constraint satisfaction problems presents an insurmountable barrier to the neo-Darwinian mechanism of unguided, gradualistic change."

Claim #8: Memories that can persist very well for 60 years are created by the strengthening of synapses, tiny unstable units that do not last for years, and are built of protein molecules that only last an average of a few weeks, synapses that are connected to short-lived dendritic spines that do not last for years.

Some of the reasons that this claim is very silly include these:

• 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 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 (with synapses making this problem much worse, as trying to find something in a dense jungle of a trillion synapses would be like trying to find a particular vine in the middle of the billion tangled vines of the Amazon rainforest);
• 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).

Below are some quotes by scientists supporting my statements above about the short lifetimes of synaptic proteins and the instability of synapses and the dendritic spines they connect to.

• "Experiments indicate in absence of activity average life times ranging from minutes for immature synapses to two months for mature ones with large weights." -- Six scientists (link). 
• "The synaptic turnover rate is as high as 1% per day in the visual cortex." -- 7 scientists (link). 
• "A recent imaging study revealed that the synaptic turnover rate in hippocampal CA1 cells is very high, with an estimated lifetime of ~1–2 weeks (Attardo et al., 2015)." -- Scientist Yuichiro Hayashi (link).
• "We observed a two-fold higher spine density than previous studies and measured a [dendritic] spine turnover of ~40% within 4 days, which depended on spine size." -- Nine scientists (link).
• "We find that [dendritic] spines appear and disappear over periods of days to weeks, even though their average density remains constant (Fig. 5)....About 80% of synapses were detectable for a day or longer; about 60% belonged to the stable pool imaged for at least 8 days. Even this stable pool was found to turn over, with only ~50% of spines surviving for 30 days or longer. Assuming stochastic behaviour, we estimate that the mean lifetime of the stable pool [of synapses] would be on the order of 120 days." -- Seven scientists (link). 
• "Another study used in vitro metabolic labeling of primary cortical cultures to measure relatively shorter half-lives for 2802 brain proteins (average half-life =~5 days; (Cohen et al., 2013)."  Four scientists (link).
• "Very few studies report long-lasting structural changes of synapses induced by behavioral training." -- Three scientists (link).
• "Mathematical modeling revealed that the data best matched kinetic models with a single population of [dendritic] spines of mean lifetime ~1–2 weeks. This implies ~100% turnover in ~2–3 times this interval, a near full erasure of the synaptic connectivity pattern." -- Three scientists (link).
• "It has been shown that in the hippocampus in vivo, within a month the rate of [dendritic] spine turnover approaches 100% (Attardo et al., 2015; Pfeiffer et al., 2018)."  -- Three scientists (link). 
• "Experience-dependent behavioral memories can last a lifetime, whereas even a long-lived protein or mRNA molecule has a half-life of around 24 hrs. Thus, the constituent molecules that subserve the maintenance of a memory will have completely turned over, i.e. have been broken down and resynthesized, over the course of about 1 week. Yet memories can persist for years or decades."  -- Two scientists (link). 
•  "Recent studies have revealed that most proteins, including synaptic proteins, have half-lives that range between 5 and 7 days (Cohen et al., 2013, Dörrbaum et al., 2018)."  -- 7 scientists (link). 

• "Where skeletal muscle tissue has been shown to turnover at a rate of 1–2% per day, here we show that brain tissue turns over much faster at a rate of 3–4% per day. This would imply complete renewal of brain tissue proteins well within 4–5 weeks." 10+scientists (link).

Claim #9: Memories form in the hippocampus (a brain region of particularly high instability), and then migrate to the cortex so that they can exist where there is more stability. 

Having no real evidence on a cellular level or a synaptic level to support their claims of neural memory storage, neuroscientists sometimes resort to claims about parts of the brain, claiming that some-such part of the brain is needed for memory.  Such claims usually involve claims that the hippocampus is crucial for memory. The experimental evidence has never supported such claims.  People with no hippocampus or a damaged hippocampus usually perform fairly well on tests of memory. 

In my widely-read long post here (entitled "Studies Debunk Hippocampus Memory Myths")  I discuss very many scientific papers that discredit the claim that the hippocampus has some big relation to memory. Some clear speaking occurs in the 2004 paper "Relationship between hippocampal volume and memory ability in healthy individuals across the lifespan: review and meta-analysis."  Contradicting claims often made about the hippocampus and memory, the paper states this:

"A negative relationship between hippocampal volume and memory (smaller is better) was significant for studies with children, adolescents, and young adults. For studies with older adults, the most striking observation was extreme variability: the evidence for a positive relationship between hippocampal size and episodic memory ability in older adults was surprisingly weak."

One of the many reasons the "hippocampus as memory center" narrative does not hold up to scrutiny is that the hippocampus is particularly unstable in regard to things that have a relevance to whether a brain can store memories. Synapses are attached to little bumps on brain dendrites, bump called dendritic spines. The more unstable that dendritic spines are, the more unstable are synapses.  The 2015 paper "Impermanence of dendritic spines in live adult CA1 hippocampus" states the following, describing a 100% turnover of dendritic spines within about six weeks:

"Mathematical modeling revealed that the data best matched kinetic models with a single population of spines of mean lifetime ~1–2 weeks. This implies ~100% turnover in ~2–3 times this interval, a near full erasure of the synaptic connectivity pattern."

The paper here states, "It has been shown that in the hippocampus in vivo, within a month the rate of spine turnover approaches 100% (Attardo et al., 2015; Pfeiffer et al., 2018)." 

Because of this particularly rapid turnover in dendritic spines in the hippocampus, the hippocampus is particularly implausible as a site in the brain that might be storing memories lasting decades. But being eager to preserve the "hippocampus as memory center" myth, neuroscientists have created a tall tale to try and save this claim.  The tall tale is that memories are created in the hippocampus, and then migrate to the cortex of the brain. 

There is zero observational basis for this claim. Scientists have never actually seen a memory anywhere in the brain (despite "Jesus in my toast" pareidolia claims to the contrary), and scientists have never seen any memory migrating from the hippocampus to the cortex. This "memory migration" myth doubles the explanatory problems of neuroscientists.  Now they have to imagine two physical things in the brain corresponding to the formation of a memory: first, the creation of a memory and then its migration to a place elsewhere in the brain. 

The idea that memories stored in synapses could become stable if such memories migrated to the cortex is a fallacious idea. The same instability problems exist in the cortex. The proteins of synapses in the cortex have the same very short lifetimes of proteins in the hippocampus: lifetimes of only a few weeks. Synapses are connected to dendritic spines, and such dendritic spines are almost as unstable and short-lived in the cortex as they are in the hippocampus. 

Claim #10: Your body arose because cells read a blueprint in your DNA for how to construct your body.

For decades materialists have pushed an untenable misconception about the origin of an individual human body. They told the tall tale that DNA in a cell contains a blueprint or set of instructions for making a human, and that morphogenesis occurs when such instructions are read and carried out inside the human womb. But there are several reasons why this idea cannot possibly be true. They include the following:

1. Human DNA has been thoroughly studied, and no blueprint of a human form has ever been discovered in it, nor has anyone discovered anything in it like a program, algorithm, or set of instructions for making a human, or even any organ or cell of a human. There is not anything like a general blueprint for an overall human form in DNA, nor is there anything like a blueprint for making any large system of a human, nor is there anything like a blueprint for making any organ of a human, nor is there even anything like a blueprint for making a particular type of human cell. Similarly, there is not anything like a set of instructions or program for making an overall human form in DNA, nor is nor is there anything like a set of instructions or program for making any large system of a human, nor is there anything like a set of instructions or program for making any organ of a human, nor is there even anything like a set of instructions for making a particular type of human cell.
2. The actual information in DNA is merely very low level chemical information, information on the chemical ingredients that make up proteins and RNA. 
3. DNA is written in a minimalist bare-bones language in which the only things that can be expressed are things such as lists of amino acids. There is absolutely no high-level expressive capability in DNA that might ever allow it to be something that might be a blueprint for making humans or a set of instructions for making humans. 
4. The amount of information in human DNA and the number of genes in DNA are vastly smaller than we would expect if DNA was a specification of a human. For example, a simple rice plant has twice as many genes as a human. 
5. There is nothing in the human womb that could ever be capable of reading and executing the fantastically complicated instructions that would need to exist in DNA if DNA were to be a specification of a human. Blueprints don't build things; building construction occurs only when there's an intelligent blueprint reader and a construction crew. We know of nothing in the human womb that could act like an intelligent blueprint reader or a construction crew. If a human specification were to exist in DNA, it would need to be instructions so complicated it  would require an Einstein to understand it; and there's no Einstein in the womb of a pregnant woman. 

See this post, this post and this post for a very detailed discussion of why DNA cannot be a human specification. Those posts include quotes by dozens of biological experts supporting my statements on this topic.  Below are only a few of dozens of similar comments that I have collected at the end of this post.

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." 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. Rather, 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."

Geneticist Adam Rutherford states that "DNA is not a blueprint." A press account of the thought of geneticist Sir Alec Jeffreys states, "DNA is not a blueprint, he says."  B.N. Queenan (the Executive Director of Research at the NSF-Simons Center for Mathematical & Statistical Analysis of Biology at Harvard University) tells us this:

"DNA is not a blueprint. A blueprint faithfully maps out each part of an envisioned structure. Unlike a battleship or a building, our bodies and minds are not static structures constructed to specification."

"The genome is not a blueprint," says Kevin Mitchell, a geneticist and neuroscientist at Trinity College Dublin. "It doesn't encode some specific outcome."  His statement was reiterated by another scientist. "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. He says, "It is at best an overlapping and potentially scrambled list of ingredients that is used differently by different cells at different times."  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."  Biologist Steven Rose has stated, "DNA is not a blueprint, and the four dimensions of life (three of space, one of time) cannot be read off from its one-dimensional strand."

The visual below shows you the very humble reality about DNA (so much less than the grossly inflated myths so often spread about it): that DNA merely specifies low-level chemical information such as the amino acids that make up a protein.  Particular combinations of the "ladder rungs" of the DNA (the colored lines) represent particular amino acids (the "beads" in the polypeptide chain that is the starting point of a protein). 

Human bodies have multiple levels of organization beyond such simple polypeptide chains, including: 

• The three-dimensional structure of protein molecules
• The three-dimensional structure of protein complexes, teams of different proteins, which can be so specially arranged that they are often called "molecular machines"
• The three-dimensional structure of the many types of organelles used by cells
• The three-dimensional structure of the 200 types of cells in the human body, most of these cell types being fantastically complicated arrangements of matter (scientists have compared the complexity of a cell to the complexity of an airplane or city)
• The structure of tissues
• The structure of organ systems and skeletal systems
• The overall structure of the human body, what you see by looking at a naked human body

None of the structures listed above are specified by DNA or genomes or genes. How such structures arise is unknown.  The lack of any credible physical explanation for the progression from a speck-sized zygote to the vast hierarchical organization of the human body is one of the biggest reasons for rejecting materialism.

The idea that a human body gets built by the reading of a blueprint in cells was always an idea that was very silly, both because it fails to explain how 200 types of enormously organized cells in the human body originate (which is half of the difficulty of explaining how a human body arises from a speck-sized zygote), and also because blueprints don't build extremely complex things. Things get built with the help of blueprints only when there are one or more intelligent agents to read the blueprints and get ideas about how to build things.