NASA's Big Lie About Its Origin-of-Life Experiment

Today on a NASA web page I saw one of the most brazen lies I have ever seen on a government web page. The web page has the title “NASA Study Reproduces Origins of Life on Ocean Floor.” The headline is entirely false, for the experiment did not produce any living thing. No cell was created, no DNA or RNA molecule was created, and not even a single protein was created. The actual result of the experiment was pretty much the most measly and paltry result you could imagine: the appearance of only a single type of amino acid.

The simplest living thing consists of a cell, very complex nucleic acid molecules such as RNA and DNA, and many very complex molecules called proteins. Proteins are built of 20 different types of amino acids. An average protein in a human body consists of about 500 amino acids, arranged in just the right way to achieve a functional result. Just as complex computer programs can be built using just-the-right arrangements of about 40 characters on your keyboard (including the letters A-Z), complex proteins can be built using just-the-right arrangements of 20 different types of amino acids. An amino acid is not a building block of life; it is merely one of the building blocks of the building blocks of life. The building blocks of life are things like proteins and nucleic acids, and an amino acid is a building block of a protein that can be a building block of life.

The NASA experiment in question was one that tried to duplicate an imagined origin-of-life in hydrothermal vents, underwater geological structures where there was lots of warm water. The scientists created some beakers in which they tried to put water and various chemicals they think might have existed near hydothermal vents billions of years ago. I may point out that this is not a valid procedure for trying to recreate conditions that might have existed in the oceans billions of years ago. If you use a glass beaker, you can confine and concentrate chemicals in a way that would not occur in underwater hydrothermal vents. If you had done a valid procedure for trying to recreate the conditions near hydrothermal vents billions of years ago, you would dump the chemicals into a vat of at least 10,000 gallons, a vat that included some hot structures resembling hydrothermal events. The objection I make here is not at all a trifling one. It can be 1,000,000 times more likely to achieve some chemical result in a confined glass beaker than in an area of very many gallons simulating the ocean.

So by using beakers rather than some container with thousands of gallons, our NASA scientists were kind of cheating. What was the grand result of their experiment? The experiment produced only a single type of amino acid, alanine. This result is very discouraging indeed. There are 20 different types of amino acids needed to make proteins, and the experiment produced only one of them.

If some origin-of-life experiment were to produce all twenty types of amino acids used by proteins, this would do nothing to show that life can naturally arise from a lifeless ocean. Such an experiment would be like showing that a monkey typing on a keyboard can produce all 26 characters of the English alphabet. If you did that, you wouldn't do anything to show that typing monkeys can produce functional computer programs. Similarly, if an origin-of-life experiment were to show that all 20 types of amino acids used by proteins can be produced under conditions simulating the early earth, that would not at all show it is possible that life could arise from non-life under such conditions. For it would still be fantastically improbable that such amino acids would ever form into all the functional proteins needed for life. Just as you need extremely fine-tuned arrangements of keystrokes to produce working computer programs (arrangements incredibly unlikely to be produced by typing monkeys), you need extremely fine-tuned arrangements of amino acids to produce functional proteins (arrangements exceptionally unlikely to be produced by random combinations of amino acids).

So you would not come remotely close to showing that life can arise from non-life by doing an origin-of-life experiment in which all twenty types of amino acids used by proteins were produced. But how many types of amino acids did the NASA experiment produce? Only one. The experiment was therefore a flop – almost as close a result to nothing as you could get.

For NASA to give us a headline claiming that this flop experiment was one that “reproduces origins of life” is as big a lie as claiming that you have shown a monkey can produce usable computer programs by bringing a monkey to a keyboard and having the monkey type only one type of character on the keyboard, such as only the letter G. Thanks to NASA's duplicity in this matter, today's science news sites are full of completely false headlines claiming that NASA has reproduced the origin of life.

Alanine – the only amino acid produced by the NASA experiment – is one of the two simplest amino acids. What is called the molecular weight of an amino acid is a measure of its complexity. Alanine has a molecular weight of only 89, but most of the other 19 amino acids used by living things have a molecular weight of more than 130. Four of the amino acids used by living things have a molecular weight of more than 160. The simplest imaginable living thing would have a molecular weight very many thousands of times greater than an alanine molecule.

A correct headline and story for the NASA experiment would be the one below:

A rather good analogy for the simplest imaginable living thing is to compare it to a 300-page technical books with 100 chapters. Each chapter can be compared to a particular protein. The simplest microbe requires at least 100 types of proteins, and most proteins consist of hundreds of amino acids. The complexity of a protein is about comparable to a 3-page book chapter. A single amino acid is like a single word in such a book, with the individual atoms of the amino acid being comparable to a single character of the book's text.  The overall information complexity of the simplest possible self-reproducing microbe is comparable to the information complexity of a 300-page technical book. 

Imagine if you gave your 6-month-old baby a pen and a paper, and saw him draw a short line. You could call that the letter "I," and say that your baby had made a single character, a building block of a book. Such a character is like the single type of amino acid that the NASA experiment produced. But imagine if you said, based on that one little line scrawled by your baby, that not only could your baby write a book, but that your baby actually had written a 300-page book.  That would be a falsehood as big as the "NASA Study Reproduces Origins of Life on Ocean Floor" headline on the NASA web page.  The fact that quite a few websites have parroted this nonsense is simply an example of how today's science journalism often acts like a mindless echo chamber. 

Exaptation or Co-Option Does Not Fix the Incipient Stages Problem

In his book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, Charles Darwin argued for natural selection as the main cause of the origin of species.  Darwin used the same term repeatedly to try to explain the fantastically intricate machinery of biological organisms: the word accumulate or accumulation. On page 29 of the first edition, he refers to "slight differences accumulated during many successive generations." On page 32 of the first edition of the book, he refers to  "the great effect produced by the accumulation in one direction, during successive generations." In Chapter 1 he refers to "the accumulated effects of selection." On page 410 he says, "modifications have been accumulated by the same power of natural selection." On page 471 he says, "natural selection acts solely by accumulating slight, successive, favourable variations." On page 480 he refers to "accumulation of successive slight favourable variations." On page 481 he referred to "the full effects of many slight variations, accumulated during an almost infinite number of generations."  If you were to state Darwin's explanation for biological innovations in a nutshell, it would be this: stuff piles up. 

But there is a huge problem with such an explanation. Accumulations are unorganized things; a thesaurus lists “pile” and “heap” as synonyms. But what we have in the human body are fantastically organized systems showing the highest order, coordination and functional coherence. It would seem to make no sense at all to speak of such systems as mere “accumulations.”

Darwin did nothing to explain how random changes could achieve any high level of organization, let alone the gigantic degree of  organization we see in the human body. Neither Darwin nor any Darwinist has ever explained how natural selection and random changes could ever cause biological parts to become well  organized.  There is no good evidence that any complex visible biological innovation ever appeared because of random mutations and natural selection, and such an idea is essentially an article of faith in a modern-day secular creed. 

In Chapter 7 of  the sixth edition of On the Origin of Species, which you can read here, Darwin addresses various objections to his theory. On page 170 he states, “A much more serious objection has been urged by Bronn, and recently by Broca, namely, that many characters appear to be of no service whatsoever to their possessors, and therefore cannot have been influenced through natural selection.” Darwin concedes on the next page that “there is much force to the above objection.” We can state the objection like this: many types of plant and animal species, in particular mankind, have major characteristics that do not add to their survival value, and which therefore cannot have arisen because of natural selection (which Darwin tells us works only to improve survival value or the likelihood of reproduction). In many types of plants (in particular, flowers) we see a vast host of features which rather seem to exist according to some principle of diversity or ornamentation or beauty rather than some principle of biological functionality. Using the term “the biology of the baroque,” biologist Michael Denton has pointed out many examples of non-adaptive features in biological organisms: things such as the intricate shapes of maple leaves, the huge variety of colors in butterfly wings, and peacock feathers.

In humanity we see many mental abilities and characteristics that seem to have no survival value for any organism existing in the wild, including spirituality, artistic creativity, philosophical reasoning ability, and mathematical ability. See here for a full discussion of such traits, and how they cannot be explained by natural selection. The co-founder of the theory of evolution by natural selection (Alfred Russel Wallace) wrote an essay stating that the theory could not explain some of the most important mental characteristics of mankind. 

On page 177 of the sixth edition of On the Origin of Species, Darwin discusses another objection to his theory, saying, “The one new point which appears to have struck many readers is, 'that natural selection is incompetent to account for the incipient stages of useful structures.'” This is the gravest objection to the credibility of Darwin's explanation for biological complexity. 

In general Darwinism fails to explain the first stages of useful structures. This was pointed out very clearly in Darwin's time by the biologist Mivart, who wrote the following at the beginning of Chapter II of his book On the Genesis of Species: "Natural Selection utterly fails to account for the conservation and development of the minute and rudimentary beginnings, the slight and infinitesimal commencements of structures, however useful those structures may later become." Mivart devoted Chapter II of that book to many examples of "incipient stages" that Darwinism could not explain well.  You can read online Mivart's many examples here.  Without even reading that, it is easy to think of many examples of incipient stages that would not be useful, such as the first small part of any limb (such as an arm or leg) or the first small part of a wing or the first small part of a mammary gland. Other examples are the first small part of a penis, testicle, or an ovary.  On the microscopic level, there is the fact that the first small part of almost every protein molecule is useless. 

To try to defend against the objection that natural selection cannot account for the incipient states or early stages of an innovation, Darwin appealed to an idea that is now called co-option or exaptation. It is the idea that a biological innovation can arise when evolution takes advantage of something that had arisen for some other purpose, and uses it for a different purpose. 

For example, on page 189 of the sixth edition of On the Origin of Species,  Darwin pointed out that Mivart had complained that in their earliest stages, mammary glands would not have been useful for providing milk for an infant:

Mr. Mirvart asks: “It is conceivable that the young of any animal was ever saved from destruction by accidentally sucking a drop of scarcely nutritious fluid from an accidentally hypertropied cutaneous gland of its mother? And even if one ever was so, what was the chance of the perpetuation of such a variation?” But the case is not here put fairly. It is admitted by most evolutionists that mammals are descended from a marsupial form; and if so, the mammary glands will have first been at first developed within the marsupial sack.

Here Darwin was trying to use the idea of co-option, arguing that the mammary glands in the breasts of mammals weren't too hard to develop, because they were co-opted from glands in a pouch-like structure of marsupials from which mammals are descended. But today's evolutionary biologists do not maintain that mammals are descended from marsupials. So this example by Darwin of a co-option now must be dismissed as erroneous reasoning.

Darwin also tried to use the swimbladder of fishes as an example of co-option, implying that lungs were not too hard to develop, because they developed from an earlier organ that existed for a different purpose, for the purpose of helping some fish float. On page 147-148 of the sixth edition of On the Origin of Species,  Darwin argued as followed:

The illustration of the swimbladder in fishes is a good one, because it shows us clearly the highly important fact that an organ originally constructed for one purpose, namely, flotation, may be converted into one for a widely different purpose, namely respiration....All physiologists admit that the swimbladder is homologous or “ideally similar” in position and structure with the lungs of the higher vertebrate animals; hence there is no reason to doubt that the swimbladder has actually been converted into lungs, or an organ used exclusively for respiration.

But this example of co-option or exaptation must also be placed in the trash can. This is because modern evolutionary biologists tell us that the first swim bladders appeared after the first lungs appeared, not before them. The Wikipedia article on swim bladders tells us, “Darwin reasoned that the lung in air-breathing vertebrates had derived from a more primitive swim bladder, but scientists now believe that the swim bladder derived from a more primitive lung.”

Other supposed cases of co-option or exaptation are not much better than these cases. It is claimed that eyes evolved from organs derived for a different purpose, the purpose of telling light from dark. But this is not real co-option, because there would be no difference between the most primitive type of vision and the ability to tell light from dark. Place a few sheets of paper in front of your eyes, and you have something that is both the weakest type of vision and something allowing you to tell light from dark.

All claims of exaptation or co-option on a large visible scale are speculative. We have no proof at all that any single complex biological innovation evolved from any previous biological structure that served some different purpose. When scientists speculate that flying feathers arose from feathers that appeared for the purpose of attracting mates or keeping warm, they are just engaging in wild guesses that don't sound credible. Even if such claims were true, they would have little force, since the origin of, say, a seductively attractive feather would be as hard-to-explain (from random mutations) as the origin of a feather for flying. 

It seems, in fact, that a Darwinist will be hard-pressed to produce a single credible major case of co-option, in which evolution could have conveniently converted one system or organ created for one purpose, and used it for some other purpose. This should surprise no one. It is, in fact, extremely rare for you to have a situation where a complex object existing for one purpose can be conveniently converted to serve some entirely different purpose. Examples of co-option are few and far-between. There is a simple reason why this is so. In the great majority of cases, once some object (whether biological or inorganic) has been specialized to serve some particular purpose, it then becomes so specialized that it is no longer possible to easily adapt it to serve some very different purpose.

Looking around my humble living quarters, I see the following objects: some beds, some chairs, a sofa, an alarm clock, a fan, some book shelves, a television, a cable box, some computers, a bicycle-type exercise machine, two tables, some pots and pans, an oven, a refrigerator, a dental irrigation device, some cell phones, some cameras, a video game console, a video game controller, a flashlight, a hammer, an air conditioner, and an air filter. Thinking about all of these things, I can find no case in which any one of them could have been built from a simpler invention which originated to serve some different purpose. Also I cannot think of a single way in which I could extend or slightly modify any of these objects so that they could serve a different purpose.

If parts or objects are specifically designed to be re-usable and to be “building blocks,” then you might be able to use them for many different purposes (Lego blocks are an example). But if something functional is complex, and has not been specifically designed to be re-usable and to be a kind of building block, it will tend to be so specialized that it cannot be used for different purposes other than the special purpose for which it originally existed. Co-option or exaptation (in which evolution achieves some new purpose by using something “on the shelf” which originated for some other purpose) is something that we would not expect to happen other than very, very rarely.

A simple example can show why appealing to co-option or exaptation is not an effective defense against claims that natural selection and random mutations could not produce very complex functional structures. Let's say a person argues that it is too unlikely that a log cabin would ever form in the woods by a random falling of logs. You might try to defend against that claim by arguing that it wouldn't be too hard, because an accidentally-forming log cabin might form from the much simpler structure called a lean-to, and that would be easier. But this reasoning is fallacious. The overall probability of falling logs forming first into a lean-to and then later into a full log cabin would not be any greater than the probability of the log cabin forming from falling logs in a way in which no lean-to existed while the log cabin was forming. Similarly if it would require five lucky random mutations to achieve some biological structure serving one purpose, and then five other lucky random mutations for that structure to be converted to serve some different purpose (call it the second purpose), then overall achieving this second purpose would not be much more likely than it would be if no such conversion occurred, and you needed ten random mutations to achieve the structure serving the second purpose.

I can explain another general reason why the idea of co-option or exaptation does not work in overcoming the problem that natural selection cannot explain the incipient stages of complex innovations. The reason is that in almost all cases in which we can imagine one complex biological innovation (used for one purpose) changing into some other biological innovation (used for some other purpose), there would be a loss of functionality before there was an equally great gain of functionality; and such a thing would be forbidden under Darwinian assumptions.

In almost all cases in which we can imagine some biological thing gradually evolving from one function to another, there would be an intermediate stage involving a decline in functionality. For example, if some species with arms were to evolve so that the arms became wings, that would be an example of co-option or exaptation. But there would inevitably be an intermediate stage in which these arms-becoming-wings were less useful as arms, but not yet useful as wings. Such a state would involve an intermediate loss in overall function.

Why does this reality discredit the idea of exaptation as a widespread occurrence in biology? According to Darwinian principles, evolution or natural selection should never move some biological innovation from one functional state to a less functional state. That's because once the transition was made to a less functional state, the organism would be less likely to survive; and organisms in such a state would become less and less common in the population. If evolution had precognition, and could foretell the future, there would be no problem with imagining a scenario where some organ or appendage (gradually changing over thousands or millions of years) goes from being functional for reason X, to then being less functional, and then to being functional for reason Y. But since evolution or natural selection lacks any ability to foretell the future, such transitions should not occur under Darwinian assumptions.

The site https://www.biorxiv.org is a server for preprints of biology papers. It stores preprints for very many thousands of biology papers (for example, when I searched for articles with "liver" in the title, I got 105 matches). Using the “Advanced search” feature of this site, I searched for biology papers with “exaptation” in the title. There was only one paper found. When I searched for papers with “co-option” or “cooption” in the title -- a term synonymous with “exaptation” – I found only seven papers. All of these papers (which are highly speculative)  refer only to claims of a co-option or exaptation on a microscropic level, typically one particular molecule or microorganism or gene.  None of these papers claim to have found evidence for exaptation involving a visible structure. Evidently our biologists have actually been able to find very few substantive examples of exaptation, which shows that the idea of exaptation is only a very weak and inadequate defense against the objection that Darwinism cannot explain the beginning or incipient stages of complex biological structures.

In almost all cases that we can imagine an incipient or beginning stage of a complex biological innovation, it is not true that we can find some other purpose that such a thing would have served.  For example, no purpose would be served by one tenth of a vision system, one tenth of a circulatory system, one tenth of a reproductive system, one tenth of a digestive system, or one tenth of an arm or leg. In the rare cases in which a use can be found for a small fraction of a biological innovation, the incipient stages problem has still not been beat, because that fraction can always be halved, and almost always no use will be found for that smaller fraction.  Show me a rare case where one fifth of some biological innovation is useful, and it will probably be a case where one tenth of such a biological innovation could not have been useful; and  show me a rare case where one tenth of some biological innovation is useful, and it will probably be a case where one twentieth of such a biological innovation could not have been useful.

On the lowest useful level, organisms are made from protein molecules, and an average protein molecule in a human consists of about 500 amino acids arranged in just the right way to achieve a functional result. In almost all cases, there is a situation where a particular specialized protein molecule is useless if only half of the molecule exists or only a third of the molecule exists (partially because protein folding, required for proper protein function, is a very tricky thing to get right).  Here the incipient stages problem exists to a mountainous degree, and the idea of exaptation is all but useless in lessening such a problem. Our biologists have no credible accounts of the origin of any of the more complex protein molecules, and they try to talk about such a topic as little as they can. This difficulty was unknown to Darwin, who had no idea that humans were built from more than 20,000 different types of fine-tuned protein molecules that would be so hard to explain, each one of these an impressive biological innovation.

Our biologists tell us that random mutations and natural selection (the mere fact that fit organisms reproduce more) are sufficient to explain how blind nature was able to leap to stratospheric heights of biological organization and functional coherence. Similarly, a man might tell you that his herbal supplements and excellent athletic shoes can allow him to jump to the top of a cloud. When someone objects that natural selection and random mutations would never be remotely sufficient to cause the appearance of biological organisms more organized and complex than a 747 jet, our biologists say it's not too hard for such towering zeniths of biological organization to be reached, because leaps can be made from simpler things which existed for other purposes (the idea of exaptation or co-option).  And similarly, the man with the excellent athletic shoes might tell you it's not too hard for him to jump to the top of a cloud, because rather than jumping all the way from the sidewalk, he can jump from the top of his roof. 

What is very amusing in that each time a person tries to use the idea of exaptation to defend Darwinian explanations, he is twice appealing to purpose while trying to salvage a theory of purposeless biological origins.  This is because the idea of exaptation or co-option is typically stated as the idea that some biological structure that existed for one purpose was then used by evolution for some other purpose.  When someone  uses such "double purpose" reasoning to defend a theory of purposeless biological origins, he is rather like a husband who swears to his wife that he has given up drinking, and then proposes that he and his wife drink a toast to his new sobriety -- not just a vodka toast but a good stiff whiskey toast also. 

25 More Who Were "Ghost-Told" of a Death

In my earlier post “25 Who Were 'Ghost-Told' of a Death,” I summarized 25 or more cases of people who experienced an apparition of someone who they did not know was dead, only to soon find out that such a person had died at a matching time (almost always the same day, and very frequently the same hour and day). The cases I cited were mainly nineteenth-century reports presented to the astronomer Camille Flammarion after he had asked for readers to send him any reports they had of “a distinct impression that you saw or heard a human being, or were touched by one, without being able to refer this impression to some known cause.” I also cited a few reports from recent decades collected by Erlendur Haraldsson. I noted at the end of the end of the post that I could no doubt find many more such cases if I searched for similar cases in the classic work on apparitions, “Phantasms of the Living” by Edmund Gurney, Frederic Myers and Frank Podmore.

I have now searched for similar cases in “Phantasms of the Living,” and found that such cases are reported quite abundantly in that work. A significant fraction of the 700+ cases reported in that two-volume work are cases in which someone reports seeing or hearing an apparition of a particular person they did not know was dead, only to find out later that just such a person had died on about the same day or exactly the same day (and often on the same hour and day). I found more than 75 such cases in "Phantasms of the Living," which will require several different blog posts to summarize (including this one and two others). 

Below are some cases from Volume 1 of “Phantasms of the Living.” By following the links, you can go to the exact page of each case I have given. The very diligent writers of the book checked out almost all of these cases, getting corroborating evidence. So, for example, if a husband reported seeing a particular thing, a wife might be asked to produce an account of what the husband said at the time. And if someone reported a death occurring at a particular day, public records were checked to see whether such a person's death occurred on that day.

Case #25, page 204: According to her later account, on January 3, 1856 a mother “looked round the room, and to my utter amazement, saw Joseph standing at the door...his head bandaged up.” Joseph, her son, died far away on the same day in a shipping accident that split upon his head.

Case #26, page 207: At 2 AM a man saw someone coming into his room, and the man identified the person as Robinson Kelsey. When the man called out, the figure disappeared. Upon making inquiries, the man later learned that Robinson Kelsey had died on the same hour. Although not explicitly stated, the narrative implies that Kelsey had died on both the same day and the same hour.

Case #27, page 209: In December 1881 an R. Rawlinson suddenly had a strange feeling that someone else was in his room. He found that instantaneously “every feature of the face and form of my old friend, X., arose” in his mind. Convinced that the old friend had died, Rawlinson soon found that his old friend had indeed died at the same time Rawlinson had this experience.

Case #28, page 210: On March 24, 1883 an N.J.S. saw his friend F.L. stand before him, and the figure “passed away” (the meaning of this phrase in the narrative is unclear). N.J.S. reported feeling an icy chill, and noted the time as 12 minutes to 9. N.J.S. felt sure F.L. was dead. The next day N.J.S. found out that F.L. was found dead of a ruptured aorta, at 9:00, at about the same time N.J.S. had seen the strange sight.

Case #197, page 531: While writing a letter, an I.B. in Switzerland saw appear before him a man he met in America, one he knew as Mountain Jim. After recording the hour and date of the strange appearance, I. B. later found that Mountain Jim had died on the same day.

Case #199, page 534: At five o'clock in the morning on Saturday a man was woke up a noise, and saw a lady friend of his “glide” across the room. He found out later in the week that the woman had committed suicide at five in the morning on Saturday.

Case #203, page 548: Isabel Allom saw an apparition of her mother. She said “the figure moved across the room, ascending as it went until it disappeared.” She afterwards learned that her mother died on the same day and hour.

Case #204, page 549: An E.C. reported that “I saw a figure of a friend pass before me, ascending” and that later “I received a letter that she had died that night.”

Case #205, page 549-550: A Lady Chatterton said that she was sure Father Hewitt was dead, because she had seen him “high above me in the air.” The next morning she learned that he died at the same time she saw this apparition.

Case #206, page 551-552: An R. Waller Jones said that he saw a vision of his sister in a coffin. He later learned that his sister had died on the same day this vision occurred.

Case #207, page 552: An M. A. Larcombe said she saw angels, and in front of them her friend Anne Cox. She later found that Anne Cox had died on the same day.

Case #210, page 556-557: In 1855 A G.F. Russell Colt said that he woke up to see his brother kneeling, “surrounded by a light sort of phosphorescent mist.” He said the apparition had a wound on its right temple. He soon learned that his brother had died in a military action far away, with the wound or death on the same day as the apparition was seen, and that “the death wound was exactly where I had seen it.”

Case #212, page 560: A Dr. Rowland Bowstead reported that in 1847 at 10 minutes to 1, he saw “the apparition of my half-brother” dressed in a “shooting suit” with a gun on his arm. He found out a few days later that the half-brother had died of a burst blood vessel, on the same day, at 10 minutes to 1, while dressed in a “shooting suit” with a gun on his arm.

Artistic depiction of a ghost

Below are some cases from Volume 2 of “Phantasms of the Living.” I will include the case numbers given in the book.

Case #228, page 44: In 1873 Frederick Barker told his wife that he had seen his aunt who lived elsewhere, and that she had disappeared. He found out a week later that the aunt had died on the same day Barker saw the apparition, and that she was calling out for Barker at the time of her death.

Case #229, page 45: Lieutenant General Albert Fytche stated “I saw a ghost with my own eyes in broad daylight.” He said he saw an old schoolmate in his house, who after a while could no longer be found. Two weeks later he was informed that the schoolmate had died 600 miles away,  on the same day Fytche had seen the apparition.

Case #230, page 46: Looking into a theater pit in Canada, J. Evans saw his brother “lighted up supernaturally.” After looking down into the pit, he couldn't find his brother. He later found out his brother had died in Shanghai on the same day J. Evans saw the strange sight in the theater pit.

Case #231, page 47-48: Stuart Stephens said that he saw Rudolph Gough: “I saw standing the man who I had been told was dying on the other side of the Tugela.” Later he “found that he had died at exactly the hour I fancied I had seen him.”

Case #235, page 51:  S.C. Swiney said that he was surprised to see his brother, who he thought was in India. He said “before I could recover from my astonishment, the figure had disappeared.” He later found his brother had died “about...the time I had imagined I had seen him,” on the same day.

Case #237, page 54: In 1874 Ellen M. Greany saw a school-friend of hers, only to find a moment later there was no one visible except her mother. A day or so later she found the friend had died. She said “she died the same evening and about the same time as I saw her vision.”

Case #240, page 59: Mary Ellis twice during a day “saw the face” of an old friend. She later learned that he died on that same day, five miles away.

Case #243, page 63-65: After being struck by a sudden feeling of sadness, Sebastiano Fenzi saw his brother on the sea coast, walking about outside on a day of terrible weather. After watching him pass behind a rock, the brother could no longer be seen. He later found “my brother had died just at the time when  in the morning I had seen him on the rocks,” with the death occuring 70 miles away. 

Case #253, page 76: An S.H.S relates this account which will be of interest to anyone who enjoys photographs of mysterious orbs:

"About the year 1841, I was in a room with my father in our house in the Isle of Wight when he exclaimed, 'Good God, what is that?' starting up as he spoke, and apparently looking at something. He then turned to me and said that he had seen a ball of light pass through the room, and added, 'Depend upon it, Nurse Simmons is dead.' This was an old servant in London, to whom he had been sending money, in illness. In course of post came information that she passed away at the very time in question."

Case #272, page 107: Lister Ives reported hearing agonized cries from his son, even though the boy was believed to be three miles away. The boy “was killed at that very time by a fall from the rocks.”

Case #273, page 108: While on a ship, G.A. Witt reported hearing the voice of his brother calling G. by his name. He later found out that his brother had died elsewhere on the same day.

Case #279, page 114: Sarah Wight reported the following:

“On five occasions in my life I have heard my Christian name uttered in a peremptory manner; as if some one was in need of my aid; and after each occasion I have learnt that a relation had died at a time closely corresponding to the call. I have never on any other occasion had any sort of hallucination of the senses whatsoever.”

Case#298, page 143: Marian Hughes reported a man had proposed to her sister, but her sister had rejected the man, who then got a job in India. In London her sister heard her name called, and looked up to see what she thought was the face of the man who had wanted to marry her, but “finding no one there became convinced she had seen an apparition announcing the death of her friend.” The sister later learned that the man had died far away “on the evening of the day she had seen the apparition in London.”

Case# 534, page 495: Arthur Bedford reported that all of his dormitory was roused by a cry of a student declaring that his father had appeared at his bedside, dripping wet, wearing a “pea coat” and high boots. It was later found that the father had died at sea, dressed like the apparition, at about the same time as the apparition.

The witnesses listed above almost all asserted or answered that the described incident was the only case they had seen anything like a hallucination or an apparition (a question routinely asked by the very thorough investigators).

I have now presented (in this post and a previous post)  a total of  50 cases of someone experiencing an apparition of someone who they did not know was dead, only to find out later the person died on about the same day (usually exactly the same day, and often on the same hour and day).  I will list 50 more such cases in later posts.  To discuss the mathematical probability of such a thing happening by coincidence will require a separate post.  I can give a preview by mentioning that we should not expect more than about 1 in 100 million ordinary people to coincidentally experience an apparition of someone who they later found died on the same day; and we should not expect more than about 1 in a billion ordinary people to coincidentally experience an apparition of someone who they later found died on the same day and also the same hour.  The existence of so many accounts of this type is therefore prima facie evidence that something much more than hallucination is going on. 

To read about 25 more such cases, click here to read the third part of this 4-part series. 

Neurons and Synapses Are Too Noisy to Explain Precisely Accurate Recall

Neuroscientists typically maintain that human mental phenomena are entirely produced by the brain. But this claim is inconsistent with many low-level facts that neuroscientists have discovered. Remarkably, the facts and details that neuroscientists have learned on a low level frequently contradict the dogmatic high-level assertions neuroscientists make.

The table below summarizes this conflict.

High-level Neuroscientist Claims	Low-Level Facts Discovered by Neuroscientists
“Brains produce thinking”	Human cognitive ability and memory is not strongly damaged by hemispherectomy operations in which half of a brain is removed to treat epilepsy seizures.
	Most of Lorber's hydrocephalus patients with brains mostly consisting of watery fluid had above average intelligence, and a Frenchman was able to long hold a civil service job while almost all of his brain was gone.
	Brain scans do not show brains working significantly harder during either heavy thinking or recall, and no signal change greater than 1% occurs during such activities.
“When we do accurate mental calculations, it is our neurons that are doing the work”	Neurons are noisy, and synapses transmit signals with only a 50% likelihood or less– the type of thing that should prevent accurate mental arithmetic as savants can perform.
“Our memories are stored in our brains”	Neurons and synapses have been extensively examined at very high microscopic resolutions, and no sign of stored information or encoded information has been found in them other than the gene information in DNA.
	There is high protein turnover in the synapses that neuroscientists claim to be the storage place of memories, and the average lifetime of the proteins that make up synapses is only a few weeks – only a thousandth of the lifespan of very old memories in old people.
	There seems to be nothing in the human brain resembling the write mechanism like we see in storage systems such as computers.
“When we remember, we read data from our brains.”	There seems to be nothing in the human brain resembling the read mechanism like we see in storage systems such as computers.
	There is in the human brain no position coordinate system, no indexing, no neuron numbering system, nor anything else that would seem to make possible an instantaneous recall of information from some very precise location in a brain, in a manner similar to a retrieval of data from a particular page of a particular book
	Although we would expect information to be reliably transmitted across neurons during precise and accurate human recall, neurons are actually quite noisy, and transmit signals with only a low reliability.
	Synaptic density studies show that the the density of synapses in brains strongly drops between puberty and adulthood, at the very time when learned knowledge is piling up.

By following the links above, you can read detailed discussions of the claims I make in the right column – except for my claims about neurons being very noisy, which I will justify in this post. 

When we talk about the noise in a communication system, we can imagine this as a kind of static that prevents the transmission from occurring without errors. A young reader may not even know what static is, since nowadays digital communication occurs with very little noise. But I experienced static frequently in my youth, back in the days long before the internet. One type of static would occur when I listened to the radio. When I tuned in to a radio station too far away, the radio signal would be mixed with a crackling noise or static that might prevent me from hearing particular words or musical notes in the transmission. In my youth there was also a problem with television noise or static. On top of a TV set there would be an antenna, and if it wasn't pointing just right, a TV signal might be rather noisy. The noise might be of a visual type, with random little blips appearing on the TV screen. Sometimes the static would be so bad you couldn't see much of anything on the TV you recognized.

The table below illustrates an example of noise in a signal transmission system.

Type of system	Input	Output
Low-noise system	“Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.”	“Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.”
High-noise system	“Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.”	“Tojo, I've a f2@eling we're Xot in K3$sas anymore.”

A neuron acts as an electrical/chemical signal transmitter. A neuron will receive an electrical/chemical input, and transmit an electrical/chemical output. But a neuron does not act as efficiently and reliably as a cable TV wire or a computer cable that transmits signals with a very low error rate. Neuroscientists know that a large amount of noise occurs when neurons transmit signals. In other words, when a neuron receives a particular electrical/chemical input signal, there is a very significant amount of chance and variability involved in what type of electrical/chemical output will come out of the neuron. The wikipedia.org article on “neuronal noise” identifies many different types of noise that might degrade neuron performance: thermal noise, ionic conductance noise, ion pump noise, ion channel shot noise, synaptic release noise, synaptic bombardment, and connectivity noise.

In a very recent interview, an expert on neuron noise states the following:

There is, for example, unreliable synaptic transmission. This is something that an engineer would not normally build into a system. When one neuron is active, and a signal runs down the axon, that signal is not guaranteed to actually reach the next neuron. It makes it across the synapse with a probability like one half, or even less. This introduces a lot of noise into the system.

So according to this expert, synapses (the supposed storage place of human memories) transmit signals with a probability of less than 50 percent. Now that's very heavy noise – the kind of noise you would have if half of the characters in your text messages got scrambled by your cell phone carrier.  A scientific paper tells us the same thing. It states, "Several recent studies have documented the unreliability of central nervous system synapses: typically, a postsynaptic response is produced less than half of the time when a presynaptic nerve impulse arrives at a synapse."

Another scientific paper tells us, “Neuronal variability (both in and across trials) can exhibit statistical characteristics (such as the mean and variance) that match those of random processes.” Another scientific paper tells us that “Neural activity in the mammalian brain is notoriously variable/noisy over time.” A paper tells us that there are two problems in synaptic transmission: (1) the low likelihood of a signal transmitting across a synapse, and (2) a randomness in the strength of the signal that is transmitted if such a signal transmission occurs. As the paper puts it (using more technical language than I just used):

The probability of vesicle release is known to be generally low (0.1 to 0.4) from in vitro studies in some vertebrate and invertebrate systems (Stevens, 1994). This unreliability is further compounded by the trial-to-trial variability in the amplitude of the post-synaptic response to a vesicular release. 

Another paper concurs by also saying that there are two problems (unreliable synaptic transmission and a randomness in the signal strength when the transmission occurs):

On average most synapses respond to only less than half of the presynaptic spikes, and if they respond, the amplitude of the postsynaptic current varies. This high degree of unreliability has been puzzling as it impairs information transmission.

This is a problem for all claims that memories are retrieved from brains, because humans are known to be able to remember things very accurately, but “neural noise limits the fidelity of representations in the brain,” as a scientific paper tells us.

Now, a neuroscientist might claim that such facts can still be reconciled with the mental performance of humans. He might argue like this:

Yes, neurons and synapses are pretty slow and noisy, but that's why human memory is slow and unreliable. Think of how it works when you suddenly see some old schoolmate that you haven't seen in twenty years. It may be a while before you remember their name. And when you remember something about that person, your memory will probably be not terribly accurate. So you have a kind of a slow “noisy” memory.

But it is easy to come up with examples of human memory performing without error in a noiseless manner. I just closed my eyes and recited the following lines without any error at a rate faster than you can read these lines aloud:

I am the very model of a modern Major-General

I've information vegetable, animal, and mineral
I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical
From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical

I'm very well acquainted, too, with matters mathematical
I understand equations, both the simple and quadratical
About binomial theorem I'm teeming with a lot o' news
With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse

But that's not very impressive, for there are singers who can flawlessly sing without any errors at a very rapid pace the entire delightful song “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General” from Gilbert and Sullivan's “The Pirates of Penzance,” and the song is about eight times longer than what I have quoted. Also, in the world of opera there are singers who can flawlessly sing every note and every word of the part of Hans Sachs in Wagner's four-hour opera Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg, an opera in which Hans is on stage singing for a large fraction of those four-hours. There are other singers who can flawlessly sing the title role in the opera Siegfried, which requires the lead singer to sing on stage for most of its three hours. There are other singers who can flawlessly sing the role of Tristan, which also requires a similar demand. In such cases we have a very rapid and flawless error-free retrieval of an amount of information that would take many, many pages to write down.

A rock singer at a funky free-wheeling concert might get away with an error rate of 2% in his memory recall of words, but opera fans are very intolerant of errors. When Wagner fans (who have typically heard an opera many times on recordings) go to something like the Bayreuth festival, they expect singers to recall Wagner's notes and words with 100% fidelity, and that is what they usually get, even when hearing roles such as Tristan and Siegfried which require a singer to memorize hours of singing.  Every time an actor performs Hamlet, he recites 1480 lines of dialog, and many such actors recall all such lines without any errors. 

Then there is Leslie Lemke, who according to this article in wikipedia.org "can remember and play back a musical piece of any length flawlessly after hearing it once."  It is well documented that there are quite a few Muslims who can recite the entire holy book of their religion, a book of some 80,000 words. Then there are people who flawlessly remember content that is hard to remember. According to the site of the Guiness Book of World Records, Rajveer Meena memorized pi to 70,000 digits, reciting those 70,000 digits without any errors. Lu Chao memorized pi to 67,000 digits.

How could such feats occur if memory retrieval is being performed by neurons and synapses that are very noisy? They cannot be. In these cases, human memory is acting at a reliability vastly surpassing what should be possible if memory retrieval or thought is a neural phenomenon.  A scientific paper states, "Neural noise limits the fidelity of representations in the brain."  But humans such as those I have mentioned seem to be able to recall huge amounts of learned text or song without any such problem of a degradation of "fidelity of representations." 

A similar conclusion is forced on us when we consider the accuracy of the most impressive human calculators. In 2004 Alexis Lemaire was able to calculate in his head the 13th root of this number:

85,877,066,894,718,045, 602,549,144,850,158,599,202,771,247,748,960,878,023,151, 390,314,284,284,465,842,798,373,290,242,826,571,823,153, 045,030,300,932,591,615,405,929,429,773,640,895,967,991,430,381,763,526,613,357,308,674,592,650,724,521,841,103,664,923,661,204,223

In only 77 seconds, according to the BBC, Lemaire was able to state that it is the number 2396232838850303 which when multiplied by itself 13 times equals the number above.  Here we have calculation accuracy far beyond anything that could be possible if noisy neurons are the source of human thought. 

Given the high amount of noise in neurons and synapses, which would strongly degrade the accuracy of neural memory retrieval and neural signal transmission, the facts of very accurate human calculation and very accurate human memory recall (as shown by calculation savants, Hamlet actors, and Wagnerian opera singers) are very much in conflict with the dogmas that our thinking is performed by our brains and our memories are stored in and retrieved by our brains.  This is yet another case in which the low-level facts of neuroscience defy the dogmatic claims of neuroscientists. 

Think for a moment about the implications if a synapse can only transmit a signal with about a 50% reliability, as indicated by the previously quoted expert on neuron noise. This does not at all mean that people would recall things with about 50% accuracy if memories are stored in brains; it's much worse than that. Since any act of neural memory retrieval would involve innumerable different signal transmissions through innumerable neurons, we would expect the actual accuracy to be only some tiny fraction of 50% if we were using synapses to retrieve our learned knowledge.  Similarly, if you play the game "Chinese whispers" (also called "gossip") at a school lunch table, and have everyone at the table be playing noisy music in earphones as they hear the gossip story being whispered among the players, the tenth person to receive the story will be unlikely to receive even 20 percent of it accurately. 

Let us imagine a planet in which the sky was perpetually covered in very thick clouds, so that no one had seen the stars or the local sun.  On such a planet there would be a great mystery: from where comes the heat that keeps life on the planet warm? If you were a rather clumsy thinker on such a planet, you might come up with some cheesy theory to explain the heat on your planet, and dogmatically cling to it -- maybe the theory that rocks on your planet warm the planet through radioactivity, or that heat shoots up from the hot core of the planet. But if you were a better thinker, you would say, "There is nothing anyone has observed that can explain this planet's heat -- it must come from some mysterious unseen reality."  It is something similar that we should say about our mental capabilities: that nothing we have observed can explain them, and that they must come mainly from some mysterious unseen reality. 

If Extraterrestrials Sent 'Oumuamua, They Must Have Been Very Stupid

The object called 'Oumuamua is an unusual object that entered the solar system in 2017. Two Harvard scientists (Abraham Loeb and Shmuel Bialy) have written a paper speculating that the object might have been a probe designed by extraterrestrials. This paper has triggered much coverage in the popular press. 

One unusual thing cited about 'Oumuamua is its shape. We have been repeatedly told that the object was cigar-shaped, and press coverage has repeatedly shown a visual of a cigar-shaped object. But that visual is not an actual photo. It is a speculative “artist's visualization” thing. No actual photographs have been taken of 'Oumuamua. In a recent Scientific American article, Loeb says this:

We do not have a photo of ‘Oumuamua, but its brightness owing to reflected sunlight varied by a factor of 10 as it rotated periodically every eight hours. This implies that ‘Oumuamua has an extreme elongated shape with its length at least five to 10 times larger than its projected width.

So 'Oumuamua may be only five times longer than its width, which would make it merely pickle-shaped rather than cigar-shaped. A pickle-shaped object is not particularly strange, and many asteroids and comets have such a shape.

There are actually three reasons for thinking that if 'Oumuamua was sent by extraterrestrials, it could only have been sent by very stupid extraterrestrials. I will now list these reasons.

Reason #1: only very stupid extraterrestrials would build a spacecraft that has the tumbling motion that 'Oumuamua has.

A scientific paper tells us that 'Oumuamua has “clear signs of a tumbling motion.” The object is apparently tumbling end over end, like some bottle spun in the “spin the bottle” game. It seems that only very silly designers of a spacecraft would design a spacecraft that had such a motion. If an object is tumbling end over end, any rocket thrust that it had would not be consistently applied in a particular direction. When the US sends rockets to Mars or the moon, they never have a tumbling motion. Instead, such rockets keep consistently pointing in a particular direction.

We can imagine a conversation between stupid extraterrestrials that might result in such a spacecraft.

Extraterrestrial worker: Uh, boss, what kind of stuff should we include with that rocket we're sending to the stars?
Extraterrestrial boss: Make it look snazzy! The shinier it looks, the better. Everybody loves a shiny spacecraft.
Extraterrestrial worker: Should we make sure the rocket always points in the direction it's trying to go to?
Extraterrestrial boss: Why bother with such details?

Reason #2: only very stupid extraterrestrials would build a spacecraft that did not head towards a life-bearing planet in a solar system it entered.

'Oumuamua came nowhere close to Earth, and showed no signs of changing its motion to come closer to Earth. 

Path of Oumuamua (from wikipedia.org)

We can imagine a conversation between very stupid extraterrestrials that might have resulted in such a design.

Extraterrestrial worker: Uh, boss, should we have some kind of deal where our rocket moves closer to a life-bearing planet if it finds one in a solar system it enters?
Extraterrestrial boss: That requires programming! You know guys on our planet aren't smart enough to do that kind of thing!
Extraterrestrial worker: So the rocket should just go into a solar system, and hopes it gets lucky by passing near a life-bearing planet?
Extraterrestrial boss: Sure, why not? It's not like there's lot of empty space in a solar system.

Reason #3: only very stupid extraterrestrials would build a spacecraft that did not transmit radio signals after entering a solar system.

Sending radio signals is an easy way for a spacecraft entering a solar system to send a message back to its home planet announcing what it found. Scientists made a careful check to see whether artificial radio emissions were coming from 'Oumuamua. But no radio signals were picked up.

We can imagine a conversation between very stupid extraterrestrials that might have resulted in an interstellar spacecraft without a radio system.

Extraterrestrial worker: Uh, boss, should we have some kind of deal where our rocket radios back to us what it discovered?
Extraterrestrial boss: Dummy, you haven't thought things through. Doing that means we'd have to point the radio transmitter antenna in the right direction.
Extraterrestrial worker: So why not just have the antenna move to the right direction?
Extraterrestrial boss: Because then we have to figure out what is the right direction when the spacecraft is who-knows-where pointing in who-knows-what direction. None of us is smart enough to figure that stuff out. Only a super-genius could figure that out!
Extraterrestrial worker:  So how about this? We'll just have the spaceship travel in random directions, and hope that it comes back to our planet long after it luckily passes by a life-bearing planet in some other solar system. 
Extraterrestrial boss: That's a great idea. I'm sure the spaceship will come back to our planet. It's not like there's lot of empty space between the stars.

Upon hearing this hypothetical conversation, some readers will probably think to themselves that the expert minds on our planet are much wiser, and would never think something so silly as the idea that random changes applied over a long period would result in fortunate outcomes resembling the outcomes of precision engineering.