When you read science news sites, you will typically read a great deal of shameless hype. Runaway hype and exaggeration is currently going on in Internet sites reporting scientific research. Major websites have learned the following fundamental formula:
Clicks= Cash Income
The reason for this is that major websites make money from online ads. So the more people click on a link to some science story, the more money the website makes. This means that science reporting sites have a tremendous financial incentive to hype and exaggerate science stories. If they have a link saying, “Borderline results from new neuron study,” they may make only five dollars from that story. But if they have a story saying, “Astonishing breakthrough unveils the brain secret of memory,” they may make a hundred dollars from that story. With such a situation, it is no wonder that the hyping and exaggeration of scientific research is at epidemic levels. Call it a "hypedemic."
Part of the problem is university press offices, which nowadays are shameless in exaggerating the importance of research done at their university. A scientific paper reached the following conclusions, indicating a huge hype and exaggeration crisis both among the authors of scientific papers and the media that reports on such papers:
“Thirty-four percent of academic studies and 48% of media articles used language that reviewers considered too strong for their strength of causal inference....Fifty-eight percent of media articles were found to have inaccurately reported the question, results, intervention, or population of the academic study”
Let us look at a recent example of such a thing. At the widely read site www.phys.org we have a headline reading this: "How the insect got its wings: Scientists (at last!) tell the tale." The story attempts to persuade us that scientists have finally discovered how the first wings appeared. We have this boastful triumphal-sounding prose:
"It sounds like a 'Just So Story'—'How the Insect Got its Wings'—but it's really a mystery that has puzzled biologists for over a century. Intriguing and competing theories of insect wing evolution have emerged in recent years, but none were entirely satisfactory. Finally, a team from the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), Woods Hole, has settled the controversy, using clues from long-ago scientific papers as well as state-of-the-art genomic approaches."
Who is it who has made this boastful claim? When we look at the article byline, we find that there is a byline of "by Marine Biological Laboratory." That should make us suspicious. We have a press release by the Marine Biological Laboratory, boasting of some alleged accomplishment made by people at the Marine Biological Laboratory. That kind of "blowing your own horn" puff piece is rather like some politician's PR desk releasing some press release talking about what a great job he's doing.
We then read a claim that makes no sense. Here is the story told:
(1) First there was some crustacean with a little lobe or outgrowth on its leg.
(2) Then this little lobe moved up along the back of some animal.
(3) Then that turned into a wing on an insect.
The article quotes a scientist telling this tale: "The leg lobes then moved up onto the insect's back, and those later formed the wings."
Later in the news story we are told once again one of the biggest myths of modern biologists, the very untruthful claim that genes contain instructions for anatomical structures. We are told that a scientist was "comparing the genetic instructions for the segmented legs of a crustacean." Genes do not contain any instructions for anatomical structures. Genes do not specify the structure of limbs, organs or even cells. Genes merely specify low-level chemical information such as the polypeptide sequences that are the starting points of proteins.
We are told little else by the press release of the Marine Biological Laboratory. There is a reference to a paper that is behind a paywall. But at the link here you can read an open-access paper by the same scientists mentioned in the press release, Bruce and Patel, one in which they discuss their thoughts on the origin of insect wings. Figure 1 shows a shrimp-like crustacean, with one of its little legs highlighted; and above that is an insect with a big wing, and the wing highlighted. The paper tries to suggest that a little leg (or lobe on the leg) on the front of a shrimp-like organism transformed into a big wing on the back of an insect organism. It says, "two ancestral crustacean leg segments were incorporated into the insect body, moving the leg’s epipod dorsally, up onto the back to form insect wings." Really, and while that mystifying migration and radical transfiguration occurred, a shrimp-like crustacean was also turning into a vastly different type of animal, into an insect?
This speculation is as silly as the theory that animals got arms after their toes moved up the side of their body and turned into arms.
|
|
Crustaceans |
Insects |
|
Body segments |
2 |
3 |
|
Number of antennae |
2 pairs |
1 pair |
|
Wings? |
Never |
Sometimes |
|
Chewing appendages |
Usually 3 pairs |
1 pair |
|
Location of appendages |
Cephalothorax and abdomen |
Head and abdomen |
|
Respiration |
Gills |
Tracheal system |
See here for this table's source
In Figure 1 of this paper by Bruce and Patel we have a drawing designed to show us some structural similarity between a part of a crustacean leg and an insect leg. The drawings aren't labeled as diagrams, but are labeled as "cartoons," which doesn't exactly inspire our confidence. When we compare these two "cartoons," we find the structural similarity isn't even very strong. So we get no visual reason for thinking one structure evolved from the other. Since the authors have claimed that insect wings evolved from a crustacean leg or part of such a leg, why aren't they showing a diagram comparing the details of an insect wing and some part of a crustacean? It's because nothing on a crustacean looks anything like an insect wing.
These scientists have done nothing to prove this silly theory about the origin of insect wings, and in their paper they repeatedly refer to their speculation as being a "model." In physics a model usually involves some complicated mathematics, but a model in biology is a mere speculation, and may be a mere "just so" story. There is a rather obvious reason why the story is unbelievable. Some primitive structure moving from the front of a shrimp-like organism to its back (or the back of an insect descended from such an organism) would have no use in such a place while the structure was some preliminary fragment of a wing. So you cannot trace any path from front leg-like structures in crustaceans to back wings in insects, with each stage being useful. A similar difficulty would apply to any sort of attempt to explain an origin of insect wings, the difficulty that half-wings or quarter-wings would be useless, so there's no reason why they would appear.
Why is such "grasping at straws" occurring? Because scientists have no credible theory of the origin of insect wings. In a previous story on phys.org a scientist states, "Insects evolved their wings long before birds and bats, yet, we do not know how their wings evolved." There is no compelling evidence that insects evolved from crustaceans, and the evidence for such a thing is so weak that the current wikipedia article on "evolution of insects" merely says (rather hesitantly) that "insects may have evolved from a group of crustaceans." A science site tells us this: "Differing mostly in their body parts, insects, such as ants, flies, wasps and dragonflies, have tri-segmented bodies consisting of the head, thorax and abdomen; crustaceans, such as crabs, lobsters, shrimps and crayfish, have only two body segments — the head and thorax." No one has a credible explanation of how a two-segment organism without wings could change into a three-segment organism with wings. The idea that a shrimp-like animal evolved into a flying insect is very far-fetched, rather like thinking that chickens evolved into monkeys.
Darwinists have no credible explanation for the origin of anatomical structures. Since DNA does not specify anatomical structures, we cannot postulate the appearance of a useful new anatomical structure by imagining lucky random mutations in DNA. DNA does not specify anatomical structures, so no amount of lucky changes in DNA can explain how useful new anatomical structures could arise. Evolutionary biologists often try to bridge this gap by using deceptive language trying to make it sound as if DNA was some kind of blueprint for an organism. We know exactly why it can be no such thing. The "language" used by DNA (the genetic code) is a "bare bones" poor-man's language capable of specifying only low-level chemical information. And if some molecule in the body were to contain instructions for making something as immensely organized as an organism, they would be instructions so complex there would be nothing in a body capable of interpreting them.
"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." Michael Levin (director of a large biology research lab) states that "genomes are not a blueprint for anatomy."
Nowadays when scientists have merely come up with a silly speculation, they may do something like putting up a big shiny achievement trophy on their mantle, making it sound like they're the first to explain some long-standing mystery. That's what happens all the time in scientific academia: professors boasting about mighty achievements they did not really accomplish, and bragging about understanding things they do not at all understand, like someone crowning his own head with a laurel wreath, or sewing a self-devised merit badge on his own shirt.
In my next post I will discuss another recent example of an unjustified boast on science news sites, the very incorrect claim that the AlphaFold2 software of the DeepMind company has solved the long-standing protein folding problem.
Postscript: Darwinists have no credible explanation for the origin of winged pterodactyls in the fossi record. A common attempt to explain a gradualist origin of birds is to imagine the evolution of birds from so-called flying squirrels, animals that can jump from one tree to another. But flying pterodactyls appear in the fossil record about 200 million years ago, which is 170 million years before the earliest appearance of squirrels in the fossil record. Also, birds appear in the fossil record 30 million years before the first squirrels.
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