The end of the year is a time for "top 10" and "top 5" stories in the science press. Unfortunately, while it has been a good year for applied science (with COVID-19 vaccines being developed), it has been a lackluster year for explanatory science. So our year-end "top 10" and "top 5" stories don't list anything very exciting in terms of explanatory science.
An article at www.pbs.org is entitled "Nova's Top 5 Science Stories of 2020." There is no discussion of any significant progress in explanatory science, other than the "applied science" research regarding COVID-19. The top 5 include "scientists race to understand and contain the virus," a mention of a boring retrieval of dusty rock from an asteroid, "racial disparities in science and medicine persist," "climate change intensifies," and "scientists discover molecules on three of our celestial neighbors." The molecules mentioned are nothing interesting.
The article here is entitled "Berkeley Lab's Top 10 Science Stories of 2020." There is no mention of any progress in explanatory science. The things mentioned are mainly just technological and applied science things. The journal Science has an article entitled "Our favorite science news stories of 2020 (non–COVID-19 edition)." Once we dismiss the untrue claim the article makes that artificial intelligence is evolving all by itself (a claim about something technological rather than scientific), we find there is no mention of anything very important or even anything very interesting (with the exception of the mention of the discovery of a virus with no genes found in any other organisms).
On the Live Science site (www.livescience.com) we have an end-of-year recap article with the phony title "Here's what we learned about aliens in 2020." The aliens referred to are extraterrestrials. Of course, we did not learn anything about aliens in the year 2020, so the title is misleading. The story has section titles such as "There could be 36 alien civilizations in our galaxy" and "White dwarfs could be alien strongholds." At the same site, there is a story entitled "The 10 biggest physics stories of 2020," which fails to mention any major progress in physics.
At the Smithsonian web site, there is an end-of-year-recap article with the title "Ten New Things We Learned About Human Origins in 2020." In huge boldface letters we see a section heading entitled "Fossils Show Ancient Primates Also Undertook Major Journeys." We are then told the extremely absurd claim that monkeys rafted across the Atlantic Ocean. Of course, no fossils told any such tale. It was merely a case that some New World monkey fossils millions of years old were found similar to equally old monkey fossils from Africa. Rather than realize that this is an indication that their ideas of the common ancestry of all species are wrong or in need of repair, evolutionary biologists have asked us to believe in the proposterous fable that monkeys from Africa rafted across the Atlantic ocean to the Western hemisphere. This migration tall tale reminds me of another motion fable: the story that Dorothy traveled to Oz when a tornado blew her house up into the air, causing it to land in the land of Oz.
In the account we learn of a new element in this most absurd tale: the suggestion that a floating raft of vegetation was conveniently equipped with a fruit tree to sustain the continent-crossing monkeys:
"In April, Erik Seiffert from University of Southern California and colleagues announced a new tiny soup-can-sized fossil monkey species, Ucayalipithecus perdita, based on four fossil monkey teeth that they found deep in the Peruvian Amazon. This newly discovered species belongs to an extinct family of African primates known as parapithecids, which are now the third lineage of mammals that made the more than 900-mile transatlantic journey from Africa to South America, most likely on floating rafts of vegetation that broke off from coastlines during a storm. Sounds improbable, but monkeys can survive without access to fresh water if they get enough food—like fruit that could have been growing on a tree and part of the vegetation raft."
This is one of the silliest tales I have ever heard told. No one has ever observed a land-originating vegetation raft with or without a tree moving in the middle of a sea or an ocean. It seems that our "Ten New Things We Learned About Human Origins in 2020" article is in the same class as our "Here's what we learned about aliens in 2020" story. It seems that the biologists who scorned a scriptural origins story involving a fruit tree (Eve and the apple) now are asking us to believe in another origins story involving a fruit tree, a tale as magical-sounding as the story they scorned.
At the same Smithsonian web site, we have an article entitled "The Ten Most Significant Science Stories of 2020." None of the stories refers to any major progress in explanatory science. The only story with a headline sounding like progress in explanatory science is a story listed as "New AI Tool Cracks a Decades-Old Problem in Biology." This is just a credulous repetition of some unfounded PR hype released in a corporate press release. The program referred to (which uses vast databases of information compiled from studying countless thousands of organisms) has not actually solved the protein folding problem (as I explain at length here), which is the problem of how protein folding is able to occur in organisms that do not have any such databases as the program relied on.
Our scientists have made little progress in explanatory science during the year 2020, and our science journalists seem to be filling in the gap by telling us tall tales of accomplishments that were not actually achieved.
Why is there so little progress in explanatory science these days? It's because so many of our scientists are on the equivalent of hamster wheels. Dedicated to proving dogmatic claims of materialism, many scientists spend year after year churning out poorly designed studies and speculative papers of little value. Meanwhile, our mainstream scientists ignore many areas of research that have produced very dramatic results previously (results that our mainstream scientists are careful not to study or discuss), and which could yield many more dramatic results if they were well investigated with modest funding. Such taboo research areas are ignored because our university scientists are afraid of discovering things that conflict with their cherished dogmas about how reality works, how minds arise, and how humans originated.
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