From a Misty Cloud to a Human Form

In Robert Crookall's book Out of the Body Experiences, we have on page 35 this very interesting passage:

"Thus, Dr. R. B. Hout saw 'a fog' leave a dying body (and gradually become its 'double'). E. W. Oaten saw 'a smokelike vapor' (which gradually became 'an exact duplicate' of the person who had just died). Florence Marryat saw 'a cloud of smoke' (which 'gradually acquired the shape of the girl’s body'). J. C. Street observed 'a column of vapor' (which assumed the form of the man under observation). Major W. T. Pole reported 'a shadowy form” (which became 'an exact counterpart of the body on the bed'). Mr. 'G' described 'clouds' (which assumed the form of the body they had left). Maurice and Irene Elliott spoke of 'a white hazy mist' (which also took the shape of the body it had left)."

On page 105 we have a fuller discussion in the same vein:

"We have already referred to the 'mist' observed to rise from dying bodies...Mrs. Annie Brittain saw that 'the mist' which left the body of a woman passed through a second stage and became its counterpart. Lily J. Price, J. P., of Australia, wrote and told me how, when present at the 'passing' of a child, she saw 'a mist' leave the head (first stage). She continued, 'The mist gradually took the shape of the child’s form [second stage].' Mrs. G. Vivian, B.A.,  saw 'a mist' leave the body of her dying mother. 'It gradually took shape and resembled my mother.' Mrs. 'Alexander' gave an identical description, as did Mrs. E. Herrick, T. E. Morgan, and an American literary woman.  The Reverend J. Lewis  saw a gambler die. A 'mist' left his body and later assumed the gambler’s form." 

On page 106 we read this: "Professor E. Bozzano quoted a missionary from Tahiti who was told by the natives: 'Shortly after a human body ceases to breathe, a vapor rises from the head . . . this vapor gradually . . . assumes the form of the inert body.”

Below is a description by an R. B. Hout on page 153:

"I could distinguish nothing more than a vague outline of a hazy, foglike substance. There seemed to be only a mist held suspended, motionless. But, as I looked, very gradually there grew into my sight a denser, more solid, condensation of this inexplicable vapor. Then I was astonished to see definite outlines presenting themselves, and soon I saw this foglike substance was assuming a human form. 

Soon I knew that the body I was seeing resembled that of the physical body of my aunt  . . . The astral body hung suspended horizontally a few feet above the physical counterpart. ... I continued to watch and . . . the Spirit Body now seemed complete to my sight. I saw the features plainly. They were very similar to the physical face, except that a glow of peace and vigor was expressed instead of age and pain. The eyes were closed as though in tranquil sleep, and 

a luminosity seemed to radiate from the Spirit Body."

On page 121 of his very interesting book The Supreme Adventure the author Robert Crookall cites the following account told by an E. W. Oaten who witnessed the death of his friend Daisy: 

"I saw a faint, smoke-like vapour rise from the body. It rose some few feet above the bed and stayed there. It was full of motion and rolled over and over until it became a ball of greyish smoke, in a state of motion, with slight traces of opalescence in it here and there. It condensed and grew larger, supplied with a steady stream from the body, a stream of vapour some three inches in diameter. Slowly the ball assumed the size of about 5 ft. 6 in. in length by 18 in. in diameter. Condensation continued until it became to me, a semi-solid body, light-grey in colour, but still like a volume of smoke all in motion. Then, gradually, definition began to come. It assumed the form of a roughly-moulded dummy of the human form. An umbilical cord united it with the physical body. I could see the flow of energy in the umbilical cord. The etheric form began to assume the perfect shape. . . . Presently there was the exact duplicate of Daisy floating face downwards in the air.  It was connected to the body by the silver cord through which her life slowly escaped. Then the form began to heave and rock, like a balloon tearing at its moorings. The silver cord began to stretch. It grew thinner and thinner at the middle until at last it snapped and the floating form assumed an upright attitude.  It was the living duplicate of the sleeping form on the bed. She turned to me and smiled. She was thanking me for the hours I had spent in trying to help her. Then, from the corner of the room, near the ceiling, there came a rush. Two white-robed figures, a man and a woman...came to her, and wrapping their robes around her, they floated away . . . .” 

On page 157 of Crookall's book Out of the Body Experiences we read of a Dr. R. J. Staver who witnessed the death of his father: 

"There was a little mistlike wraith which rose rather slowly. ... It had no human appearance at the time of withdrawal; that 

came a bit later. The whole proceeding took the best 

part of an hour, and for some time following the com¬ 

plete withdrawal, there was a wisp of connection between 

the physical body and that portion which had left it— 

it reminded me of the oft-mentioned ‘silver cord.’ "

On page 159 we read this:

"Mrs. Josephine Taylor ... told how she saw a child die: 'I saw a mist above the little body. It took the shape of the body which lay on the bed. This was attached by a very fine silver cord. . . . The replica was about three feet above the body, then gradually tilted itself into an upright position. It then floated away.'  Charles Moore observed, 'There slowly escapes from the outworn body a luminous cloud of fine substance. This rapidly becomes compact and takes the form of a solid ethereal body exactly like the old physical body from which it has arisen.' "

On page 162 we are told a Dr. Kayner  observed "a vapor or mist"  which left the chest and head and "gradually rose" until 

the "newly born man" stood up.

The world-class scientist Sir William Crookes was the inventor of the Crookes tube that was the forerunner of all television sets (and also the co-discoverer of the element thallium).  Crookes wrote the following:

"Under the strictest test conditions, I have more than once had a solid, self-luminous, crystalline body placed in my hand by a hand which did not belong to any person in the room. In the light, I have seen a luminous cloud hover over a heliotrope on a side table, break a sprig off, and carry the sprig to a lady; and on some occasions I have seen a similar luminous cloud visibly condense to the form of a hand and carry small objects about."

Lt.-Col. L. Moore Cosgrave reported the following incident occurring near the time of the death of Horace Traubel, the main biographer of the American poet Walt Whitman:

"During this long watch, Horace Traubel, who was suffering from paralysis and debility, was without visible pain, and semi-conscious, unable to articulate owing to paralysis of the tongue....On the last night, about 3 a. m., he grew perceptibly weaker, breathing almost without visible movement, eyes closed and seemingly comatose, he stirred restlessly after a long period, and his eyes opened, staring towards the further side of the bed, his lips moved, endeavoring to speak, I moved his head back, thinking he needed more air, but again it moved away, and his eyes remained rivetted on a point some three feet above the bed, my eyes were at last drawn irresistibly to the same point in the darkness, as there was but 

a small shaded night lamp behind a curtain on the further side of the room. Slowly the point at which we were both looking grew gradually brighter, a light haze appeared, spread until it assumed bodily form, and took the likeness of Walt Whitman, standing upright beside the bed, a rough tweed jacket on, an old felt hat upon his head and his right hand in his pocket, similar to a number of his portraits, he was gazing down at Traubel, a kindly, reassuring smile upon his face, he nodded twice as though reassuringly, the features quite distinct for at least a full minute, then gradually faded from sight."

Besides such accounts of a full or nearly full human form arising from a misty cloud, there are numerous accounts of mysterious hands appearing from such a cloud or mist. We read the following in the book "Occult Science in India" by Louis Jacolliot:

"A slightly phosphorescent cloud seemed to have formed in the mid- dle of my chamber, from which semblances of hands appeared to go and come with great rapidity. In a few minutes, several hands seemed to have lost their vaporous appearance and to resemble human hands ; so much so, indeed, that they might have been readily mistaken for the latter. Singular to relate, while some became, as it were, more material, others became more luminous. Some became opaque, and cast a shadow in the light, while others became so transparent that an object behind them could be distinctly seen. I counted as many as sixteen....One of them, breaking away from the rest, flew toward me and pressed my outstretched hand. It was small, supple and moist, like the hand of a young woman....For nearly two hours a scene ensued which was calculated to set my head in a whirl. At one time, a hand brushed against my face or fanned it with a fan. At another, it would scatter a shower of flowers all over the room, or would trace in the air, in characters of fire, words which vanished as soon as the last letter was written."

On page 269 of the same account, we read the following account of a full human form arising from such a cloud:

'A cloud similar to the first, but more opaque and of a brighter color, hovered near the little furnace, which, at the Hindu's request, I had kept constantly fed with burning coals. By degrees it seemed to assume a human form, and I distinguished the spectre — for I cannot call it otherwise — of an old Brahminical priest kneeling by the side of the little furnace."

Although it involves only a paranormal cloud (but not such a cloud turning into a human form), the following notable passage from the book Cosmic Consciousness by Richard Maurice Bucke may be relevant in this post. In the passage the author is describing his own experience:

"All at once, without warning of any kind, he found himself wrapped around as it were by a flame-colored cloud. For an instant he thought of fire, some sudden conflagration in the great city; the next he knew that the light was within himself. Directly afterwards came upon him a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination quite impossible to describe. Into his brain streamed one momentary lightning-flash of the Brahmic Splendor which has ever since lightened his life ; upon his heart fell one drop of Brahmic Bliss, leaving thenceforward for always an after taste of heaven. Among other things he did not come to believe, he saw and knew that the Cosmos is not dead matter but a living Presence, that the soul of man is immortal, that the universe is so built and ordered that without any peradventure all things work together for the good of each and all, that the foundation principle of the world is what we call love and that the happiness of every one is in the long run absolutely certain. He claims that he learned more within the few seconds during which the illumination lasted than in previous months or even years of study, and that he learned much that no study could ever have taught. The illumination itself continued not more than a few moments, but its effects proved ineffaceable ; it was impossible for him ever to forget what he at that time saw and knew; neither did he, or could he, ever doubt the truth of what was then presented to his mind."

Below is the famous photo described as the "Ghost of Raynham Hall," as it appeared in the December 26, 1936 edition of the British magazine "Country Life." 

Postscript:  The description of seances of Franck Kluski by  anatomy professor F. W. Pawlowski is one of the most astonishing testimonies of paranormal phenomena ever recorded. Beginning here you can read an account of more than five pages, filled with the most extraordinary claims. The quote below is another example of the phenomenon referenced by this post's title:

"As the phantoms made their appearance I saw something resembling luminous smoke or fog floating above the head of the medium like a small cloud. This cloud moved to one side and in a few seconds became a human head, or else it would spread out vertically and become a complete human figure, which immediately began to walk about. The most astonishing and interesting part of these phenomena, so to speak their most important feature as far as I was concerned, was the absolutely human behavior of the apparitions. They acted precisely like guests at a party. As they passed around the table they greeted the more familiar participants with a smile of recognition, whereas they studied any newcomers attentively. The inquisitive look in their eyes is hard to describe. I could see from their efforts to understand our expressions, our smiles, our questions and answers, as well as from their actions, that they were particularly anxious to convince us of the fact that they were real beings and not illusions or hallucinations."

There Is No "Genetic Architecture of the Human Face"

What I call the Great DNA Myth is a false teaching that continues to be spread by innumerable parties in the world of biology, even though there are very many other authorities in that same world who are telling us the teaching is false.  The Great DNA Myth is the myth that inside DNA is some blueprint or recipe that specifies how to make a human body.  

There are various ways in which this false idea is stated, all equally false:

• Someone may describe DNA or the genome as a blueprint for an organism.
• Someone may describe DNA or the genome as a recipe for making an organism.
• Someone may describe DNA or the genome as a program for building an organism.
• Someone may claim that DNA or genomes specify the anatomy of an organism. 
• Someone may claim that genotypes (the DNA in organisms) specify phenotypes (the observable characteristics of an organism).
• Someone may claim that genotypes (the DNA in organisms) "map"  phenotypes (the observable characteristics of an organism) or "map to" phenotypes.
• Someone may claim that DNA contains "all the instructions needed to make an organism."
• Someone may claim that there is a "genetic architecture" for an organism's body or some fraction of that body. 
• Using a little equation, someone may claim that a "genotype plus the environment equals the phenotype," a formulation as false  as the preceding statements, since we know of nothing in the environment that would cause phenotypes to arise from genotypes that do not specify such phenotypes. 

Weaker formulations of this false idea include claims that DNA is "life's instruction book" or "the key to life" or "the book of life" or "the secret of life." While such rather vague assertions are not as explicitly false as the statements in the bullet list above, such formulations are equally misleading, as they insinuate the false claims in such a bullet list. 

There is no truth to the claim that DNA is a specification for anatomy.  DNA merely specifies low-level chemical information such as which sequences of amino acids make up polypeptide chains that are the starting points of protein molecules.  Many biology authorities (some of which I quote below) have confessed this reality that DNA does not specify anatomy. But the "useful stooge" that is the Great DNA Myth continues to be taught or suggested in the literature of biology by many other people.  So now we have a very strange situation that might be described like this: biology's left hand is writing one thing, and biology's right hand is writing the opposite.  

A recent scientific paper was another example of biology's left hand writing claims that biology's right hand is denouncing as false. The paper had the very misleading title "Insights into the Genetic Architecture of the Human Face." There is no such thing as a genetic architecture of the human face. Genes do not specify the human face or any part of the face or even the structure of any cell that is part of the face. 

The study  found no genes specifying any particular part of the human face.  The study merely found very weak statistical association between some genes and various aspects of the human face. The study claims to have found  "203 genomic regions associated with normal-range facial variation." 

How were such genes found? The technique used by the "Insights into the Genetic Architecture of the Human Face" study involved a  shady trick very much like the shady trick used by DeepMind's AlphaFold2 software in analyzing protein folding.  Trying to help explain how 3D protein shapes arise from mere one-dimensional sequences of amino acids, the AlphaFold2 software used the shady trick of scanning vast protein databases storing the amino acid sequences and 3D protein shapes of countless proteins, a database derived from studying very many different organisms. Why can we call this a shady trick? It's because inside a human body there is virtually none of the information in such databases. Humans do not have inside them some database of the 3D proteins shapes of a vast number of non-human organisms.  The AlphaFold2 software should have followed a rule of "use only information available inside a human being."  Instead it relied on a vast amount of biological information existing only outside of a human being. Since such a technique involves information not available in a human being, it should not be used by any software that claims to help explain how human genes can give rise to the 3D protein shapes found in humans. 

It's a very similar story with the "Insights into the Genetic Architecture of the Human Face" study. The study relied on databases containing scans of very many human faces, along with genomic data (DNA data) for the same individuals, and also data on their gender and ethnicity. It is easy to see how the type of complicated computer algorithms used by the study might have been able to come up with some weak correlations between facial structure and genetic structure. What is going behind the scenes in studies like this is probably something like this:

(1) The algorithms identify genetic variations (called SNP's) associated with a female gender or a male gender, and look for any weak correlation between such variations and facial variations (very easy, because male faces tend to differ from female faces).

(1) The algorithms identify genetic variations (called SNP's) associated with particular ethnic groups, and look for any weak correlations between such variations with facial variations. This is very easy, because certain ethnic groups tend to have certain facial characteristics. 

In the study there are a few lines suggesting a bit of ethnic filtering to limit the ethnic diversity of the people analyzed. We are told that "recruitment was limited to individuals aged 3 to 40 years old and of self-reported European ancestry." But such a technique would not have done much to limit the ethnic diversity of the data analyzed.  For example, a person with Asiatic facial features or African facial features may have a mother from one region of the globe and a father from another region of the globe. If such a person is asked to specify his region of ancestry, he may pick "European" although his facial features are more typical of people from some other region of the globe.  There's also plenty of ethnic diversity in Europe (for example, millions of people of Asian ancestry in the UK). People are not terribly careful in filling out medical questionaires (particularly those with very many questions); self-reporting is not a reliable way to exclude people; and we can imagine many people in Europe reporting themselves to be of "European ancestry" regardless of where their parents came from.  Although the paper gives hints here and there trying to suggest that it used a sample of limited ethnic diversity, based on its content we should assume it analyzed a data set that included a rather full range of human ethnic diversity.  

Having identified such genetic variations (called SNP's) very weakly associated with gender and ethnic differences, the study called them "genomic regions associated with normal-range facial variation," even though there was no reason for thinking that such genomic regions were anything like a specification of a human face.  A similar technique would be to have a computer analyze address data and building descriptions.  You might find that variations in zip code were weakly associated with variations in building structures. For example, a zip code from the East Side of Manhattan (such as 10028) would be  associated with high building heights, and a zip code from rural Montana would be associated with low building heights. But zip codes do absolutely nothing to specify how tall a building should be or what type of structure it has, and it would be a most ridiculous falsehood to speak of a "zip code architecture for apartment buildings."  Similarly, genes do nothing to specify the structure of any visible part of a human face, so it is very misleading to be speaking of a "genetic architecture of the human face." It is a huge mistake to be confusing a mere association or correlation with a specification or an architecture, particularly when you merely have the type of extremely weak correlations reported by the study in question.  

The authors of the study have done nothing to support their use of the very erroneous phrase "genetic architecture of the human face."  We know why there can be no such thing as a genetic architecture of the human face, or any other piece of anatomy. Genes do not specify anatomy.  Genes do not specify body plans or the structure of skeletons, appendages or organs. Gene do not even specify the structure of cells. Genes merely specify low-level chemical information such as the sequence of amino acids that make up a polypeptide chain that is the starting point of a protein molecule. Were we to examine the genes mentioned in the paper, and look at the protein molecules that correspond to such genes, we would find structures that look nothing at all like a human face, and look nothing like any visible part of a human face. 

Here are a few relevant quotes by authorities, which collectively deny any claim that there is any such thing as a "genetic architecture of the human face":

• 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."
• Biologist Rupert Sheldrake says this "DNA only codes for the materials from which the body is constructed: the enzymes, the structural proteins, and so forth," and "There is no evidence that it also codes for the plan, the form, the morphology of the body."
• Describing conclusions of biologist Brian Goodwin, the New York Times says, "While genes may help produce the proteins that make the skeleton or the glue, they do not determine the shape and form of an embryo or an organism." 
• Professor Massimo Pigliucci (mainstream author of numerous scientific papers on evolution) has stated  that "old-fashioned metaphors like genetic blueprint and genetic programme are not only woefully inadequate but positively misleading."
• Neuroscientist Romain Brette states, "The genome does not encode much except for amino acids."
• In a 2016 scientific paper, three scientists state the following: "It is now clear that the genome does not directly program the organism; the computer program metaphor has misled us...The genome does not function as a master plan or computer program for controlling the organism; the genome is the organism's servant, not its master.
• In the book Mind in Life by Evan Thompson (published by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press) we read the following on page 180: "The plain truth is that DNA is not a program for building organisms, as several authors have shown in detail (Keller 2000, Lewontin 1993, Moss 2003)."
• Developmental biologist C/H. Waddington stated, "The DNA is not a program or sequentially accessed control over the behavior of the cell."
•  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...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 statement also made by biochemistry professor Keith Fox.
• "The genome is not a blueprint," says Kevin Mitchell, a geneticist and neuroscientist at Trinity College Dublin, noting "it doesn't encode some specific outcome."
• "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, who 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," and after referring to a "deep puzzle" of how biological forms arise, he gives this example: "Scientists really don’t know what determines the intricate shape and structure of the flatworm’s head."
• Ian Stevenson M.D. stated "Genes alone - which provide instructions for the production of amino acids and proteins -- cannot explain how the proteins produced by their instructions come to have the shape they develop and, ultimately, determine the form of the organisms where they are," and noted that "biologists who have drawn attention to this important gap in our knowledge of form have not been a grouping of mediocrities (Denton, 1986; Goldschmidt, 1952; B. C. Goodwin, 1985, 1988, 1989, 1994; Gottlieb, 1992; Grasse, 1973; E. S. Russell...Sheldrake, 1981; Tauber and Sarkar, 1992; Thompson, 1917/1942)."
• Biologist B.C. Goodwin stated this in 1989: "Since genes make molecules, genetics...does not tell us how the molecules are organized into the dynamic, organized process that is the living organism."
• An article in the journal Nature states this: "The manner in which bodies and tissues take form remains 'one of the most important, and still poorly understood, questions of our time', says developmental biologist Amy Shyer, who studies morphogenesis at the Rockefeller University in New York City."
• Timothy Saunders, a developmental biologist at the National University of Singapore. says, "Fundamentally, we have a poor understanding of how any internal organ forms.”
• On the web site of the well-known biologist Denis Noble, we read that "the whole idea that genes contain the recipe or the program of life is absurd, according to Noble," and that we should understand DNA "not so much as a recipe or a program, but rather as a database that is used by the tissues and organs in order to make the proteins which they need."
• A paper by Stuart A. Newman (a professor of cell biology and anatomy) discussing at length the work of scientists trying to evoke "self-organization" as an explanation for morphogenesis states that "public lectures by principals of the field contain confidently asserted, but similarly oversimplified or misleading treatments," and says that "these analogies...give the false impression that there has been more progress in understanding embryonic development than there truly has been." Referring to scientists moving from one bunk explanation of morphogenesis to another bunk explanation, the paper concludes by stating, "It would be unfortunate if we find ourselves having emerged from a period of misconceived genetic program metaphors only to land in a brave new world captivated by equally misguided ones about self-organization."
• Referring to claims there is a program for building organisms in DNA, biochemist F. M. Harold stated "reflection on the findings with morphologically aberrant mutants suggests that the metaphor of a genetic program is misleading." Referring to  self-organization (a vague phrase sometimes used to try to explain morphogenesis), he says, "self-organization remains nearly as mysterious as it was a century ago, a subject in search of a paradigm." 
• Writing in the leading journal Cell, biologists  Marc Kirschner, John Gerhart and Tim Mitchison stated, "The genotype, however deeply we analyze it, cannot be predictive of the actual phenotype, but can only provide knowledge of the universe of possible phenotypes." That's equivalent to saying that DNA does not specify visible biological structures, but merely limits what structures an organism can have (just as a building parts list merely limits what structures can be made from the set of parts). 
• A paper co-authored by a chemistry professor (Jesper Hoffmeyer) tells us this: "Ontogenetic 'information,' whether about the strucure of the organism or about its behavior, does not exist as such in the genes or in the environment, but is constructed in a given developmental context, as critically emphasized, for example, by Lewotin (1982) and Oyama (1985)."
• 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."
• At the Biology Stack Exchange expert answers site, someone posted a question asking which parts of a genome specify how to make a cell (he wanted to write a program that would sketch out a cell based on DNA inputs).  An unidentified expert stated that it is "not correct" that DNA is a blueprint that describes an organism, and that "DNA is not a blueprint because DNA does not have instructions for how to build a cell." No one contradicted this person's claim, even though the site allows any of its experts to reply. 
• "DNA is not a blueprint for an organism," states Templeton Prize-winning physicist and astrobiologist P. C. W. Davies.
• Two scientists said this: "We see no valid use for definitions of the genotype and phenotype in terms of blueprints, programs, or sets of instructions, and their realizations or manifestation....The program/manifestation metaphor is factually misleading, because it suggests that the genotype uniquely determines an organism’s phenotype. However, as is well known, all it does is specify an organism’s norm of reaction to environmental conditions (Rieger et al., 1991,Lewontin, 1992)."
• A 2022 paper in the journal Science (one authored by more than ten scientists) says this: "Although the genome is often called the blueprint of an organism, it is perhaps more accurate to describe it as a parts list composed of the various genes that may or may not be used in the different cell types of a multicellular organism....The genome in and of itself does not provide an understanding of the molecular complexity of the various cell types of that organism."
• A Duke University biologist and a Cornell University biologist have confessed this: " No information about the overall architecture of these body parts is present in the cells and tissues of the parts themselves, or in each organism’s genes."  

This is the right hand of biology, telling us loud and clear that genes do not specify human anatomy. But the left hand of biology keeps misleading us, by continuing to repeat or suggest the untrue claim that genes specify how to make a human body. 

Let us imagine a small child trying to explain how astronauts got to the moon. He might tell us some silly story like this:

"I heard guys walked on the moon. I know how they must have done it. They must have got a real big balloon, kind of like the ones at birthday parties, but much bigger. Then they must have rode the balloon all the way to the moon."

Helium balloons rise up into the air because helium is lighter than the air, but a helium balloon would be of no value in crossing the airless space between Earth and the moon.  And no one ever tried to ride a balloon to the moon. So the story told by the child would be both false and childish.  Similarly, the story told by many a biologist (that the incredibly organized arrangements of matter in organisms arise from blueprints in DNA) is a story that is both false and very childish. The story is false because there is no blueprint of human anatomy in genes or DNA. The story is very childish because blueprints don't build things. Things can only get built from blueprints when there are intelligent agents such as construction workers who read the blueprints, understand the blueprints, and use the blueprints to construct complex things. Not only is there nothing in the human body like an anatomy blueprint, there is also nothing below the neck that could act as a blueprint reader and "make what the blueprint specifies" if a blueprint for human anatomy happened to exist inside DNA. 

A respectable way to do a study such as the "Insights into the Genetic Architecture of the Human Face" would be:

(1) Before doing any work, publish a very exact research plan discussing precisely how data would be gathered and analyzed, and then follow such a plan to the letter.

(2) Create a strict blinding protocol to be followed to reduce the chance of experimental bias.

But the study mentions no blinding protocol, and makes no mention of any pre-registration of a research plan. Instead the paper rather suggests  the authors were improvising as they went along in order to get the desired result, playing around with various exotic statistical contortions until they got the desired result, and slicing and dicing the data until it produced the desired result. For example, we read the following (I have put some words in boldface):

"First, for each segment, we separated the 203 variants into three groups and ran three SEM models on each of these groups, plus all covariates. If any of the three subset SEMs did not converge, we then re-grouped the SNPs into four or more groupings and re-ran the subset SEM models on these groupings. This process was repeated until all subset SEMs converged and we had parameter estimates for all 203 SNPs. Next, for each segment, SNPs with p-values lower than 0.2 in the initial subset SEMs were collected and a unified SEM model for each segment was created and subsequently refined. If the unified SEM model did not converge, then this segment was discarded and no further analysis was performed. If all of the SNPs included in the unified model had p-values lower than 0.2, a cutoff selected to maintain model stability, no further changes were made, and we reported the model fit indices and parameter estimates. For segments where the unified SEM model produced SNP p-values greater than 0.2, the SNPs included in the SEM model were pruned by selecting SNPs with p < 0.05 and the model was re-run with this reduced set of SNPs. This process was repeated until all SNPs had p-values lower than 0.2. In the case of segments 7, 16, and 25, this iterative pruning process led to a rapidly declining model, so we elevated the SNP pruning p-value from 0.05 to 0.1 to account for instability in these models....In general, the number of model parameters generated by the final refined SEM model for each segment ranged between 92 and 217, depending on the number of shape PCs and SNPs included in each model. As 8,246 participants were used, this led to a range of 38-90 participants per parameter, which is well above recommendations. Additional statistical power was lent to our models by having a large number of samples and input variables per latent factor. Of the 63 segments, the SEM models for 13 segments were discarded because they did not converge on a solution, which normally occurs when variants are non-informative for that particular segment or the variance of the segment is low. For each of the 50 SEM models where the refinement process was successful, we evaluated the fit of each model by instituting cutoffs on the following indices: Chi-square (p-value < 0.05), comparative fit index (CFI > 0.90), root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA < 0.08), and standardized root mean square residual (SRMR < 0.08), which generally indicate the strength of how well the SEM models the data."

As the old saying goes, "Torture the data sufficiently, and it will confess to anything."

Occasional very weak statistical associations can always be found between totally unrelated things, by a person willing to look in enough places, and willing to engage in vigorous statistical manipulations until he finds what he is looking for. A sufficiently energetic and motivated analyst could probably analyze the genome of the sunflower plant (which is actually larger than the human genome), and find a few hundred genes that had a weak statistical association between features of the human face.  Given two sets of unrelated data, and a willingness to play around with statistical tricks until you find a few weak correlations you are hoping to find, analysts can always find some weak correlations here and there between totally unrelated data sets, simply because of a few random mathematical coincidences found when comparing two large unrelated data sets. 

The authors of the "Insights into the Genetic Architecture of the Human Face" claim to have found some very weak correlations between 1% of the human genome and some facial database.  Using the same "pull out all the stops"  and "keep trying until something coughs up" statistical techniques, you could find weak correlations between 1% of the daily numbers in things like this:

• 1960's price movements of Brazilian soybeans and 1990's yields of New England cod fishermen;
• 1960's stock price movements of European electronics manufacturers and 1990's rainfall fluctuations in Africa;
• 1950's American high school students grades and 1990's European soccer scores.

Postscript: The term "body plan" is a profoundly misleading term that biologists love to use, a term that opens the door to deceptions about DNA. In biology literature the term "body plan" has a very limited meaning, something vastly different from a complete plan for constructing an organism. According to a scientific paper "a body plan is a suite of characters shared by a group of phylogenetically related animals at some point during their development." The wikipedia.org article on "body plan" tells us this: "A body plan, Bauplan (German plural Baupläne), or ground plan is a set of morphological features common to many members of a phylum of animals." 

According to this definition, all chordates (including men, bears, dogs and fish) have the same body plan. So when biologists talk about "the human body plan" they

are merely referring to the common characteristics of all chordates, including men, bears, dogs and fish:  basically just the existence of a backbone and bilateral symmetry (having the same things on both sides of the body).  They are not referring to the structure of the 200 types of cells in the human body, or the structure of internal organs, and are not referring to the dynamic intricacies of human physiology. But anyone hearing the term "body plan" will think the term referred to a complete specification of a human body.  So, most misleadingly, biologists may say that this or that "determines the body plan," when all they mean is the beginning of a bilateral organism with a backbone, something a thousand times simpler than the final product of the internally dynamic and enormously organized human body.  This is as misleading as someone saying that he has built a starship, when he has merely built a boat in the shape of a star. 

Be In No Hurry to Trust Financially Motivated Theorists

When you read my writings on this blog or my two other blogs (here and here), you are always reading material untainted by financial motivations.  Since I started blogging quite a few years ago, I have never made any net earnings from my literary or photographic activities.  During that time I made a very small number of dollars from books I have for sale on www.amazon.com, but such paltry income has come nowhere close to matching the expenses I pay to cover my photography blog.  That blog has required thousands of dollars of expenses, because I make heavy daily use of expensive Sony cameras that work very well but tend to stop working about every six months or so.  The only books of mine now listed on my home page www.markmahin.com are books you can read online for free, because I have uploaded them to www.archive.org.  Content of all of my blogs can be republished without paying me anything, as all of my blogs are under a Creative Commons license described on the home page of each blog. I do not have any ads on any of my sites, and have never received a penny from anyone paying to support such sites. 

But when we read in books statements by theorists, we often are reading statements tainted by financial motivations.  A theorist writing a book may often be thinking: "How can I write this in a way that will sell well?" When he writes his paragraphs and selects his book title, he may be asking himself, "How can I do this in a way that will get me lots of money?"

Scientific activity is often described by scientists as a kind of unsullied and pristine Quest for Truth carried out by impartial judges of reality. But scientific activity is often largely something much less pure and grand, such as:

• A Quest for Paper Counts and Citation Counts: Scientists strive to get a high number of papers published, and a high number of citations for papers they write. Such citation counts are used as a performance metric. So a scientist may give a paper some title that is not justified by what is in the paper, hoping that this may result in a higher citation count for the paper.
• A Quest for Grant Money. Unless he has grant money, a scientist may have no funds to fund experimental activities. So a scientist may start claiming it is really important to do some type of experiment, to get the funds to keep him busy, perhaps even if such experiments aren't proving fruitful.  
• A Quest for Tenure. A scientist may be eager to line up the lifetime job of being a tenured professor. He may say and do things largely because he thinks such speech and behavior will advance this goal.
• A Quest for Consulting Fees or Speaking Fees.  Many a scientist makes money on the side by getting consulting fees from private corporations, or by getting speaking fees for speechs often held in corporate settings.  A scientist may say whatever will tend to maximize such fees.  For example, a neuroscientist may package some dubious claims into a  "How to Maximize the Brain Performance of Your Staff" presentation that can be delivered in exclusive talks commanding a high speaking fee. 
• A Quest for Corporate or Millionaire Funds.  Corporations and millionaires have "deep pockets" filled with tons of money, and they are not shy about throwing money towards scientists, particularly those willing to write something that favors the bottom line or private passions of the corporations or millionaires (who may sometimes be billionaires). Often such funds flow indirectly, with a scientist getting money for writing or speaking through some media source or commission or committee or council that is largely funded by corporate or millionaire donations. 
• A Quest for Book Contracts.  If a scientist has some provocative and interesting theory, he may be able to parlay such speculation into a lucrative book contract received from a major publisher. 

We should always be wary of a theorist who is presenting a theory mainly through a book for sale. When a scientist does such a thing, he is no longer acting like an impartial judge of truth. He is in a situation where he has a strong financial motive to speak in an overconfident manner, and "pull out all the stops" to sell some particular theory, for the sake of making more money from the sales of his book. "This is just how it is" books sell better than "maybe it's kind of like this" books and "we don't really understand such things" books.  And so we have theorists who write science-related books with overconfident know-it-all titles such as "Who We Are and How We Got Here," titles which make the authors sound like they understand deep mysteries that are far, far beyond the understanding of any human.  

Below are some examples of theorists who had strong financial motivations to make overconfident presentations of dubious theories:

• Erich von Daniken:  Starting with his book "Chariots of the Gods?"  von Daniken's "ancient astronauts" theory has been a financial windfall for von Daniken. He has made a ton of money from a series of books, and the ancient astronauts theory has become a kind of cottage industry, morphing into the long-running TV series Ancient Aliens.  On that show we can sometimes hear von Daniken using some dubious reasoning, such as speaking as if something written in the ancient theological Book of Enoch should be taken as a serious record of what happened ages ago. 
• Charles Darwin.  Darwin is often mistaken as some impartial judge of truth, but he was not.  Darwin presented his theories in commercial books for sale, and made a lot of money from the royalties he received from such books.  
• Richard Dawkins. As some of his books have ridiculously impartial titles targeted to appeal to atheists, no one should mistake this author as being anything like an impartial judge of truth. Dawkins books give us an example of the lucrative publishing practice of niche-marketing.  
• Stephen Hawking. The late Stephen Hawking's books were a gigantic money machine, but their content was often groundless speculation sold as science. In one book he pitched the very dubious speculative contraption that is M-theory as if it were some great breakthrough. Mathematics authority Peter Woit says this about the many books that came out under Hawking's name after A Brief History of Time:  "The problem is that, on the whole, they’re not any good, and they’re not written by Hawking." He suggests there was quite a bit of ghost-writing going on behind his books. 
• Carl Sagan. Between 1960 and 1995 the late astronomer Sagan made a bundle on books selling a quirky creed including ideas such as the claim that our galaxy has a million or more  species of intelligent beings, none of whom look like humans, and none of which has recently visited Earth.  A fact check on his claims turns up quite a few cases of unwarranted and inaccurate statements, and radio searches for extraterrestrials have come up empty (contrary to Sagan's frequent insinuations they would soon provide a great bonanza for mankind).  Oddly, Sagan repeatedly blasted fellow author von Daniken for his claims about ancient astronauts, even though Sagan had presented a very similar theory in writing before von Daniken. 
• Steven Pinker. Psychologist Pinker writes books often peddling very dubious theories, and his 2018 book had some large  errors of fact and logic;  but he tries to load his book titles with various high-sounding terms such as "enlightenment," "reason," "rationality," "progress," and "science." One of his book titles makes the strange claim that rationality "seems scarce," which is an example of the kind of arrogant snob-speak in which  swollen heads of the ivory towers haughtily insinuate that the majority  of humans are irrational (contrary to the observational fact that the vast majority of human behavior is rational). 
• Brian Greene. Inexplicably, PBS funds were used for a 3-part NOVA TV presentation of Greene's book The Elegant Universe devoted to selling the purely speculative "white elephant"  that is string theory, what seems like a modern type of gobbledygook infested by buckets of guesswork jargon.  
• Michio Kaku: You may read here about some of the overconfident statements of string theory physicist Kaku, which include a silly recent boast about "an equation that's maybe 1 inch long" that "explains the entire universe." 

The latest example of a scientist vigorously  hawking a dubious theory for profit is Avi Loeb, a Harvard professor who has a recent book claiming that some barely visible blip distantly seen in telescopes is an extraterrestrial spaceship. Does Loeb really believe this theory? It's hard to tell, because he's making lots of money from his book selling the theory, and has every financial motivation to sound like he's convinced of the truth of his theory. 

Rather hilariously, Loeb has recently seemed to insinuate he is like some kind of Galileo persecuted by an intolerant scientific tribal orthodoxy. He has written an article in Scientific American entitled "When Scientific Orthodoxy Resembles Religious Dogma," which features a painting of the trial of Galileo, along with complaints that fellow scientists haven't shown enough love for Loeb's new book.  There are indeed intolerant tribal orthodoxies in science that cling to ideas that are like religious dogma.  But Loeb has not really suffered from any heresy-shaming.  There was no intolerant orthodoxy claiming that spaceships cannot come into the solar system.  The idea of a spaceship coming into the solar system does not clash with the two main scientist orthodoxies resembling religious dogmas (the claim that Darwin explained the origin of species, and the claim that human mental phenomena all comes from brains).  The scientists dismissing Loeb's claim were mainly those who would have loved for it to be true. Loeb's claims have been dismissed because he never presented any very convincing evidence for them. 

As a Harvard professor, Loeb is very much a privileged member of an exclusive clique, enjoying very rare advantages such as book deals involving large publicity budgets and  the ability to get your very personal "not-enough book fame" gripes published in largely read web sites such as Scientific American. His latest Sci-Am article is kind of like a member of a country club whining because he only got an exclusive parking space in the "Members Only" parking lot, but didn't get the best parking spot.  

Because a writer motivated to sell more books may overstate his case and cherry-pick facts to support his thesis (ignoring or not fairly treating realities conflicting with his theories), financial motivations are a source of bias in scientific literature.  Scientists have some techniques for reducing bias in their literary outputs. One of the main such techniques is to rigorously follow a blinding protocol in both the collection and analysis of data (so that a scientist getting data on a subject or analyzing data on the subject does not know whether the subject is or is not in a control group without some particular characteristic being investigated).  

But it is a gigantic scandal of modern experimental biology that effective blinding protocols are infrequently used in experiments.  A scientific paper states, "Using text mining and a literature review, we find evidence that blind protocols are uncommon in the life sciences and that nonblind studies tend to report higher effect sizes and more significant p-values."  The paper states, "For example, across 960 empirical studies in five animal behavior journals, 6.3% of the sampled studies were conducted blind." One of the techniques I use to quality-check experimental neuroscience studies is to do a simple text search for the word "blind" in the full text of the paper,  and I usually find a paper failed to use such a word, indicating no effort was made at following a blinding protocol.  We would be outraged by similar professional incompetence in other fields, and would be angry if we found that only 6% of doctors put on gloves before surgery  (thankfully doctors don't act so carelessly). 

One of the reasons experimental biologists so infrequently use blinding protocols is that when they are used an experimenter will be more likely to find a null result, making the experiment less likely to get published (journals favor positive results over null results). Following proper experimental techniques loses out for the sake of the Quest for Paper Counts and Citation Counts.

Funny thing about that Quest for Paper Counts and Citation Counts: it's leading to a plethora of junk science and a mountain of baloney misstatements about science research, a situation in which a paper is many times more likely to be cited if the study could not be replicated. We read in a recent news story that a study will be 153 times more likely to be cited if the research could not be replicated. 

Postscript: You've got to hand it to Avi Loeb: the guy knows how to generate publicity (although sometimes in a "jump the shark" kind of way).  His latest Scientific American post is urging that we need to establish a treaty with alleged extraterrestrial neighbors so that they don't destroy us in some "domain wall" way that no one has ever imagined before.  It's kind of like urging an international treaty to prohibit radioactive vampire zombies. 

The Best Basis for Believing in an Afterlife Is Something Other Than Paranormal Phenomena

When people are asked to explain why they believe in a life after death, many people cite something taught or promised thousands of years ago. But many other people prefer to seek a more modern basis for believing in life after death.

One very substantial modern basis for suspecting life after death is the fact that we live in an astonishingly fine-tuned universe filled with innumerable great wonders of biological organization that scientists have not been able to credibly explain.  The fundamental constants of the universe are astonishingly fine-tuned. For example, each proton has a mass 1836 times greater than each electron, but each proton has a charge that is the very precise opposite of the charge of each electron. If this very exact match of the absolute value of the proton charge and the electron charge did not exist, then imbalances of electromagnetism (a force more than a trillion trillion trillion times stronger than gravitation) would prevent planets and suns from holding together by gravity.  There are many similar cases of fine-tuning in the universe's physics that are necessary for our existence.  Within our universe are innumerable wonders of biological organization resembling products of design.  Materialist attempts to explain away such cases of biological and cosmic fine-tuning as accidents do not hold up well to scrutiny, for reasons often explained on this blog.  In short, nature gives us some extremely strong reasons for suspecting there exists some purposeful guiding intelligence helping to achieve the mechanistically inexplicable results of biology.  Such reasons do not directly support the idea of life after death, but they do tend to lead to a worldview in which the idea of life after death seems credible, by suggesting the existence of some enormously powerful transcendent agency powerful enough to be able to cause life after death.  

There is another modern basis for believing in life after death: the existence of paranormal phenomena suggesting that humans survive death.  There is nothing wrong in appealing to such evidence. Indeed, a wide variety of paranormal phenomena argue very strongly for the persistence of a human soul after death. Let's look at some of these phenomena, starting with those that only indirectly support the idea of life after death, and moving on to phenomena that more directly support such an idea. 

There is massive evidence for extrasensory perception (ESP), both in the form of observational case histories and experimental evidence gathered under controlled scientific conditions.  When materialists claim there is no evidence for ESP, they are either reflecting their failure to research the topic with adequate diligence, or simply speaking dishonestly. In the literature of psychic phenomena, you can read about very many dramatic first-hand reports in which reliable witnesses described accurately out-of-sight things, using clairvoyance that is a form of extrasensory perception.  Many examples can be found in the posts here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.  There is also an abundance of experimental evidence for ESP, which has been gathered for more than 130 years. You can read about such evidence here, here, here, here, here and here.  

Such evidence for ESP is not direct evidence for life after death. But we may reasonably consider evidence for ESP as being evidence indirectly supporting the existence of life after death.  There is no neural way to explain the phenomenon of telepathy or ESP.  Any evidence for ESP is evidence that the human mind is some reality beyond a physical explanation.  If the human mind cannot be explained purely as being the result of material explanations such as neural activity, then we have a strong reason to suspect that a human mind persists after the death and decay of a physical body.  Similarly, if the plumbing in my house is not caused by electricity, then I should reasonably expect that after a local electrical power failure, I will still be able to take a bath. 

Stronger evidence for life after death comes in the form of death-bed visions. In such visions a dying person will typically see an apparition of one of his deceased relatives. In the posts here and here you can read about some of the earliest accounts of such deathbed visions.  Researching the topic of deathbed visions, Karlis Osis and Erlendur Haraldsson conducted research surveys of hospital workers. In a July 1977 paper published in Volume 71, Number 3 of the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, they reported 178 cases of dying people who reported seeing an apparition of a dead person (Table 1). The number was much higher than the 68 who reported an apparition of a living person. We read the following on a page of the Psi Encyclopedia:

"In 2017, Una MacConville carried out a study with Irish health care professionals. The carers reported that 45% of their patients spoke of visions of deceased relatives, often joyful experiences that bring a sense of peace and comfort."

A skeptic might try to explain such sightings as hallucinations of the very ill, although such an explanation cannot explain why twice as many such sightings are of deceased people rather than living people.  We would expect hallucinations to have random content (very often being of objects, animals, living humans and earthly places), and not so often of deceased people. 

Apparition sightings are extremely common in human history. There are two types of apparition sightings that are particularly powerful as evidence for life after death:

(1) The first type is cases in which a normal person in good health sees an apparition of someone he did not know was dead, only to soon learn that the corresponding person did die on the same day (and often about the same hour) as the apparition was seen. I have collected 200+ cases of such apparitions, which you can read in the posts here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here. Collectively such cases provide evidence for life after death,  first because we would not expect so many such healthy normal people to be having such hallucinations, and second because it is all too improbable that very many hallucinations of a person would coincidentally occur at about the same time as a death of that person unknown to the person reporting an apparition. 

(2) The second type is cases in which multiple witnesses report seeing the same apparition, the apparition of a human who died.  You can read about very many such cases in the posts here, here, here, here, here, here and here.  Collectively such cases provide evidence for life after death,  because we would expect such cases to virtually never appear under the hypothesis that apparitions are mere hallucinations. Two people having the exact same hallucination at the same time or place is as improbable as two people in the same house having the exact same dream on the same night. 

Then there are cases in which living persons seem to know information that should have been unknown to them, but which was known to a dead person. I can think of three varieties of such cases:

(1) Cases in which some person claimed to be a reincarnation of some person who died before the first person was born, usually not very long before. Dr. Ian Stevenson was a University of Virginia professor and MD who was once the head of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia. He spent decades gathering evidence for reincarnation, and published a 2268-page two-volume work Reincarnation and Biology, providing a huge amount of evidence. The book can be read online here. Stevenson's main technique was to investigate reports of children who claimed to have memories of past lives. He produced countless cases in which the details of the claims of the past life were verified, and also very many cases of people having unexplained birthmarks corresponding to the death wounds of the person they claimed to have been in a previous life. 

(2) Cases in which mediums (often speaking in a trance) provided information about deceased people, information that should have been unknown to them.  The careers of Leonora Piper and Gladys Osborne Leonard provide many dramatic and compelling examples, some of which are discussed here. On pages 245-248 of the book Contact with the Other World by James H. Hyslop we have an example of such evidence, one of innumerable such cases in the literature involving mediums. Purporting to be getting communication from a deceased  Dr. Hodgson, a medium named Miss Gaul stated that Hodgson had said William James looked cute wearing pink pajamas.  Hyslop wrote about this statement to William James, who stated he was wearing pink pajamas at the time, a fact Miss Gaul could not have known. Later after William James died, another medium (a boy) claiming to be speaking a message from William James, stated, "I want you to give Hyslop two pairs of pink pajamas and a black necktie for Christmas," while Hyslop was not present. Hyslop had worn a black necktie that belonged to William James, but the medium boy could not have known about this or about the pink pajamas. Hyslop says, "I had kept the incidents absolutely to myself." 

(3) Rare cases in which a first person claimed to be possessed by the spirit of a second person known to be dead, a person who died during the lifetime of the first person.  The post here discusses two well-documented cases of this type. In both of these cases the first person seemed to know many things that should have been known only to the second person. 

Dreams provide some modest evidence in support of life after death. Besides many cases in which dreams seemed to foretell someone's death (as if such an approaching death was known by some spiritual reality causing the dream),  discussed here and here and here, there is the fact that dreams hinting at life after death can occur to some people vastly more often than we would expect by chance. 

There are very many well-authenticated cases of dramatic physical  paranormal effects produced in seances or produced in the presence of mediums, cases in which some phenomenon such as levitation occurred. The posts here, here and here discuss some examples. There is very dramatic and extremely abundant photographic evidence of massively repetitive and inexplicable orb patterns that seem to be manifestations of some unfathomable spiritual reality. Such evidence can be examined here, here and here. Such cases may not directly support the idea of life after death, but they tend to make such an idea seem more credible, in that they suggest some invisible spiritual power far beyond the explanation of current science. 

The best type of modern evidence for life after death is near-death experiences. Ever since Raymond Moody's best-selling 1975 book Life after Life, the common characteristics of a near-death experience have been well-known. A particular near-death experience may have between  one or more of these characteristics. The characteristics include:

• a sensation of floating out of the body, which may include seeming to view the body from above;
• feelings of peace, joy or tranquility;
• a life-review in which previous life events are reviewed or relived in some sped-up manner;
• a passage through a tunnel;
• coming to some border or boundary that seems to be some "point of no return" between life and death;
• an encounter with a very bright light or a “being of light” or a light that is somehow sensed to be numinous or a source of thought or feeling;
• an experience of seeing some heavenly or supernatural realm;
• an experience of seeming to see one or more deceased relatives;
• an experience of being told that you must “go back” and continue to live your regular life;
• an experience of having heightened consciousness, mentality or perception.

There are two reasons for thinking that accounts of such experiences are not simply some modern myth spread by authors. One reason is that we can find accounts of such experiences much earlier than 1975.  You can read about two 19th century near-death experiences here, and you can read about four 19th century near-death experiences here.  You can read an early 20th century near-death experience here.  The discussion of evidence for out-of-body experiences here includes many reports of aspects of near-death experiences that were reported before Moody's 1975 book. 

A second reason is that such near-death experiences seem to occur to significant fractions of the population. A recent study using so-called crowdsourcing found that 10% of the subjects reported a “full-blown” or “classic” near-death experience, and some 28% reported some type of near-death experience.

There are four reasons why it is not credible to maintain such experiences are hallucinations. The first is that such near-death experiences typically occur suddenly to people with no history of hallucination. The second is that there is too much similarity in the accounts. Were such experiences hallucinations they would have the almost infinite variety of dreams, but instead near-death experiences tend to follow particular patterns, having some of the characteristics listed above.  The third reason is that near-death experiences often occur to people having a cardiac arrest, during which their heart has stopped, and brain activity has stopped. Since brain activity very quickly stops when the heart has stopped,  hallucinations should be impossible during cardiac arrest. The fourth reason is that during near-death experiences people often report details of medical efforts to revive them, details that they should have been unable to know about while unconscious. You can read some dramatic examples here. 

Altogether these many examples of paranormal phenomena provide a very substantial basis for believing in life after death. But are paranormal phenomena the best basis for believing in an afterlife? No, I think they are not.  I think the best basis for believing in an afterlife is the existence of normal, everyday human mental phenomena that cannot be credibly explained by anything we know about the brain. 

Below are some basic facts about human mental activity, facts that we take for granted but cannot actually explain by reference to any credible theory about the brain:

(1) Humans are capable of instantly forming permanent memories.
(2) Humans are capable of remembering very clearly things that happened to them more than 50 years ago.
(3) Upon hearing a name or seeing a picture, humans can instantly recall a great deal of information learned about a person, place or thing many years ago. 
(4) Humans can remember with 100% accuracy very large bodies of memorized information, as we see occurring when an actor flawlessly recites all of the lines of the very long role of Hamlet, or when a Wagnerian tenor flawlessly recites all of the lines and notes of the very long roles of Tristan, Siegfried or Hans Sachs, or when a Muslim accurately recites every verse in his holy book of 6000+ verses (as some can do). 
(5) Humans can understand a host of very subtle concepts and topics. 
(6) Some humans can do accurate mathematical calculations at blazing speeds. 
(7) Humans are capable of great creativity, and can quickly come up with novel ideas. 

We have been told for many years that all such phenomena can be explained as activity of the brain. Such claims are not correct. We have no understanding of how a brain can do any of the things listed above. We have no understanding of how a brain could produce consciousness. We have no understanding of how neurons could ever think or understand anything or ever come up with an idea.  There is no credible detailed theory of how a brain could do any of the main things it would have to do if it stored our memories, such as translating human experience and learned knowledge into neural states, storing memories for 50+ years, and instantly retrieving memories.  We know from our work with computers some of the things that systems have when they are devices for writing, instantly retrieving and permanently storing new information. The brain has no such things (as I discuss here, here and here). 

Claims that brains store memories and that brains produce things like thinking and ideas and imagination are not claims well-established by evidence, but are merely speech customs that spread around by a process of social contagion, like the once-dominant custom of men wearing ties and hats to work (a custom that office workers followed religiously during the 1950's).

When it comes to memory, the shortfalls of neuroscience are gigantic.  Neuroscientists have no credible explanation for how any conceptual or episodic memory could ever form in the brain.  The brain has no known mechanism for writing complex information.  For a brain to store a memory, it would have to somehow translate sensory experience or conceptual knowledge into neural states. No one has the slightest idea of how such a miracle of translation could occur.  If stored memory information existed in the brain, it would leave a very clear mark of itself, just like stored genetic information in DNA leaves a very clear mark that scientists were able to detect in the middle of the twentieth century.  No sign of any such stored memory information has been found in the brain of humans or any other species.  If such information existed, we would have found very clear signs of it about 70 years ago, around the time when DNA was discovered in cells. No such information has been found. 

Lacking any other credible possibilities, neuroscientists typically claim that memories are stored in the synapses of the brain. Such synapses bear not the slightest resemblance to some memory storage system.  Scientists have determined that the proteins that make up synapses have very short lifetimes, having an average lifetime of only a few weeks.  The longest amount of time that humans can remember things (60 years or more) is 1000 times longer than the average lifetime of the proteins in synapses. This means that the theory of synaptic memory storage cannot be correct.  Neuroscientists have ignored this difficulty.  They have also ignored the problem that humans can form permanent new memories instantly, but such a thing could never occur if memories were to be stored in a brain, which would require protein synthesis that would take at least minutes.  

Besides lacking any credible theory as to how human memories could be stored and persist for decades, neuroscientists lack any credible theory as to how a human could instantly retrieve a memory. Humans build computer systems capable of retrieving information very fast, and we know the kinds of things that enable instantaneous retrieval (things like coordinate systems, addressing systems, and indexes).  The human brain has no such things.  The human brain no more resembles a device for instantly retrieving learned information than does a sunflower plant. 

Since the brain lacks any known read mechanism for reading stored information, we have no understanding of how a brain could recall a memory at any speed, even a very slow speed. There also seems to be no way that a brain could retrieve information quickly enough to explain instant human recall, and accurately enough to explain memory retrieval that often occurs with 100% accuracy.  A variety of speed bumps and slowing factors in the brain (such as what are called synaptic delays and synaptic fatigue) should make brains too slow for instant recall.  A large amount of signal noise in the brain should make it impossible for humans to neurally recall large bodies of information with 100% accuracy, as occurs when someone playing Hamlet correctly recites all of his lines.  Inside the cortex of the brain, signals  travel from one neuron to another with a reliability of much less than 50%, as low as 10%.  The same slowing factors and noise factors in the brain should make it impossible for a human to do something such as accurately perform in his head with great speed a very complex math calculation, something that some people are capable of doing. 

All of these things very strongly indicate that the brain is not actually the storage place of human memories, and that brains are not the source of human intelligence and thinking. There is a way to test such an idea. If you remove half of a human brain, then according to the theory that memories are stored in brains and the theory that brains produce thinking, removing half a brain should cause a vast loss of memories, and a vast reduction in intellectual capabilities as measured by IQ tests.  Such a test has actually been done many times, usually on people suffering from daily brain seizures so bad that the only way to stop them was to remove half the brain, in an operation called a hemispherectomy operation. 

Data from many different hemispherectomy operations (discussed here) show that removing half of a brain does not cause any great loss of memories, and does not usually result in a substantial reduction of thinking ability as measured by IQ tests. Such operations tell us loud and clear: your memories are not stored in your brain, and your brain is not source of your intelligence. 

A similar test is gradually performed not by surgical operations, but by rare diseases such as hydrocephalus that destroy much more than half of a brain. The physician John Lorber studied much cases, and was surprised to find that in patients who had lost the great majority of their brains due to disease, more than half had intelligence above average. Many other such cases can be found in the medical literature. There was one boy who never spoke a word except "Mumma" until they took out half out of his brain to stop seizures; and after that he started speaking well.  A Frenchman who was employed as a civil servant was astonished to be told by doctors that he had almost no brain, because some disease had been gradually replacing his brain with fluid.  Like the hemispherectomy cases, such cases tell us very strongly that the brain is not the source of the human mind. Such results are ignored by neuroscientists, who have created a belief community organized around belief dogmas that all human mental activity can be explained by the brain. 

So the most impressive features of human mental activity cannot be explained by anything known to exist in the human body. Why is such a reality a more impressive basis for believing in life after death than cases of paranormal phenomena? It is because cases of paranormal phenomena strongly suggest that some people survive the death of the body.  But the failure of neuroscientists to credibly explain the main aspects of human mentality (and the facts of neuroscience indicating that the brain cannot possibly be the cause of the more impressive human mental phenomena) suggest that all people have minds and memory that cannot be explained by bodily activity.  If none of our minds can be explained by brain activity or any other bodily activity, then there is a strong reason to believe that every single one of us will continue to exist after the body perishes. Similarly, if the functions of no car can be explained by the activity of television networks, we have a strong reason for believing that every car will continue to function if the television networks all fail.  

A person believing in the myth of a human mind arising from a brain may believe in life after death as some kind of special miracle. A person correctly understanding that minds do not arise from brains (and that memories are not stored in brains) will tend to believe in life after death as a kind of natural continuation of a mind after the passing of some physical thing that the mind never depended upon, some physical thing that was never the source of such a mind. 

People sometimes refer to the "miracle of birth," but there is nothing very marvelous about the moment when a baby comes out of a mother's womb. The real physical miracle is the origination of a human body, its growth from a speck-sized egg.  There is nothing in that speck-sized egg that specifies how to make a full-sized human body. DNA does not specify anatomy, and does not even specify how to make any of the 200 types of cells in the human body.  The DNA in a fertilized ovum merely specifies low-level chemical information.  Our biologists do a terrible job of describing the mountainous levels of organization and fine-tuned complexity and dynamic goal-oriented behavior inside human bodies, and they fool us with tricks such as enormously misleading cell diagrams which make cells look 1000 times simpler and 1000 times less organized than they are.  Each cell has a level of organization and complexity comparable to that of a large factory, and each cell's dynamic activity is as impressive as the dynamic activity of a large active factory. Just as a human body is a marvel of supremely dynamic hierarchical organization that cannot at all be explained by DNA or anything in a tiny speck-sized ovum, the human mind is a spiritual wonder that is not at all explained by the brain.  

The uniting of your father's sperm and your mother's egg never resulted in something that explains the mountainous levels of hierarchical organization in your infant body. We know of nothing inside a female body that can explain the appearance of a full-sized baby from a speck-sized fertilized egg, and each time such a full-sized baby arises in a womb it is a wonder of origination as great as a new car slowly materializing inside another car, and emerging from it (or a wonder a million times greater, since each human body is a million times more organized and internally dynamic than a car).  The stratospheric levels of fine-tuned complexity and organization of your infant body arose from some unfathomable process a thousand miles over the heads of today's scientists.  Your mind arose from some other unfathomable spiritual process also a thousand miles over the heads of today's scientists.  Just as it makes no sense to worry about your adult body dying because your mother or father has died (neither being capable of explaining the origin of your body), it makes no sense to worry about your mind dying because your brain or body will die (neither being capable of explaining the origin of your mind or the persistence of your memories).