False Headlines in This Month's Astronomy News

Nowadays a large fraction of the neuroscience news and the psychology news and the natural history news is clickbait making untrue or unreliable claims. We may hear of basically worthless experimental studies suffering from one or more grave procedural defects such as insufficient sample sizes, a lack of a blinding protocol, unreliable subjective methods for judging fear in animals, dubious "slice and dice" statistical manipulations or a lack of a hypothesis to be tested before gathering data. Or we may hear of some natural history claim based on the skimpiest fossil fragments or dubious projections or doubtful assumptions derived after guesswork was done on fragmentary data about the genomes of extinct species.  But it is not merely neuroscience news and psychology news and natural history news that is infested with untrue headlines. Many of the headlines we read in the astronomy news are untrue.

Let us look at some examples, using only examples from this month (September 2021).  It will come as no suprise that the first example comes from the Daily Galaxy site at www.dailygalaxy.com, an "astronomy news" web site where there very often appears untrue  clickbait headlines.  In many cases the headlines simply fail to match what is stated in the story under the headlines. In many other cases, what is stated in the story is just plane wrong. 

A recent story on the site had this headline: "Fingerprints of the Big Bang: SphereX Mission Will Probe First Seconds of the Universe." But the NASA page describing the SphereX mission mentions nothing at all about it having anything to do with studying the Big Bang. The NASA page describes SphereX as a mission that will "collect data on more than 300 million galaxies along with more than 100 million stars in the Milky Way in order to explore the origins of the universe." The phrase "to explore the origins of the universe" is inappropriate and inaccurate here, and is not repeated later on the page, when we merely read "Astronomers will use the mission to gather data on more than 300 million galaxies, as well as more than 100 million stars in our own Milky Way," without using the phrase "to explore the origins of the universe." There is a type of telescopic mission that helps to shed light on the universe's very early years: one that studies what is called the cosmic background radiation.  The SphereX mission is not such a mission. 

There is actually a reason why it is physically impossible that anyone will ever build a telescope that probes the first seconds of the universe. The reason is that the first 300,000 years of the universe's is forever blocked from being observed.  Cosmologists say that during the first 300,000 years of the universe's history, before any atoms formed, the universe was so dense with matter and energy that any light from the first 300,000 years most have been hopelessly scattered, making observation of the first 300,000 years physically impossible.  Light from the first 300,000 years must have been scattered so bad it would be like passing light through a million prisms, or passing an email message through a million email message scramblers. 

So it will forever be impossible to invent a telescope that "probes the first seconds of the universe," just as it will forever be impossible to invent a telescope that even probes any of the first hundred thousand years of the universe.  You can't look back that far, because the density blocks all observations from the universe's first 100,000 years. 

Another Daily Galaxy article this month had this headline: "Mysteries of the Primordial Universe Before the Big Bang." Nothing whatsoever is known of any state of the universe before the Big Bang, which was, as far as we know, the absolute beginning of the universe. 

Then there is a recent Daily Galaxy story entitled "NASA's ENIGMA: 'We Have Found the Building Blocks of Life.' "  This headline is misleading, and it does not correspond to any discovery made by NASA of any building blocks of life.  The building blocks of macroscopic life are cells, and the building blocks of one-celled microscopic life are mainly functional proteins. Neither cells nor functional proteins have ever been observed in space except in spaceships of space stations built by humans.  The story does not even mention any discovery of the building blocks of the building blocks of life (amino acids).  

In the text of the story we read a statement that is half false and half true. After someone refers to proteins as "nanomachines," we read: "We are making huge strides in understanding the evolution of the smallest nano machines that enabled biological metabolism and designing their analogues in the laboratory." To the contrary, while scientists are making some progress in designing artificial proteins, scientists have never made any real progress in understanding the origin of the millions of different types of protein molecules in the animal and plant kingdoms.  The origin of each one of these types of protein molecules is something we would never expect to occur under Darwinian assumptions.  

Most types of protein molecules are arrangements of hundreds of amino acids in just the right way to achieve a functional end. We would no more expect any such protein molecule to arise accidentally than we would expect a functional paragraph of text to arise from some horde of typing monkeys.  You do not get around this difficulty by evoking "natural selection," for appealing to such a thing is like imagining some quality judge among the typing monkeys who will make copies whenever one of them produces a functional paragraph by random keystrokes. There will be no accidental functional paragraph with or without such a presence. In the scientific paper here, a Harvard scientist says, "A wide variety of protein structures exist in nature, however the evolutionary origins of this panoply of proteins remain unknown."

Then in early September there was a story on www.scitechdaily.com entitled "Astrophysicists Identify 'Significant Reservoirs' of Organic Molecules Necessary To Form the Basis of Life."  The story discussed University of Leeds observations of three chemicals (cyanoacetylene, acetonitrile, and cyclopropenylidene) that are neither the building blocks of life nor the building blocks of the building blocks of one-celled life. It is not at all true that these chemicals are "necessary to form the basis of life." I can find no mention of cyanoacetylene being present in any organism. Acetonitrile is a toxic substance.  A wikipedia.org article on cyclopropenylidene says, "On Earth, cyclopropenylidene is only seen in the laboratory due to its reactivity."

A person being interviewed by the story mentions some chemicals (amino acids and sugars) that are actually building blocks of the building blocks of microscopic life, but these chemicals were not detected when the reported observations were made (and are mentioned only once in the scientific paper, in an extraneous "name dropping" type of way not referring to an observation). A clumsy attempt is made to associate the observed biologically worthless chemicals with important unobserved molecules on kind of grounds like the grounds that the first could be rearranged into the second.  This is as lame as trying to suggest that the sentence "dsdgsaiu weasdg owqeweqow nsdosa ndgodenw qoenewqn qwent weqodr tnqwe oqowent weqt nqwe odsan odgagns" is kind of a useful instruction because the letters could be rearranged into a useful instruction.  

Another press report on this University of Leeds study uses the common shady reporting technique of the unattributed quote. The press report has the false news headline "Chances of alien life in our galaxy are ‘far more likely than first thought.’" But who is it said this? The story does not mention anyone saying such a thing, and we should suspect that no one actually said that.  The observations did nothing to show that life is more likely than we thought. The story makes the incorrect statement, "They found large reservoirs of precursor molecules which are 'stepping stones' to complex molecules needed for life, such as sugars, amino acids and ribonucleic acid." No, the three molecules observed are not "stepping stones" to sugars, amino acids or ribonucleic acids. You cannot make any of those things by tweaking cyanoacetylene, acetonitrile, or  cyclopropenylidene. 

The original press release by the University of Leeds began with this statement: "Analysis of unique fingerprints in light emitted from material surrounding young stars has revealed 'significant reservoirs' of large organic molecules necessary to form the basis of life, say researchers."  This single sentence contains three errors.  First, the molecules in question (cyanoacetylene, acetonitrile, and cyclopropenylidene) are not at all necessary for life, and  are neither building blocks of life nor any of the building blocks of the building blocks of one-celled life or multicellular life. Second, none of the three molecules is a large organic molecule. Large organic molecules contains scores or hundreds or thousands of atoms  (most protein molecules have thousands of atoms); but none of the three molecules in question (cyanoacetylene, acetonitrile, and cyclopropenylidene) has more than six atoms in it. The three molecules in question (cyanoacetylene, acetonitrile, and cyclopropenylidene) are correctly described as some of the smallest of all known organic molecules.  The error of calling such molecules "large organic molecules" occurs in the title of the scientific paper. Nowadays the titles of scientific papers often contain erroneous language. 

Third, nothing remotely like "reservoirs" were detected (the term referring to a lake-like supply). The observations of these organic molecules are observations of extremely tenuous amounts roughly 100 million trillion times less dense than the density of matter in a reservoir.   Table 3 of the relevant paper lists a total of roughly 10²¹ grams of the three chemicals occurring over a length of 50 astronomical units.  An astronomical unit is the distance between the earth and the sun. A cube with a size of 50 astronomical units contains 10⁴¹ cubic centimeters, to use a figure I get when doing a Google search for "50 astronomical units in cubic centimeters."  So the so-called "reservoirs" contain the three organic molecules in an amount of roughly .00000000000000000001 gram per cubic centimeter, which is a density about 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 times less than the density of matter in a reservoir of water. 

The densities of these molecules (cyanoacetylene, acetonitrile, and cyclopropenylidene) in space are clarified by Figure 1 of the paper here, where we get some figures on fractional abundances of various chemicals in the interstellar medium between stars. Using the figures in that table, and the commonly stated figure that molecular clouds have a density of about 300 molecules per cubic centimeter (300 million molecules per cubic meter), we can make the table below:

Molecule	Sym-bol	Relative abundance in molecular clouds	Absolute abundance in a molecular cloud with an average density of 300 million molecules per cubic meter
cyanoacetylene	HC3N	About 1 particle in 100 million	Roughly 3 molecules per cubic meter
acetonitrile	CH3CN	About 1 particle in a billion	Less than 1 molecule per cubic meter
cyclopropenylidene	C3H2	Negligible	Negligible

So the densities of these molecules in the so-called "reservoirs" is something like  100,000,000,000,000,000,000 times less dense than an actual reservoir  (which contains about 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 water molecules per cubic centimeter). Both the press release and the scientific paper  have misled us greatly by referring to "reservoirs" of such chemicals, a falsehood about as bad as calling a sneeze a "gigantic flash flood thunderstorm downpour." 

There has long been in use a term in astronomy to refer to extremely sparse scatterings of molecules in space: the term "cloud," as used in the phrase "molecular cloud." The term has always been objectionable, because such "molecular clouds" are vastly less dense than earthly clouds. According to the source here, molecular clouds in space have a density of about 2 x 10^-22 gram per cubic centimeter, which is roughly 10,000,000,000,000,000 times less dense than the density of earthly clouds (only about .000001 gram per cubic centimeter). Earthly clouds are very roughly about a million times less dense than liquid water.  When astronomers eager for publicity start using the term "reservoir" rather than "cloud" to refer to  molecular clouds, they are making it sound as if certain units of space are a million times more dense than earthly clouds, when such units of space are  roughly 10,000,000,000,000,000 times less dense than earthly clouds. Such language is something like a billionfold trillionfold deception, and is numerically far more outrageous than some pauper with a net worth of a few pennies insinuating he is one of the world's richest billionaires. 

 I have referred above to only stories from September 2021. Documenting all of the misleading news clickbait astronomy stories of the past five years would require a long volume. 

Let us compare the amount of clickbait and misleading news in two different areas: astronomy and high technology.  There is some clickbait and hype on sites such as www.wired.com devoted mainly to covering developments in high technology, but not that much. Why? Because the high-tech world has been very good over the years at providing a steady stream of impressive new devices and software. So you can have a very exciting site discussing developments in high technology, without having to do much hype and clickbait.  Nowadays there's always some exciting new app or phone model or gaming device or game that can be discussed.  Things have worked better than anyone dreamed back around 1990, when few dreamed that palm-sized devices would be far more powerful than any desktop computer then available. 

But in the astronomy world, we have a different situation.  Things haven't worked out as well as people hoped around 1960. It was hoped that Mars or Venus might be fairly habitable. That didn't work out. It was hoped that life would be found on Mars. That did not occur, according to most experts. It was greatly hoped that attempts to listen to radio signals from other civilizations living on other planets would be successful. This has not occurred, despite decades of efforts. So in some ways the situation in astronomy (not very much exciting happening since 1970) has been rather the opposite of what happened in the high tech world (a steady stream of very  exciting outcomes occurring since about 1977). 

So what do you do if you have some astronomy web site, trying to keep up your readership (or an agency like NASA trying to keep up your funding)? You may feel a need to resort to hype and clickbait and "carnival barking" to keep people interested. If this only involved people wasting some screen time checking out "not much there" headlines, it would not be so bad.  But sometimes this hype and clickbait and "carnival barking" involves leading people to false ideas about matters of great philosophical importance.  Very much of the misleading astronomy news has been helping to spread the erroneous idea that scientists are gaining an understanding of natural origins of life or intelligent life, something that has not at all been occurring.  

In a recent essay on science, a writer states, " In my experience, it is the norm, rather than the exception, for cited claims in popular science books and review papers to misstate the claims of their sources." You might reasonably make the same claim about university press releases, which nowadays tend to have ridiculous  amounts of hype, exaggeration and untruth about the studies they are discussing (like the case I just discussed of three different errors in the first sentence of a university press release).  It would be naive to place the blame for this entirely on careless writers in university press offices. The blame also must be placed on the authors of scientific papers, who often give inaccurate titles to their papers, and often allow wildly inaccurate press releases about their research to be published by their universities, without making sure their research is described by an accurate press release.  It is rather obvious why such oversight conveniently occurs: when a sensationalized misleading  news press release goes out, more people will read and cite a scientific study (to the benefit of the authors of the paper, who are judged partially by how many people have cited their papers).  

So the scientist said while laughing loudly

The "Eyeless Sight" Experiments of Jules Romains

The very interesting 1924 book Eyeless Sight by Jules Romains (which can be read here) is a book that begins with a very serious error.  The topic of the book is extra-sensory perception, not the type of ESP that involves thoughts traveling mysteriously between minds, but clairvoyant perception about the nature and color of external objects without the use of touch, hearing, smell or sight with the eyes.  Romains begins his book most erroneously by stating this:

"No bibliography will be found in the pages which follow. The principal question with which I am dealing is new. I cannot consider as real sources the few brief passages in earlier works where a presentiment of the phenomena we are going to study appears, nor as a tradition of scientific research a few observations collected in chance circum- stances, noted without criticism and bearing witness at most to a superficial and easily satisfied curiosity."

This passage shows a dismal lack of scholarship on the topic that the book discusses.  Before Romains book there was a hundred years of very voluminous published evidence for ESP and clairvoyance, much of it written by very distinguished and accomplished writers.  This literature included:

• the long 1831 report of the French Royal Academy of Medicine in favor of clairvoyance (based on a long investigation between 1825 and 1831);
• the long work Letters to a Candid Inquirer, on Animal Magnetism, a book by William Gregory MD (a chemistry professor at the University of Edinburgh established in 1562);
• A lengthy book by the extremely successful clairvoyant Adolphe Didier, discussed here;
• many articles in the journal The Zoist,  
• many articles in the journals and proceedings of the British Society for Psychical Research, 
• a work on clairvoyance by the very successful surgeon James Esdaile.  
• Eugene Osty's 1923 book Supernormal Faculties in Man (discussed here).
• A book on the case of the blind or nearly blind clairvoyant Mollie Fancher, discussed here.

Altogether we have here thousands of pages, which is not at all a "few brief passages."  But luckily Romains' competence as an experimenter is an entirely different matter from his incompetence as a scholar of the topic he was researching. Romains fails to prove himself as a best-practices experimenter, because he too often  speaks vaguely about his experiments, failing to tell us how many subjects he tested to reach his conclusions. But at various places in his books he drops some very fascinating observational tidbits worthy of further followup. 

In the first 40 pages of the book (which I suggest any reader skip), Romains starts talking about human skin, trying to suggest it may have undreamed of powers. Later, after reporting successful experiments regarding ESP, he advances the theory that skin has special powers allowing sight to occur even when eyelids are closed and eyes are blindfolded. This is not a very plausible theory, and in the century since no discoveries about the skin have substantiated it. But the important thing about the book are its reported observations, not its theoretical speculations to explain such observations. 

By page 46 Romains finally gets around to report some interesting observations. He reports picking a random patient and testing him for sightless vision, assuring him that he will succeed:

"I bandaged his eyes, and warned him that he would be using a faculty which he possessed beyond doubt, although he has never had occasion to discover it. I explained to him briefly that I was going to place a newspaper in his hands and that he should try to 'see' and 'read' some, at least, of the largest letters. I made it very clear that he was not to rely upon sensations of touch ; that he was to 'see,' in the strict sense of the word, and furthermore that I was persuaded that he could do it....The subject...finally began to enunciate in jerks, but correctly, the title of the newspaper, printed in letters 30 mm. in height, the lines of which were 5 mm. in thickness. Having congratulated him, I told him to decipher the title of an article printed in letters 5 mm. high with 1 mm. lines. He increased his efforts and after a few moments, pronounced, not the exact words themselves of the title, but a very close equivalent. There was reading apparently, as in the first case, but for some unknown reason, a work of interpretation added to it. He finally pronounced the words themselves."

The reported result (sightless vision) is astonishing, but maybe not so astonishing when we consider that it is perhaps no more remarkable than the very well-documented placebo effect, under which remarkable medical improvements can be produced by doctors in white coats telling patients that a pill they are being given will "work like magic" to help their medical problem, with the pill being only a sugar pill. 

On page 51 Romains uses the term "paraoptic perception" for sightless vision or ESP. After noting that he documented such an effect in many subjects, who had no idea what kind of test would be done ("they knew nothing of what I was expecting from them"), and no chance to prepare any trickery, he states the following:

"Paroptic perception is a phenomenon sui generis, whose experimental existence is beyond all question. Its reality is of the same order of certainty as that of the respiratory phenomenon or of the phenomenon of fecundation in biology. This phenomenon is of a certain generality. It is even likely that every individual is capable of exhibiting it in certain conditions. I need not say that I have taken, in the course of these hundreds of experiments, all imaginable precautions to eliminate the smallest chance of illusion or trickery."

The attempts of skeptics to explain away observations such as these are very lame. They say things like "the blindfolds were not tight enough, and people were able to peek through little cracks at the bottom." Anyone who has studied demonstrations of clairvoyance in the nineteenth century knows that it was extremely common to use the most thorough double measures to make sure there was no chance of seeing while blindfolded. It was, in fact, extremely common for subjects being tested to have their closed eyes thoroughly covered with sticky plaster or tape, and for double blindfolds to then be tied on over such a plaster or tape. After the clairvoyance was demonstrated, the blindfolds would be removed, and the unbroken plaster or unbroken tape covering the closed eyes would be shown.  But much simpler measures can be used by any competent investigator to rule out some possibility of reading through the bottom gap of a blindfold. One such simple measure is simply to ask someone to read or describe something a meter away from him, at eye level (while being careful to discard any results in which the subject tilted back his head). No one with an untilted head can use his eyes to see through a decent blindfold to see something a meter away at eye level.  

Romains describes methods he used to rule out fraud, such as using the device below, with two handles held by the subject. The item to be read (or have its colors described) was placed on the subject's knees, where there was no possibility of the object being seen with the eyes. 

He states this: 

"In particular I arranged the Bouclier in the position indicated in the sketch, the object to be seen being placed on the knees of the subject and the hands of the subject holding the interior grips. The phenomenon did not cease."

It is clear from the visual and statement above that Romains was getting something much more than "touch reading" in which a blindfolded person might be able to read something he is touching with his hands. 

Using the term extra-retinal vision for the ESP he is investigating, on page 79 Romains makes the interesting conclusion that such vision is 360 degree "full circle" vision instead of the cone-like vision that occurs with eyes:

"The retinal field is roughly cone-shaped, and gives, in horizontal section, a sector whose angle varies slightly according to the individual, without ever exceeding a maximum value which remains below 180°. Now this horizontal section of the field in the case of extra-retinal vision reaches 360°. That is to say, the field is circular or even spherical. If I am in the centre of a room, and if I wish to see, with my eyes, all that surrounds me I must move about, or at least my head must pivot on my neck. To obtain the same result the subject who sees paroptically can remain motionless."

Very interestingly, the same thing is often reported by those who have near-death experiences: the ability to see in a 360 degree full-circle manner. 

Romains uses the term "time of elaboration" for the length of time a subject needs to describe such object seen with "eyeless vision" ESP.  He gives us this tidbit of possible use to future investigators:

"I note finally that the time of elaboration is shortened and vision facilitated, if, instead of keeping the object motionless, it is slowly moved and turned round without being shifted away from or towards the body."

About page 141 Romains discusses his own attempt to cultivate eyeless vision or ESP.  He says, "A dozen sittings, spread over about a month, none of which lasted an hour, passed without the faintest sign of vision appearing." Then he seemed to get a little progress, but things moved slowly:

"Nine sittings did no more than confirm the results of those which had preceded. I tested myself in other places and on other objects ; but the function seemed to develop only imperceptibly.  A tenth sitting showed a sudden progress (and this from the beginning of the sitting), (1) I had the impression of a more intense general brightness. (2) I succeeded in discerning more numerous and more various objects, with a better defined shape and colour."

He summarizes his self-experiments as follows:

"A preparatory period of ten sittings, without apparent result.

A period of ten sittings, when the function appeared in a still rudimentary way.

A period of three sittings, when a somewhat more perfected function appeared.

A period of eight sittings, characterised by a remarkable extension of the function."

On page 163 he lists colors that can be seen with sightless vision: "White, bluish-white, brick-red, gold, reddish-yellow, brown, azure blue, black." Later he seems to suggest testing in natural light rather than artificial light. 

Considering possible explanations for the phenomenon, Romains hastily rules out the possibility that ESP is produced by some faculty of the soul, by a non-organic "immediate perception." The only evidence he gives for ruling out such a claim is this: "But if I dress my subject in a thick cloth, from head to foot, he sees nothing." But we have no details of any observations backing up such a claim. How many subjects were such a test done on: only one, or many?  How much time was this subject given to produce a result  before reaching the conclusion that complete skin covering prevents ESP? How many trials were done? We are not given any details other than the bare statement that "if I dress my subject in a thick cloth, from head to foot, he sees nothing." So we don't know that it was a reliable result. 

On page 114 Romains suggests a theory that ESP is caused by special features of the skin: 

"We are, then, inevitably led to this conclusion : extra-retinal vision is brought about by an apparatus or microscopic organs of the magnitude of histological elements. These organs are so distributed that a limited region of the periphery— a few square centimetres of surface — contains at least one and probably several of them."

Later, using the term "the paraoptic sense" for ESP, and using the term "epidermis" to refer to skin, Romains states these improbable conjectures: 

"The paroptic sense has as organs the ocelli, microscopic organs situated in the epidermis. The ocellus is a nidimentary but complete visual organ. It possesses a refracting body, an ocellary retina, and an optic fibre."

This was not a good guess, and nothing that we have learned about the skin in the past century has supported such an idea. We have nothing in the skin that would allow people to see without eyes through use of their skin.  Some animals such as jellyfish and insects have multiple ocelli (primitive light-sensing organs), but humans do not have ocelli in their skin.  Romains seems to have come up with this idea partially because he failed to study previous evidence for clairvoyance and ESP. If he had made a thorough study of such topics, he would have found countless accounts from reputable sources of clairvoyance of distant places. In such accounts people seem to see with "eyeless vision" things in other rooms, other buildings and distant locations.  Any explanation for ESP must be able to explain not just a blindfolded person seeing something a meter from him, but also the many cases in which people can seem to see well places that they could never see if the skin somehow had a power of sight. 

Later in the book Romains describes working with a blind patient:

"On the 20th of September, Baudoin, a Colonial Adjutant, who had been blinded, recognised, in the same conditions, the digit 7 ; a few minutes later the digit 8 ; a few minutes later the digit 2. On the 2ist of September, Baudoin again made several correct readings of numbers and recognised colours and objects. On the 28th of September, after a week of interruption, the causes of which still remain obscure, Michel succeeded once more in reading several figures and capital letters, and described, in an incomplete but striking manner, an unusual object which was shown him at a distance."

Sadly, Romains seems to have been prevented from doing further work with the patient.  The book ends with a long appendix describing  Romains doing experiments involving dramatic ESP successes performed by a well-blindfolded subject, who had both adhesive tape over her eyes, and a blindfold over her eyes. Numerous named witnesses sign off on the reported results. The successes include identifying a ladies black shoe with a buckle (placed 50 centimeters away) as being a ladies black shoe with a buckle.  We read below a successful test done with the object to be read being at eye-level (allowing no chance of reading through a bottom crack in a blindfold). 

"Dr. Cantonnet presents to the subject who was standing up, one of his blue pamphlets, at the level of her eyes and holding it himself. The subject brings her fingers near the title and reads correctly, scanning her words : 'Papillary stagnation.' "

Another success was reading the words "Sur les traces de Pausanias."  We read that after such a reading, "When the bandage was withdrawn, the adhesive tape was still adhering to the eyes."  The names of eight witnesses are given that signed off on the accuracy of the account. 

The current edition of the EdgeScience magazine (#47) published by the Society for Scientific Exploration has an article "Seeing Without Eyes" (page 9) which discusses evidence for clairvoyance like that gathered by Romains. It mentions work by Carol Ann Liaros in the 1970's, saying, "Liaros discovered that blind people could see the images on black-and-white photos (and could see the photos when they were turned over, face-down, and even their reallife colors)."  We read about many other examples of ESP and clairvoyance similar to that reported by Romains, most occurring in recent decades. 

A long article in the June 12, 1964 Life magazine was entitled "Seeing Color With the Fingers." It reported a great number of observations very similar to those reported by Romains.  You can read the article here, by scrolling down to page 102. Any objective reader of the article will be likely to conclude that Romains was not faking his observations. In 1964 Life magazine was as mainstream and respectable as the New York Times, and had been a trusted mainstream source for decades.  Just as there is now a gigantic New York Times building in New York City, an equally sized skyscraper was once called the Time-Life building. In the article a scientist enthuses about how great it will be when news of the research spreads around, because it might offer the blind a path to see. 

Why was so promising a possibility not massively pursued? Maybe because in  the academia world, sticking to the prevailing taboos and belief systems is more important than the health and happiness of humans.  The professors shut things down, and made the study of ESP a taboo that few professors dared defy. 

It was the same kind of tragedy that occurred in regard to hypnotism. In India around 1850 the surgeon James Esdaile had performed countless painless operations removing big tumors in people who were awake during surgery, but hypnotized to feel no pain. At about the same time, chemical anesthesia was being developed. But for many years using chemical anesthesia was like playing Russian roulette, because the technique was very hazardous before it was  perfected. Referring to chloroform (later found to be carcinogenic), a source tells us, "Skill and care were required to differentiate between an effective dose (enough to make patient insensible during surgery) and one that paralyzed the lungs, causing death." 

The other early chemical anesthetic was ether, which could cause explosive fires if not used right, fires that might kill or hideously disfigure surgical patients. Surgeons flocked to use  chemical anesthesia that killed very many, rather than taking up Esdaile's safe technique for painless surgery through hypnosis. It was largely so that doctors could cling to materialist and mechanistic ideas about the body that were contradicted by painless surgery involving a mind-only technique.  Similarly, during the opioid epidemic, something like 500,000 Americans died from opioid overdoses, most of which could have been avoided if doctors had cultivated non-chemical methods of pain relief during the previous decades. 

Now we have a culture in academia in which professors are afraid to discuss research such as that of Romains.  The professors are scared to death that some angry Twitter mob might cause them trouble by denouncing them as heretics who fail to speak the way science professors are expected to speak.  The culture of academia becomes ever more heresy-intolerant, now doing things such as threatening those who do not adopt eccentric pronoun usage that refers to students without saying "his" or "her." 

COVID-19 Origins Groupthink Resembled Human Origins Groupthink

The COVID-19 pandemic began spreading worldwide in the year 2020, after originating in Wuhan, China, the site of two major virus labs. Throughout that year scientists showed a very high degree of "follow the herd" behavior and groupthink and conformism when talking about the origins of the virus. "Singing from the same hymn book," scientists almost uniformly claimed that the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 had a purely natural origin.  

In February 2020 a letter had appeared in the British medical journal The Lancet entitled "Statement in support of the scientists, public health professionals, and medical professionals of China combatting COVID-19." The statement denounced as "misinformation" and "conspiracy theories" suspicions that "COVID-19 does not have a natural origin."  It stated the following:

"The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumours and misinformation around its origins. We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin."

The authors suggested that "conjecture" on this topic should be repressed for the sake of "unity," stating, "We support the call from the Director-General of WHO to promote scientific evidence and unity over misinformation and conjecture." 

The authors very inaccurately claimed to have no conflict of interests, stating "We declare no competing interests."  In reality, several of the authors had major conflicts of interest. The scientist who had orchestrated the Lancet letter (Peter Daszak) was very entangled with a Chinese lab (the Wuhan Institute of Virology) that was very close physically to the place where the COVID-19 virus outbreak first occurred.  Daszak's EcoHealth Alliance organization had given lots of money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for it to engage in dicey research on viruses. 

Later in The Lancet we read this reference to the letter mentioned above, one that embarrasses that letter's authors by calling on them to "re-evaluate their competing interests":

"In this letter, the authors declared no competing interests. Some readers have questioned the validity of this disclosure, particularly as it relates to one of the authors, Peter Daszak....The Lancet invited the 27 authors of the letter to re-evaluate their competing interests."

There then follows a statement by Daszak in which he seems to confess quite a bit of what sounds like  conflict of interest, but still fails to mention the name of the Wuhan Institute of Virology that he was closely involved with, using instead three times the vague phrase "work in China."   

The Daily Mail quotes a scholar of COVID-19 origins (Jamie Metzl) as speaking very unfavorably about the February 2020 Lancet letter orchestrated by Daszak:

"Jamie Metzl, who sits on the World Health Organization's advisory committee on human genome editing and is a former Bill Clinton administration staffer, said Dr Daszak's letter was a 'form of thuggery'. He said: ‘The Lancet letter was scientific propaganda and a form of thuggery and intimidation. By labelling anyone with different views a conspiracy theorist, the Lancet letter was the worst form of bullying in full contravention of the scientific method.' "

Metzl was using a little hyperbole, as no literal thuggery (no literal physical violence) was involved, and mere words are never "the worst form of bullying," which is physical violence. It is rather hard to judge exactly how much of an effect the February 2020 Lancet letter had. But it did rather seem in early 2020 that the letter had "worked like a charm" to tell scientists that no heresy was allowed from the prevailing view on this topic.  Throughout that year scientists acted as if they were thinking, "We got the memo: it is a taboo to question the purely natural origin of COVID-19." 

When I wrote my January 21, 2021 post "Gene Engineers Keep Up Their Risky Tinkering, Unfazed by Pandemic Suspicions," such a taboo was very much in effect; and I was "going out on a limb" by giving equal treatment to natural origins ideas and the hypothesis of a lab leak as being the cause of COVID-19, stating the following:

"Because of such explanatory difficulties, there does not currently exist any plausible detailed theory of a purely natural origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19...We do not yet know exactly how COVID-19 originated, and we do not know whether its origin was purely natural."

But then in the next few months the taboo started to break its stranglehold on the thinking of scientists, as you see in the postscripts I added to my January 21, 2021 post, mentioning discussion of the lab leak hypothesis starting to occur in mainstream publications in February and March 2021. By spring 2021 many a scientist was saying that we do not know whether COVID-19 originated by purely natural effects or because of a leak from some lab doing research on viruses.  

Mainstream sources began to point out that it was not at all a conspiracy theory to merely doubt that COVID-19 had purely natural origins.  There were three main hypotheses:

(1) That COVID-19 had originated because of purely natural evolution. 

(2) That COVID-19 had accidentally escaped from a laboratory (the lab leak hypothesis), presumably when well-meaning scientists were working to try to prevent future pandemics. 

(3) That COVID-19 had been deliberately designed as a biological weapon. 

Mainstream sources began to point out that the second of these two hypotheses (the lab leak hypothesis) is not at all a conspiracy theory, as it involves merely a hypothesis of an accident. 

By March 25, 2021 there appeared a letter in the journal Environmental Chemistry Letters which was titled "Should we discount the laboratory origin of COVID-19?" and stated the following:

"Several characteristics of SARS-CoV-2 taken together are not easily explained by a natural zoonotic origin hypothesis. These include a low rate of evolution in the early phase of transmission; the lack of evidence for recombination events; a high pre-existing binding to human angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2); a novel furin cleavage site (FCS) insert; a fat ganglioside-binding domain (GBD) of the spike protein which conficts with host evasion survival patterns exhibited by other coronaviruses; and high human and mouse peptide mimicry. Initial assumptions against a laboratory origin by contrast have remained unsubstantiated. Furthermore, over a year after the initial outbreak in Wuhan, there is still no clear evidence of zoonotic transfer from a bat or intermediate species."

US President Joe Biden ordered an intelligence review on the topic. CNN describes the resulting report like this:

"Four intelligence community agencies and the National Intelligence Council assessed, with low confidence, that Covid was likely caused by natural exposure to an animal, the summary says. One agency assessed with moderate confidence, however, that the first human infection most likely was the result of a lab-associated incident that 'probably involving experimentation, animal handling, or sampling by the Wuhan Institute.' And three agencies said they were unable to coalesce around either explanation without additional information."

An article in the journal Science very inaccurately describes this intelligence review as favoring a purely natural origin for COVID-19, which makes no sense because having one agency conclusion with "moderate" confidence in favor of the lab leak hypothesis is stronger than having several agency conclusions against that hypothesis (all of merely "low" confidence). 

A sign of the new respectability of the lab leak hypothesis is a recent (September 17, 2021) letter in The Lancet, one entitled, "An appeal for an objective, open, and transparent scientific debate about the origin of SARS-CoV-2."  The letter strongly criticizes the Daszak letter that had appeared in the same journal in February, 2020.  The September 17 letter states the following:

"As will be shown below, there is no direct support for the natural origin of SARS-CoV-2, and a laboratory-related accident is plausible. There is so far no scientifically validated evidence that directly supports a natural origin...After 19 months of investigations, the proximal progenitor of SARS-CoV-2 is still lacking. Neither the host pathway from bats to humans, nor the geographical route from Yunnan (where the viruses most closely related to SARS-CoV-2 have been sampled) to Wuhan (where the pandemic emerged) have been identified. More than 80 000 samples collected from Chinese wildlife sites and animal farms all proved negative....A research-related origin is plausible...Overwhelming evidence for either a zoonotic or research-related origin is lacking: the jury is still out... As shown above, research-related hypotheses are not misinformation and conjecture. More importantly, science embraces alternative hypotheses, contradictory arguments, verification, refutability, and controversy. Departing from this principle risks establishing dogmas, abandoning the essence of science, and, even worse, paving the way for conspiracy theories. Instead, the scientific community should bring this debate to a place where it belongs: the columns of scientific journals."

The claim that COVID-19 had a purely natural origin was a questionable dogma that was kept in place through almost all of 2020 because of sociological conformity effects such as groupthink.  While the stranglehold of that dogma has weakened, there continues to exist many other dubious dogmas in the world of science academia that keep sitting on thrones largely because of sociological effects and peer pressure.  One such dogma is the dogma that humans had a purely natural origin.  The way in which such a dogma has continued to reign is very similar to the way that the dogma of purely natural COVID-19 origins kept in power throughout the year 2020.  Below is a table comparing the two cases:

	Purely natural COVID-19 origins versus design involvement in COVID-19 origins (possibly well-intentioned design)	Purely natural human origins versus design involvement in human origins
The main issue was a conflict between a “purely natural” origins explanation and an explanation involving intelligent agency.	Yes.	Yes.
“Purely natural” theory became an orthodoxy that it was “heresy” to question	Yes, during the year 2020.	Yes, through most of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century.
“Purely natural” theory was never well-established by observations	Yes (see the previous quote in The Lancet).	Yes.
The “heretical” design hypothesis was always reasonable and not very far-fetched	Yes. Given Wuhan virus labs in the same city where COVID-19 arose, and many cases of “gain of function” research by scientists, a “lab leak” hypothesis was always reasonable.	Yes. Given enormous levels of hierarchical organization in the human body, tons of functional information in DNA, very many uniquely human mental traits and mental abilities not credibly explained by brain activity, and seemingly fine-tuned fundamental constants in nature, the hypothesis of design involvement in human origins was always reasonable, and never was far-fetched.
Lack of any credible detailed theory to explain “purely natural” origins	Yes (see recent letter in The Lancet). There was never any credible explanation of how the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 could have so quickly become so well-adapted to transmission in humans. An intermediate organism serving as a bridge between bats and humans was never found.	Yes. The misleading term "natural selection" (which does not actually involve selection, a choice by a conscious agent) was never a credible explanation for the origin of so many unique human capabilities, as the co-creator of  evolutionary theory (Alfred Russel Wallace) explained at length in an essay "The Limits of Natural Selection As Applied to Man."
Proponents of reasonable “design” hypothesis unfairly described with a misleading epithet.	Yes. Proponents of the lab-leak hypothesis were called “conspiracy theorists,” even though they did not actually believe in a conspiracy, but merely some possible overconfidence and carelessness.	Yes. Theorists of intelligent design were frequently called “creationists,” a word implying   biblical fundamentalism, even though the Bible is rarely mentioned in the literature of such theorists, who argue not by appealing to scripture, but by describing the fine-tuned functional complexity and   enormous level of hierarchical organization in human beings, and the inadequacy of Darwinist explanations for such biological wonders and the human mind.
The prevailing orthodoxy was established partially to serve the vested interests of biologists	Yes. If a pandemic arose from a lab-leak in a scientist lab, the prestige of scientists would be lessened, and they might get less funding and more restrictive regulations.	Yes. The claim that scientists understood the origin of humans and other species led to a huge boost in the prestige of scientists, who could then paint themselves as “grand lords of explanation.”

The table above mentions only one of the forms of bullying that has been used against theorists of design involvement in human origins, who are sometimes defamed as  "zealots" or "fanatics" by their Darwinist opponents, even though there is no sign of any difference in the levels of passion in the two camps. 

Shaming someone with a "could easily be true" hypothesis

An excellent article by journalist by Paul D. Thacker discusses the groupthink, dysfunctional journalism, intellectual bullying and herd-following cowardice of the year 2020. The article is entitled "The covid-19 lab leak hypothesis: did the media fall victim to a misinformation campaign?" The misinformation campaign referred to is one coming from the mainstream science news sources. 

Referring to SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19), the article begins by stating a little of what I mentioned above:

"For most of 2020, the notion that SARS-CoV-2 may have originated in a lab in Wuhan, China, was treated as a thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory....But that all changed in the early months of 2021, and today most outlets across the political spectrum agree: the 'lab leak' scenario deserves serious investigation."

The article mentions quite a few mainstream sources that were to blame for the supression of one of the two leading hypotheses about COVID-19 origins, mentioning censorship by Facebook. It mentions the failure of science journalists, quoting science journalist Nicholas Wade:

"Wade explains, 'Science journalists differ a lot from other journalists in that they are far less sceptical of their sources and they see their main role as simply to explain science to the public.'  This, he says, is why they began marching in unison behind Daszak."

We see such a failure constantly on science news sites: science journalists meekly acting like  North Korean journalists, repeating trustingly any claims that come from professor authorities, no matter how groundless, dubious or speculative such claims may be. 

What we saw in the year 2020 in regard to COVID-19 origins (the premature claim that scientists knew about about how a mysterious biological innovation had appeared) was no fluke. It was just another example  of a malfunction that repeatedly occurs in modern academia: overconfident scientists dogmatically proclaiming they  understand things that they don't actually understand.  It was the opinion reversal of 2021 that was the real fluke, because once scientists start claiming in great numbers to understand something they don't understand, they typically continue for very many years to repeat such boastful claims of understanding, rather than realizing within a year or two that they claimed to understand things they don't understand.  

What goes on regarding scientific matters is that a very tiny group at the top of a pyramid can control what millions of other people believe, as illustrated in the diagram below (in which the tiny pink triangle at the top controls the beliefs of all the other layers).   

Postscript: They're still at it. In a very interesting article in Undark.org, we read, "Still, some continue to refer to those who suggest the possibility of a lab leak as conspiracy theorists, among them H. Holden Thorp, Science’s editor-in-chief, who used the term in a Nov. 11 [2021] editorial." We read, "Undark reached out to numerous scientists who worked with Daszak, and most never responded." 

Why "We Are All Star Stuff" Is a Poor Slogan

Trying to make astronomy seem more relevant to the average man, the astronomer Carl Sagan tried to popularize the slogan "we are all star stuff," a slogan that many people have since repeated.  But there are several reasons why the slogan "we are all star stuff" is a poor slogan to be using. 

Reason #1: We Don't Really Know How the Elements in Our Bodies Originated

Scientists sometimes boast about understanding how the elements originated.  Their claim is that the three lightest elements (hydrogen, helium and lithium) originated in the Big Bang, the sudden origin of the universe. They claim that other elements such as carbon and oxygen originated in stars. 

But the Big Bang theory does not correctly predict the amount of lithium. This shortfall is called the cosmological lithium problem.  A university press release tells us, "The standard models of the Big Bang that are currently used predict an abundance of Li-7, the main lithium isotope, which is three or four times more than that determined via astronomical observations."

The biggest failure of the Big Bang theory is that it incorrectly predicts the universe should consist of equal amounts of matter and antimatter.  We know from experiments in particle accelerators that when two high-energy photons collide at very high speeds, they produce matter and antimatter in equal amounts. In the first instants of the Big Bang, the universe should have consisted of such very high-energy photons, colliding with each other constantly, leaving equal amounts of matter and antimatter. A web page of the leading particle physics organization CERN starts out by saying, "The Big Bang should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter in the early universe." But it is known that the amount of matter in the universe is actually at least 10,000 times greater than the amount of antimatter in the universe.  If even a tiny bit of antimatter came into contact with some matter here on our planet, it would create an explosion vastly bigger than a hydrogen bomb explosion. 

It seems the Big Bang theory is a far-from-perfected work-in- progress, and currently way, way off in its prediction about the ratio of matter and antimatter in the universe, and also way off in its predictions about lithium. So we cannot rule out the possibility that future refinements of the Big Bang theory will claim that the Big Bang produced not just the first three elements on the periodic table (hydrogen, helium and lithium) but the first eight elements on the periodic table (hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, boron, carbon, nitrogen and oxygen). If that were to happen, then scientists would stop claiming that most of the mass in our bodies comes from stars. 

No one would be terribly surprised if scientists were to stop claiming that most oxygen and carbon came from stars.  The current theory to explain the origin of oxygen and carbon has a rather fishy smell to it.  The theory is that the oxygen and carbon on Earth came from one or more other stars. But the problem is that stars are very, very far apart.  The nearest star is 25 trillion miles away.  There has always been the problem of accounting for how so much material from other stars could have got here.  An average star will not shoot out matter that far away from it. 

There are rare events called supernova explosions in which stars explode violently and shoot out matter far away. Scientists claim that such explosions can account for planets like Earth getting elements such as oxygen.  Such claims may not be warranted. 

The Crab Nebula is a nebula caused by a supernova explosion nearly 1000 years ago:

 Credit: NASA

The NASA web page here lists the width of the Crab Nebula as six light-years. In the calculation below I'll assume a supernova casts heavy elements across an area of about 1000 light-years (more than the roughly 200 cubic light-years of the Crab Nebula).

Below we see some very rough calculations on the topic on how much of the galaxy should have been seeded with heavy elements from supernova explosions. I'll use the estimate of about 3 supernova explosions per century given by several sources. 

Length of our galaxy, light years	100000
Cubic size of galaxy, light years	1000000000000000
Number of supernova per year in our galaxy	0.03
Number of supernova in past 6 billion years in our galaxy	180000000
Number of cubic light years that get heavy elements from one supernova	1000
Number of cubic light years in our galaxy getting supernova heavy elements (past 6 billion years)	180000000000
Fraction of our galaxy getting heavy elements such as oxygen from supernovas during the past 6 billion years	.000180

These calculations suggest that less than two ten-thousandths of our galaxy should have got elements such as oxygen from supernova explosions.  So what confidence can we have in claims that the oxygen and carbon in our body came from distant stars?

Attempts to account for the origin of heavy elements by stellar activity don't quite work correctly. To account for the abundances we observe of gold and silver, scientists have appealed to far-fetched ideas like colliding neutron stars. A recent paper attempting a "latest and greatest model" confesses, "We find that silver is overproduced by a factor of 6, while gold is underproduced a factor of 5 in the model."  Oops, our "elements from the stars" guys still haven't got things right, it seems.  A 2019 paper states, "The origin of many elements of the periodic table remains an unsolved problem."

My purpose here is not to claim a refutation of current models of the origin of elements, but to merely point out that such models are far from proven.  We don't really know that the oxygen and carbon in our bodies came from some other star or stars.  Such elements could have originated before any stars existed, at the time of the Big Bang. 

Also, the entire universe could have been divinely created ten thousand years ago, a million years ago, a billion years ago, or any number of years ago, in some state of organization far greater than the hot, disorganized state of the Big Bang.  In that case it would be false that the carbon and oxygen in our bodies came from stars. Similarly,  a builder can create a Colonial-style house in Vermont that looks like it is 200 years old, but which is actually only three months old.  

Commenting on the prevailing hypothesis that the oxygen and iron in our solar system came from a nearby supernova explosion, one scientific paper states, "Numerous individual characteristics of the solar system when viewed collectively reveal that the supernova enrichment scenario is not sufficiently self-consistent." The author then discusses at some length some serious problems with such a hypothesis. 

Given all these uncertainties, claiming "we are all star stuff" is not a statement of scientific fact, but a statement of shaky scientist speculation.  

Reason #2: It Is Misleading to Use the Term "Stuff" to Refer to Our Enormously Organized Bodies

Let us consider the word "stuff" in the slogan "we are all star stuff." The word "stuff" implies a disorganized set of things or disorganized material.  For example, if someone said to you, "Let me show you some metal stuff I have in my garage," you would be surprised if the person opened his garage door and pointed at a car.  The word "stuff" implies some not-very-organized set of things.  For example, someone may say, "I bought some stuff at the food store," referring to various items that are not any very organized arrangement.  

But human bodies are not some disorganized stuff. Bodies are things that have an enormous degree of hierarchical organization.  In a body subatomic articles are organized into atoms, which are organized into simple molecules like amino acids, which are organized into vastly more complicated protein molecules consisting of hundreds of amino acids arranged in just the right way to produce a functional effect. Then such protein molecules are organized into protein complexes or organelles, which are organized into cells that may have thousands of such organelles. Then the cells are organized into tissues, which are organized into organs, which are organized into organ systems. "Stuff" is a misleading term to use about that type of organization. Using such a term for something as organized as the human body is like calling the Golden Gate Bridge "some metal stuff." 

Reason #3: We Are Mainly Our Minds Not Our Bodies, and It Is Dehumanizing and Morally Hazardous to Refer to Humans As "Stuff"

A human being is mainly a mind rather than a body. You are mainly your thoughts, your self, your personality, your memories, your beliefs, your feelings, and your way of living, none of which are any kind of material stuff. (The claim that memories are material has no basis in robust science.)  When you speak as if a human being is "some stuff," you are engaging in dehumanizing speech. Such speech is morally hazardous. Once a person starts talking about a human as "some stuff," he may feel no qualms about getting rid of that "stuff."  For example:

Captain: Get rid of all that stuff over there.

Corporal: How should I do that, with a machine gun or a flame thrower?

Slogans such as "we are all star stuff" are loved by those who wish to get people to think of themselves as mere accidents of nature. Get a man to think of himself as mainly some stellar debris, and you may get him close to thinking of himself as some mere accident of nature.  But ironically, in developing their theories of the origin of elements, scientists find themselves appealing to very lucky fine-tuning in physics which does not sound accidental.  For example, a paper entitled "Chemical Elements Abundance in the Universe and the Origin of Life" states this: "

"Element synthesis which started with p-p chain has resulted in several specific characteristics including lack of any stable isotope having atomic masses 5 [boron] or 8 [oxygen]. The carbon to oxygen ratio is fixed early by the chain of coincidences. These  remarkably fine-tuned conditions are responsible for our own existence and indeed the existence of any carbon based life in the Universe."

Postscript: At a mainstream science site, we read the following:

"Our study suggests that the Earth itself has been able to create lighter elements by nuclear transmutation,'  said Mikio Fukuhara, a co-author from Tohoku University's New Industry Creation Hatchery Center in Japan. If accurate, this is a revolutionary discovery because 'it was previously theorized that all of these elements were sourced from supernova explosions, whereas we postulate a supplementary theory,' Fukuhara said."

Apparently there are three possible ways in which the oxygen and carbon in our bodies might have naturally originated: in the Big Bang, in stars, or through earthly processes.  Since we don't know how the elements in our bodies originated, we should not be saying "we are all star stuff," as if we knew how the elements in our bodies originated.