There's No Good Evidence Genetic Engineering Can Yield Animals With Better Intelligence or Better Memory

Occasionally a scientist will claim to have enhanced intelligence or memory in an animal by manipulating one or more of its genes. In this post I will discuss why none of these claims is convincing. 

One such claim was made in 1999. The science journal Nature published a paper entitled “Genetic Enhancement of Learning and Memory in Mice.” We read about some test in which mice that were genetically modified so that a NR2B gene was overexpressed. The paper shows a few graphs attempting to convince us that genetically modified mice did better in performance tests. But the results do not look very impressive. We see only a slight difference in performance. In Figure 5 we are told “Each point represents data collected from 8-10 mice per group.” But that is way too small a sample size for a reliable result. The rule of thumb in animal experiments is that at least 15 animals should be used per study group to have a decent chance of a reliable result. Figure 5 also tells us that some performance test was based on “contextual freezing.” Judging whether a mouse has frozen at a particular point requires a subjective judgment where it would be very easy for experimental bias to creep in.  While the experimenters make the vague claim that "all experiments were conducted in blind fashion," we should be very skeptical of such a statement because the paper fails completely to specify any details of how any blinding protocol was followed.

What we have in this research are the same type of Questionable Research Practices so very common in modern experimental neuroscience papers. The slight effects shown are just what we would expect to get occasionally, given a large group of neuroscientists playing around with altered genes and testing animal performance, even if all the altered genes had no effect on mental performance.  Similarly, if there are 20 experimenter teams eager to prove the Super-Duper Herbal Pill makes you smarter, and those groups use small subject groups sizes smaller than 15, we would expect that one or two such groups would report a small success. Such results are plausibly attributable to chance variations in performance scores having nothing to do with the stimulus being tested. 

Another paper involving this NR2B gene is the 2009 paper "Genetic Enhancement of Memory and Long-Term Potentiation but Not CA1 Long-Term Depression in NR2B Transgenic Rats."  What we have in the paper is another example of Questionable Research Practices,  one even worse than the previously discussed example. In the 2009 paper the study group sizes are even smaller than in the 1999 paper.  The paper mentions ridiculously small study group sizes such as 3 rats,  4 rats and 5 rats.  There is some graph showing genetically modified rats performing better in the Morris Water Maze test, a test of memory.  How many rats were tested to get this result? The paper does not tell us, and merely uses the vague term "rats" without telling us how many rats were tested (usually a sure sign that a way-too-small study group size was used). Because the paper has previously mentioned absurdly small study group sizes such as 3 rats,  4 rats and 5 rats, we may presume that the unspecified number of rats in the Morris Water Maze test was some equally way-too-small study group size such as 3, 4 or 5 rats.  A result produced with such way-too-small study group sizes is worthless, because you would expect to get by it chance (due to random performance variations), given 10 or 20 tests with random rats, even if the genetic modification had no effect at all on performance. 

Then there's a year 2000 study "Enhanced learning after genetic overexpression of a brain growth protein."  The study has some graphs showing 4 groups of mice,  with better performance by one group.  But the paper tells us that each of these groups consisted of only 5 mice. This sample size is way too small for a reliable result, and the performance difference is probably just a false alarm, as we would expect to get from random performance variations that could easily show with small sample sizes. 

A very misleading 2007 press release from the UT Southwestern Medical Center was repeated on the Science Daily site (www.sciencedaily.com), which has proven over the years to be a site where misleading academia PR gets repeated word-for-word without challenge.  The story appeared on the Science Daily site with the headline "'Smart' Mice Teach Scientists About Learning Process, Brain Disorders." In the press release we hear a James Bibb making statements about genetically modified mice that are not warranted by anything found in the research paper he co-authored. He absurdly states "everything is more meaningful to these mice." Then he states, "The increase in sensitivity to their surroundings seems to have made them smarter."  Later (dropping the "seems") he states, "We made the animals 'smarter.' "  Very conveniently, the Science Daily story includes no link to the scientific paper, making it hard for people to find out how groundless such claims are.  The story mentions mice modified to have no cdk5 enzyme. 

But by looking up James Bibb on Google Scholar, I can the find the 2007 paper that the press release is based on, a paper entitled "Cyclin-dependent kinase 5 governs learning and synaptic plasticity via control of NMDAR degradation."  The paper discusses tests with mice that had been modified to have no cdk5 enzyme.  The paper gives us  another example of a poorly designed experiment involving Questionable Research Practices.  If we ignore a test that produced no significant difference, we find the study group sizes used to test  mouse intelligence and memory were only 10, 11, and 12, way too small to be anything like a robust demonstration of a real effect.  Most of the graphs show only a minor difference between the performance of the genetically engineered mice and normal mice.  The study was not pre-registered, and did not use any blinding protocol.  Using the term "both genotypes" to refer to the normal mice and the genetically engineered mice, the paper confesses, "Both genotypes showed equally successful learning during initial training sessions." No robust evidence has been published that any smarter mice or better-remembering mice were produced. 

There is a general reason why slight results like the ones resulted in such papers are not convincing evidence of an extraordinary claim such as the claim that an increase in intelligence or memory was genetically engineered. The reason is that if many experiment tests are done, it would be a very easy for some experimenter to get a small-sample modest effect result that is purely due to chance, not to some effect claimed by the experimenter. For example, imagine I wanted to claim that eating some food increased someone's psychokinetic mind-over-matter powers. I could do 20 dice-throwing experiments, each done after a small number of subjects (such as 5 or 10) ate a different food. Purely by chance I would probably get a random variation, and then I could say something like, “Aha, I've proved it – asparagus increases your mind-over-matter powers.” I could then ship that test with asparagus off to a scientific journal. But this type of limited test is never sufficient to establish such an extraordinary claim. The results would be not much better than you would expect to get by chance, given that number of experiments and small samples. 

Similarly, you should never be impressed by hearing that some scientists testing with one particular gene got some slight increase in performance in a few tests involving small numbers of subjects. We would not have convincing evidence that some mice actually had their intelligence or memory increased unless scientists had shown something like one of these:

1. A large and dramatic performance increase shown in repeated tests by several replicated scientific studies using at least 25 or 35 subjects: or
2. A moderate but very substantial increase in performance shown by a large number of scientific studies (such as 10 or 20) each using a fairly good sample size (such as 30 or 50); or
3. A moderate but very substantial increase in performance shown by several scientific studies each using a good sample size such as 100 or 200. 

No such result has occurred in the literature. The studies claiming cognitive enhancements in genetically altered animals are typically junk science studies using way-too-small study group sizes and having multiple other deficiencies.  

In 2014 some scientists claimed that they had made mice smarter by inserting a human gene into them. A popular press account of the scientists' paper had the bogus headline “Mice Given Gene From Human Brains Turn Out To Be Super-Smart.” But that's not what the scientific paper reported. In fact, the scientists reported that “we did not observe enhanced learning” in these genetically engineered mice with a human gene “in the response-based task or the place-based task.” Referring to the genetically enhanced mice and the normal mice as “the two genotypes,” the scientists also reported, “The two genotypes exhibited equivalent procedural/response-based learning as assessed with the accelerating rotarod protocol, the tilted running wheel test, the T-maze protocol in which extramaze cues had been removed, and the procedural/response-based version of the cross-maze task.” In Figure 1, the paper has two graphs comparing the performance of the genetically enhanced mice in a maze to the performance of mice without the genetic enhancement. In one graph, the genetically enhanced mice did a little better, and in the second graph they did a little worse. This is not at all compelling evidence of increased intelligence.

As so often happens nowadays in neuroscience literature, the authors gave their paper a title that was not warranted by the data collected. The title they gave is "Humanized Foxp2 accelerates learning by enhancing transitions from declarative to procedural performance." That title in inappropriate given the results described above. The paper mentions no blinding protocol, meaning it failed to follow best practices for experimental research. The study group sizes were sometimes as high as 21 but often much smaller. A result such as this could very easily have been produced by chance variations having nothing to do with the difference in genomes. 

What we see in some of these studies is a very creative searching for superior cognitive performance after animals are tested, by graphing rarely-graphed performance numbers.  There are many ways of testing learning, intelligence and memory in small animals. Eleven different methods are discussed on the page here.  Each test offers multiple different things that can be measured.  For example, in the Elevated Plus Maze test described here, there are at least six different performance numbers that could be gathered and graphed: the duration and entry frequency numbers graphed here, and the % open arms number, the % closed arms number, the number of head dips, and the number of passages numbers graphed here.  With at least eleven different possible performance tests each offering five or more numbers that can be graphed, it seems that someone testing learning or memory in a rodent can have up to fifty or more different performance measures that he can graph in his scientific paper. 

So should we be impressed when some paper testing genetically modified rodents shows a few graphs showing superior performance from genetically modified rodents? Not at all.  Given random performance variations from a variety of tests, with no effect at all from genetic modifications, we would expect that merely by chance a few of the numbers for the genetically modified rodents would be better.  And given a situation where the writers of scientific papers have the freedom to cherry-pick whatever results look most favorable to some hypothesis they are claiming (because they did not pre-register beforehand exactly which results they would be graphing), we would expect such to-be-expected-by-chance results to show up as being graphed in their papers. Similarly, if I have the freedom to cherry-pick any five graphs out of 50 possible graphs that could be made numerically comparing the quality of life in the United States and life in Afghanistan, I could probably create the impression that those in Afghanistan have a superior quality of life than those in the United States.   

Imagine you are comparing two baseball teams for which plays baseball better. There is one generally recognized way of judging which team is better: their position in the team standings. But imagine some baseball scholar has the freedom to compare baseball teams in any of 40 different ways, using metrics such as the total runs scored per season, the average runs scored per game, the total number of games won, the total number of strikeouts per game, the average time spent on a base, the total number of walks, the total number of caught balls, the total number of bat swings, the total number of game throws (practice or non-practice), the cleanliness of uniforms, the average time spent in the field, the average time spent in the batter box, and so on and so forth.  By cherry-picking 4 or 5 of these statistics and displaying them in graphs, the baseball scholar could make an average team look like some superior team. Similarly, with the freedom to graph any of about 50 different numbers gathered from any of 10 different experiments,  any researcher can make some genetically engineered mice look as if they have better intelligence or memory, even if there is no robust evidence for superior intelligence or memory.  In some of the papers discussed above, we do see scientists graphing rarely-used performance metrics, in shady "grasping at straws" attempts to show superiority of their genetically engineered mice. 

If he is doing some low-statistical-power study using way too few subjects for a robust result, the person trying to get evidence for some unfounded claim is always greatly helped if he uses some test in which results vastly differ by 1000% or more from animal to animal of the same species.  That way such a person will be much more likely to get some false alarm result caused by one or two random-variation outliers that cause  some average to be raised.  The Morris Water Maze test (the main test used to test rodent memory) is such a test. Table 1 of the paper here shows that when such a test is given to 46 ordinary rats, the results differ from animal to animal by about 3000% or more, with some animals taking only a few seconds to find the hidden platform, and other animals not finding it in even two minutes.  A similar situation occurs with mazes used to test intelligence, which produce vast variations in performance (1000% or more) from animal to animal when normal animals of the same species are tested.  We should always suspect false alarm results when such tests are done with study group sizes smaller than 15 (and a much higher study group size would be needed for a robust result). 

No matter how long you search, you will not be able to find any well-designed and well-replicated scientific studies with good study group sizes showing any robust evidence for superior intelligence or superior memory in any animals because of genetic engineering. 

Be Very Wary of Astronomers Talking Of Prebiotic Molecules in Space

The scientists who call themselves SETI scientists use giant radio telescopes to search for radio signals coming from other planets. This method has been used for 60 years, and has not produced any promising results. The same scientists use optical telescopes to search for signs of optical radio beacons or signs of engineering by super-advanced civilizations. Such methods have also failed.  

Such methods have been used fruitlessly to a gigantic extent. An article in Scientific American has a headline of "Alien Supercivilizations Absent from 100,000 Nearby Galaxies."  Below are some of the failed searches:

• The SERENDIP project, surveying a large portion of the sky, the portion depicted in Figure 4 of the paper here, a project which a Sky and Telescope article tells us surveyed "many billions of Milky Way stars."
• The Southern SERENDIP project surveying a large portion of the sky, the portion depicted in Figure 2 of the paper here.
• A SETI project surveying a significant portion of the sky, the portion depicted in Figure 2 of the paper here. 
• The all-sky SETI survey discussed here, which operated continuously for more than four years. 
• The two-year southern sky SETI search discussed here, which observed for 9000 hours and "covered the sky almost two times."  
• A recent failed search of 10 million stars using the latest and greatest technology. 

Astronomers do not claim success in such searches. But astronomers often claim success in a different type of space search: a search for life-relevant molecules floating around in outer space.  Unfortunately these claims of success are generally unfounded. 

For example, in September 2021 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."

As I discuss in the post here, the densities of these molecules in the so-called "reservoirs" was 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." 

The hogwash about prebiotic molecules in space continues to this day.  The latest misleading headline is one stating this: "Key Discovery in Search for Origin of Life – Astronomers Detect Largest Molecule Yet in a Cosmic 'Dust-Trap' ”.  The molecule found is dimethyl ether, with a formula of CH₃OCH₃.  Is this a building block of visible life? No. The building blocks of visible living things are cells, which are billions of time more complex. Is this chemical a building block of microscopic one-celled life? No. The building blocks of microscopic one-celled life are things such as protein molecules and nucleic acids. Is this dimethyl ether at least one of the building blocks of the building blocks of one-celled microscopic life? No. Such building blocks of the building blocks of one-celled microscopic life are things such as nucleotides and amino acids, which are more complex molecules containing carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen (the last of these is not in dimethyl ether).  Dimethyl ether is neither a building block of one-celled microscopic life nor a building block of the building blocks of one-celled microscopic life. 

How much of this dimethyl ether was found? We hear not a single word about that in the press release. We also hear no clear mention of how much of this dimethyl ether was found in the scientific paper.  But there is a way to find out about the density of such a molecule in the observed protoplanetary disk, by doing a little jumping through hoops:

(1) Figure 3 of the scientific paper tells us that the density of dimethly ether was about a tenth of the density of methanol (CH₃OH). 

(2)  Figure 1 of the paper here tells us that the density of methanol in protoplanetary disks is about a millionth of the density of gaseous hydrogen. 

(3) The source here tells us the hydrogen density in protoplanetary disks is about 10⁴  (10,000 molecules) per cubic centimeter. 

From the numbers above it seems that the density of dimethly ether is only about 1 molecule per 1000 cubic centimeters, a ten-millionth of 10⁴  (10,000 molecules) per cubic centimeter.  That is a density of about 1 molecule for each cubic volume that is 10 centimeters or 4 inches across. Since a dimethly ether molecule is way, way too small to see, this is a negligible amount. 

So it's not true at all that astronomers made a "key discovery in [the] search for [the] origin of life."  The only discovery was a biologically irrelevant molecule found in the tiniest trace amount. 

Astronomers have been making extremely false statements about the abundance of prebiotic molecules for a very long time. Perhaps the first major astronomer to start shoveling baloney on this topic was Carl Sagan. At about the 2:15 minute mark in the interview here,  Sagan began to tell a great big falsehood related to extraterrestrial life.  He stated the following:

"The carbon-rich complex molecules that are essential for the kind of life we know about, are fantastically abundant. They litter the universe. We see them in asteroids, and comets, and the moons and the outer solar system, and even in the cool dark spaces between the stars. So the stuff of life is everywhere."

He thereby led his listeners to think that “stuff of life” has been discovered in outer space. No such thing has occurred. The “stuff of life” would be things such as nucleic acids and functional proteins, and they have never been discovered in outer space. There are virtually no signs of the building blocks of life in outer space. None of the twenty amino acids used by living things has been discovered in space, other than the two simplest amino acids, glycine and alanine (which were not found in space while Sagan lived). The claimed detections of glycine and alanine are "tiniest trace amount" things that are rather dubious, and we cannot be sure that such things were really found. Sagan frequently repeated this "stuff of life is everywhere" falsehood in a variety of places. 

Sagan's misstatement on this topic have been repeated by many astronomers. A NASA press announcement states, "Massive Stars Are Factories for Ingredients to Life."  The headline and story are misleading in two respects. The use of the term "factories" implies that something complex is being created.  That is not correct, because the report merely refers to very simple things: water (H₂0), ammonia (NH₃), methane (CH₄), and acetylene (C₂H₂).  All of these have chemical formulas much simpler than the amino acids that are the simplest things that could be called building blocks of life.  And neither ammonia nor methane nor acetylene is actually an ingredient of life, in the sense of being any kind of building block of life. 

Doing calculations like the one I did above, and using Figure 1 of the paper here, a calculation of the abundance of ammonia and methane and acetylene in protostars (such as found in environments like the Orion Nebula) give you an abundance of about 10 molecules for each fist-sized volume of matter. That's hardly an abundance comparable to a factory's production. 

      Much less dense that it looks: Orion Nebula (Credit: NASA)

What astronomers keep doing again and again is reporting the detection in space of biologically irrelevant molecules that are neither building blocks of life nor the building blocks of the building blocks of life; and the observation of such molecules is described as something relevant to the question of the origin of life or the likelihood of extraterrestrial life, even though the molecules were detected in such extremely sparse amounts that no such claim should be made.  Using obfuscation or information hiding tactics, such astronomers will avoid telling us in plain English that the molecules were detected merely in the tiniest trace amounts.  If you want to find out the density per square meter of the molecules reported, it will be as hard as  pulling teeth.  

In the NASA announcement here, it was announced that scientists had discovered the "largest and farthest reservoir of water ever detected in the universe," with an amount equal to 140 trillion times the amount of water on Earth. That sounds impressive, until you keep reading the announcement, and find that this amount is spread over hundreds of cubic light-years, meaning that the density of water in this so-called "reservoir" probably doesn't even equal the water vapor at the 2-meter-level in the driest part of the Sahara Desert. 

Often the astronomers will make a claim such as stating that the "column density" of the molecules was something like a trillion molecules, failing to tell us that this "column density" is the total amount of molecules in a vast volume of outer space.  So some tiniest trace amount such as a few molecules per square meter may be described using some "column density" figure giving a layman the impression the molecules exist in some density 1,000,000,000,000,000 times greater than the actual density.  Getting no plain English in regard to molecular density, press release writers will describe such observations in enormously misleading terms, sometimes referring to "reservoirs" of the molecules, even though the observed density may be 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 times less dense than the molecular density in a reservoir of water. 

A recent press article is entitled, "New Clues on Origins of Life As Peptides Produced in Space-Like Conditions." The article refers to a laboratory experiment that claims to be simulating conditions in interstellar clouds.  We should be very skeptical that the experiment realistically simulated any conditions in outer space, because origin-of-life researchers have a long history of creating unrealistic experiments that do not realistically simulate any natural conditions, and then claiming such experiments as simulations of natural conditions.  In the Methods section of the scientific paper, we read this:

"The background pressure inside the vacuum chamber (1 × 10−10 mbar) and the temperature of the substrate (10 K) allowed us to mimic the chemistry under dense molecular cloud conditions. We used approximately equal amounts of CO and NH3 molecules, while the number of C atoms was at least ten times smaller."

But according to Figure 1 of the scientific paper here, ammonia (NH3 ) is a thousand times less common than CO (carbon monoxide) in molecular clouds, and ammonia (NH3 ) is a ten times less common than CO (carbon monoxide) in high-mass protostars.  So clearly the experiment did not realistically simulate molecular  clouds. And what density of NH3 and ammonia was used? The methods section of the paper does not tell us. We may presume that the density of such chemicals was some density very much greater than we find in molecular clouds in space, where NH3 is a millionth as common as hydrogen, according to Figure 1 of the scientific paper here. It seems the experiment was not at all a realistic simulation of any conditions in outer space. 

As discussed above,  astronomers make misleading claims about a discovery of "reservoirs" of "building blocks of life" when they are talking about chemicals which are not building blocks of life and which have been found only in amounts 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 times less dense than the molecular density in a reservoir of water. This is only one type of outrageously misleading speech trying to warm you up to the dea of life accidentally appearing on other planets.  Another example of such speech comes from the chemists.  An example was a recent full-of-falsehoods story with this headline:

"Scientists Create RNA That Evolves on Its Own. This Could Be How Life on Earth Started."

The beginning of the enormously misleading news story told us this untrue tale that contains several untruths: 

"We just received more evidence that life on Earth may have started with RNA, with scientists in Japan creating RNA that can replicate, diversify, and develop complexity all on its own. Long before Earth had its first budding cells of primordial ooze, it was awash with a churning organic soup that sat on the brink of something profound. That thin line between complex chemistry and the evolution of life represents a pivotal moment in the emergence of biology."

The study refers to some result produced through the most ridiculously artificial and high-tech manipulations, meaning that the claim about RNA doing something "all on its own" was very much untrue. The claim in the second sentence about Earth being "awash with a churning organic soup" is groundless.  The idea of a "primordial soup" filled with "building blocks of life" has no basis in fact.  Such claims are based on appeals to irrelevant experiments such as the Miller-Urey experiment, which failed in multiple ways to realistically simulate the early Earth (as discussed here).  Far from there being a "thin line" between complex chemistry and the evolution of life, there is a barrier like the barrier between the assorted metal scraps in a junkyard and a very large 10-story skyscraper equipped with working electricity and plumbling. 

The story is based on the paper here. The paper has a misleading title referring to "evolutionary transitions." The experiment produced results through extremely elaborate and hi-tech manual manipulations that were nothing like natural evolution. Nothing was done to simulate any natural conditions on the early Earth. To the contrary, a close examination of the "Methods" section of the paper reveals that at every step what is going on is labor-intensive manual manipulations by the experimenters, much of which involved high-tech equipment. The researchers started out with some concoction that had been produced through extensive manual manipulation and high-tech interventions by previous researchers, and then added many rounds of their own extensive manual manipulations and high-tech interventions. Below is a quote giving you a little idea of how utterly unnatural these proceedings were, with phrases such as "16000 rpm" and words such as "centrifugation" referring to very advanced high-tech equipment:

"All RNA clones were prepared from the plasmids by in vitro transcription with T7 RNA polymerase (Takara) after digestion with Sma I (Takara). The remaining plasmids were treated with DNase I (Takara), and the transcribed RNAs were purified using the RNeasy Mini kit (Qiagen)...164 rounds of replication were performed, started with the RNA population in round 74 of the main experiment (total 240 rounds). In round 1, 10 μl of reaction mixture containing 1 nM HL0–0 and the translation system was vigorously mixed with 1 ml of buffer-saturated oil using a homogenizer (POLYTRON PT-1300D, KINEMATICA) at 16,000 rpm for 1 min on ice to prepare water-in-oil droplets....Next, the droplets were incubated at 37 °C for 5 h to induce RNA replication through protein translation. From round 2 to 240, 200 μl of water-in-oil droplets in the previous round, 10 μl of the translation system, and 800 μl of buffer-saturated oil were homogenized by the same method to prepare a new droplet population, followed by incubation under the same condition (at 37 °C for 5 h) to induce RNA replication....The recovered solution was mixed with four volumes of diethyl ether, centrifuged (11,000 × g, 1 min) to remove the diethyl ether phase, and purified using RNeasy Mini kit (Qiagen). Obtained RNA samples were then subjected to 8% polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis in 1× TBE buffer."

There were many other further manual manipulations and high-tech interventions to produce the uninteresting results reported in the paper, which our hugely false news story has told us involves RNA that can "replicate, diversify, and develop complexity all on its own."  That's as misleading as describing a printing plant and saying it shows that books can make copies of themselves "all on their own." No actual functional complexity was produced through all this complex manual and hi-tech manipulation. No natural replication of RNA was observed. There is no truth to claims that the paper does something to support the "RNA World" hypothesis about life's origin. 

A spacecraft gathered a mere 5 grams of material from an asteroid, and the material was brought back to Earth. A recent article on www.space.com says, "Pristine asteroid Ryugu contains amino acids that are building blocks of life."  Amino acids are not actually buiding blocks of life, but merely the building blocks of the building blocks of one-celled life. The building blocks of microscopic life are functional protein molecules, which have never been detected in space. 

The scientific paper says that only two of the twenty amino acids used by earthly proteins were found in the asteroid: the two simplest amino acids, glycine and alanine. In what abundance were such amino acids found? The paper does not say, and we therefore cannot have much confidence in such claims.  We may presume that any traces of such amino acids were merely the tiniest traces, such as I part in a billion. If the authors had found any higher abundance, they no doubt would have mentioned the abundance found. Unfortunately, when something is detected in only the tiniest trace amounts, or when paper authors decline to mention in what abundance something was found, we should always doubt the claim that a detection was made. It's too easy to misidentify (or get something from trace earthly contamination) when you are dealing with the tiniest trace amounts. 

An example of the "give you the wrong idea" news coverage about prebiotic molecules in space is a recent NASA page asking the rhetorical question "Could the blueprint for life have been generated in asteroids?" The idea that DNA is a blueprint for making living things is a mythical claim that scientists have long advanced for ideological reasons. Having only low-level chemical information, DNA does not have any blueprint or recipe or algorithm for making an organism or any of its organs or any of its cells.  

The article refers to some new analysis of old meteorites, one that reports finding two prebiotic molecules that were not previously found when such meteorites were analyzed.  This reported discovery is very questionable. If such molecules were there, why would they have not shown up in previous investigations of the meteorites?  The NASA page conveniently fails to mention the abundances reported. When we look at the scientific paper, we find that we have a mere claim that the tiniest trace abundances were found. The paper says, 'Other pyrimidine nucleobases, such as cytosine and thymine, as well as their analogs containing a pyrimidine ring, were identified by their chromatographic retention times, accurate mass measurements of their parent masses, and mass fragmentation patterns in the MS/MS measurements (Supplementary Table 1), with concentrations ranging from 0.02 to 6 ppb (Table 2)." That is an abundance of less than 7 parts per billion (ppb means parts per billion). We should not have great confidence in such detections, since the reported abundances are so very small. 

Like the NASA page, a press release news story on this paper totally fails to mention the trivial abundances reported (less than 7 parts per billion), and incorrectly states this:

"We still don't know just how the first life emerged on Earth. One suggestion is that the building blocks arrived here from space; now, a new study of several carbon-rich meteorites has added weight to this idea." 

No, since the study reports only negligible abundances of less than 7 parts per billion, it does not add weight to the idea that life arose by building blocks arising from space. 

Any Pathway to an Afterlife Realm Implies the Possibility of Reverse Visits

The site www.archive.org is an invaluable resource for scholars of psychic phenomena and the paranormal. Using the site, you can find very many books written by witnesses of the paranormal and scholars of the paranormal.  The full text of very many of these books can be read by a user who does not even bother to register at the site.  Examples of such books are below:

• The astronomer Camille Flammarion's monumental three-volume work Death and Its Mystery (which you can read here, here and here);
• Flammarion's also monumental opus The Unknown;
• Catherine Crowe's long book The Night Side of Nature;
• The often cited work two-volume Phantasms of the Living by Gurney, Podmore and Myers, which you can read here and here;
• The long and very fascinating work Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World by former US congressman Robert Dale Owen;
• The Debatable Land Between This World and the Next by the same author, a worthy successor volume of equal length; 

• The Voices by Vice-Admiral William Usborne Moore, a fascinating account of mysterious auditory phenomena during seances;
• On the Edge of the Etheric by James Arthur Findlay, a book on the same topic;
• The Proof Palpable of Immortality by Epes Sargeant;
• Planchette, or the Despair of Science, a longer work on paranormal phenomena by the same author;

• Natural and Mesmeric Clairvoyance by James Esdaille MD, written by a doctor who was very successful in getting very large numbers of patients to be pain-free during surgery without anesthesia (using only hypnosis);
• The very long two-volume work Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death by Frederic Myers, which you can read here and here;
• From the Unconscious to the Conscious by Gustave Geley;
• The Widow's Mite and Other Psychic Phenomena by Isaac Funk, the same Funk of the famous Funk and Wagnall's dictionary;
• The Watseka Wonder by E.W. Stevens,  a contemporary account of one of the most notable cases in the history of the paranormal, discussed here; 
• Noted Witnesses for Psychic Occurrences by W. F. Prince, a book documenting how countless illustrious names have reported paranormal experiences;
• Researches into the Phenomena of Modern Spiritualism by Sir William Crookes, one of the most accomplished physicists of the nineteenth century;
• The Survival of Man by physicist Sir Oliver Lodge;
• Out-of-the-Body Experiences by Robert Crookall;
• More Astral Projections by the same author, containing some fascinating cases I discuss here;
• What Happens When You Die by the same author;
• Dead and Gone by James S. Pollack, a very readable description of paranormal phenomena;
• Ghosts and Poltergeists by Herbert Thurston and J.H. Crehan, one of the most in-depth examinations of poltergeist cases;
• Phenomena of Materialization by Baron Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, discussing very interesting results described here;
• Letters to a Candid Inquirer, on Animal Magnetism, by William Gregory M.D. professor of Chemistry at Edinburgh University,  a book abundantly documenting the reality of clairvoyance, as discussed here; 
• New Frontiers of the Mind by J. B. Rhine, the foremost twentieth century researcher on ESP;
• After Death -- What? by Cesare Lombroso;
• Thirty Years of Psychical Research by Charles Richet, a Nobel Prize winner in Physiology or Medicine;
• The Seeress of Provost by physician Justinus Kerner, an astonishing case history described here; 
• There Is No Death by Florence Marryat;
• Mysterious Psychic Forces, another great work on the paranormal featuring abundant first-hand testimony by the astronomer Camille Flammarion;
• Patience Worth: A Psychic Mystery by Casper S. Yost, a book documenting one of the most interesting cases of the twentieth century;
• Seen and Unseen by Emily Katherine Bates, a remarkable account of a woman's observations of paranormal phenomena around the world;
• The Proofs of Life After Death, a balanced book presenting the opinions of many scientists, heavy thinkers and investigators regarding whether there is good evidence for life after death;
• An Introduction to the Study of Animal Magnetism by the Baron Dupotet de Sennevoy, a book that abundantly testifies to the reality of clairvoyance during hypnotic trances; 
• The "Report on Spiritualism" by the Dialectical Society of London, a document of more than 400 pages containing some of the most shocking and interesting testimony ever given (the contents of which are discussed here). 
• Incidents in My Life by D. D. Home, one of the most famous mediums;
• The Case for Astral Projection by Slyvan Muldoon;
• Supernormal Faculties in Man by Eugene Osty, one of the most carefully documented accounts of clairvoyance, including the very interesting case discussed here;
• Man and His Relations by Samuel Byron Brittan, a very long and little-known classic of parapsychology with contents described here. 
• Glimpses of the Unseen by B. F. Austin, a 500+ page book documenting a great variety of paranormal experiences;
•  The 633-page book "Psychical and Supernormal Phenomena, Their Observation and Experimentation" by Dr. Paul Joire, which you can read here (it includes the extremely interesting case I discuss here);
• Studies in the Out-lying Fields of Psychic Science by Hudson Tuttle; 
• Mollie Fancher, the Brooklyn Enigma, a long case history of one of history's most astonishing clairvoyants;
• China's Super Psychics by Paul Dong and Thomas E. Raffill;
• Man's Survival After Death by Charles L.Tweedale, a long book that includes many cases from the annals of the Society for Psychical Research, as well as many fascinating first-hand cases of paranormal observation by Tweedale and his family;
• Psychic Science: An Introduction and Contribution to the Experimental Study of Psychical Phenomena by Emile Boirac, which you can read here. 

If you take the time to register at www.archive.org, which does not take long, the door will be opened to a huge number of more modern books, which you can "borrow" on an hourly basis simply by pressing a Borrow button after logging in. By clicking on the Borrow button after registering, you will be able to read important works on the paranormal such as these: 

• Life After Life by Raymond Moody;
• Hidden Channels of the Mind by Louisa Rhine, who was one of the leading collectors of accounts of spontaneous telepathy and spontaneous precognition;
• Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain by Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder;
• The Gift: ESP, the Extraordinary Experiences of Ordinary People by Sally Rhine Feather and Michael Schmicker;
• What Happens When You Die by Robert Crookall PhD, which contains many interesting accounts of out-of-body experiences;
• Out-of-Body Experiences: A Handbook by Janet Lee Mitchell;
• Extraordinary Experiences: Personal Accounts of the Paranormal in Canada by John Robert Colombo;
• At the Hour of Death by Karlis Osis and Erlendur Haraldsson.

An aspect of www.archive.org that I particularly like is that there are individual URLs for each page.  So if a scholar is citing page 347 of some book, he can include a link that takes the reader exactly to that specific page. 

A technique I recommend for serious students of psychic phenomena is to read works at www.archive.org, and look for references in such works to other books that sound worth reading. When you hear an interesting book mentioned, then look and see whether that book is also available for free at www.archive.org. If so, save the URL for that other book in a reading list to be finished later. 

I have recently found quite a few interesting works at www.archive.org on the topic of what is called after-death communication.  In such an event someone may experience some mysterious effect he may regard as having come from some person who died. For example:

• Someone may report that while awake he heard the voice of someone who died.
• Someone may report that while awake he saw some human form that looked like someone who died.
• Someone may report some mysterious hard-to-explain event occurring at the time someone died or shortly thereafter. 
• Someone may report having some "feeling of presence" in which he somehow gets the idea that some deceased person is near. 
• Someone may report some very hard-to-explain event that he regards as some kind of sign of manifestation of someone who died, which may occur months or years after the person died. 
• Someone may have an unusually high number of dreams about someone who died. 
• Someone may have some particularly vivid dream about someone who died. 

A scientific paper tells us that experiences such as these are common. Below is a quote:

"Haraldsson reported on an Icelandic survey in which 31% reported that they had ‘perceived or felt the nearness of a deceased person’ (36% of women, 24% of men), and in the USA McCready and Greeley found that 27% of respondents answered affirmatively the question ‘Have you ever felt that you were really in touch with someone who had died?’ In the UK, an Ipsos MORI poll found that 17% of their sample claimed to have personally experienced a ‘ghost’, and a subsequent poll found that 10.4% had experienced an ADC [after-death communication].  In Germany the incidence of having experienced an ‘apparition’ (described as perceiving something they took for a ‘ghost’ of someone who had died) was 15.8% (18.6% of women, 11.3% of men). These experiences seem to be independent of culture or religious affiliation."

One very interesting book on this topic (which can be read at www.archive.org) is the 2005 book "Induced After-Death Communication : A New Therapy for Healing Grief and Trauma" by Alan L. Botkin, who holds a Doctor of Psychology degree. After mentioning 20 years of experience treating subjects at a Chicago Veterans Administration hospital, Botkin describes a very high success rate treating grief-stricken subjects or subjects suffering from PTSD (post-traumatic stress syndrome), using an extremely unorthodox technique.  The technique first involves something called  EMDR (eye movement desenitization and reprocessing), which sounds a bit like hypnosis.  The technique somehow leads to subjects reporting visions of the deceased, experiences that end up having a highly therapeutic value.  Botkin says he has used that technique on thousands of patients, and claims "the therapy method has worked for nearly everyone with whom we have had sessions."  Conversely, conventional therapeutic methods of treating PTSD tend to be very much less effective. 

On page 32 Botkin states that the cases he treats often involve someone haunted by some image of the last time they saw a dead person, perhaps a distressed or disfigured face or a badly wounded person. He says that with his technique such a distressing image is replaced by an image of the same person but with some smiling face, often accompanied by words claiming well-being or happiness.  On page 36 Botkin states that these "induced after-death communication" experiences which his subjects report typically last between 5 and 20 seconds, but may last as long as 10 to 20 minutes.  A movie recently atttempted to document therapeutic treatment based on Botkin's technique. You can learn about the movie at this site. 

Botkin's book has been largely ignored, which is a shame. Regardless of whether such experiences do or do not come from actual contact with the deceased, a technique that is so powerfully effective deserves the fullest attention of psychiatrists and psychologists.  What has occurred is just another example of the massive failure of psychiatrists and psychologists to follow up on promising leads, while continuing to stick with ineffective techniques that are largely chemical based.  In the nineteenth century before 1870 very many hypnotists reported the most astonishing medical improvements and useful medical effects (physical and psychological) from hypnotic treatment, which were long referred to under the name of Mesmerism or animal magnetism.  But after about 1870 there was little effort by psychologists to follow up on such successes, using the methods that had produced the successes. There was often a practice of hypnotism, but a kind of watered-down version of hypnotism that was not as effective.  

Two other books on after-death communication that can be read on www.archive.org are the book After Death Communication by Emma Heathcote-James and the book Messages and Miracles: Extraordinary Experiences of the Bereaved by Louis E. Legrand PhD. In these books we have many accounts of apparition sightings.  Countless apparition sightings were reported in the literature of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, as you can read about in the post here and the posts that post links to. Some have claimed that in modern times apparitions are seen less frequently, but judging from the accounts in these books, that is not the case. 

On page 137 of the Legrand book, we have an interesting list of different types of apparitions that people report seeing. These include two-dimensional apparitions like seeing a photo, three-dimensional apparitions in which someone may look as real as if he were still alive on Earth, mist-shrouded or translucent apparitions, apparitions that appear only as a figure, and "angelic" apparitions in which someone may appear surrounded by light.  For example, in a different book on after-death communications by a different PhD, we have on page 30 an account of a person saying she saw her deceased sister standing in a doorway "as solid as you or me," with an instant disappearance "in the blink of an eye." But on the next page we have an account by a different person saying she saw her deceased father "see-through, but with color," an apparition that "began fading until it just disappeared."  The author of the book (Edie Devers) says, "Many people report seeing the deceased as a living person (no different from any other living person) or as a spiritual entity (transparent and/or not in a physical body)."

The book by Legrand has very many lengthy first-person accounts of people who reported having hard-to-explain experiences that the author has categorized as after-death communication.  One minor imperfection with Legrand's book is that he repeatedly defines after-death communication as if it only occurred with mourning people, but quite a few experiences like those in my bullet list above seem to occur to people who are no longer mourning some friend or relative who died. 

The book is written in question-and-answer format. On pages 101-102 Legrand considers the question of how some soul could make contact with an earthly relative (or give some sign to an earthly relative) after that soul had progressed to some afterlife realm.  Legrand's answer is a poor one. He basically appeals to the miraculous, saying that this could happen if God willed it or some angel helped it happen.  He could have answered the question in a better way. 

Let us consider the hypothesis that a human soul can survive death and progress or travel to some afterlife realm of existence. It is not necessary to maintain that such a thing happens each time by some divine fiat, by some miraculous intervention.  Following the very strong evidence (discussed in the posts of this site) that the brain is absolutely inadequate to account for human mental phenomena and human memory, we can believe very justifiably that the real basis of human minds and human memory is some non-neural soul. If humans have a soul, there could be some transit path by which souls can leave Earth and go elsewhere.  Evidence from near-death experiences suggest that there may well be such a transit path. Commonly people in near-death experiences experience something like traveling through a tunnel or arriving in some afterlife realm where deceased ancestors are seen.  If such a transit path exists,  then that implies a strong possibility or probability that the path allows travel in both directions. 

Humans sometimes construct one-way transit paths. But most of nature's transit paths are two-way paths.  For example, a river and a lake and an ocean can be crossed going in either direction. So can a mountain pass or a desert plain or a meadow or the atmosphere (in which helicopters or spacecraft can traverse going up or down).  It is relatively rare to find in nature a one-way transit path (a waterfall is practically the only example I can think of). 

One of nature's rather rare one-way paths

If a human soul could somehow leave our earthly realm and go to some other state of existence, this tends to imply the possibility of a return (possibly a very brief return) by which the journey can be made in the opposite direction.  So if Joe believes that his late mother died and that her soul went to some heaven or afterlife realm, it would seem that Joe should not be terribly surprised to see such a person briefly returning (or perhaps some sign created by the invisible presence of such a person after briefly returning).  Most paths of travel are two-way paths rather than one-way paths. 

Mysterious appearances of coins are some of the things that many people regard as examples of manifestations from the departed or some other strange reality, perhaps angels. I have had innumerable mysterious-seeming occurrences involving coins, such as seeing a coin roll up from behind me (on its edge) while I was alone in an apartment, and just after I had double-checked that there were no loose coins in the apartment (a checking that followed what seemed like, over several days, a great repetition of finding mysterious coins in the apartment).  Just after publishing this post on my blog today, I found a dime in my shoe, right under the heel of my foot. The shoe (a typical running shoe like the one here) was one which I had previously worn a few minutes earlier without noticing any such thing.  

An interesting and very speculative hypothesis is that it is possible for some mysterious unseen presence to move or materialize objects in our world, but that the more massive the object, the harder such a task is. In such a case we might expect strange events involving very lightweight objects such as dimes and hairs and small feathers to occur vastly more often than strange events involving heavy objects.  In a 2018 post I stated, "Since 2014 the breakdown of the number of anomalous-seeming coins I have sighted is as follows: 121 pennies, only two nickels, 20 quarters, and 62 dimes, for a total of 205 coins."  What is striking here is that I recorded hard-to-explain dimes appearing 36 times more frequently than hard-to-explain nickels, but in the US coin population dimes are only about twice as common as nickels.  So it is incredibly unlikely that such a 36-to-1 ratio would occur among some random set of hundreds of coins.  The difference might have to do with the fact that a nickel is about twice as heavy as a dime. Under the imaginative hypothesis I mentioned, the sighting of hard-to-explain nickels might be less common because it is harder for spooky things to happen with heavier objects.