When Hi-Tech Manufacturing Is Passed Off as Evolution

Many biologists and natural history experts have been guilty of misleading language and misleading practices. Below are some examples:

• Many biologists write scientific papers that have titles, summaries or causal inferences that are not justified by the data in the papers. A scientific study found that "Thirty-four percent of academic studies and 48% of media articles used language that reviewers considered too strong for their strength of causal inference." A study of inaccuracy in the titles of scientific papers states, "23.4 % of the titles contain inaccuracies of some kind." A scientific study found that 48% of scientific papers use "spin" in their abstracts.
• Many neuroscientists design experiments with way-too-small sample sizes, experiments in which there will be a very large chance of a false alarm, and then enthusiastically report the results of such experiments, failing to inform us of the low statistical power involved.
• Many biologists present visually misleading brain visuals that create impressions of very large brain activity differences that do not match the underlying data of the brain scans, which show only very small differences such as 1 part in 200.
• Abusing the word "selection" which refers to choice by a conscious agent, many biologists repeatedly use the misleading phrase "natural selection" to refer to some effect that is not actually selection.
• Many biologists repeatedly use speculative charts and diagrams that are not correctly identified as being speculative.
• Many biologists make inappropriate use of images, and an article states "35,000 papers may need to be retracted for image doctoring."
• Many biologists repeatedly make inappropriate use of "action verbs" in describing inanimate chemical units, using terms such as "guide," "control" and "regulate" as if mindless chemicals had minds or agendas of their own.
• Many biologists publish extremely inaccurate and misleading diagrams of cells, causing people to think cells are 1000 times simpler than they are.
• Some biologists write extremely inaccurate and misleading comparisons in which they claim that there is little difference between the minds of animals and the minds of humans.
• Some biologists fallaciously try to get us to draw conclusions about natural selection and natural evolution based on what goes on in artificial selection. 
• As discussed here, many natural history experts create or display misleading skeletons or skulls, using techniques such as (1) a large use of speculative gluing together of bone fragments that may have come from different organisms or different species;  (2) heavy use of plaster-like filling material to fill in the many bone gaps that may be 50% or more of the displayed fossil; (3) the creation and display of entirely fiberglass fossil-lookalikes that museum attendees mistake for actual fossils. Such experts often use misleading language, such as referring to a few small bone fragments (which may be from different individuals or different species) as a "skull." 
• When finding some very weak correlation with a negligible  correlation coefficient, biologists may announce the correlation as being significant, or publish misleading "trend line" graphs, and fail to state clearly how weak the correlation is.  
• Many biologists make unproven statements about specific biological units such as synapses, failing to inform us of the relevant facts that are inconsistent with their claims (such as the short lifetimes of synapse proteins and the fact that a chemical synapse transmits signals with a reliability of less than 50%).
• Although there is no physical sign of any lasting representations in the brain other than the DNA representations of low-level chemical information (such as nucleotide base pairs representing amino acids), neuroscientists frequently make misleading claims about "neural representations," citing evidence that is no real evidence of any representation going on. 
• Some biologists publish brain diagrams making dubious and unwarranted claims of function localization.
• Some biologists use the term "early human" when it is not justified, referring to organisms that showed no signs of the hallmark characteristics of humans, the use of language or symbols.
• Many biologists make improper citations of other scientific papers, claiming that they said something or established something such papers did not actually say or establish (a study of such quotation errors found that 25% of paper citations are in error).
• For decades many biologists have made false claims that the hippocampus is necessary for the formation of new memories, an idea debunked by a 2020 paper finding that "contrary to predictions, we observed no robust impairments in memory or relational cognition either within- or between-groups following hippocampal damage," and also a 1992 paper studying memory in 140 humans who had a hippocampus removed, with a majority having no major memory decline, and a small but substantial fraction having memory improvements (judging from their test scores) after removal of a hippocampus. 
• Many biologists use misleading terms, such as when they use the term "body plan" to refer to something that is not actually a body plan (saying that all chordates have the same body plan), or when they try to explain memory by referring to what they call "long-term potentiation" (an effect that is actually merely a short-term effect). 
• Faced with consistent observational results that a single human personality and mind is well preserved after loss or surgical removal of the corpus callosum connecting the two brain hemispheres,  many biologists have misrepresented such results, claiming or insinuating that such "split-brain" patients have two minds. 
• Trying to get photographic evidence supporting claims about natural selection, scientists photographed dead moths placed on trees, passing off such photos as photos of living organisms.  
• Cognitive neuroscientists very frequently use an extremely misleading technique in which some thought, emotion, behavior or recollection is statistically correlated with some very small group of cells arbitrarily chosen for study, even though there is no reason (even under the assumption of cognitive neuroscientists) to assume that such arbitrarily selected cells (like a few randomly chosen hay strands from a haystack) have any causal connection to the thought, behavior or recollection under study.
• Quite a few biologists have committed the huge deception of claiming or insinuating that a blueprint or recipe for making a human body is to be found in the DNA molecule, something that contains only low-level chemical information, and does not have any specification of how to make a human or any of its organs or any of its cells (DNA does not even specify how to make one of the organelles that are the building blocks of cells). 
• An article in Science states that "more than half of Dutch scientists regularly engage in questionable research practices, such as hiding flaws in their research design or selectively citing literature," and that "one in 12 [8 percent] admitted to committing a more serious form of research misconduct within the past 3 years: the fabrication or falsification of research results."

You can read my posts here and here which give many details backing up the claims made above. In this post I will discuss a misleading practice not mentioned in those two posts: the practice of trying to pass off laborious hi-tech manufacturing efforts as evolution.  It works like this:

(1) Using all kinds of complex manual fiddling involving laborious work by scientists and the involvement of a wide variety of hi-tech equipment, scientists will produce some manufacturing result. 

(2) Most misleadingly, this manufacturing result will then be passed off as evidence of the power of natural evolution.  

We had an example of this type of misleading talk recently when Quanta Magazine published an article entitled "In Test Tubes, RNA Molecules Evolve Into a Tiny Ecosystem." The article title misleadingly tries to insinuate that some life has been produced from lifeless chemicals, but no such thing occurred.  The not-very-complex result produced (very much a manufacturing product produced by manual hi-tech fiddling) was not at all an ecosystem, which is something involving living organisms.  No natural evolution occurred at all. Instead, the result was produced by laborious fiddling by scientists using hi-tech electronic equipment. 

The first paragraph of the article is full of misleading language describing this manufacturing effort:

"After a lengthy experiment with tantalizing implications for origin-of-life studies, a research group in Japan has reported creating a test tube world of molecules that spontaneously evolved both complexity and, surprisingly, cooperation. Over hundreds of hours of replication, a single type of RNA evolved into five different molecular 'species' or lineages of hosts and parasites that coexisted in harmony and cooperated to survive, like the beginning of a 'molecular version of an ecosystem,' said Ryo Mizuuchi, the lead author of the study and a project assistant professor at the University of Tokyo. Their experiment, which confirmed previous theoretical findings, showed that molecules with the means to replicate could spontaneously develop complexity through Darwinian evolution, 'a critical step for the emergence of life,' the researchers wrote."

We have a whole bunch of misleading language in this paragraph, because:

(1) The RNA did not naturally evolve, but merely changed because of very frequent manual hi-tech interventions by scientists.

(2) No actual species were produced, no life was produced, and nothing anywhere near as complex as a functional protein molecule was produced. 

(3) Since no life was produced, no ecosystem was produced. 

(4) No actual Darwinian evolution or natural evolution has occurred, but merely a change in some lifeless chemicals produced by manual hi-tech manufacturing efforts. 

The Quanta article conveniently avoids mentioning all the use of hi-tech equipment and laborious manual fiddling that went on. But it does refer us to a 2016 paper by Bansho et. al. that describes such efforts. In that paper we get a description of how laborious the manufacturing technique was, and how it used hi-tech centrifuge machines that can rotate at 16,000 revolutions per minute.  We read this, which describes only part of the manufacturing process:

"Under the bulk condition, the reaction mixture (10 μL) was incubated at 37 °C for 5 h and one-fifth (2 μL) of the solution was transferred to 8 μL of the reconstituted translation system. The mixture was then incubated at 37 °C for 5 h for the next round of replication. Under the compartmentalized condition, the reaction mixture (10 μL) was vigorously mixed with the buffer-saturated oil phase (1 mL) prepared according to the previous study (7) using a homogenizer (POLYTRON PT-1300D; KINEMATICA) with a plastic disposable shaft at 16,000 rpm for 1 min on ice. The size distribution of the water droplets is shown in Fig. S1. The emulsion was incubated at 37 °C for 5 h and one-fifth (200 μL) of the emulsion was transferred to a new emulsion (800 μL) prepared with the translation system (8 μL) as a water phase by the same method as described above. The added emulsion was then mixed with the homogenizer at 16,000 rpm for 1 min on ice to completely mix the contents of the water droplets and incubated at 37 °C for 5 h for the next round of replication. At each hour during the incubation, aliquots were collected and the host and parasitic RNA concentrations were measured after 10,000-fold dilution for the bulk condition or 100-fold dilution for the compartmentalized condition with 1 mM EDTA (pH 8.0)."

There were apparently many rounds of such laborious hi-tech manual fiddling.

The Quanta article also refers to a 2020 paper that relied on  the same laborious manufacturing technique. In that paper we read "In this study, we performed an additional 77 rounds of replication using the RNA population of round 43 of a previous experiment, using the same method (Bansho et al., 2016)."  So the 2020 paper did some additional manufacturing starting out with results produced by the laborious hi-tech manufacturing process mentioned in the quote above. 

Below is the POLYTRON PT-1300D machine that was used as part of this manufacturing process:

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines "manufacture" as "to make from raw materials by hand or by machinery," and that is exactly what was going on in these so-called experiments. 

The title of the first paper quoted above misleadingly describes its manufacturing results as "evolution." The title of the second paper quoted above misleadingly describes its manufacturing results as "Darwinian evolution." Hi-tech manufacturing with frequent laborious scientist manual labor is not Darwinian evolution.  And even if the results had been produced naturally, it would not be evolution, since no living organisms were involved.

In misleading stories very similar to the misleading stories described above, some press stories have recently described some experimental results produced by Carell and others, and described in their paper "A prebiotically plausible scenario of an RNA–peptide world."  It's the same kind of thing that has been going on for 70 years in news coverage of origin-of-life research: misleading accounts in which irrelevant hi-tech manufacturing procedures are described as if they revealed something encouraging about the origin of life. An example is this story in The Scientist, entitled "Synthetic RNA Can Build Peptides, Hinting at Life’s Beginnings." No such hinting occurred, because the result describes the creation of chains of amino acids merely about 15 amino acids long, without any functional result, which is no more impressive than making a chain of 15 random letters from a little spill of Alpha Bits letters.  A functional cell requires hundreds of proteins, each consisting of hundreds of special arrangements of amino acids. The difference between such a result and the Carell result is like the difference between 15 random characters spilt out from an Alpha Bits box, and a 100-page grammatical and readable instruction manual giving extremely complex functional instructions. 

How did Carell and his colleagues get this result? Did they do some experiment simulating early Earth conditions? Not at all. Instead they used an extremely complicated labor-intensive manufacturing process filled with all kinds of laborious manual interventions and hi-tech processing. The press stories about such results hide such manufacturing details from readers. To get all the gory details of the manufacturing process, it is best to look in the Supplemental Information of the scientific paper.  Reading the pdf file for that (which you can read here), we read details such as this:

"Silyl-protected 5-methyluridine 2 was synthesized starting from 5-methyluridine 1 following a procedure previously described in literature. A solution of 2 (1.0 equiv.) in dry CHCl3 was heated at 60°C. N-bromosuccinimide (NBS) (1.2 equiv., previously purified by recrystallization) and azobisisobutyronitrile (AIBN) (0.12 equiv.) were added and the reaction was stirred under reflux for 1.5 h. After that, the reaction mixture was cooled to r.t. and either MeNH2 (2 M in THF, 5.0 equiv.) for 3a or NH3 (0.5 M in 1,4-dioxane, 5.0 equiv.) for 3b were added. The resulting suspension was stirred for 2 h at r.t. and, subsequently, it was diluted with aq. sat. NaHCO3 solution. The crude was extracted three times with DCM. The combined organic layers were dried (MgSO4), filtered and concentrated. The crude was purified by silica gel column chromatography to furnish 3a,b as a yellow foam...To a solution of 3a,b (1.0 equiv.) in 1,4-dioxane and H2O (1:1 v/v) were added teoc-OSu (1.1 equiv.) and triethylamine (TEA) (1.5 equiv.). The mixture was stirred at r.t. for 16 h. After that, the crude was diluted with water and extracted three times with Et2O. The combined organic layers were washed with water, dried (MgSO4), filtered and concentrated. The obtained residue was purified by silica gel column chromatography to yield the teoc-protected compound 4a,b as a white solid."

This is only a small fraction of the extremely complicated manufacturing process involved. We hear of the use of a machine called a ThermoMixer, the use of an RNA automated synthesizer (an Applied Biosystems 394 DNA/RNA Synthesizer),  and the use of chromatography, something which involves high-tech machines. Most misleadingly, this extremely laborious hi-tech manufacturing process is described in a paper with the title "A prebiotically plausible scenario of an RNA–peptide world."  Of course, nothing remotely like so laborious a hi-tech manufacturing process could ever have occurred in the natural world. We should always remember that "plausible" is perhaps the most abused word in scientific literature, so abused that it means basically nothing whenever any scientific paper uses that word in its title. 

Recently Quanta Magazine had an article on this paper, containing the same type of misleading language in its earlier piece, an article trying to pass off a laborious hi-tech manufacturing process as something telling us some important truth about evolution or a natural origin of life. For more on science journalism glitches and science reporting shortfalls at Quanta Magazine, read here and here and here and here.  "Question Quanta" is a good little slogan to remember. 

Postscript: An interesting recent article by Joelle Renstrom is entitled "How Science Fuels a Culture of Misinformation."  We read this:

"Misinformation and disinformation often start with scientists themselves. Institutions incentivize scientists going for tenure to focus on quantity rather than quality of publications and to exaggerate study results beyond the bounds of rigorous analysis. Scientific journals themselves can boost their revenue when they are more widely read. Thus, some journals may pounce on submissions with juicy titles that will attract readers."

The article discusses how university public relations offices "play a role in the hype machine" .by "exaggerating the certainty or implications of findings in press releases, which are routinely published almost verbatim in media outlets." Overall the analysis in Renstrom's article reminds me of the points I made in my post here, in which I describe an Academia Cyberspace Profit Complex in which important-sounding junk science is incentivized in quite a few  different places. Below is a diagram from that post. 

Today (June 4) we have another example of scientists and their press lackeys passing off hi-tech manufacturing as evolution. Very suspiciously, the scientific paper doesn't have a methods section. But you can tell from reading the text that manually laborious hi-tech manufacturing was involved.  The result is a function-less information-free arrangement of 300 nucleotides (the rough equivalent of 300 random characters). The simplest living cell would require about 500,000 very well-arranged nucleotides, a large body of functional information. The difference between 300 random nucleotides and the simplest living thing is like the difference between 300 random characters and a well-written textbook.  But phys.org announces this unimpressive manufacturing result with a  pure baloney headline of "Scientists announce a breakthrough in determining life's origin on Earth—and maybe Mars." What is very funny is when scientists pondering the origin of life (a problem a thousand miles over their heads) make statements such as one we read in the phys.org press release, where we hear a scientist saying, "important questions remain," rather as if he just had a few things left to do to unravel the origin of life. That's kind of like someone saying he "still has a few things left to do" on his project of migrating humanity to live in the Alpha Centauri solar  system.