A Critique of Morphogen Gradients, a Tall Tale of Developmental Biologists

When people discuss the mathematician Alan Turing, the word that is most commonly used is "brilliant." Turing did act very brilliantly during the 1940's when he led a secret British effort during World War Two to figure out how to decipher messages from a machine the Nazis were using to transmit secret messages. The Nazis were using a complicated machine called Enigma to transmit their secret messages.  Devising novel technology that rather resembled a digital computer, before any digital computer had been invented, Turing devised machinery that eventually was capable of deciphering the secret Nazi messages, so that the British could read and understand them. The efforts of Turing and his colleagues played a large role in helping the Allies win World War Two. 

But in the 1950's Turing did not act brilliantly when he addressed the problem of morphogenesis, the problem of how a speck-sized human zygote (a fertilized ovum) is able to progress to become a full-sized human body.  In 1952 Turing wrote a paper with the misleading title "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis." The first sentence of the abstract was this: "It is suggested that a system of chemical substances, called morphogens, reacting together and diffusing through a tissue, is adequate to account for the main phenomena of morphogenesis." But the theory he suggested in the paper did nothing to explain any of the harder-to-explain wonders of morphogenesis. 

The theory Turing suggested explained so little that it is misleading to even call it a theory of morphogenesis.  It would be more accurate to call it a theory relating to morphogenesis. Turing's theory was scarcely more than a mere claimed explanation of the arising of a few simple ring-like structures. Of course, within biological organisms we see a vast diversity of functional structures, almost all of which are not ring-like. 

The beginning of the paper should have alerted the careful reader that something very suspicious and shady was going on. The first lines of the abstract are below:

"In this section a mathematical model of the growing embryo will be described. This model will be a simplification and an idealization, and consequently a falsification. It is to be hoped that the features retained for discussion are those of greatest importance in the present state of knowledge. The model takes two slightly different forms. In one of them the cell theory is recognized but the cells are idealized into geometrical points. In the other the matter of the organism is imagined as continuously distributed."

We see some gigantic "red flags" here. By telling us that in one form of the theory cells would be "idealized into geometrical points," Turing was revealing that what would be going is kind of "biological baby talk" rather than a realistic treatment of the problem of morphogenesis. The origin of fantastically organized and intricate cell structures is one of the chief aspects of the problem of morphogenesis. Cells are units so complex they have been compared to factories and jet planes. When someone tells us that he is going to be treating cells as mere "geometrical points," that is an indication that the person will not be realistically assessing the complexities of biological organization.  Also, when someone says that he is going to imagine matter in an organism as being "continuously distributed" (which means having the same concentrations everywhere), it is also an indication that he is not dealing with organisms realistically. By calling his model a "simplification," "idealization," and "falsification,"  Turing was also hinting that he was in some kind of theoretical fantasy world. 

On the second page of his paper, Turing introduces the term "morphogens," a term meaning chemicals that produce a form. He introduced the term in a way that suggested the term had no precise meaning. He stated this:

"These substances will be called morphogens, the word being intended to convey the idea of a form producer. It is not intended to have any very exact meaning, but is simply the kind of substance concerned in this theory. The evocators of Waddington provide a good example of morphogens (Waddington 1940). These evocators diffusing into a tissue somehow persuade it to develop along different lines from those which would have been followed in its absence. The genes themselves may also be considered to be morphogens. But they certainly form rather a special class. They are quite indiffusible. Moreover, it is only by courtesy that genes can be regarded as separate molecules. It would be more accurate (at any rate at mitosis) to regard them as radicals of the giant molecules known as chromosomes. But presumably these radicals act almost independently, so that it is unlikely that serious errors will arise through regarding the genes as molecules. Hormones may also be regarded as quite typical morphogens. Skin pigments may be regarded as morphogens if desired." 

Introducing this concept of morphogens, Turing was all fuzzy and imprecise. After defining a morphogen as a "form producer," he told us skin pigments may be regarded as morphogens. But skin pigments do nothing to produce biological forms.

On page 41 Turing very strangely says, "According to the cell model then, the number and positions of the cells are given in advance, and so are the rates at which the various morphogens diffuse between the cells."  There did not exist during his life and still does not exist any "cell model" in which "the number and positions of the cells are given in advance." Neither the number nor the positions of any cells are specified in DNA, which also does not specify the structure of any cell. Turing seems to have been just confabulating here. He excused himself from explaining the great mystery of how cells arise in particular numbers and particular positions by claiming that some "cell model" specified such things "in advance," when no such thing was true. 

On page 42 of the paper, Turing shows that he is in a kind of puerile fantasy land by stating this: "The contents of either cell will be supposed describable by giving the concentrations X and Y of two morphogens." Cells are units of enormously high complexity, and often described as being complex as factories. Claiming their contents are "describable by giving the concentrations X and Y of two morphogens" is a statement indicating a complete lack of insight into the complexity of cells. 

In the paper's last paragraph, Turing basically admits that his theory only applies to a very small number of biological structures. He states this:

"It must be admitted that the biological examples which it has been possible to give in the present paper are very limited. This can be ascribed quite simply to the fact that biological phenomena are usually very complicated. Taking this in combination with the relatively elementary mathematics used in this paper one could hardly expect to find that many observed biological phenomena would be covered. It is thought, however, that the imaginary biological systems which have been treated, and the principles which have been discussed, should be of some help in interpreting real biological forms." 

So in the last paragraph of the paper, Turing gets all modest and humbly speaks as if his theory is only applicable to a few cases, saying "one could hardly expect to find that many observed biological phenomena would be covered," which conflicts with the delusional claim he made at the beginning of the paper, the groundless boast that his theory "is adequate to account for the main phenomena of morphogenesis." 

Similarly, in a letter to a colleague quoted here, Turing made only very modest claims about his morphogenesis theory, merely claiming that it would explain a few things here and there. He stated this:

"At present I am not working on the problem at all, but on my mathematical theory of embryology, which I think I described to you at one time. This is yielding to treatment, and it will so far as I can see, give satisfactory explanations of --

(i) Gastrulation

(ii) Polygonally symmetric structures, e.g. starfish, flowers.

(iii) Leaf arrangement, in particular the way the Fibonacci series

 (0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13...) comes to be involved.

(iv) Colour patterns on animals, e.g. stripes spots and dappling.

(v) Pattern on nearly spherical structures such as some 

  Radiolaria, but this is more difficult and doubtful."

If you explained such things, you would have solved less than a thousandth of the problem of morphogenesis; for you would not have explained how protein molecules achieve folded three-dimensional shapes, how immensely organized cells arise, how tissues arise, how organs arise, or how something like the human body arises. Gastrulation takes only about 1 week, less than 3% of the 273 days needed for a human baby to form in a womb. So why did Turing write a paper with the title "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis" when his theory explained so little?  And why did he make the hugely inaccurate claim that his theory "is adequate to account for the main phenomena of morphogenesis," so contrary to what he said in the letter to his colleague? 

Nowhere in Turing's paper did he show that he had insight or understanding of the complexity and organization of living things. The paper failed to even use the words "organization" or "organized."  Turing acted like a mathematician who could not be bothered to study the complexity of cells and protein molecules and anatomy, which had been well-discovered by the time his paper was written.  

Turing certainly did not do a hundredth of what would be needed to explain the appearance of even simpler animals such as a starfish. Explaining how a starfish arises would involve explaining how the thousands of types of protein molecules used by starfish manage to get their three-dimensional shapes needed for their functionality, shapes vastly more complicated than the simple shape of a starfish. Explaining how a starfish arises would also involve explaining how a starfish gets all of the different cell types it has, each an organization of matter vastly more intricate than the simple shape of a starfish. Turing did nothing to explain either of these things. 

Eager to claim some progress on a problem that is a thousand miles over their heads (the problem of how a speck-sized human egg manages to progress to become a full-grown human body), biologists have tried to look for places where theories such as Turing's could help explain morphogenesis. But such places have been few and far-between. A leading expert in developmental biology (L. Wolpert) stated in 2017, "It is still not clear whether diffusible morphogens provide cells with positional information and so pattern a tissue during development."  Another paper ("Biological notion of positional information/value in morphogenesis theory") states this:  "The fundamental role of morphogens as a basis for positional information in a complicated living body is still questionable."  Claims that morphogen gradients encode positional information are not well founded, and are examples of the extremely common phenomena of biologists making unwarranted claims, such as when they claim that memories form by synapse strengthening.   

The often advanced idea that a "morphogen gradient" (the mere intensity of some chemical) could tell cells where to go in three-dimensional space has always been a ludicrous one. Such a gradient would at best supply a single number, but you need three different numbers to specify a position in three-dimensional space. And if a cell were to receive three different numbers telling it where to go in three-dimensional space, it would have no way of acting on such information. Not knowing its own position in three-dimensional space, the cell would have no way of knowing how to modify that position to go to some other position.  

We can compare the theory of morphogen gradients to the theory of panspermia, the theory that life on Earth came from outer space. Panspermia does not solve the problem of how life arose, because it leaves you with this unanswered problem:  how could life have originated in outer space? That's just as hard as the problem of how life could have originated on Earth, so there's no real explanatory progress made if you imagine life came from outer space. Similarly, the theory of morphogen gradients attempts to solve the problem of how cells find their correct position in a forming human body by imagining that their correct position is told them by signals from some external chemicals (morphogen gradients). But that leaves unanswered the equally big question: how could such chemicals know what the correct positions of the cells should be?  They could not have got the information from DNA or genes, which specify neither how to make cells nor how cells should be arranged.  So imagining signaling chemicals that tell cells where to go accomplishes nothing, because no explanation is given as to how such chemicals knew where the cells should go.  We've simply gone from "inexplicably high-knowledge cells" to "inexplicably high-knowledge signaling chemicals," which accomplishes nothing in reducing the mystery of how a fertilized ovum progresses to become an adult organism.

The teacher felt confident...

...until the student asked this

Worthless for reducing the mystery of how a fertilized ovum progresses to become an adult organism, the concept of morphogen gradients serves mainly as "busy work" for developmental biologists.  Endless chemicals can be tested by them to see whether they act like morphogen gradients, by scientists failing to realize that very rare successes in such searches can be best explained as mere coincidences they should expect to get given all that searching, even if morphogen gradients is a mythical concept. When we read developmental biologists make statements such as "secreted signals, known as morphogens, provide the positional information that organizes gene expression and cellular differentiation in many developing tissues," or "morphogen gradients play a crucial role in development," we are reading folklore with no robust evidence to support it, and we seeing an example of an unwarranted speech custom of a small ivory tower tribe that is very susceptible to groupthink effects and ideological contagion phenomena. 

Around the 25:00 mark in the video here, a scientist tells us this about a morphogen gradient, which supposedly works through diffusion: 

"The diffusion constants are.. ten-fold, twenty-fold less than what you'd actually need to visually establish the gradient... So we simply don't have enough time in development for a gradient to be established with diffusion constants that we see." 

On the page here, a PhD in chemical physics lists many problems with claims about morphogen gradients, and repeatedly compares those who advance such claims to the advocates of the Ptolemaic theory of the solar system, who would keep complexifying their theory by postulating speculative details (epicycles) when their theory failed tests. We read, "Many doubts about the functioning or existence of these so-called 'morphogen' gradients have been raised." Turing appealed to morphogen diffusion, but another paper states that "arguments against morphogen movement by diffusion have been raised by many." 

The scanty observational evidence commonly cited for morphogen gradients (involving appeals to Drosphilia,  decapentaplegic/transforming growth factor beta, Hedgehog/Sonic hedgehog, Wingless/Wnt, epidermal growth factor, and fibroblast growth factor) will not seem convincing after you consider that there are countless millions of protein molecules and biological chemicals scientists can study, and that given a large body of developmental biologists eagerly seeking for evidence for "morphogen gradients," we would expect that a few chemicals or proteins could be found that sometimes seem to act rather like morphogen gradients purely by chance, even if the concept of morphogen gradients is a myth that has no foundation in reality. Similarly, given some large community believing that animal ghosts live in the clouds, and searching eagerly for evidence of such ghosts by taking many photos of clouds, we would expect such a community to occasionally produce some cloud photos that look like animals, even if there are no ghosts of animals in the clouds. Pareidolia (the tendency of humans to find patterns they are eagerly seeking) can plausibly explain all of the few examples given of evidence for morphogen gradients. 

The purveyors of morphogen gradients folklore have papers with line graphs supposedly showing some relation between a concentration of a morphogen gradient and the position of something in a developing embryo. The lines in these graphs are very rarely diagonal lines showing a straight-line relationship, but other types of lines which may look a little diagonal. In general, the papers providing such graphs fail to qualify as good evidence, because (1) there so often is no indication of the number of observations that were used to make the graph; (2) we have no way of knowing whether the graphed data points were cherry-picked to produce such a graph, with data points that did not fit the hoped-for story line being discarded. It is extremely common for scientists to discard data points that do not fit their story line, justifying such conclusion as "outlier elimination." In general, line graphs made from only a few data points are not convincing evidence of a causal relation.  

Some of the graphs you see in the morphogen gradient literature involve a "lying with lines" type of procedure in which only a few data points are graphed, but some kind of curve-fitting software is used to project a line using the small number of points (using linear interpolation). If there is no listing of the exact number of observations, such graphs are deceptive, because they make it look like there were many observations, when there were actually few.  In general, in papers of the morphogen gradient literature you will find no mention that a blinding protocol was followed. But the crucial measurements that are made are very much the type of measurements in which subjective observational bias might come into play, particularly seeing that the measurements are usually of very small distances such as nanometers (billionths of a meter), and particularly since the measurements often involve subjective  judgments about very tiny distances between two microscopic things without precise edges (rather like judging the distance between two clouds or two waves or two cold fronts, but far more subjective). So we must always suspect that the researchers were gathering and analyzing information in a biased way, trying to fit observations to some hoped-for curve so that some nice line graph could be produced suggesting a relationship between the intensity of the gradient and a position of some cells during development. Any such paper that fails to mention the following of a detailed blinding protocol has little value as evidence. Given so many observers acting so oblivious to good scientific protocols (by failing to follow a blinding protocol), we may wonder: has anyone ever really reliably observed any chemical behaving like a morphogen gradient? 

Although his original paper merely referred to a "French Flag" problem rather than a model, we are repeatedly told that the biologist Lewis Wolpert tried to advance some "French Flag" model  that molecules might encode positional information telling cells where to go to. But in later years he was candid about admitting the lack of evidence for such an idea. In 2015 he was asked this: "Where do you think the French Flag model fits with our current understanding of positional information, and what do you think are the exciting questions at the moment?" He answered this:

"There are problems we haven’t solved. It is terrible, but we still don’t have a molecular basis for it. If I still had an active lab, finding the molecular basis for positional information would be my objective, but would be quite tricky, since I’m not a biochemist or molecular biologist. There is one case of a molecule that might encode positional information, Prod 1, which is graded along the amphibian limb and was discovered by Jeremy Brockes. But it would be nice to find similar molecules in other systems."

This is the most damning confession. By saying "we still don't have a molecular basis for it," Lewis Wolpert pretty much confessed here that the "positional information" claim that he had encouraged innumerable times in his career was basically baloney. We should remember how good detectives act when they analyze the transcripts of suspects being questioned. Such detectives look for "letting down the guard" moments when lying suspects say something that contradicts the claims they have repeatedly made. That is just what we seem to get here. 

I know exactly why Wolpert said "it is terrible" in the statement "it is terrible, but we still don't have a molecular basis for it."  The reasons are:

(1) First, it is terrible because it shows that Wolpert was guilty of very bad misrepresentation and misleading by encouraging an idea of molecules passing around "positional information" that had no real evidential support. 

(2) Second, it is terrible because without any such evidence of "positional information" helping to explain how cells get to the right places in development, it seems that the progression from a speck-size zygote to the vast organization of the human body is a miracle of organization light-years beyond anything scientists can explain, a reality that is profoundly upsetting to atheist zealots such as Wolpert, as it implies some transcendent agency in the origin of every adult human body. 

The next year Wolpert would make a similar confession:

"Central problems are how positional information is set up, how it is recorded, and then how it is interpreted by the cells. A number of models have been proposed for the setting up of positional gradients, and most are based on diffusion of a morphogen and its interactions with extracellular molecules; however, diffusion may not be reliable mechanism. There are also mechanisms based on timing. There is no good evidence for the quantitative aspects of any of the proposed gradients and details how they are set up." 

Figure 3 of the paper here  helps to make clear that sociological effects caused a myth to arise on this matter.  Wolpert's original 1969 paper merely referred to a "French flag problem," and never mentioned a "French flag model." The term "French flag model" was almost never used in the scientific literature until about 1998. Then between 1998 and the year 2010 more and more scientific papers started to refer to a "French flag model," with about 60 papers a year referring to such a thing by the year 2010. A myth had been socially constructed, that a scientist (Wolpert) had advanced some "French flag model" when his paper never even used such a term.  This is the same Wolpert who confessed in 2015 (in the quote above) that "we still don't have a molecular basis for it."

In the wikipedia.org article on the "French flag model," we read the following reasons for doubting it:

"The difficulties with all gradient based models of morphogenesis were extensively reviewed by Natalie and Richard Gordon and include seven^[5] specific points:

1. In order to maintain a gradient at steady state there has to be a sink i.e. a way in which diffusing molecules are destroyed or removed along the way and/or at some boundaries. Sinks are rarely, if ever, even considered when the gradient model is invoked.
2. Diffusion must occur in a confined space if a gradient is to be established. However, many organisms such as the axolotl develop normally even if the vitelline membrane and jelly layers are removed and development occurs in flowing water.
3. Diffusion is temperature dependent yet development can proceed normally over a wide variety of temperatures in animals whose eggs develop external to the mother.
4. Diffusion gradients do not scale well yet embryos come in variety of sizes.
5. Diffusion gradients follow the superposition principle. This means that a gradient of one substance in one direction, and a gradient of the same substance in a perpendicular direction, result in a single one-dimensional gradient in the diagonal direction, not a two dimensional gradient. Developmental biologists frequently invoke a two dimensional gradient even though a two dimensional gradient system requires two morphogen gradients with two different sources and sinks placed approximately perpendicular to one another.
6. Fluctuations in gradients always occur, especially at the low concentrations commonly found during embryogenesis, making a specific response by an individual cell to particular concentration thresholds problematic.
7. Each cell has to be able to 'read' the morphogen concentration accurately, otherwise boundaries between tissues become ragged. Yet such ragged boundaries are rare in development."

A French flag is a two-dimensional arrangement of matter, and it was always absurd to be suggesting that a three-dimensional positioning of cells could be explained by referring to the positioning of squares on a two-dimensional flag. The work that has been done on "morphogen gradients" is a "grasping at straws" wild goose chase affair, something that often goes on in the world of science. The claim that scientists have helped explain morphogenesis by postulating "morphogen gradients" by which cells reach the correct positions is a socially constructed triumphal legend that is not well-grounded by observations, one of very many such legends in the world of modern science.  

A Typical Week in the "Hall of Mirrors" That Is Science News

"A confusing or disorienting situation in which it is difficult to distinguish between truth and illusion or between competing versions of reality."

"Hall-of-mirrors" definition on www.yourdictionary.com

The world of science news is a world in which truth is all mixed up with hype and misleading claims. These days most science news comes from press releases written by the copy writers of corporate and university press offices, who are notorious for making claims not warranted by anything found in the scientific papers they are promoting, and who often lack strong knowledge of the complex and deep topics being discussed. Below are some sounds-like-baloney samples from this week's science news. 

On Monday August 22 our science news sites had a link to an article on www.space.com entitled "Comet 67P has the building blocks of life — smells like mothballs and almonds." No such thing has been found on Comet 67P.  It is always misleading to refer to "building blocks of life" because such a phrase makes a living thing (a state of very high organization and fine-tuned dynamic metabolism) sound like some static lifeless thing like a building. If you are going to use so unfortunate a phrase, there are only two honest ways to use it:

(1) When referring to a multicellular organism, you can refer to cells as the building blocks of life.

(2) When referring to a one-celled microscopic organism, you can refer to protein molecules or nucleic acids (RNA or DNA) as the building blocks of life. 

Were any such things found on Comet 67P? Certainly not. Did anyone discover perhaps the building blocks of the building blocks of life on such a comet? No, not at all. The building blocks of protein molecules are amino acids, and the building blocks of nucleic acids are nucleotides. The scientific paper does not mention any such things being found on Comet 67P. It merely mentions biologically irrelevant molecules.  The deceit of calling biologically irrelevant molecules "building blocks of life" has been going on for a very long time in the "25% baloney" world of science news. 

On the same day we had a story telling us that the beautiful pictures we've been seeing recently from the James Webb Telescope are using fake colors. We read this:

"The recent images from the James Webb Telescope were deliberately made to look beautiful by NASA. The telescope itself can’t even detect visible light – the colours of the images were chosen by the astronomers." 

The article gives us some verbose baloney in which a philosopher of science attempts to persuade us that's it is really quite okay for astronomers to be faking things in this type of way. Philosophers of science should not be apologists for the misrepresentations of scientists. The same type of "lying with colors" has long gone on in the world of neuroscience for many years, and the science news has for many years passed off deceptively colored brain scan visuals that give us false ideas about particular brain regions "lighting up" during particular types of mental activity. Were such visuals to be honestly colored, it would never look like particular regions of the brain are "lighting up," because the differences in activity are typically no more than about 1 part in 200. 

On Monday we also had a very misleading news article in the journal Nature, one entitled "Brain stimulation leads to long-lasting improvements in memory." Among the misleading aspects of the story were these:

(1)  The news story made it sound like a large sample size was used, by telling us, "Reinhart’s team conducted a series of experiments on 150 people aged between 65 and 88."  In fact, when we read the scientific paper we find that the study group sizes in these experiments consisted of only 20 subjects per study group: too small a size to produce robust evidence. The news article has made the study group size look more than 700% bigger than it was. A total of 120 subjects were assigned to various experimental groups, most of which had only 20 subjects. 

(2) The subtitle of the story gives us the misleading impression that after four days of brain zapping the subjects were tested throughout a month, by saying, "After four days of non-invasive electrical stimulation, trial participants were better at recalling information for up to a month."  That's not what happened. Subjects had their memory tested during four days in which their brains were zapped, and then had their memory tested 30 days later in a single test. 

The not-very-impressive results reported in the paper are very easy to explain under an assumption of random variations that are quite possible given the small study group sizes. There's another explanation that does not even require an appeal to slightly luckier-than-average chance results. We are told that there was a "sham" control group that had electrodes attached to its head, but received no brain stimulation, which was compared to a group that received real brain stimulation from electrodes. But a paper tells us that when brain stimulation occurs, "The subject feels, sees, or hears something and thereby knows stimulation has occurred." And the article here says, "People reported feeling things like itching, tingling, poking and warming as the device ramps up or down, for the first and last 30-60 seconds of treatment, Reinhart said."

We can imagine how things would go if subjects are told that they will be part of either a group getting real brain simulation, or a "sham" group getting no such stimulation, while supposedly not knowing which group they were part of. The subjects recognizing they are in the "real stimulation" group (from the sensations described above) would tend to feel an obligation to perform better, while those recognizing they are in the "sham" group (from a lack of such sensations) would feel no such obligation, and perhaps think they are expected to perform worse. This alone could account for the kind of slight difference typically reported in memorization results between "sham" groups getting no brain stimulation and "real" groups actually getting brain stimulation, without the results being any evidence of memory improvement caused by electrical stimulation of the brain. 

You could probably get the same slight difference in memorization results by using a low-power cattle prod that electrically jolted someone on their buttocks. The people being mildly prodded on their butt might have more of a sense of urgency to complete the memorization task quickly, thinking, "Damn, I better finish this quickly!" The reported results tell us nothing about the brain and memory.  No real evidence has been provided that electrical stimulation of brains improves memory. 

A 2016 study using a higher sample size (28 subjects in one study group) found that electrical stimulation of the brain worsened memory.  None of the news reports on the recent Nature study mentioned the larger 2016 study. How typical: mention only a smaller study finding X, while ignoring a larger study finding the opposite of X. 

On Wednesday on the Google Science News page we had a dire headline of "Nearly all marine species face extinction if greenhouse emissions don’t drop: study." The link is to an article with that headline, one that misrepresents what a scientific paper found.  The abstract of the paper is here. The paper is behind a paywall, but in the article here one of the authors explains its findings. The author says, "The 'risk' in the CRIB framework is measured as the likelihood that a species will no longer be able to persist in a location where it is currently found."   The study found that 90% of marine species are "at risk" defined in such a way. But there is a big difference between being "at risk" defined in such a way, and "facing extinction." Most marine species exist in multiple locations. And if it gradually gets warmer, marine species existing in one latitude will presumably be able to gradually shift to slightly lower or higher latitudes. Finding that 90% of marine species are at risk of not being able to persist at one of their current locations is not at all the same as finding 90% of marine species "face extinction." 

In a similar alarmist vein, on the same day we had a BS clickbait "science news" headline claiming that the sun will engulf the Earth. Reading the article you will find that it merely refers to some event that will supposedly occur billions of years in the future. 

A CNN "science news" article on Wednesday was entitled "A 7 million-year-old practice set our ancestors on the course to humanity, new study finds." The practice referrred to is bipedalism. Of course, it's baloney to claim that bipedalism might have "set our ancestors on the course to humanity." Our humanity has to do with mental things such as thinking and language use, not walking on two legs. 

The dubious story claims evidence of bipedalism in some seven- million-year-old organisms, but no robust evidence was found. The only fossils mentioned are a cranium and a femur. Scientists have no credible explanation for the origin of bipedalism. All evolutionary explanations fail, because of a lack of any "continual improvement" path leading from animals walking on four limbs (like chimps do) to bipedal organisms walking on two legs. The story begins like this:

"Bipedalism was extremely important to our evolution, but it didn't make a lot of sense for our ancestors, Lieberman said. Walking on two legs makes an animal slower, more unsteady and more at risk for back pain, none of which is helpful for survival, he added." 

The story gives us a not-at-all credible explanation for the origin of bipedalism:

"When the evolutionary paths of humans and chimpanzees diverged, Earth's climate was changing and rainforests in Africa were breaking up, so our ancestors had to travel farther to get food, he said. The hypothesis is that walking on two legs gave them more energy to travel."

This story does nothing to explain why any species walking stably on four limbs would have very gradually evolved (over hundreds of thousands or millions of years) through a long instability phase halfway towards bipedalism, which would initially not have been an improvement in locomotion ability, resulting in "an  animal slower, more unsteady and more at risk for back pain."  There can be no credible natural evolutionary explantion imagining a very gradual progression from "working well" to "working worse" to "working better than the original state." There can be no credible Darwinian evolutionary explantion that assumes some very gradual path over a very long time proceeding like this: "Organism structure 1 that works well --> organism structure 2 that works much more poorly --> organism structure 3 that works better than organism structure 1."  Natural selection would never cause any such progression. 

What happens is that Darwinist theorists may make appeals to "compensating results" -- favorable results postulated to have occurred in the long run, after some negative results occurring before them. But blind evolution can't look into the future. So you can't use such results to explain some evolutionary change that made fitness go from good state 1 to worse state 2 to better state 3, on the grounds that better state 3 was better than good state 1. If you believe in some divine intelligence with foresight controlling evolution, you can make such appeals. But if you're claiming that only blind chance and so-called "natural selection" was involved, things with no foresight, you cannot credibly make such appeals. 

Contradicting its own title, an article in Nature throws some cold water on this alleged evidence for bipedalism in 7-million-year-old organisms, obtained from analysis of a femur:

"Other scientists are less swayed by the analysis. One of the features Guy’s team cited as evidence for bipedalism is the presence of a bony ridge that supports the femur during upright walking. But a 2022 study5 found that this feature, called a calcar femorale, is present in some apes such as orang-utans but is occasionally missing in humans, and therefore should not be taken as a hallmark of bipedality. Moreover, it’s not even clear that the Sahelanthropus femur had a such a feature, says lead author Marine Cazenave, a palaeoanthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Macchiarelli contends that other traits of the femur touted as indicative of bipedalism, such as the twist in its shaft, could instead be the result of being compressed after millions of years covered in sediment. 'They cherry-pick what they think is information which is consistent with the femur shaft being a biped, and they studiously ignore information to the contrary,' adds Bernard Wood, a palaeoanthropologist at George Washington University in Washington DC who co-authored the 2020 analysis with Macchiarelli and Bergeret-Medin."

Finally I will discuss another not-really-true headline in this week's science news: the headline "Doppelgangers share similar habits and education levels as well as looks, scientists reveal for the first time." No such thing has been revealed by science. The story discusses a study in which scientists started out with 32 pairs of people looking very much alike. After having everyone in these 32 pairs of people fill out questionnaires and give blood samples for DNA analysis, the scientists chose 16 of these pairs for statistical analysis. Since the study was not a pre-registered study or a "registered report" study that had previously committed itself to following some particular method, the selection of these 16 pairs from the 32 was cherry-picking.  

In the 16 pairs the scientists supposedly found a few behavior similarities such as similar education levels and similar smoking habits. This meager evidence does not at all justify the claim that the look-alike people had "similar habits."  Give 32 randomly selected people a questionnaire asking about dozens of different things (education, sexuality, political views, sports preferences, drinking behavior, spending behavior, etc), you will be likely to find that by pure chance there will be a similarity in one or two of these characteristics. The study reports no robust evidence that people with similar faces tend to have similar habits.  Neither the title nor the abstract of the paper claim that people with very similar faces share similar habits.  Once again, a "science news" story has claimed a study found something that it did not find.    

An Early Veridical Near-Death Experience

The concept of near-death experiences became well known in the mid-1970's with the publication of the book Life After Life by Raymond Moody Jr. But elements of near-death experiences were reported long before the 1970's.  For example, in the 1898 book Glimpses of the Unseen by B. F. Austin, the author refers to "hypermnesia, or exaltation of memory," stating the following: 

"It  is  also  frequently  present  in  case  of  imminent  death,  when  the whole  life  passes  in  review  in  a  few  seconds,  facts  and  events  long  forgotten rushing  with  incalculable  speed  through  the  consciousness.  During  fever,  the language  of  childhood,  long  disused  and  forgotten,  has  been  recalled.  A  man  of remarkably  clear  head  was  crossing  a  railway  in  the  country,  when  an  express train,  at  full  speed,  appeared  closely  approaching  him.  He  had  just  time  to throw  himself  down  in  the  centre  of  the  road  between  the  two  lines  of  rails,  and as  the  train  passed  over  him  the  sentiment  of  impending  danger  to  his  very  existence, brought  vividly  to  his  recollection  every  incident  of  his  former  life  in such  an  array  as  that  which  is  suggested  by  the  promised  opening  of  ' the  Great Book  at  the  last  great  day.' "

This is an early reference to the "life review" very often reported during near-death experiences.  An 1889 book reports an account of someone very near death, who is visited by a daughter who died very young. The book then states this:  "The testimony of those who have approached nearest to death, and have been brought back to life, favors, if not proves, that at that great crisis, as the senses fail, spiritual sensitiveness becomes acute, and the perceptions merge into a universal consciousness." The nineteenth century book then cites an account of a "life review" occurring for a man who almost drowned:

"Then he saw, as if in a wide field, the acts of his own being, from the first dawn of memory until the time he entered the water. They were all grouped and ranged in the order of the succession of their happening, and he read the whole volume of existence at a glance : nay, its incidents and entities were photographed on his mind, illumined by light, the panorama of the battle of life lay before him."

In the same nineteenth century book Hudson Tuttle gives this account he heard of a near-death experience:

"A gentleman in Iowa related to me his experience while insensible from the effect of cold. He was overtaken by a fearful storm, such as sometimes sweep across the prairies, and, losing his way after hours of vain struggling, sank exhausted in a drift of snow. The past events of his life came in a panoramic show before him, but so rapidly moving, that from boyhood until that moment was as an instant ; then came a sense of perfect physical happiness, and he began dimly to see the forms of those whom he had known while living, but were now dead. They grew more and more distinct, but just as they came near and were, as he thought, overjoyed to receive him, darkness came suddenly and great pain ; the vision faded, and he became conscious of the presence of his friends who had rescued him, and were applying every measure to restore him to life. How near he had reached the boundary line, the ' dead line' beyond, from which there is no return to the body, was shown by his crippled hands and feet."

The post here discusses out-of-body experiences and near-death experiences reported before 1975, some dating from the nineteenth century. In my previous post "Four Near-Death Experiences of the Nineteenth Century," I described four near-death experiences that had been written before the year 1900. In the post here I describe two other near-death experiences of the nineteenth century.

Below are some similar accounts not mentioned in those posts. In the 1919 book "A True Record of My Psychic Dreams and Visions," Florence May Bailey tells us on page 33 of one paranormal experience quickly followed by another. While feeling very ill, she suddenly saw an apparition of her husband's deceased father, dressed in an odd black suit, who offered words of comfort and encouragement. She then describes an out-of-body experience:

"Just then the doctor came in, and saw at a glance that quick action was necessary. First he called mother out into the hall and told her she might as well prepare for a funeral Sunday, but on reflection agreed to call another physician and perform a slight operation. They came at nine o'clock and administering the anesthetic, I fell asleep. I had not been asleep over twenty minutes when my astral body became free, and floating about the room I could see my body still lying on the bed and the operation going on while I listened to every word they were saying. I saw mother standing outside the door as if fearing to enter. Then I left the house and sailing through the air made a trip to the city of Lawrence, a distance of thirty miles."

Florence recalls seeing her husband near Lawrence, and remembering specific details:

"I saw him and another man hitching a horse to a buggy, which at that time of night surprised me. I hovered over them all the time they were thus engaged, and heard every word of their conversation, which I afterwards recollected distinctly. I even approached so near that I saw the time, twenty minutes to ten, as my husband pulled his watch from his pocket. I reached out to touch him on the hand. Just then they got in the buggy to drive away, but they, of course, did not notice me, nor did they have the slightest idea that I was there." 

Florence records these eerie details about her out-of-body experience:

"I then looked at my astral body to note its appearance. It was all blue and white like the clouds in the sky. I was able to see my face and body as plainly as though looking in a mirror. I remember distinctly looking down at my feet, or where I expected my feet to be, and apparently I had none. My body seemed to taper down, and to be like a veil floating in the breeze. I had an exquisite sensation of pleasure in not being hampered with an unwieldy body. Looking about, I saw that the men had already gone a good ways down the road, so I decided to go back home."

Upon describing this experience to her husband, Florence found that the details she described were verified by the husband:

"On Sunday my husband came home and I told him of my astral visit, repeating the conversation that I had heard. He declared that every word of it was correct, and that even the time was as I had observed it to be. The description I gave of his father, he said, was perfect in every detail, and that the peculiar black suit I described was the very one in which he was buried. This experience corroborated what I had long known to be true, viz., that we inhabit two bodies simultaneously, and that death consists merely in the separation of these bodies. This separation, as in my experience, may frequently take place without death ensuing." 

This is one of the earliest cases of a phenomenon that may be called veridical near-death experiences, in which observational details reported by someone being out of his body are later verified.  In my post "The Enigma of Veridical Near-Death Experiences," I list dozens of such cases,  in which observational details reported by someone being out of his body were found to be true. In each of these cases, the witness reported seeing something that he did not know about before his out-of-body experience, something that was later established to be correct.  Here are two examples from that post:

Case 2.11: a woman reported floating out of her body during a cardiac arrest, and that during such an experience she rose up through the hospital's floors, rising up above the roof, where she saw the skyline and a red shoe. A search of the hospital's roof found a red shoe on the roof.

Case 3.33: A man who underwent cardiac arrest reported an out-of-body experience in which he felt himself "rising up through the ceiling" and then seeing some hospital area  in which there were mannequins. Above the ICU he was in was a CPR training area in which there were dummies (resembling mannequins) used for CPR training. 

Another case of a near-death experience occuring years before the term became commonly used (in the late 1970's) was a case reported in the Canadian Medical Association Journal in 1971. In the report (entitled "Cardiac Arrest Remembered") a patient gives this account:

"Then I am looking at my own body from the waist up, face to face (as through a mirror in which I appear to be in the lower left corner). Almost immediately I saw myself leave my body, coping out through the head and shoulders. (I did not see my lower limbs). The 'body' leaving me was not yet exactly a vapour form, yet it seemed to expand very slightly once it was clear of me. It was somewhat transparent,  for I could see my other 'body' through it." 

In a 19th century work we read this 1897 account about a near-death experience involving a Mr. Weeks:

"But  the  most  remarkable  thing  was  his  apparent  death  and  coming  to  life again.  Some  time  before  I  knew  him  he  was  very  sick,  the  bowels  were  mortified and  to  all  appearance  he  died.  The  body  had  been  'laid  out'  some  little time,  when  suddenly  he  sat  up  and  called  for  his  trowsers,  saying  he  wanted  to go  to  the  window  to  see  the  angel  go  back.  The  physician  chanced  to  be  in  the room,  and  said  :  '  Put  him  back,  he  is  a  dead  man.'  But  he  insisted  that  he should  get  well,  and  proceeded  to  tell  them  what  to  do  to  cure  the  mortification....Mr.  Weeks  told  me  that  he  was  surely  dead,  and  that  his  spirit  was  escorted away  by  a  bright  spirit,  told  of  some  things  which  he  saw  and  of  his  reluctance to  return,  when  the  spirit  told  him  he  must  do  so.  He  spoke  of  seeing  his  dead body  as  he  looked  in  at  the  window  on  his  return,  at  the  time  his  escort  left  him."

We have here three things very commonly reported in modern accounts of near-death experiences: (1) a person viewing his own body from outside it; (2) a reluctance to return to that body after briefly outside it; (3) an encounter with some supernatural or religious or ethereal figure. 

On page 205 of the 1919 document here, May Crommelin describes hearing about an out-of-body experience:

" 'Do you know I died then, I believe ! Oh, of course, as you see, I am back again.' Pressed to explain himself, he confided under the seal of secrecy, which his later death has released, what he really believed had happened. 'It was when I had been very bad, but was slightly better, and they left me alone in my room to sleep, or be quiet for a while...Then somehow— I can’t tell how— I found myself outside of myself and standing on the floor. There was my body lying on the bed and I looked down at it, and said : "'Thank goodness ! I ’ve done with you."  It looked worn-out. With that I walked out of my bedroom and went down the corridor till I came to the lift. There I stopped, and for what reason I can’t tell, I said to myself,  " No. It won’t do. I ’ve got to go back !" So I went back to my room— saw my body as I had left it— and found myself, rather against my wish, in it again.'  Once more he quietly but earnestly, even solemnly, repeated to me his conviction that that was death. He seemed to be satisfied (perhaps pleased) that there was nothing else to fear in the final severance of soul and spirit from the outer body." 

On page 209 of the same 1919 document, we hear of a doctor who tried some experimental injection treatment on a man who seemed to have died. We read this:

"Nurse, intensely surprised, hurried after, being at his orders. Then she realized that the energetic surgeon was bent on an experiment ! At his elbow she stood, carrying out directions rapidly given and obeyed. He made injections ; they both watched. It seemed past belief— but the heart of the dead man began to beat faintly; increased in strength. Slowly the old tramp ' came back,' as the watchers said.  Next day, when Geordie had recovered from his weakness, and saw an opportunity to speak with Nurse Ierne alone, he signed to her. ' I say ! I’ve got a queer thing I ’d like to tell you, Nurse. . . . You know yesterday . . . well, I thought I was in heaven. I was in just the loveliest place ever anyone could think of— and I was so happy ! Then somehow it seemed as how I’d got to come back here— and I can tell you I was sorry.' ”

The account matches many near-death experiences in recent decades, in which a common element is a person expressing sorrow that he was brought back from death. On page 211 of the same document, we read the following account of someone's experience near death:

"After intense agony following a severe operation he mercifully became unconscious for a time. Rousing then, his nurse was surprised to see him smiling with a look of radiance and utter happiness on his face. Aloud he said, as if his gladness must find expression : ' How lovely 1 . . . I could be happy for ever in so lovely a place. . . . Oh, how lovely! ' "

Since November 2020 I have had hundreds of dreams that seemed to suggest a theme of life after death (all listed in the post here). Very recently such dreams have been suggesting themes of life after death being like winning a huge sum in the lottery, such as: 

(1)  a dream of a person winning $645,000,000 in the lottery, and then disappearing into the high stalks of a corn field, like in the movie Field of Dreams in which a corn field with high stalks was a portal to the afterlife; 

(2) another dream in which I won big in the lottery, one in which I thought to myself during the dream that whenever anyone reaches life after death, it is like winning big in the lottery. 

If I had experienced such dreams five years ago, I would have bought a lottery ticket. I haven't bothered to do that, for I have the strong feeling that such dreams are not about good fortune in this life, but in the next one. 

Loeb's Strange SETI Scheme to Search Sea for Spooky Specks

Claims about meteor CNEOS 2014-01-08 are an example of the press repeating unverified and rather far-fetched claims in a matter-of-fact way that are not justified by any observations.  The claim made is that meteor CNEOS 2014-01-08 came from interstellar space and plunged into the ocean off the coast of Papua New Guinea in 2014.  That is a very extraordinary claim, not made about any other meteor that has struck our planet. Virtually all meteors are believed to simply originate from other places in the solar system, or from the Oort Cloud believed to exist on the outer fringes of our solar system. 

The first two people to make such a claim were the astronomers Abraham Loeb and Amir Siraj, who made the claim in a 2022 preprint paper entitled "The 2019 Discovery of a Meteor of Interstellar Origin." When I search for the topic of CNEOS 2014-01-08 on the Cornell physics paper server, I find that 8 out of 9 papers mentioning it were written by Abraham Loeb and Amir Siraj. The "2019 Discovery of a Meteor of Interstellar Origin" was just another example of scientists claiming something as fact which had not yet been shown to be even likely.

The data from a CNEOS database indicated the CNEOS 2014-01-08 meteor had a speed of about 44 kilometers per second before exploding or burning up high above the Pacific Ocean. Supposedly the trajectory of the object suggested it might have traveled in space as fast as 60 kilometers per second. Such speeds are not all that unusual. Meteors commonly strike the Earth with similar velocities. A web site states, "Meteoroids enter Earth’s atmosphere at speeds typically of 12-40 km/s relative to the Earth." 

A Scientific American story in 2019 ("Did a Meteor from Another Star Strike Earth in 2014?") strikes a good critical tone. The story has a subtitle of "Questionable data cloud the potential discovery of the first known interstellar fireball." We read this:

"Weiss says, the claim that this particular space rock was interstellar is problematic. 'The meteor catalog that [Loeb and Siraj] used does not report uncertainties on the incoming velocity,' he notes. 'These uncertainties need to be quantified before this meteor can be accepted as interstellar.'  That is also the view of Paul Chodas, the CNEOS catalog’s manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. 'We at CNEOS simply post the fireball data that is reported to us; we have no information on the uncertainties,' he says... Loeb and Siraj’s 'quite extraordinary' and “highly speculative” claim, he says, 'is based on just a few numbers that are likely highly uncertain.' ”

Later in the Scientific American article we read a NASA official (Lindley Johnson) saying that the CNEOS database has estimates of speed and directionality as kind of an afterthought, in hopes that some people might find such estimates helpful in searching for meteorites (the physical remains of a meteor).  He says that using those estimates to infer where a meteor came from was "already stretching the credence in the data beyond anything really scientifically valid."  We read the official complaining like this:

"Johnson says, 'Now [Loeb and Siraj] want to speculate based on such tenuous data that some could be interstellar objects? That really stretches the credibility past the breaking point for me.' ”

But the science news press is now doing what they do all the time: speaking as if tenuous speculations are facts. Recently we see quite a few stories matter-of-factly referring to CNEOS 2014-01-08 as an object of interstellar origin, despite the lack of any convincing evidence for such a claim. In a paper in August 2022 Abraham Loeb claims that "the U.S. Department of Defense has since verified that 'the velocity estimate reported to NASA is sufficiently accurate to indicate an interstellar trajectory,' making the object the first detected interstellar object and the first detected interstellar meteor."  No, so sketchy and imprecise a statement does not at all make CNEOS 2014-01-08 "the first detected interstellar meteor." 

The statement quoted is from a document shown here. The document is a memo written by John E. Shaw who merely states that "Dr. Mozer confirmed that the velocity estimate reported to NASA is sufficiently accurate to indicate an interstellar trajectory." Such a statement is not a government confirmation that CNEOS 2014-01-08 came from another solar system. We still don't know how high the estimate uncertainties are here. We are merely reading a Shaw reporting a vaguely worded opinion of a Mozer, without getting any numerical specifics. When Person X gives a sentence vaguely summarizing the opinion of Person Y that may have been nagged out of him by Person Z and may have involved some secret satellite, without any specific numbers being mentioned, that isn't science. Science is well-replicated precise results involving publicly available data. 

In the paper mentioned above Loeb is proposing a very expensive mission to retrieve what he thinks will be no more than .1 millimeter-sized specks of this meteor. Specks that size can only be seen by someone squinting. We read this:

"Our plan is to mobilize a ship with a magnetic sled deployed using a long line winch. We will be operating approximately ∼ 300 km north of Manus Island. The team will consist of seven sled operators, plus the scientific team. The goal of the expedition is to recover ∼ 0.1 mm size fragments from the meteorite that exploded over the Bismarck sea in 2014. The recovered fragments will be carefully analyzed and will be shared with the global scientific community. We will tow a sled mounted with magnets, cameras and lights on the ocean floor inside of a 10 km ×10 km search box."

Why is Loeb proposing so expensive a mission to look for tiny specks in the sea? He seems to have got the idea that maybe CNEOS 2014-01-08 was an extraterrestrial spaceship that burned up in the atmosphere. Such an idea is ludicrous. A civilization capable of  launching missions between solar systems would have god-like technological powers. The idea that such a mission would come all the way from some other solar system, reach our planet, and then explode in our atmosphere is a very absurd idea. It's much more far-fetched than thinking that the US would launch a Mars lander that exploded in the atmosphere of Mars before it even landed on Mars. 

In a universe that is about 13 billion years old, there is no reason we can think of why intelligent life would appear in two different solar systems at roughly the same time in the same ten-parsec part of a galaxy. People who theorize about extraterrestrial civilizations frequently tell us that if some extraterrestrial civilization existed, it would probably be very many thousands or millions of years more advanced than our civilization. It is hardly credible to believe that so advanced a civilization would launch interstellar missions that would explode in the atmosphere of a planet after the mission arrived after a very long  interstellar voyage.  Exploding in the atmosphere is the behavior of natural meteors, not interstellar spaceships. 

If such a mission as proposed by Loeb were to find such just-barely-visible sea specks, there would be no way to even identify that they were fragments of the CNEOS 2014-01-08 meteor, and no way to verify that this meteor came from another solar system.

I can think of hundreds of scientific efforts that could spend the cost of such a mission in ways that would have a much higher chance of discovering something important. The most "bang for the buck" way that scientists can spend money to shed light on the mysterious is to simply have someone write up and publish a long honest review of the tons of important observations that most physical scientists have senselessly ignored. The second most "bang for the buck" way for scientists to spend money is by doing simple easy-to-run experiments of a type our materialist scientists refuse to perform, because they are afraid of discovering things they don't want to learn about. Loeb's scheme is one of the least "bang for the buck" proposals I have ever heard of. Very few or no one will ever be persuaded that barely visible specks dredged from the sea are evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. 

Pitching this project in an email quoted here, Loeb says that the sea speck search project "could confirm the interstellar origin of this meteor independent of its speed based on its composition being different from solar system objects."  That makes it sound like he isn't actually sure the object is of interstellar origin, and needs to try to confirm such a suspicion.  But it makes no sense at all to think that you could determine the interstellar origin of a meteor by dredging up highly scattered specks of material only a tenth of a millimeter in size. There would be no way to tell which of those specks came from the meteor.  And since no one has ever analyzed the composition of an interstellar meteor or interstellar spaceship, there would be no way to reliably judge that some specks had the characteristic composition of an interstellar meteor or interstellar spaceship. Loeb's sea speck search scheme makes no sense at all.

Postscript: Loeb's mission to search for the sea specks has now completed. No evidence of an extraterrestrial spaceship seems to have been found. Loeb is trying to get people interested in reports of supposedly unusual composition of some little scraps and specks he found. Two other scientists recently published a paper saying that the simplest explanation for the CNEOS 2014-01-08 meteor is that it was not from some other solar system, and that its speed was simply overestimated.  See my post here for some reasons why it is implausible to imagine interstellar spaceships crashing on Earth.  I could summarize the logic by saying that because traveling between inhabited solar systems is 1000 times harder than developing crash-proof spacecraft, it is implausible to imagine crashes of craft from other solar systems. 

Cosmologists Hauling Heavy Speculative Baggage Sure Are Not Reductionists

The "Big Think" site at www.bigthink.com is a materialist propaganda site. The Big Think site likes to have philosophical essays such as a recent essay arguing that life on Earth has no purpose (one that absurdly offers the extinction of dinosaurs as its main evidence). The site is at least good for a few laughs, such as when we come to a page claiming in big bold letters that its articles (often very poorly reasoned essays) are written by "the world's greatest thinkers." Sometimes the site has essays that are unintentionally hilarious. An example is a recent essay by cosmologist Ethan Siegel, one entitled "Yes, the Universe really is 100% reductionist in nature."

Your first chuckle should come after considering that title. Reductionism is a tendency in philosophy or science to try to explain complex things only by appealing to simpler things. A philosopher or scientist can be a reductionist, but a universe cannot be. Claiming that the universe is reductionist is as laughable an error as claiming that the universe is atheist, theistic or agnostic.

Your second chuckle should come after reading Siegel's bad definition of reductionism. He states, "This simple idea — that all phenomena in the Universe are fundamentally physical phenomena — is known as reductionism." That is not a correct definition of reductionism. The claim that all phenomena in the Universe are fundamentally physical phenomena would be one way of definining materialism, a particular philosophical doctrine. Reductionism is not a philosophical doctrine, but merely a kind of strategy or tendency when dealing with scientific or philosophical questions: the tendency to try to explain complex realities by appealing to known simpler realities. 

But your biggest chuckle in reading the essay should come from reading Ethan Siegel try to sound like he supports reductionism. For many years Siegel and many other cosmologists have been operating in a way that is the exact opposite of reductionism. 

Reductionism involves trying to explain some complex reality by appealing only to a much simpler reality or much simpler realities. An example of reductionism is when neuroscientists try to explain human mental phenomena by saying they are caused only by chemical activity in the brain. You can write a kind of generic schema for reductionism (using algebraic placeholders) by saying that reductionism involves claiming that complex realilty X can be explained by a much simpler known reality Y (or maybe much simpler known realities Y and Z, or maybe much simpler known realities Y1, Y2, Z1 and Z2). 

What has gone on in cosmology and theoretical physics during Siegel's career is the opposite of reductionism. Some of the main events were these:

(1) After pondering a nice simple Big Bang as the origin of the universe, cosmologists were very bothered that this mysterious event seemed to require extraordinarily precise fine-tuning at the very beginning, with the expansion rate being fine-tuned to one part in ten to the fiftieth power.  Cosmologists responded by creating a theory called "cosmic inflation" that postulated an exponential expansion in the universe's first instant. Before long, they found that the theory didn't work in its simple initial form. Cosmologists then began advocating multiverse versions of the cosmic inflation theory, which postulated innumerable unobservable universes, or innumerable unobservable events like the Big Bang. This was all the opposite of reductionism. Reductionism is when you try to explain some complex reality by saying it is explained by known simpler realities. When you try to explain some complex reality by speculating that there exists some other vastly more complicated unobserved reality, that is the opposite of reductionism. 

(2) Finding that galaxies do not seem to rotate at the observed rates given only the amount of matter observed, cosmologists invented a theory of dark matter, speculating that dark matter makes up most of the matter in the universe. The dark matter theory required all kinds of very specific speculations about the distribution of dark matter, such as the claim that galaxies are surrounded by halos of invisible dark matter. Speculating about unproven unobserved realities is not reductionism, but the opposite of reductionism. Reductionism is when you try to explain a complex reality by appealing to observed  simpler realities. 

(3) Finding that the universe does not seem to expand at the rate predicted by theory, cosmologists invented a theory of dark energy, speculating that dark energy makes up most of the mass-energy in the universe. Just as dark matter has never been observed, dark energy has never been observed. Speculating about unproven unobserved realities is not reductionism, but the opposite of reductionism. Reductionism is when you try to explain a complex reality by appealing to observed  simpler realities. 

Throughout his career, Ethan Siegel has been an enthusiastic pitchman for the theory of cosmic inflation, the theory of dark matter and the theory of dark energy. Nowhere on the Internet can you find a more dogmatic and partisan apostle of these speculative theories, all of which involve the opposite of reductionism. So now Ethan Siegel is trying to make it sound like he favors reductionism? That's hilarious. 

It is also very funny when Siegel evokes this principle: "The fact that 'There exists this phenomenon that lies beyond my ability to make robust predictions about' is never to be construed as evidence in favor of 'This phenomenon requires additional laws, rules, substances, or interactions beyond what’s presently known.' ” For many years Siegel has been a dogmatic pitchman for the now-floundering theory of dark matter, which very much involved postulating a never-observed substance beyond what's presently known.

Siegel has very often spoke as if dark matter is fact, and has repeatedly made misstatements claiming that the theory of dark matter is well-established. It's becoming increasingly clear that he has misspoke on this topic. For example:

(1) A recent news story entitled "No trace of dark matter halos" quotes a scientist saying that "the number of publications showing incompatibilities between observations and the dark matter paradigm just keeps increasing every year."

(2) There recently appeared another science article with a headline of "Dark Matter Doesn't Exist."  That article (by an astrophysics professor) says there are multiple observations showing that dark matter cannot exist. The article says, "We need to scientifically understand why the dark-matter based model, being the most falsified physical theory in the history of humankind, continues to be religiously believed to be true by the vast majority of the modern, highly-educated scientists." This suggests all those dark matter stories we have read for so many years were just ivory tower tall tales. 

Scientist specialists such as cosmologists and cognitive neuroscientists are members of  belief communities involving very strong groupthink tendencies, in which "follow the herd" is the supreme rule. In such communities (resembling little sects) the members follow speech customs when they keep parroting dubious unproven claims, regardless of how much evidence has accumulated against such claims.  

After describing a doctrine of materialism, incorrectly referring to that as "reductionism," Siegel ignorantly states this: "There is no evidence for the existence of any phenomena that falls outside of what reductionism is capable of explaining." There is a mountain of evidence for very many phenomena that fall outside of what reductionism is capable of explaining, much of it undisputed biology and psychology such as ordinary mental capabilities, and much of it in experiments and human observational reports that materialists such as Siegel refuse to study.  A person who makes a statement as dead wrong as the one I just quoted will tend to be either a very big liar or a non-scholar of human mental phenomena.  Since Siegel has never shown the slightest sign of being a scholar of human mental phenomena in any of the many essays of his I have read, I will assume he is a non-scholar of human mental phenomena. 

But when Siegel ignores his own frequent explanatory appeals to never-observed dark matter (involving no discovered particle) to explain galaxy behavior, and also ignores his own frequent explanatory appeals to a never-observed dark energy (involving no discovered particle), and also ignores his own frequent explanatory appeals to a never-observed "inflaton field" force, and states that "the combination of the known particles that make up the Universe and the four fundamental forces through which they interact has been sufficient to explain, from atomic to stellar scales and beyond, everything we’ve ever encountered in this Universe," we have a statement that is both dead wrong and extremely inconsistent with its author's frequent statements. After reading so huge a misstatement, refuted by endless facts and observations I list in the post here and the dozens of posts here, you may stop laughing and simply cringe. 

The runaway boastful hubris of such claims matches the runaway boastful hubris of the large-type boldface claim on the Big Think site that its authors are "the world's greatest thinkers." An exponential expansion in the first instant of the universe is doubtful, but it sometimes sounds like there's been an exponential expansion of the egos and boasts of some scientists.   Meanwhile with each passing year humans discover and observe more and more huge mysteries and spooky anomalies and glaring defects of prevailing explanations and not-yet-materially-explained fine-tuned biological complexity and hierarchical organization that all make such boasts sound ever more hollow.