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.