Two Types of Superstition

An interesting word in the English language is the word "superstition." Nowadays the word is used mainly as a term of abuse by those who do not want you to believe in something that is outside of well-understood physical reality, particularly things that humans have long believed in. But it is interesting to look at the varying definitions of the word "superstition." Such a look may suggest that the term "superstition" is applicable to quite a few things that are not commonly called superstitions. 

Below are some definitions of the word "superstition":

• "A belief or practice resulting from ignorance, fear of the unknown, trust in magic or chance, or a false conception of causation" or " an irrational abject attitude of mind toward the supernatural, nature, or God resulting from superstition"  (Merriam Webster dictionary).
• "A belief or notion, not based on reason or knowledge, in or of the ominous significance of a particular thing, circumstance, occurrence, proceeding, or the like" or "irrational fear of what is unknown or mysterious, especially in connection with religion" or "any blindly accepted belief or notion" (Dictionary.com).
• "A belief or way of behaving that is based on fear of the unknown and faith in magic or luck : a belief that certain events or things will bring good or bad luck" (Brittanica.com).
• "Belief that is not based on human reason or scientific knowledge, but is connected with old ideas about magic, etc." (Cambridge Dictionary).
• "An irrational belief that an object, action, or circumstance not logically related to a course of events influences its outcome" or "A belief, practice, or rite irrationally maintained by ignorance of the laws of nature or by faith in magic or chance" (The Free Dictionary)

Using such definitions as a starting point, I can help clarify the notion of superstition by distinguishing between two types of superstition: what I will call intent-presuming superstition and chance-presuming  superstition. Not all superstition is either type, but these two types of superstition make up a large fraction of superstition. 

I can describe intent-presuming superstition as an illogical belief that something was caused by intention (volition, or the will of some agent), when the thing was most likely the result of mere chance. I can give some examples of volitional superstition. 

• A person walks out of his house and sees that it is sunny. He says, "Thank you God, for making it sunny today."
• A person enters a train car, and sees an empty seat. He says, "Thank you, Jesus, for arranging for me to have a spare seat where I can sit."
• In the spring a person taking a one-hour walk in the park sees a small white butterfly. She says, "This must be a sign from my late mother."

In each of these cases, a person has attributed to intention or a will something that is more reasonably attributed to mere chance. Given the physical arrangement of clouds on our planet (with about 40% of the Earth's surface being covered by cloud masses that move around), there is roughly a 50% chance of any day being sunny by chance. So it makes no sense to think that some particular sunny day came as the result of an act of God. Similarly, given that most train cars do have an empty seat, it makes no sense to think that an empty seat in a train car was the result of a special blessing from some supernatural power. And given that small white butterflies are quite common in parks during the spring, it makes little sense to think that so common a sight was a sign from the deceased.  All of these cases seem to be an example of superstitious thinking. 

There is another very different type of superstition that is rather the opposite of intent-presuming superstition as I defined it above. I can call this type of superstition "chance-presuming superstition." 

When chance-presuming superstition occurs, someone unreasonably believes something was the result of mainly chance, when it is more reasonable to suspect that the thing was the result of will, design or intention. Below are some examples of chance-presuming superstition:

• A person seeing a log cabin in the woods says "An interesting coincidence, that the falling trees randomly formed into the shape of a house."
• A person sees a message spelled out in rocks and seashells on the beach and says, "It's remarkable that pure chance caused rocks and seashells to form a readable message."
• A person sees a house's long entrance walkway lined with identically-sized rocks on both the left and right side, and says, "An interesting coincidence, that all these identically-sized rocks have randomly rolled to only the left and right sides of the walkway."
• After seeing on the beach a very impressive sand castle like the one below, a person says, "An interesting coincidence, how the mere chance action of the wind and the waves have accidentally created a structure looking so much like  a castle."

All of these statements involve superstition. Involving faulty ideas of chance and causation not based on reason, the statements meet some of the characteristics of superstition mentioned in the definitions above.  The type of superstition involved in the statements above is chance-presuming superstition, which is illogically attributing to chance something that is not reasonably attributed to chance. 

It would seem that many of those who fancy themselves as opponents of superstition are guilty themselves of believing in superstitions: chance-presuming superstitions. Specifically:

• Many of those who claim to be opponents of superstition believe in abiogenesis, the idea that life can originate from a chance combination of chemicals. Given the enormous organization and functional complexity of even the simplest one-celled things, which require a very special organization of millions of atoms, believing in abiogenesis would seem to be a chance-presuming superstition. When we analyze the minimal requirements of even the simplest self-reproducing thing, we find a degree of organization and suitable arrangement of parts very many times more impressive than we see in the sand castle above. 
• Many of those who claim to be opponents of superstition believe in the doctrine of the accidental origin of protein molecules. Given that protein molecules consist of thousands of very well-arranged atoms, atoms that have to be arranged just right for the protein molecule to be functional, it would seem to be illogical to attribute the origin of any new protein molecule to chance or an accident.  The improbability is not lessened if you consider a protein molecule as being an arrangement of amino acids.  There are 20 different amino acids used by living things, and the average protein molecule has about 470 amino acids arranged in just the right way to produce some biological function.  The chance of getting a functional protein molecule from a chance arrangement of amino acids is very roughly about the same as the chance of getting a useful, functional paragraph from monkeys randomly typing on a keyboard. 
• Many of those who claim to be opponents of superstition believe in the accidental origin of our universe, despite all of its fine-tuned physical constants which against all odds allow organisms such as ourselves to exist and long-lived stars such as the sun to exist. When you bring to their attention the microscopic probability that a random accidental universe would have the laws, fundamental constants and conditions necessary for living creatures, such individuals may claim that there is some infinity or near infinity of other universes, and that we should therefore expect our universe to be habitable. Such desperation obviously hints very strongly at some dysfunctional causal reasoning going on, if only because you do not increase the likelihood of any habitable universe being habitable by imagining some vast collection of other universes. 

It would seem, therefore, that those regarding themselves as superstition opponents are very often themselves guilty of believing in very big superstitions, superstitions of the chance-presuming type.  There's an additional reason for categorizing the two beliefs above as superstitious: the fact that such beliefs seem to arise largely from fear, and "fear" is a word that appears in two of the definitions of superstition I cited above. Why do some believe there occurred some chance arrangement of atoms in the early Earth (yielding life), an arrangement so improbable that we would never expect it to occur by chance anywhere in the galaxy? Largely, we may surmise, because they fear attributing the origin of life to some mysterious agency they do not wish to believe in. Why do some believe that there occurred countless chance arrangements of amino acids resulting (against all odds) in countless types of functional protein molecules, in events as improbable as random pebbles and shells at the beach forming accidentally into long functional paragraphs?  Largely, we may surmise, because they fear attributing the origin of protein molecules to some mysterious agency they do not wish to believe in.

There is a word we can use to describe the fear that seems to be involved in such chance-presuming superstitions. We can call such fear teleophobia. "Teleo" is a prefix meaning "end, goal, purpose." "Phobia" is a suffix meaning "fear." Those who are afraid of discovering evidence of purpose when it exists in nature may be described as being teleophobic people or teleophobes. I can imagine many reasons that a person might be teleophobic. A person may want to position himself as a kind of ace of explanation, who can explain the basics of how reality works, rather than admitting that reality is driven by some unfathomable agency far beyond his power to understand. A person of bad character may prefer to believe that he will never have to suffer consequences for his bad actions, and may fear the existence of any divine power that might imply that he might one day have to suffer sorrow or possible punishment for his bad actions. Another reason for teleophobia is that a person may prefer to believe that certain thinkers or certain belief systems have got things totally wrong. The person may be afraid of the idea of purpose in nature, on the grounds that this might force him to start thinking that belief traditions that he has totally rejected may have some large element of truth in them. 

What happens so often is that a simple-thinking person may mentally put all of the ideas he believes in into a kind of "good box" --a category in his mind of "smart ideas" -- and he may put all of the ideas he disbelieves into a kind of "bad box" -- a category in his mind of "stupid ideas." But let's suppose one of the main ideas in this "bad box" turns out to be true. That is a result that the simple-thinking person finds profoundly troubling, a result that he may fear very much. Such a result might force the person to reassess assumptions that he very much does not want to reassess. The person may end up twisting himself into knots, believing in multiple forms of nonsense, all for the sake of avoiding some conclusion he fears -- that some belief that he has concluded is one of the main things in the "bad box" should really be put in the "good box." As part of such a process, teleophobia may arise and stubbornly persist. Twisting himself into the most ridiculous knots, the telephobe may mentally conjure up an entire multiverse (some vast infinity or near-infinity of random universes), all so that he can avoid believing in what he greatly fears: that one of the items he has placed in his "bad box" of stupid ideas (a belief that the universe is purposeful) actually belongs in the "good box" (the category of smart, justified  ideas).  

We may compare the teleophobe to some inventor named Rowan who very much regards himself as a self-sufficient person, but who every week receives a check of more than $1000 check from his father. Let's suppose this man Rowan very much hates to believe that he ever gets so generous a gift from the father he dislikes, largely because it would upset his cherished theory that he is an independently successful inventor who has no reliance on his father. So the man resorts to a theory of chance. Rowan concludes that the weekly check is not really from his father,  but is merely an accidental check sent by a computer that malfunctioned (possibly because it was struck by a cosmic ray burst).  He concludes that when the computer malfunction occurred his address was randomly and accidentally generated, all because of a fantastically improbable coincidence, rather like someone emptying a box of Alpha Bits (or scrabble letters) on the ground, and all of the letters accidentally forming into a grammatical well-spelled paragraph. 

Now let us suppose that this happened week after week, with such an envelope arriving each week in each of twenty consecutive years, each time with a check of more than $1000. Suppose this man Rowan each week says to himself after opening the check envelope, "Oh, another check supposedly from my lousy father -- it must be merely another accidental computer error, probably caused by another cosmic ray burst."  What would be going on here is a chance-presuming superstition, an illogical presumption that something looking very much like an act of will was caused by chance. Rowan's ideas about what caused him to get such gifts would involve ideas of miracles of chance that are not as implausible as believing in the accidental origin of many thousands of types of novel protein molecules, which would be even more improbable. 

When there is illogical belief about causation often associated with fear, that is superstition, which may exist as either intent-presuming superstition (illogically attributing to will or volition something more logically attributed to chance) or as chance-presuming superstition (illogically attributing to chance something more logically attributed to will or volition).  It would seem that some of the biggest believers in superstition (superstition of the chance-presuming type) are those who fancy themselves as opponents of superstition. The Rowans of academia should analyze their own teleophobia. 

Information Centralization and Knowledge Constriction Helped Materialism Flourish Between 1945 and 1995

To describe a particular system of belief that gained some ascendancy,  we may use the term "ideological regime."  An ideological regime is some structure of belief and related social structures and habits that have become popular in a particular place.  In a particular country there may exist more than one ideological regime.  For example, in the United States there are currently multiple ideological regimes, such as these:

(1) the belief tradition and social structure of Catholicism;

(2) the belief tradition and social structures of Protestantism, taking several different forms;

(3) the belief tradition and social structures of Darwinist materialism;

(4) the belief tradition and social structures of what we may call money-centered consumerist capitalism.

The interesting topic of the sociology of ideological regimes is discussed in my post "The Sociological Dynamics of Ideological Regimes." One of the topics I discussed in that post is how ideological regimes have often attempted to restrict the flow of information, so that people would not be exposed to information conflicting with the dogmas of such regimes. 

A prominent example of such restriction occurred during the Middle Ages. In Western Europe, information was largely controlled by the Roman Catholic Church. Since it was before the invention of the printing press, there were few books available to the masses. People in Western Europe got their information about how the world worked (and about history) largely through a priesthood that told a story line consistent with the dogmas of the Catholic Church. After the printing press was invented around 1436, it was almost inevitable that this highly centralized information structure would be weakened. It was now possible for independent writers to write and have printed books that conflicted with the story line of the Catholic Church. In 1517 the Protestant Reformation began, largely fueled by the availability of printed books. Protestants began telling a story line conflicting with the story line that came from Rome.  An ideological regime that had overwhelming dominance in Western Europe then had its hegemony weakened and challenged. 

There was another great case of information constriction that helped an ideological regime gain a kind of hegemony and dominance. I refer to the information constriction occurring in the fifty-year period between about 1945 and 1995. During these decades there was an extremely large degree of information centralization and knowledge constriction that helped a particular ideological regime flourish: the ideological regime of Darwinist materialism. This was a time prior to the large-scale adoption of the Internet, before it was easy to get information online. 

I can give a little sketch of some of the main elements of the kind of information constriction that occurred:

(1) People got information through books, magazines, television programs and college courses, which tended to be very biased towards the dogmas of Darwinist materialism, and which tended to restrict people from learning about things conflicting with such doctrines. 

(2) A small "elite" of publishers, producers and professors exerted enormous control over what type of information the average person would be exposed to. 

(3) A small number of encyclopedias displaying very heavy ideological bias were used overwhelmingly as information sources. Such encyclopedias used deplorable information constriction techniques and biased information presentation, to indoctrinate the public in the dogmas of a powerful elite, while minimizing mention of innumerable observations that challenged such dogmas. 

(4) There was through the first two decades of this time a very high level of submissive conformism that facilitated such information constriction. 

(5) In much of the world, there existed a situation in which challenging the dogmas of materialism might leave you dead, imprisoned in a gulag, or without a job. 

Let us consider one aspect of this information centralization: the very heavy influence of printed encyclopedias.  It is almost impossible to over-emphasize the effect which such printed encyclopedias had.  A few encyclopedias dominated, such as the massive one-volume Columbia Encylopedia, the multi-volume Encyclopedia Brittanica, and (in the Soviet Union) the Great Soviet Encyclopedia.  Since it was not yet possible to efficiently research things online during most of this period,  such printed encyclopedias had overwhelming influence. Such encyclopedias were overwhelmingly biased towards indoctrinating people in the dogmas of Darwinist materialism.  Instead of offering people an opportunity to research topics conflicting with such dogmas, the encyclopedias of the 1945-1995 era almost invariably made it very hard for people to learn things conflicting with such dogmas. 

I can give an example of the ridiculously biased information presentation that was going on. At the link here you can read online the 2224-page one-volume 1950 edition of the Columbia Encyclopedia. What happened if a reader looked up the topic of "extra-sensory perception"? He would find no article on the topic, only a "See PARAPSYCHOLOGY" statement. What happened if a reader looked up the topic of "Parapsychology" in the Columbia Encyclopedia?   He would find no article on the topic, only a "See PSYCHICAL RESEARCH" statement. It was as if the Columbia Encyclopedia had been edited to discourage anyone from reading up on ESP, making it hard as possible to find something on that topic. What happened if a reader looked up the topic of "Psychical Research" in the Columbia Encyclopedia? He would find on page 1612 a one-paragraph article that would tell him nothing of substance about ESP or parapsychology or psychical research, merely mentioning some people and groups who did research in this area, without mentioning any particular observations. 

The article begins with the highly inaccurate claim that "the use of scientific discipline in the investigation of the paranormal and supernormal phenomena is comparatively modern, having its inception with the foundation (1882) of the Society for Psychical Research."  To the contrary, any careful scholar of psychical research would be aware that the use of scientific discipline in the investigation of the paranormal occurred massively in decades before 1882, with highlights such as the 1825-1831 investigation of the French Royal Academy of Medicine, the 1869 investigation of the Dialectical Society of London, and the 1870's investigations of the world-class scientist Sir William Crookes.  The rest of the short Columbia Encyclopedia article gives us no substantive information about psychical research, merely mentioning a few books and researchers. So a reader of the 1950 Columbia Encyclopedia was prevented from learning anything about the massive laboratory evidence for ESP which had been accumulated in previous decades by researchers such as Joseph Rhine. If a reader had looked up William Crookes in the Columbia Encyclopedia, he would have learned that Crookes had discovered the element thallium and was the inventor of the Crookes Tube (the technological ancestor of computer monitors and television), but would merely be told that Crookes was "interested in psychical research," rather than being told of the eyewitness reports this eminent scientist made describing observations of human levitations, phantom faces and hands, a musical instrument mysteriously playing by itself, and paranormal materializations. 

This is the type of information constriction that occurred during the period from 1945 to 1995. Textbooks during that time were notorious for their failure to include extremely relevant information. If you read a psychology textbook during this period, you would not have been informed of hundreds of extremely important facts and observations you should have been told about. A "nothing spooky allowed" rule was generally followed in the halls of academia. If seemed after the first atomic bomb had been exploded in 1945, millions were treating the scientists rather like gods, forgetting that the ability to create enormous destructive power does not equal insight about topics such as life and mind. 

During the first twenty years of this period belief conformity was aided by the general tendency towards conformism in US society. In the USA the 1950's were in particular a period of astonishingly high conformism in which everyone seemed to want to conform to his neighbors in dress and speech.  In New York City in the 1950's almost all the men who went to office jobs wore both suits and hats, afraid to defy the prevailing dress customs. By the late 1960's we started to see a substantial rebellion against such conformism, largely led by youthful nonconformists. 

In the East communist regimes enforced ideological conformity with dire penalties for thought deviants. Information was centralized through sources such as the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, consisting of  65 volumes published from 1926 to 1947, 100 volumes published  between 1950 and 1958, and 30 volumes published between 1969 and 1978. The Soviet Union had suppressed religious expression during the first two decades of its existence. While such suppression was eased during World War II, it sprang up again in the Soviet Union after the war ended, persisting for very much of the time until 1991, when the Soviet Union broke up. If you had tried to challenge the dogmas of atheist materialism around 1975, you would have risked ending up in some gulag work prison, perhaps in Siberia. Similarly, for much of the period between 1950 and 1990, communist China actively practiced religious repression, persecuting those who deviated from Marxist orthodoxy. 

By about 1995 there were some hopeful signs. For one thing, the ideological oppression of the Soviet Union had ended, with the Soviet Union ending in late 1991. China maintained a communist regime, but seemed to have little interest in enforcing materialist dogmas.  Another very important development was the widespread adoption of the Internet, and Internet search engines, which became powerful and efficient for the average person around 1995.  Now anyone could quickly find information on almost any topic. The chance of information constriction was greatly reduced. 

We now have a situation in which people can very quickly and easily find information that discredits the dogmas of materialism.  But still materialism largely maintains a stranglehold over the minds of so many.  There are some factors that help to explain this paradox:

(1) Materialism maintains a gigantic power base in academia, where almost everyone dances to the tune played by professors indoctrinated in materialist belief traditions, or at least speaks as if they were afraid to criticize such figures.

(2) Rather than using the power of the Internet to properly research topics and discover the most relevant observations and facts, people are still kneeling to the authority of the professorial priesthood.  

(3) We have an extremely problematic situation in which most people have their viewpoints shaped by a small elite that controls the most widely viewed web sites. Such an elite often shows an unscholarly credulity to the unwarranted claims of an academia elite that often proclaims things in a way that promotes its own interests. 

(4) There has arisen a click-bait economy, in which web sites uncritically parrot unwarranted "science news" claims, largely for the sake of increasing page views that result in increased advertising revenue for those hosting the web pages. 

(5) The 1945-1990 problem of excessive influence by biased encyclopedias (such as the Columbia Encyclopedia and the Encyclopedia Brittanica) has now appeared in a new form, with search engines always producing at the top of their results links to an ideologically biased online encyclopedia (wikipedia.org). Whenever you reach a wikipedia page discussing any topic that challenges the dogmas of Darwinist materialism, you will typically find misleading and often factually inaccurate information. 

(6) Instead of supplying a broad range of web search results that are most relevant to search queries, Internet search engines and social media sites will often show results designed to parrot whatever dogmas prevail in academia. 

Despite all of the problems listed above, we should be hopeful that over the very long run the easy accessibility of information will help give rise to the decline of the materialist worldview, and to a decrease of its deleterious hegemony over our educational system and information sources.  When there is some great advance in the accessibility of information, it can take quite a few decades for the effects of that to appear.  It was 81 years between the invention of the printing press and the Protestant Revolution that the printing press made possible. After we have had 40 or 50 or 60 years of the average man having easy and instant access to the facts discrediting the dogmas of materialism, the power structure that keeps alive such dogmas may well weaken, and its spiritually poisonous stranglehold on the minds of the masses may well be lessened.  

But we should not be over-optimistic about such a topic. We should remember that Darwinist materialism is arguably a religion, a kind of stealth church in which indoctrination sessions are called "classes" rather than "sermons," the stone buildings are called "university facilities" rather than "churches" or "monasteries," and those teaching sacred dogmas are called "professors" rather than "ministers" or  "priests." Darwinist materialism qualifies as a religion if you use my definition of a religion, which is "a set of beliefs about the fundamental nature of reality and life, or a recommended way of living, typically stemming from the teachings of an authority, along with norms, ethics, rituals, roles or social organizations that may arise from such beliefs." Such a definition describes Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Confucianism, Scientology and also Darwinist materialism. Whether or not they call themselves churches, organized religions tend to persist for a very long time, and only slowly decrease in influence. 

When They Claim a "Fossil Series," Is It Mainly Just Paleontology Pareidolia?

Darwin's theory of evolution consists of three parts: (1) the doctrine of common descent, that all earthly species are derived from a common ancestor; (2) the doctrine of gradualism, that all new species and biological innovations occur because of gradual changes that very slowly occur; (3) the idea that the origin of species and biological complexity can be explained as a result of merely accidental natural events: so-called "natural selection" and random changes or random mutations. Don't be fooled by the constant attempts to make such a theory sound modern by mixing it with modern data. Inconsistent with modern data such as the enormous organization and fine-tuned complexity of protein molecules and cells, Darwinism is a moldy old ideology from the nineteenth century, which echoes ideas of Epicurus and Lucretius dating from the first century BC and earlier. 

Some think that series of very old fossils dating back many thousands or millions of years provide proof for Darwin's theory of evolution. But I will now explain why very old fossils do not prove Darwinism as a whole, and also do not prove any one of the theory's three parts.

No Fossils Prove Common Descent

There are almost no fossils dating back earlier than about 550 million years. Then the fossil record suddenly blossoms with a huge number of fossils. This explosion of fossils (very difficult to explain under Darwinian assumptions) is called the Cambrian explosion. The fossils that appear in the Cambrian explosion are fossils of highly developed organisms such as trilobites.

But it is believed that life began more than three billion years ago. We have virtually no fossil record of the first three billion years of life's history. So it clear that fossils cannot prove any doctrine of common descent, that all life is derived from the same ancestor. In order to prove that, you would have to have a complete fossil record showing the intricate details of the first three billion years of life's history. We have no such thing. From the fossil record, we cannot tell whether all life has evolved from the same ancestor, or 12 different ancestors, or 100 different ancestors.

The major groups of animals are called phyla, and there are about 24 different animal phyla. What the first major flourish of the fossil records shows us is not one phyla appearing, and then branching out into twenty. What we see is more like phyla suddenly appearing at the same time. While this is not (strictly speaking) incompatible with the idea of common descent, it is not particularly consistent with such an idea, and almost seems to suggest a very different idea.

No Fossils Prove That Natural Selection Drives Evolution

As far as the Darwinian doctrine that natural selection is the main cause of evolution, such an idea is a speculative idea that is not proven by any fossil or any series of fossils. Fossils suggest nothing about a cause of evolution. A series of fossils no more proves that natural selection is causing species to appear than it proves that magic fairies are causing species to appear. It might be otherwise if natural selection left some kind of tell-tale mark or trace element that you could use to tell when natural selection occurred. But there is certainly no such trace or tell-tale mark in any fossil.

It Is All But Impossible to Distinguish Between the Fossils of a Real Transitional Series and a Coincidentally Similar Set of Fossils That Is Not From a Real Transitional Series

Many Darwinists naively assume that once a series of fossils has been arranged into a series suggesting a transitional series, that such an arrangement proves a line of evolution from one species to another (the idea of gradualism that is one of the three parts of Darwinism). But such an assumption is erroneous. One reason is that assuming alternate scenarios under which gradualism does not occur, and one species does not evolve into another, we would coincidentally expect to see many sequences of fossils that a gradualist might mistakenly interpret as a transitional series.

For example, let's imagine some super-advanced and very old extraterrestrial civilization that visits Earth at long intervals. Suppose that 10 million years ago they introduced monkey-like species to our planet, that 5 million years ago they introduced ape-like species, and that 100,000 years ago they cause the human species to appear on Earth. This might result in a fossil record that cannot be distinguished from a Darwinian fossil record in which apes evolve from monkeys, and men evolve from apes.

Here is a very interesting idea for a computer program, one I may one day write. The program would first generate a hypothetical history of life of an extraterrestrial planet, based not on Darwinian assumptions, but on the idea that some unknown force or power causes species to suddenly appear and then survive for a random length of geological time. Each of these hypothetical species would have a certain set of characteristics. Then in its second phase the program would search through the data generated in the first phase, looking for sequences that look rather like transitional series in which one species evolved from the next (even though no such thing had ever happened in this hypothetical history). The program would probably be able to find many such series looking like transitional series, even though they would all be false alarms resulting from coincidence.

We have no idea whether the alleged transitional series presented by Darwinists are similar false alarms, resulting from coincidental similarities rather than actual gradual evolution in which one species evolves into another species. Those alleged transitional series could be the result of a kind of “paleontology pareidolia,” in which people find a few patterns they are hoping to find after spending great lengths of time scanning a large data realm, rather like people who spend countless hours scanning Mars photos and who occasionally find things on the surface they claim are evidence of ancient Mars civilizations. Dictionary.com defines pareidolia as “the imagined perception of a pattern or meaning where it does not actually exist.” The scientist who spends decades searching for transitional series of fossils (and who eventually finds one or two alleged fossil series that seem to please him) may be like some person who for 40 years carefully checks his toast for dark spots that look like the face of Jesus, and who eventually finds something that pleases him.

Below is some random text. The characters in orange accidentally happen to be sequential characters in the alphabet.

If I have the entire text to scan through, and I am free to cherry-pick  any sequential progression of characters (such as “defghijk” or “pqrstuvwx” or “ijklmnopqr”), it may be quite easy (depending on the size of the text) for me to find a sequential series of characters. I can then cherry-pick my data, and make an “evolution graphic” that looks like this:

COLUMN NUMBER	1	2	3	4	5	6
LETTER	a	b	c	d	e	f

I have now presented a visual that seems to tell a “tale of evolution.” By making this table I have suggested that the letter in the first column has evolved into the letter in the second column, that the letter in the second column has evolved into the letter in the third column, and so forth. But this is purely a case of finding a pattern I was hoping to find. There was no actual “evolution of characters” in this random text.

This simple example shows how easy it is easy it is to search through a large amount of data and find some “evolution series” when evolution is not actually happening.

Doing research along these lines might be less speculative if we were able to recover the DNA of presumed human ancestors. But we have very little of such DNA. Here's the oldest thing found: scientists were able to retrieve a small fragment of DNA from a 400,000-year-old hominid fossil, but only the mitochondrial DNA which accounts for only 37 genes. That's only about a five hundredth of the total human genome. This fragment told no clear tale supporting conventional theories, and confusingly resembled DNA of the Denisovans who supposedly lived about 80,000 years ago.

We may contrast the typical visual claiming a fossil series with a scientific chart such as the periodic table. One shows an extremely arbitrary and doubtful claim of a series, and the other shows a series that involves no ideology at at all.  Nature really is objectively structured in a way that matches the periodic table. For example, all carbon atoms have six protons, all nitrogen atoms have seven protons, all oxygen atoms have eight protons, and so forth. Although the arrangement of the periodic table is somewhat arbitrary, there is nothing arbitrary about the numbering found in its squares or the ordering of the squares.  We might expect to find exactly the same numbering and ordering on periodic tables drawn up by intelligent species on other planets, because the numbers and sequences match  objective facts of nature. The periodic table does not push any ideology; it tells us objective indisputable measurable facts of nature.  Charts suggesting fossil series, on the other hand, are extremely cherry-picked affairs in which someone selects fossils out of millions that a particular age may have produced, for the sake of planting in our minds some particular storyline that may or may not be true. 

The Number of Alleged Transitional Series Presented to Support Darwinian Gradualism Is Small, and Many Say It Is Much Smaller Than We Would Expect If Darwinian Gradualism Were Occurring

Under Darwinian assumptions we should expect to find innumerable transitional series, but the evidence that exists for transitional series is something much, much weaker.  Below is a quote from a leading paleontologist, the late evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould:

"The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our text-books have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils. Yet Darwin was so wedded to gradualism that he wagered his entire theory on a denial of this literal record: 'The geological record is extremely imperfect and this fact will to a large extent explain why we do not find interminable varieties,  connecting together all the extinct and existing forms of life by the finest graduated steps. He who rejects these views on the nature of the geological record, will rightly reject my whole theory.' Darwin's argument still persists as the favored escape of most paleontologists from the embarrassment of a record that seems to show so little of evolution."

Alleged Transitional Series of Fossils Often Involve Fossils Gathered in Places So Geographically Diverse That the Claim of a Transition Is Not Credible

When we see some chart showing an alleged set of transitional fossils, we never see any identification of where the fossils were gathered. What we sometimes get is something like this:

Fossil A --> Fossil B --> Fossil C --> Fossil D

where the fossils came from different continents, or different quadrants of a the same continent.  But claims of a gradual transition in such cases are often not credible, because of the impossibility or implausibility of descendants traveling from one continent to another, or traveling from one quadrant of a continent to some other quadrant of that continent thousands of miles away.  

If you do a Google image search for "oceanic dispersal," you can find maps depicting claims that plants or animals somehow crossed oceans long before there were any boats. The page here has one of those maps, which appeared in a scientific paper.  The arrows in the map tell us a large set of vastly improbable tall tales of oceanic movements before the existence of boats, such as (1) the claim that eons ago monkeys and cotton plants traveled from Africa to South America; (2) the claim that eons ago some plant traveled from South America to Africa; (3) the claim that eons ago gecko lizards traveled from Africa to Cuba; (4) the claim that eons ago some plant traveled from North America and Africa to Australia; (5) the claim that eons ago some plant traveled from Australia to Hawaii;  (6) the claim that eons ago chameleons and frogs traveled 200 miles between  Madagascar and Africa; (7) the claim that eons ago some plant traveled from New Zealand to South America; (8) the claim that eons ago some plant traveled from India to New Zealand; and (9) the claim that eons ago some trees traveled between Africa and Australia.  These are the kind of claims that paleontologists make in connection with some of their claims of transitional fossil series. The problem is that these claims are tall tales lacking in credibility, sounding like the tale of a cyclone taking Dorothy's house from Kansas to Oz.  

The Alleged Transitional Series Presented to Support Darwinian Gradualism Typically Involve Too-Fast Evolution That Darwinism Cannot Plausibly Account For

It's not enough to just have an alleged transitional series – you need to have a series with plausibility. Suppose you are a district attorney presenting a kind of transitional series as part of your case against a defendant. You maintain that the defendant left his job near Penn Station in Manhattan at 5:00, went to an apartment in eastern Brooklyn, killed the murder victim at 5:10, and then returned to his apartment in northern Manhattan by 5:20. This is a transitional series, but not a plausible one, because it happens too fast. Whether you take subway, train, car, or cab, you cannot get from Penn Station to eastern Brooklyn and back to northern Manhattan in only twenty minutes.

An equal lack of plausibility is found in most or all of the fossil transitional series alleged by Darwinists. The most famous such series is the fossils claimed to be a transitional series between 4-million-year-old primates and modern man. This series involves an explosive growth of brain power, requiring many favorable mutations. But the smaller the population, the lower the likelihood of getting favorable mutations; and it is generally held that about a million years ago the population of human ancestors was very small, only about 10,000. Given such a small population, Darwinian evolution cannot explain a rapid transition to human brains of the type that Darwinists imagine.

Four scientists (one from Cornell University) published a scientific paper entitled “The Waiting Time Problem in a Model Hominem Population,” which was published in the journal Theoretical Biology and Medical Modelling. The paper can he read here. Using a computer simulation, they “simulated a classic pre-human hominin population of at least 10,000 individuals, with a generation time of 20 years, and with very strong selection (50 % selective elimination).” They were basically trying to see how long it would take before you got a mutation consisting of two nucleotides (which is a fairly minor mutation, only some tiny fraction of the mutations needed for the evolution of human intelligence). This is called the “waiting time problem.” The authors summarize their results as follows:

"Biologically realistic numerical simulations revealed that a population of this type required inordinately long waiting times to establish even the shortest nucleotide strings. To establish a string of two nucleotides required on average 84 million years. To establish a string of five nucleotides required on average 2 billion years. We found that waiting times were reduced by higher mutation rates, stronger fitness benefits, and larger population sizes. However, even using the most generous feasible parameters settings, the waiting time required to establish any specific nucleotide string within this type of population was consistently prohibitive."

Another series of fossils that Darwinists like to discuss is one that supposedly suggests an evolution from land-based creatures to whales. But the dating of these fossils shows they were deposited over a span way too short to plausibly account for such a transition under Darwinian assumptions of mere random mutations and natural selection. When a major popular science web site gives us a headline claiming, “Whales Evolved in the Blink of an Eye,” we have a series of postulated changes occurring too fast to be accounted for under Darwinian assumptions.

What does this “too fast” problem mean? It means that the most famous series of alleged transitional fossils must be “taken off the table” as evidence for Darwinian evolution. Like a wise jury that would need to disqualify and invalidate any “transitional series” claim that a defendant got from mid-Manhattan to Brooklyn and then to northern Manhattan in 20 minutes, we must disqualify and invalidate any series of fossils used to support claims of Darwinian gradualism that appear to show transitions happening way too fast to have occurred under Darwinian assumptions.

Once we do that, Darwinism seems to be left with very little in the way of supporting fossil evidence. Such a situation could possibly be reversed if Darwinists were to revolutionize their thinking to allow for some plausible method of fast evolution. But our Darwinists keep stubbornly sticking to their same old “random mutations plus natural selection” story that is way, way too slow to produce the transitions they claim occurred.

Visuals Used to Depict the Appearance of Alleged Transitional Species Are Often Fanciful or Misleading, and Do Not Correspond to Any Fossils 

What often occurs is something like this:

(1) Some fossil will be found that slightly suggests the possibility of something a little like some transitional species that paleontologists hoped to find. 

(2) There will then be many artist depictions which depict such a species as having characteristics that are not justified by the fossil that was found. 

For example, if you do a Google image search for "tiktaalik," you will see a great number of artist depictions showing a fish-like animal with forelimbs. But if you do a Google image search for "tiktaalik fossil," you will see that the very slight fossil evidence for such a species does not correspond to the artist depictions, and merely show slight protrusions that might easily be mere fins.  

So it's kind of a "give them an inch, and they'll take a mile" situation. 

A Large Fraction of the Fossil Evidence Presented in Support of Darwinian Gradualism Involves Subjective Interpretation,  Subjective Forensics, Social Construction and Adhesive Construction

Some of the leading fossil cases involve subjective analysis. An example is the famous skeleton called Lucy, which consists of fragments of a skeleton rather than anything like a complete skeleton. We have in this case subjective analysis both in the judgment that the fragments were all originally part of the same animal skeleton, and also subjective analysis when people speculate on what this Lucy animal looked like. If any prosecutor in a court were to try to argue that scattered fragments of a skeleton were bone fragments of a particular individual who died decades ago, a defense attorney would be able to raise all kinds of objections relating to how the evidence was gathered, how the conclusions were drawn, and whether there were alternate interpretations. Medical studies are double-blinded to avoid scientist bias, but no such procedure occurs for paleontologists who are gathering fossil fragments. We typically let some paleontologist eager to support some orthodox Darwinian interpretation do the evidence gathering and interpretation, without guarding against bias that might produce “find whatever you hope to find” kind of results.

A related example of subjective interpretation may be found in rocks that are claimed to be evidence that human ancestors existed about 500,000 years ago. It has long been claimed that flaked rocks from hundreds of thousands of years ago must have be stone tools made by human ancestors. But this link says, “Recent research published in Nature by a team led by Tomos Proffitt at the University of Oxford shows that capuchin monkeys regularly produce sharp-edged flakes indistinguishable from those made by early hominins.”

Claims made about the significance of particular fossils are typically socially constructed claims. They rely on some chorus of paleontologists repeating countless times claims about fossil fragments that are of debatable or doubtful significance. Paleontologists also often rely on a literal adhesive construction of fossil fragments. In the history of paleontology what has very often occurred is that bone fragments were found scattered around some site, and paleontologists or their helpers decided to glue together fragments to make some impressive-looking find.  This often involves dubious assumptions that the fragments came from a single organism or the same species, when no such assumption is warranted.  My post "Fragment Follies of the Guessing Glue Guys" discusses how paleontologists often resort to dubious gluing efforts to make speculative constructions from fossil fragments. Often, it is not merely glue that is used, but baking soda mixed with superglue, which allows massive gaps to be filled in with some binding substance that looks like bone. 

The Deliberate Faking of Fossils Has Long Been a Cloud on Paleontology Claims

A history of paleontology will tell the tale of Piltdown Man, some fossil fakery that long fooled paleontologists, who for decades cited it is as important evolution evidence. Nowadays what looks like an important fossil can be sold for large sums of money. This has given rise to a "cottage industry" in faking fossils in certain countries. A Scientific American article entitled "How Fake Fossils Pervert Paleontology" states, "A nebulous trade in forged and illegal fossils is an ever-growing headache for paleontologists." We read of "a growing and serious problem of fraudulent fossils being produced on an industrial scale in China."

Below is a statement by two natuaral history museum curators (link).:

"Countries where fossil fakes are common include Peru, Colombia, Russia, USA, Germany, France, and (especially) Morocco and China. The biggest markets for these fakes are in the USA, Morocco and China. The US market is also the leader in the trade of fakes and the Internet provides a ready source for them. Sale and auction websites on the Internet are an ideal way for selling fake fossils. Other outlets for selling fake fossils are the numerous mineral and fossil fairs organised around the world, and the more important the fair, the larger the number of fakes.... An important fact to emphasise is that, since China became open to commerce, fakes have increased by more than 500% as a result of the massive demand for Chinese fossils. The variety and magnitude of Chinese fake fossils is endless. They include every kind of forgery, from fakes made of pieces of different specimens (dinosaurs, turtles and crocodiles), to copies made completely of plaster (turtles, crocodiles and sabre-toothed cat skulls)."

Proving an Example of One Species Gradually Evolving Into Another Would Not Prove That Most Species Have Appeared Because of Gradual Evolution

Darwinists typically take a kind of “if I've moved a meter, I've moved a mile” attitude in the way they act as if proving one case of a species evolving into another would prove the general idea that all species have appeared through gradual evolution. But, to the contrary, one would have to prove that very many or most species have evolved from more primitive species to prove the gradualism claim of Darwinism.

A Marxist may dogmatically claim that class struggle is the main thing that explains historical events, and he may try to prove that by giving the example of the French Revolution, which did seem to be a case of class struggle. But proving this one example (or a few similar examples) does not prove that most historical events occur because of class struggles. Similarly, if a Darwinist were, for example, to prove some particular transition showing that one species had evolved into another millions of years ago, this would not prove that most species had appeared because of such a process, nor would it prove that the rather recent appearance of mankind had occurred because of such a process.

Darwinists Lack Any Credible Theory of Macroevolution

Darwinism can possibly explain small-scale transitions, such as a species gradually changing its color to better adapt to environmental changes. But Darwinism lacks any credible theory of how dramatic evolutionary changes could occur, such as dinosaurs evolving into birds or ape-like animals evolving into humans. The modern theory of Darwinism (called Neo-Darwinism or the Modern Synthesis) relies  on a lie: the lie that DNA is an anatomy blueprint. DNA only stores low-level chemical information, such as which amino acids make up a protein. If there is no anatomy blueprint in DNA (and there certainly is not), then Darwinists cannot explain dramatic anatomical transitions by postulating gradual DNA changes. 

Almost Any Large Group of Richly Funded Researchers Will Produce Superficially Persuasive Results for Its Favored Tenets

There is a rule that I may call the Rule of Richly Funded Researchers.  I may define this as the rule that almost any large group of richly-funded researchers will be able to produce superficially persuasive evidence for its cherished beliefs, even if those beliefs are false. So, for example, let us imagine that there were to exist tens of thousands of astrology researchers, who were given more than a billion dollars in federal funding to do research. Such researchers would probably be able to crunch data on births, illnesses and deaths to produce superficially convincing evidence in favor of astrology,  the belief that stars and planets produce a mysterious influence on humans.  Given that very many millions of dollars have been given over the past century to paleontologists very eager to prove their Darwinist beliefs, we should not be surprised if they are able to produce a few superficially persuasive cases of "transitional fossil series," even if their ideas about origins are way wrong. Similarly, if there was some community of thousands of researchers who passionately believed that the ghosts of animals live in the clouds, and were such researchers to receive many millions of dollars in funding, they would no doubt eventually be able to produce some superficially impressive photos showing clouds that looked very much like animals. 

Correcting the Most Iconic Visual of Darwinism

The most famous visual presented by Darwinists is one in which we see a series of four or five species, all shown facing the right. The visual is misleading because it typically fails to display an implausible transitional state, and also fails to mention the intellectual gulf between these species.  But the famous visual may be corrected by showing it as below:

Now we can see why it makes no sense to imagine gradual accidental changes producing such a transition: (1) the lack of any explanation for the giant leap from speechless organisms to speaking organisms; (2) the lack of an explanation for why there would have been a "survival of the fittest" transition resulting in an intermediate organism that would not be able to walk as well as its predecessor.  

A Paper Documenting COVID-19 Heresy Suppression Treats One Guilty Party With Kid Gloves

There is an extremely common narrative stated repeatedly by scientists, one that claims that scientists and clergymen are kind of polar opposites. What typically occurs is this:

(1) First, the narrative will start out by describing clergy in a stereotypical way, a way that makes the clergy sound like persons of blind faith who pay no attention to evidence, and who believe only according to tradition.

(2) Then the narrative will describe an idealized portrait of the fair and noble truth-seeking scientist. The scientist will be described as some impartial judge of truth, who calmly weighs matters purely according to the latest and greatest evidence. The scientist will be described as someone ever-ready to discard his previous beliefs when some new evidence appears contradicting such beliefs. The scientist will be described as someone ready to stand against authority, and the example of Galileo will often be used. 

This kind of narrative is quite misleading. The truth is that scientists and clergy have very much in common.  

Similar advice of scientific academia and organized religion

In this post I will look at just one of these similarities: the fact that both clergy and scientists engage very strongly in heresy shaming and heresy suppression. It is well known that in the history of the Catholic Church there was not merely heretic shaming but also violent persecution of Christians holding doctrines differing from the doctrines approved by the Catholic Church. What is not so well known is that scientist belief communities have often engaged in similar behavior, but without anyone being burned at the stake. Some of the attempts in the world of scientific academia to suppress inconvenient observations are documented in Etzel Cardena's paper "The Unbearable Fear of Psi: On Scientific Suppression in the 21st Century."At the link here, we read of the heresy shaming of a thinker who did not even challenge any of the core tenets of astronomers, but merely maintained that Venus had arisen after being ejected from Jupiter:

"When Worlds in Collision came out, its would-be publisher, Macmillan, was threatened with a boycott of all its books. The editor who bought the manuscript was fired...A concerted effort was made to suppress Velikovsky's ideas. His data was distorted, the presentation of his views blocked, his books boycotted or scurrilously reviewed, his supporters fired, his integrity impugned -- all because his ideas challenged an existing dogma." 

A recent paper ("Censorship and Suppression of Covid-19 Heterodoxy: Tactics and Counter-Tactics") in an academic journal described some more recent examples of heresy shaming and heretic persecution in which people with reasonable unpopular opinions on COVID-19 were defamed, mistreated and persecuted. The main such opinion was the lab leak hypothesis, the hypothesis that COVID-19 arose because of some lab accident occurring in Wuhan, China. The lab leak hypothesis is not a conspiracy theory, but a mere theory of human error, involving the idea that overeager and overconfident but probably well-meaning scientists were doing dangerous experimentation with disastrous results. People advancing this reasonable hypothesis have been wrongly smeared as "conspiracy theorists," a term nowadays used to dismiss someone as an irrational fantasist.  Another contrarian opinion on COVID-19 was one that rejected lockdowns (including the closing of schools) on the grounds that the harms supposedly exceeded the benefits.  

The paper (by Shir-Raz and others) does a good job of documenting the type of heresy suppression that went on. We read details such as this:

• The paper says, "Since early 2020, there has been an upsurge of complaints about censorship by individuals and groups presenting heterodox COVID-related viewpoints and information, with even more complaints in 2021 following COVID-19 vaccine rollouts," and that "many instances involve social media censorship, including the removal of accounts ('deplatforming') or blocking the visibility of a user’s content without informing them ('shadow banning') (Martin 2021)."
• The paper says, "Respondents reported that exclusion was only the first step: shortly after that they started being subjected to defamation by the media, and disparaged as 'anti-vaxxers,' 'Covid deniers,' 'dis/misinformation spreaders' and/or 'conspiracy theorists.'"
• The paper says, "Tactics of censorship and suppression described by our respondents include exclusion, derogatory labelling, hostile comments and threatening statements by the media, both mainstream and social; dismissal by the respondents’ employers; official inquiries; revocation of medical licenses; lawsuits; and retraction of scientific papers after publication."
• We read about social media platforms that made it harder for people to find out about a Great Barrington Declaration in which some experts criticized the use of lockdowns to fight COVID-19. 
• We read about how government officials colluded with social media companies to suppress minority opinions about COVID-19. 
• We read about how so-called "fact checkers" seemed to be sometimes groups given a mission to discredit, disparage or defame anyone deviating from whatever COVID-19 opinion was currently regarded as mainstream.
• We read, "Some of the respondents reported that they were subjected to defamation by their own institution, with the apparent intention to harm their reputation and careers." 
• The paper tells us, "In some cases, respondents reported that following a position or criticism they expressed, they were dismissed from their institution, or were notified that their contract would not be renewed."
• We read, "Respondents said they were summarily dismissed or disqualified from prestigious positions, such as serving on leading health or scientific committees, or editing medical journals, without due process or transparency."
• We read, "Some doctors reported on official inquiries launched against them, such as investigating or threatening to withdraw their medical license," and that "some researchers and doctors recounted how their research had been retracted by the journal after publication."
• We read, "Another theme that arose repeatedly during the interviews was that research critical of COVID-19 policies and orthodoxy were treated in ways the interviewees had never encountered before in their careers," and that "this included having papers rejected from journals (often multiple times) without peer review, the journal review and publication process taking many months longer than typical for the journal, and even having papers rejected from pre-print servers such as MedRXiv."

All in all, the new paper by Shir-Raz and others does a fine job of documenting the heresy suppression and the intimidation of heretics and contrarian thinkers that went on during the first three years of COVID-19. Their paper is a valuable work well worth a read. But the paper suffers from two great shortfalls:

(1) The persecuted and defamed thinkers are depicted entirely as scientists and doctors, even though such people were only a small fraction of the contrarian thinkers who were defamed, censored and suppressed. 

(2) There is basically no mention at all made of the very large role of scientists themselves in attempts to suppress, intimidate and defame people who expressed contrarian heretical opinions regarding COVID-19. 

In the new paper by Shir-Raz and others, certain groups are targeted for blame for the suppression of contrarian viewpoints about COVID-19, including these:

• Social media companies
• The medical establishment
• Academia administrators
• Government officials
• Science journal publishers and the staff at science journals
• Mainstream media editors and writers

Trying to act as if scientists are a group of different people from such figures is fallacious, largely because scientists often hold some of the jobs listed above. For example, whether to publish or retract a paper is a decision typically made by scientists themselves. To give another example, the administrators at universities and colleges are very often science professors themselves. And the government officials involved with COVID-19 were very often scientists themselves. 

A crucial early document in the attempt to suppress reasonable contrarian opinions about COVID-19 was the Lancet's March 2, 2020 declaration "Statement in support of the scientists, public health professionals, and medical professionals of China combatting COVID-19," one that set the tone for the two years of scientist statements. The document unfairly attempted to smear anyone suggesting an accidental lab origin of COVID-19 as a conspiracy theorist, saying, "We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin." For the next 18+ months scientists treated this declaration almost as holy scripture.  Scientists acted like they had "got the official message": that anyone claiming an accidental lab leak origin of COVID-19 was to be shamed as some kooky unhinged conspiracy theorist. Who were the dozens of signers of this declaration? Mainly scientists. 

It is very easy to find abundant evidence of the very high complicity of scientists in the unfair treatment and defamation of those holding contrarian opinions on COVID-19. Just do Google searches like the ones below (changing "magazine" later to "journal" or "publication"):

• Scientific magazine on COVID-19 origins 
• Scientific magazine on COVID-19 lockdowns 

A typical example of the type of work we got from scientists during the period from 2020 and to mid-2022 was a March 2022 Scientific American  article with the absurd title "The Lab-Leak Hypothesis Made It Harder for Scientists to Seek the Truth." The claim is not at all true.  The hypothesis that COVID-19 may have arisen from a lab accident has not done anything to make it harder for any scientist to seek the truth. The article was written by three scientists: a virologist, a psychologist, and a climate scientist. The article repeatedly tries to draw illegimate associations between those who favor the lab leak hypothesis and various unrelated parties who the authors regard as unsavory. Specifically:

(1) The article again and again unfairly tries to paint supporters of the lab leak hypothesis as conspiracy theorists.  You need not believe in any conspiracy theory to think that COVID-19 may have arisen from a lab leak when overconfident scientists were not as careful as they should have been. A theory of human error and overconfidence is not a conspiracy theory.  

(2) By having a photo showing people opposing vaccine mandates, the article tries to link people opposing vaccine mandates and those who think COVID-19 may have originated when some lab leak occurred. These are two different unrelated opinions. 

(3) Most ridiculously, the article tries to link those disbelieving in man-made global warming with those supporting the lab leak hypothesis. Those two opinions have no connection, and in one sense are rather the opposite. A global warming denialist is often saying "it's all just natural, not man-caused" about global warming, while a lab leak theorist may typically say "it's not all just natural, it was man-caused" about COVID-19.  

Such an article was typical of the work of scientists for more than two years.  In 2020, 2021 and 2022 we got endless tweets and articles from scientists and professors who tried to portray anyone deviating from the supposed mainstream position on COVID-19 as a kook, a crank, a conspiracy theorist or a public menace.  A typical tactic was the mindless current tactic of branding anyone who disagrees with your scientific opinion about something as being "anti-science." The tactic is as intellectually empty as someone in the US calling anyone who disagrees with his political opinions as being "anti-American." 

Why did scientists seem so eager to defame and discredit anyone advancing opinions about COVID-19 contrary to the storyline most of them were telling? We can only speculate about some of the possible reasons, including these:

(1) Scientists may have wanted people to dismiss any COVID-19 origins hypothesis in which clumsy scientists played a key causal role.

(2) Wishing to continue their often dangerous fiddling with genomes, scientists may have wanted people to dismiss any hypothesis that would have caused the public to demand much greater restrictions for gene-splicing scientists, and possibly reduced funding for such genetic experimentation.

(3) Having become vocal supporters of corporate GMO suppliers (suppliers of Genetically Modified Organisms), often because of payments scientists received directly or indirectly from such corporations, and having often called anyone concerned about GMOs  "anti-science," scientists may have wanted to exclude any hypothesis that might make such product enthusiasm look questionable. 

(4) Having assured us of the unlimited creative powers of blind evolution, and having disparaged and shamed anyone supporting design in a "design or blind evolution" debate, scientists may have become addicted to dogmatically attributing biological innovations to blind evolution, no matter how strongly the evidence may suggest purposeful intention was involved.  

Martin Kenney's 1986 book Biotechnology: The University-Industrial Complex documented how universities had started to become thoroughly entangled with corporate interests, and such a situation has become much worse since that time. Nowadays professors are often such vested interests with so many corporate entanglements and money-related industrial associations that they can no longer be regarded as impartial judges on any matter heavily related to contemporary pharmaceutical research, genetic engineering or  biotechnology research. The opinions of professors on such topics are often no more to be trusted than the opinion about some corporation held by someone who has invested large sums of money in such a corporation.