It sometimes seems like the grand lords of academia never learned such simple virtues as humility and modesty. For example, if you do a Google search for the Science 2.0 (www.science20.com), you will get this tagline:
"The world's best scientists. The internet's smartest readers."
Funny, but looking at today's version of the site, I don't see any articles written by the "world's best scientists." I merely see articles written by little known figures such as W. Glen Pyle, Anton Lucanus, Robert H. Olley, Tommaso Dorigo and Irena Soljic. There's an odd thing about these "world's best scientists" supposedly working for the Science 2.0 site: they can't even manage to get the sorting right on that website. Whenever you look up the articles in a particular category, you will find the articles sorted in reverse chronological order, with the oldest articles (dating back to 2007) shown first. Trying to find the latest science news by clicking on a link such as "Neuroscience," you'll always get instead the oldest science news: articles backing back to 2007.
Then there is a materialist propaganda site which proclaims in large type that it is written by "the world's greatest thinkers," but which very often contains very stupid essays. The list of people listed under this large type proclaiming "the world's greatest thinkers" are a group of people you almost certainly have never heard of:
Hilariously, the error-prone writers at Quanta Magazine call themselves "the best team in science journalism."
A 2012 book is entitled "Big Questions from Little People -- And Simple Answers from Great Minds." Sadly some of the answers from these "great minds" were downright stupid.
On page 11 philosopher Alain de Botton attempts to answer the question "How are dreams made?" A wise answer would have been to have said something like, "I don't understand how dreams are made, and I don't even understand how thoughts are made." Scientists understand neither of these things. Instead the philosopher discusses dubious theories about brains, and ends by saying, "Dreams show us that we're not quite the bosses of our selves." Dreams don't show us any such thing, and we are the bosses of our selves.
Asked on page 41 "Why can't animals talk like us," the very smart linguist Noam Chomsky makes the stupid claim that "every animal has some way of talking with other animals of the same kind." Then, as if he had realized how stupid this claim was while writing it, he immediately starts to backtrack on this answer. We do not get the wise answer we should have got, which is that animals cannot talk like us because human minds are vastly superior to the minds of animals. Experts sometimes senselessly claim the opposite, merely for the sake of trying to minimize the unsolved problem of human origins.
On page 101, neuroscientist Susan Greenfield attempts to answer the bad question "How does my brain control me?" That is a question that should always be answered by saying something like this: "We do not know that the brain does control you, and have no understanding of how it could control you." Instead Greenfield goes into a recitation of unfounded neuroscientist dogmas, some of which make no sense at all. She then gives this very stupid answer:
"The answer to the question, therefore, is that 'my brain' and 'me' are the same. So one cannot control the other."
No, your brain is not your self. Many times scientists have performed hemispherectomy operations on people with severe epilepsy, to prevent them from being tortured by very frequent seizures. In such an operation half of the brain is removed. The people who had such operations did not end up with half of their former selves, but with the same selves that they had before. In other cases, the fibers connecting the two hemispheres of the brain were severed, to prevent epileptic seizures. This never resulted in two selves in the same body, but always left us with a single self. This observational result is profoundly embarrassing for those claiming the brain is the self, and many of them have made deceptive statements about this matter. The evidence is very clear: splitting a brain into two disconnected hemispheres leaves you with a single human self, not two.
On page 123 evolutionary biologist Yan Wong attempts to answer the question "Do monkeys and chickens have anything in common?" Yang gives us a stupid answer claiming that monkeys and chickens "inherited the same DNA -- the same set of 'building instructions.' " Monkeys and chickens do not have the same DNA, but DNA that is very substantially different (there being much difference between the genome of a chicken and a monkey). And DNA is not "building instructions" for building an organism. The claim that DNA is a blueprint or set of instructions for building organisms is an ivory tower "old wives tale" that many evolutionary biologists keep telling. DNA merely contains low-level chemical information. DNA does not specify anatomy, and does not even specify how to make the cells of an organism.
Wong uses her answer to push the dubious dogma of common descent, that all organisms have a common ancestor. That was not the question asked. The question was what monkeys and chickens have in common, and Wong failed to tell us. A wise answer would have been something like this:
"Monkeys and chickens have very much in common. They are both incredibly organized arrangements of matter. Subatomic particles are arranged into atoms, which are arranged into molecules called amino acids, which are arranged into protein molecules consisting of hundreds of well-arranged amino acids; and protein molecules are arranged into organelles, which are arranged into incredibly complex systems called cells, which are arranged into tissues, which are arranged into organs, which are arranged into organ systems, which (along with skeletal systems) make up the physical structure of both monkeys and chickens."
On page 145 cosmologist Lawrence Krauss attempts to answer the simple question "What am I made of?" Krauss gives the stupid answer of "Stardust." He then immediately shows his lack of confidence in this dumb answer by then adding "Well, sort of." Krauss then gives us a lecture attempting to justify the claim that elements in the human body came from distant stars. In my post "Why 'We Are All Star Stuff' Is a Poor Slogan," I gave three reasons why it is misleading for scientists to be using such a slogan. One reason is that scientists actually lack any very solid basis for making dogmatic claims about the origins of carbon and oxygen. Claims that such elements came from supernova explosions are speculative and doubtful. Another reason is that given the enormous physical organization of human bodies, it is extremely misleading to be referring to human bodies as "stuff" or to be making claims such as "we are stardust." Dust is disorganized matter. The human body is supremely organized matter.
People with ideology like that of Krauss like to avoid discussing the extremely important reality that human bodies are vastly organized arrangements of matter, something that is embarrassing to them, given their worldview. An intelligent answer to the question "What are we made of?" would have been an answer like this:
"Physically, besides the 200+ well-arranged bones in our skeletal systems, we are mainly made of organs systems, which are made of organs, which are made of fantastically complex units called cells, which are made of extremely complex units called organelles, which are made of very complex things called protein molecules, each of which has thousands of well-arranged atoms. Cells in a way are more complicated than any machine man has made, because one cell can split into two functional cells, but no machine man has made can reproduce itself."
On page 237 paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer attempts to answer the question "What makes me me?" He gives the following stupid and extremely misleading answer:
"The recipe that said how all the ingredients in your body would be prepared, put together and cooked in different ways, is called your genetic code. It's like a tiny but very long book of instructions for how to make you. This genetic code was in the egg that began your life, inside your mum."
This is the childish and very false answer that Darwinist biologists have told us so many times. The DNA in the fertilized egg that began your life (a zygote) contained no instructions on how to make your body or any of its cells. Such DNA merely contained low-level chemical information such as which amino acids make up the protein molecules in your body.
I'll quote just a few of more than 25 similar quotes from doctors, biologists and chemists contradicting the Stringer quote above (all 25 can be read at the end of the post here). Geneticist Adam Rutherford states that "DNA is not a blueprint," a statement also made by biochemistry professor Keith Fox. B.N. Queenan (the Executive Director of Research at the NSF-Simons Center for Mathematical & Statistical Analysis of Biology at Harvard University) tells us this:
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