The Poisonous Effects of the "Struggle for Life" Ideology

When there first appeared Darwin's book "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life," the book was greeted by many almost if it was manna from heaven.  A scholar (Velikovsky) noted the following:

"One wonders at the avidity displayed by scientists in the acceptance of the Darwinian theory....It was not brought up against him that he had no academic position in a university, or that his own scholastic degree was that of a bachelor of theology, or that he omitted all footnotes to his sources, or that it was often impossible for a reader to check the data...Darwin became the supreme authority, the symbol of resolution of all questions, and a substitute for the Creator himself."

At that time there was something which was like a gigantic springboard ready to launch some theory of natural biological origins that might have been proposed, ensuring its cultural success. That springboard was the social structure of academia. Just as the social structure of medieval churches served as a huge springboard that helped many a legend go viral (such as legends of the healing powers of saint bones), the social structure of universities and colleges stood ready to make a natural theory of biological origins go viral. Once an idea starts being spread about by the professors at ten or twenty top universities, the idea has a good chance of eventually infecting the masses, even if the idea is very poorly substantiated. Once a bandwagon effect gets rolling to spread some idea in a process of social contagion, and an academia herd effect comes into play, some flimsy claim can become a societal norm, a speech custom that all compliant students are expected to mouth.  

Within the halls of academia there existed a large group of people extremely eager to popularize some theory of natural biological origins as soon as it appeared. We may call these people the yearning-to-say-we-got-this guys. “We got this” is a phrase people say when they think they have something under control or when they think they understand some thing. The yearning-to-say-we-got-this guys included people in academia who hungered for some theory of natural biological origins which would feather their caps and enhance their prestige: a set of professors yearning to crown themselves with glory by positioning themselves as sages who understood the great secret of biological origins. 

Of course, if you are a professor of biology or a professor of natural history, you will seem like a vastly more impressive person if you can convince people that you understand the deep mystery of the origin of species and the origin of humanity. Some professor saying "I understand how mankind originated" sounds like a far more impressive figure than some professor humbly saying, "Such a mystery is a hundred miles over my head." The yearning-to-say-we-got-this guys also included many inside and outside of academia who desired some theory of accidental origins that would fit in with their belief in the nonexistence of any power greater than man.  In the nineteenth century atheists wanted a theory of natural biological origins more than a young boy wants a Playstation or Xbox machine under his Christmas tree. 

So we can begin explaining how Darwinism got to be so popular by mentioning the two groups of people that were most eager for a theory such as Darwin's: professors (particularly biology professors) and atheists. But there were other groups that flocked to Darwinism: oppressive capitalists and oppressive imperialists. To such people Darwinism was like a big Christmas gift: an ideology that would give a green light or a "thumbs up" to their cruel and oppressive behavior. 

Darwin said that the basis of all biology was a "struggle for existence" or "struggle for life" in which "survival of the fittest" was the key principle. Darwin used the very term "struggle for life" in the title of his book "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life," also making use of the racist-sounding phrase "preservation of favoured races." Two large groups of people greatly welcomed such ideas:

(1) Capitalist business men running Victorian Era factories, workhouses and sweatshops that ruthlessly overworked workers, and often worked children to their deaths.  The Victorian Era (1837 - 1901) was famous for its brutal exploitation of workers. 

(2) Anyone at all building an international empire such as the British Empire, an empire built upon the ruthless exploitation and domination of people all over the globe. 

Velikovsky puts it this way:

"The teaching of Darwin in a sense sanctified the exploitation of the less fit by the better fit -- that is, exploitation of those less able to adapt to the circumstances and opportunities of the times. The industrial revolution that was shaping itself in the Victorian age saw the enterprising, but also the unscrupulous, take advantage of the underprivileged, the resourceless, the ignorant, the unprotected -- in a word, the unfit. The exploitation manifested itself in work hours from before dawn until the night, in child labor paid pittances, in unhygienic factories and perilous mines." 

The map below shows the British Empire at its height in 1920.  Of course, global empires are not built by gentle means. Global empires are built through the oppression and exploitation of local peoples. Darwinism provided a green light to the oppression that built the British Empire. All cruelties and oppression could be justified with slogans such as "survival of the fittest" and "struggle for existence."

Using the term "enslaved" in a rather loose way, to mean oppression something less than literal enslavement, Velikovsky put it this way, referring to the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901):

"The British Islands, having lost the American colonies at the end of the former century, now, under Victoria, were expanding to become the dominant colonial power in the world. The blacks of Africa, the dark-skinned peoples of the lands bordering the Indian Ocean and various other colors were enslaved as colonial people -- and though the colonial expansion of the British goes back to the sixteenth century, it never reached the scope, the glamour and the degree of extortion that it did in the days of Victoria." 

The ideology of Darwinism aided and abetted this oppression. One of Darwin's main works was The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. That book had some shockingly racist passages in it. One of them was the passage below:

“At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.”

This racist passage predicts that the “savage races” (meaning humans such as blacks and Africans) will in the future all be exterminated. It is also a passage seeming to suggest that blacks or Australian aborigines are closer to gorillas than Caucasians are.  Although it does not specifically advocate a program of racial extermination, such a passage can be called exterminationist-friendly.  The British imperialists oppressing Africans in East Africa and aborigines in Australia no doubt took solace in passages such as the one above, which rather seemed to give them a "green light" to proceed as cruelly as they wished.  American imperialists also took comfort from Darwinist ideas, using them to justify their oppression in places such as the Philippines. 

A book by another scholar states this, referring to the passage by Darwin quoted above:

"The use of natural selection as a vindication of militarism or

imperialism was nothing new in European or American thought. Imperialists, calling upon Darwinism in defense of the subjugation of weaker races, could point to The Origin of Species, which had referred in its sub-title to The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life...Had not Darwin himself written quite complacently, in The Descent of Man, of the likelihood that backward races would disappear before the advance of higher civilization?" 

The same scholar gives us this quote:

" 'The greatest authority of all the advocates of war is Darwin,' explained Max Nordau in the North American Review in 1889...'They can cover their natural barbarism with the name of Darwin and proclaim the sanguinary [bloodthirsty] instincts of their inmost hearts as the last word of science.' "

Later the same scholar writes this:

"Darwinism and the imperial urge were bound to be fused. If Darwinism was not the primary source of the belligerent ideology and dogmatic racism of the late nineteenth century, it did at least put a new instrument into the hands of the theorists of race and struggle."

Velikovsky remarks below on how Darwinian ideas helped plant the seeds of Hitlerism:

"The doctrine of the fit, whom natural law expects, almost obliges, to live off the unfit, developed in its next phase into Nietzsche's teaching of the Superman to whom all is permitted. And the basis for the Hitlerian philosophy in the following generation was prepared: out of 'fit' and then 'Superman' emerged the concept of a master race." 

Referring to the fifty years before World War I, a book tells us "Darwinism became a kind of popular philosophy in Germany more than in any other country, even England." A book notes the following about Ernst Haeckel, a German writer who had a best-seller book ("The Riddle of the Universe") first published in 1899 and selling half a million copies by 1933: 

"Haeckel saw in Darwin's theory the chance to provide a unified theory of physical, biological and psychological phenomena...Perhaps the most distinctive aspect of his philosophy was the duty of self-preservation and self-assertion according to the natural law of struggle for life. That there are clear differences between the existing human races is a point emphasized by Haeckel...At another level, the idea of spreading the German Lebensraum, or vital space, was essential; the idea of an expansion to the East was essential. It is obvious that the National Socialist bio-policy...was well inaugarated by Haeckel, and indeed followed my many others. In this sense, Hitler 'did not invent national socialist bio-policy' (Stein 1988:51), but took it from the Haeckels and converted it into a down to earth treatise as Mein Kampf should be perceived. "

A search for references to Darwin in Haeckel's "The Riddle of the Universe" shows 47 occurrences, many of them worshipful. On pages 220 to 221 of this book Haeckel gives the atheistic-Darwinist reasoning under which Darwinism was used to justify a "might makes right" degenerate morality. Sounding like he was planting the seeds of Hitlerism, the fervent Darwin devotee Haeckel stated this:

"Darwin has not only proved by his theory of selection that the orderly processes in the life and structure of animals and plants have arisen by mechanical laws without any preconceived design, but he has shown us in the struggle for life the powerful natural force which has exerted supreme control over the entire course of organic evolution for millions of years. It may be said that the struggle for life is the  'survival of the fittest' or the 'victory of the best'  ; that is only correct when we regard the strongest as the best (in a moral sense)....Do we find a different state of things in the history of peoples, which man, in his anthropocentric presumption, loves to call 'the history of the world '? Do we find in every phase of it a lofty moral principle or a wise ruler, guiding the destinies of nations? There can be but one answer in the present advanced stage of natural and human history : No. The fate of those branches of the human family, those nations and races which have struggled for existence and progress for thousands of years, is determined by the same 'eternal laws of iron' as the history of the whole organic world which has peopled the earth for millions of years."

A major popularizer of Darwinism was the philosopher Herbert Spencer, whose works were very popular in the nineteenth century, but are read by almost no one today. A book states this about Spencer:

"Spencer was a firm opponent of welfare, relief or any kind of state aid to the poor of the sick. Such measures, he claimed, simply increased the number of 'unfit' individuals and interfered with social evolution."

Spencer probably was inspired by the cruel and immoral statement below by Darwin in The Descent of Man:

"With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated ; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination : we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed."

Darwinism helped pave the way for bloodshed, cruelty and oppression in a variety of ways:

(1) Creating the myth that human origins had been scientifically explained, Darwinism helped paved the way for totalitarian atheism, which in Russia, China and Cambodia proved to be history's most enormous engine of mass murder and oppression, cropping up many tens of millions of dead bodies at the hands of people like Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, along with millions of others who were put in the living hell of places such as the Soviet gulag prison camps. For example, in the wikipedia.org article “Persecution of Christians in the Soviet Union,” we read, “The total number of Christian victims under the Soviet regime has been estimated to range between 12-20 million.” We read details such as these:

•  “In the years 1917–1935, 130,000 Russian Orthodox priests were arrested; 95,000 were put to death, executed by firing squad.” 
• "During the purges of 1937 and 1938, church documents record that 168,300 Russian Orthodox clergy were arrested. Of these, over 100,000 were shot."

Similarly, a CIA document refers to attacks by the Red Guard in Maoist China that "spared no religious group in China." On the page here we read of some of the unspeakable persecutions Communist officials used on religious students (seminarians). 

(2) Creating the very absurd myth that humans did not fundamentally differ from animals, a ludicrous claim taught by Darwin himself, Darwinism paved the way for people to slaughter their fellow men while thinking they were doing something not much worse than killing animals. 

(3) Centered around phrases such as "struggle for existence," "the preservation of favored races," and "survival of the fittest," Darwinism provided an ideological underpinning for systems such as Hitlerism, Leninism and Maoism that were based on the cruelest exploitation and oppression of the weak by the strong. 

All of this was so unnecessary, because a proper analysis of biology would have had centered upon things such as cooperation and harmony and organization and component teamwork and mutual interdependence, which are all necessary in mountainous amounts for organisms and ecosystems to exist. A careful study of such things will tend to lead you in the opposite direction of some emphasis on a brutal "struggle for existence," and also lead you away from all boasts of understanding how we got such marvels. But rather than studying the gigantic levels of cooperation and harmony and coordination and organization and component teamwork and mutual interdependence within nature, which were things defying his boasts, Darwin shunned a study of such key facets of nature, focusing on only things that fitted in with his explanatory boasts. 

The effects of Darwinism on human history have been extremely pernicious. Darwinism continues to be a comfort for racists trying to justify their erroneous claims. The continued popularity of  Darwinism in academia (despite the disastrous moral effects of Darwinism) is not so surprising when we consider that Marxism was popular in pockets of US academia during the late 1960's, at a time when the worst bloody excesses of the Maoist Cultural Revolution were occurring, and decades after millions had needlessly died under the hands of Marxist regimes such as Stalin's. A small fraction of professors in sociology and economics continues to support Marxism. It is sometimes joked that Marxism is dead everywhere in the world except in academia.

It is good for a person to study things such as (1) the psychic phenomena and brain physical shortfalls that lead to the idea that all humans are souls rather than mere animals; (2) the fine-tuned laws and fundamental constants of the universe that lead us to suspect the existence of not just eternal laws of physics but eternal laws of morality;  (3) the gigantic degree of cooperation and harmony and organization and component teamwork and mutual interdependence  within the bodies of humans. Such studies may inspire in that person a beneficial ethics in which respect for all humans and harmony and the cooperative teamwork of very diverse agents is emphasized and prized, an ethic that is the opposite of the cruel and morally poisonous "survival of the fittest" ideology.  

Postscript: On the page here of The Black Book of Communism, we read this estimate of state-caused deaths in communist countries:

U.S.S.R.: 20 million deaths

China: 65 million deaths

Vietnam: I million deaths

North Korea: 2 million deaths

Cambodia: 1 million deaths

Eastern Europe: 1 million deaths

Africa: 1.7 million deaths

Afghanistan: 1.5 million deaths

When Apparitions Are Seen of Those Who Died Long Ago (Part 4)

Apparitions of the dead seem to occur most commonly close to the death of the person corresponding to the apparition. But it is not all that rare for someone to see an apparition of someone who died long ago. I discussed some cases of this type in three previous posts:

When Apparitions Are Seen of Those Who Died Long Ago (Part 1)

When Apparitions Are Seen of Those Who Died Long Ago (Part 2)

When Apparitions Are Seen of Those Who Died Long Ago (Part 3)

Let us look at some more cases of this type, cases I did not discuss in the previous posts. On page 416 of Volume V of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research (March 25, 1889), we read this account dated September 15, 1886, from John E. Husbands:

"The facts are simply these. I was sleeping in a hotel in Madeirs in January, 1885. It was a bright moonlight night. The windows were open and the blinds up. I felt some one was in my room. On opening my eyes, I saw a young fellow about 25, dressed in flannels, standing at the side of my bed and pointing with the first finger of his right hand to the place I was lying. I lay for some seconds to convince myself of some one being really there. I then sat up and looked at him. I saw his features so plainly that I recognized them in a photograph which was shown me some days after. I asked him what he wanted ; he did not speak, but his eyes and hand seemed to tell me I was in his place. As he did not answer, I struck out at him with my fist & I sat up, but did not reach him, and was as I going to spring out of bed he slowly vanished through the door, which was shut, keeping his eyes upon me all the time."

In a letter dated October 8th, 1886, K. Falkner stated this:

"The figure that Mr. Husbands saw while in Madeirs was that of a young fellow who died unexpectedly months previously, in the room which Mr. Husbands was occupying. Curiously enough, Mr. H. had never heard of him or his death. He told me the story the morning after he had seen the figure, and I recognized the young fellow from the description."

Falkner showed Husbands a photo of the person who died, and Husbands identified the person as the apparition he had seen, saying, "That is the young fellow who appeared to me the other night."

In the article in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research in which this account appears, on page 427, we have the interesting diagram below, one suggesting apparition sightings occur most frequently about the time of someone's death, but with quite a few sightings occuring well after someone dies:

In the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, Volume 6, July 8, 1889 there is an article entitled "On Recognized Apparitions Occurring More Than a Year After Death."  On pages 26-28 we read an account by a Mrs. P, who tells of both herself and her husband seeing an apparition:

"Sitting upon the bedside, he put his arm about me and said, 'Do you know what we have seen ?' And I said, 'Yes, it was a spirit. I am afraid it was Arthur, but could not see his face' - and he exclaimed, 'Oh ! no, it was my father ! ' My husband's father had been dead fourteen years... My husband and I related the occurrence to my uncle and aunt, and we all noticed that my husband's agitation and anxiety were very great: whereas his usual manner was calm and reserved in the extreme, and he was a thorough and avowed sceptic in all so-called-supernatural events."

On pages 162-166 of his book Man's Survival After Death, Charles Tweedale tells a remarkable tale of personal experience that includes apparitions of his mother appearing long after her death. The story includes Tweedale putting an acorn under the head of his dead mother just before her coffin was sealed, and also claims that messages believed to be from his dead mother included references to oak trees (which grow from acorns). On pages 154-157 he describes repeated sightings of an Aunt Leah appearing long after her death, with the apparition speaking. 

On page 161 of the book Love Beyond Life, we read of a case of an elderly woman who went to the hospital because of a sharp leg pain, seeing an apparition of her father decades after he died:

"Fran was waiting in the emergency room for a nurse to return with the injection. Suddenly the curtains around the examining table parted and Fran's late father emerged. William Butterfield, who had been dead more than forty years, appeared not as the elderly man he was when he died but as he had been when Fran was a young girl: tall, slender and handsome...'Fannie,' he said addressing her by her childhood name, 'why don't you come with me? Why don't you come home with me?' "

A month later, the woman died of a heart attack. The reference to an afterlife realm as "home" is one that often occurs in near-death experiences and dreams suggesting life after death, as I discuss here. 

On page 64 of the interesting Time-Life book Phantom Encounters we read of an apparition appearing  long after someone's death:

"Looking around, Stirland saw a vision of his father who died more than twenty years earlier, standing only six feet away. 'In appearance,' Stirland related, 'he was filmy or misty, insubstantial, yet of natural color and stature, observable in clear detail...This apparition, if that is the word, was surrounded by an aura of gold, silver, and bright blue rings, approximately three feet in diameters...radiating a white silvery light into the surround." 

On the next page we read this account about Julian Burton seeing an apparition in 1980:

"He confronted the phantom of his mother, who had died seven years earlier. 'She was fully visible,' he wrote later, 'looking years younger than at the time of her death. She was wearing a diaphanous pale-blue gown trimmed in marabou, which I had never seen before.' Before Burton could even call out, the figure of his mother disappeared, leaving him deeply unsettled. The next morning he called his sister, who added a strange detail. Two weeks before her death, Mrs. Burton had gone shopping with her daughter and admired a pale-blue gown whose description perfectly matched that of the gown warn by the apparition."

The book Seen and Unseen by Emily Katherine Bates is a very interesting account of paranormal phenomena observed by one woman in the late nineteenth century.  On page 11 Bates recalls having a severe feeling of dread at the exact time that her brother was struck by a long-lasting paralysis far away:

"It was an overwhelming conviction of some great and definite disaster to him, and my friends in vain tried to argue me out of such an unreasonable terror by pointing out, truly enough, that he could not possibly be within the zone of danger at that time. I could only repeat : 'I know that something terrible has happened to him, wherever he is. It may not be death, but it is some terrible calamity.' I spent the day in tears and in absolute despair, and wrote to tell him of my conviction. Allowing for difference of time between Quetta and Oxford, my mental telegram reached me in the same hour that my brother, whilst on the march, and only thirty miles beyond Quetta, was suddenly struck down in his tent by the paralysis which kept him confined to his chair — a helpless sufferer — for twenty-eight years."

On page 15 Bates begins to describe witnessing many "materialized apparitions" appearing during seances.  Her account takes up about the next twenty pages and also some pages after page 208. Her accounts on this topic will be shocking to the modern ear, but they  match many similar accounts that appeared in the nineteenth century, often written by very respectable witnesses such as Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-founder of the theory of evolution. What would be reported occurring very frequently by many different witnesses is a situation where some corner of a room would be cordoned off by something like a curtain, with such a small area called "the cabinet." A medium would typically sit in such a small area. This is just the situation Bates described on page 20. Witnesses would report seeing again and again mysterious figures arising from such a small area of the room, coming from behind such a curtain, and later seeming to disappear after returning to the area behind the curtain.  Skeptics would try to explain such wonders by a hypothesis of trapdoors in the floor, but the witnesses would typically report the small area being inspected without any such thing being found. 

That such very frequent reports of utterly paranormal materializations of human forms have been hidden from the eyes of the modern reader is astounding. I can never recall seeing a depiction of such reports in any TV show or movie, and modern mentions of such reports virtually never occur, even though the reports of such things were abundant in the nineteenth century.  The figures appearing in such materialization seances were often described as being recognized by attendees as having forms matching those of their deceased relatives.  Any attempt to explain such reports by fraud will seem to quickly become untenable, requiring a skeptic to postulate (1) a trap door not seen by the witnesses who typically closely inspected the small "cabinet" area; (2) a band of conspirator helpers assisting the medium by rising up through a trapdoor; (3) the conspirator helpers somehow so closely matching deceased relatives that they would be frequently identified as deceased relatives. Rather than trying to advance so far-fetched a conspiracy theory, skeptics of the paranormal simply deal with the problem of such reports by avoiding all mention of them.  

We do know that a world-class scientist (Sir William Crookes) reported repeatedly observing such materialization phenomena in his own home (as described here); that another world-class scientist (Alfred Russel Wallace) gave abundant testimony of seeing such materialization phenomena (as discussed here), and that under very tight scientific conditions, another investigator (Shrenk-Notzing) did seem to replicate a less dramatic form of such materialization phenomena, and was able to photograph quite a few examples of it. 

Bates says this about her experiences witnessing materialization phenomena:

"No one hitherto has been able to suggest any intelligent explanation of my personal experiences on these occasions. Conjuring tricks and trap doors are, of course, ' trotted out ' by the unintelligent sceptic, but these do not meet the difficulty of an accurate knowledge of names and of family matters of comparatively small importance."

Later Bates discusses evidence she got for clairvoyance, stating the following, apparently about visits to more than six claimed clairvoyants:

"I was told some six or seven times that my mother (who died during my infancy) was my guardian spirit, and six times her name was given to me, with some difficulty in one or two cases, but invariably without the smallest guessing on the part of the clairvoyant or any hint from me." 

Later she says, "Whilst consulting these clairvoyants, in widely different parts of America, two very near relatives of mine were almost invariably described, and the names — one male and one female — were generally given." 

Later Bates describes seeing at about the end of 1887 what seemed to be an apparition of George Elliot, who died in 1880 (she was a female writer who took a male pen name). Bates states this:

"To my infinite amazement there stood between the wall and my bed, a diaphanous figure of a woman, quite life size or rather more, with one arm held out in a protecting fashion towards me, and some drapery about he head. The features were, moreover, quite distinct, and, as I afterwards realised, the counterpart of George Elliot's curious and Savonarola-like countenance.  But at the moment, oddly enough, I only thought of two things — first, how extraordinary that what had appeared to me such a silly waste of time overnight should have had any element of reality about it ! Then swiftly came the second idea : ' And how in the world does it happen that I don't feel a bit frightened ? '

I lay there absolutely content and peaceful, with a feeling of blissful satisfaction which I have never exactly realised either before or since that one occasion. 'Everything is all right — nothing can really ever go wrong — nothing at least that matters at all. All the real things are all right.' I can never doubt the truth  of these things after this experience. It was promised and the promise has been redeemed.  These were the thoughts that passed idly through my brain as I lay — fully awake — and looked up at the comforting woman's figure. For it seemed more — much more — than a mere vision. I have spoken of the figure as diaphanous because it was not as solid as an ordinary human being, but, on the other hand, I could not see the wall through it : it was too solid for that....And as this consciousness held me in its loving grasp, to my infinite sorrow the kind, protecting figure disappeared, gently and very slowly, sinking into the ground on the spot where I had first seen her ; and once more all was dark in the room."

On page 312 of the book Hot Chocolate for the Mystical Soul, we have an account by a man who reports seeing an apparition of his grandfather who died more than twenty years ago. 

The case of the apparition of James L. Chaffin is one of the best documented cases of an apparition appearing long after death. The case was first documented on page 517 in Part 103 of Volume 36 of the Proceeedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 1928, in the November 1927 article "CASE OF THE WILL OF MR. JAMES L. CHAFFIN," which can be read here.  The facts and narratives were all entered as testimony in a legal case. 

James L. Chaffin had four sons, and on November 16, 1905 made a will in front of two witnesses, giving his farm to his third son, Marshall, with his widow and other three sons getting nothing. On the 16th of January, 1919 James L. Chaffin made a new will, dividing his property up equally to his four sons, with instructions that his widow be taken care of.  The new will said that it was written "after reading the 27th chapter of Genesis."  James L. Chaffin told no one about the second will, which was placed in an old Bible of his father's. But James did put instructions sewed up in the lining of an overcoat, instructions telling where the second will could be found. James L. Chaffin died on September 7, 1921.  His son Marshall was granted possession of the farm on the basis of the first will, the second will being unknown to the wife or children.

One of the sons of James L. Chaffin (a son named James Pinkney Chaffin) gave this testimony in court about seeing an apparition of his father about four years after the father's death:

"Some time later, I think it was the latter part of June, 1925, he appeared at my bedside again, dressed as I had often seen him dressed in life, wearing a black overcoat which I knew to be his own coat. This time my father's spirit spoke to me, he took hold of his overcoat this way and pulled it back and said, ' You will find my will m my overcoat pocket,' and then disappeared."

James Pinkney Chaffin retrieved the coat from a brother twenty miles away, to whom the coat had been given. Inside the coat (sewed up in its lining) was a piece of paper in the handwriting of James L. Chaffin stating, "Read the 27th chapter of Genesis in my daddie's old Bible."  Accompanied by some witnesses, James Pinkney Chaffin retrieved the old Bible, in which was found (in a spot matching the 27th Chapter of Genesis) the second will of James L. Chaffin. James Pinkney Chaffin filed a court case, giving the testimony above, and demanding that the second will be declared as the valid will. In the middle of the case the opposition to this claim was dropped, and a jury found that the second will (the one found in the Bible, apparently found with the help of an apparition) was the valid will of James L. Chaffin.  The case stands as one of the best-documented cases of an apparition appearing long after someone died. 

Postscript: On page 167 of his book A Critical Examination of the Belief in a Life After Death, C. J. Ducasse (a professor of philosophy at Brown University) told this astonishing account:

"The prima facie most impressive evidence there could be of the survival of a deceased friend or relative would be to see and touch his materialized, recognizable bodily form, which then speaks in his or her characteristic manner. This is what appeared to occur in my presence on an occasion three or four years ago when, during some two hours and in very good red light through out, some eighteen fully material forms—some male, some female, some tall and some short, and sometimes two together—came out of and returned to the curtained cabinet I had inspected before hand, in which a medium sat, and to which I had found no avenue of surreptitious access.

These material forms were apparently recognized as those of a deceased father, mother, or other relative by one or another of the fourteen or fifteen persons present; and some touching scenes occurred, in which the form of the deceased spoke with and caressed the living."

Will Rocket Builders Risk a Million Lives for the Tiny Few Interested in Uranus?

An interesting recent scientific paper examined the willingness of scientists to risk the death of very many people (or possibly even the destruction of the entire planet) to satisfy the curiosity of specialists about topics that are of no interest to 99% of humans. The paper ("Agencies and Science Experiment Risk") by Eric E. Johnson looked at two cases:

(1) the hazardous Cassini mission, which risked a disastrous plutonium release event that could have given cancer to millions;

(2) the Brookhaven laboratory's experiments involving so-called strange matter, which some thought might result in a physics disaster destroying all life on Earth. 

The paper by Johnson starts out by describing a case of scientist recklessness that I have described before:

"When getting ready to test the first atomic bomb, scientists of the Manhattan Project considered the possibility that detonating the device might ignite a runaway chain reaction in the atmosphere, engulfing the world in a fireball that would kill all plant and animal life. They wagered it would not and threw the switch."

It is often claimed that scientists did calculations beforehand proving to them an atmosphere-destroying chain reaction would not occur from the detonation of the first atomic bomb, but that is not correct. At the beginning of the post here, you can read some quotes I make from a book dealing with the topic, quotes indicating that when the first atomic bomb was exploded, the worry of a runaway reaction detonating the entire atmosphere was not at all anything that had been disproven. According to one source, before the first nuclear weapon was ignited the leading nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi said this:

"It would be a miracle if the atmosphere were ignited. I reckon the chance of a miracle to be about ten percent."

Apparently the atomic bomb scientists gambled with the destruction of all of humanity. Decades later another great gamble was taken by NASA, when it launched a Cassini spacecraft that was powered by plutonium-238. Being incredibly radioactive, plutonium-238 is one of the most deadly substances ever created.  

The Cassini mission sent a spacecraft including plutonium towards Venus. The mission plan was to leverage what are called gravitational slingshots. When a spacecraft flies by a planet, the spacecraft's speed can be greatly increased. The Cassini plan was to send the spacecraft to fly by Venus,  and to then have the spacecraft turn around and fly by Earth to increase the spacecraft's speed even further, with the spacecraft eventually going into orbit around Saturn.  With this plan there were two opportunities for disaster:

(1) The Cassini spacecraft could have blown up during its liftoff from Earth, just as the Challenger space shuttle did.

(2) The Cassini spacecraft could have burned up in Earth's atmosphere or crashed on Earth while the attempt was being made for the spacecraft to do a flyby of Earth. 

In either case, the result would have been catastrophic. On page 539 Johnson quotes a NASA estimate that 5000 people might die because of contamination from the Cassini probe's plutonium-238. On page page 540 Johnson says this:

" One critic was Michio Kaku, a professor of physics at City University of New York and author of several popular science books. He said, 'I find that NASA bureaucrats in some sense are living in Fantasyland . . . . Pure guesswork has replaced rigorous physics. Many of these numbers are simply made up.'  Kaku thought 200,000 deaths was a fairer estimate. Other estimates were even higher. John Gofman, an emeritus professor of molecular and cellular biology at the University of California, Berkeley, estimated up to 1 million deaths would result from a Cassini swing-by burn-up.  And Ernest J. Sternglass, an emeritus professor of radiological physics at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, suggested 40 million deaths could result."

On the same page we are given a reason why NASA's risk assessment was almost certainly very flawed.  NASA's risk assessment was based mainly on an estimate of a tiny micrometeorite hitting its Cassini spacecraft. NASA estimated almost no chance that a software error could cause the spacecraft to fail and release plutonium.  But the paper tells us a reason why it made no sense to estimate such a low chance of failure by software error:

"Just weeks after Cassini flew by Earth without incident, NASA lost contact with the Mars Climate Orbiter. A subsequent investigation determined that the spacecraft burned up in the Martian atmosphere. The reason the Mars Climate Orbiter came in too low was that some of its software code used English unit measurements instead of the metric system —the kind of failure that NASA thought so improbable for Cassini as to be statistically insignificant."

Almost every software developer knows that software errors (called bugs) usually end up in the final releases of software, no matter how carefully the software has been tested. And you can never do all the required software tests before introducing a novel type of spacecraft, which requires the mission itself to do the bug testing. It seemed that an overconfident NASA played "megadeath Russian roulette," risking the life of millions for its Cassini mission to Saturn. And it may do the same thing again, to investigate a planet much less interesting than Saturn: the deadly dull planet Uranus. Uranus is a lifeless ball of ice and frozen gas, about the dullest planet imaginable. No one thinks there is any life on Uranus or any of its moons, because it's too cold where Uranus is. 

Here is a photo of the extremely boring, featureless planet that is Uranus. Can anyone imagine a less interesting-looking planet?

Dull as dishwater: Uranus as seen by Voyager 2 (Credit: NASA)

I was very surprised last year to read a baffling headline of "Probing Uranus is Top Priority, US Science Advisors Say." Apparently there's some limited launch window which might lead to a rushed hurry-up Uranus mission. A white paper by a Uranus enthusiast (Mark Hofstadter) who attempts to make "The Case for a Uranus Orbiter." The case is very weak.  There is no mention of life or biology. The biggest points the author makes seem to be these:

(1) Uranus "is the only giant planet whose gravity data cannot be fit by a simple 3-component model, with separate layers of rock, ice, and gas. Instead, it requires more realistic mixed-density regions (Podolak et al. 1995)." So the planet would be kind of interesting to planetary gravity modeling specialists. 

(2) Composition-wise, the "ice giants" such as Uranus and Neptune are different kind of planets from the "gas giants" such as Jupiter and Saturn, so let's study them for kind of "variety" reasons (a weak point).  

(3) It's easier to get to Uranus than Neptune. 

Reading the paper confirms my suspicion that Uranus is of zero interest to anyone who is not a scientist specializing in the planets of our solar system.  How would a Uranus mission work? It would apparently involve a plutonium gamble like the Cassini probe used: what could well be another case of "megadeath Russian roulette." 

We read in the rather recent article here that new plutonium-238 is being created to meet NASA's space travel needs, an indication that the Cassini "megadeath Russian roulette" approach may be repeated. Besides the risk of vast numbers getting cancer from a spacecraft disaster, the very production of additional plutonium-238 puts the public at danger.  Being the perfect weapon for a "dirty bomb," plutonium is a tempting target for theft by terrorists.  A dirty bomb combining plutonium-238 and conventional explosives might be enough to render the downtown part of a major city effectively uninhabitable. 

A disaster like the one imagined above may already have occurred. A 1990's article in the Christian Science monitor states this:

"Three out of the 26 earlier US nuclear space missions have involved mishaps. The worst: In 1964 a satellite with a SNAP 9-A plutonium system aboard fell to earth, disintegrating and dispersing its 2.1 pounds of plutonium. Gofman has long linked that accident to a rise in lung cancer on earth."

According to the source here, plutonium 238 was used for a variety of space missions. We read this:

"Pu-238 fueled the first RTG used in space, launched aboard the Navy TRANSIT 4A Navigational Satellite in 1961. Since then, the fuel has been used in nearly every National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) mission that required an RTG, including several Apollo flights (1969–1972), the Viking 1 and 2 Mars landers (1976–1982), Voyager 1 and 2 space probes to the outer planets of our solar system (launched in 1977) and the New Horizons mission to Pluto (launched in 2006)."

Every one of these missions risked huge number of earthly deaths from a launch failure that would have released plutonium into the atmosphere. Risking such loss of life for a mission to the boring site of Pluto is particularly objectionable. 

The paper I quoted from above (by Eric E. Johnson) also discusses how scientists may have risked the destruction of the entire Earth by doing experiments at Brookhaven Laboratory. We read this about that laboratory's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC):

"Some expressed concern, however, about the RHIC’s venture into unknown realms of physics—particularly a question of whether the experiment might create a 'strangelet,' a tiny particle of exotic strange matter.  Creating a strangelet would be a triumph of modern physics. In an unlikely scenario, however, it might also be unbelievably dangerous— unstoppably transforming and absorbing all normal matter it touches. After a latency of many years, the concern is, the accreting mass of strange matter within the Earth would overtake the whole planet. In the words of one eminent scientist, the Earth would be left 'an inert hyperdense sphere about one hundred metres across.' ”

We read that one pair of physicists described the following possible scenario:

"[G]ravity and thermal motion may then sustain the accreting chain reaction until, perhaps, the whole planet is digested, leaving behind a strangelet with roughly the mass of the Earth and ~ 100 m radius. The release of energy per nucleon should be of the order of several MeV and, if the process is a run-away one, the planet would end in a supernova-like catastrophe."

Referring to two leading physicists, we read that "far from characterizing the issue as absurd, Glashow and Wilson wrote, 'It is a fair concern: one that must be raised.' " We then read of an analysis by Cambridge University theoretical physicist Kent of the likelihood of this strangelet catastrophe:

"Kent explained that the 'probability bound'—meaning the maximum-possible risk—implied by Busza’s analysis was ...no more than a one-in-10,000 chance that the RHIC would destroy the Earth.  It was this result the Busza report deemed “comfortable.' "

We read on page 551-552 of Johnson's paper that this Busza report was produced by scientists who had financial and career interests in letting the strangelet research proceed, which is a reason for doubting their probability estimates. On page 552 we read that these concerns about the Earth being destroyed have had no effect on the research program, which is intensifying:

"These criticisms have not had a perceivable impact at Brookhaven, which has continued to run its experiments. In fact, the RHIC program has expanded and evolved since the strangelet controversy was aired. Originally, the RHIC was scheduled to collide gold ions over a 10- year-long program. Program extensions, however, have kept the RHIC going, and it is now in its 15th year. The program has also changed in ways unanticipated by the Busza team’s report. Brookhaven has moved beyond gold nuclei to begin experimenting with copper and uranium ions. The RHIC has also been upgraded to achieve many times more collisions than it was able to make under its original design."

These examples are part of a pattern of scientists putting the public at risk for the sake of research that is of no interest to anyone but a small clique of specialists. Such a thing has long gone on in the field of experimental neuroscience (not to be confused with physician-controlled neurology, which involves medical treatments and diagnostics rather than experimentation). Many healthy subjects without brain problems are put through long brain scans with 3T scanners, typically for the sake of poorly designed experiments that do nothing to advance human knowledge because they commit multiple examples of Questionable Research Practices (QRP). The issue is discussed in my post here.  We have no idea of how many of these people will end up with cancer because of the long unnecessary scans they received. Following a "scan them and forget them" policy, our scientists are failing to make the long-term tracking of health results of brain scan subjects that would allow them to reliably judge whether long 3T brain scans increase a risk of cancer. 

In the field of virology, there is occurring reckless "gain of function" research that creates risks of some new pandemic arising from a lab leak. A recent article in The Atlantic states, "The 1977 flu pandemic, which killed roughly 700,000 people, may well have started in a laboratory." It has a link to the paper "The Reemergent 1977 H1N1 Strain and the Gain-of-Function Debate." That paper states, "The 1977-1978 influenza epidemic was probably not a natural event, as the genetic sequence of the virus was nearly identical to the sequences of decades-old strains. " 

Scientists have a poor record of alerting us to grave risks. The paper by Eric E. Johnson reminds us of how physicists were so often wrong about alerting people to the threat of nuclear weapons. We read this:

"In the early 1930s, scientists dismissed the possibility of nuclear fission. When, in 1934, chemist Ida Noddack wrote a paper arguing that the uranium nucleus might be capable of fission, her paper was poorly received. In fact, famed physicist Enrico Fermi dismissed her work as having no possibility of being correct....Likewise, physicist Otto Frisch considered fission of uranium to be 'impossible,' and he initially refused to believe the compelling (and correct) arguments made by his aunt, Lise Meitner. Robert Oppenheimer also flatly rejected the possibility of uranium fission, and he offered a number of theoretical reasons why fission could not happen."

Biologists in particular often sound like they are bad at estimating probabilities. Committed to the dogmas of Darwinism entangled with socially constructed 19th century triumphal legends, the modern biologist repeatedly asserts that there occurred by chance things that we have every reason to believe could not possibly have occurred by chance -- things such as the origin of vastly impressive fine-tuned molecular machinery involving novel protein molecules and protein complexes that require many thousands of well-arranged atomic parts to do their incredibly complex metabolic missions. Such claims are like a claim that very many five-page grammatical, correctly spelled and well-reasoned essays were produced by typing monkeys. How should we judge the probability calculation skills of people who make such claims? Borrowing a phrase from the title of a children's book, we might say that  biologists making such claims are sometimes "very bad, no good, horrible" at realistically estimating probabilities. But now our lives are in the hands of gene-splicers who assure us that the risks of their genetic tinkering activity are small. We should be very concerned after realizing that modern biologists have repeatedly acted as if they were incompetent at realistically estimating probabilities. 

An example of the molecular machinery I refer to above is the spliceosome, pictured below:

Credit: MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology

At the site here, we read this about the human spliceosome: 

"The spliceosome is a complicated and formidable example of a multi-subunit molecular machine, with the pre-catalytic form being the largest spliceosomal complex, containing 5 RNA molecules and 65 proteins, in addition to a substrate mRNA precursor. The arrangement and activities of all of these has to be intricately coordinated, paradoxically to catalyse a rather simple chemical reaction."

The structure shown above is not specified in DNA, which merely specifies which amino acids make up each of the protein parts. The amino acid information needed to make the structure above (only a small part of what is needed to make the shown structure) is not at all contiguous in DNA. To assemble the structure above, among other wonders of construction a human body must magically gather genetic information scattered across 46 different chromosomes in the nucleus, like someone quickly finding just the right 65 loose pages hidden in random books of 46 tall, long bookcases in a library. I am in the middle of analyzing the spliceosome components for a future post, and my preliminary work suggests that the spliceosome structure requires accessing at least these human chromosomes: Number 1 (SF3A3 and PRPF3), Number 5 (SLU7 and RBM22), Number 9 (PRP4), Number 17 (PRP8 and U5S1), Number 19 (SF3A2 and PRP31) , and Number 22 (SF3A1). 

Why We Were Told So Often the Huge Lie That DNA Is a Specification for Building Humans

The Big Lie Repeatedly Told About DNA

Not long after DNA was discovered about the middle of the twentieth century, scientists and science writers began spreading a false idea about DNA: the idea that DNA contains a specification for building an organism such as a human.  There are various ways in which this false idea is stated, all equally false:

• Many described DNA or the genome as a blueprint for an organism.
• Many said DNA or the genome is a recipe for making an organism.
• Many said DNA or the genome is a program for building an organism, making an analogy to a computer program.
• Many claimed that DNA or genomes specify the anatomy of an organism. 
• Many claimed that genotypes (the DNA in organisms) specify phenotypes (the observable characteristics of an organism).
• Many claimed that phenotypes (the observable characteristics of an organism) are "expressions" of genotypes (the DNA in organisms). 
• Many claimed that genotypes (the DNA in organisms) "map"  phenotypes (the observable characteristics of an organism) or "map to" phenotypes.
• Many claimed that DNA contains "all the instructions needed to make an organism."
• Many claimed that there is a "genetic architecture" for an organism's body or some fraction of that body. 
• Many claimed that DNA or its genes "guide," "direct" or "control" the nine-month process by which a zygote progresses to become a full-sized human baby. 
• Using a little equation,  many claimed that a "genotype plus the environment equals the phenotype," a formulation as false  as the preceding statements, since we know of nothing in the environment that would cause phenotypes to arise from genotypes that do not specify such phenotypes. 

Some of these claims are documented in Table 1 of the paper here, where some authors count (in only June and July of the year 2000, in a single newspaper) 10 claims that DNA is a draft or script, 6 that it is a software program, 8 that it is a blueprint, 6 that it is a cook book (a recipe), and 12 that is a map. The same table shows similar claims being made abundantly in the leading scientific journal Nature; and Table 2 and Table 3 of the same paper shows similar claims being made abundantly in 2001 and 2003 in both the newspaper and Nature. 

There was never any justification for making any such claims. The only coding system that has ever been discovered in DNA is a system allowing only low-level chemical information to be specified.  That coding system is known as the genetic code, and it is merely a system whereby certain combinations of nucleotide base pairs in DNA stand for amino acids.  So a section of DNA can specify the amino acids that make up a protein molecule. But no one has ever discovered any coding system by which DNA could specify anything larger than a protein molecule. 

The Genetic Code

No one ever discovered any coding system in DNA by which parts of DNA can specify high-level anatomy such as the arrangement of parts in an organ, or a skeletal structure, or an overall body appearance.  No one has even discovered any coding system in DNA by which the structure of cells can be specified.  The human body has at least 200 types of cells, and the structure of none of these cell types is specified by DNA. DNA does not even specify the structure of organelles that are the building blocks of cells.

If you ponder the simple fact that blueprints don't build things, you can start to get an idea of how nonsensical is the claim that a human arises because a DNA blueprint is read.  Blueprints have no power of construction.  When buildings are built with the help of blueprints, it is because intelligent agents read the blueprints to get an idea of what type of construction work to do, and because intelligent agents then follow such instructions. But there is nothing in the human body below the neck with the power to understand and carry out instructions for building a body if they happened to exist in DNA. 

Consider what goes on when you read a web page at a complicated site such as www.facebook.com or www.buzzfeed.com.  What occurs is a very complicated interaction between two things: (1) a web page that is rather like a blueprint for how the page should look and act, and (2) an extremely complicated piece of software called a web browser, which is rather like a construction crew that reads the web's page blueprint (typically written in HTML), and then constructs very quickly a well-performing web page.  If the web browser did not exist, you would never be able to get a well-performing web page.  The construction of a three-dimensional human body would be a feat trillions of times more complicated than the mere display of a two-dimensional web page.  Just as it is never enough to have just a web page without a web browser,  having some DNA blueprint for building a body would never be enough to build a body.  You would also need to have some "body blueprint reader" that would be some system almost infinitely more complicated than a web browser, in order for a body to get built.  

We have no evidence that DNA contains any instructions for building cells or anatomy, and we also have no evidence for the existence of any such thing as a "body blueprint reader" in the human body, capable of reading, understanding and executing incredibly complicated instructions for building a human body. When you consider the amount of organization in a human body, you may start to realize the gigantic absurdity of thinking that a human specification can be found in some molecule merely listing low-level chemical information. 

The organization of large organisms is extremely hierarchical.  Subatomic particles are organized into atoms, which can be organized into amino acids, which are organized into protein molecules, which are organized into protein complexes, which are organized into organelles, which are organized into cells, which are organized into tissues, which are organized into organs, which are organized into organ systems, which are organized into organisms. 

Cells are so complex they have been compared to cities. The diagrams you see of cells are enormously misleading, making them look many  thousands of times simpler than they are.  A cell diagram will show 20 or 30 organelles in a cell, but the actual number is typically more than 1000.  A cell diagram will typically depict a cell as having only a few mitochondria, but cells typically have many thousands of mitochondria, as many as a million. A cell diagram will typically depict a cell as having only a few lysosomes, but cells typically have hundreds of lysosomes. A cell diagram will typically depict one or a few stacks of a Golgi apparatus, each with only a few cisternae, but a cell will typically have between 10 and 20 stacks, each having as many as 60 cisternae.  There are about 200 different types of cells in the human body. 

Internally organisms are enormously dynamic, both because of constant motion inside in the body, and also because of a constant activity inside the body involving cellular changes. Just one example of this enormously dynamic activity is the fact that protein molecules in the brain are replaced at a rate of about 3% per day. A large organism is like some building that is constantly being rebuilt, with some fraction of it being torn down every day, and some other fraction of it being replaced every day.  The analogy comparing a cell to a factory gives us some idea of the gigantically dynamic nature of organisms.

When we consider this complexity, you may realize that the very idea of a blueprint for building a body is an absurdity. To have a visual specification for building a human body, you would need something more like a thousand-page textbook filled with color diagrams and tons of fine print.  Even if such a specification existed in the human body, it wouldn't explain morphogenesis: because the specification would be so complex it would require some super-genius to understand it all and build things according to such a specification. 

We may compare the idea that a human body arises because of the reading of a body blueprint in DNA to the myth of Santa Claus. Just as there is no evidence of a big toy workshop around the North Pole manned by toy-making elves and led by Santa Claus, there is no evidence of any such thing in DNA as a specification for making cells, organs or human bodies. And just as you would never explain the phenomenon of children getting Christmas gifts even if there were to exist Santa flying around in a sled filled with toys (who would have neither the time nor the toys to give more than a thousandth of the world's children their gifts on Christmas night), you could never explain the growth of a vastly organized full-sized human body from a speck-sized zygote even if there were to exist a blueprint for building humans in DNA (because of the simple fact that blueprints don't build things, and we know of nothing in a body capable of understanding a vastly complex human body construction blueprint if it happened to exist in DNA). 

Below are some examples of miniature languages, two of them involving artificial constraints, and the other matching what can be expressed in DNA:

MINIATURE LANGUAGES
NAME	LIST OF WORDS IN LANGUAGE	WHAT CAN BE SPECIFIED BY LANGUAGE	WHAT CANNOT BE SPECIFIED BY LANGUAGE
Sandwich Language	Bread, Turkey, Ham, Cheese, Lettuce, Tomato, Onion, Bacon	Various types of sandwiches	Anything that is not a sandwich
Exercise Language	Jump, Crouch, Stretch, Punch, Lift, Bend, Squat, Spin	Various types of exercises	Anything that is not an exercise
DNA Language	Alanine, Asparagine, Aspartic acid, Arginine, Cysteine, Glutamine, Glycine, Glutamic acid, Histidine, Isoleucine, Lysine,Leucine, Phenylalanine, Methionine, Serine, Proline, Tryptophan,Threonine, Tyrosine, Valine	Polypeptide sequences – a linear one-dimensional  sequence of amino acids	Anything that is not a polypeptide sequence, including the 3D shape of a protein, the shape of any body part, the structure  of any organism, or a behavior or instinct.

As for the idea that genes "guide," "direct" or "control" human development or morphogenesis, it is entirely fictional. A protein-coding gene is a mere list of amino acids.  Claiming that such genes "direct" or "guide" some enormously complex construction process is as silly as claiming that a list of building parts controls or guides how to construct a skyscraper. 

So how does a full-sized human body manage to arise from the tiny barely visible simplicity of a speck-sized egg existing just after human conception? This is a miracle of origination a thousand miles over the heads of today's scientists. 

Some of the Scientists Who Lied to Us About DNA

Let us now look at some of the prominent scientists who told us outrageous lies about DNA. An example of a Darwinist biologist shamelessly telling this gigantic lie is the utterly deceptive statement made below by French biologist Francois Jacob on page 313 in his 1970 book "The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity":

"The formation of a man from an egg is a marvel of exactitude and precision. How can millions of cells emerge, in specialized lineages, in perfect order in time and space, from a single cell? This baffles the imagination. During embryonic development, the instructions contained in the chromosomes of the egg are gradually translated and executed, determining when and where the thousands of molecular species that constitute the body of an adult are to be formed. The whole plan of growth, the whole series of operations to be carried out, the order and the site of syntheses and their coordination are all written down in the nucleic-acid message." 

The last two sentences were a huge fiction, written decades before the Human Genome Project had even started to analyze the contents of DNA. Jacob's ideological motivation in telling this lie is made rather clear by the quotation he gives at the very beginning of this book, where he quotes Diderot as saying this:

"Do you see this egg? With it you can overthrow all the schools of theology, all the churches of the earth." 

From this quote, you can infer what was going on in the mind of Francois Jacob, who scorned all religion as a "farce":

(1) He got the idea that if a blueprint for making humans was to be found in a human egg, that this might be a devastating blow against religion, one that might help to "overthrow all the schools of theology, all the churches of the earth" by somehow showing that the physical origin of each human was a purely mechanistic affair that required no special assistance (directly or indirectly) from some divine power. 

(2) Not content to wait for the discovery of such a blueprint in DNA, Jacob simply told us the lie that such a thing had already been discovered in a "nucleic acid message" (DNA) in the human egg. 

Another French biologist who told us gigantic lies about DNA was Jacques Monod. On page 104 of his 1971 book "Chance and Necessity; An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology," Monod told us the following grotesque lie about DNA:

"The universal components -- the nucleotides on the one side, the amino acids on the other -- are the logical equivalents of an alphabet in which the structure and consequently the specific associative functions of proteins are spelled out. In this alphabet can therefore be written all the diversity of structures and performances the biosphere contains."

The first sentence is a half-truth, and the second statement is a huge lie. Nucleotides specify amino acids, which merely specify the chemical chain that is the starting point of a protein, not its three-dimensional structure. Protein molecules are merely a low-level building block of organelles, which are building blocks of cells, which are building blocks of tissues, which are building blocks of organs, which are building blocks of organisms. Claiming that the DNA alphabet (merely spelling out amino acids) "can therefore be written all the diversity of structures and performances the biosphere contains" was a gigantic fiction. The lists of amino acids given in DNA do not and cannot spell out anatomical structures. DNA does not even specify the structure of cells. The fictional idea that DNA specifies the human structure was stated in various other ways by Monod. 

Like Francois Jacob, Monod gives away his ideological motivations in a quotation at the front of his book. Monod's quotation is some atheistic passage by Sartre. On page 171 Monod further gives away his ideological motivations by referring to the "disgusting farrago of Judeo-Christian religiosity, scientistic progressism, belief in the 'natural' rights of man, and utilitarian pragmatism." Monod's book is largely devoted to trying to combat what he calls "animist" thinking, by which he means any kind of spirituality or theism or belief in souls or spirits or human destiny. It seems the intensity of Monod's hatred towards all spiritual ideas was one of the things that led him to tell the lie that DNA was a specification for making a human. Such a lie was a linchpin of his anti-religious reasoning. On the next page Monod tells us that it "is perfectly true that science outrages values" and telling us (using italics) that science must ignore values. He expounds on this idea of ignoring values very emphatically in the next pages. 

Monod certainly followed his own "ignore values" suggestion, by ignoring the value of telling the truth, and telling the outrageous lie that DNA contained a program for constructing human bodies, telling this lie decades before the Human Genome Project for analyzing the contents of DNA had even begun. Another example of a scientist lying about DNA came from Francis Crick, who in 1988 told us the lie that "the growth of an organism is controlled by an elaborate program, written in its genes," followed later in the same book by the lie that "genes are units of instruction in an elaborate program that both forms the organism from the fertilized egg and helps control much of its later behavior."  DNA is not a program, and the genes that make up DNA are not any program that forms organisms. DNA does not have any of the control structures (such as if/then statements) found in computer programs. DNA does not specify the growth of an organism, and does not know or state anything about organisms or their cells. In the same book Crick tells us of his "strong inclination towards atheism," which helps explain his DNA misrepresentations.  The Human Genome Project had not even started when Crick told us these whoppers about DNA. 

Another example of a Darwinist biologist telling the appalling lie that DNA is a blueprint for building organisms may be found in the 1991 book "One Long Argument" by Ernst Mayr. On page 150 he falsely stated, "The genetic program does not by itself supply the building material of new organisms, but only the blueprint for making the phenotype." No such blueprint for making organisms exists in DNA. On page 99 we get a hint about the atheistic motivations of this lie, for Mayr tells us this:  "The conviction that the diversity of the natural world was the result of natural processes and not the work of God was the idea that brought all the so-called Darwinians together."

Carl Sagan was another prominent scientist who lied to us about DNA. On page 259 of a book, Sagan stated, "Molecular biologists are busily recording the sequence of the three billion nucleotides that specify how to make a human being." That job was finished in the year 2003 when the Human Genome Project was completed, and no such specification of "how to make a human being" was ever found in DNA or its nucleotide sequences. When Sagan wrote the words, we already knew why DNA could not possibly be a specification of "how to make a human being," because we knew that DNA only specifies low-level chemical information such as the amino acid sequences of proteins, not higher-level structural information such as how to make a cell or an organ or organ system or a human. Sagan's misrepresentations about DNA also occurred on page 16 of his book "The Dragons of Eden," where he claimed that DNA was a specification of how to make a human:

"It is clear, then, that the sequence of rungs on our DNA ladders represents an enormous library of information. It is equally clear that so rich a library is required to specify as exquisitely constructed and intricately functioning an object as a human being."

On page 253 of his book Billions and Billions, Sagan told us this  lying boast about DNA:  "The most significant aspect of the DNA story is that the fundamental processes of life now seem fully understandable in terms of physics and chemistry." To the contrary, scientists lack any credible explanation of so simple a thing as how human cells are able to reproduce; they lack any credible explanation of the most basic mental processes such as thinking and memory; and since DNA is not a specification for making a human, scientists lack any credible explanation for the progression from a speck-sized zygote to an adult human. Later on the same page, Sagan made clear his ideological motivations for the previous quote, making clear that it was all about asserting "no life force, no spirit, no soul." Sagan was guilty of quite a few severe misrepresentations about important scientific matters, as I document in my post "Misstatements and Dubious Claims of Carl Sagan." 

 

Erwin Schrodinger was a famous physicist who wrote a book about biology entitled What Is Life?  Schrodinger told a huge lie in that book. It came when he stated this:

"Let me use the word 'pattern' of an organism in the sense in be which the biologist calls it 'the four-dimensional pattern', meaning not only the structure and functioning of that organism in the adult, or in any other particular stage, but the whole of its ontogenetic development from the fertilized egg the cell to the stage of maturity, when the organism begins to reproduce itself. Now, this whole four-dimensional pattern is known to be determined by the structure of that one cell, the fertilized egg. Moreover, we know that it is essentially determined by the structure of only a small part of that cell, its large nucleus....It is these chromosomes, or probably only an axial skeleton fibre of what we actually see under the microscope as the chromosome, that contain in some kind of code-script the entire pattern of the individual's future development and of its functioning in the mature state."

No such knowledge existed when Schrodinger wrote these lying words in the 1940's. By now the cell, the cell nucleus and DNA have all been exhaustively studied, and no one has found in such things anything like a pattern specifying the structure of an adult organism or "the whole of its ontogenetic development from the fertilized egg the cell to the stage of maturity, when the organism begins to reproduce itself." All that is contained in DNA and the cell nucleus and genes is low-level chemical information such as which amino acids are in a particular protein molecule, and not even a specification of the structure of any cell. 

The only thing true about Schrodinger's statement is the insight that to specify a body you would need four-dimensional information. Human bodies are not just three-dimensional structures, but also things with constant internal dynamism, as internally active as a very active factory. To specify a human body and its enormously active metabolism and its development from a speck-sized zygote, you would need four-dimensional information, something that understood width, height, depth and also the element of time. 

But what we have in DNA is merely one-dimensional information. Schematically you can think of it like this:

Amino Acid #1--> Amino Acid #2 --> Amino Acid #3 ....

Here the "..." means "and so on and so forth." 

One of the sacred rituals of Darwinism is to endlessly quote a profoundly misleading statement by the geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky, one claiming that nothing makes sense in biology except in the light of evolution. Given that Darwinists lack any credible explanation for anatomy or human minds (neither of which are explained by DNA or its genes), and the fact that Darwinists lack any theory of biological organization that can explain the mountainous levels of organization and purposeful complexity in biological organisms, a more truthful statement would be to say that pretty much nothing in biology makes any sense in the light of the dogmas of Darwinist biologists such as Theodosius Dobzhansky. 

On page 242 of his 1955 book Evolution, Genetics and Man, Dobzhansky told us the following huge lie:

"What we do inherit is, instead, genes which determine the pattern of developmental processes. The fertilized egg is a single cell which becomes many cells; these cells become compounded into various organs and acquire various physiological functions; the body grows, reaches a stage when it is capable of reproducing its like, and finally becomes old and dies."

There was no evidence at the time that genes (parts of DNA) "determine the pattern of developmental processes." A similar lie was told by Dobzhansky in his 1975 book Mankind Evolving: The Evolution of the Human Species. On page 42 he stated this: "All the traits, characters and features of the phenotype are, of necessity, determined by the genotype and by the sequence of environments with which the phenotypes interacts." There is no specification of how to make a human body or any of its organs or cells in a organism's genotype (its DNA or set of genes), and such a specification is not to be found anywhere in "the sequence of environments with which the phenotypes interacts." Your life experiences do not make up any organizational effect that can explain the progression of a one-celled zygote to the vastly more organized state of a human body.  

On page 164 of the same book, Dobzhansky showed himself to be a very big liar by making the preposterous claim that "the differences between man and ape are quantitative and not qualitative." Anyone who makes such a claim (so contrary to all human experience) is a very big liar. 

Robert Sinsheimer was a biologist who described DNA as "the book of life." He told this big fat lie about such a "book of life": "In this book are instructions, in a curious and wonderful code, for making a human body." No such instructions have been found in DNA. We understand the simple code used by DNA, and it is a code for specifying low-level chemicals such as amino acids, not a code for specifying the structure of cells, organs or human bodies.  

On page 287 of his book The Strands of a Life: The Science of DNA and the Art of Education, Sinsheimer engages in some very serious miseducation by writing this:

"In the deepest sense, we are who we are because of our genes. Genes provide our physical framework, much of the specific basis for personality, and the raw material for intellect."

This was all a very big fiction. Genes do not specify any anatomical structures, and certainly do not "provide our physical framework." They also do not provide any basis for personality, and do any even specify how to build any of the neurons in the human brain (which are not actually the raw material for intellect).  We are who we are mostly because of things having nothing to do with genes, such as the experiences we have had. On the same page Sinsheimer told us this gigantic whopper: "Here in our genome is written in DNA letters the history, the evolution of our species over billions of years." DNA is not a history book, and the human species is only about 100,000 years old, making it impossible for anything to specify "the evolution of our species over billions of years." Such a statement is as absurd as claiming that you have a book detailing "the history of the United States government over millions of years." 

Sydney Brenner was a Nobel Prize-winning biologist. On page 159 of the book Mind, life, and universe : conversations with great scientists of our time, Brenner tells us a great big lie about DNA and genes:

"If you look at genes, they are a description of the final organism...Encoding of the entire organism in a molecular description (that we call DNA) allows indirect propagation."

Later on the same page, Brenner gives away his motivation for this fiction: it is back up his claim that "the wonderful feature about living systems is that they evolved without a designer."

Developmental biologist Lewis Wolpert was another major biologist who frequently lied about DNA and matters of developmental biology, making the untrue claim that "all the information for embryonic development is contained within the fertilized egg," and the equally untrue claim that "the fertilized egg contains a program of instructions for making the organism."  In the first page of a  book ("The Triumph of the Embryo") he made the false claim that "genes control development."  For many years, Wolpert taught the groundless tall tale that "morphogen gradients" contain positional information about where cells should go to in the body, but in a 2017 interview he confessed, " It is terrible, but we still don’t have a molecular basis for it." Wolpert's zealous atheism was no doubt a major factor driving his misrepresentations about such topics. 

On US government web sites such as www.genome.gov there still stands the false claims the US government made about DNA being a blueprint for building humans, which I list in the post here. I will skip a mention of the many living biologists (including quite a few famous names) who told lies exactly like the lies I have quoted above. One of these famous names told us the complete fiction that DNA is a set of instructions for life's assembly and also the utterly fictional claim that DNA is a screenplay spelling out the history of a person's life.

 

Some Scientists and Doctors Who Told the Truth About DNA

Since the lie that DNA is a blueprint or program or recipe for building bodies has so often been told, I will need to cite again a list I have compiled of distinguished scientists and other PhD's or MD's who have told us such an idea is untrue. Below is the list:

• On page 26 of the recent book The Developing Genome, Professor David S. Moore states, "The common belief that there are things inside of us that constitute a set of instructions for building bodies and minds -- things that are analogous to 'blueprints' or 'recipes' -- is undoubtedly false."
• Biologist Rupert Sheldrake says this "DNA only codes for the materials from which the body is constructed: the enzymes, the structural proteins, and so forth," and "There is no evidence that it also codes for the plan, the form, the morphology of the body."
• Describing conclusions of biologist Brian Goodwin, the New York Times says, "While genes may help produce the proteins that make the skeleton or the glue, they do not determine the shape and form of an embryo or an organism." 
• Professor Massimo Pigliucci (mainstream author of numerous scientific papers on evolution) has stated  that "old-fashioned metaphors like genetic blueprint and genetic programme are not only woefully inadequate but positively misleading."
• Neuroscientist Romain Brette states, "The genome does not encode much except for amino acids."
• In a 2016 scientific paper, three scientists state the following: "It is now clear that the genome does not directly program the organism; the computer program metaphor has misled us...The genome does not function as a master plan or computer program for controlling the organism; the genome is the organism's servant, not its master.
• In the book Mind in Life by Evan Thompson (published by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press) we read the following on page 180: "The plain truth is that DNA is not a program for building organisms, as several authors have shown in detail (Keller 2000, Lewontin 1993, Moss 2003)."
• Developmental biologist C/H. Waddington stated, "The DNA is not a program or sequentially accessed control over the behavior of the cell."
•  Scientists Walker and Davies state this in a scientific paper: "DNA is not a blueprint for an organism; no information is actively processed by DNA alone...DNA is a passive repository for transcription of stored data into RNA, some (but by no means all) of which goes on to be translated into proteins."
• Geneticist Adam Rutherford states that "DNA is not a blueprint," a statement also made by biochemistry professor Keith Fox. 
• "The genome is not a blueprint," says Kevin Mitchell, a geneticist and neuroscientist at Trinity College Dublin, noting "it doesn't encode some specific outcome."
• "DNA cannot be seen as the 'blueprint' for life," says Antony Jose, associate professor of cell biology and molecular genetics at the University of Maryland, who says, "It is at best an overlapping and potentially scrambled list of ingredients that is used differently by different cells at different times."  
• Sergio Pistoi (a science writer with a PhD in molecular biology) tells us, "DNA is not a blueprint," and tells us, "We do not inherit specific instructions on how to build a cell or an organ." 
• Michael Levin (director of a large biology research lab) states that "genomes are not a blueprint for anatomy," and after referring to a "deep puzzle" of how biological forms arise, he gives this example: "Scientists really don’t know what determines the intricate shape and structure of the flatworm’s head."
• Ian Stevenson M.D. stated "Genes alone - which provide instructions for the production of amino acids and proteins -- cannot explain how the proteins produced by their instructions come to have the shape they develop and, ultimately, determine the form of the organisms where they are," and noted that "biologists who have drawn attention to this important gap in our knowledge of form have not been a grouping of mediocrities (Denton, 1986; Goldschmidt, 1952; B. C. Goodwin, 1985, 1988, 1989, 1994; Gottlieb, 1992; Grasse, 1973; E. S. Russell...Sheldrake, 1981; Tauber and Sarkar, 1992; Thompson, 1917/1942)."
• Biologist B.C. Goodwin stated this in 1989: "Since genes make molecules, genetics...does not tell us how the molecules are organized into the dynamic, organized process that is the living organism."
• An article in the journal Nature states this: "The manner in which bodies and tissues take form remains 'one of the most important, and still poorly understood, questions of our time', says developmental biologist Amy Shyer, who studies morphogenesis at the Rockefeller University in New York City."
• Timothy Saunders, a developmental biologist at the National University of Singapore says, "Fundamentally, we have a poor understanding of how any internal organ forms.”
• On the web site of the well-known biologist Denis Noble, we read that "the whole idea that genes contain the recipe or the program of life is absurd, according to Noble," and that we should understand DNA "not so much as a recipe or a program, but rather as a database that is used by the tissues and organs in order to make the proteins which they need."
• A paper by Stuart A. Newman (a professor of cell biology and anatomy) discussing at length the work of scientists trying to evoke "self-organization" as an explanation for morphogenesis states that "public lectures by principals of the field contain confidently asserted, but similarly oversimplified or misleading treatments," and says that "these analogies...give the false impression that there has been more progress in understanding embryonic development than there truly has been." Referring to scientists moving from one bunk explanation of morphogenesis to another bunk explanation, the paper concludes by stating, "It would be unfortunate if we find ourselves having emerged from a period of misconceived genetic program metaphors only to land in a brave new world captivated by equally misguided ones about self-organization."
• Referring to claims there is a program for building organisms in DNA, biochemist F. M. Harold stated "reflection on the findings with morphologically aberrant mutants suggests that the metaphor of a genetic program is misleading." Referring to  self-organization (a vague phrase sometimes used to try to explain morphogenesis), he says, "self-organization remains nearly as mysterious as it was a century ago, a subject in search of a paradigm." 
• Writing in the leading journal Cell, biologists  Marc Kirschner, John Gerhart and Tim Mitchison stated, "The genotype, however deeply we analyze it, cannot be predictive of the actual phenotype, but can only provide knowledge of the universe of possible phenotypes." That's equivalent to saying that DNA does not specify visible biological structures, but merely limits what structures an organism can have (just as a building parts list merely limits what structures can be made from the set of parts). 
• At the Stack Exchange expert answers site, someone posted a question asking which parts of a genome specify how to make a cell (he wanted to write a program that would sketch out a cell based on DNA inputs).  An unidentified expert stated that it is "not correct" that DNA is a blueprint that describes an organism, and that "DNA is not a blueprint because DNA does not have instructions for how to build a cell." No one contradicted this expert's claim, even though the site allows any of its experts to reply. 
• A paper co-authored by a chemistry professor (Jesper Hoffmeyer) tells us this: "Ontogenetic 'information,' whether about the structure of the organism or about its behavior, does not exist as such in the genes or in the environment, but is constructed in a given developmental context, as critically emphasized, for example, by Lewotin (1982) and Oyama (1985)."
• Biologist Steven Rose has stated, "DNA is not a blueprint, and the four dimensions of life (three of space, one of time) cannot be read off from its one-dimensional strand."
• Jonathan Latham has a master's degree in Crop Genetics and a PhD in virology. In his essay “Genetics Is Giving Way to a New Science of Life,” a long essay well worth a read, Latham exposes many of the myths about DNA. Referring to "the mythologizing of DNA," he says that "DNA is not a master controller," and asks, "How is it that, if organisms are the principal objects of biological study, and the standard explanation of their origin and operation is so scientifically weak that it has to award DNA imaginary superpowers of 'expression'” and 'control' to paper over the cracks, have scientists nevertheless clung to it?"
• An interesting 2006 paper by six medical authorities and scientists tells us that "biochemistry cannot provide the spatial information needed to explain morphogenesis," that "supracellular morphogenesis is mysterious," and that "nobody seems to understand the origin of biological and cellular order," contrary to claims that such order arises from a reading of a specification in DNA. 
• Keith Baverstock (with a PhD in chemical kinetics) has stated "genes are like the merchants that provide the necessary materials to build a house: they are neither the architect, nor the builder but, without them, the house cannot be built," and that "genes are neither the formal cause (the blueprint), nor the efficient cause (the builder) of the cell, nor of the organism."
• Evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin stated, "DNA is not self-reproducing; second, it makes nothing; and third, organisms are not determined by it." Noting that "the more accurate description of the role of DNA is that it bears information that is read by the cell machinery," Lewontin lamented the "evangelical enthusiasm" of those who "fetishized DNA" and misspoke so that "DNA as information bearer is transmogrified into DNA as blueprint, as plan, as master plan, as master molecule." In another work he stated "the information in DNA sequences is insufficient to specify even a folded protein, not to speak of an entire organism." This was correct: DNA does not even specify the 3D shapes of proteins, but merely their sequence of amino acids. 
• In 2022 developmental biologist Claudio D. Stern first noted,  "All cells in an organism have the same genetic information yet they generate often huge complexity as they diversify in the appropriate locations at the correct time and generate form and pattern as well as an array of identities, dynamic behaviours and functions." In his next sentence he stated, "The key quest is to find the 'computer program' that contains the instructions to build an organism, and the mechanisms responsible for its evolution over longer periods." Since this was written long after the Human Genome Project had been completed, he thereby suggested that no such instruction program had yet been discovered in the genome (DNA). 
• A 2024 article says, "Martínez Arias, 68, argues that the DNA sequence of an individual is not an instruction manual or a construction plan for their body...The Madrid-born biologist argues that there is nothing in the DNA molecule that explains why the heart is located on the left, why there are five fingers on the hand or why twin brothers have different fingerprints."
• Two scientists said this: "We see no valid use for definitions of the genotype and phenotype in terms of blueprints, programs, or sets of instructions, and their realizations or manifestation....The program/manifestation metaphor is factually misleading, because it suggests that the genotype uniquely determines an organism’s phenotype. However, as is well known, all it does is specify an organism’s norm of reaction to environmental conditions (Rieger et al., 1991,Lewontin, 1992)."
• A 2022 paper in the journal Science (one authored by more than ten scientists) says this: "Although the genome is often called the blueprint of an organism, it is perhaps more accurate to describe it as a parts list composed of the various genes that may or may not be used in the different cell types of a multicellular organism....The genome in and of itself does not provide an understanding of the molecular complexity of the various cell types of that organism."
• A Duke University biologist and a Cornell University biologist have confessed this: " No information about the overall architecture of these body parts is present in the cells and tissues of the parts themselves, or in each organism’s genes."  

In the very mainstream publication The Guardian, science writer Phillip Ball says this about the Human Genome Project that ended in 2003, noting the failure of science figures to clean up their old misstatements about DNA after they were debunked by the Human Genome Project:

"But a blizzard of misleading rhetoric surrounded the project, contributing to the widespread and sometimes dangerous misunderstandings about genes that now bedevils the genomic age. So far, there have been few attempts to set the record straight. Even now, the National Human Genome Research Institute calls the HGP an effort to read 'nature’s complete genetic blueprint for building a human being' – the 'book of instructions' that 'determine our particular traits'. A genome, says the institute, 'contains all of the information needed to build and maintain that organism'. But this deterministic 'instruction book' image is precisely the fallacy that genomics has overturned, and the information in the genome is demonstrably incomplete. Yet no one associated with genomic research seems bothered about correcting these false claims...Plenty remain happy to propagate the misleading idea that we are 'gene machines' and our DNA is our 'blueprint'.

The correct relation between DNA and the different levels of organization in a human body is illustrated in the diagram below. The black bar makes it clear that none of the seven most complex levels of organization is specified by DNA or genes.

Why We Were Told So Often the Huge Lie That DNA Is a Specification for Building Organisms

Very clearly, when we were told so often that DNA is a specification for making an organism, we were told a lie. But why was this lie told so often? Is it because biologists or science writers just enjoy making up lies, for no particular reason? No.  The main reason why we were told so often the lie that DNA is a specification for building organisms is that this was a lie that Darwinists very much needed to tell. 

If a 16-year-old teenage female has a very strict and often angry father, and this daughter arrives home at 1:00 AM after a long romantic session with her boyfriend, why does the daughter say, "I'm late because the car broke down"? Because this is the lie she needs to tell in this situation.  If an unfaithful husband spends the evening with his mistress, and comes home to his wife at midnight, why does he say, "Sorry, honey, I had to work late at the office"? Because this is the lie he needs to tell in this situation.  If a politician is photographed taking a thick sealed manila envelope from a corporate polluter who has given him 500 new hundred-dollar bills, why does the politician say something like, "The envelope just had some suggestions on how to help people?" Because it's the lie he needs to tell in this situation.  People typically lie because they are trying to get themselves out of some difficult situation. 

That's the main reason why Darwinists started telling us the lie that DNA is a blueprint for building humans, a specification for making organisms: because it was a lie they very much needed to tell. The discovery of DNA was kind of a combined blessing and curse for Darwinist theorists. In one limited sense, such a discovery was a blessing, because Darwinists could now point to concrete examples of microevolution that were well understood. For example, a paper might be written describing how some DNA mutations might cause a virus to become more dangerous.  But there were two gigantic problems for Darwinism caused by the discovery of DNA. The first gigantic problem was that DNA contained a vast repository of low-level information, specified information that had to be just right. This presented a new explanatory problem as to how this huge repository of "had to be just right" information had arisen. Darwin had used the word "information" a total of 37 times in his two main works, never once using such a word to claim there was information stored in an organism.  The second gigantic problem was that DNA wasn't the anatomy specification that Darwinists needed.  The DNA molecule merely contained low-level chemical information.  

Darwinism has always maintained that mutations can accumulate to produce dramatic structural transformations, such as an ape-like or chimp-like species gradually changing into a human species, or fish species gradually changing into reptile species.  However enormously unlikely such a transformation might be,  it would at least be not utterly impossible if an organism carries inside it some genetic plan that specifies an anatomy; for such a plan might be changed by mutations. But what if the genetic material passed from one generation to the next contains no specification of anatomy, and fails to even have a specification of the structure of cells? That would be a fatal difficulty for Darwinism, a "show-stopper."  If DNA does not specify anatomy,  then one species gradually changing into some other species with a vastly different anatomy through random mutations is not just improbable, but seemingly downright impossible. 

For Darwinists the choice was pretty simple. They could concede that a fatal difficulty had been discovered in their theorizing, and that mutations in genetic material (DNA) could not possibly be the explanation for complex anatomical and cellular innovations occurring during Earth's history (an admission that would have destroyed the credibility of their boasts about understanding biological origins). Or they could start misleading people by telling them the fiction that DNA was some kind of blueprint for making an organism (against all the evidence). It was kind of a choice of "die or lie," "defeat or cheat," "retreat or deceit."  Many Darwinists chose the second of these options. 

Soon after the discovery of DNA, Darwinists began telling us all over the place the huge lie that DNA was a blueprint for building a human body. There were various different versions of this lie (some involving a metaphor of a recipe or a program or a map). They all involved planting in people's mind the utterly erroneous idea that DNA was a specification for making a human body. Again and again (contrary to all the facts), we were told the lie that Darwinists needed to tell: that DNA contains all the information to build a human body. 

Such statements were lies both before and after the Human Genome Project was completed in 2003.  Before the completion of the project, the situation was that we knew what parts of DNA did (which was merely specify the amino acid sequences of proteins), and there was no sign of any anatomical information in DNA.  Even if you don't know the complete contents of something, it is a lie to claim that such a thing contains something completely different from what you have discovered in it.  For example, if you know that a small child has 20 notebooks, and you have checked a few of them and found nothing but crayon drawings, it would be a lie for you to claim that the notebooks you haven't looked in contain symphony scores or novel astrophysical theories.  Similarly, before the Human Genome Project was completed, it was a lie to claim that DNA was a blueprint for making organisms, because no signs of anatomy instructions had been found in DNA, and also no signs of instructions for making cells had been found in DNA. 

After the Human Genome Project was completed in 2003, DNA had been exhaustively cataloged, and there was still no evidence of any anatomy specification in it, no evidence that DNA specified how to make any type of cell.  But the "DNA is a body blueprint" lies and the "DNA is a body construction program" lies continued full blast from Darwinists, who kept repeating the earlier lies told by earlier people like the biologists Jacob and Monod. 

Other than the reality that telling lies about DNA is necessary for Darwinist theorists to cover up a fatal difficulty in their theory, a lesser reason why Darwinists told such lies was to try to lend credence to their atheistic or anti-spiritual ideology (such a motivation is made rather clear in some of the cases cited above).  There were countless others who just mindlessly parroted the claim that DNA is a blueprint, kind of thinking to themselves that it must be true because someone else said it; and it is debatable whether such persons should be called liars or just extremely careless writers. 

Telling us huge lies about DNA is only one of many ways in which Darwinism enthusiasts have been "cheating for Charles" by making misleading statements. It is rather as if such people think they are soldiers in some kind of intellectual holy war, that the ends justify the means, and that the regular rules of honest speech may by violated, as long as it serves the grand purpose of assuring the global dominance of Darwinist ideology.  Misrepresentations and misleading language have been core features of Darwinist literature from its very beginning. Examples include the following:

• More than 160 years of using the misleading phrase "natural selection," which does not actually refer to any selection (selection is a word meaning a choice by a conscious agent). Darwin himself in a letter to Charles Lyell dated June 6, 1860 said, "I suppose  'natural selection' was a bad term ; but to change it now, I think, would make confusion worse confounded." Darwin wrote in 1869,  "In the literal sense of the word, no doubt, natural selection is a false term."
• The use of doubly-deceptive phrases such as "selection pressure," a reputed effect that does not actually involve either selection or pressure. 
• The use of enormously deceptive claims that there is no fundamental difference between humans and animals, or only quantitative differences.
• The frequent use of misleading language trying to make animals sound like they have minds rather like humans, and trying to make humans sound like beings who have minds like animals. 
• Misleading equivocations involving the word "evolution" that shift between four different definitions of evolution, switching between defining evolution as (1) mere gene pool variation; (2) macroevolution (dramatic anatomical transformations such as dinosaurs turning into birds); (3) common descent (the idea that all organisms are descendants of the same ancestor), or (4) the claim that all earthly organisms have natural accidental origins  (the factuality of the first definition being used to "prove" the correctness of the three vastly more presumptuous definitions, none of which involve things proven or observed). 
• Misleading equivocations involving the words "variant" and "variations" that switch around between mere assertions of variations in the size, weight and health of some organism to assertions that nature produces "variants" that involve dramatic new features (something not well-observed in the study of any generation of organisms).
• The frequent use of misleading cell diagrams that depict cells as being thousands of times simpler than they are. A Nature article says that "textbook depictions of the cell’s innards have changed little since 1896," and quotes a scientist saying, "Nothing is drawn the way the cell actually looks."
• Frequent misleading uses of the phrase "body plan," in which a body plan is strangely defined as the mere rough shape of all organisms in the same phylum, despite the term suggesting something vastly different: a blueprint for how to build the whole structure of an organism. 
• The very frequent use of misleading analogies, such as comparing Darwinian evolution to a tinkerer (a tinkerer is a conscious agent willfully attempting to improve something by trial and error, and evolution is no such thing). 
• Misstatements about the complexity of protein molecules,  such as documented here and here,  in which an author claims that a typical protein molecule involves only about 100 amino acids, when the median number of amino acids in a human protein molecule is about 431, exponentially harder to achieve than merely 100. 
• The frequent use of misleading language designed to "sweep under the rug" the vast levels of organization and purposeful molecular machinery in organisms, such as language describing humans as "bags of chemicals" or "star stuff." 
• Deceptive appeals to artificial selection (a purposeful guidance of breeding) to try to support claims about so-called "natural selection" (claimed to involve no purposeful agency).
• Frequent misleading uses of the term "early human" to describe long-extinct organisms without any evidence to show that such organisms had any of the defining characteristics of humans (such as language and the ability to use symbols). 
• Extremely misleading statements that Darwinian evolution is not random, evoking some special, uncommon definition of the word "random" different from the normal definition of that term: "happening, done, or chosen by chance rather than according to a plan."
• Misleading claims claims that "trees of life" (speculative social constructs of analysts made after countless arbitrary analysis choices) are "yielded" or "produced" by genomes, things that do not naturally tell any story about a "tree of life."  
• Extremely misleading language in which non-biological reactions in lifeless chemicals are referred to as "metabolism" (contrary to the definition of metabolism, which is chemical reactions required for the maintenance of living thing), used for the sake of deceptively blurring the difference between life and lifeless chemicals .
• Extremely misleading claims of universal acceptance of Darwinist dogma, something not well-established by secret ballot opinion polls (the only reliable way to determine scientific opinion).
• Misleading claims that when scientists say something is a theory, it means it is well-established (a claim that can be refuted by many examples, such as the common example of the term "string theory" to describe a completely unsubstantiated type of physicist speculation).
• Misleading characterizations of opponents, often involving attempts to insinuate people making no reference to scriptures are fundamentalists.
• Deceptive claims about chance protein evolution, such as the assertion by one authority that if you have "trillions" of random protein molecules you can get "any function you want" (because the average amino acid length of a human protein is more than 400 amino acids, and because there are 20 possible amino acids in each position of a protein, such a statement underestimated by about 10 to the 500th power the difficulty of getting by chance "any function you want"). 
• Misleading language about natural history, such as failing to describe enormous leaps of organization and complexity as very complex innovations, but merely describing them as "variants" or "diversification."
• Misleading language using the phrase "missing link," often referring to things that are not credible evolutionary missing links, such as claiming that a type of dinosaur is a missing link between dinosaurs and birds, because it has a triangular membrane on its front similar to a triangular membraine on the back of birds.
• Misleading claims that evolution might have occurred before life existed, claims evoking a special use of the word "evolution" very different from  normal definitions. 
• A massive repetition by Darwinists of a doubtful claim that human genomes and chimp genomes are 98% or 98.6% the same, ignoring a 2005 paper with the title "Eighty percent of proteins are different between humans and chimpanzees." A 2021 study found that "1.5% to 7% of the human genome is unique to Homo sapiens," suggesting the 98% claim may have been much in error.   
• Misrepresentations involving fossils, often including gluing together (using a mixture such as superglue and baking soda) fossil fragments not known to be from one organism and claiming they are from a single organism.
• Visual misrepresentations of organisms, such as a visual attempting to persuade us that giraffes could have easily evolved from okapi, and depicting okapi as being half the height of giraffes (they are actually only about a third the height of giraffes). 
• Misleading statements about the quality of evidence for spiritual and psychical phenomena that tend to contradict Darwinist explanations, typically made by people who have never seriously studied such evidence, combined with misleading sterotypical or gaslighting characterizations of the people who have reported such phenomena.
• Deceptive drawings of embryos such as used by Darwinist zealot Ernst Haeckel, to try to create some impression that a study of embryos supports Darwinist claims, and the use of such drawings in Darwinist literature to the present day, decades after they had been debunked.  
• Many decades of erroneous claims about origin-of-life studies, which have not made any substantial progress in explaining an origin of life from non-life. 
• Doubly-misleading language in which experiments involving deliberate continuous artificial selection by humans and producing mere disorganized clumps of cells are referred to as examples of "multicellularity evolution," when they are neither multicellularity (examples of organisms with many cells) nor natural evolution.  
• Misleading language about the origin of life, such as referring to amino acids as "seeds of life," which is misleading as saying bricks are the seeds of cathedrals. 
• Questionable research practices: a survey of evolutionary biologists and ecologists reported that "around 64% of surveyed researchers reported they had at least once failed to report results because they were not statistically significant (cherry picking); 42% had collected more data after inspecting whether results were statistically significant (a form of p hacking) and 51% had reported an unexpected finding as though it had been hypothesised from the start (HARKing)."
• The very frequent use by natural history museums of "fossil exhibits" that are entirely plaster or fiberglass, with countless visitors getting the idea that such things were real fossils.
• The evocation of enormously implausible tales such as the tale of monkeys rafting across the Atlantic oceans millions of years ago, with such wild tales described as facts. 
• Frequent evocation of an utterly fallacious principle which one Darwinist evoked by saying "let us suppose instead that each step made in the good direction provides a small advantage in terms of survival or fecundity to the being that makes it," a principle extremely erroneous because improvements in survival or fecundity (reproduction) almost always require many coordinated changes before any such advantage is achieved. 
• Passing off deliberately faked fossils as important evidence of evolution (such as the fraudulent Piltdown Man fossil which for forty years was hailed as a fossil of key significance). 

Once we have realized that the Great DNA Myth has been a huge lie, and that DNA does not contain any specification for building a human body, we can start to realize the truth about how little progress our biologists have made in explaining biological origins and the realities of the human body and mind. That lack of progress is summarized in the table below:

Question	Answer	Discussion
Did scientists credibly explain the appearance (in appreciable quantities) of the building blocks of the building blocks of one-celled life on the early Earth?	No.	What can be called the building blocks of the building blocks of one-celled life are chemical units such as amino acids and nucleotide base pairs. No such things have ever been produced in any experiment realistically simulating the early Earth. The widely discussed Miller-Urey experiment failed in multiple ways to be a realistic simulation of the early Earth.
Did scientists credibly explain the origin of any of the main building blocks of one-celled life on the early Earth?	No.	The main "building blocks" of one-celled life are functional proteins, with even the simplest one-celled life requiring hundreds of types of proteins. No functional protein has ever been produced in any experiment realistically simulating the early Earth.
Did scientists credibly explain the origin of one-celled life?	No.	Life has never been produced from non-life through any kind of laboratory experiment.
Did scientists credibly explain why life uses only left-handed amino acids, when laboratory experiments always produce equal numbers of left-handed and right-handed amino acids?	No.	This long-standing problem (called the homochirality problem) has never been credibly answered. Homochirality is accidentally unachievable.
Did scientists credibly explain the origin of eukaryotic cells?	No.	The most popular current explanation for the appearance of eukaryotic cells (cells many times more complex than the simplest types of cells) involves an unbelievable appeal to non-Darwinian "endosymbiosis" events that are basically "miracles of chance."
Did scientists credibly explain the origin of any of the thousands of types of proteins used by the human body?	No.	The average protein molecule has about 400 amino acids, well-arranged to achieve a particular biological effect. The chance appearance of a functional protein molecule is as improbable as typing monkeys producing a long, grammatical, functional paragraph. Because protein molecules do not fold correctly and are not functional if half or a third of their amino acids are missing, you cannot explain the origin of protein molecules by a gradual accumulation of many parts that were each useful.
Did scientists credibly explain how any cell in the human body is able to reproduce?	No.	Scientists have described various phases in cell reproduction such as anaphase and prophase, but scientists are unable to credibly explain how any eukaryotic cell is able to reproduce. Since cells in the human body are units with a complexity like that of  jet aircraft or automobiles, such a cell reproducing is no explicable than a car splitting into two different functional cars.
Did scientists credibly explain how protein complexes are able to form in the human body?	No.	As there are more than 20,000 types of proteins used by the human body, and DNA does not specify which proteins make up particular protein complexes, the formation of protein complexes in which proteins "find the right team to join" is a mystery, one not credibly explained by mere random combinations. A scientific paper notes that "the majority of cellular proteins function as subunits in larger protein complexes," but also notes that "very little is known about how protein complexes form."
Did scientists credibly explain the occurrence of protein folding continually occurring in the human body?	No	Scientists cannot currently explain how sequences of amino acids are able to continually fold to form the 3D shapes used by protein molecules. Success in the different task of protein structure prediction (using advanced AI software and huge “deep learning” databases) does nothing to explain how protein folding occurs in the human body.
Did scientists credibly explain how a human is able to instantly recall detailed facts when asked a short simple question such as "How did Lincoln die"?	No	We know how information can be instantly retrieved using books or computers: by the use of things such as sorting, addressing and indexing. Since there is no sorting, addressing or indexing in the human brain, the instant recall of learned information is inexplicable under prevailing assumptions of scientists. Finding the right answer to a question by looking in a brain that has no sorting, indexing or addressing should be as hard as finding a needle in a haystack.
Did scientists credibly explain how cells find the right positions in a developing human body?	No	Claims that “morphogen gradients” do anything to solve this mystery are unfounded, and such claims merely shift the mystery from one place to another, creating an equally great mystery of how such chemicals could know where cells should go to.
Did scientists credibly explain how protein transcription occurs so rapidly?	No	Protein transcription is part of the process by which new proteins are created when particular genes in DNA are read to help make a new protein. Protein transcription occurs almost instantly, but scientists are unable to explain why such a thing should not take a very long time, because finding the right gene would be like finding a needle in a haystack. I will describe this issue in a later post. In an article on Chemistry World, we read this: "How does the machinery that turns genes into proteins know which part of the genome to read in any given cell type?" The article makes rather clear that the answer has not yet been found.
Did scientists credibly explain the appearance of any adult human body?	No.	Human DNA merely specifies low-level chemical information such as which amino acids make up a protein. Since the "DNA as body blueprint" or "DNA as body recipe" or "DNA as body program" tales are all lies having no basis in fact, the progression from a speck-sized zygote to the vast organization of an adult human body is unexplained.
Did scientists credibly explain the fossil record?	No.	Scientists have never given a credible explain of the Cambrian Explosion, involving the appearance of all or almost all animal phyla within a relatively short period about 540 million years ago, contrary to what we would expect from Darwinist assumptions. Scientists have also failed to credibly explain the geographic distribution of fossils,  resorting to ridiculous explanatory tall tales such as the story of monkeys rafting across the Atlantic Ocean millions of years ago.
Did scientists credibly explain the appearance of any adult human mind?	No.	There are very many reasons why the human mind cannot be credibly explained as a mere product of the brain, or as the same thing as the brain.
Did scientists credibly explain the origin of the human species?	No.	The answer to this question could only be “Yes” if all  or almost all of the answers above are “Yes.” When all are answers are “No,” the answer to this question is “No” in the loudest voice.

On this blog I have been teaching you the truth about DNA since 2014, when I published a post noting the utter inadequacy of DNA as an explanation for human beings, and noting the need for some conceptual leap to postulate some explanatory reality far beyond anything known by biologists.

The lack of any specification for making a human body in DNA is a clue of the most gigantic importance. In my very long essay here, I list it as being one of what I call the Six Main Clues About Reality. If you study these six clues with sufficient diligence, you will be led to a worldview radically different from the views being taught by our materialist professors. The gigantic implication of the centrally important fact that our bodies lack any molecular specification of a human body or any human cell is this: that we are not at all organisms that arose in any "bottom up" way explicable through low-level chemistry, but must be organisms that arose in a "top-down" way from some unfathomable agency vastly greater than any of us. 

The grand climax is the "rabbit hole bunker" of the multiverse