Clump-Fooled Press Calls It Multicellularity Evolution, But It Was Neither

For many decades evolutionary biology has been characterized by language abuse, deceptive speech and misleading practices. Some of the worst abuses over the past 160 years have been 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." 
• Many decades of false claims that DNA is a blueprint or recipe or program specifying how to make an organism, claims that are utterly fictional because neither DNA nor the genes in it even specify how to make any of the cells that are the main components of an organism, or any of the organelles that make up such cells.  
• The use of very 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 like humans, and trying to make humans sound like beings who have minds like animals. 
• 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."
• 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. 
• 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 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).
• 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"). 
• Frequent appeals to an utterly erroneous principle that any fantastically improbable bonanza of luck can happen as long as there are millions of years of chance events. 
• 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 membrane 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. 
• Frequent claims that certain parts of the human body are "vestigial structures" with no current use, despite evidence that such structures do actually have a function. 
• 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.
• 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 stereotypical 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.  
• Misleading language about the origin of life, such as referring to amino acids as "seeds of life" (which is as misleading as saying bricks are the seeds of cathedrals). 
• 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.
• 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. 

In the press we had recently another example of misleading language about evolution. An experiment was described as telling us something about "multicellularity evolution." The results of the experiment were neither multicellularity nor Darwinian evolution. 

The term "multicellularity" refers to organisms consisting of many different types of cells, organized to have structures such as organs. The origin of multicellularity has always been one of the biggest problems in explaining the appearance of visible organisms. Pretty much the first large appearance of multicellular life in the fossil record occurs around the time of the Cambrian Explosion. The fossil record suggests that large organisms appeared rather abruptly about 540 million years ago, with all or almost all of the main types of animals (called phyla) originating about the same time. How could you ever got so many types of multicellular organisms showing up so suddenly? A jump from single-cell organisms to organisms consisting of very many billions of very well-organized cells (with different types of organ systems and many different types of cells) would have been a transition as baffling and hard-to-explain as a jump from only aquatic organisms to both aquatic organisms and land-based organism, or a jump from only non-flying animals to the existence of both non-flying and flying animals. 

As described in this paper, some experimenters did an experiment with yeast cells in a test tube. Over 600 days they did some manual selection process, saving only the microscopic cells which were largest. Such a thing is called artificial selection. It is the type of manual, purposeful selection that went on when dog breeders made specific decisions designed to produce particular types of dogs. Artificial selection is not so-called "natural selection," which is a purposeless, unguided thing.  Artificial selection is not Darwinian evolution, claimed to be a purely natural process not involving any willful intention. 

What was the result of this experiment? Just some clumps of yeast cells. That isn't multicellularity, which is when you have an organism consisting of many different types of cells.  The yeast clumps were not an organism. They were merely disorganized clumps consisting of many one-celled organisms. 

Following its Standard Operating Procedure of parroting  any insinuations made by scientific papers, no matter how phony-sounding they may be, the press has hailed this experiment. Inexplicably categorizing their article under "Trilobites," The New York Times had an article called "An Experiment Repeated 600 Times Finds Hints to Evolution’s Secrets," with a subtitle entitled "Snowflakes of yeast in a lab offer insights into how life on Earth transitioned from single-celled into multicellular organisms."  No, we got no "insights into how life on Earth transitioned from single-celled into multicellular organisms." because (1) no multicellular organisms were produced, only clumps of one-celled organisms, and (2) what was going on was artificial selection involving constant intentional human fiddling, not natural evolution. 

We are told this about a Ratcliff: "Every day, he swirled yeast cells in a test tube, sucked up the ones that sank to the bottom quickest, then used them to grow the next day’s population of yeast." We hear of nothing to justify the title, merely the production of "clumps," a word the article uses repeatedly in discussing the results. The last two sentences of the article lets us know how misleading the article's title and subtitle were. We read this:

"The team is now exploring whether dense clumps of snowflake yeast might develop ways to get nutrients to their innermost members. If they do, these yeast in their test tubes in Atlanta might tell us something about what it was like, eons ago, when the ancestors of you and many living things around you first began to build bodies from cells. The team is now exploring whether dense clumps of snowflake yeast might develop ways to get nutrients to their innermost members. If they do, these yeast in their test tubes in Atlanta might tell us something about what it was like, eons ago, when the ancestors of you and many living things around you first began to build bodies from cells."

So there's something that could possibly happen in the future, and if that were to happen, it "might tell us something" -- but that thing hasn't yet happened yet. And if the imagined thing were to happen, it would not actually tell us about the origin of multicellular organisms, because the clumps of yeast cells were not multicellular organisms. So why did the New York Times make the untrue claim that this experiment "offer insights into how life on Earth transitioned from single-celled into multicellular organisms" when nothing like that has happened? 

The site phys.org  habitually passes on dubious press releases word-for-word while creating many an untrue headline to hype up the results. The phys.org site gives us an equally misleading headline on this experiment, a headline of "A journey to the origins of multicellular life: Long-term experimental evolution in the lab." No, we didn't get any multicellular life (which means an organism built from many cells of different types), and we didn't get any experimental evolution, because the kind of artificial selection that occurred is not experimental evolution. An example of experimental evolution would be if you built a screened cage housing fruit flies, and you put in some extra radiation, watching the natural results that occurred over multiple generations. 

The web site of the Atlantic magazine (www.atlantic.com) has long been known for its credulous "hook, line and sinker" parroting of the most unbelievable boasts of professors. We typically get gullible "swallow any hype" science journalism from this site.   At the site we have the false headline "One of Evolution's Biggest Moments Was Re-Created in a Year," followed by the misleading subtitle "A unique experiment shows how multicellular organisms might have evolved from single-celled ancestors."  No, there were not any multicellular organisms produced by the experiment, and what was going on was artificial selection, not Darwinian evolution. 

As is so often the case, the blame for these misleading articles should be placed not merely on today's ever-gullible science journalists but on the authors of the scientific paper. We have another example here of what occurs so very often these days: a science paper that has a misleading title. The title of the paper was "De novo evolution of macroscopic multicellularity." There was no real Darwinian evolution (just artificial selection not natural selection), and no real multicellularity (since no multicellular organism appeared). The abstract of the paper makes a statement trying to fool you into thinking that the yeast became 20,000 times larger. No such increase in the size of the yeast cells occurred. The size increase was almost all simply a clumping effect produced by thousands of yeast cells clumping together. Figure 2C of the paper makes clear that after 600 rounds of artificial selection (not actual evolution), the only change in the average individual size of the yeast cells was a change in length of about 200% to 300%. 

The article at the Atlantic site quotes an evolutionary biologist as saying, "This is the most exciting study I've seen in a long time." If making some clumps of yeast cells through 600 rounds of artificial manual manipulation is the most exciting thing evolutionary biologists have to report "in a long time," you can count that as Exhibit A that our evolutionary biologists are lost in the woods. 

The arising of multicellular organisms with such gigantic levels of hierarchical organization is a mystery a thousand miles over the heads of today's scientists. To properly understand the dismal failure of scientists to explain the arising of multicellular organisms,  simply consider the failure of scientists to explain the origin of any mammal individual. Scientists do not understand the progression from the single cell of a speck-sized zygote to the vast state of organization that is a full-grown human body.  Their failure to explain such a progression is shown by the huge lies they have told on this topic, such as the lie that a human body arises because a blueprint for constructing a body is read from DNA. DNA contains no such blueprint, no recipe or program for building a human. DNA does not have any anatomy construction information, does not specify any cell in the body, and does not even specify how to make the components from which cells are constructed (organelles and protein complexes).  DNA merely contains low-level chemical information such as which amino acids make up a protein. Never think that people telling big lies about something understand that topic. The fact that so many biologists have told us such outrageous lies about DNA and its genes (such as the lie that DNA is a body blueprint or a program for building bodies) is a clear sign of how "lost in the woods" biologists are when it comes to explaining the arising of any mammal body. 

There are many scientists who have confessed the truth about DNA and its genes, telling us that DNA is no blueprint or program or recipe for making a body. The great majority of such scientists have failed to realize the gargantuan implications of such a thing, just like the great majority of neuroscientists have failed to realize the gargantuan implications of the reality that a significant fraction of humans report out-of-body experiences. The lack of any anatomy specification in DNA implies that the origin of every human body (a state of enormously high hierarchical organization) must be a top-down event driven by some enormous causal agency beyond our understanding, not some bottom-up event caused by mechanistic molecular events. Out-of-body experiences and the lack in the brain of any physical characteristics that can explain any of the main powers of human minds (such as instant recall, instant learning, and preservation of memories for half a century) imply something similar, that the origin of the mind of each human is a top-down event driven by some enormous causal agency beyond our understanding, not some bottom-up event caused by mechanistic molecular events.