My post here discusses very shady shenanigans that have gone on for many decades at natural history museums, funny business involving misleading fossil displays. Recently the Washington Post published an article on some shady business going on at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. We read about some weird collection of brains and human bones held by the museum:
"Most of the brains were removed upon death from Black and Indigenous people and other people of color. They are part of a collection of at least 30,700 human bones and other body parts still held by the Natural History Museum, the most-visited museum within the Smithsonian. The collection, one of the largest in the world, includes mummies, skulls, teeth and other body parts, representing an unknown number of people. The remains are the unreconciled legacy of a grisly practice in which bodies and organs were taken from graveyards, battlefields, morgues and hospitals in more than 80 countries. The decades-long effort was financed and encouraged by the taxpayer-subsidized institution. The collection, which was mostly amassed by the early 1940s, has long been hidden from view....The vast majority of the remains appear to have been gathered without consent from the individuals or their families, by researchers preying on people who were hospitalized, poor, or lacked immediate relatives to identify or bury them. In other cases, collectors, anthropologists and scientists dug up burial grounds and looted graves."
It seems that quite a few people have been asking the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History to return some of these bones and brains that were improperly taken. We read that "The Natural History Museum said that in the last three decades it has returned 4,068 sets of human remains." A secretary of the Smithsonian (in charge of the museum) confesses, "these brains were really people of color to demonstrate the superiority of White brains, so I understand that is just really unconscionable." Apparently it's been a dirty little secret of the National Museum of Natural History. We read, "Though top Smithsonian and Natural History Museum officials have long known about the tens of thousands of body parts held by the institution, the full scope of the brain collection has never been publicly disclosed."
Part of the disreputable doings of the Smithsonian Institution are the kind of misleading articles we often read at its site www.smithsonianmag.com. A recent example is an article with the misleading clickbait title "How NASA Captured Asteroid Dust to Find the Origins of Life." Many readers will get from that title the impression some capture of asteroid dust has found the origins of life. Nothing of the sort has happened. Nothing of any value in illuminating the origin of life has come thus far from NASA's retrieval of some asteroid dust. And no one at NASA thought that the origin of life could be solved by retrieving some asteroid dust. It is universally agreed that asteroids are sterile objects incapable of supporting life. So the subtitle of the story ("The sample of the space rock Bennu that OSIRIS-REx collected could unlock an ancient existential mystery") is untrue.
The article tells us that the dust returned from OSIRIS-REx is "older than any substance on Earth," which is not true. Pieces of asteroids routinely fall to Earth as meteorites. Recovered meteorites are just as old as the OSIRIS-REx sample. We have nonsensical claims in the article, such as the claim that "we have to understand the composition of Bennu in order to understand how life could have started on this planet." No, understanding the composition of a distant sterile asteroid will not do anything to explain how life could have started on Earth. And scientists have already known the composition of asteroids for a long time, because pieces of asteroids often fall to Earth in the form of meteorites; and the composition of such meteorites has been thoroughly analyzed. The article confesses this (with a confession contradicting some of its other claims) by saying this:
"We have samples from asteroids: They’re meteorites. They’ve been landing on Earth since there was Earth..."
In the article a scientist tells us that "on Earth—this is so weird—all of the organic materials used in living processes are left-handed." This is the mystery of homochirality, discussed here. When created in labs, molecules such as amino acids form equally in left-handed and right-handed amounts. But that's not what we see in life. Instead we see something rather like a million coin tosses, all landing heads rather than tails. Besides the accidentally unachievable very high levels of information-rich organization in even the simplest living things, homochirality is one of the major reasons for thinking that life cannot originate from non-life by any unguided process. In the Smithsonian article a scientist makes the groundless claim below:
" But asteroids will be able to help us understand these things, and we’ll be able to confirm that, yep, all of these right-handed substances are right-handed on the asteroids, too. Or they’re left-handed on the asteroids."
No, getting a soil sample from an asteroid will do nothing to solve the mystery of why there is homochirality in living things. Amino acids are incredibly rare in asteroids, having abundances of only about 1 part in a billion. The amino acids already detected in a Japanese soil sample from an asteroid (and from meteorites that came from asteroids) were left-handed and right-handed in equal amounts. That finding does not make homochirality understandable, but leaves it all the more accidentally unexplainable.
Previously at the Smithsonian magazine web site, there was an end-of-year-recap article with the title "Ten New Things We Learned About Human Origins in 2020." In huge boldface letters we see a section heading entitled "Fossils Show Ancient Primates Also Undertook Major Journeys." We are then told the extremely absurd claim that monkeys rafted across the Atlantic Ocean. Of course, no fossils told any such tale. It was merely a case that some New World monkey fossils millions of years old were found similar to equally old monkey fossils from Africa. Rather than realize that this is an indication that their ideas of the common ancestry of all species are wrong or in need of repair, evolutionary biologists have asked us to believe in the preposterous fable that monkeys from Africa rafted across the Atlantic ocean to the Western hemisphere. This migration tall tale reminds me of another motion fable: the story that Dorothy traveled to Oz when a tornado blew her house up into the air, causing it to land in the land of Oz.
For further evidence of silly error-ridden ideology-driven education coming from the Smithsonian Institution, let us look at a FAQ page on the web site of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History run by the Smithsonian Institution. The first question is "How does evolution work?" We have an answer that fails to explain any of the vastly impressive and enormously complex and gigantically organized biological innovations that we need to explain. Here is the answer:
"To survive, living things adapt to their surroundings. Occasionally a genetic variation gives one member of a species an edge. That individual passes the beneficial gene on to its descendants. More individuals with the new trait survive and pass it on to their descendants. If many beneficial traits arise over time, a new species—better equipped to meet the challenges of its environment—evolves."
We see a big diagram that merely shows how there might occur color changes in a population of mice. But that does not explain how the idea of evolution or natural selection can explain the appearance of enormously complex novel innovations in biological organisms, such as new organs, new types of functional limbs, new types of cells and new types of protein molecules. Getting such things (involving enormous leaps of purposeful organization) is more than trillions of times harder than getting mere color changes. And you cannot explain such things by the idea of genetic variation, because genes contain only low-level chemical information such as which amino acids make up a particular protein, not high-level information such as how to build a body or any of its organs or cells.
So the "how evolution works" answer has failed. All it has explained is how some tiny tweak could occur, not some new biological invention such as new types of protein molecules, new types of cells, new types of organs or new types of organ systems. Along the way, the answer has planted in our minds the vastly erroneous idea that new genes can arise from mere random variations. A gene contains a specification of the amino acid sequence of a protein molecule. There are more than 20,000 types of protein molecules in the human body, each with its own unique amino acid sequence specified by some gene. The protein molecules of mammals contain an average of about 475 very well-arranged amino acids, and each type of protein molecule has a sequence that has to be just right for the protein molecule to fold properly and serve its biological function. According to the 2012 scientific paper here, "Eukaryotic proteins have an average size of 472 aa [amino acids], whereas bacterial (320 aa) and archaeal (283 aa) proteins are significantly smaller (33-40% on average)." Mammals such as humans have eukaryotic proteins.
In terms of its information content, a gene is roughly comparable to a well-written grammatical paragraph. The chance of a new functional gene arising by a random variation is roughly equivalent to the chance of an ink splash producing a well-written functional paragraph, something so improbable we would never expect it to occur in the history of the universe. Darwinists lack any credible explanation for the origin of genes and lack any credible explanation for the origin of the protein molecules that genes partially specify. You cannot credibly explain new genes by simply imagining random variations or random mutations.
Part of the reason why genes and protein molecules cannot be credibly explained by Darwinist ideas is that genes and protein molecules are very sensitive to small changes, being broken by such small changes. See the appendix of this post for quotes establishing this fact.
The next question answered by the FAQ is: "What do scientists mean when they call evolution a theory?" We are told the untrue claim that in science "a theory is the most logical explanation for how a natural phenomenon works," and that when scientists refer to a theory they mean something "quite the opposite from our informal use of the word theory." No, that isn't true at all, and scientists use the word theory just like ordinary people use it, to mean all kinds of things ranging from groundless to near-certain, as when scientists massively use the term "string theory" to refer to a groundless and massively speculative family of physics theories, when they use the term "supersymmetry theory" for a theory that has failed all empirical tests, and when they frequently use terms such as multiverse theory and parallel universes theory to refer to groundless speculative theories for which there is no evidence.
The next question in the FAQ is "How does evolution explain complex organisms like humans?" The answer is a laughably lame little speck of fluff. Here's the whole answer:
"Evolution doesn’t happen all at once, especially in complex organisms such as human beings. Modern humans are the product of evolutionary processes that go back more than 3.5 billion years, to the beginnings of life on Earth. We became human gradually, evolving new physical traits and behaviors on top of those inherited."
My goodness, could we ever find a more lame and pathetic answer to the great question of how we got humans? Physically humans are a state of enormous hierarchical organization more impressive than anything humans have ever constructed. A volume of 1,000 pages would be grossly inadequate for storing all of the information needed to construct the vast state of organization and dynamic functionality that is a human body. Mentally humans are something vastly different from anything found in the animal kingdom, with there existing very many uniquely human characteristics and capabilities. Explaining humans would be a task of oceanic depth. The answer above does not even "wade its feet in the water" of such an ocean. You're not explaining things by saying they happened gradually, or took a long time.
Attempting to answer the question "how are humans and monkeys related," we have an answer that is vacuous. We are given a chart that attempts to persuade us that humans and chimpanzees have a common ancestor. What was this common ancestor? We are never told. No fossils have been found corresponding to such an alleged common ancestor. The complete vagueness here about this alleged common ancestor is a strong reason for believing that the claim is false. Similarly, if a man claims that he and John F. Kennedy have a common ancestor, but refuses to say anything about who this ancestor is, you have a strong reason for suspecting the claim about this ancestry is untrue.
In the FAQ we have the untrue claim that there is no scientific controversy over whether evolution "explains the history of life on Earth." There very much is such a controversy, as we can see from examining some of the quotes from scientists I list in my post "Candid Confessions of the Scientists" here. In fact, it is almost universally admitted by scientists that Darwinian evolution fails to explain the beginning of life on Earth. A December 2023 paper by several biologists states this:
"There is a growing sense of unease among biologists that there are serious shortcomings in the Neo-Darwinian framework, in particular that several of its central assumptions are wrong and that, as a result, it lacks explanatory power. The problems are many and likely fatal."
A statement signed by about 1000 scientists states the following:
"We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged."
Ask a biologist whether Darwinism explains the history of life, and you'll probably get some overconfident "repeat the chant" claim that it does. But if you ask the right follow-up questions, you'll expose the reality contradicting such a claim. The conversation might go like this:
Reporter: So does Darwinism and evolutionary theory explain the history of life on Earth?
Scientist: Yes, absolutely. Darwin rules!
Reporter: So can you list some unsolved problems of biology?
Scientist: Well, there's the origin of life. We don't understand that.
Reporter: You mean the origin of prokaryotic cells. But what about the origin of the vastly more complex eukaryotic cells?
Scientist: We have a theory that covers that, a theory of a huge leap in organization by endosymbiosis, kind of like a house converting into a high office tower.
Reporter: Is that a Darwinian theory, involving nothing but very gradual steps over a long time?
Scientist: No, it actually involves a gigantic sudden leap in a short time, not actual evolution in the Darwinian sense.
Reporter: And so what about the Cambrian Explosion, when all or almost all the animal phyla originated rather suddenly?
Scientist: That's quite a mystery. We're still working on trying to explain how that happened. Quite a few say that oxygen levels had something to do with it.
Reporter: Are oxygen levels part of Darwinian theory?
Scientist: No, not actually.
Reporter: And do you understand the origin of language?
Scientist: Little progress has been made on that.
Reporter: Each of us has more than 20,000 types of protein molecules in our bodies, and almost all of these types contain hundreds or thousands of well-arranged amino acid parts. How did Darwin explain the origin of all those molecule types?
Scientist: Well, that kind of complexity was not discovered until the 20th century, so it's not fair to expect he explained that.
Reporter: What about morphogenesis, how a speck-sized zygote progresses to become the vast organization of an adult human body?
Scientist: That's one of the biggest unsolved problems of biology.
Reporter: Do you understand how a single human cell is able to reproduce?
Scientist: Well, we can describe the stages. But the "how" is very puzzling. We don't really understand the how.
Reporter: And how does a human being instantly remember a complex answer upon hearing a single name or short question?
Scientist: I don't know. That's a puzzle the neuroscientists are working on.
Reporter: How can people remember things for fifty years, when the proteins that make up neurons and synapses have lifetimes of only a few weeks?
Scientist: Memory is quite the mystery.
Reporter: So why do you claim that evolutionary theory explains the history of life, when it seems like it does not explain most of the biggest things that occurred in that history?
Attempting to answer the question "What has been discovered about evolution since Darwin?" the FAQ gives us this lame and misleading answer:
"A lot! Since Darwin died in 1882, findings from many fields have confirmed and greatly expanded on his ideas. We’ve learned that Earth is old enough for all known species to have evolved. We’ve discovered DNA, which confirms that all organisms are related to one another. And we’ve uncovered millions of fossils that provide evidence of how one life form evolved into another over time."
No, findings since 1882 have never confirmed the main claim of Darwin, that new species and new biological innovations in natural history occur because of unguided processes such as random mutations. In fact, what has been discovered since 1882 has made such claims untenable. We now know that biological organisms are almost infinitely more functionally complex, information-rich and well-organized than Darwin ever dreamed, making his ideas seem like quaint old wives' tales. DNA does not confirm that all organisms are related to one another in the sense of sharing a common ancestry. The use of a common genetic code is something we might expect from some designer of biological organisms trying to standardize on an encoding scheme. The gigantic levels of functional information in DNA makes ideas of accidental biological origins all the more implausible. We now know that the total amount of functional information stored in the DNA of all the world's organisms is greater than the total amount of information in all the books in a very large library of 100,000 volumes or more. To maintain that all that information arose from accidental unguided processes is like claiming that all the books in a library of 100,000 volumes arose from accidental ink splashes.
Contrary to the FAQ's claim that "we’ve learned that Earth is old enough for all known species to have evolved," realistic calculations of the "waiting time problem" suggest that a few billion years is enormously insufficient for even a hundredth of the known genes to have evolved by Darwinian means. Referring to a probability of less than 1 in a billion trillion quadrillion, two scientists state in a 2022 paper that "macroevolution (required for all speciation events and the complexifications appearing in the Cambrian explosion)" is "probabilistically highly implausible (on the order of 10−50) when based on selection by survival of the fittest."
As for fossils, it is false to claim that "they provide evidence of how one life form evolved into another over time." Fossils do nothing to show how one species could have evolved into some greatly different species, nor do fossils in general even show that one species even did evolve into some very different species. Fossils generally only show that some type of species existed at some time in the past. A large part of the problem with fossil displays in museums such as the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History is that a large fraction of the fossil displays are largely or mostly fake or constructed through extremely dubious methods in which scattered fragments of bone (often gathered from a wide area) are built into "fossil displays" using very large amounts of wishful-thinking guesswork and filler material such as fiberglass, plaster, or a mixture of baking soda and superglue. That problem is discussed in my post "Fossil Exhibit Shenanigans of the Natural History Museums" here.
A "Human Family Tree" visual published by the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History inadvertently gives us an indication of how current claims of human evolutionary origins are in disarray. Instead of giving us a tree-like diagram making a claim of an ancestry between Homo sapiens and species such as Homo erectus and Homo habilis and Homo heidelbergenis, we have a diagram with this structure:
We have all seen very many times that iconic "Evolution of Man" visual showing four or five figures in a line, facing right. It seems based on the kind of diagram above that such a visual would be more honestly displayed like this:
The bad information and dubious ideology (marketed as science) that often comes from the taxpayer-supported Smithsonian Institution is only one of the many cases of US taxpayer dollars going to push bad ideas and doubtful theories. For example, my post here documents how US government sites such as www.genome.gov continue to make outrageous misstatements about genes and DNA. And how much money has the US government given in grants that are basically welfare programs for the pitchmen of dubious theories in fields such as physics and cosmology and astrobiology? Probably billions.
- "It seems clear that even the smallest change in the sequence of amino acids of proteins usually has a deleterious effect on the physiology and metabolism of organisms." -- Evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin, "The triple helix : gene, organism, and environment," page 123.
- "Proteins are so precisely built that the change of even a few atoms in one amino acid can sometimes disrupt the structure of the whole molecule so severely that all function is lost." -- Science textbook "Molecular Biology of the Cell."
- "To quantitate protein tolerance to random change, it is vital to understand the probability that a random amino acid replacement will lead to a protein's functional inactivation. We define this probability as the 'x factor.' ...The x factor was found to be 34% ± 6%." -- 3 scientists, "Protein tolerance to random amino acid change."
- "Once again we see that proteins are fragile, are often only on the brink of stability." -- Columbia University scientists Lawrence Chasin and Deborah Mowshowitz, "Introduction to Molecular and Cellular Biology," Lecture 5.
- "We predict 27–29% of amino acid changing (nonsynonymous) mutations are neutral or nearly neutral (|s|<0.01%), 30–42% are moderately deleterious (0.01%<|s|<1%), and nearly all the remainder are highly deleterious or lethal (|s|>1%).” -- "Assessing the Evolutionary Impact of Amino Acid Mutations in the Human Genome," a scientific paper by 14 scientists.
- "An analysis of 8,653 proteins based on single mutations (Xavier et al., 2021) shows the following results: ~68% are destabilizing, ~24% are stabilizing, and ~8,0% are neutral mutations...while a similar analysis from the observed free-energy distribution from 328,691 out of 341,860 mutations (Tsuboyama et al., 2023)...indicates that ~71% are destabilizing, ~16% are stabilizing, and ~13% are neutral mutations, respectively." -- scientist Jorge A. Villa, "Analysis of proteins in the light of mutations." 2023.
- "Proteins are intricate, dynamic structures, and small changes in their amino acid sequences can lead to large effects on their folding, stability and dynamics. To facilitate the further development and evaluation of methods to predict these changes, we have developed ThermoMutDB, a manually curated database containing >14,669 experimental data of thermodynamic parameters for wild type and mutant proteins... Two thirds of mutations within the database are destabilising." -- Eight scientists, "ThermoMutDB: a thermodynamic database for missense mutations," 2020.
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