The Top 10 Unsolved Problems of Science: A Candid List

In general scientists are bad at listing unsolved problems of  science. Probably we can largely explain this on the grounds that scientists have several huge myths that they are trying to uphold. The first myth is the myth that the human mind can be explained by the brain. The second myth is that biological origins can all be explained by Darwinian evolution. The more candidly scientists list their unsolved problems, the harder it is to uphold such myths. And the more fully scientists describe unsolved problems of science, the harder it is to uphold such myths. 

Consequently we see several different shortfalls:

(1) There rarely appear papers or lengthy thoughtful articles dealing intelligently and candidly with the topic of unsolved problems in science. 

(2) When there appear articles or papers dealing with the topic of unsolved problems in science, most of the problems discussed are usually not the main unsolved problems of science. 

(3) When there appear articles or papers dealing with the topic of unsolved problems in science, the problems discussed tend to be discussed in a skimpy shorthand way, so that people will be unlikely to realize how big some particular explanatory shortfall is.

(4) Scientists tend to avoid discussing anomalous phenomena they cannot explain.

(5) Instead of using articles about unsolved problems in science as an opportunity for a rare display of humility, scientists often use such articles to try to perpetuate their unfounded boasts, engaging in "humble brags," which one dictionary defines as "an ostensibly modest or self-deprecating statement whose actual purpose is to draw attention to something of which one is proud."   

The latest example of a bad list of unsolved problems in science is an article on the Big Think site, one entitled "10 of the most mystifying open questions in science."  We have some bad defects in the article by physicist Marcelo Gleiser:

• While listing an unsolved problem of "What is the universe made of?" Gleiser turns the discussion into an unfounded boast that scientists understand that the universe is 27% dark matter and 68% dark energy, something that scientists don't actually know, because no one knows whether dark matter or dark energy even exist. 
• It seems like Gleiser's sole mention of a problem of biology is listing the problem of the origin of life. All of biology is filled with unsolved problems, because scientists do not have any credible theory of the origin of any species, and also lack any credible explanation of the origin of any adult human organism, there being no credible theory of how a speck-sized zygote could progress to become the vast organization of the human body. 
• Gleiser lists as one of his ten biggest unsolved problems a  problem he states as "what makes us human?" He acts as if he is puzzled by what makes a human different from a gorilla, asking,  "So, what exactly differentiates us from them?" There are the most gigantic and obvious differences between humans and gorillas, so the discussion here makes no sense. 
• Gleiser lists as one of his ten biggest unsolved problems "what is consciousness?" This is not an unsolved problem. We know what consciousness is.  
• Gleiser lists as one of his ten biggest unsolved problems "why do we dream?" That is an interesting unsolved problem, but not at all one of the ten biggest unsolved problems of science. 
• Gleiser lists as one of his ten biggest unsolved problems "Are there other universes?" There are no observations anyone could have in this universe showing there are other universes. No matter how strange the event observed, it would merely be evidence for some mysterious reality in our own universe.  So "are there other universes?" is not an unsolved problem of science, but some kind of metaphysical question. 
• Gleiser lists as one of his ten biggest unsolved problems "Where will we put all the carbon?"  That is not one of the biggest unsolved problems of science. 
• Gleiser lists as one of his ten biggest unsolved problems "How can we get more energy from the sun?" That is an engineering problem, not an unsolved problem of science.  

You can make a much better list of unsolved problems in science if you pay no attention to the groundless boasts of scientists, and list problems without trying to cover up things that have embarrassing consequences for the dogmas of scientists.  Below is such a list:

(1) How are humans instantly able to retrieve lots of information after seeing a single sight or hearing a single name?

We take for granted the wonder of instant memory recall. A person can be shown a photo of a person, and instantly recite very many details about that person. Or a person may hear the name of another person or a place, and instantly recall many facts about that person or place. But instant memory recall should be impossible if our memories are stored in brains. If our memories were stored in our brains, there would be in the brain very many thousands of places where knowledge was stored, so how could you ever find exactly the right spot instantly to be able to retrieve the right information? We know fast retrieval can occur using things constructed by humans, such as books and computers, by the use of addressing, sorting and indexing. There is no addressing, sorting or indexing in the brain. Neurons don't have addresses, and the physical arrangement of the brain (with each neuron entangled with many others) makes a sorting of neurons impossible.  For such reasons, scientists have zero understanding of how a brain could ever instantly find a memory. They also have zero understanding of how knowledge stored as neuron states or synapse states could ever be translated into some knowledge that would cause you to instantly start talking about some topic such as Napoleon or Venice once such a topic had been mentioned.  Neuroscientist David Eagleman put it this way: 

"Memory retrieval is even more mysterious than storage. When I ask if you know Alex Ritchie, the answer is immediately obvious to you, and there is no good theory to explain how memory retrieval can happen so quickly." 

(2) How are the most complex cells able to reproduce?

Scientists do not understand how any complex cell like those in a human body is able to reproduce. Scientists list stages of cell reproduction, but listing stages of something is not an understanding how it occurs. If cells were simple things, we might have no big problem in understanding cell reproduction. But the cells in the human body are fantastically complex things consisting of very many thousands of subunits called organelles (of many different types).  The complexity of cells has been compared to the complexity of a factory or the complexity of a full-sized jet aircraft. When a eukaryotic cell reproduces, it is therefore an event as astonishing as some 747 jet turning into two full-sized 747 jets. 

At a web page that is now a dead link, there was a confession about how scientists do not understand how cells are able to reproduce. The page stated this:

"Scientists have been trying to understand how cells are built since the 1800s. This does not surprise us and, as scientists ourselves, we have always been puzzled at how cells, such complex structures, are able to reproduce over and over again. Even more astonishing is that, despite the frequency of cell division, mistakes are relatively rare and almost always corrected. According to Professor David Morgan from University of California, the complexity that we observe in cells can be compared to that of airplanes."

One of the main reasons why scientists cannot explain how cells reproduce is that the DNA in the nucleus of cells does not contain any instructions for how to build a cell. Neither DNA nor its genes even specify how to make any of the organelles that are the main building components of cells. DNA merely specifies low-level chemical information such as which amino acids make up a protein.  So we cannot at all explain the reproduction of cells by imagining that a cell reads from DNA some blueprint on how to make a cell. 

(3) How did the 20,000+ types of protein molecules in the human body ever originate?

Living things require very many different types of protein molecules. In the human body there are more than 20,000 different types of protein molecules, each a different type of complex invention. Most types of protein molecules require hundreds of well-arranged amino acid parts, and that altogether requires thousands of very well-arranged atoms. How did such protein molecules originate? Scientists do not understand how this occurred. You do not have any credible explanation if you merely refer us to Darwin or natural selection or evolution. The problem is that the functional thresholds of protein molecules are very high, as is their sensitivity to losing function by small random changes, ruling out a Darwinian explanation for their origin, one appealing to an accumulation of countless tiny changes that are each useful.  Darwin knew nothing about the complexity of protein molecules, and certainly did not explain their origin. For a good explanation of why Darwinism fails to explain the origin of protein molecules, read computer scientist David Gelernter's widely discussed book review entitled "Giving Up Darwin."  I may note that in that  book review, Gelernter misstated the average amino acid length of a protein molecule, listing it as merely 250. For the type of cells humans have, the average length of a human protein molecule is about 450, meaning the probability of evolution producing a successful protein molecule (estimated by Gelernter as basically zero)  is very, very many orders of magnitude smaller than Gelernter suggests.  As four Harvard scientists stated in a paper, "A wide variety of protein structures exist in nature, however the evolutionary origins of this panoply of proteins remain unknown."  

(4) How do protein molecules fold correctly to form into the 3D shapes needed for their function, and why do they form into the organized protein complexes so often needed for them to function?

DNA merely specifies which amino acids make up particular protein molecules, and does not specify the three-dimensional shapes that such molecules must have to function properly. How do protein molecules form into such shapes? That is the long-standing problem called the protein folding problem, and it has never been solved. Don't be fooled by false claims that some AlphaFold2 software solved the protein problem. Such software merely made progress on a different problem, called the protein folding prediction problem. The quotes below tell us the truth on this matter:

• "In real time how the chaperones fold the newly synthesized polypeptide sequences into a particular three-dimensional shape within a fraction of second is still a mystery for biologists as well as mathematicians."   -- Arun Upadhyay, "Structure of proteins: Evolution with unsolved mysteries," 2019.
• "The problem of protein folding is one of the most important problems of molecular biology. A central problem (the so called Levinthal's paradox) is that the protein is first synthesized as a linear molecule that must reach its native conformation in a short time (on the order of seconds or less). The protein can only perform its functions in this (often single) conformation. The problem, however, is that the number of possible conformational states is exponentially large for a long protein molecule. Despite almost 30 years of attempts to resolve this paradox, a solution has not yet been found." -- Two scientists, "On a generalized Levinthal's paradox," 2018. 

Very closely related to this problem is a problem we might call the protein complex formation problem. This is the problem of why it is that protein molecules so often form into very organized protein complexes needed for the protein molecules to be functional. Such complexes are often so organized they are called "molecular machines." We cannot explain their formation merely by referring to DNA. Neither DNA nor its genes specify which protein molecules belong to particular protein complexes, nor do they specify how the intricate arrangement should occur. Here are some relevant quotes: 

• "The majority of cellular proteins function as subunits in larger protein complexes. However, very little is known about how protein complexes form in vivo." Duncan and Mata, "Widespread Cotranslational Formation of Protein Complexes," 2011.
• "While the occurrence of multiprotein assemblies is ubiquitous, the understanding of pathways that dictate the formation of quaternary structure remains enigmatic." -- Two scientists (link). 
• "A general theoretical framework to understand protein complex formation and usage is still lacking." -- Two scientists, 2019 (link). 
• "Protein assemblies are at the basis of numerous biological machines by performing actions that none of the individual proteins would be able to do. There are thousands, perhaps millions of different types and states of proteins in a living organism, and the number of possible interactions between them is enormous...The strong synergy within the protein complex makes it irreducible to an incremental process. They are rather to be acknowledged as fine-tuned initial conditions of the constituting protein sequences. These structures are biological examples of nano-engineering that surpass anything human engineers have created. Such systems pose a serious challenge to a Darwinian account of evolution, since irreducibly complex systems have no direct series of selectable intermediates, and in addition, as we saw in Section 4.1, each module (protein) is of low probability by itself." -- Steinar Thorvaldsen and Ola Hössjerm, "Using statistical methods to model the fine-tuning of molecular machines and systems,"  Journal of Theoretical Biology

(5) How are humans ever able to learn new things, and form new memories that can last a lifetime?

Scientists have got nowhere in trying to explain how learning and the formation of new memories can occur by some change in a brain. Any sound bites they utter when being asked about such a thing are examples of vacuous hand-waving.  When asked about how learning occurs, a scientist may mention LTP.  LTP is an acronym misleadingly standing for long-term potentiation. This so-called long-term potentiation is actually a very short-lived effect typically lasting only hours or days.  There is no good evidence that LTP is any brain mechanism for the creation of memories, and we have very good reasons for concluding that LTP cannot be any explanation for human memories that can last for decades.  When scientists try to explain memory formation by mentioning "synapse strengthening," they are also engaged in vacuous hand-waving. 

There is nothing in a brain that can explain either the creation of memories or the persistence of memory for decades. The brain has nothing like some mobile read-write head that a computer may use to write data to some particular place, or read data from some particular place. No one has ever discovered any encoding system by which the very many types of things that humans learn and remember could ever be translated into neuron states or synapse states.  The proteins that make up synapses (claimed to be a storage site for memory) have average lifetimes 1000 times shorter than the longest length of time humans can remember things (more than sixty years). 

Below are some relevant quotes:

• "Direct evidence that synaptic plasticity is the actual cellular mechanism for human learning and memory is lacking." -- 3 scientists, "Synaptic plasticity in human cortical circuits: cellular mechanisms of learning and memory in the human brain?" 
• "How the brain stores and retrieves memories is an important unsolved problem in neuroscience." --Achint Kumar, "A Model For Hierarchical Memory Storage in Piriform Cortex." 
• "We are still far from identifying the 'double helix' of memory—if one even exists. We do not have a clear idea of how long-term, specific information may be stored in the brain, into separate engrams that can be reactivated when relevant."  -- Two scientists, "Understanding the physical basis of memory: Molecular mechanisms of the engram."
• "There is no chain of reasonable inferences by means of which our present, albeit highly imperfect, view of the functional organization of the brain can be reconciled with the possibility of its acquiring, storing and retrieving nervous information by encoding such information in molecules of nucleic acid or protein." -- Molecular geneticist G. S. Stent, quoted in the paper here. 
• "Up to this point, we still don’t understand how we maintain memories in our brains for up to our entire lifetimes.”  --neuroscientist Sakina Palida.
• " If I wanted to transfer my memories into a machine, I would need to know what my memories are made of. But nobody knows." -- neuroscientist Guillaume Thierry (link). 
• "The very first thing that any computer scientist would want to know about a computer is how it writes to memory and reads from memory....Yet we do not really know how this most foundational element of computation is implemented in the brain."  -- Noam Chomsky and Robert C. Berwick, "Why Only Us? Language and Evolution," page 50. 
• "We take up the question that will have been pressing on the minds of many readers ever since it became clear that we are profoundly skeptical about the hypothesis that the physical basis of memory is some form of synaptic plasticity, the only hypothesis that has ever been seriously considered by the neuroscience community. The obvious question is: Well, if it’s not synaptic plasticity, what is it? Here, we refuse to be drawn. We do not think we know what the mechanism of an addressable read/write memory is, and we have no faith in our ability to conjecture a correct answer."  -- Neuroscientists C. R. Gallistel and Adam Philip King, "Memory and the Computational Brain Why Cognitive Science Will Transform Neuroscience."  page Xvi (preface). 
• "Current theories of synaptic plasticity and network activity cannot explain learning, memory, and cognition."  -- Neuroscientist Hessameddin Akhlaghpourƚ (link). 
• "We don’t know how the brain stores anything, let alone words." -- Scientists David Poeppel and, William Idsardi, 2022 (link).
• "If we believe that memories are made of patterns of synaptic connections sculpted by experience, and if we know, behaviorally, that motor memories last a lifetime, then how can we explain the fact that individual synaptic spines are constantly turning over and that aggregate synaptic strengths are constantly fluctuating? How can the memories outlast their putative constitutive components?" --Neuroscientists Emilio Bizzi and Robert Ajemian (link).
• "After more than 70 years of research efforts by cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists, the question of where memory information is stored in the brain remains unresolved." -- Psychologist James Tee and engineering expert Desmond P. Taylor, "Where Is Memory Information Stored in the Brain?"
• "There is no such thing as encoding a perception...There is no such thing as a neural code...Nothing that one might find in the brain could possibly be a representation of the fact that one was told that Hastings was fought in 1066." -- M. R.  Bennett, Professor of Physiology at the University of Sydney (link).
• "No sense has been given to the idea of encoding or representing factual information in the neurons and synapses of the brain." -- M. R. Bennett, Professor of Physiology at the University of Sydney (link).
• "We have still not discovered the physical basis of memory, despite more than a century of efforts by many leading figures." --Neuroscientist C.R. Gallistel, "The Physical Basis of Memory," 2021.
• "To name but a few examples, the formation of memories and the basis of conscious  perception, crossing  the threshold  of  awareness, the  interplay  of  electrical  and  molecular-biochemical mechanisms of signal transduction at synapses, the role of glial cells in signal transduction and metabolism, the role of different brain states in the life-long reorganization of the synaptic structure or  the mechanism of how  cell  assemblies  generate a  concrete  cognitive  function are  all important processes that remain to be characterized." -- "The coming decade of digital brain research, a 2023 paper co-authored by more than 100 neuroscientists, one confessing scientists don't understand how a brain could store memories. 

(6) How is a speck-sized zygote ever able to progress to become the vast organization of an adult human body?

If someone defines a fertilized human egg as a human being, a definition that is very debatable, you might be able to say, "I understand the physical origin of a human being," and merely refer to a sperm uniting with an egg cell as such an origin.  But a more challenging question is whether anyone understands the physical origin of an adult human being. The physical structure of an adult human being is a state of organization many millions of times more complex than a mere fertilized speck-sized egg cell.  (A human egg cell is about a tenth of a millimeter in length, but a human body occupies a volume of about 75 million cubic millimeters.) So you don't explain the physical origin of an adult human being by merely referring to the fertilization of an egg cell during or after sexual intercourse. 

We cannot explain the origin of an adult human body by merely using words such as "development" or "growth." Trying to explain the origin of an adult human body by merely mentioning a starting cell and mentioning "growth" or "development" is as vacuous as trying to explain the mysterious appearance of a building by saying that it appeared through "origination" or "construction."  If we were to find some mysterious huge building on Mars, we would hardly be explaining it by merely saying that it arose from "origination" or by saying that it appeared through "construction." When a person tries to explain the origin of a human body by merely mentioning "growth" or "development" or "morphogenesis," he is giving as empty an explanation as someone who tells you he knows how World War II started, because he knows that it was caused by "historical events."

There is a more specific account often told to try to explain the origin of an adult human body. The account goes something like this:

"Every cell contains a DNA molecule that is a blueprint for constructing a human, all the information that is needed. So what happens is that inside the body of a mother, this DNA plan for a human body is read, and the body of a baby is gradually constructed. It's kind of like a construction crew working from a blueprint to make a building."

The problem with this account is that while it has been told very many times, the story is just plain false. There is no such blueprint for a human being in human DNA. We know exactly what is in human DNA. It is merely low-level chemical information such as the sequence of amino acids that make up polypeptide chains that are the starting points of protein molecules. DNA does not specify anatomy. DNA is not a blueprint for making a human. DNA is not a recipe for making a human. DNA is not a program or algorithm for making a human. 

Not only does DNA not specify how to make a human, DNA does not even specify how to make any organ or appendage or cell of a human. There are more than 200 types of cells in human beings, each an incredibly organized thing (cells are so complex they are sometimes compared to factories or cities).  DNA does not specify how to make any of these hundreds of types of cells. Cells are built from smaller structural units called organelles. DNA does not even specify how to make such low-level organelles. 

Below are some relevant quotes:

• "Yet while these are several examples of well-understood processes, our study of animal morphogenesis is really in its infancy." -- David Bilder and Saori L. Haigo1, "Expanding the Morphogenetic Repertoire: Perspectives from the Drosophila Egg." 
• "Fundamentally, we have a poor understanding of how any internal organ forms." -- Timothy Saunders, developmental biologist (link).
• "Biochemistry cannot provide the spatial information needed to explain morphogenesis...Supracellular morphogenesis is mysterious...Nobody seems to understand the origin of biological and cellular order."  -- Six medical authorities (link).  

(7) How is a human able to think and understand? 

Humans lack any understanding of how a human being is able to understand things. Human understanding is not explained by brain activity.  All attempts to explain human understanding by comparing the human brain to a computer are entirely fallacious, because computers do not understand anything. Computers process data and retrieve data and run computer programs, without having any understanding of anything. 

Using the term "thinking" rather loosely, we can say that computers think in the sense of being able to perform logic and process data. But all attempts to explain human thinking by appealing to computers are fallacious. Computers are able to process data because they have various types of things that human brains do not have, such as an operating system and application software. Brains have no such things. 

In fact, there is nothing in the human brain that can explain how humans can think and perform reasoning.  Moreover, there are many humans who can think at a speed and reliability that should be impossible for any brain (as I discuss here, here and here). The reliability and speed of any thinking occurring by a brain should be severely limited by three brain shortfalls:

(1) Signals do not transmit across chemical synapses with 100% reliability, but instead transmit across chemical synapses with less than 50% reliability, as discussed here.

(2) There are many types of signal noise within the brain that should very greatly limit the reliability of signal transmission in brains. 

(3) There are many signal slowing factors within the brain (such as cumulative synaptic delays and the relatively slow transmission within dendrites) that should cause the average speed of brain signals to be relatively slow, very roughly about 1 centimeter per second, way too slow to allow for very fast thinking. 

But despite such physical limitations, which should prevent reliable and fast thinking from occurring in any brain, it is a fact that many humans can perform very accurate math calculations at blazing fast speeds, as discussed in my post here. In short, we do not know how humans are able to think or understand, and all claims that such things occur by brain processes are untenable. 

(8) How were the cells and anatomy of any complex visible organism ever able to originate?

For more than 100 years biologists have been teaching the groundless triumphal legend that the origin of species was explained by the 19th century biologist Charles Darwin. The claims were first vague, based on woolly notions that nature produces random variations and that the better variations survived more. Around the middle of the twentieth century, DNA was discovered, and the claims of Darwinists started to get more specific. They started to teach that DNA of organisms had a blueprint or recipe or program for making the organisms, and that the random variations were mutations in which the subunits of DNA were randomly changed.  The story was a big lie from the beginning. No blueprint or recipe or program for making an organism's body had ever been discovered in DNA. 

By now DNA has been thoroughly studied and analyzed by big projects such as the Human Genome Project. We now know that neither DNA nor its genes have any blueprint or recipe or program for making an organism or any of its organs or even any of its cells. So how did the fantastically complex anatomy of any visible organism arise? We do not know. How did any large multicellular organism get any of its cells. We do not know. The answer is not to be found in any ideas of evolution or natural selection. 

(9) How was human language ever able to originate?

There does not exist any credible theory of the origin of human language.  Any attempt to naturally explain the origin of human language faces insurmountable difficulties. One difficulty is that the establishment of a language in a particular place requires a kind of very elaborate social compact in which many people agree that a very complex set of rules will be followed. But there is no way to explain how so complex a social compact could have got started unless there already existed a language. So once you have a group of humans using a language, you can explain them adopting a new language. But you could never explain the origin of the first language. It's a situation that can be described as "it takes a language to establish a language."  The difficulty is discussed at greater length in my post "Why the Origin of Language Is Inexplicable Under Orthodox Assumptions." 

(10) Why does there occur the many well-established things that so many scientists senselessly refuse to believe in?

Here I could list innumerable types of paranormal phenomena which we have many decades of very good observational evidence for, including ESP, clairvoyance, near-death experiences, spiritual manifestations near mediums, out-of-body experiences, and so forth. I could also list the simple existence of a unified human self, something that could not be more obvious from direct personal experience, but which many a scientist senselessly denies because he has no credible explanation of how such a thing could arise from billions of tiny chemical reactions or electricity fluctuations coming from neurons.