More Early Accounts of Out-of-Body Experiences and Near-Death Experiences

In the January 1894 edition of the publication Borderland, page 257, George Wlyde M.D. states the following:

"It has been long known that persons who have been all but drowned, so as to appear actually dead, but who—it may be after hours of manipulation—have been restored to consciousness, have sometimes declared that the process of drowning, after the first struggle, was mot agonising, but actually pleasurable. These individuals have sometimes said that the entire history of their lives has flashed before them as if photographed instantaneously, and that then they have seemed to ascend to heavenly regions and celestial felicity."

Wlyde then gives us an account of his personal experience of having an out-of-body experience. 

"The same results have often followed the use of chloroform, and I myself, one day, in the year 1874, while inhaling chloroform as a relief to the agony of passing a small renal calculus, suddenly, to my great wonder, found my ego,  or soul, or reasoning faculty, clothed, and in the form of my body, standing about two yards outside my body, and contemplating that body as it lay motionless on the bed. "

On the next page, Wlyde states this: "Mr. Stodart, dentist, told me he had met with many analogous cases, and at the Dental Hospital they told me that the patients under gas often saw visions and spoke of being out of their bodies." On the same page we read of this striking case reported by a Mr. Duguid:

"My wife’s mother, Mrs. Arnot, left us for the higher existence on Feb. 5th, 1880. There is a married daughter living at Banchory, three miles from this town; Mrs. Arnot died at eleven o’clock in the forenoon. The married daughter was very ill in labour, and the doctors in attendance thought it wise to administer chloroform... She passed under the influence thereof at twelve o’clock, noon, and while doing so told all those present that her mother was dead, for she saw her, and that the baby was with her mother. No tidings of the mother’s death reached the daughter’s house till four o’clock in the afternoon, and on no account was she told after coming from under the influence of the chloroform. It is noteworthy that she spoke of having seen her babe in the spirit world as well as her mother, which was quite consistent with fact, as the infant died in the doctor’s hands, and was in the spirit world while the mother was still under the influence of chloroform."

1n 1932 Mary M. Schulz wrote an account entitled "One hour and five minutes in eternity."  She stated this on page 22 of the June 1932 Forum of Psychic and Science Research:

"Many have had experiences 'in eternity.' I spent one hour and five minutes in the world eternal, where there is no death. It was on Sunday night, January twenty fourth, nineteen hundred and thirty-two, that I transcended the mystery of the grave. I was greatly worried over a lawsuit in which I was involved and could not sleep. I had been praying to the great Invisible for help when suddenly a strange 'quiver' went over my body and the next instant I was standing looking at myself. Then I heard the voice of 'something' say, 'Let’s go'.  And yet I could see my body and also the body of a friend who was sleeping soundly. Suddenly I found myself floating in space accompanied by a spirit friend who had come for me. It was a thrilling journey filled with varieties of scenery and climates— storms, ice and cold, and then miraculously, warmth and sunshine. We were surrounded by hundreds of planets, as it were. The guide bade us stop at one in particular which he said was 'Mario'. Its inhabitants were very cordial to us and made us welcome. But it was not for us to linger there. Our chief destination was the plane which is really the clearing house for all souls released from earth life. It was there I gained conclusive evidence that while mourners weep and say goodby to the soul claimed by death, friends 'over there' are greeting us and us and welcoming our spirit to its new home where life is eternal....This 'place' was peopled with the departed of earth— our dear ones—-and everything was similar to the planet earth, except more beautiful. Everywhere I saw happy faces free from the lines of worry and money problems. From my friends I learned that when the end of our earth experience occurs, through what is known as death, certain of our spirit friends and guides are told and are commissioned to come for us."

A similar tale was told in 1929 by a person who claimed to have spent  "minutes in eternity" after having what felt like a heart attack. He states, "I know that for a limited time one night last year out in California my spiritual entity left my body and went somewhere -- a concrete place where I could talk, walk about, feel and see; where answers were returned to questions addressed to physically dead people, which have checked up in in the waking world and clarified for me the riddle of earthly existence." 

In 1897 William H. Hamby told an account of a near-death experience and out-of-body experience, at a time when such terms were not in common use.  On page 71 of the June-November 1897 Metaphysical Magazine (Volume 6),  Hamby states the following:

"Early in the evening I had started to return to our cabin, but. soon discovered that I had completely lost my bearings. I had been feeling very cold, but seemed to be perfectly comfortable when I sank down behind the tree to rest, before again trying to reach camp....Soon the world seemed slowly fading away. I could hear thousands of the merriest silver bells ringing away off in the forest. Nearer and nearer they came until they were all around me ringing in the strangest, wildest way. Then I began to rise and without feeling the least surprise glanced downward and saw my body sitting by the tree. I felt perfectly content and considered the circumstance a matter of course. Then suddenly and without effort I saw my companions two miles away hunting for me-and could hear them talking. Neither did this seem in the least strange; I was conscious of them without any special effort. I watched them-or thought of them rather-until they found my body, and heard one fellow say, ' He is frozen.' They rubbed and worked desperately with my body for some time. Then the other said- ' It's too late, I fear, but let's get him to the camp.'....I was placed on the bed. Again I heard one of them say: ' He's dead.'  'I hope not,' replied his companion; ' maybe we can bring him to.'  They piled snow all around me, built up a large fire and continued to rub my hands and face. After a little they forced my mouth open and poured some brandy down my throat. Suddenly there was a flash of lightning, followed by a moment of keen pain; then I knew no more. About three hours later I became conscious of being on a very wet bed, with two scared men still pulling and hauling at me."

On page 237 of the June-November 1897 Metaphysical Magazine (Volume 6),  we have a similar account by another author.  W. A. Laufman tells us this:

"My strange experience dates from about two years ago when I took sick in Mankato. . . . On December 26, at I I o'clock in the morning, the doctor pronounced me dead and my body was turned over to M. Maui's undertaking establishment for preparation for shipment. My brother, C. H. Laufman, of Des Moines, Ia., was telegraphed for and came on to take charge of my remains.  

On that fatal morning I was suddenly aware of an indescribable sensation, beginning at my feet and snapping clear through my frame and out at the top of my head. I was then conscious of something like a ball of cotton released and spreading out, in form the size of a man at least three feet taller than myself. I was standing in the centre of the room and plainly saw my dead body lying on the cot. I started to leave the room and met one of the doctors. I wondered that he did not say something to me, but as he made no effort to stop me I went out on the street. 

I walked down Fourteenth street to the corner toward California avenue, and there met an old acquaintance from Mitchell, S. D., named Milt Blose. I attempted to strike him on the back by way of salutation, but my arm passed right through him. I did not speak to him, but struck at him again with the same result. I utterly failed to attract his attention., although I followed him at least a block. I distinctly saw him walk across the street and gaze at a miniature Ferris wheel in a window." 

After leaving Blose I went up to the hospital to see the body. I found the door closed, but as I could see into the room I passed through the door and gazed at myself for a while. I then went out and found the doctors and heard them discussing my case. I hung around with them until the arrival of my brother. I went in with him and the doctors and watched his anguish as he looked at my dead face. He remained at the hospital that night, as it was very late, and I went into the room with him and watched until he fell asleep.

I was laid out dead exactly thirty-seven hours and fifty-eight minutes. I stayed around with the doctors and my brother during all of the time, and heard and remembered every word spoken by them. The doctors wanted to make a post-mortem examination, but my brother objected.

Of course, you want to know how I got back into my shell, and it happened in this way: One of the specialists wanted to try some experiment with a new electric apparatus. My brother consented to it, and I accompanied them to my deathbed to watch the operation. The instruments were attached to my feet, and I distinctly felt the sensation while standing out in the centre of the room. I was next conscious of excruciating pains all through me, and I knew I was in my body again."

The link below takes you to a 1972 story that appeared before Moody's 1975 book was published:

https://digitalcollections.lib.umanitoba.ca/islandora/object/uofm%3A2962401?solr%5Bquery

We get the account shown below (click on the image to read it more easily).

The headline in the story is "BOY 'CAME BACK FROM DEAD' SIX TIMES." We read this:

"At no stage was the boy in the presence of the doctors and nurse other than when he was in a deep coma or clinically dead...His father...told Litchfield: 'It was if he had been watching everything from afar, as if another world. He was aware of everything those doctors had done for him, without anyone telling him.' " 

It sounds like another case of a veridical near-death experience, like those described in my post here. 

A typical account in a near-death experience

NASA's Groundless Boast About Finding a "Potential Biosignature"

Politics have often played a big part in what goes on at NASA. NASA's biggest project was the Apollo moon landing, which seemed to be launched largely for political reasons.  The Apollo project was introduced to the public in a speech made by President John F. Kennedy, a speech he made before a joint session of Congress on May 25, 1961. The previous month Kennedy had suffered the most embarrassing failure of his administration, the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs landing, which occurred on April 17 to April 20, 1961.  About 1400 American-trained Cuban exiles landed in Cuba, attempting to overthrow its government led by Fidel Castro. The attempted invasion quickly ended in ignominious defeat, with almost all the invaders being captured.  What Kennedy needed was a big distraction that would turn the public's attention away from the previous month's foreign policy disaster. The announcement of the moon landing project served as such a distraction. There was also geopolitics involved. The moon landing was largely an attempt to prevent the Soviet communists from gaining global prestige by becoming the first nation to land on the moon. 

Recently NASA has suffered from some embarrassing setbacks that have damaged its reputation as a "can do" center of competency. On April 15 of this year, NASA's administrator Bill Nelson gave a strange announcement suggesting that NASA's plan to return soil samples from Mars is basically in a kind of project limbo. We read this in an ABC news story from April of this year:

"During a press conference, NASA administrator Bill Nelson said although the federal space agency is 'committed' to retrieving the samples, independent reviews have estimated the project would cost between $8 billion and $11 billion and samples may not return until 2040.

'That is unacceptable to wait that long,' Nelson said. 'It's the decade of the 2040s that we're going to be landing astronauts on Mars ... the long and short of it then is that the current budget environment doesn't allow us to pursue an $11 billion architecture and 2040 is too long."

This all had a stink of incompetence about it. The reservations about the design does not surprise me in the least. NASA chose the following silly design:

(1) Land a Perseverance rover vehicle on Mars, which would have a main task of digging up soil and putting the soil in tubes that would be dumped near where the soil was dug up.

(2) Then years later send an unmanned "sample return" mission to Mars to retrieve these dumped tubes and bring them back to Earth. 

 The mission design has always seemed utterly bizarre. Why send a rover to Mars to put soil samples into tubes for later retrieval by another spacecraft, when any newly arriving spacecraft could simply dig up Mars soil at the spot it landed, rather than try to find and retrieve such tubes filled up with soil years earlier? I complained about the bad design of the mission in my February 2021 post "The Poor Design of the Latest Mars Mission."  Now it seems that NASA itself has woken up to how badly it bungled with its design for Mars soil sample retrievals. 

It seems that the NASA has now realized that it makes no sense whatsoever to be spending 8 to 10 billion dollars to send an unmanned sample return mission that might not return until 2040, when NASA thinks that astronauts will be walking on Mars in the decade of the 2040's.  Such astronauts could presumably bring back as many Mars soil samples as they wanted. 

So in April of this year NASA sent out how a kind of "help us!" cry, hoping some brilliant designer will help it clean up its mission design mess.  The ABC news story from April says this: "To make the mission work, NASA is requesting assistance from the NASA community, including the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), to create a new, updated mission design that 'has reduced complexity, improve resiliency and risk posture, and well as well as strong accountability and coordination.' "  You could translate this as: NASA has finally realized it painted itself into a corner, and put out a desperate cry for help, asking for some genius to extract itself from the great big design mess that it created. 

The April press conference by NASA's chief was very embarrassing for the agency. But something just as embarrassing happened this week on Wednesday. NASA announced that it is canceling an unmanned lunar project called the VIPER (Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover) project. NASA already spent 450 million dollars on the project, so that's 450 million dollars of US taxpayer money down the drain. 

What NASA needed was to come up with something as quickly as possible to help attract attention away from its bungling, just as John Kennedy needed something to help attract attention away from his Bay of Pigs bungling. And so yesterday, two days after the very embarrassing VIPER cancellation announcement, NASA conveniently came up with just such a distraction. On Friday NASA announced grandly that it had discovered a "potential biosignature" on Mars. The claim is groundless.  There is not the slightest reason to think that any sign of life -- living or long dead -- was actually discovered. 

We have a NASA press release with the modest title "NASA’s Perseverance Rover Scientists Find Intriguing Mars Rock." The subtitle of the press release then goes into groundless boasting mode, stating "The six-wheeled geologist found a fascinating rock that has some indications it may have hosted microbial life billions of years ago, but further research is needed."  We read this "doesn't really mean much of anything" statement:

"The rock exhibits chemical signatures and structures that could possibly have been formed by life billions of years ago when the area being explored by the rover contained running water. Other explanations for the observed features are being considered by the science team, and future research steps will be required to determine whether ancient life is a valid explanation." 

We see in the press release the unimpressive-looking rock below, which has no visual signs of life. Someone trying to suggest something like life has named some tiny spot a "leopard spot," trying to suggest something biological. The maneuver is ridiculous. The spot circled and called a "leopard spot" looks nothing like a leopard spot, and could have been formed by any of 1001 lifeless processes. 

Image credit: NASA

We then have the old "organic molecules" trick. The misleading maneuver works like this: you exploit the fact that scientists define "organic molecules" as any molecules containing carbon and some other element, even if they have nothing to do with life. You can then discuss some carbon-containing molecule with no biology relevance, and insinuate that you found something with biological relevance, by saying something like, "We found some organic molecule, and life itself is made of organic molecules."  That's a "make the dross sound like gold" trick, like someone saying, "I have a collection of metals, and metals such as gold and silver command high prices," when the metals he's thinking of are tin cans and lumps of lead in his garage. Typically, when this "organic molecules" trick occurs no mention is made of any abundance of organic molecules found. The abundance will typically be some negligible abundance such as 1 part in a billion. 

The NASA press release mentions that some "organic compounds" were found in the rock shown above, but makes no mention of what type of organic molecule was found when this rock or nearby soil was investigated. We can assume with 99% confidence that no molecule used only by living things was found, because if such a thing a found, we surely would have had a mention of the exact molecule found. Most types of organic compounds (or organic molecules) are biologically irrelevant.  

The lowest building components of one-celled life are amino acids. Cells are built from organelles, which are built from protein complexes, which are built from protein molecules, which are built by making very special sequences of hundreds or thousands of amino acids, sequences that have to be just right for the protein to be functional. No amino acid used by living things has ever been found on Mars. This failure makes it very unlikely that Mars ever had life. To put it in baseball terms, Mars seems to have never even got a third of the way to first base in the process of building the simplest life. 

The paper here discusses chemical analysis by the Mars Perseverance rover and its SHERLOC instrument mentioned in Friday's press release. We have no mention of any amino acids found. We have no mention of any biologically relevant molecules, and the biologically irrelevant organic molecules discussed are not found in any concentration greater than 20 parts per million (Earth soil, by comparison, is between 1% and 80% organic molecules). 

There is not a single thing in Friday's NASA press release that should cause anyone to think that a "potential biosignature" has been found, or that any sign of ancient Mars life has been found. The attempt to raise up biology suspicions by calling faint little features "leopard spots" is pathetic. 

NASA has been guilty before of "crying wolf" in regard to extraterrestrial life or the origin of life. As described here, in 2019 the agency brazenly produced a page with the bogus headline "NASA Reproduces Origin of Life on Ocean Floor." The headline was entirely false, for the experiment described did not produce any living thing. No cell was created, no DNA or RNA molecule was created, and not even a single protein was created. The actual result of the experiment was a measly result: the appearance of only a single type of amino acid. In the 1990's NASA announced that it had found proof of Mars life in a meteorite it believed had come from Mars to Earth. The claim is now generally believed to be false. 

We should suspect that the latest announcement by NASA is politically motivated, and that it is no coincidence that this grand-sounding boast has been published two days after NASA announced that it had wasted 450 million dollars on a moon mission it has canceled. Grand boasts are a great way to distract attention away from "sorry, we wasted 450 million dollars of taxpayer money" announcements. 

NASA can get away with this kind of nonsense because it has done such a terribly bad job at educating people about the huge organization of even the simplest type of living things.  Since 1960 US taxpayers have paid 650 billion dollars to fund NASA since its beginning, but the agency hasn't even succeeded in educating the public about the basic realities of biology. So NASA gets away with again and again using nonsensical "building blocks of life" talk, failing to tell us that even the simplest cell is not built from simple components that can be accurately described as "building blocks," but is instead built from many different types of very complex protein molecules that each require a very special arrangement of hundreds of amino acids that must be in just the right sequence. 

Note the same old duplicity in the latest NASA press release. We have this quote:

"Multiple scans of Cheyava Falls by the rover’s SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals) instrument indicate it contains organic compounds. While such carbon-based molecules are considered the building blocks of life, they also can be formed by non-biological processes."

No, the only type of organic molecules ever found on Mars are neither proteins nor amino acids, and are not in any sense "building blocks of life." And living things are not built from simple components that can be called "building blocks."  Even the simplest living thing is built from many types of very complex protein components requiring very specially arranged sequences of hundreds of amino acids. 

Postscript: I wrote the text above before reading any articles skeptical about the announcement. Now the journal Science has an article on the announcement that echoes some of my skepticism about it. After a subtitle saying "Some see hype over intriguing rock as plea for troubled multibillion-dollar Mars Sample Return mission," we read this:

"Although there is no doubt about the scientific value of the new sample, the provocative announcement about the rock by JPL, which is desperate not to lose Mars Sample Return funding, has raised some eyebrows. As Marc Fries, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Johnson Space Center and member of the Perseverance team, posted on X, 'It should come with a conflict of interest warning sticker.' ”

At a major source of science news, we have an article senselessly promoting the rock photo as if it were something very important. A check of the writer's biography reveals him to be a "writing intern." So many of the most widely read science news articles are written by science newbies who don't understand what they're writing about.  A similar article on a similar site has a clickbait headline immediately contradicted by the text of the article. 

The mere existence of organic molecules does nothing to prove life ever existed, but when life exists, organic molecules exist in huge numbers. Whenever there's a great rarity of organic molecules on some place beyond Earth, you have a "life probably never existed there" situation. A very recent scientific paper states this, and all you have to do is put two and two together to realize the meaning for whether an actual biosignature has been found on Mars:

"Given that one of the major objectives of the Mars 2020 mission is to find and collect materials that, among other potential biosignatures, preserve organic compounds (Farley et al., 2020), the astrobiological potential of the collected samples increases with their organic content. However, the SHERLOC instrument on Perseverance has not detected unambiguous organic signals to date (Scheller et al., 2024)."

Touchdowns and Fumbles at a Contrarian Biology Site

Lacking any theory of a natural process that could plausibly produce very complex and information-rich biological innovations requiring very special arrangements of thousands of parts, evolutionary biologists are always appealing to miracles of luck, like the person in the visual below. But not everyone has jumped on their erring bandwagon. 

The "Evolution News" site at www.evolutionnews.org provides many articles well worth reading, although it is not very rare for the site to provide erring articles. A typical article at the site will draw attention to the inadequacy of Darwinism as an explanation for the wonders of biology. Inside such an article you will very often get very good details helping you to learn about how well-organized and fine-tuned biological organisms are, and how mainstream thinking fails in its attempts to credibly explain such wonders of biology. Using American football terminology, we can call such articles touchdowns. But the site also has some fumbles. Some examples of erring articles at the site include these:

(1) One writer eager to claim molecular evidence of design in DNA repeated the groundless myth that DNA is a blueprint specifying how to construct a human body. DNA is no such thing. DNA merely contains low-level chemical information such as which amino acids make up proteins. DNA is indeed a rich repository of fine-tuned functional information, and by very strictly sticking only to what we know to exist in DNA, you already have a great wonder of fine-tuned information that Darwinism fails to explain, as Darwinism lacks a credible account of the origin of the genes that make up DNA. 

(2) Another writer eager to tell a story of how brains show evidence of design repeated a groundless claim that "sharp wave ripples" are evidence of memory consolidation in human brains. The claim is groundless, being based on poor-quality research guilty of Questionable Research Practices such as way-too-small study group sizes. 

Another example of a fumble at the www.evolutionnews.org site is  William A. Dembski's  recent post "Building a Better Definition of Intelligent Design." Dembski makes a long attempt to create a better definition of the term "intelligent design," but drops the ball. 

Speaking of a definition of "intelligent design," Dembski tells us, "The one that until recently I used in my public lectures and that served as my working definition of intelligent design is this: Intelligent design is the study of patterns in nature that are best explained as the product of intelligence." That itself is a poor definition of the kind of writing that has gone on at sites such as www.evolutionnews.org and in books such as Stephen Meyers' "Darwin's Doubt." The word "pattern" is a very weak word to describe what an intelligent design theorist typically discusses. What such a person typically discusses are information-rich states of enormously high organization that are so fine-tuned and specially arranged and hierarchically ordered that they are not credibly attributed to unguided processes. Such states of matter are magnificent examples of engineering that are far more than mere patterns. 

What is the most impressive result in biology? It is a human being. Is a human being a mere pattern? Certainly not. A good description of a human being is given by my acronym CHIRDREOC, which stands for Comprehending Hierarchical Information-Rich Dynamic Reproducing Enormously Organized Complexity.  Let me justify some of the words in that acronym:

(1) Humans are information rich.  Contrary to a widely circulated myth widely spread to serve the ideological purposes of Darwinists, it is absolutely untrue that living organisms carry around in their cells or DNA any blueprint or program or recipe for making such organisms. The DNA in cells merely contains low-level chemical information such as the amino sequences to make the polypeptide chains that are the starting points of protein molecules.  But while DNA does not contain any specification of anatomy, it is at least information-rich. The essence of information is the use of representational tokens, in which some individual tokens (low-level semantic units) stand for or represent some larger physical or conceptual thing.  DNA does qualify as information, because it is a series of nucleotide base pairs, and particular combinations of these base pairs stand for particular amino acids used to construct proteins.  A human DNA molecule has 3 billion nucleotide base pairs, and these 3 billion units qualify as both information and representational information. So because a human is carrying a huge amount of information in each of his cells, we can call a human information-rich. Other simpler organisms also carry very high levels of information in their DNA, so every organism is information-rich. 

(2) Humans are enormously organized.  The degree of organization in large living organisms is greater than the organization of anything humans have constructed. A single cell is so organized that is has been compared in complexity to a factory or a city. 

(3) Humans have a hierarchical organization.  The organization of large organisms is extremely hierarchical.  Subatomic particles are organized into atoms, which are 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. 

(4) Humans are gigantically dynamic. Humans have known for centuries about two ways in which organisms are dynamic: first, the fact that organisms can move, and second that organisms grow from a small size to a large size.  In recent decades, scientists have come to understand a third way in which organisms are dynamic: the fact that 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 that 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. 

(5)  Humans reproduce. Scientists understand how human females can become pregnant, but they do not at all understand how large organisms are able to reproduce. Scientists cannot even credibly explain how a single cell is able to reproduce. Scientists lack any credible explanation of how a speck-sized egg is able to progress to become the enormous organization of a large organism with so many different types of cells and organs. There is no truth to the claim that organisms reproduce because some blueprint or recipe for making the organism is read from the organism's genome or DNA.  No such blueprint or recipe exists in DNA, which merely contains low-level chemical information such as the amino acids sequences of a protein molecule.  Once you study all the very many types of incredibly dynamic and fine-tuned chemical and cellular choreography going on in the body, continuous intricate processes necessary for life, you may start to realize how childish is the very idea that an organism with such enormously dynamic internal activity could ever be specified by a blueprint (a plan for constructing static immobile things). 

We take for granted the miracle of reproduction because it almost always happens under a certain set of conditions. Similarly, if you could always conjure up a delicious 10-course meal by saying "Abracadabra," you might take such a thing for granted, and think it nothing very special.  Without resorting to misstatements such as false and childish claims that organisms reproduce by a reading of a DNA blueprint for making the organism, evolutionary biologists are unable to explain the reproduction of large organisms. 

(6) Humans comprehend.  Human beings have all kinds of mental abilities that biology fails to explain, including the capability of very subtle comprehension. 

So those are some of the extremely impressive characteristics and capabilities of human beings, summarized by my acronym CHIRDREOC, which stands for Comprehending Hierarchical Information-Rich Dynamic Reproducing Enormously Organized Complexity. Do we adequately describe such wonders by using the term "patterns"? Certainly not.  "Patterns" is an extremely weak word to describe the wonders of human beings that are not credibly explained by Darwinism. So you may reasonably criticize Dembski for clumsiness when  he tells us that until recently "my working definition of intelligent design is this: Intelligent design is the study of patterns in nature that are best explained as the product of intelligence." "Patterns" is way, way too weak a word to be using to describe the accidentally unachievable attributes and capabilities of human beings. 

But now Dembski tells us he has a new improved definition that he recommends should be used to describe the theory of intelligent design. Before giving us his definition, he launches into a longwinded discussion that makes heavy mention of Aristotle.  It's the kind of discussion that will cause many a reader to stop reading (or maybe fall asleep while reading). Finally in section 7 Dembski gives us his very clumsy new  definition of intelligent design, telling us this: "Intelligent design is the study of systems whose information output is best explained as the result of intelligently inputted external information rather than the inherent capacities of the systems."

Oops, Dembski has here fumbled badly.  At the center of intelligent design is the study of humans. A human is not a mere system. A human consists of numerous different very organized physical systems, and also a mind.  Intelligent design theorists have focused on the extremely high levels of physical organization in the human body, something that can also be described as a fine-tuned arrangement of physical parts. We have no mention of organization or arrangement or fine-tuning in Dembski's new definition of intelligent design.  The physical marvel of the human body is not an "information output" but a wonder of dynamic physical organization. Similarly, the construction of an aircraft carrier is not an "information output" but a wonder of physical organization and fine-tuned functionality.  

You cannot explain the origin of human bodies or human minds by a mere input of external information.  DNA does not specify how to make anything bigger than a microscopic protein molecule, so you cannot explain the origin of human bodies by merely saying there was a mysterious external input of information into the human genome.  

Very strangely, Dembski says, "Information (from the Latin verb informare) means to give form or shape to something." N0, that is not what the word "information" means.  "Information" is defined as "facts provided or learned about something or someone" or "what is conveyed or represented by a particular arrangement or sequence of things." Those are the two definitions of "information" that I get when I do a Google search for "definition of information."

It seems that Dembski has got all enamored with something called information theory, and that he is proposing some wonky new definition of intelligent design that may have some appeal to information theorists. Most who are not information theorists will be puzzled or bored by his new definition of intelligent design, and the explanation that precedes it. Information theorists have a very bad habit of stretch-speaking in which they use the term "information" for almost everything. It reminds me of that old quip that to a carpenter everything looks like a hammer, a nail and a piece of wood. You might say that to an information theorist everything looks like information. Anyone wishing to get a clear easy-to-read introduction to the theory of intelligent design should skip Dembski's "new definition" post (a confusing affair), and read instead the post here by leading intelligent design theorist Stephen Meyer. Scoring many touchdowns, Dembski has often written more skillfully on this topic than his recent "new definition" post. 

What would a good definition of intelligent design be?  A web site on this topic gives this older definition that is better than Dembski's clumsy new definition: "The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection." But this definition has the weakness that it does not mention any particular characteristic of living things, and only vaguely refers to "certain features." 

A good definition of intelligent design that is more informative (but  mentions only humans) might go something like this: "Intelligent design is the theory that the information-rich hierarchical organization of human bodies involves so much special arrangement, fine-tuning, purposeful dynamism and hard-to-achieve interdependent component teamwork that it cannot be credibly explained as being the result of mere accidental unguided chance processes, but must in part be the result of superhuman intelligent agency."  A fuller definition that includes a mention of cosmic fine-tuning might go like this: "Intelligent design is the theory that the information-rich hierarchical organization of human bodies involves so much special arrangement, fine-tuning, purposeful dynamism and hard-to-achieve interdependent component teamwork that it cannot be credibly explained as being the result of mere accidental unguided chance processes, but must in part be the result of superhuman intelligent agency, often along with similar thinking that the universe has fine-tuned features suggesting it is the product of superhuman intelligent agency." 

The first of these definitions is a definition that could be comfortably used by either theists or those who are not theists.  The phrase "superhuman intelligent agency" refers to some causal reality that could either be a deity or conceivably some extraterrestrial power that is not a deity. The second definition seems to hint at some divine agency, as no conceivable extraterrestrial power would have the ability to fine-tune the universe to give it the features needed to allow life to appear in it (features that would have to exist before any such extraterrestrial power existed).  

If you don't understand what is meant by the phrase "interdependent component teamwork" in the definition above, I have two diagrams that may clarify the phrase. The first is this one:

The second diagram is this one:

A dictionary definition of "dynamism" is "the quality of being characterized by vigorous activity and progress." The term "purposeful dynamism" in the definition above refers to the mechanistically inexplicable progression from a speck-sized zygote to the vastly more organized state of a full-grown human body, and also refers to many other wonders of movement, organization, recycling and positioning continuously occurring within the human body, such as when different types of protein molecules conveniently form into very many different types of complex "molecular machines" needed for body function, when such protein complexes and organelles find the right positions within cells, and when newly created cells find appropriate positions within human bodies, positions not specified by DNA or genes. 

For a look at another case of clumsiness in the rhetoric of intelligent design theorists, read my post here that criticizes Michael Behe's very weak analogy of a mousetrap, an analogy that is poor largely because the most impressive results of biology are marvels of organization almost infinitely more impressive than mere mousetraps. 

If the above discussion fails to clarify the basic question here, I can try to state it as simply as possible. The basic question here is: is the human race an accident of nature? The Darwinist answers "yes," and the intelligent design theorist answers "no." An all-important consideration is that human bodies are very, very specially arranged, looking like something that was massively engineered, and requiring many thousands of types of very complex inventions (such as the 20,000+ different types of protein inventions in the human body, each requiring thousands of very specially arranged atoms to perform its  function). The Darwinist says, "Accidental effects can produce very complex inventions and engineering effects," and the intelligent design theorist says, "No, very complex inventions resembling engineering results cannot be produced by mindless, blind processes of nature."

Postscript: There are some fumbles in an article at the Evolution News site entitled "Wrap Your Mind Around the Synapse — Just Try." Quoting someone mentioning the length of time it takes for only part of what goes on in the transmission of a signal across a synapse, the author (David Coppedge) tries to insinuate that the transmission of a signal across a synapse occurs in "a fraction of a millisecond." That is not correct. 

There is a scientific term used for the delay caused when a nerve signal travels across a synapse. The delay is called the synaptic delay. According to this 1965 scientific paper, most synaptic delays are about .5 milliseconds, but there are also quite a few as long as 2 to 4 milliseconds. A more recent (and probably more reliable) estimate was made in a 2000 paper studying the prefrontal monkey cortex. That paper says, "the synaptic delay, estimated from the y-axis intercepts of the linear regressions, was 2.29" milliseconds. It is very important to realize that this synaptic delay is not the total delay caused by a nerve signal as it passes across different synapses. The synaptic delay is the delay caused each and every time that the nerve signal passes across a synapse.

Such a delay may not seem like too much of a speed bump. But consider just how many such "synaptic delays" would have to occur for, say, a brain signal to travel from one region of the brain to another. It has been estimated that the brain contains 100 trillion synapses (a neuron may have thousands of them).  So it would seem that for a neural signal to travel from one part of the brain to another part of the brain that is a distance away only 5% or 10% of the length of the brain, that such a signal would have to endure many thousands of such "synaptic delays" requiring a total of quite a few seconds of time. 

Synaptic delays are a very serious slowing factor in the brain. The cumulative delay caused by synaptic delays means that brains must be too slow to account for human thinking and recall, which very often occurs instantly. Furthermore, a  synapse only transmits a signal with a reliability of 10% to 50%. A paper states, "Several recent studies have documented the unreliability of central nervous system synapses: typically, a postsynaptic response is produced less than half of the time when a presynaptic nerve impulse arrives at a synapse." Another scientific paper says, "In the cortex, individual synapses seem to be extremely unreliable: the probability of transmitter release in response to a single action potential can be as low as 0.1 or lower." 

This means that when humans quickly recall large bodies of text with 100% accuracy, such as when a Moslem scholar perfectly recalls more than 6000 verses in the Quran, this cannot be occurring by retrieval of information stored in the brain.  Senselessly, these crucial facts about synapses have been ignored by neuroscientists, who also ignore the short lifetimes of the proteins in synapses (less than two weeks), by making the absurd claim that memories that can last fifty years are stored in unstable synapses that don't last for years. 

What we know about synapses is compatible with the theory of intelligent design, but not with the theory that brains produce minds and that brains store memories. There is no need for an intelligent design theorist to be defending the erroneous claim that the brain is like a fast, efficient computer, or the erroneous claim that the brain has features that can explain the human mind and all its capabilities.  

When Multiple Witnesses See the Same Apparition

 In a 1973 book we read this:

" Professor Hart in 'Scientific Survival Research'  published in the International Journal of Parapsychology, March, 1967, comments that collectively perceived apparitions cannot be considered to have been produced by their viewers for two primary reasons. One is that, with examples which included more than one possible witness  between one third and two thirds of all phantoms are collectively seen. He notes that each viewer observed the phantoms according to correct perspective: the percipients do not disagree regarding phantasmic actions, the garb, and the appearance of the apparition; each percipient saw the apparition when moving about according to normal parallax and perspective, and when a viewer walked around a phantasm (which has occurred in a few cases) it was seen according to normal perspective and appropriate parallax according to the point of angle."  

Later in the same book we read this:

"Cases of collectively perceived apparitions exist in large number -- so large, in fact, that Tryrell pointed out in 1953 that he had studied 130 such examples and had no doubt that there were many more. Professor Hart notes in 'Six Theories About Apparitions' that in 156 cases involving phantoms, 46 featured other individuals placed so that during the appearances they would have seen the apparition if they had been real persons. It is noted that 26 of these, or 56 percent were witnessed collectively."

On page 38 of the January 23, 1880 edition of The Spiritualist we hear of an apparition sighting involving multiple witnesses:

"Mr. Shakespeare, one of the members, suddenly looked up, exclaiming, ' Good God, there is my father ! ' The whole Council then saw a figure of an unknown person glide through the chamber into another room which had no outlet, and disappear."

On January 7, 1881 H. D. Jencken wrote the account below of events occurring about ten days earlier, events involving his wife and a servant, an account published soon thereafter on page 21 of the January 22, 1881 edition of the publication Light:

"At about half-past six in the morning, on the 29th December last, the servant woman, as is her custom, opened the shutters of the back parlour window, when, to her surprise, she saw two luminous figures clad in white robes. The figures appeared to float across the lawn of the small garden, and moved towards the house. Alarmed at what she saw, the servant ran upstairs and called Mrs. Jencken, who descended into the parlour and likewise saw the two figures, which were not unlike, in size and outline, to my two boys. More bold than her servant she opened the window, when, lo and behold ! the two figures approached the window and stood on the small balcony in front. This movement of the apparitions so frightened Mrs. Jencken that she, accompanied by the servant, in their alarm closed the window and ran away. The interesting part of this account is the agreement in the description of the figures between Mrs. Jencken and her servant, the time the forms remained visible, and the time they occupied in approaching the window, evidently drawn towards Mrs. Jencken."

On page 255 of the publication here, we have an account of an apparition seen by multiple witnesses:

"We had only gone a short distance, and were traversing a small pasture, when I caught a glimpse of a figure in white behind us and sideways to me. I called the attention of my companions to it, for it was plainly discernible—a tall figure all in white, even the head appeared to be shrouded in white. Mr. de Wolfe shouted at the figure ' to keep off, that we wanted nothing of it,' or words to that effect, and then the figure seemed to move more rapidly towards us. It came with great swiftness and with a gliding motion; I could perceive no motion like walking. I turned round and looked at it several times. When I first saw it it was coming from the direction of an old apple orchard. We walked rapidly across the pasture, and got through the bars of the fence that divides my father’s land from the Sharp property. On the other side of this fence is a lane leading up from the main road to our house. The figure followed us along the line of this fence, keeping all the time on the Sharp side of it, till it came to the corner where a cross fence formed the upper boundary of the pasture. I was on the inside nearest that corner, and I plainly saw the figure at that corner about ten feet from me. As we walked up towards our house I went up to the lane fence and saw the white figure gliding away in a northerly direction. I had a good view of it, and it seemed to be up from the ground two or three feet. We all saw it several times....I have been questioned by several persons about the appearance we saw as above stated, and to the various suppositions offered by them, attributing the figure to fraud, viz., to a man on stilts, or a person dressed in white designing to frighten us by a practical joke. I have only to say that I consider such suppositions baseless, that I believe the form to have been that of a spirit, and the most careful inquiries relative to the possibility of personation by any person in the form, as well as calm reflection since I saw the apparition, have only confirmed me in that belief."

The account here from page 4 of the Psychic News of February 25, 1984 tells of a radio station where multiple people claimed to have seen an apparition. Gloria Johnson reported seeing a transparent figure floating by. She immediately went to a lunch room where others were lunching, and screamed, "Oh my God, I saw a ghost!"  We read this about Henry Eaton: "When Ms. Johnson burst into the lunch room, the engineer said he too had seen an apparition that morning." 

The account here from page 10 of the Psychic News of November 12, 1932 tells of an apparition seen by multiple witnesses.  We read this: "Both opened their doors, and both saw the figure of a Passionist Father parading the corridor, and finally disappearing...The apparition spoke and said that the rector had not fulfilled a promise made to him when in the flesh to pray for a him a certain number of times on certain occasions."

In the report here, from the August 28, 1982 edition of Psychic News, we read of a man and a woman who in 1981 both saw an apparition of a boy in their home. We read that in one occurrence the form persisted for two hours.  We read, "Two or three times weekly the apparition appeared."

On page 5 of the January 28, 1939 edition of Psychic News, which you can read here, we read of a woman who shot herself after shooting her husband. The woman was found at 7:45 AM on December 6, 1938, by a person who called the police. Arriving at 8:30 AM, the police determined that the two must have died the previous evening. At about 9:20 AM on that morning two witnesses in a passing car claimed to have seen the woman outside her house. After reading a newspaper account of the woman's death, the two went to the police and reported that they had seen the woman outside her house at 9:20 AM. The police insisted that they had arrived at 8:30 AM and found the woman dead. The account says the two witnesses had no doubt the woman was the same woman found dead at 8:30 AM. 

In the August 21, 1954 edition of Psychic News, which you can read here, we read that 50 students and members of the Coptic School in Jerusalem claimed to have seen an apparition of a woman holding a baby. The account tells of a room being flooded with light when the apparition was seen. 

Below is a story from page 2 of the February 2, 2008 edition of Psychic News. You can read the full story here. 

The account below appears on the front page of the December 26, 1953 edition of Psychic News:

The account here in a Scottish newspaper tells us that Robert Brock and Mrs. Hartley saw an apparition of Hugh Astley, on the same night of learning that Astley had suffered a severe injury in a railway accident. This is not a typical apparition account, as Astley apparently recovered from his injuries. But the account is one of quite a few accounts in which someone claimed to see an apparition of the living. We are told the interesting detail that Astley had suffered a brain concussion, and was probably unconscious when the reported apparition was seen.  You could fit the story into a theory that in a coma the soul can kind of wander the way souls seem to wander during near-death experiences. 

Below is part of the account:

The account below appeared on page 8 of the December 23, 1989 edition of Psychic News:

An article here tells us that near Dublin, Ireland an eight-foot-tall ghost was seen near a railway line by multiple witnesses, including a party of six that went out to see based on previous reports.  The article below comes from the Charlevoix County Herald, January 29, 1916, and can be read here. 

Below is another news account of an apparition seen by multiple witnesses. The original account in the Medford Mail Tribune (dated 25, 1913) can be read here and here. We read of twelve witnesses, and an apparition persisting for three hours.

The account below appeared in the La Jara Chronicle of November 23, 1906 (you can read the full account here):

An 1875 newspaper account tells this story of an apparition seen by more than one witness:

You can read the full account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84038198/1875-09-20/ed-1/seq-3/

Apparently the news report below appeared after an apparition was seen by multiple witnesses:

You can read the strange account using the links here and here. 

We read below of a ghost seen by two witnesses:

You can read the 1926 story on the page here:

The accounts given above are only a few of many cases in which more than one witness reported seeing the same apparition. For many other cases different from the ones above, see my posts below:

When Two or More See the Same Apparition

When an Apparition Is Seen by Multiple Observers: 17 Cases

When an Apparition Is Seen by Multiple Observers: 17 More Cases

More Apparitions Seen by Multiple Observers
Many an Apparition Is Seen by More Than One
Still More Apparitions Seen by Multiple Observers

When an Apparition Is Seen by Not Just One

A Science Writer's Lame Excuses for Biologists Lying and Science Writers Lying

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 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. 

Because of the lack of any justification for making the claims in the bullet list above, the biologists who have made such claims have been guilty of massive lying. Their deceits about DNA and genes have occurred over the course of 70 years. But now many scientists, doctors and science writers have confessed that there is no truth to the claims that DNA is a specification for making a human. A list of some of these confessions is found in the appendix of this post. 

You can describe the strange situation like this: the left hand of biology keeps lying about DNA and genes, while the right hand of biology is telling the truth. In which of these camps should we put science writer Phillip Ball? It's a little hard to tell. In the very mainstream publication The Guardian, science writer Phillip Ball said 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'.

But in a recent essay on Aeon entitled "We Are Not Machines", Ball fails to give us the plain truth on this matter. In the middle of telling us that the narrative of biologists about DNA is "at best a partial and at worst a misleading picture," he describes a narrative about DNA claiming that "the genome contains the information needed to make a human." He then says this:

"This story is (for the most part) not wrong. It’s plenty good enough to give students a rough notion of how biology works. But its elisions, omissions and simplifications can create serious misconceptions about what genes are and do."

No, the claim that "the genome contains the information needed to make a human" is very much wrong, because the genome (in other words, DNA and its genes) does not have even a tenth of the information needed to make a human. The genome only specifies low-level chemical information, and that is only a tiny fraction of what you would need to know to make a human. The genome does not specify how to make anything bigger than a protein molecule. DNA does not specify anatomy. In fact genomes only half-specify how to make protein molecules, because DNA does not specify how to make the 3D shapes of protein molecules vital for their proper function.  Protein molecules are only the beginning of the vast hierarchical organization of a human body.  

Let us imagine a man who goes to a special library that is dedicated to fully teaching about the complexity and organization of the human body. Suppose the person has been commanded that he has to study all of the details and complexity of the human body. He might start by looking through books that describe proteins. A full description of the average protein molecule would require maybe 5 to 10 pages of information in a large book. First there would be a listing of all the amino acids in the protein, which would require several pages. Then there would be a diagram showing the three-dimensional shape of the protein.  A single book could not display all the details for more than about 100 types of protein molecules. So reading all of the protein books would require the man reading about 200 long books. This is because there are roughly 20,000 types of protein molecules in the human body. 

But reading all of those books would only be the beginning of the man's chore. For we would also have to study protein complexes. This would require reading about the complexities of all the thousands of protein complexes that may consist of dozens of different types of proteins.  So there would be many additional books the man would have to read. Then the man would have to read about all the different organelles in cells, and the structure of cells. This would not merely involve studying those phony childish cell diagrams like they have in biology books, those diagrams that depict cells as thousands of times simpler than they are. The man would have to study realistic cell diagrams. 

Such diagrams would have to be huge. We can imagine some special books in the library made up of large pocket-pages, with huge folded diagrams in such pockets. Taking out the diagrams, the man might spread them out to the size of a huge table. Each diagram would show the position of many thousands of organelles. There would be endless such diagrams to be studied. 

But the man's work would still not be done. Now he would have to study huge diagrams showing the unfathomable complexity of human biochemistry. We can imagine many special books in the library made up of pocket-pages, with huge folded diagrams in such pockets. Taking out the diagrams, the man might spread them out to the size of a huge table, and study many thousands of incredibly complex biochemistry diagrams, illustrating how fantastically hard-to-achieve functional results are achieved in the human body by the magnificently purposeful choreography of endless components acting together as smoothy and harmoniously as all the dancers and musicians in all the theaters of Broadway. 

Then the man would have to study endless more details, how cells combine to make organs and organ systems. How long would the total job take of studying all these details at the library? It would seem to take thousands of hours. 

In his Aeon essay Phillip Ball gives us no real sign that he understands the sky-high levels of organization and coordination and interdependent component teamwork  needed to make a human body.  But at least he seems to have perceived that there's something terribly wrong with biologists and the narratives they are telling. He describes them like this:

" Physicists are often keen to proclaim, at the drop of a hat, that ‘This changes everything!’ Biologists, on the other hand, while no slouches at drumming up media coverage for their own work, seem rather averse to big shifts in the discourse. ‘Well, we sort of knew that years ago,’ they will mutter – or alternatively: ‘That’s probably just a rare exception.’...Others said that, even if biology was indeed more complicated that we’d thought, what was to be gained by telling the public that? In other words: don’t upset the status quo....Finally, I suspect the narrative inertia reflects a general tendency in science whereby scientists get even more wedded to their metaphors than to their theories. Many biologists seem to have forgotten where the old metaphor of the genetic blueprint came from in the first place. The Harvard historian and philosopher of science Evelyn Fox Keller pointed out that it was never a notion compelled by the experimental evidence, but was merely a stopgap solution for our lack of knowledge about how the information in the genome (the genotype) was related to the visible traits of the organism (the phenotype)....Yet one can’t reasonably expect researchers to give up their metaphors unless they have others to replace them."

This quote only gives a part of the portrait Ball paints of biologists who keep telling us false claims, because they are clinging to misleading speech customs. The excuse given at the end of the quote is a lame one. It is misguided to claim that when scientists discover that a metaphorical explanation they have been using is untrue, they should be excused for continuing to lie by giving such an explanation, until they have some other more truthful metaphorical explanation they can give. 

We may wonder whether Ball is suggesting a rule such as "stick to your narrative of how something arises because of a particular physical explanation, no matter how badly that explanation is failing, until you can replace that narrative with a different and more successful narrative of how something arises because of a particular physical explanation."  That's a bad, dishonest rule. 

There's a much better rule of proper scientific behavior: when you discover that the boastful claims you previously made about having a good physical explanation of the origin of something are not sound, then confess your ignorance of the origin of such a thing, and start telling people, "I thought I understood how this enormously complex reality arises, but now I see that my explanation is not credible, and that I don't understand how it arises."  It is wrong and unethical to claim that boastful and failing claims of understanding something by some physical explanation must be maintained until they can be replaced by new boastful claims of understanding that thing by some new physical explanation. When the most popular explanation of something fails, healthy scientists should be saying things like, "We use to think we understood how this reality arose, but it's now clear that it's a complexity far over our heads, and that we don't understand  at all how such a reality arises." 

In the visual below, we see scientists who have placed themselves on pedestals. The pedestals were constructed by misleading statements. What are the first things such erring scientists should do? They should start by climbing off of their pedestals, and confessing all of the times they made statements and claims that were untrue or unbelievable. They should remove their self-devised crowns marked "Grand Lord of Explanation," and start confessing that their knowledge of nature is fragmentary. 

Ball gives us another lame excuse for lying biologists who claim to understand things they don't understand, stating this: "It has also become much harder in recent years for scientists to admit to gaps in knowledge and understanding, which will be exploited by everyone ranging from creationists to climate-change deniers to anti-vaxxers as evidence that we shouldn’t believe a word they say." It is not a decent excuse for deception that if you stop such deception you will give some talking points to your opponents. Here Ball represents critics of Darwinism using the most misleading portrayal. He absurdly portrays them as people eager to say that we shouldn't believe a word that biologists say. To the contrary, intelligent design theorists are building their case very much on the truth of very many of the claims that biologists make, such as their  claims about the many types of intricate molecular machinery inside our body, their claims about the vast organization of organisms, their claims about the gigantic functional complexity of cells, and so forth. A typical intelligent design theorist is constantly citing the low-level facts discovered by biologists, while doubting some of the high-level causal claims such biologists make. 

Ball gives another excuse for science journalists continuing to tell false biology claims such as the "DNA is a body blueprint" claim: the very lame excuse that the reality is so complex that it cannot be fit into a short explanatory soundbite. He says this (very ridiculously insinuating that he understands "the real picture" of how human bodies arise, a miracle of organization that is actually a thousand miles over his head and the head of every biologist):

"But surely another reason for the near invisibility in the science media of the transformation in biology is that we now have a much harder story to tell. The idea that ‘genes make proteins, and proteins make us’ is easy to grasp. The real picture is far harder to capture in a sound bite. I suspect we hear so little about this new biology in part because many journalists (or their editors) take a look at the latest research on, say, gene regulation of chromatin remodelling or cell signalling and think: ‘I’m not going anywhere near that!’"  

This is no excuse. It presumes that journalists have to have a nice little mechanistic explanation when writing a science story. They don't have to have any such thing. Rather than giving us some little sketch and saying, "That's how it happens," a science journalist can tell us about the vast organization and mountainously complex functional biochemistry in  human bodies, and say, "We don't understand how such organization and vast functional complexity arises."  There are all kinds of metaphors that can be used to give a correct idea about a state of knowledge that is merely fragmentary. For example, you can use Isaac Newton's classic analogy that he was like a little child at the seashore examining a few seashells, while the great ocean of truth lie undiscovered before him.  Or you could give the analogy of some 1st century person transported to Times Square, seeing all kinds of engineering and technology beyond his understanding.  Or you can give the analogy like the one in the visual below, in which the sitting figure represents the current state of modern science, compared to the unsolved mysteries of reality. There is no rule that science stories have to give neat little explanations of how something very complex works or how scientists are starting to understand how something very complex works. 

Talking about metaphors used by scientists, Ball makes the very untrue claim that "metaphors aren’t the kind of thing you test at all." No, that's not true; there are all kinds of ways of testing whether a metaphorical statement is valid. For example, if someone says the brain is like a computer, I can test whether that metaphor is valid by listing some of the things a computer has, and checking whether the brain has such things. An example of trying such a test can be read here. 

At the end of his article, Ball asks, "So how now should we be speaking about biology?"  He starts out very strangely by quoting some biologist making the silly claim that the genome is "an organ of the cell." No, cells don't have organs; cells are the components of tissues, which are the components of organs. Saying the genome is an organ of the cell is every bit as silly as saying your distributor cap is the car inside your engine. 

Ball then gives us a puerile little sound bite that sounds like "new nonsense to replace the old nonsense." Struggling for an explanation of how human bodies end up so vastly organized (something that cannot be explained by genes, genomes or DNA), Ball claims this: "Our biomolecules appear to make decisions not in the manner of on/off switches but in loosely defined committees that obey a combinatorial logic, comparable to the way different combinations of just a few light-sensitive cells or olfactory receptor molecules can generate countless sensations of colour or smell. " This is nonsense.  Molecules don't understand things; they are not minds, they do not decide, and do not form committees.  And if a molecule had a mind it could never understand the proper decisions it would need to make to help achieve the goal of creating the state of stratospheric organization that is a walking, talking, eating, grasping human, something the molecule had never observed and could never get the faintest notion of.  What is going on when a body grows are endless examples on very many different scales of fantastically organized and functional arrangements of matter appearing.  Giving some metaphor evoking the variety of different color combinations does nothing to explain such reaching of accidentally unachievable states of fine-tuned functional organization.  The history of Darwinism is a history of people making very  misleading biology metaphors, and Ball's metaphor quoted above is the latest in this long clown parade.  

 

With the statement above, Ball ends up pitching some new "bottom-up" nonsense to replace the old bottom-up nonsense and lie of blueprint-containing genes building bodies.  What he should have said  at the end of his essay is something like: "We now know human bodies are gigantically more organized and exponentially more functionally complex than anyone ever dreamed a century ago, and no scientist understands how such vast heights of purposeful organization and fine-tuned  functionality arise." 

Misspeaking very badly, Ball tells us in his essay that "the more complex the organism, the fuzzier its molecular mechanisms have to be," because if "countless components interlock in precisely coordinated ways" our bodies would be "far too fragile."  That sounds like complexity denialism and component coordination denialism.  Enormously complex organisms such as humans have endless examples of the most precise molecular teamwork and coordination, and such organisms have endless examples of components that are interdependent in magnificently fine-tuned and precisely coordinated ways. An armchair argument that such results would leave you with organisms "far too fragile" cannot discredit the observed reality that such precise coordination and fine-tuned molecular teamwork really exists all over the place in the human body, in mountainous amounts, without humans being "far too fragile." 

Ball has written a book with the title "How Life Works," and has another book  that purports to tell us "how we are made," and another book that purports to tell us "how to understand ourselves and other beings, from animals to AI to aliens." With titles and subtitles so pretentious, it rather sounds as if Ball is trying  to crown himself as a grand lord of biological explanation, which may be a bit of a stretch for someone having no biology or psychology degree. Ball has not learned the lesson of humility he should have learned from his studies: that the origin of human bodies and human minds are realities a thousand miles over his head, and a thousand miles over the heads of today's biologists, who do not have any credible physical explanation for human minds or human memory, do not have any credible explanation for the appearance of very complex biological innovations,  and do not have any credible explanation for how there occurs the progression from a speck-sized zygote to the vast hierarchical organization that is an adult  human body. 

The long bibliography of Ball's "The Book of Minds" shows an  "ignore everything spooky"  filter-bubble reading list that includes very few or none of the 50 top books one should read before writing a book with such a title, many of which can be found here. The bibliography is the kind of echo-chamber reading list someone might have if he couldn't bear to ever read a word conflicting with materialist orthodoxy. People with parochial reading lists so very narrow should not be regarded as very diligent and very thorough scholars of human minds and human mental phenomena. 

The deception that is committed by the advocates of materialism is several dozens of times greater than merely lying that human DNA (the human genome) contains a specification for how to make a human body. For a very long list of 60+ types of deceptions committed by such people, see my post here. 

Appendix: 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."
• 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."