Quanta Magazine is a widely-read online magazine with slick graphics. On topics of science the magazine again and again is guilty of the most glaring failures. Quanta Magazine often assigns its online articles about great biology mysteries (involving riddles a thousand miles over the heads of PhDs) to writers who lack even a bachelor's degree in biology. Often it will assign such articles to be written by people identified as "writing interns." The articles at Quanta Magazine often contain misleading prose, groundless boasts or the most glaring falsehoods. I discuss some examples of such poor journalism in my posts here and here and here.
Let us look at a fairly recent example of very misleading journalism at Quanta Magazine. It is an article with the enormously misleading title "Meet the Eukaryote, the First Cell to Get Organized." We are deceived very badly by this title. Eukaryote cells are the type of cells found in human bodies. Eukaryote cells are vastly more organized than a much simpler type of cell called prokaryotic cells. But prokaryotic cells are also enormously organized. Prokaryotic cells simpler than eukaryotic cells are fantastically organized cells, requiring more than 100,000 base pairs very specially arranged in a vastly improbable way to achieve functional performance.
The paper "Fundamental behaviors emerge from simulations of a living minimal cell" describes "a genetically minimal bacterial cell, consisting of only ... 493 genes on a single 543-kbp circular chromosome with 452 genes coding for proteins (Breuer et al., 2019 ), some of which are subunits of multi-domain complexes." Each of those genes is a complex invention with hundreds of fine-tuned parts that almost all have to be just right. The total number of amino acids that have to be arranged just right in the proteins partially specified by these genes is roughly 150,000. Far from supporting any "life is simple, we can make it from scratch" narrative, such a paper supports the idea that even the simplest self-reproducing cell has a degree of organization and functional complexity greater than the organization and functional complexity of an 80-page technical manual. And even all that information does not give you a self-reproducing cell; it's only a prerequisite for such a cell.
The claim that eukaryote cells were "the first cell to get organized" is a glaring falsehood. The predecessors of eukaryote cells (prokaryote cells) were themselves enormously organized. The claim that the earliest cells were simple is a lie told by materialists to help bolster their claims of accidental biological origins. If you are trying to sell the unbelievable idea that life accidentally originated, then the lie that the earliest cells were simple is one of the lies that you need to tell. And materialists keep telling that lie. We may excuse the writing intern who is the author of this article for the article's glaringly false headline, because writing interns should not be held to very high standards. But we should not excuse the editors of Quanta Magazine, who have let an article with a glaringly false headline be published in their publication.
A guy lying (in the 2nd sentence) about the earliest cells
In the rest of the article, we get an attempt to sell us the fairy tale story of endosymbiosis, the idea that we got enormously complex eukaryotic cells by some "lucky swallowing." We read this: "How this all happened isn’t entirely clear, but today, most experts agree that 2 billion or 3 billion years ago, an archaean cell engulfed a bacterial cell, which somehow escaped digestion and adapted to life inside its host." How did eukaryotic cells originate? Our professors have now "got the memo" that they are supposed to be telling a particular answer, one that is extremely unbelievable. They now maintain that the first eukaryotic cell originated because of an incredibly improbable “combination” accident. The idea is that a bunch of prokaryotic cells somehow ganged up to become a eukaryotic cell – kind of like what would happen if five people collided into each other to somehow originate a new species of three-headed creatures which each had ten legs and ten arms.
Inside a eukaryotic cell are many specialized units called organelles. The organelles include things like ribosomes, lysosomes, mitochondria, and endoplasmic reticulum. Our professors attempt to convince us that these mitochondria are ancestors of prokaryotic cells that somehow got incorporated into eukaryotic cells.
There are several reasons for thinking that such a thing is far too improbable to have ever happened. Among these are the following:
- No one has ever observed any type of event like the supposed event in which prokaryotic cells combined to become a eukaryotic cell. Microbiologists have done innumerable experiments with prokaryotic cells, and have never observed any combination of prokaryotic cells become anything like a eukaryotic cell.
- A prokaryotic cell injected with the DNA of a eukaryotic cell will not start producing eukaryotic cells as its offspring.
- Nowhere in human DNA does it specify the overall shape of a human body, the structure of a human organ system, the structure of a particular human organ, the structure of a tissue, the structure of a cell, or even the structure of any organelle of a cell. Although genotypes influence phenotypes, genotypes do not specify phenotypes. Genotypes merely list chemicals used by an organism. DNA does not specify the physical structure of an organism. We can therefore imagine no conceivable event by which some lucky combination of prokaryotic DNA could result in a cell that produced eukaryotic offspring, because the structure of a eukaryotic cell is not even specified in DNA.
In the book Aliens, biologist Matthew Cobb gives a description of current thinking on this topic, emphasizing the improbability of it:
"What happened on Earth – known as eukaryogenesis – was not the product of random mutation and the subsequent sifting of acquired characters that have differential fitness (the essence of natural selection). Instead there appears to have been a single event of mind-boggling improbability, for it involved two life forms interacting in a most novel way....Prior to that moment, all life had consisted of small microbes with no cell nucleus and no mitochondria. Everything changed when one unicellular life form, known as an archaebacterium, ended up inside another, called a eubacterium."
On another page Cobb says this:
"We could in principle calculate the probability of the appearance of eukaryotes, but we would soon run out of zeros...That weird hybrid was our ancestor, and its existence – and therefore ours – was incredibly improbable. As far as we are aware, no such event happened before or since."
Obviously we have here a fairy tale, an "old wives' tale." Scientists have no credible tale to tell of how eukaryotic cells originated, just as they have no credible tale to tell of how prokaryotic cells originated. Whenever they refer to eukaryotic cells arising by fantastically improbable combination accidents, biologists are merely engaging in the most farfetched hand-waving. Because neither prokaryotic cells nor eukaryotic cells specify in their DNA how to make either a eukaryotic cell nor any of its organelle components, there is no conceivable lucky combination accident of prokaryotic cells that would result in eukaryotic cells with the ability to reproduce to make other eukaryotic cells.
Only at the end of the Quanta Magazine story (with a deceptive title and the most unbelievable fairy tale as its content) do we get some candid truth telling. At the end the evolutionary biologist Toni Gabaldon says, "The most fascinating thing about eukaryotes is that we still don’t understand how they came about.” Correct -- so why is it that biologists are claiming to understand the origin of species such as ours? If you don't understand how the cells in human bodies originated, then you don't understand how the human species originated.
What happens is that biologists are always making these groundless boasts about understanding great mysteries they do not understand. But every now and then they make confessions that contradict such boasts, and reveal how little they know. You can read many hundreds of such confessions in my very long post "Candid Confessions of the Scientists."
The same Quanta Magazine had a recent story with the groundless headline "The Cosmos Teems With Complex Organic Molecules," with the false subtitle of "Wherever astronomers look, they see life’s raw materials." The article gives the asteroid Ryugu as an example of such claimed abundance. The truth is that amino acids (the smallest components of living things) have only been detected in space in the tiniest trace amounts. The only biologically relevant amino acid reportedly found in Ryugu were three of the simplest amino acids (glycine, alanine and valine), which were reportedly found at a level of only 1 part per billion; and whenever levels that small are reported, the reported detection is questionable. Senselessly the Quanta article describes molecules containing only 20 atoms as "very complex." That isn't a complex molecule from the perspective of biology. An average-sized protein molecule has about 8,000 atoms in it. No protein molecule has ever been found in space outside of manned spacecraft or space stations.
Those wishing to push unbelievable ideas of accidental biological origins engage in different types of misspeaking. Most commonly they engage in a kind of misspeaking in which great marvels of vast organization are described as if they are things not complex. So, for example, they may falsely describe a human body (something with sky-high levels of organization) as a mere "bundle of atoms." But when it comes time to sell the groundless notion that life can accidentally originate, then their language is entirely different. Suddenly they are trying to persuade us that molecules of merely 20 atoms are "very complex."
The Quanta Magazine article "Meet the Eukaryote, the First Cell to Get Organized" was enormously misleading, but its brazen falsehoods and absurdity is not quite as great as the brazen falsehoods and absurdity in a recent article on the site The Conversation, another materialist propaganda site often littered with the type of false and nonsensical statements so often found in Quanta Magazine.
The writer of the article is a professor of astronomy. Trying to sell Darwinism, the astronomy professor teaches the glaring falsehood that Darwinists keep telling again and again, the claim that DNA is a specification for building an organism. He states this: "In biology, information refers to the instructions stored in the sequence of nucleotides on a DNA molecule, which collectively make up an organism’s genome and dictate what the organism looks like and how it functions." No, DNA does not dictate what an organism looks like and how it functions. DNA contains no anatomy information. DNA does not specify the structure or function of any organ system; DNA does not specify the structure or function of any organ; DNA does not specify the structure or function of any cell; DNA does not specify the structure or function of any of the organelles that are the building components of cells. See my post here for a long list of quotations by scientists and doctors saying that DNA is no such thing as a specification for building an organism.
The levels of hierarchical organization in the human body are shown in the diagram below, which correctly tells us that none of the seven highest levels of organization are specified by DNA or its genes.
I explain in other posts (such as here) why if there were to exist a blueprint in DNA for making a human body or any of its organs or cells -- something never found -- that would not at all explain how human bodies or their organs or their cells get built, for reasons such as the fact that such building instructions would be so vastly complex that nothing inside a human womb would be capable of understanding them and acting on them to produce the state of vast hierarchical organization that is a human body.
After inexcusably telling us the flagrant falsehood that DNA dictates "what the organism looks like and how it functions," the astronomy professor then makes the supremely ludicrous statement that "it’s wrong to conclude that animals are more complex than microbes." This is very obviously the worst kind of nonsense. Animals such as mammals are very obviously gigantically more complex than microbes.
Wise worldviews tend to make the people who argue for them sound smart. But when people try to sell foolish or fallacious worldviews they can end up making very stupid-sounding statements, even if they have high IQs. And when the proponents of an ideology again and again make many different types of deceptive statements in their zeal to sell that ideology, you have a very clear sign of people marching in the wrong direction.
Humans have minds, mental capabilities and mental experiences of gigantic depth and complexity, and bodies more organized and functionally impressive than anything humans manufacture. In a previous post I stated what I called the first rule of accidental construction:
The first rule of accidental construction: the credibility of any claim that an impressively organized final result was accidentally achieved is inversely proportional to the number of parts that had to be well-arranged to achieve such a result, and the amount of organization needed to achieve such a result.
I can state a similar rule relating to minds:
The first rule of neural explanation: the credibility of any claim that human minds are produced by brains (or are the same thing as brain states) is inversely proportional to the diversity and depth of human mental experiences, the number of mental powers that humans have, and the speed, skill and depth of such powers.
It is because of such rules that Darwinists tend so strongly to misrepresent the vast physical complexity of humans and other living things and misrepresent the vast mental complexity of human minds, telling us the most absurd nonsense and falsehoods such as the claim quoted above that an animal is not more complex than a microbe, or other falsehoods as glaring and other word tricks as bad, such as the deception of trying to describe a human as mere "consciousness." What is going on is that such people are telling the falsehoods they need to tell and performing the deceptive tricks they need to perform in order to sell us on a theory of accidental construction that has a credibility inversely proportional to the degree of organization and complexity in living organisms and human beings, and to sell us a "brains make minds" theory that has a credibility inversely proportional to the skill, speed, depth and diversity of human mental powers and human mental experiences. The more we can be tricked and deceived into thinking that living organisms and humans are a million times simpler than they are, the more likely such ideology pitchmen will be to succeed.
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