For Insight on Why Gradualism Does Not Work, Ponder the Building of a Stone House

 Biologists teach the doctrine of gradualism, the idea that every species appeared because of very many tiny random changes that gradually took place over long periods of time. There are several very large reasons why gradualism is not a credible general theory of biological origins.  One of the biggest is that gradualism fails to explain why any useless early stage would appear in a population of organisms. 

In general Darwinism fails to explain the first stages of useful structures. This was pointed out very clearly in Darwin's time by the biologist Mivart, who wrote the following at the beginning of Chapter II of his book On the Genesis of Species: "Natural Selection utterly fails to account for the conservation and development of the minute and rudimentary beginnings, the slight and infinitesimal commencements of structures, however useful those structures may later become."  Mivart devoted Chapter II of that book to many examples of "incipient stages" that Darwinism could not explain well, including the first small part of any limb such as an arm or leg or the first small part of a wing or the first small part of a mammary gland.

Darwinists have told many a tall tale to try to account for such things, such as suggesting that maybe wings grew out of wing stumps that were used to catch insects. Such tales are typically unbelievable.  Two of the attempts that Darwin made to suggest such stories are now believed to be erroneous (biologists now reject his "maybe mammals come from marsupials" explanation for the incipient stages of mammary glands, and also reject his "lungs come from swim bladders" explanation for the incipient stages of lungs). 

Consider the case of the biological implementation needed to produce vision. We can call this a vision system, and it requires much more than just an eye. Below are four requirements of a vision system.

1. Some type of eye.
2. An optic nerve leading from the eye to the brain.
3. Extremely complicated proteins used to capture light, such as rhodopsin.
4. Very complex brain changes needed to allow for a vision effect that is useful for an organism.

Now if an organism had only or two of these things, it would receive no benefit. For example, merely having an eye and an optic nerve would not be useful unless the eye had the protein molecules needed for vision, and unless the eye also connected to changes in a brain needed to make use of visual inputs. And if there were only such proteins and such brain changes, and no eye and no optic nerve, that would not be beneficial.

The general principle that the first stages of a complex implementation are not beneficial can be stated as the principle of preliminary implementations. We can state this principle like this:

The principle of preliminary implementations: in almost all cases, with few exceptions, preliminary or fragmentary implementations of very complex organized things by themselves yield no benefits or rewards.

This principle holds true in general life, and also in regard to biological implementations. So if we are speaking of some complex biological innovation requiring a certain number of parts organized in the right way, we should not at all assume that the first stages of such an innovation will provide a benefit. A benefit will occur only when a certain degree of complexity and functional coherence has been achieved. In other words, no benefit will come unless some functional threshold has been reached. Such a functional threshold will typically require that several or many parts are arranged in the right way. The diagram below illustrates the point.

The same principle is illustrated by the diagram below:

The reason why Darwin's ideas do not work to credibly explain the origin of biological innovations was rather well explained by scientist Gustave Geley in his monumental work From the Unconscious to the Conscious.  He mentioned "embryonic organs" that are "merely adumbrated" to refer to some mere useless preliminary fragment of an organ. He stated the following: 

"It is not difficult to show that neither the Darwinian 

nor the Lamarckian hypothesis enables us to understand 

the origin of characteristics that constitute a new 

species...In order that any given modification occurring in 

the characteristics of a species or an individual, should 

give to that species or to that individual an appreciable 

advantage in the struggle for life, it is evident that this 

modification must be sufficiently marked to be utilizable. 

Now an embryonic organ, a modification merely 

adumbrated, appearing by chance in a being or a group 

of beings, can be of no practical use and give them no 

advantage....Now an embryonic 

wing, appearing by chance, one knows neither how nor 

why, in the ancestral reptile, could not give that reptile 

the capacity or the advantage of flight, and would give 

it no superiority over other reptiles unprovided with the 

unusable rudiment. It is therefore impossible to attribute 

to natural selection the transition from reptile to bird. 

...Rudiments of legs and lungs would give no 

advantage to a fish...It is  indispensable that its heart, lungs, and organs of locomotion should be already sufficiently developed to allow it to live out of the water."

We can imagine some useless early stage of a useful innovation appearing in a single member of a species because of some random variation. But because such a useless early stage would provide no survival value, it would not spread around from a single organism to reach most members of a species in subsequent generations in a "selective sweep" occurring because of "survival of the fittest" reasons. 

In fact, useless early stages would often be not just useless but actually detrimental to the survival chances of an organism.  An example would be a not-yet functional appendage that was the beginning of a wing.  Such an appendage would slow down an organism that had it, and make an easy target for predators to bite.  Another example would be a rudimentary not-yet-functional eye lens, which would tend to block light and reduce sight until it became a sophisticated functional lens. 

Darwin attempted to answer the problem of useless early stages by speculating on some examples of useful early stages. But far from being answered by his speculations, the problem of useless early stages has grown gigantically larger after Darwin because of what we have discovered about the great complexity and fragility of protein molecules, something Darwin never knew about. We now know that the animal kingdom contains more than a billion different types of protein molecules, each its own separate complex invention, each typically requiring hundreds of amino acids that have to be arranged in just the right way for the molecule to be functional.  In the human body there are more than 20,000 different types of protein molecules, each its own separate complex invention. Experiments have repeatedly shown that protein molecules are fragile, and become nonfunctional when only a small fraction of their amino acids are removed.  A biology textbook tells us, "Proteins are so precisely built that the change of even a few atoms in one amino acid can sometimes disrupt the structure of the whole molecule so severely that all function is lost." And we read on a science site, "Folded proteins are actually fragile structures, which can easily denature, or unfold." Another science site tells us, "Proteins are fragile molecules that are remarkably sensitive to changes in structure." Protein molecules are not functional if only a half or a third of their amino acids exist.  Typically we have no credible explanation for why the first half or the first third of any protein molecule would have ever originated. So what we have learned about protein molecules causes the problem of useless early stages to loom a hundred times larger than it did in Darwin's time. 

Besides protein molecules that are not useful when only half of the molecule exists, there are countless larger features of organisms that are not useful when only half of such features exist.  Some of these features are mentioned by biologist , Richard Goldschmidt, who wrote the following on page 6 of his book The Material Basis of Evolution:

"I may challenge the adherents of the strictly Darwinian view, which we are discussing here, to try to explain the evolution of the following features by accumulation and selection of small mutants: hair in mammals, feathers in birds, segmentation of arthropods and vertebrates, the transformation of gill arches in phylogeny, including the aortic arches, muscles, nerves, etc.; further, teeth, shells of mollusks, ectoskeletons, compound eyes, blood circulation, alternation of generations, statocysts, ambulacral system of echinoderms, pedicellaria of the same, cnidocysts, poison apparatus of snakes, whalebone, and, finally, primary chemical differences like hemoglobin vs. hemocyanin, etc. Corresponding examples from plants could be given.” 

To help clarify why gradualism is not a credible theory of biological origins, it may help to imagine yourself in a particular situation in which you are trying to improve your survival prospects. Imagine you are some human living 20,000 years ago, in Africa. Imagine that you have the problem that predators such as lions sometimes arrive, to kill and eat the members of your little human group. It would be nice if you could live in a cave for protection. But unfortunately in your area there are no caves. 

So you devise an ingenious plan for improving your survival prospects. You decide to build yourself a house for your protection. But you lack any tools such as a saw or a hammer. How can you build the house? 

Eventually, you get a brilliant idea. You can build the house by simply gathering large stones, and piling them up to make walls. So you get started. It is difficult work, and takes a long time. After many days you have the first fraction of your stone house:

You have gathered more than 100 different parts (each a stone), and arranged them in the right way to produce a wall. However, despite all of this effort, you do not have anything that will increase your likelihood of survival. A single wall does not protect you from predators. 

So now you work much longer. Working many additional days, you create two more walls. You have now gathered more than 300 different large stones, and arranged them in a special way, to make three of the four walls of your stone house. But you still have nothing that improves your likelihood of survival. Predators can still easily get inside the structure, to attack and eat anyone trying to hide inside it. 

So now you do the remaining work necessary to make your house a safe place of refuge. You add the final wall. Doing this part is tricky, because you cannot simply build another wall like the three walls you have previously built. You have to build a wall that includes some kind of door. Building the door requires using some material other than just stones. 

Finally, after doing all of this work, and after carefully assembling more than 400 different parts, arranging them all in just the right way, you finally have something that improves your likelihood of survival. You can sleep in such a structure at night. If you built the walls high enough, and built the door right, you can be sure that no lion will be able to attack you while you sleep, and that no lion will be able to get inside the structure. If you see a lion on the horizon, you can run inside your stone house for protection. 

But this effect of improved survival value was one that only appeared very late in the construction of the house that you built. It certainly was not true that you got 10% of the survival benefit after building 10% of the house; and it was not true that you got 20% of the survival benefit after building 20% of the house. There was a functional threshold that had to be met to get the survival benefit. Until that functional threshold was met, there was no survival benefit. 

And that is just how things work in the world of biology. In general complex innovations do not produce any benefit until late in the construction of such things. This holds true in 95% of all cases. That is part of the reason why gradualism and Darwinism are not credible theories of biological origins. In 95% of the cases, we cannot credibly maintain that some very complex and very organized innovation arose through a series of a large number of changes, each of which produced a benefit (causing such a change to be preserved because of so-called natural selection). In almost all cases, new complex things requiring an arrangement of many parts do not produce any benefit until late in the construction of such things. 

In biology one of the main building components are protein molecules. Inside a human body are more than 20,000 different types of protein molecules, each a separate type of complex invention. Human cells are eukaryotic cells, and it has been estimated that on average a protein molecule in a eukaryotic cell requires about 400 well-arranged amino acids to achieve its functional effect (some types of protein molecules require thousands of well-arranged amino acids). Each type of protein molecule is an invention as hard-to-achieve by chance as a stone house consisting of about 400 well-arranged stones. And just as the house of stones imagined above has no usefulness if it has only three of its walls, almost all protein molecules are very sensitive to small changes, and have no use if you remove 25% of their amino acids (which prevents the molecules from folding in the required way). 

You would be thinking foolishly if you were to ever be walking in nature, and found 400 stones arranged in just the right way to make a house, and thought that this was an arrangement produced by chance, by falling or rolling stones just happening to form into four connected walls, each taller than a man. No such arrangement so-hard-to-achieve would ever accidentally occur in the history of the universe. Believing in Darwinism is rather like someone reviewing more than 20,000 stone houses discovered in some country, and concluding that they were all produced by accidental arrangements of falling or rolling stones. This comparison may be charitable, because while there are more than 20,000 types of protein molecules in a human body (each requiring as many well-arranged parts as in a stone house), the total number of different types of protein molecules in the animal kingdom is probably at least a billion. 

Old Newspaper Accounts of Clairvoyance or Telepathy

 "The distinguished Parisian Professor of Medicine, Rostan, gave at the time his corroborative testimony to the existence of this power in the article ' Magnetisme,' in the ' Dictionnaire de Medecine,'  wherein he remarked : 'There are few facts better demonstrated than clairvoyance' ....Innumerable instances are recorded of the possession of the faculty of clairvoyance by persons in the normal state, in sleep [hypnotism], and in some abnormal conditions of the system. " -- Edwin Lee, MD, "Animal Magnetism and Magnetic Lucid Somnambulism" page 103 and page 133.

Although very abundantly reported in books and journals such as The Zoist (as you can read about in my set of 14 posts here),  reports of clairvoyance are rather hard-to-find in old newspapers. But some accounts can be found. For example, the following account appeared in 1905:

"MUSICAL CLAIRVOYANCE  PUZZLES PARIS PEOPLE.

 Paris is very much concerned at present over a new phenomenon, which is called, for lack of a better name, musical mediumship, says Public Opinion. In the same way that a few years ago the attention of French scientists was largely occupied with thought transference, now many investigators in the French capital are carefully following the experiments which are being conducted with the musical mediums. In the last number of the Journal des Debats. M. Henri de Parvllle carefully goes over the whole ground, and the facts presented are well worth considering. M. de Parvllle first takes up the case of a subject by the name of Aubert. 'This man, although he had but a rudimentary knowledge of music, performs on the piano, in a semi-hypnotic state, compositions which recall the musical style of Moxart, Chopin, Beethoven, Schubert and others. A second and far more remarkable case, however, is that of Mlle. Nydia. This woman, in a hypnotic state and with her eyes carefully bandaged, is able to play on the piano any piece of music which may be given her. Thus at a sitting recently held at the Theater de la Monnaie, in Brussels, Mlle. Nydia was led to M. Slyvayn Dupuy, chief of the orchestra of the theater, who gave her a piece of music composed by himself, which had never been published. M. Dupuy saw that the bandage had been tightly placed over the girl’s eyes. Mlle. Nydia then sat down, held the paper in her hands for a few moments, and then, to the great astonishment of everyone, played the piece without hesitation. 

Two physicians examined the young woman, and found her to be in a real hypnotic state and absolutely insensible to the exterior world. There were then placed over her eyes a succession of bandages, alternating black and white, and she was led to the piano. One of the spectators offered a new opera, which was placed on the piano. The hypnotizer looked at his subject, and immediately the girl played the piece with the greatest cleverness. Another spectator, who had just arrived from New Zealand, offered a piece of music which had never been performed in Europe. Mlle. Nydia, however, executed it at once, and she played with the same skill a piece which had just been composed by M. G. Germain. At public request she played a piece of Paderewski, which was unknown to her, and, finally, a lady wrote the title of a piece of music on a slip of paper, put it into an envelope, which was afterward sealed, and gave it to the girl. She placed it on her forehead for a moment, and the next instant was playing Beethoven’s ‘Clair du Lune’ sonata."

The writer is presumably referring to Debussy's "Clair de Lune," misidentifying the composer.  You can read the account here:

https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=CR19050613.2.60&srpos=32&e=-------en--20--21--txt-txTI-clairvoyance-------

The terms "artificial somnambulism" and "mesmerism" were used for hypnosis before the word "hypnosis" became popular. An 1891 newspaper article states this: "The testimony in favor of subjects in this artificial somnambulism being able—some of them—to see what is going on at a distance, to read sealed letters, and to hear a conversation taking place several miles away, seems to be so conclusive that many distinguished scholars, physicians and philosophers are firm believers in clairvoyance and clairaudience." 

Below is the first part of a news article from 1931:

Below is the remainder of the story:

You can read the accounts using the links below:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84026749/1926-11-02/ed-1/seq-17/

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84026749/1926-11-02/ed-1/seq-24/

In the newspaper account below, we read of a Mr. Tyndall who is able to perform a "carriage test" of mind-reading or clairvoyance:

"Alexander J. Mclver Tyndall, the mind-reader, yesterday morning performed the carriage feat in the same manner in which it was performed by the late Mr. Bishop. On Saturday afternoon W. A. Spalding and W. O. Miller, two members of the committee appointed to superintend the experiment, hid a small silver match-safe in an oyster-stall of the Broadway market. Yesterday morning at 11 o'clock the committee, including Messrs. Spalding, Bennett, Miller, Dr. Bryant and two others, repaired to the Hollenbeck hotel. For a preliminary sample of Mr. Tyndall's peculiar power, a knife was hid in a crack of the brick wall surrounding the court back of the hotel, and the mind-reader, taking Mr. Spalding's hand, found the article without difficulty, although he bad been most carefully blindfolded. The committee, together with Mr. Tyndall, then descended to the street, where a carriage was in waiting. The mind-reader had again been securely blindfolded, and with Mr. Spalding mounted the driver's seat, while the rest of the committee occupied the body of the vehicle. Spalding placed his hand on Tyndall's forehead, concentrated his thoughts upon the article which had been hidden in the market, and the drive began. Tyndall had taken the reins and the whip, and as soon as he had thoroughly established communication between himself and his subject, he struck the horse a sharp blow and started down Spring Street at a sharp trot. At Fourth street be got off his course and turned down to Main at a gallop. Narrowly missing the curb at the corner, he turned down Main, and, with the horse still on the jump and the occupants of the carriage extremely nervous, he drove up Fifth Street to Broadway, down Broadway to Sixth, up Sixth to Hill, and down Hill street around old St. Vincent's college to the rear of the market. A door had been left open to admit the party. The mind-reader stopped the team, and, almost dragging Mr. Spalding by the hand, rushed by three or four doors, entered the one that was open, ran up to an ice-box, reached to the top of it behind a lot of rubbish, and placed his hand on a pasteboard box, which he lifted down. The match-box had been hidden in this box. The whole length of time occupied from the departure from the Hollenbeck until the finding of the hidden article was less than twenty minutes."

 You can read the full story here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84025968/1892-02-01/ed-1/seq-2/

Below is another newspaper account of a mind-reader or clairvoyant, dating from 1895. It refers to a horse-driven carriage:

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn89051168/1895-09-14/ed-1/seq-1/

Below is an 1886 report of mind-reading by W. Irving Bishop. Bishop became very well-known for his telepathy skills. He performed countless public demonstrations successfully, 

You can read the full account below:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn91099608/1886-12-14/ed-1/seq-4/

Bishop would become very famous as a mind-reader, before suddenly dying three years later (during a telepathy demonstration) from what a newspaper called catalepsy. His death is reported in the 1889 article below, one with a title of "Death of the Great Mind Reader":

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn87060190/1889-05-14/ed-1/seq-1/

Below is a newspaper account of the clairvoyance of Mollie Fancher of Brooklyn, New York:

Below are some excerpts from the newspaper account:

"Dr. S. Fleet Speir, an eminent Brooklyn physician, has attended Miss Fancher ever since her first illness. 'I am a firm believer in her power of clairvoyance,' he said. 'It exists. That is all I know, and is all anyone knows. For years and years she took no solid food. During as many ensuing years her lips were merely moistened occasionally with fruit juices and other slight nourishment....Dr. C. E. Adamson said that he had visited Miss Fancher on many occasions with Dr. Speir. He continued: 'I really believe that Miss Fancher possesses in the highest degree the perceptivity those fraud clairvoyants pretend to have. She is a wonder....You could take a bank check and hold the reverse side toward her, or in fact, shield it entirely from the view of anyone but yourself, and Mollie would tell you the contents of the check, the name of the bank, the amount and the signature. In the same way you could read a letter and Mollie would immediately reproduce the contents. Mind, the person testing her would not move the lips in reading or give any sign or indication by which she could gain the knowledge she exhibited.' ...."

We read in the account that the wonder show organizer P. T. Barnum (convinced of her clairvoyant powers) offered Mollie a fortune if she would become a star attraction of his traveling wonder shows, saying, "I offered other than money inducements, such as all possible luxuries of travel in a private car, the finest quarters at hotels, the best of attendance, and, in short, a very great betterment of her mode of living." But Mollie turned him down flat, saying that "millions would not tempt her to exhibit herself for a single day to the public."

We read in the account of the accidents that led to Mollie becoming permanently bed-bound: first a fall from a horse, and later a fall from a street car. Then we read this account narrated by a Rev. Talmadge:

"That was about twenty-one years ago. Her nervous system seems to be shattered. She had alternative spasms and trances for a month, and that was followed by a death like continuous trance of two months. Then came nine years of a wonderful and unexplained condition. She lay in bed in an unaltered position, apparently blind and with her eyes tightly closed. Trances were interspersed with spells of a sort of ecstacy, during which she told of marvelous visions and supernatural experiences. She seemed to have the gift of second sight [clairvoyance], and this was tested daily. Her physical rigidity remained a singular accompaniment of her mental exaltation."

"It was in 1875 or ’76 that a change came to pass in her. Her

body relaxed, and she professed to have no recollection of what occurred during the nine years. But her clairvoyance developed, and the stories are innumerable of her reading of sealed letters, her discernment of visitors before they came into her room, and of all imaginable sort of second sight [clairvoyance]. The experiments were made so numerously and carefully, and by gentlemen of such unassailable probity, that there can be no doubt of their genuineness. Within the past two or three years she has recovered some of the lost flesh—for she had become little more than a living skeleton—and her appearance was much less spectral. But her mind reading power has been unimpaired.”

The Mollie Fancher case is described in my post here, and in the long book here. 

Similar to the case above are the equally dramatic cases of Eliza Hamilton and Mrs. Croad, discussed in my post here, and the cases of Frederica Hauffe and Adele Magnot discussed in my post here.  The denialism or evidence-ignoring under which male science professors refuse to mention or study cases of clairvoyance and mediumship so well documented in females (with other cases such as here, here and here) is a lamentable example of lingering sexism in the patriarchy of academia, where the most empirically groundless theories of male professors often get 1000 times more attention than the most well-documented and philosophically relevant effects related to female psychics or mediums. 

Speaking of females who act as if they have psychic abilities, the Internet is currently abuzz about the recent interview you can see here, in which two twins (Brigitte and Paula Powers) describe their mother's encounter with a thief.  It seems that for most of the three-minute interview, the twins seem to speak in sync, with one twin saying exactly what the other twin says at the exact time the other twin says it, as they both describe something they recently saw.

Another sync-speaking interview with the two twins is below:

Astrobiologists Play "Keep Torturing the Data Until It Confesses"

 In 2023 Nikku Madhusudhan and four other scientists created quite a stir. They authored a paper entitled "Carbon-bearing Molecules in a Possible Hycean Atmosphere." Researching a planet called  K2-18 b revolving around another star, the paper claimed to have found "potential signs of dimethyl sulfide (DMS), which has been predicted to be an observable biomarker in Hycean worlds." The term "Hycean worlds" refers to planets in other solar systems that may be entirely covered by an ocean. The term "biomarker" refers to something that may be a sign of life. A very simple compound, dimethyl sulfide is not any type of building block of life. But on Earth dimethyl sulfide is sometimes produced by life. 

But there were some reasons why the attempt to insinuate a biomarker was very dubious. One reason was that the claims about "potential signs of dimethyl sulfide" was a kind of "reading tea leaves" affair, in which scientists were analyzing the faintest of faint signals, rather like someone squinting at something on the horizon miles away. That type of observation offers plenty of opportunity to see what you want to see, by interpreting marginal hard-to-interpret just-barely-detectable data in some way that fits your cherished desires, rather than a hundred other ways. 

Then there is the fact that when scientists do observations like this, they are picking up signals from many different chemical sources, with the signals being all mixed up. It's a recipe for false alarms, rather like someone in a very crowded high school cafeteria trying to listen to what someone at a different cafeteria table far away is saying. 

Then there is the fact that the paper failed to detect any water at this planet. The paper stated this:

"We do not find significant contributions due to H2O or NH3, but find 95% upper limits of -3.21 for log(XH2O) and -4.46 for log(XNH3 ) in the no-offset case. These upper limits are also consistent with those from the other retrieval cases, as shown in Table 2. The non-detections of both molecules are important considering their strong spectral features and detectability expected in the 0.9- 5.2 µm range (Madhusudhan et al. 2021; Constantinou & Madhusudhan 2022). The non-detection of H2O is at odds with its previous inference using the HST WFC3 spectrum in the 1.1-1.7 µm range (Tsiaras et al. 2019; Benneke et al. 2019a; Madhusudhan et al. 2020)."

It is generally agreed that water is absolutely necessary for any form of life of life to exist. The apparent non-presence of water at K2-18 b is a reason for thinking that life does not exist there.

Despite the paper's failure to detect water, and its weak mention of a mere mention of "potential signs of dimethyl sulfide," the world's "give us an inch and we'll take a mile" science news press began publishing a flood of misleading stories falsely claiming that some promising sign of life had been found. An example was this story on www.yahoo.com, which very badly misinformed us by stating this:

"The ability of a planet to support life depends on its temperature, the presence of carbon and probably liquid water. Observations from JWST seem to suggest that that K2-18b ticks all those boxes."

No, the scientific paper said that water was not detected on  K2-18b, even though a sensitive test was made that should have detected traces as low as 1 part in a billion. 

After the "sugar rush" of this flood of misleading stories, other scientists got busy examining the data on the distant planet K2-18 b, to see whether there was any decent evidence for dimethyl sulfide. In 2024 scientists produced a paper arguing that K2-18 b was not a "Hycaean" planet covered by an ocean, but instead a gas planet like Neptune with no ocean. The paper was "JWST Observations of K2-18b Can Be Explained by a Gas-rich Mini-Neptune with No Habitable Surface" authored by Nicholas F. Wogan and others. 

Then in early 2025 there was published the paper "A Comprehensive Reanalysis of K2-18 b's JWST NIRISS+NIRSpec Transmission Spectrum." It reanalyzed the data on K2-18 b and says "we find no statistically significant or reliable evidence for CO2 or DMS [dimethyl sulfide]." The paper had 16 authors, as compared to only five authors of Madhusudhan's paper. The 16 authors had found that Madhusudhan's claims about dimethyl sulfide at K2-18 b were unfounded. 

But now Madhusudhan is back with a new paper, trying to persuade us that dimethyl sulfide exists on K2-18 b. It is a paper entitled "New Constraints on DMS and DMDS in the Atmosphere of K2-18 b from JWST MIRI." He has some new observations, but only a scanty affair. It's a mere six hours of observations done with the James Webb Space Telescope, on April 26, 2025. Madhusudhan and his small team has put this data through some very arbitrary and gigantically convoluted analysis pipeline, one that was probably selected to maximize the chance of being able to claim that dimethyl sulfide exists on K2-18 b. The raw data gathered is shown below (Figure 1 from the paper).  Ignore the red line, which is not part of the raw data. 

Data like this does nothing to naturally suggest the existence of dimethyl sulfide. The James Webb Space Telescope has nothing like a "dimethyl sulfide detector" comparable to a carbon monoxide detector in a home. But it is possible for a scientist eagerly hoping to claim some evidence of dimethyl sulfide to arbitrarily analyze such data, to try and gin up something that can be claimed as evidence of dimethyl sulfide. 

At least seven long paragraphs of the paper discuss the incredibly elaborate rigmarole that is going on in Madhusudhan's analysis pathway.  It would be way, way too charitable to describe this analysis pathway as a Rube Goldberg machine. It would be more accurate to say that the analysis pathway is some incredibly weird analytic contraption that makes the crazy-looking machines of Rube Goldberg look simple and straightforward in comparison. Below is a paragraph giving us only one eighth of the "keep torturing the data until it confesses" craziness that was going on:

"We use the 1-D spectra time series to construct a white light curve (between 4.8-10 µm). We exclude the first 250 integrations, where the systematic trend is most extreme. We identify outliers on the white light curve, ± 2.5-σ from a rolling median, and replace the 1-D spectra corresponding to these outliers with linearly interpolated spectra from adjacent integrations. We scale the error bars on the light curve points such that the average error bar equals the observed standard deviation of the scatter in the out-of-transit residuals. We use emcee (Foreman-Mackey et al. 2013) to perform a Markov Chain Monte Carlo parameter estimation of the white light curve, fitting for a transit model with quadratic limb-darkening generated by pylightcurve (Tsiaras et al. 2016) multiplied by a systematic trend consisting of an exponential term and a linear term (as in section 2.1). In the white light curve, we fit for Rp/R∗, mid-transit time, a/R∗, i, quadratic limb-darkening coefficients and four parameters for the trend. Uniform priors are used except for a/R∗ and i, where we apply Gaussian priors based on values in Madhusudhan et al. (2023b) and use the Kipping parameterisation (Kipping 2013) for limb-darkening priors. We fix the period to 32.940045 days (Benneke et al. 2019a), the argument of periastron to 90o and the eccentricity to 0. The white light curve parameter estimates are given in Table 1." 

There are seven other paragraphs describing machinations and manipulations as bizarre and complex as these. It seems that at no point in these eight paragraphs do the authors give any justification for the weird convoluted spaghetti-code manipulations and transmogrifications that are occurring. There is nothing natural or straightforward about anything that is occurring.  Something comparable would be occurring if you took a photo of a pine tree, and passed it through many different arbitrarily selected photo filters, to finally end up with a photo looking like a sexy woman, without ever justifying your use of any of those filters. 

Finally the authors create some "model" that is basically a collection of guesses about 20 chemicals that might be in the atmosphere of this planet K2-18 b. Of course, their "model" includes their cherished gas dimethyl sulfide, because trying to gin up some evidence for that is the point of all these weird labors. Near the end of the paper, the authors triumphally announce that their model fits their pipeline-adjusted data.

This is pretty much just a big pile of baloney. No actual detection of dimethyl sulfide has occurred. The analysis pipeline is "keep torturing the data until it confesses" nonsense. There is no basis for any confidence in an analysis pipeline so convoluted and artificial.  We can conclude with 99% confidence that the described analysis pathway is untrustworthy. 

•  Nothing reliable has been done in this paper to show any likelihood of the existence of dimethyl sulfide on this planet K2-18 b. 
• Nothing reliable has been done in this paper to show any likelihood of the existence of any biomarker on this planet K2-18 b. 
• No observations have ever been done to show a likelihood that water exists on this planet  K2-18 b.
• In all likelihood (as suggested by the paper  of Wogan) the planet K2-18 b is a gas planet like Neptune, with neither an ocean nor a land surface, a type of planet that should be incapable of supporting life. Not just Wogan's paper but also this 2025 paper make this conclusion, with the paper stating, "Our results, therefore, render the mini-Neptune scenario the most likely interpretation for K2-18 b, given current observational constraints."

Imagine if you have took the six hours of data that Madhusudhan played with to get his results, and gave such data to ten different teams of astronomers, asking them to tell you what the data suggested, without telling where in space the data came from. Not even one of such teams would tell you that a biomarker had been found, and not one of them would say that any evidence of dimethyl sulfide had been found. Madhusudhan's funny business here merely shows that when scientists have their hearts set on reporting the existence of some thing they are eagerly hoping to find, and when they are willing to exert unlimited weird labors playing around with their data, then they may report finding some trace of what they were so fervently desiring to find. 

This is similar to what is going on in the world of neuroscience so frequently. Neuroscientists keep analyzing the noisy wavy blips of EEG readings, and they often report finding some faint sign of what they were eagerly hoping to find, after they subjected the data to many a strange convolution and contortion, in some arbitrary way, in a "keep torturing the data until it confesses" fashion. You can read about some examples of such a thing in my series of posts here. 

Postscript: An Ars Technica article published after this post is entitled "Skepticism greets claims of a possible biosignature on a distant world." We read this:

"The last issue is whether, if dimethyl sulfide is really present on K2-18b, it was produced by life as it is here on Earth. The answer appears to be 'possibly not': A 2024 paper indicates it's possible to produce the chemical through light-activated reactions."

A CNN article has a false clickbait headline, and a bad scientist misstatement.  But it least it has a good quote by astrophysicist Sara Seager, who states this:

"Now, with thousands of exoplanets in view, the temptation to overinterpret is strong — and some are jumping the gun. When it comes to K2-18 b, enthusiasm is outpacing evidence.”

The article also quotes a scientist named Schwieterman giving a technical reason for doubting that dimethyl sulfide was discovered at K2-18 b. 

To get an analogy what it is like for astronomers getting spectroscopic data from a distant planet, consider the visual below:

This text consists of many different sentences, overlaid on top of each other. Imagine trying to extract a particular word from such a mess. That's pretty much impossible. It's a similar deal for an astronomer getting spectroscopic data from another planet, because what such a person gets is signals from many different elements and compounds and chemicals, arriving all at once. Unless you are very lucky, there is almost no way to reliably extract which part is a signal from which chemical, compound or element. But with a mess like an astronomer gets in such a situation (or a mess like the one shown above), there are unlimited opportunities to see what you are fervently hoping to see. All that can be truthfully said about such a mess is something like this: "The data is too noisy for me to say much of anything reliable about it." 

I'm surprised to see some "question the hype" science journalism today in The Atlantic, where it's more typical to find credulous cheerleading of scientist boasts. Referring to Madhusudhan's team, an article there states this:

"The chemical [dimethyl sulfide] is one of several that could be responsible for the signal they found. And while it's the most likely one according to their models, others disagree." 

The article notes that dimethyl sulfide was found "in the dead, icy spray of a comet," meaning it isn't any reliable biomarker. "Abiotic" refers to something not involving life.  One paper is entitled "On the abiotic origin of dimethyl sulfide: discovery of DMS in the Interstellar Medium." Another paper is entitled "Evidence for Abiotic Dimethyl Sulfide in Cometary Matter."

In the Atlantic article we read a quote by astronomer Ignas Snellen stating that Madhusudhan's framing of his research is "irresponsible nonsense." 

Madhusudhan's overenthusiasm reminds me of the overenthusiasm of another astronomer, Avi Loeb. Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb somehow got the idea that a  2014 meteor (the CNEOS 2014-01-08 meteor) may have been an interstellar spacecraft that blew up high in the sky. Loeb ran a million-dollar oceanic expedition looking for what he hoped would be remnants of a crashed extraterrestrial spaceship, an expedition he organized.  He found no sign of anything looking like a spaceship or any of its parts. Loeb claims to have found tiny round specks only about a millimeter in size. All that he recovered were some tiny metal specks. The metal specks he found are just like metal sea specks found all over the world.  But  Loeb tried to suggest that he may have discovered smithereens of an exploded interstellar spacecraft. 

There was nothing special about the specks Loeb and his team gathered (as I discuss here), and there is nothing special about the data Madhusudhan got from K2-18 b. Madhusudhan's readings are just like the readings from quite a few extrasolar planets that must be lifeless because they are outside of the habitable zone of the stars they revolve around. Loeb got a nice book deal out of his glory-hounding efforts, and one can wonder whether Madhusudhan's similar efforts may eventually pay off financially for him. 

A National Geographic page interviews some experts about Madhusudhan's recent claims. Some excerpts:

" 'I'm pretty skeptical of this claim, and I wish the press coverage better reflected the skepticism of the astronomical and astrobiological community,' wrote astrobiologist Joshua Krissansen-Totton of the University of Washington in an email....Another researcher, astronomer Ryan MacDonald at the University of Michigan went further, criticizing the three sigma claim as 'statistical hacking' on Bluesky....'The simplest explanation of this planet is a very thick gas-giant atmosphere with no habitable surface,' says exoplanet scientist Nick Wogan of NASA Ames. ...And we already know that nature can produce DMS [dimethyl sulfide] without life. Last year, chemist Nora Hänni at the University of Bern and her colleagues found DMS on comet 67P—not exactly a habitable world. Other researchers have found it in interstellar space. And last year, chemist Eleanor Browne of the University of Colorado, Boulder and her colleagues showed that DMS can be produced in light-fueled chemical reactions in lab experiments with synthetic atmospheres.

'There's no reason to understand [DMS] as a unique consequence of life,' says Mathis. 'I just, for the life of me, cannot figure out exactly what the argument is about: why they think this could even potentially be indicative of life, given that we've seen abiotic sources.' ”

Post-postscript: An article at Gizmodo.com quotes some experts discussing Madhusudhan's recent paper:

Planetary chemist Oliver Shorttle says "I do not believe the report of DMS in the spectrum of K2-18 b moves the astrobiological needle." He states this:

"There is presently no requirement from the data that this planet hosts liquid water oceans and a climate amenable to life. In fact, based on the data there is every reason to believe the climate will be far too hot for liquid water oceans, with the deep atmosphere potentially being underlain by oceans of magma, not liquid water. For this reason, even if 1 and 2 return a DMS detection, our expectation should be that this [molecule] has emerged in a lifeless, hot, sulfur and hydrogen rich atmosphere and ask ourselves what the atmospheric chemistry is that would have enabled this. Believing instead that this is DMS of biological origin would require overturning our every expectation as to the climate of this planet, without any other reason to do this from the data."

Astrophysicist Ignas Snellen says this:

"The whole thing is completely blown out of proportions.... The research team finds bumps in their spectrum. It is not clear whether these are real, and if so, what they could be caused by. There could be dozens of molecules (if real), or even cloud features. What do the authors do? They just look whether DMS [dimethyl sulfide] could cause this (and add DMDS). They ignore the dozens of other species [i.e. non-biological sources of molecules] that could cause this bump and call it a day. If I had been the referee, I would have stopped this publication right there. There is no reason to invoke astrobiology, let alone call it the biggest breakthrough or whatever....In the long run this will hurt astronomy when nobody will take us seriously anymore."

An NPR story says that  a scientist has analyzed the most recent data from K2-18 b, and has found it has no signal of any kind. We read this:

"The results he got suggested that there's too much noise in the data to draw any conclusions. Rather than seeing a bump or a wiggle that indicated a signal, 'the data is consistent with a flat line,' says Taylor, adding that more observations from the telescope are needed to know what can be reliably said about this planet's atmosphere."