What we may call the Ministry of Materialism is a huge power structure with a base in academia and corporations selling pharmaceuticals and biomedical devices, along with other corporations profiting from clickbait science news that generates advertising revenue from interesting-sounding but often untrue or exaggerated science news stories. The diagram below gives a crude sketch of the main part of the power structure of materialism, which is far more complicated than the diagram suggests. The power structure is funded by many billions of "Darwin dollars" mostly located in the endowment funds of universities and in the capitalization of corporations selling pharmaceuticals and biomedical devices. Some of the key players in the power structure are the credulous "yes men" journalists who pass on without question dubious or groundless triumphal boasts of professors. Other key players in the power structure are the so-called skeptics mentioned at the bottom right, who do their best to suppress the reporting and studying of thousands of observations that conflict with the materialist worldview, while gaslighting, disparaging and defaming those who report or mention such observations. In psychology analysis of groupthink conformity, such agents are called "mindguards."
In the past century one of the most notorious tendencies of such a Ministry of Materialism has been to pass off untrue news about the scientifically groundless idea of abiogenesis, news stories falsely suggesting that scientific activity is doing something to substantiate this scientifically unfounded claim. Abiogenesis is the idea that life can arise from non-life. Everything we know about the gigantic complexity and huge amount of organization in living things argues against this idea. Even the simplest living thing is a cell that requires hundred of different types of protein molecules to exist and reproduce. Each of those types of protein molecules is a separate complex invention as unlikely to arise by chance as a well-written 100-word paragraph from a random arrangement of shells and pebbles and seaweed at a seashore.
There are no experiments supporting the idea of abiogenesis. No one has ever produced a living thing from any experiment realistically simulating lifeless early Earth conditions. No one has ever produced a functional protein molecule (one of the building components of one-celled life) from any experiment realistically simulating early Earth conditions. No one has ever even produced one of the building components of the building components of one-celled life (an amino acid) from any experiment realistically simulating early Earth conditions. The Miller-Urey experiment which produced some amino acids was not a realistic simulation of early Earth conditions, for reasons discussed in my post here.
Some of the worst examples of materialist journalism can be found on the slick online site Quanta Magazine. In an earlier post I detailed how an article in Quanta Magazine was pushing the enormously misleading idea that eukaryotic cells were the first type of cells to be organized. 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.
Quanta Magazine continues to mislead us about cells. In early 2025 we had in the magazine an article with a title that had two deceptions. The article was entitled "Scientists Re-Create the Microbial Dance That Sparked Complex Life." Here are the two deceptions involved in that title:
(1) The title is referring to the origin of eukaryotic cells, and refers to such an origin as the beginning of complex life. Such a reference is extremely misleading, as the cells believed to have preceded eukaryotic cells (prokaryotic cells) were themselves enormously organized.
(2) The title makes the groundless triumphal boast that something was done to recreate the origin of eukaryotic cells. Nothing of the sort occurred.
The current story given by mainstream biologists to try to explain the origin of eukaryotic cells is the silliest of fairy tales. 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."
We have in the narrative about eukaryogenesis 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 any type of cell or any of the organelle components from which cells are built, 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.
The "Scientists Re-Create the Microbial Dance That Sparked Complex Life" article refers us to a paper that was not an experiment simulating natural conditions. Instead, what went on was that scientists used high-tech equipment to inject bacteria into fungi. It is misleading to be claiming that this directed high-tech intervention was something recreating a natural event. And it is particularly misleading to try to claim that such high-tech tinkering sheds any light on the origin of eukaryotic cells, partially because fungi are themselves eukaryotic cells.
Something that might conceivably shed light on the origin of eukaryotic cells would be if you put different types of prokaryotic cells (far simpler than eukaryotic cells) in a simulated natural environment, and watched as something more complex somehow naturally arose. But The "Scientists Re-Create the Microbial Dance That Sparked Complex Life" article refers to no such thing. Instead prokaryotic cells (bacteria) were artificially combined with fungi cells that were already eukaryotic cells before the high-tech manual intervention.
Was any biological improvement or any impressive biological innovation produced by this high-tech intervention of injecting bacteria into a fungi? Apparently not. We read this:
"Our initial characterizations of the induced endosymbiosis have also shown substantial costs associated with bacterial occupation, which led to an initially low fitness of the endosymbiosis... The implantation of E. coli into R. microsporus strains EH and NH resulted in the collapse of the system in a single fungal generation, underscoring the expected instability of new endosymbiotic pairings."
Nothing like the imagined origin of eukaryotic cells has been produced here. No new species of fungi with any useful biological innovation was produced. And the technique was so artificial it tells us nothing about what could have happened naturally. Because fungi are eukaryotic cells, injecting prokaryotic cells into eukaryotic cells tells us nothing about the origin of eukaryotic cells.
Similar boastful deceits were recently published by the site BBC Science Focus. A story on the BBC Science Focus site had this utterly bogus lying Fake News headline: "We finally know how life on Earth started, staggering new asteroid discovery suggests."
Fake News, BBC-Style
The study discussed provided not the slightest warrant for such a claim, and none of the study's authors made such a claim. The study merely claimed to have found the tiniest trace amounts (roughly 1 part in a billion) of some chemicals used by living things, in a sample taken from an asteroid. As I discuss at length in my post here, the claims made in the study are not reliable, because the amounts reported are such negligible trace amounts that we can have no confidence that the reported chemicals came from the asteroid, rather than from earthly contamination. The BBC article on this study has quite a few statements as bogus and untrue as the article's headline.
On the same day as the bogus headline shown above appeared at the BBC Science Focus site, we had this equally bogus headline: "Alien life on Mars: ancient beach discovery may offer clearest proof yet." The article discussed nothing that was any evidence of life on Mars, where scientists have failed to even find any of the building components (amino acids) of the building components (proteins) of the simplest living things. This BBC Science Focus site these days is a shameless spreader of bogus science-related stories. It currently has a phony headline claiming "Our chances of finding alien just skyrocketed." It is referring to research that did nothing to make extraterrestrial life seem more probable, for reasons discussed here.
A Daily Mail story recently had the phony headline of "Scientists discover the 'true origin of life.' " It was just another example of science-flavored Fake News. It's a story about the unimpressive paper here, which used an utterly artificial apparatus to get some trace (probably negligible) of one of the 20 amino acids used by living things (the simplest one, glycine), after starting with a mixture of gases that probably did not match the earth's early atmosphere. Suspiciously the paper tells neither the abundances of gases used nor the amount of glycine produced, meaning it was probably some negligible tiny trace amount that was already present in the water or apparatus before it was used. Not being a realistic simulation of early Earth conditions, and failing to produce anything complex, the result is irrelevant to the question of the origin of life.
Darwinist materialism is addicted to groundless triumphal boasts. Its main triumphal boast is the groundless socially constructed legend that in the 19th century (long before the sky-high complexity of cells and biochemistry was even understood) Charles Darwin did something to explain the origin of species. Now that we understand the stratospheric levels of organization and the enormous levels of fine-tuned information-rich functional complexity throughout the biosphere, and the vast levels of component interdependence everywhere in large organisms (more impressive than any works of human engineering), we should realize that none of Darwin's specious claims do anything to explain any of the more hard-to-explain phenomena of biology (such as those discussed here and here). After you study the missing specifications problem (the failure of DNA and its genes to have any anatomy specification or any specification of how to make any of the types of cells in a human body or even any specification of how to make any of the organelles of such cells), the triumphal boast that human origins have been explained by the idea of an accumulation of random DNA mutations seems like a mere old wives' tale of academia. A deep further study of the failure of neuroscientists to credibly explain human mental abilities will further clarify the need to rollback triumphal boasts claiming achievements that were never actually achieved.
An example of the kind of wobbly stuff being put out as "science literature" these days is shown by a recent long preprint on quantum biology (a not-yet-well-established branch of biology), which starts out with a dedication to "faithful enthusiasts of quantum biology" (letting us know what a "preaching to the choir" affair it is), and which also assures us that the "main content" of the treatise was not written by generative AI (giving away that much of the treatise was written by generative AI).
The EurekaAlert site often issues falsehood-filled, unbelievable or nonsensical press releases, such as the recent one below. The release makes the absurd claim that "big brains" led to the evolution of birds, as if the author wasn't aware that birds have small brains, and as if the author somehow thought that something in a head could explain the appearance of wings.
"Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert system."
Got it? It's "science news," except that these guys won't vouch for a word you read on their site.
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