Scientist Flubs and Flops, #2

 

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• "The origin of the amniotic egg and the amphibian - reptile transition is just another of the major vertebrate divisions for which clearly worked out evolutionary schemes have never been provided. Trying to work out, for example, how the heart and aortic arches of an amphibian could have been gradually converted to the reptilian and mammalian condition raises absolutely horrendous problems....The living world is full of innumerable other systems, particularly among the insects and invertebrates, for which gradual evolutionary explanations have never been provided."  -- Michael Denton, MD and biochemistry PhD, "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis," 1986, page 219.
• "Major transitions in biological evolution show the same pattern of sudden emergence of diverse forms at a new level of complexity. The relationships between major groups within an emergent new class of biological entities are hard to decipher and do not seem to fit the tree pattern that, following Darwin's original proposal, remains the dominant description of biological evolution. The cases in point include the origin of complex RNA molecules and protein folds; major groups of viruses; archaea and bacteria, and the principal lineages within each of these prokaryotic domains; eukaryotic supergroups; and animal phyla. In each of these pivotal nexuses in life's history, the principal 'types' seem to appear rapidly and fully equipped with the signature features of the respective new level of biological organization. No intermediate 'grades' or intermediate forms between different types are detectable." -- Biologist Eugene Koonin, "The Biological Big Bang model for the major transitions in evolution" (link).
• "This is the basic story of evolution, as recounted in countless textbooks and pop-science bestsellers. The problem, according to a growing number of scientists, is that it is absurdly crude and misleading." --Stephen Buranyi, science writer, "Do We Need a New Theory of Evolution?" in The Guardian. 
• "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." -- Biologist Richard Goldschmidt, "The Material Basis of Evolution," pages 6-7. 
• “While scientists are still working out the details of how the eye evolved, we are also still stuck on the question of how intelligence emerges in biology.” -- Scientists Rafael Yuste and Michael Levin, an article in Scientific American. 
• "Biological systems have evolved to amazingly complex states, yet we do not understand in general how evolution operates to generate increasing genetic and functional complexity." -- four scientists, "Adaptive ratchets and the evolution of molecular complexity."

Scientists Almost Seem to Have Given Up on Trying to Explain the Origin of Proteins and Genes

Scientists like to make various types of big boasts about their knowledge of things, such as the boast that they understand the basics of how the human species appeared. But various types of unsolved problems act as antagonists to such boasts. It's kind of like this:

Scientist: I understand how life originated.

Boast antagonist problems: No, you sure as hell do not.

Scientist: I understand how a human mind arises.

Boast antagonist problems: No, you sure as hell do not. 

Scientist: I understand how the human species arose.

Boast antagonist problems: No, you sure as hell do not.

In regard to the origin of life, the boast antagonist problems include the problems of the origin of DNA, the origin of the genetic code, the origin of genes, the origin of the first protein molecules, and the origin of homochirality.  In regard to the origin of large organisms, the boast antagonist problems include the problems of the origin of eukaryotic cells, the origin of most of the proteins used by mammals, the origin of protein complexes, the origin of multicellular life and the origin of bipedalism.  In regard to the origin of man, the boast antagonist problems include the problems of explaining morphogenesis, the origin of language, the origin of higher abstract reasoning, and the problems of explaining instantaneous memory creation, instant memory recall and the persistence of memories for 50 years. 

There are different ways scientists can act when faced with such boast antagonist problems. A healthy response to such problems is to spend great amounts of time trying to resolve them. Another healthy response to such problems is to modify and restrain your boasts of knowing grand things, on the basis that there are too many related unsolved problems for you to make such boasts. An unhealthy response to such boast antagonist problems is to pretty much ignore them, to mention them as little as possible, and to hope that people don't pay attention to them. There is a reason for thinking that scientists are largely guilty of this type of unhealthy response. The reason I refer to is that when we search for US federal funding for research on these boast antagonist problems, we find that some of the biggest of these problems are getting scant research. 

The web page here allows you to search grants that have been approved by the National Science Foundation:

If you type in "cancer" as the search string, and press the Search button, you will get 750 results.  The number of results is not directly listed. But by multiplying the part of the page showing results per page by the part of the page showing how many pages of results were returned, you can figure out the total number of results. For example, in the search result below, we have 30 results per page, and 25 pages of results. So apparently there are about 750 National Science Foundation projects that have some involvement with cancer:

You can also find a huge number of research results searching for topics that have no practical value. Below is what the search term "dark matter" produces:

We get 55 pages of results, with 30 results per page, giving a total of something like 1650 federally funded projects relating to dark matter. That's an amazing result, given that dark matter has never even been directly observed; and we don't even know if it exists. 

Now, let's try a different search. We will look for funded research projects relating to the origin of protein molecules. The problem of the origin of protein molecules is one of the boast antagonist problems I referred to above. Inside each human body there are more than 20,000  different types of protein molecules, each a different type of complex invention requiring a very special arrangement of thousands of atoms.  Scientists lack any credible theory for the origin of protein molecules. 

Protein molecules require very special arrangements of amino acids as hard-to-achieve by chance as it is hard for ink splashes to produce useful functional paragraphs. Because protein molecules are in general very sensitive to small changes, with their functionality typically being broken if you change only 10% or less of their amino acids, protein molecules have very high organization thresholds for them to be functional, meaning that they are not credibly explained by gradualist ideas such as Darwinism. The difficulties in explaining the origin of protein molecules is one of the biggest reasons for rejecting boasts that biological origins are successfully explained by ideas of Darwinian evolution. The issue is discussed at much greater length here and here. 

Below is the result I get when I search for the phrases "origin of protein molecules" and "origin of proteins" and "origin of protein" using the National Science Foundation grant query tool (the visual combines three different search results):

The search for research projects using the term "origin of protein molecules" produced no results. The search for research projects using the term "origin of proteins" produced no results. The search for research projects using the term "origin of protein" produced only two results. Both of those results were projects related to Alzheimer's disease, neither of which had anything to do with explaining the origin of any protein molecule. 

There's another way we can search for research projects related to the origin of protein molecules. We can search using terms such as "origin of genes" and "origin of gene."  Each type of protein molecule has its amino acid sequence specified by a particular type of gene. So research into the origin of genes is pretty much equivalent to research on the origin of proteins. 

Below is the result I get when I search for the phrases "origin of genes" and "origin of gene" using the NSF grant query tool:

The results are extremely scanty. A search for the phrase "origin of genes" produced only one result, and it is a project completed in the year 2000.  A search for the phrase "origin of gene" produced only four results. The first result is a project that ended in 2023.  The other three results are all projects that ended in the year 2007. 

Another topic related to the origin of genes and proteins is the origin of the genetic code. The genetic code is the system of representation used by genes, in which certain combinations of nucleotide base pairs stand for certain types of amino acids. This system of representations is shown below:

A search for the phrase "origin of the genetic code" on the NSF grant query tool produces only the three results shown below:

All of these projects have already been completed. 

Another of the boast antagonist problems I mentioned was the origin of protein complexes. Most or a large fraction of all proteins seem to be useless when acting alone. Most or a large fraction of all proteins only become functional when they act as team members within groups of proteins called protein complexes. Why such protein complexes arise so conveniently in the body is a major unsolved problem of biology. Below are some relevant quotes:

• "The majority of cellular proteins function as subunits in larger protein complexes. However, very little is known about how protein complexes form in vivo." Duncan and Mata, "Widespread Cotranslational Formation of Protein Complexes," 2011.
• "While the occurrence of multiprotein assemblies is ubiquitous, the understanding of pathways that dictate the formation of quaternary structure remains enigmatic." -- Two scientists (link). 
• "A general theoretical framework to understand protein complex formation and usage is still lacking." -- Two scientists, 2019 (link). 
• "Most proteins associate into multimeric complexes with specific architectures, which often have functional properties like cooperative ligand binding or allosteric regulation. No detailed knowledge is available about how any multimer and its functions arose during historical evolution." -- Ten scientists, 2020 (link). 
• "Protein assemblies are at the basis of numerous biological machines by performing actions that none of the individual proteins would be able to do. There are thousands, perhaps millions of different types and states of proteins in a living organism, and the number of possible interactions between them is enormous...The strong synergy within the protein complex makes it irreducible to an incremental process. They are rather to be acknowledged as fine-tuned initial conditions of the constituting protein sequences. These structures are biological examples of nano-engineering that surpass anything human engineers have created. Such systems pose a serious challenge to a Darwinian account of evolution, since irreducibly complex systems have no direct series of selectable intermediates, and in addition, as we saw in Section 4.1, each module (protein) is of low probability by itself." -- Steinar Thorvaldsen and Ola Hössjerm, "Using statistical methods to model the fine-tuning of molecular machines and systems,"  Journal of Theoretical Biology.

Below is the result we get using the phrase "origin of protein complexes" on the NSF grant query tool:

The query produces no results. If you change the query to "formation of protein complexes," you will get only five results, all referring to projects already completed. None of those projects generally addressed the problem of how protein complexes form. 

The queries above suggest that scientists almost have given up on trying to explain the origin of genes, protein molecules and the genetic code, and that scientists have almost given up on trying to explain the formation of protein complexes.  The problems of trying to explain the origin of such things are some of the biggest unsolved problems in science. But as long as you stay chained to the ball and chains of Darwinism and materialism, there is basically no hope of making progress on such problems. So rather than giving us continued demonstrations of how bad a job Darwinism does at explaining the origin of genes, proteins and the genetic code, scientists seem to be taking a kind of "hands off" approach to such problems, hoping that people won't notice their gigantic failure to credibly explain such things. 

By their failure to "put two and two together" in realizing the implications of their failure to credibly explain the origin of protein molecules, genes, protein complexes, the genetic code and homochirality,  today's biologists remind me of Lois Lane in the Superman comic books, TV shows and movies.  I am currently watching on HBO Max reruns of the TV series "Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman." The series has excellent romantic chemistry between Superman/Clark Kent (very well-played by Dean Cain) and Lois Lane (very well  played with comic flair by Teri Hatcher).  

In the series Lois Lane is a bright woman, but when it comes to figuring out Superman's secret identity (that Superman is really Clark Kent), Lois just cannot put two and two together (to use an English expression meaning to reach a very obvious conclusion). Lois frequently sees Superman right next to her, and every day she sees  Clark Kent, who looks and talks exactly like Superman, the only difference being that Clark Kent wears glasses. Also, Lois never sees Superman and Clark Kent together. And it seems that in half of the episodes, whenever some danger arises when Lois and Clark are together, Clark suddenly disappears and Superman suddenly appears to save the day. Figuring out that Superman must be Clark Kent is just a matter of putting two and two together, but Lois just cannot bring herself to do that.  Similarly, faced with a biosphere in which all the big organisms look as well-designed and precisely fine-tuned and information-rich and well-organized as anything could look, our biologists just cannot bring themselves to put two and two together and reach the obvious conclusion that follows from such realities.

Psychic Experiences in the News, Part 4

 Here is the latest in a series of videos I am making about newspaper accounts of ESP, precognition, prophetic dreams, out-of-body experiences and near-death experiences. 

If you have any difficulty viewing this video, try the link here. 

To see another video as long as this one, with the same type of newspaper clippings, see Part 1 of this video series using the link here, or see Part 2 of this video series using the link here, or part 3 of this video series using the link here.

Biology-Befuddled NASA Sounds Complexity-Clueless

Last summer I did a post on a press release NASA issued trying to whip up exobiology enthusiasm about some rock found on Mars by one of its robotic rovers. There was no logical basis for suggesting that the rock had any biological relevance. Analysis of the rock had not discovered any evidence of any of the building components of one-celled life in such a rock, because no evidence of any proteins had been found. Analysis of the rock had not discovered any evidence of any of the building components of the building components of one-celled life in such a rock, because no evidence of any amino acids had been found. What kind of tricks did NASA use to try to whip up some exobiology enthusiasm about the rock?  For one, they published a photo in which a tiny little feature on the spot was circled after the photo was taken, and the spot was called a "leopard spot." Talk about your strained efforts to make a dead thing sound a little biological. 

Since last summer, NASA has kept running its robotic rovers named Curiosity and Perseverance, looking for amino acids, the building components of the building components of one-celled life. NASA has failed to find any trace of any such things on Mars. So what do you do when don't have anything worthy of a boast? Maybe you brag about things that are not worthy of a boast.  Recently we had NASA making grand boasts about finding some biologically irrelevant molecules that were hardly worthy of a boast. It was like some young male suitor who did not have any car or house or apartment he could boast of owning, who tries boasting to his blind date that he has a nice TV set or video game device. 

NASA's unwarranted boasts on this topic have inspired a USA Today news story with the bogus headline "Mars rovers make separate finds pointing to past life: What Perseverance, Curiosity found." In the headline the word "separate" is misspelled. Neither of the items referred to "point to past life."

The article has a modus operandi we see abundantly these days in science news articles: an untrue clickbait headline followed by a "letdown" that kind of says, "Not really." I identified this pattern in a visual I made a long time ago:

In the USA Today story, we get "the letdown" very quickly, as the story quickly changes from "pointing to past life" to a "just maybe" in the first sentence of the story. Normally you don't get the "letdown" until later in the story, which better promotes ad-viewing.

First we get a description of a Perseverance rover find that is a big nothing from an exobiology standpoint: just a rock with lots of bubble-like spheres, which might have produced by any number of geological processes (such as bubbling hot molten rock) having nothing to do with life. Contrary to the story's claim, this does nothing at all to indicate that "ancient life may have once existed on the Red Planet." 

The second item mentioned by the USA story is the discovery of the molecules decane, undecane and dodecane. The writer of the USA story has got the wrong idea from this quote from this recent NASA press release:

"Scientists probed an existing rock sample inside Curiosity’s Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) mini-lab and found the molecules decane, undecane, and dodecane. These compounds, which are made up of 10, 11, and 12 carbons, respectively, are thought to be the fragments of fatty acids that were preserved in the sample. Fatty acids are among the organic molecules that on Earth are chemical building blocks of life."

Here we have some misleading sleight-of-hand designed to make us think that something biologically relevant was found. But no such thing occurred. Specifically:

• Decane is not in any sense a building block of life. The wikipedia.org article on decane says, "Although it is a component of fuels, it is of little importance as a chemical feedstock, unlike a handful of other alkanes."
• Undecane is not in any sense a building block of life. 
• Dodecane is not in any sense a building block of life. 

The building components of one-celled life are proteins and DNA and its genes.  The building components of such building components of one-celled life are: (1) the twenty types of amino acids that are the building components of proteins; (2) the four types of nucleobases (adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine) and the deoxyribose that are the building components of DNA and its genes. No protein or DNA or genes have been found on Mars, and none of these amino acids or nucleobases have been found on Mars. 

The statement quoted above from the NASA press release was not strictly speaking untrue, but just something that might give you the wrong idea. But the next part of the NASA press release ends up with a statement that is dead wrong.  We read the following:

"Living things produce fatty acids to help form cell membranes and perform various other functions. But fatty acids also can be made without life, through chemical reactions triggered by various geological processes, including the interaction of water with minerals in hydrothermal vents.

While there’s no way to confirm the source of the molecules identified, finding them at all is exciting for Curiosity’s science team for a couple of reasons.

Curiosity scientists had previously discovered small, simple organic molecules on Mars, but finding these larger compounds provides the first evidence that organic chemistry advanced toward the kind of complexity required for an origin of life on Mars."

The last sentence is the most egregious error.  It is gigantically untrue to claim that the simple chemicals of decane, dodecane and undecane are "the kind of complexity required for an origin of life on Mars." To get something like the origin of life you need something more than 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times harder-to-achieve: the creation of hundreds of types of functional protein molecules, most of which require hundreds of specially arranged amino acids. 

The image of the NASA press release shows how trivial from an information standpoint are the three molecules discovered:

There is nothing hard-to-achieve about such molecules. They are mainly just the same little section consisting of three or four atoms, repeated in a chain. From an information standpoint, this is as easy-to-get as this sequence of letters: 

 HHCCHHCCHHCCHHCCHHCCHHCC

What is required to produce a living cell is an amount of well-arranged functional information that is exponentially more improbable than getting so trivial a result as the simple chemicals of decane, dodecane and undecane.  The mathematical improbability of getting that result is discussed in my post "Why Accidents Cannot Produce Very Complex and Useful Instruction Information," which you can read here. 

Here's how someone could roughly go about calculating the likelihood of getting the type of organization and complexity needed for the simplest self-reproducing cell:

(1) First, he would study the likelihood of a random set of amino acids resulting in a functional protein, keeping in mind that proteins are very sensitive to small changes, and that the average protein requires hundreds of specially arranged amino acids. A key part of the calculation is that there are twenty possible amino acids used by living things. 

(2) Under a reasonable assumption that at least half of a functional protein's amino acid sequence is necessary for it to have any function, he would make a rough calculation that the probability of getting a functional protein by chance combinations of amino acids is roughly 1 in 10 to the hundredth power. 

(3) He would consider the minimum number of types of functional proteins in a self-reproducing cell, which is at least 100, each of these being a different type of complex invention. 

(4) Using the rule that you get the probability of independent events all occurring by multiplying their individual probabilities, he would calculate that the chance of amino acids accidentally forming into a collection of all the proteins needed for a self-reproducing cell is roughly 1 in 10 to the ten-thousandth power, or roughly 1 in ₁₀¹⁰⁰⁰⁰.

How hard is it to get such a result? Almost infinitely harder than to get the easy-to-get result of decane, dodecane and undecane. NASA's recent statement that "finding these larger compounds provides the first evidence that organic chemistry advanced toward the kind of complexity required for an origin of life on Mars" is therefore the most complexity-clueless misstatement. It's kind of like saying that your dog fetched a stick, and the stick makes the letter "I," so that shows your dog can produce the kind of complexity needed to write novels or technical manuals. The amount of just-right functional information needed to get even the simplest one-celled life is about the same as the amount of just-right functional information that you need to produce a 100-page well-written technical manual.