I have noticed that many scientists and science journalists plod on for thirty or forty or fifty years while showing almost no signs of progress in their thinking or methods. For example:
- There's a nearing-retirement-age cosmologist I know of who has been grinding out the same type of work for 40 years, endlessly peddling the same theories that have never been backed up by direct observations during such a period. I get a feeling that he has not learned any lessons from his 40 years in the field, and that he completely failed to learn a lesson of "don't be so dogmatically enthusiastic about things that no one ever observed."
- There's a science journalist who for decades has been the main writer of science-related stories at a major newspaper. During that time his work has been guilty of very bad "hook, line and sinker" credulity when it comes to reporting on unfounded claims of scientists. I see no sign of any improvement in his writings, which seem to be still making newbie science journalist mistakes.
- There's a guy whose career has been centered upon the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. He has not got anywhere in such searches, and neither has any of his colleagues. But he seems to have learned no lesson from such a failure.
- There are the science specialists who have spent 40 years in some very narrow field of inquiry, like someone looking at reality through a straw hole. Many of them acted as if their goal was to get as many papers published as they could, rather than to do the kind of broad studies needed for insight about reality. Instead of studying the most fundamental issues relevant to gaining insight about reality, they spent their careers focusing on some tiny fragment of the big picture, like some person working on a jigsaw puzzle who neglects to put together the pieces, and spends all his time focusing on only one puzzle piece.
- There's a biologist in his eighties who has shown zero real progress in moving towards credible explanations of biological phenomena over the past 50 years of his career. His latest essay involved mainly dumb evocations of the groundless explanation legends biologists have been chanting throughout his career, along with a little philosopher name-dropping to make things sound a little more intelligent to those who are impressed by such name-dropping.
- There's a physicist-turned-biologist who showed promising signs that he can pay attention to important clues about 45 years ago, but who has proven to be a disappointment since then, doing little but spouting the same easily discredited ideas, which he combines with some clever lure phrases to lure in book readers opposed to such ideas, who are disappointed once they buy his books.
- There are many neuroscientists who have had careers spanning 30 or 40 years, but who have shown no improvements in terms of adopting better and more reliable experimental methods. Thirty or forty years ago they were doing junk science studies using way-too-small sample sizes for any reliable result to be credibly claimed. Thirty or forty years later they are still doing the same type of crappy junk research, using the same type of way-too-small sample sizes. Thirty or forty years ago they were using bad, unreliable measurement techniques such as trying to measure fear or recall in mice by doing "freezing behavior" judgments. Thirty or forty years ago they are still using the same utterly unreliable method. During those 30 or 40 years all attempts to use microscopes to find evidence of a brain storage of memory have utterly failed. But such neuroscientists have learned nothing from such a failure.
Instead he uses his article to mainly denounce people who deviate from the scientific mainstream. He seems angry that people are not always believing like they were told to believe by professors. Surely the old timer has learned some important things over these 40 years, but he has done a very poor job of discussing what it was he learned.
Shortly thereafter the same author wrote an extremely misleading article that rather seems to inadvertently tell us what he did not learn in his 40 years in a science-related field. Among the article's defects are these:
(1) The article propagates the very bad misconception that life is something that might arise once some mere "ingredients" were delivered. Even the simplest one-celled life is a state of enormous organization, requiring the existence of hundreds of different types of protein molecules, each its own separate complex invention requiring a very special arrangement of thousands of atoms. To suggest that a living thing can originate from non-life by a mere depositing of ingredients is as misleading as claiming that a ten-story apartment building can arise by a mere depositing of building materials at a construction site.
(2) The article makes the untrue claim that high levels of chemicals crucial for life were retrieved by US robot space probe OSIRIS-REx, when it got a soil sample from the asteroid Bennu. Those who analyzed the sample from the asteroid Bennu merely found negligible trace amounts of such chemicals. The amounts reported were levels such as 70 nanomoles per gram, which is less than 1 part in 100 million. In fact, the levels reported were so low that we can have no confidence that the reported chemicals actually came from the asteroid Bennu. It is well known that trace amounts so tiny can easily be produced by earthly contamination. The issue is discussed in my post here. The fact is that a paper stated that the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft would maintain a cleanliness standard of " <180 ng/cm2 of amino acids" (nanograms per cubic centimeter), but the amino acid abundances reportedly found in the Bennu sample were less than this amount, not greater -- meaning that we can have no confidence that the reported negligible trace amounts came from the asteroid rather than earthly contamination.
(3) The article quotes a scientist suggesting the groundless idea that asteroids similar to Bennu crashed on to Earth, bringing crucial ingredients that led to the appearance of life here, a claim that is groundless because of the negligible levels of amino acids found in the Bennu sample, the impossibility of knowing whether such levels are merely due to earthly contamination, and the nonsensical nature of the idea that vastly organized states of matter such as a living thing can appear because of mere depositing of trace ingredients. The author's article lets the goofy claim go unchallenged.
(4) Later in the article the author makes the groundless claim that observations of the exoplanet K2-18b revealed the chemical dimethyl sulfide, and the untrue claim that the chemical is only produced by life. No such thing occurred, and the study mentioned provided no decent evidence that the compound even exists at K2-18b. You can read about the unwarranted claim and how other scientists have undermined it or denounced it by reading my post here. It is also untrue that the dimethyl sulfide mentioned is only produced by life. My post here cites two scientific papers discussing how such chemicals can be produced when there is no life.
From the article I can make a list of some of the things that the old-timer with a science-related career spanning 40 years has apparently not learned in the past 40 years.
(1) He apparently did not learn to supply his readers with the most important relevant facts when reporting on important issues such as whether a soil sample from an asteroid tells us anything important about the origin of life. The most important facts he should have mentioned were facts relating to the enormously high organization level and information richness of even the simplest life, the fact that the reported abundances of life-relevant chemicals were mere negligible trace amounts, and the fact that earthly contamination occurs so frequently in projects such as this that all reports of finding chemicals in such very low trace amounts are reports leaving it unclear as to whether the chemicals even came from outer space. None of these facts was mentioned in the old timer's article.
(2) He apparently did not learn to use precise and accurate language when such language is needed, seeing that he referred to high levels of complex chemicals when he should have referred to "extremely tiny trace amounts" or "negligible trace amounts" when referring to those chemicals, and also given that he incorrectly claimed that two chemicals can only be produced by life.
(3) He apparently did not learn to avoid misleading metaphorical language or misleading simplistic language, as he has suggested the untrue idea that the origin of life can occur through a mere depositing of ingredients or the mere appearance of simple "building blocks," rather than discussing how the origin of life requires the appearance of many types of extremely organized and specially arranged components (different types of protein molecules).
(4) He apparently did not learn to apply critical scrutiny to the statements of scientists telling goofy tall tales about never-observed things claimed to have happened long ago, or statements of glory-hounding scientists making very dubious claims to have done grand things they did not actually do.
All too often people with long science-related careers show way too little sign of having learned important insights and lessons from decades of reading, writing about or producing scientific material. All too often you may look at 65-year-old Professor Smith, compare him to 30-year-old Professor Smith, and then shake your head in dismay, asking: where was the gain in insight, where are the lessons learned, and where is the improvement in methods?
When a child goes to First Grade, it can be a year of amazing progress. Here is part of what a typical First Grade report card might look like:
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PS 124 Report Card
Student Name: Mary Smith
Grade: First Grade
Teacher Comments: Mary has made the most amazing progress during the past nine months! She can now read her entire "Dick and Jane" basic readers with each have 20 illustrated pages. And Mary has also learned how to write! She can write full grammatical sentences such as "This is a nice day and I am good." She often makes spelling errors, but her spelling is improving.
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What if scientists were to get report cards grading their progress over a 40-year career? Sadly very many of them would need to get report cards like this:
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Scientist Progress Report
Scientist Name: William Stubbornsky
Time Span: 40 Years (1985 - 2025)
Analyst Comments: Regrettably there has been very little progress in the speech and methods of this scientist. He keeps on repeating the same vacuous catchphrases and empty sound bites he would mutter soon after getting his PhD forty years ago: empty phrases such as "synapse strengthening" and groundless claims of "neural representations" and "brain regions lighting up." While he has learned some hi-tech skills such as how to operate fancier equipment, there has been no improvement in the quality of his experimental practices. Forty years ago he was doing low-quality poorly-designed mouse studies using way-too-small sample sizes. He is still doing the same kind of low-quality poorly-reproducible research. He seems to read the writings of only those who think like him. Always making dogmatic claims about the limits of minds and what brains do, he still shows no signs of having seriously studied the very large body of observations that challenge or defy such claims.
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