When Frustrated Scientists Make the Most Grandiose Boasts

 A recent article by scientist Alexandra Amon is an example of very bad hubris by a scientist. It is an article with the doubly misleading title "The Dark Universe: Why we're about to solve the biggest mystery in science." The mystery referred to is the so-called mystery of dark matter. Contrary to the groundless boasting of the title, no progress is being made in solving this so-called mystery, which we should always call a so-called mystery because of the lack of a clear evidential basis for believing that dark matter exists. And this so-called mystery of dark matter is almost trifling and insignificant compared to other mysteries of science that are a million times bigger. 

Right from the start, we have an indication that Amon has gone astray. She begins her article saying this:

"Tiny, fuzzy blobs. I’ve spent a lot of time in the last few years looking at images of tiny, fuzzy blobs. They’re only ever a few pixels wide, like smudges on a photo, but they could be the key that unlocks the mystery of dark matter."

It's a waste of time to ever spend much time on any image that is only a few pixels wide. For many years I've got photographs stranger than that of 99% of all photographers. One of my rules is: never publish any image smaller than about 70 pixels by 70 pixels. Below that size, it is is just too easy to get false alarms. So it is pretty nonsensical to think that images "only ever a few pixels wide" could every unlock some deep cosmic mystery. 

Amon states, "Our theory of the Universe hinges on the existence of dark matter, and we have no idea what dark matter is." But a great rule is: in almost every case, with few exceptions, if you have no idea of what something is, then you do not actually know such a thing exists. And that rule holds true in this case. We do not know that any such thing as dark matter exists. 

Amon is a member of a belief community, the tiny community of scientists that calls themselves cosmologists. The total number of cosmologists around the world is only a few thousand. In tiny groups this small, it is extremely common for groupthink to occur. Groupthink is typically when some belief tradition arises in a small community, and it becomes taboo for people in that little clique to challenge that belief tradition.  People in the little clique may get wildly excited about ideas that are not warranted by observations. 

The cosmologist belief community clings without warrant to several unproven and dubious belief traditions, all of which involve never-observed things.  Those belief traditions include:

• A belief in the existence of dark matter.
• A belief in the existence of dark energy.
• A belief in the existence of primordial cosmic inflation, not to be confused with the more general belief in the Big Bang.   

Cosmologists are very often guilty of egregious misstatements in which they claim to know grand and glorious things that they do not actually know. 

We have this goofy reasoning from Amon:

"Maybe dark matter is simply something we’ve invented out of a misinterpretation of the theory. Maybe it’s not really out there at all.

Sadly, not. Because one thing we do know is that something is out there. We can’t see it and we don’t know what it is, but since Dr Vera Rubin first observed the effects it was having on stars in the late 1970s, there’s no denying it’s there. Rubin set out to study the motions of stars in spiral galaxies, but her measurements suggested that the stars weren’t moving as expected."

Amon refers to the fact that textbook versions of gravitational theory do not correctly predict the orbital motion of stars around the centers of galaxies. But such a failure does not amount to an argument for the likely existence of dark matter. There are many possible theories that might explain such an anomaly, theories different from the dark matter theory. The "there's no denying it's there" claim is false. There is a substantial group of MOND theorists who very much deny that the "it" she refers to (massive amounts of invisible dark matter) is there. 

After describing that outer stars (farther away from the center of the galaxy) orbit the galaxy as quickly as inner stars (closer to the center of the galaxy), Amon claims that  "the only thing that could explain this finding would be if there is a tremendous amount of invisible matter in the outer regions of galaxies beyond the inner clump of visible stars." No, that is not true. There are quite a few different theories that have been created to explain this observational anomaly.  One of them is called MOND, which stands for Modified Newtonian Dynamics. 

Below is a post from one of the main sites of such a MOND theory, the site www.darkmattercrisis.wordpress.com:

Amon speaks above just as if the MOND theory does not exist. This is a common tactic of scientists: just pretend competing theories do not exist, and hope they go away. Amon incorrectly says this about dark matter: "So we know it’s there and that there’s a lot of it." No, we do not know that dark matter exists, and no one has ever observed it. 

Very strangely, referring to the so-called Standard Model of Cosmology, Amon states, "This ‘baby picture’ of the Universe supports the evidence that the cosmos is composed predominantly of dark matter." No, according to such a model the universe is composed predominately of something different from dark matter: dark energy. 

Misspeaking very badly about something never observed, Amon states this "Our observations tell us that dark matter is the invisible scaffolding of the cosmos: it forms a cosmic web of clusters and filaments, with enormous voids in-between, that guide the location of galaxies." To the contrary, there have been no such observations. Dark matter has never been observed. 

Neither dark matter nor dark energy has any place in the Standard Model of Physics, something that is on vastly sounder ground than the so-called Standard Model of Cosmology. Few claims are more laughable than Amon's groundless boast that " we're about to solve the biggest mystery in science." Despite decades of heavy funding, no progress has been made in either observing dark matter or substantiating a physics basis underlying the existence of dark matter.  Nothing currently being done offers much hope for progress on this topic. 

The alleged mystery of dark matter corresponds to what particle or particles make up dark matter, if dark matter exists. That is not a known mystery of the universe, but may well be merely a socially constructed artificial mystery that is the creation of speculating scientists. Ideas about dark matter arose from observations of why stars do not revolve around the center of a galaxy at the expected speed. Such a mystery is not even one of the hundred biggest mysteries of science. 

All of the mysteries below are mysteries a thousand times bigger than any mystery of dark matter:

(1) How are humans instantly able to retrieve lots of information after seeing a single sight or hearing a single name?

(2) How are the most complex cells able to reproduce?

(3) How did the 20,000+ types of protein molecules in the human body ever originate?

(4) How do protein molecules fold correctly to form into the 3D shapes needed for their function, and why do they form into just the right organized protein complexes so often needed for them to perform useful functions in the human body?

(5) How are humans ever able to learn new things, and form new memories that can last a lifetime?

(6) How is a speck-sized zygote ever able to progress to become the vast organization of an adult human body?

(7) How is a human able to think and understand? 

(8) How were the cells and anatomy of any complex visible organism ever able to originate?

(9) How was human language ever able to originate?

(10) Why does there occur the many well-established things that so many scientists senselessly refuse to believe in?

For a discussion of why each of these questions is very much unanswered,  read my post here. 

It's not that Amon is mostly wasting her time. She works on a project called the Dark Energy Survey which describes itself as "an international, collaborative effort to map hundreds of millions of galaxies, detect thousands of supernovae, and find patterns of cosmic structure that will reveal the nature of the mysterious dark energy that is accelerating the expansion of our Universe."  Such a project is actually doing some solid mapping work. It is simply that such a project has done nothing to prove the existence of either dark matter or dark energy, which was its grand ambition.  Scientists working on not-meeting-their-grand-goals projects should not be boasting so loudly, as Amon has done. 

If there were a monthly magazine on the search for dark matter, it might look like this:

Some More Who Were "Ghost-Told" of a Death

 What if your whole earthly life is the mere infancy of your soul's existence? Then when you die, it may be like progressing from being a baby to being a toddler. 

In the series of posts listed below I gave many examples of people who saw an apparition of someone they did not know was dead, only to soon learn that the person had died about the same time the apparition was seen:

An Apparition Was Their Death Notice

25 Who Were "Ghost-Told" of a Death

25 More Who Were "Ghost-Told" of a Death

Yet Another 25 Who Were “Ghost-Told” of a Death

Scientific American's Very Lame "Ghost Explanations"

They Also Were "Ghost Told" of a Death

More Accounts of Veridical Apparitions

Even More Cases of Veridical Apparitions

When Apparitions Serve as Announcements

Still More Cases of Veridical Apparitions

When Apparitions Act as News Bulletins

They Too Were "Ghost-Told" of a Death

They Seemed to Ghost-Learn of Someone's Death

It Seemed Her Suicide Was Not Her End

Veridical Apparitions Are Not Very Rare

Let us look at some more cases of this type. Here is an account of someone "ghost-told" of a death, with the interesting twist that the ghost viewer then died:

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85040614/1908-12-04/ed-1/seq-2/

The account below is from the newspaper story here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn88064537/1885-08-22/ed-1/seq-8/

The account below seems to qualify as a case of being "ghost-told" of a death:

The full newspaper story can be read here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84026749/1926-12-10/ed-1/seq-22/

The account below was told by  Doctor Elliot Coues, a biologist member of the National Academy of Sciences,  in a story printed in 1900 in the Washington Post. Although in the same article Coues refers to "death wraiths," which he says appear "a little before or a little after the death of the sender," it is not quite clear whether he knew of the death of the person mentioned below before the apparition was seen. 

The full account can be read below:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84026965/1900-02-14/ed-1/seq-2/

Later in the same article the biologist makes these interesting statements:

The National Academy of Sciences biologist then makes this startling claim:

The volumes referred to are Volume One of Phantasms of the Living, which can be read online here, and Volume Two of the work which can be read here. A significant fraction of the 700+ cases reported in that two-volume work are cases in which someone reports seeing or hearing an apparition of a particular person they did not know was dead, only to find out later that just such a person had died on about the same day or exactly the same day (and often on the same hour and day).

The 1872 newspaper account below appeared with a title of "Seeing a Sister's Apparition and Then Hearing of Her Sudden Death."

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84027008/1872-10-10/ed-1/seq-1/

Here is yet another case of being "ghost-told" of a death:

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045462/1931-11-15/ed-1/seq-21/

On page 592 of the document here, we read a Dr. Coleman state the following case of a young boy who saw the apparition of a teacher who had very recently died, a boy who had never been told of the teacher's death:

"The day before the little boy died he and his mother and the nurse were alone together in the room. The child said his Sunday school teacher was in the room with them, told how she was dressed,

etc. At the time this took place the teacher, who had suddenly died, was lying in her casket. The child had not been informed of her death."

The next case in this post does not quite qualify as being "ghost-told of a death" as no one at the time knew that either a ghost had been seen or that a death had occurred. But the case does seem like evidence of an apparition of a person appearing near a relative at about the time of that person's death. The case is found as Case #  242 in Volume I of the famous work Phantasms of the Living, and can be read on the page here: 

"October 30th, 1885.

(242)  In the month of August, 1864, about 3 or 4 o'clock in the afternoon, I was sitting reading in the verandah of our house in Barbadoes. My black nurse was driving my little girl, about 18 months or so old, in her perambulator in the garden. I got up after some time to go into the house, not having noticed anything at all — when this black woman said to me, ' Missis, who was that gentleman that was talking to you just now ?' ' There was no one talking to me,' I said. ' Oh, yes, dere was, Missis — a very pale gentleman, very tall, and he talked to you, and you was very rude, for you never answered him.' I repeated there was no one, and got rather cross with the woman, and she begged me to write down the day, for she knew she had seen someone. I did, and in a few days I heard of the death of my brother in Tobago. Now, the curious part is this, that I did not see him, but she — a stranger to him — did ; and she said that he seemed very anxious for me to notice him.

"MAY CLERKE."

On the same page someone else corroborates the tale:

"I well remember that on the day on which Mr. John Beresford, my wife's brother, died in Tobago — after a short illness of which we were not aware — our black nurse declared she saw, at as nearly as possible the time of his death, a gentleman, exactly answering to Mr. Beresford's description, leaning over the back of Mrs. Clerke's easy-chair in the open verandah. The figure was not seen by any one else.

SHADWELL H. CLERKE."

On pages 547 to 559 of Volume XI of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research (1895), which can be read here, we have a most unusual and complex report of being ghost-told of a death. In this case the witness does not report seeing an apparition of someone she knew (as typically occurs), but of someone unknown to her. Reportedly the apparition made a series of predictions that were verified, such as that the witness would learn of the death of a child who was buried in a particular graveyard she would soon visit. The case seems to have been diligently checked out by members of the Society, who found quite a lot of corroborating evidence. But the account is too complex for me to summarize here. 

A drawing from an old newspaper story

The great majority of accounts in this post and the posts mentioned at the top of this post involve cases in which someone reports seeing an earthly apparition of someone he did not know was dead, and then soon learns the person died at about the time the apparition was seen.  A very similar type of account I have rarely heard of may have a form such as this:

(1) Person X may have a near-death experience in which he reports seeing some person who he knew had died, perhaps in some mystical realm. This Person X may also report seeing in such a place a Person Y who he did not know was dead. 

(2) It may then soon be confirmed that this Person Y had died, unknown to Person X when he had this near-death experience. 

The quote below from a 2024 article seems to describe a case of this type, which we might describe as "spirit-told of a death" rather than "ghost-told of a death":

"A young nine-year-old boy named Eddie was seriously ill in a hospital. Recovering from a thirty-six-hour fever, Eddie immediately told those in the hospital room that he had been to heaven, recounting seeing his grandfather, an aunt, and an uncle there. But then his startled and agitated father heard Eddie report that his nineteen-year-old sister Teresa, away at college, was in heaven too, and she told Eddie that he had to return. But the father had just spoken to Teresa two days prior. Checking with the college, the father found out that his daughter had been killed in a car accident the previous day, but that the college could not reach the family at their home, presumably because of Eddie’s hospital stay!"

Scientist Flubs and Flops, #7

 

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•  "In real time how the chaperones fold the newly synthesized polypeptide sequences into a particular three-dimensional shape within a fraction of second is still a mystery for biologists as well as mathematicians."   -- Arun Upadhyay, "Structure of proteins: Evolution with unsolved mysteries," 2019.
• "The problem of protein folding is one of the most important problems of molecular biology. A central problem (the so called Levinthal's paradox) is that the protein is first synthesized as a linear molecule that must reach its native conformation in a short time (on the order of seconds or less). The protein can only perform its functions in this (often single) conformation. The problem, however, is that the number of possible conformational states is exponentially large for a long protein molecule. Despite almost 30 years of attempts to resolve this paradox, a solution has not yet been found." -- Two scientists, "On a generalized Levinthal's paradox," 2018. 
• "A wide variety of protein structures exist in nature, however the evolutionary origins of this panoply of proteins remain unknown."  -- Four Harvard scientists, "The role of evolutionary selection in the dynamics of protein structure evolution." 
• "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). 
• "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.
• "Yet while these are several examples of well-understood processes, our study of animal morphogenesis is really in its infancy." -- David Bilder and Saori L. Haigo1, "Expanding the Morphogenetic Repertoire: Perspectives from the Drosophila Egg." 

No, Falling Birthrates Are Not a "Serious Threat to Humanity"

 The online magazine Aeon publishes many poorly reasoned essays. Aeon's latest example is an article by an associate professor of philosophy, one entitled "The Vanishing of Youth."  The essay by Victor Kumar attempts to convince us that falling birth rates are a "serious threat to humanity." We get some bad armchair reasoning. The silly title gives us a hint of how far astray the author has gone. Declining birth rates will not produce any such thing as a "vanishing of youth." 

After pointing out that many say that declining birth rates will very much help reduce the problem of global warming, Kumar says, "These hopes are misplaced." He then says this:

"The path forward on climate change is clear: rapid decarbonisation. We must transition as fast as possible from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources. If we fail, the future will be disastrous, and population size becomes irrelevant. If we succeed, additional humans won’t impact carbon emissions."

Decarbonization means the replacement of carbon-based energy sources such as coal and oil with alternative energy sources such as solar power, geothermal power, nuclear power, hydroelectric power, and so forth.  Such a thing requires many types of extremely difficult work across the globe, occurring over many decades. Any claim that it can be achieved rapidly is erroneous. The idea that you can make population size irrelevant to global warming by "rapid decarbonisation" is fallacious "silver bullet" reasoning.  The likelihood of successfully replacing oil and coal as energy sources is very much related to population size. The smaller the global population, the greater the chance of success such a decarbonization project has. It is fallacious to claim that in some disastrous future "population size becomes irrelevant."  Population size is always extremely relevant. 

Kumar then gives us this fallacious reasoning:

"Moreover, the timelines don’t match. Climate change demands solutions within the next few decades; population decline won’t materialise until the next century. Having fewer humans arriving then won’t retroactively cool the planet." 

The insinuation here that under a low-birthrate scenario "population decline won't materialise until the next century" is not correct.  Below is a year 2025 global population projection appearing in a scientific paper authored by Harvard scientists (a paper published in The Lancet):

In three or four of the five scenarios, global population peaks around the year 2060, and begins declining after then. So it is not correct that under a low-birthrate scenario, population decline will only occur in the twenty-first century. Under reasonable versions of such a scenario, population decline may begin around the year 2060,  forty years earlier than Kumar claims. If that occurs, such a decline will be a very big help indeed in reaching some goal of global decarbonization. The smaller the population, the easier that goal is to achieve. 

Kumar's next paragraph is this very fallacious bit of armchair reasoning, which seems to be based on the premise that a smaller global population would mean fewer young people. 

"Imagine, however, that population decline accelerates. That would worsen rather than salvage our climate prospects. Young people are more likely to support bold environmental policies, become climate activists, and invent green technologies. A shrinking, ageing population means fewer contributors to these efforts."

This kind of reasoning is fallacious. Whatever global warming reduction/slowing effect might occur by having a larger population and more activist young people, it would not be as nearly as great as the global warming reduction/slowing effect that would occur if the population was smaller and there were fewer people around, resulting in a much smaller carbon footprint for most nations. Kumar's reasoning above is like saying it would be a shame if the death-by-drunk-driving rate fell too low, because in that case there would be fewer activists trying to reduce deaths by drunk driving. 

Kumar illogically depicts the following events in the US:

• "Hospitals will burst at the seams while playgrounds empty." No, playgrounds will not empty, because many young people will still be born. And given an overall decline in population or a flattening of population growth, there is no reason to believe that "hospitals will burst at the seam," something that would be more likely to occur if populations keep rising. 
• Kumar predicts that the Social Security system will crumble if the population declines or population growth flattens.  This is fallacious. The current financial difficulties of the Social Security system are easy to permanently fix by simple measures such as eliminating the current "cap" under which income above $200,000 is not subject to the Social Security tax, or by increasing the retirement age after there occurs a corresponding increase in life span (projected to occur because of medical advances). 
• Kumar says there won't be enough tax revenue if the population decreases or population growth flattens. This is a fallacious argument. Tax revenue problems in the US can easily be fixed by increasing tax rates on the wealthiest or creating a wealth tax applying only to the richest. If the population was slightly declining, there would be less need for tax revenue, because tax revenue needs are proportional to population size. 

We then have from Kumar this paean to youth:

"To thrive, societies need young people. New generations drive economic growth, pioneer technologies, challenge outdated moral views, create art, and advance social change. They’re more likely to take risks, embrace new ideas, and imagine different futures. When we talk about population decline, what we’re really talking about is the gradual dissipation of this vital social force."

There will still be plenty of young people if the population declines or if population growth flattens, so this is not a good argument for keeping the population growing. Kumar's statements here are an example of ageism. People who are between 35 and 60 have done very much to  "pioneer technologies, challenge outdated moral views, create art, and advance social change," and they also often "take risks, embrace new ideas, and imagine different futures." In fact, a person over 60 may be more likely to embrace new ideas than someone who is 25. 

Let us consider a young person who studies to get a PhD at a university. Can we expect that this person will be particularly likely to take risks and embrace new ideas?  Often the exact opposite is true.  In many fields such as neuroscience, psychology, evolutionary biology, philosophy and cosmology, we have belief communities that are dominated by old dogmas and old taboos that have been hanging around for decades or centuries. The career path of someone in such fields is a path of conformity. In such fields a person's chance of progression from PhD candidate to PhD to  "post doc" to assistant professor to full professor will be totally dependent upon how much that person parrots the "party line" of some academia belief community. This is the opposite of a situation where the most thought innovation comes from the youngest. 

Imagine someone is part of such an academia belief community for decades.  If he is a neuroscientist, he writes like his academia overlords and peer reviewers expect a neuroscientist to write.  If he is an evolutionary biologist, he writes like his academia overlords and peer reviewers expect an evolutionary biologist to write. It's a "publish or perish" situation in which the person is expected to meet some quota of papers written. And to get papers published, conformity is required, because peer reviewers tend to reject papers advancing contrarian ideas or heretical claims

But then let's imagine such a person retires from academia. Now he might feel a greater freedom to speak his mind. So the 60-year-old or the 65-year-old might actually be more likely to "embrace new ideas" and "take risks." He might now think that for the first time in his life he can stick his neck out, without suffering dire consequences. My point here is that there is a large reason for doubting the  generalization that young people think in daring, innovative ways, and older people stick to the old way of thinking. Often the main people to realize the stupidity of bad old dogmas are those who have had decades to ponder the failures of such dogmas and how they fail as explanations for very deep complexities of reality that take many years of study to appreciate. 

Kumar makes some fallacious claims about economic growth:

" More importantly, degrowth would devastate developing nations. Economic growth dramatically reduced global poverty. Reverse that growth, and poverty will resurge."

No, poverty will not increase if global population growth reverses or flattens. Degrowth in population is not the same as a shrinking economy.   Statistics about economic growth can be very misleading. An economy can be counted as growing when there occurs many different things that people do not need, such as the building of too-large houses and the building of weapon systems and the manufacture of unnecessary cars. 

An economist says this:

"It’s a false assumption to say that growth is increasing the standard of living in the present world because we measure growth as growth in G.D.P.  If it goes up, does that mean we’re increasing standard of living? We’ve said that it does, but we’ve left out all the costs of increasing G.D.P. We really don’t know that the standard is going up. If you subtract for the deaths and injuries caused by automobile accidents, chemical pollution, wildfires and many other costs induced by excessive growth, it’s not clear at all."

Birthrates below replacement levels are not even happening in developing countries, making Kumar's point here particularly weak. Here is some data from this page:

The "developing nations" do not even have birthrates below replacement levels, and it is a fallacy to assume that if the global population begins to decline, that this will mean there will be birthrates below replacement levels in developing nations. Such developing nations will still be able to grow economically, and their population will still grow. The dip in population growth will come mainly from dips in birthrates of developed countries. 

Kumar states this:

"A smaller population will thus shrink what the evolutionary theorist Joseph Henrich in The Secret of Our Success (2015) calls our ‘collective brain’. We’ll forgo not just particular innovations but entire fields of enquiry, impacting everything from basic research to practical applications in engineering and medicine."

No, there will not occur the disappearing of "entire fields of enquiry" if population growth flattens or if the world's population size slightly declines.  A global population of seven billion working smarter can do just as much intellectually as a global population of ten billion not working so smartly. 

Kumar is speaking erroneously when he says this:

"Young people have always been the main source of art, fashion, music, literature and film. As their numbers diminish, the future will become a cultural wasteland. Imagine the 1960s without rock-and-roll, the 1970s without Hollywood auteurs, the 1980s without street art, or the 1990s without hip-hop." 

Nonsense. There will still be billions of young people in a world of seven billion people with a slowly declining (or not increasing) number of total humans.  And it is not true that "young people have always been the main source of art, fashion, music, literature and film." Middle-aged people have contributed just as much to such areas as young people. 

Kumar seems to have his face twisted into agony over some prospect that he should not be worried about at all: the prospect that the global population may stop rising and slightly decline. Kumar suggests desperate measures we can do to increase the birth rate, and make it more affordable to have children. Kumar suggests the nonsensical solution of "artificial wombs," stating this: "Perhaps the most effective solutions, ultimately, will relieve the costs of childrearing through artificial wombs or AI nannies." This would not actually do anything to reduce the expense of having children. Pregnancy is not expensive, but having your child be grown by an artificial womb would be gigantically expensive.  And the progression from a speck-sized zygote to a full-sized human baby is a miracle of organization that could never be reproduced by some artificial womb. 

Part of the reason why someone at a university might be suggesting artificial wombs is that places like Boston University (where Kumar works) do a really bad job at educating people about the vast levels of hierarchical organization and fine-tuned functional complexity and component interdependence and purposeful molecular machinery choreography everywhere in human bodies, because the proper teaching of such realities conflicts with the preservation of accidental origins dogma that is prioritized at such churches of materialism. 

Some of the Strangest Deathbed Visions

"Of the various kinds of apparitions, death-bed visions lend themselves the least to telepathic explanation. It appears as if those who passed over were waiting at the gates for their loved one. The dying one is fully conscious of the reason of their coming : sometimes there is an exclamation of surprise at the perception of someone whom the dying did not know to have died (the news having been withheld to prevent a shock), the apparitions always represent the departed, and the vision is shortly followed by death."  -- Dr. Nandor Fodor, Light, 9/8/1933, p. 565 (link).

Below is a newspaper account from 1900 of two deathbed visions, which can be read using the link here, and looking for the "Dying Women" story near the middle of the page. The first account is a typical account of this type, involving a dying person reporting what seems like a glimpse of the Great Beyond. The second account has a "clock stopping" twist that makes it stranger than the average deathbed vision. 

"Friends who attended two women in Newark, N. J„ one of whom is dead, while the other is on her deathbed, are convinced that they saw through the veil that divides this world from the next.

The city is stirred by reports of these visions 'from beyond,' and can give no better explanation of them than that offered by the attendant woman who heard the patients describe what they saw and who now say that approaching death sometimes allows a person who is ill to see beyond the pale.

The first case is that of Miss Mattie Oakley, 18 years old, who lived with her aunt. Mrs. M. E. Van Ness, at No. 90 Elizabeth avenue. The girl was a pupil in the Miller High School. She was to have been graduated next Thursday. She was an orphan. Her parents died several years ago.

She fell ill three weeks ago. Dr. B. H. B. Sleight, of Lincoln Park, attended her. Her aunt, Mrs. Van Ness, tells the story of the vision convincingly, for she is herself convinced. She was sitting with the girl last Monday afternoon, she says. They prayed together. She feared that her niece might die at any moment. For a long time the girl lay still, with her eyes fixed upon the celling, as if she looked through and beyond it. Then she turned to Mrs. Van Ness and she said she had just seen a beautiful vision.

'I stood in heaven,'  she said. Her voice was calm. She seemed
to be of normal mind.

'What have you seen?' Mrs. Van Ness asked.

'My father and mother,' the girl replied. 'They spoke to me. Mother told me to be a good girl. Father said, "Come to me."' 

Mrs. Van Ness and the girl sang a hymn together. A little later the girl died. Mrs. Van Ness is confident that her niece was rational, and that she saw that of which she spoke.

The other case is that of Mrs. Geo. W. Beatty, of No. 78 Sussex street. She is 62 years old. She was attacked by paralysis about nine months ago. Just before the first stroke, she says, the mother of former Mayor Daniel W. Beatty, of Washington, N. J., her stepson, appeared beside her bed, 'robed in pure gold.' A little later she saw Mrs. John Walters, who has been dead for half a century. Last Sunday night the spirit of her late husband appeared walking beside a beautiful river. She called aloud to him, and then she realized that she was in her room but the spirit was beside her. It lingered for a moment, she said, and then it passed through the door, although the door was closed.

At this time, it is said, the clock in former Mayor Beatty's house stopped. The hour of her vision, her friends say, was identical with that at which the clock stopped."

My post here gives five other newspaper accounts of clocks mysteriously stopping at the time of someone's death. 

Below is an untypical account of a deathbed vision, which can be read here. Instead of the dying person having the vision, a vision reportedly comes to a relative far away, alerting that person of a relative's death. There is also a strange element of a feeling of a cold chill acting as an omen of disaster.

Page 477 of the October 7, 1911 edition of the periodical Light gives an account of a deathbed vision. It includes an enormously strange element of faces of the deceased appearing on the face of a dying person. 

"A well-known business man of New York passed away. His widow is a clear-minded and educated lady, without any morbid or superstitious taint in her nature, or any belief in Spiritualism. While bending over her husband shortly before his death she observed that the expression of his face was changing, and the next moment saw there, instead, the face of her dead brother. The two men were entirely unlike in appearance, one being light and having a blond beard, and the other very dark. Shortly afterwards the lady saw on her husband’s face the expression of another deceased friend, and a little later that of a third. Her morbid and overwrought fancy deceived her, someone says. Could two persons be deceived at the same time and in the same way? I ask this because three years ago this lady and her sister watched beside the dying child of the latter. The little girl’s face suddenly changed. One of the ladies saw that the other observed this, and said : ‘ Emily, who was it ? ’ ‘ Adelaide,’ was the answer. 'Yea, Adelaide. ’ The two ladies told our informant that they saw unmistakably the face of their dead cousin, a woman, shining out through the face of the dying child. She could offer no explanation of these phenomena, and we present them, because they seem unusual and interesting."

Below is a very interesting account of a doctor who claimed to have twice seen a soul departing from the body when someone was dying. The doctors claimed that the souls looked like blue smoke. 

You can read the account here:

https://books.google.com/books?id=jvFCAAAAIBAJ&pg=PA2&dq=deathbed+vision&article_id=2891,7442987#v=onepage&q=deathbed%20vision&f=false

The account here tells the same account in fewer words:

An old newspaper account discusses something similar seen by others at a deathbed: one involving a blue flame, and the other a dark vapor leaving the head, forming into a human figure:

Anyone interested in this topic of strange lights or strange mists seen at a deathbed should read my post here, which discusses several other cases of this type. 

Partial corroboration of some of the accounts above might be found in the account below, in which the paranormal researcher Hamlin Garland reports seeing a bluish smoky cloud arising from someone's chest, with the cloud forming into a kind of spirit hand:

On the next page Garland reports, "The spectral hand darted out, seized the goblet, lifted it and brought it to the psychic's lips."

Below is one of the strangest deathbed visions ever recorded. You can read the account here. I can summarize for those not wanting to squint to see the text. In the account a woman has a vision of her late father coming to carry away her sick mother. Then the vision ends. Immediately checking on the sick mother, the woman finds that she had died. 

Use the link here to read six other posts of mine on the topic of deathbed visions (you can read them all by continuing to press Older Posts at the bottom right). In the 2023 scientific paper here ("A Review of Clinical Signs and Symptoms of Imminent End-of-Life in Individuals With Advanced Illness"), we read this about End-of-Life Dreams and Visions (ELDVs):

"It is estimated that nearly 50-70% of dying people experience ELDVs (Dam, 2016; Mazzarino-Willett, 2010). While ELDVs often occur when death is imminent within days or hours before death, it is often non-specific and may also occur about weeks or months before death (Depner et al., 2020; Kerr et al., 2014; Levy et al., 2020; Nyblom et al., 2022; Santos et al., 2017)."

Below is a diagram showing how deathbed visions fit into a larger framework of related topics: