How Academia's Echo Chamber Problem Could Be Reduced

There is a gigantic problem in today's universities and colleges: the fact that the classes of such institutions often act like echo chambers that repeat endlessly the dubious dogmas and "old wives' tales" of academia, which are often groundless triumphal boasts.  Consider a typical lecture hall in a large university. We have many students gathered together in front of some professor, who maybe has a giant screen to make his dubious truth claims. Typically there will be no student comments allowed until a brief "Question Period" at the end of the lecture. In such a "question period" students are supposed to merely ask questions, not dispute claims that the professor has made. The lecture hall may look like this:

Dumb dogma taught at a college

In such an environment, there is no real opportunity for a student to challenge dubious claims of a professor. If the student stands up and says something of substantial length, he will probably be told to "keep it short" so that other students can ask their questions. Moreover, the student will fear that if he stands up and disputes the professor's teaching, that this will negatively impact his grade. 

We have in such an environment an "echo chamber" effect. The students are all being conditioned to think that good students accept whatever the professor teaches. A student may fear very much standing up and making some point or discussing some experience that may cause him to be ridiculed as an oddball or an outcast. Imagine the professor is claiming that people who report psychic experiences are all liars or mentally disturbed.  Will a student dare stand up and make a statement like this:

"No, professor, you are engaging in a shameful gaslighting of  witnesses of the paranormal. Many millions of respectable people are such witnesses, and they tend to be regular, good-thinking people just like me. I myself once saw the apparition of my dead father, before I learned that he died. And very many other people have had the same type of experience." 

Will a student dare stand and say such a thing, knowing that the professor will probably make some facial expression that serves as a "laugh, students, laugh" signal, leading to a cascade of ridicule and scorn? Probably not. In such an environment an echo chamber will be preserved. 

But I can imagine some ways in which the echo chambers in academia could be busted, so that real debate could occur. One way would be to have a two-screen system. Any professor giving a lecture could use the large screen shown on the left in the visual below. The large screen on the right would be reserved for student comments, which would be displayed as soon as the comments were typed and submitted. It would be an anonymous system, so that any student could type a comment without anyone knowing that he had sent the comment. Since all the students would be taking notes on their laptops or digital pad devices, no one could know which student had sent the comment. 

We would then have healthy situations like the one depicted below, in which the comment on the right is an anonymous comment by one of the students in the class. 

Academia's "echo chamber" problem could also be reduced by having all-electronic college textbooks, textbooks that allow any student to anonymously insert a comment at any point in the textbook, causing all other students to read his or her comment when they read from that page. So if page 233 of a textbook teaches some silly old legend of academia, and student John Smith recognizes why the page is making a dubious claim, John Smith will have the power to insert a comment into page 233 of that textbook, causing all of his fellow students to see his comment when they come to that page. 

Academia's "echo chamber" problem could also be reduced by encouraging online student newspapers that include anonymous essays. In such essays students could make negative commentaries on any college lectures they received that had shortcomings of credibility.  A typical essay might have a title such as "Why Professor Smith's Biology Lecture This Week Was Largely Unbelievable Nonsense." 

Another idea for reducing the "echo chamber" problem of academia would be to phase out or sharply reduce the moldy old custom of requiring students to attend professor lectures. The custom of educating students by having students assemble for lectures in front of some teacher is a custom that made sense before the invention of the printing press. In the age of the Internet and very powerful and affordable digital devices, the custom no longer makes much sense. Almost anything you want to learn you can learn by reading information online and by watching free online videos; so professors giving in-person lectures are no longer needed for most fields of study. Advances in AI do very much to make conventional classroom habits outdated and unnecessary.  It is becoming less and less necessary to even have professors to grade papers, as such routine work can be largely automated by AI systems. 

Having people listen to lectures is not even a very efficient way for above-average students to learn. For anyone with good reading skills, reading tends to be a faster way to learn things than listening. Reading also has the advantage that you can go back and re-read some passage, and vary your reading pace, reading more slowly the more important and hard-to-understand parts, and skimming over  "boilerplate" material of less importance. You can't do that while listening to a professor lecture. 

So in an age when people can educate themselves very well at low cost through independent study without going to college lectures, why do universities still teach students as they were taught thousands of years ago at Plato's Academy, by having a group of about 30 students gathered around taking notes while some expert talks? It is partially for profit reasons, to justify exorbitant tuition fees. A college or university may try to maintain the no-longer-true idea that you need to learn by listening to some highly paid professor, as a justification for some $40,000 annual tuition it charges. 

Another reason is that the old outdated tradition of having students listen to endless in-person lectures from authorities is one that helps with the ideological indoctrination that is a huge factor in the business of today's universities. We must always remember that colleges and universities are ideological enclaves, belief communities dedicated to the propagation of old belief traditions such as Darwinism and materialism. If you are someone trying to preserve some old belief tradition, the last thing you want is for people to study a topic by independent inquiry involving seeking out information and opinions equally from very many diverse sources. Instead, what you want is to preserve some old authoritarian teaching tradition that helps to enforce a conformist echo chamber, and that encourages a semi-mindless kneeling to authority. So we continue to have endless college and university lectures in biology and psychology that can be schematically depicted like this, with the "blah blah blah" parts representing cherry-picked facts or dubious boasts:

The authoritarian "mind-kneel to your master" dynamics in such a conformist lecture hall are exactly the same as in the conformist lecture halls of seminaries training preachers or priests, with the "suppression of dissent" effect and the "follow the herd" effect being ruthlessly effective. It's a crappy way for people to learn about topics such as biology and psychology, but great for enforcing old socially-constructed belief customs. 

An Astronomer's Unhistorical Description of the Search for Extraterrestrials

 An article at the site BigThink.com is entitled "David Kipping on how the search for alien life is gaining credibility." We have an interview with an astronomer who claims that the search for life on other planets is gaining credibility. Kipping fails to give a single decent reason backing up such a claim. The reality is that the credibility of astrobiologists may be dwindling, because some astrobiologists keep "crying wolf" announcing false alarms, by wrongly insinuating that they found signs of extraterrestrial life or extraterrestrial intelligence when no such signs were found. Examples of this are discussed here and here and here and here.  

We have this exchange in which the interviewer (Adam Frank) refers to the Fermi Paradox, the "where is everybody?" paradox that despite the existence of so many planets revolving around other stars, no extraterrestrial life has been found. The mention of SETI refers to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, which has been primarily conducted by using big radio telescopes to search for radio signals from civilizations on other planets.  

Frank: Let’s pivot to the Fermi paradox: If life is common, where is everybody?

Kipping: The key is to stick to ground truths. We haven’t detected technosignatures, but SETI has been woefully underfunded and has only scratched a tiny fraction of the sky. So we can’t conclude much yet.

SETI has been woefully underfunded? SETI has "only scratched a tiny fraction of the sky"? These statements are very false. 

The fact is that by now SETI has been very well-funded. The fact is that SETI searches for radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations have scanned the sky so thoroughly that every portion of the sky has been searched multiple times. Below are some of the SETI searches that have occurred over the past 65 years (some of the observation time figures are taken from the source here):

• The SERENDIP I project, which from 1979 to 1982 surveyed a large portion of the sky, the portion depicted in Figure 4 of the paper here, a project which a Sky and Telescope article tells us surveyed "many billions of Milky Way stars."

• The Southern SERENDIP project lasting 1998 and 2005, which surveyed for some 60,000 hours a large portion of the sky, the portion depicted in Figure 2 of the paper here.

• The SERENDIP II project from 1986 to 1988, involving some 17,000 hours of observations. 

• The All-Sky Search at Ohio State University from 1989 to 1996 (Childers, Dixon and Bolinger), involving 60,000 hours of observations, 

• The Astropulse and Fly's Eye SETI projects surveying a significant portion of the sky, the portion depicted in Figure 2 of the paper here. 

• The SETI@Home project, which according to the source here covered 20% of the full celestial sphere, and 67% of the sky area observable from the Arecibo observatory. 

• The Harvard BETA all-sky SETI survey discussed here, which operated continuously for more than four years (1995-1999), scanning the whole part of the sky observable from Massachusetts, USA, and doing 35,000 hours of observations. 

• Years of SETI searches using the Allen Telescope Array, involving 12 hours a day of SETI searches, 7 days a week, for years (such as 2007 to 2010), resulting in 95,000 hours of observations (discussed here). 

• An optical search for extraterrestrial intelligence, searching 577 nearby stars that might have habitable planets, looking for laser signals.

• All of the optical searches for extraterrestrial intelligence listed on the three pages you can view here, including three searches each involving more than 7000 hours of telescope time, and one search involving 200,000 objects and other searches involving thousands of stars. 

• The two-year southern sky SETI search discussed here, which observed for 9000 hours and "covered the sky almost two times."  

• The five-year META SETI project discussed here, which between 1988 and 1993 spent about 80,000 hours of telescope time searching for extraterrestrials. 

• A META II SETI project between 1990 and 2010, involving 9000 hours of observations of the southern sky.

• All of the radio telescopes searches listed on the seven pages of search results you can review at the link here, including a Dixon, Ehman and Raub search from 1973 to 1986 involving 100,000 hours of telescope time, 

• A failed search of 10 million stars using what in 2009 was the latest and greatest technology.

• A SERENDIP III project from 1992 to 1997, involving 40,000 hours of observations, and surveying 30% of the sky. 

• Extensive SETI searches carried out by the 500-meter FAST radio telescope in China. 

• The ASTROPULSE project discussed here, involving 21,000 hours of observations from 2006 to 2010. 

• The SETI-Italia project discussed here, involving 30,000 hours of observation from 2006 to 2010.

• The Breakthrough Listen project described here, which began in 2015, and has run for 10 years with 100 million dollars in funding, involving thousands of hours each year of dedicated SETI searching, on two of the world's largest radio telescopes.

• A failed search of 1300 galaxies, reported in 2024, using low frequencies and the  Murchison Widefield Array (MWA).

So what on Earth was Kipping doing claiming that "SETI has been woefully underfunded and has only scratched a tiny fraction of the sky"? Let us be charitable, and not say Kipping was lying. We'll just speculate that maybe he had a fleeting case of what we may call "astrophysical amnesia," and that he forgot very badly about the history of SETI searches for extraterrestrials. 

Maybe severe frustration caused a recall problem

Astrobiologists will not gain credibility when they misspeak so very badly about the history of SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. And astrobiologists will not gain credibility by repeatedly  "crying wolf," and doing thing such as trying to get people excited about unimpressive rock results on a planet such as Mars where amino acids (the building components of the building components of one-celled life) were never even discovered. 

It's not rare for scientists to speak as if they had amnesia about previous research efforts. Scientists routinely speak as if they had the most severe retrograde amnesia regarding research efforts in parapsychology. Such efforts searching for evidence of paranormal phenomena have been producing positive results for 200 years, with serious research on the paranormal stretching back all the way to the 1825-1831 commission of the French Royal Academy of Science, which found resoundingly in favor of the reality of clairvoyance, a result replicated by innumerable later observations of physicians and professors in the 19th century and early 20th  century.  Innumerable papers and books written by distinguished doctors and scientists have thoroughly documented the reality of paranormal phenomena. Extremely convincing experiments carried out by university professors have well-proven the reality of things such as telepathy and ESP, as discussed here, here and here.  But a large fraction of scientists seem to have a severe retrograde amnesia about such research. For a typical scientist of this type, it is as if every word he heard about research results on this topic simply went in one of his ears and out the other. 

Astronomers very often make very bad misstatements when talking about extraterrestrial life, statements as false as the statement I recently read in which a well-known and frequently misspeaking astronomy figure claimed that everyone who has studied the topic of extraterrestrial life agrees that extraterrestrials exist. To the contrary, among those who have deeply studied the vast amount of organization and functional information needed for even the simplest life and the stratospheric additional level of organization and fine-tuned information-rich anatomy and biochemistry engineering needed to produce large mobile organisms, very many have concluded that we should not expect extraterrestrials to have arisen by unguided processes anywhere else in the observable universe. Again and again we hear astronomers making senseless insinuations that the question of whether intelligent extraterrestrials exist all boils down to the simple matter of how many solar systems there are. That is a hugely ignorant type of thing to insinuate, as that question involves very many other extremely deep and complex matters, such as the accidentally unachievable component interdependence within organisms as complex as human bodies, whether there is a superhuman intellect working in the universe to overcome the seemingly insurmountable odds against the accidental appearance of a species such as ours, and the very deep topic of whether any possible arrangement of matter in a brain can explain the appearance of creatures with the type of mental capabilities that humans have (capabilities far richer than just memory, intelligence and creativity). The latter topic is one of oceanic depth, and the typical astronomer barely even wades his feet in that ocean. 

Dreams, Visions or Premonitions That Seemed to Foretell a Death

 In the series of posts below, I discussed dreams, visions or mysterious voices that seemed to foretell a death or disaster:

When Dreams or Visions Foretell a Death

More Dreams or Visions That Seemed to Foretell a Death

Still More Dreams or Visions That Seemed to Foretell a Death

Still More Dreams, Visions or Voices That Seemed to Foretell a Death

Even More Dreams and Visions That Seemed to Foretell a Death

Some More Dreams or Visions That Seemed to Foretell a Death or Disaster

When the Future Whispers to the Present

When Dreams or Premonitions Seem to Act Prophetically

Dreams, Visions or Premonitions That Seemed to Correctly Predict a Death

Sometimes Dreams, Visions or Premonitions Seem to Foretell a Death

Let us look at some more examples of this type.

The article below tells of a man who seemed to have a dream or premonition that correctly foretold both the time and exact manner of his improbable death:

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn91052314/1912-03-21/ed-1/seq-1/

In the account below (which you can read here) we have a description of a person who predicted the death of Queen Victoria about five months before her death on January 22, 1901, at a time when the Queen was expected to live for additional years.

Below is a newspaper account of an old man who seemed to have had uncannily accurate premonitions about how two strangers would die:

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn94052989/1893-09-26/ed-1/seq-6/

Below we have an account of a man who seemed to have had a premonition that he would soon die, on the day he died in a bus crash:

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045211/1920-08-25/ed-1/seq-2/#

We have a newspaper account below of a soldier who seemed to have had a premonition of his own unexpected death, very shortly before that death occurred:

You can read the full account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn94056446/1904-05-20/ed-1/seq-19/

You can read an almost identical account in the "Premonitions of Death" article below:

You can read the article here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85025620/1894-09-13/ed-1/seq-7/

At the link above we read an old soldier say, "I could not tell you how many times I have seen my comrades foretell their death." He tells of a "Boss" McKellar who foretold his own death in a battle. We read of a John Dunbar who told his fellow soldiers that this would be his last night on Earth, and that he would be "shot tomorrow sure." He was killed in battle the next day. The old soldier says this:

"To me it was a most solemn moment when I heard a man say he was going to be killed. It invariably turned out that way." 

Below is another case of a dream foretelling a death:

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84038095/1912-01-10/ed-1/seq-12/

On the page below we have a claim that on the night before dying in an elevator accident, a woman had a dream of herself in a coffin:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86063952/1919-12-16/ed-1/seq-2/

On the page below we have the sad story of a mother who had a dream of her son drowning.  The mother wrote to the son asking him not to go fishing. The son ignored the warning, and apparently died by drowning on the same week. 

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn89066489/1904-05-26/ed-1/seq-6/

Here is another case of a dreamed that seemed to foretell a death:

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn92051126/1905-02-22/ed-1/seq-9/

Below are two more cases of this type:

You can read the account here:

https://digitalcollections.lib.umanitoba.ca/islandora/object/uofm%3A2956895

This week I had a vivid dream of disastrous events. High up in some tall tower, I could see far away three raging fires, and huge columns of black smoke rising up from these distant fires. Then in the dream there was a huge shower of rocks that I could see from the tower windows, rocks falling upon the building I was in and the surrounding area, rocks falling from the sky. Two of my dream images are roughly depicted in the visuals below. I hope the dream does not come true. 

Visual Fakery Is a Pillar of Darwinist Propaganda

 Misleading and deceptive imagery has long been a staple of Darwinist propaganda. In my Google science news feed on the day that I am writing this post auto-scheduled for later publication, I see a prominent example. We have a story in the Google science news feed, with a headline of "Ancient fossil discovery in Ethiopia rewrites human origins." When we click on the story, we get a press release that looks like this at the top:

Wow, looks like an impressive fossil find, does it not? But what is going on here is fakery. No one discovered any such fossil as the fossil shown. When we scroll down, we read in the fine print that all that was discovered were some teeth. 

So where did the image come from? Not one in five readers will realize the answer to that question.  The image came from a site called Shutterstock, which is a commercial site that sells stock images. The images at Shutterstock are a combination of real photos and artwork. Using the reverse image search at www.tineye.com, I was able to find how the image originated. As you can see using the link here, it is an image uploaded to Shutterstock in 2010 by Derek R. Audette. Derek is an artist, and he has uploaded 600+ images to the the stock image site Shutterstock. The images seem to be his own artistic creations. The Shutterstock site lists Derek as a ""Photographer, Illustrator / Vector Artist." Using 3D modeling programs like the one depicted below, a vector artist can create realistic-looking images of things that never actually existed.

Derek committed no fakery or fraud by uploading his artistic depiction of a fossil in 2010, having no idea how it would be used. But it seems someone at ScienceDaily.com is guilty of visual deceit by adorning this press release with an image that looks like an actual fossil but is not an actual fossil, being purely an artistic creation. 

Scrolling down further in the Science Daily press release, we get the truth. Nothing like a fossil skull was discovered. All that was discovered were some teeth. A look at the visuals in the corresponding scientific paper show the meager results, nothing better than what is shown below:

The paper's attempts to suggest that such teeth shed any light on human evolution is laughable. A few teeth don't tell us anything about human origins.  You cannot reliably identify some pre-human species from remains that are mere teeth. And for reasons I will discuss later in this post, the paper's attempts to date the teeth are not even reliable.

We have various degrees of misleading language and/or misrepresentation occurring here:

(1) A scientific paper has in its abstract referred to a discovery of "fossils" rather than stating that all that were discovered were teeth, as if it was trying to create the impression something much larger than mere teeth was discovered. 

(2) An Arizona State University press release has an extremely misleading title "ASU scientists uncover new fossils — and a new species of ancient human ancestor." All that is mentioned is the discovery of a few teeth, something that certainly does not entitle anyone to claim the discovery of "a new species of ancient human ancestor."  And it is misleading to be referring to mere teeth as "fossils" rather than using the term "teeth." An honest title for the press release would have been "ASU scientists uncover some old teeth, and speculate they are from a new species of ancient human ancestor."

(3) A Science Daily press release has repeated word-for-word the Arizona State University press release, but has gone further down the path of deceit by including a single image with the press release, an image that is an old artistic depiction from 2010, an image looking like a real skull, one that will give 90% of the casual readers of the press release the false idea that a full skull was discovered. This is visual fakery. All that was discovered were a few teeth. No one ever discovered a skull like the skull that is depicted in the Science Daily press release image. 

Fake images of fossils are easy to create using 3D modeling software. First you create or upload what is called a wireframe model, which consists of a connected set of points in three-dimensional space, each with its own X, Y and Z coordinate. The interface of the software may allow you to drag and drop particular three-dimensional points that are part of the model. You can then apply what are called textures to particular surfaces on the model, which gives them a color or look. You can then choose to perform what is called rendering, to produce a realistic looking image like the one shown below. Creating an image of a fossil that never existed is even easier than creating an image of a type of car that never existed. 

Nowadays it is even easier to create fake images of fossils, by using AI image generators such as the ImageFX product of Google. Just type in a text prompt such as "fossil of pre-human skull" and you will get output in seconds. 

At the page here we have another example of a "science news" story using visual fakery. We have a story about some fossil find, and the story has an impressive-looking visual that shows something that looks maybe like something halfway between a man and an ape. It looks like a photograph of a complete skull. But the image does not correspond to anything ever discovered. A reverse image search shows that the image is another example of photorealistic artwork uploaded to Shutterstock, some artwork created by user Busker909. The user's profile picture is a picture of a cat. It seems that nowadays stories about human evolution are often using not actual photos of fossils ever discovered, but mere photorealistic artwork got from the Shutterstock site, or maybe artwork created by AI image generators. 

At the page here, we have another example of a "science news" story using visual fakery. It is a story that includes a large image identified as "the most complete skull of an Homo heidelbergensis ever found."  There is a watermark in the image identifying the source as WH_Pics. A reverse image search shows that the image is the one here, an image from the Shutterstock site. The image was uploaded by the anonymous source WH_Pics.  This anonymous source gave the image a tag claiming that it is "the most complete skull of an Homo heidelbergensis ever found."  But since this anonymous source has no credibility, we should very much doubt that the image is a photograph of any such thing. In all likelihood it a photorealistic piece of artwork, which has been give a tag designed to increase royalties from its use.  A Smithsonian Institute page on fossils of Homo heidelbergensis shows no fossil matching this Shutterstock image. 

Certain physically impressive buildings such as natural history museums seem like cathedrals of Darwinism. One of the shameful practices long going on at natural history museums has been to display  misleading fossil exhibits that are largely or entirely fake.  An article tells us about some of the fakery going on in natural history museums:

" 'Back in the day —  and when I say that, I mean as far back as the 1800s — museums originally used plaster of paris,' Storrs says. 'It was about 40 years ago that resins came into wider use.'  For smaller bones and casts for exhibits within the museum —  plants or fish, for example —  museum staff use urethane foams to cast and sculpt the replicas themselves, says Dave Might, exhibits coordinator/artist at the Cincinnati Museum Center...Alternatively, some entire skeletons can be purchased 'off-the-shelf' from RCI. 'For example, take Tyrannosaurus rexes,' Fair says. 'There are only about 29 or so skeletons in the world, and that’s not nearly enough for all of the museums and theme parks that want one. So we produce 100% composite T. rexes.' ”

Here the "100% composite" means "100% fake." We read in the same article about "a fiberglass/polyester Allosaurus on display at the American Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C." That's a fake. On a page of the American Museum of Natural History we read "Eighty-five percent of specimens are actual fossils, as opposed to casts or reproductions." That means at least 15% of the fossils displayed are fake. We can reasonably suspect that much more than 15% of the fossils can be called fake or semi-fake.  The semi-fake fossils would be those consisting of mixtures of bones and artificial material such as plaster of Paris, fiberglass, resin or a mixture of baking soda and superglue. A page of the American Museum of Natural History tells us its displayed T. Rex fossil "is about 45 percent real fossils."  The page makes this confession hard to discover. To get to this confession, you have to click on all of the little + icons next to a picture of the T. Rex.  I would imagine that 99% of the visitors to the museum never learn that most of its T. Rex exhibit is fake.  

It is very rare for scientists to discover a complete fossil skeleton or skull. What they most often find are fragments. Then, very frequently, bone fragments are mixed with artificial filler material that might be made by mixing superglue and baking soda. The results are passed off as a single fossil, although this can be extremely misleading.  We don't know whether an organism ever actually had bone material corresponding to the filler material. And very often we also don't know whether the fragments came from a single organism, or were fragments from multiple organisms living in different times, possibly organisms from different species. We often don't know whether the resulting fossil display corresponds to the skeleton or skull of some organism that ever lived. This kind of funny business is a very big deal whenever the concocted "composite" displays are used to try to back up claims of evolutionary progressions that have never been well-established. Fakes and partial fakes should not be part of the evidence cited or displayed to back up such claims. 

A long recent article at www.undark.org ("Fossils Are Shaped by People. Does That Matter?" by Asher Elbein) is a great piece of "pull back the Wizard's curtain" journalism, a shocking expose of the shenanigans going on with the fossil exhibits of natural history museums. The subtitle tells us "Preparing a fossil is often more of an art than a science." We read about some of the fraud and fakery that is going on, although the language is generously chosen so that such words are not directly used. We read this about what started to go on in the late nineteenth century:

"The culture of scientific achievement soon merged with one of showmanship and display — goals that coexisted uneasily. The solution, Rieppel said, was to mount genuine bones liberally (but increasingly quietly) reconstructed with plaster, creating 'awe inspiring, eye-catching sculptures that pretended not to be sculptures at all.' "

That makes it sounds like plaster was secretly being used, to fool people into thinking full fossils from a single organism had been discovered.  Later we read about all the guesswork and gluing that is going on when someone called a "fossil preparator" gets some bones-in-a-rock or box of bones, and hopes to produce a compelling fossil exhibit:

"Fossils sometimes arrive in a broken or jumbled state, often with hidden facets waiting to be discovered. Uncovering them requires painstakingly isolating fossil from stone, using fine tools such as dental picks and pneumatic chisels, and alternating applications of solvent and adhesives. At every step, preparators must make choices. Some are basic: How much rock should be removed? Others are trickier: If the preparator decides one piece of bone belongs with another, do they attach it, and if so, with what glue? Should incomplete bones be rebuilt with a best guess?"

We are told that most of these fossil exhibit preparators are not scientists, and that a "wide range of people do this work, including volunteers, professional freelancers, institutional employees, and commercial contractors." No doubt, a large fraction of the fossil exhibits involve wild guesses by people who are not scientists, but were mainly hoping to make a compelling exhibit.  Did such people usually follow a rule of "do not glue bones together unless you think  they probably came from the same species, or the same organism?" Very probably not.  We are told, "By the early 20th century, for example, preparators — often under the direction of a principal investigator — physically manipulated bone surfaces and added speculative plaster to fill out the suspected shapes of incomplete limbs and skulls, which influenced interpretations of dinosaurs like Dilophosaurus." 

We are told, "Very occasionally, independent commercial preparators have intentionally created fake or exaggerated remains to sell."  Actually, the faking of fossils seems to be a kind of cottage industry in certain foreign lands, so that "very occasionally" might reasonably be replaced with "quite often." A Scientific American article in entitled "How Fake Fossils Pervert Paleontology." The subtitle is "A nebulous trade in forged and illegal fossils is an ever-growing headache for paleontologists." We hear about poor people in distant lands who first heard that you can get lots of cash by finding a good fossil, and who then started to make fake fossils in hopes of getting lots of money

We can imagine here what typically goes on. Bone fragments may be dug up from various spots at a location, perhaps with some fragments gathered from 30 meters or 50 meters away from others. The fragments are then boxed up and sent to a fossil preparator, along with a drawing of the desired output. The problem is that the fragments may be from different organisms, so the end result fossil exhibit may profoundly mislead us, creating a skeleton or skull unlike any that ever existed. The famous "Lucy" image (of bones arranged as if they belonged to one organism) is one of paleontology's most famous images.  There is a large chance the bones consist of bones from multiple species, for reasons discussed here. 

We read this about fossil exhibits:

"Many of these are prepared by commercial contractors like Triebold Paleontology. They’re often casts that contain no real bone. They represent a specific interpretation of incomplete fossils, available for a price: Triebold has provided reconstructed casts of Appalachiosaurus montgomeriensis— an east-coast relative of Tyrannosaurus rex — to two separate southeastern museums, with arms of varying sizes based on different scientists’ interpretation of the original limited material."

It seems natural history museums are paying huge sums for these shady exhibits, and turning a blind eye to all the fakery and guesswork. We read this:

"Such prices are largely based on the notion that the lucky winner is receiving a mostly real skeleton, Brown noted, and although that’s sometimes true, other times they’re really receiving something akin to a reproduction of the Mona Lisa with a few scraps of the original painting stitched in. A person might think they’re buying a dinosaur for millions, he said, 'but mostly what you bought is plastic.' ” 

We are told that these fossil preparators that make the fossil exhibits for museums "tend to have broader backgrounds, with no standard license, training, or methods." So why are we putting their gluing plaster-in-the-gaps guesswork inside buildings called science museums?

US taxpayer funds are still being used to support the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, one guilty of displaying fossil exhibits produced by the unreliable practices describes above.  The David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins in that museum is filled with speculative artistic representations of previous species, containing heads and shoulders looking like wax museum creations. A kind of "glorious path to whiteness" is depicted. We do not know that any of the organisms displayed by such artwork actually looked how they are depicted. These artworks were created by artist John Gurche, who is not a scientist. A web page on the site of the  Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History has a page calling these "Reconstructions of Early Humans." The art works depict organisms that are mostly not humans. The hallmark characteristic of humans is the use of speech and the use of symbols.  The word "human" should never be used to describe some species that has never been shown to have used speech or symbols.  The use of "human" or "early human" to refer to species that probably did not use speech or symbols (and were therefore not actually human) is one of the most misleading tactics of Darwinist propaganda. Web pages of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History contain other examples of the most misleading claims of Darwinist propaganda, but I will have to leave a discussion of that for a separate post. 

Then there is the practice of creating misleading "replicas" of fossils, recreations that are not exactly the same as the original. The claimed "replica" may have features that are exaggerated to help sell some evolutionary story. I will give an example. At left of the photo pair below we see a photo of what is called the Kabwe 1 fossil, also called the Broken Hill fossil, because it was found at a Broken Hill mine in Northern Rhodesia. It is one of the earliest photos of the fossil, from the front page of the November 19, 1921 edition of the London Illustrated News, an edition you can read here.  At right of the photo pair below is a visual that is found at the wikipedia.org article on this fossil. It is a claimed "replica" of the fossil shown at left, a "replica" found at a German natural history museum. But as you can see, it is not a very close match. Certain features have been exaggerated, such as the eyebrow ridges, which look much bigger in the claimed "replica." And also the forehead in the claimed "replica" looks much more sloped than in the original fossil. 

This is fakery. Creating something you call a "replica" which looks very different from the original is deception.

In the Reuters story here, we have a photo of a professor holding something that is identified in the caption as the Broken Hill skull. But what we see looks to me more like the distorted "replica" seen above at right, not like what we see in the original 1921 photo at left, marked "original fossil" in the photo above. The same Reuters story tells us that although scientists long asserted the skull was 500,000 years old, scientists have changed their estimate to be about 300,000 years old, and that "this indicates the species represented by the skull was unlikely to have been a direct ancestor of Homo sapiens as some had thought."

Visual fakery occurs not just in natural history museums, but abundantly in the books, web pages and magazines advancing Darwinist propaganda. This can occur in hundreds of different ways. An example involves the famous so-called skeleton of Lucy. Bone fragments were gathered up over a rather large area not specified in the scientific paper reporting the find. The bone fragments of the so-called Lucy skeleton have been arranged as if they were part of a single skeleton. But the fragments were not found in an area the size of a single skeleton. The paper fails to specify how large the gathering area was. A Google AI search says that one source says the gathering area was about 160 square feet, but that claim is not made in the paper, and I would imagine it is a severe underestimation of the gathering area. We do not know whether the fragments were all found at the same depth. A book describing the find says the fragments were the gathering of three weeks by a team of people (pages 17-18), which implies that they were scattered across a rather wide area, at different depths. 

Below is the image from the paper:

The image above in the scientific paper is a very misleading one, because the fragments were not gathered from any positions corresponding to the positions shown in the visual. The only honest and scientific way to visually present information on these fragments is to have a photo of a gathering area, and to have indications of which fragments were found in which parts of such an area, and at what depths the fragments were found. It is deceptive to gather up fragments found over an area of 160 square feet or larger, at different soil depths, and to place such fragments in a flat area of only 3 square feet, suggesting they were all found closely together. We do not know whether the fragments shown above all belonged to the same individual. They may be fragments from different individuals and different species. 

Similar shady business is going on in the paleontology study here. Tiny bone fragments much smaller than a finger were gathered up over an area of 100 square meters, with the fragments then arranged into a drawn shape of hands, to suggest they are from the hands of some member of an extinct species. There is no basis for confidence these fragments are from the same individual, or even the same species. 

In reference to the press release discussed at the top of this post, I may note that the Arizona State University press release describes a chain of reasoning that is extremely dubious. We read this:

"How do scientists know these fossil teeth are millions of years old?

Volcanoes.

The Afar region is still an active rifting environment. There were a lot of volcanoes and tectonic activity, and when these volcanoes erupted ash, the ash contained crystals called feldspars that allow the scientists to date them, explained Christopher Campisano, a geologist at ASU. 

'We can date the eruptions that were happening on the landscape when they're deposited,'  said Campisano, a research scientist at the Institute of Human Origins and associate professor at the School of Human Evolution and Social Change.

“And we know that these fossils are interbed between those eruptions, so we can date units above and below the fossils. We are dating the volcanic ash of the eruptions that were happening while they were on the landscape."

The chain of reasoning here is extremely dubious. No reliable method is discussed. Trying to estimate when volcanic ash was deposited is guesswork. The technique described is an example of what is called biostratigraphy, which is much less reliable as a dating method than radiometric dating. "The volcanoes told us" is not a very reliable sounding answer to the question "How do you know how old these teeth are."  And if you were to reliably date some old teeth, that would not allow you to infer that you had discovered some new species. 

It is interesting that Darwinism is based on an idea that undermines the credibility of most attempts to infer the ancestry of species from fossils. Darwinism is based on the idea that there occur dramatic random variations in some member of a species, in some members of the population of a species. So, for example, under Darwinist accounts member # 233,023 of a population of 500,000 members of a species might be born looking much different from the average member of that species. But let us imagine you find something like a tooth that looks a little different from known teeth, or a skull forehead that looks a little different from the foreheads of known species. Under the Darwinist assumption that there can occur dramatic random variations in some members of the population of a species, it seems that you would  never be entitled to assume that some oddball fossil was evidence of a transitional species.  Instead, under Darwinist assumptions such a fossil might be merely evidence of a dramatic random variation in some member of the population of a species.  

You can't have it both ways. Either:

(1) The members of a species all look almost exactly the same, as if they all arose following some blueprint for that species, or 

(2) There can be born in some species oddball members looking much different from the average appearance of members of such species. 

Idea (2) is useful for the person trying to explain the idea of so-called natural selection. But if idea (2) is true, then a fossil that looks like a fossil of Species X but significantly different can never be cited as evidence of a transition from Species X to some other species. For under Idea (2) a simpler explanation would simply be a random variation of a member of Species X, an oddball outlier in Species X.  So, for example, if you had a fossil with a sloping forehead halfway between the slope of an ape's forehead and the slope of a man's forehead, that would be best explained as an oddball outlier in the population of an ape or an oddball outlier in the population of humans, not as some transitional species between an ape and a human species. 

A neglected issue is the issue of pressure distortions of fossils. Fossils are often found at deep depths where the bones may have been subjected to great physical pressure over many thousands of years. We have no idea of what distortions in bones such physical pressure may produce over a span of many thousands of years. But such a factor is typically ignored, and an assumption is typically made that some species existed with a skull matching the appearance of the found fragments. Something looking like a fragment of a sloped forehead may be a clue that  some species with a sloped forehead existed. Or maybe that species had no such sloped forehead, and the slope appearance in the bone came from the thousands of years of pressure distortion. 

The photo below (from the scientific paper here) shows an example of the type of highly speculative business that paleontologists often engage in. We see some image that looks like a skull. The authors have done a "reconstruction" which is mostly speculative. Particular bone fragments have been fitted to a rather arbitrarily chosen skull shape (plastic or computer-generated), to try and suggest they are fragments of a skull with the shown shape.  But we can have little confidence that such fragments ever belonged to a skull with such a shape. The fragments could be from  different skeletons of different species. We have no idea whether the bone fragments belonged to any species with a forehead like the forehead shown or eyes like the eyes shown. 

I can state some principles you should follow when analyzing claims about fossils:

• Treat with suspicion all objects described as "replicas" of some other fossil, as such objects may not match the original, and may be distorted to help serve some narrative end or ideological purpose. 
• Treat with great suspicion all objects or visuals described as "reconstructions," as such objects or visuals may be mostly speculative guesswork, such as the "reconstruction" in the photo directly above. 
• Recognize that most "looking like a fossil" objects identified as coming from stock photo sources such as Shutterstock are probably 3D vector artwork not actually matching any fossil ever found.
• Disregard any "looking like a fossil" image that fails to list a source and fails to correspond to a reputable-sounding account of how such a fossil was found. 
• Do not trust the authenticity of an object merely because some natural history museum is listed as it source, given how much fakery and misleading "reconstruction" work (involving plaster, fiberglass, putty and superglue) has been going on at such museums. 
• If a reputable-sounding account of how such a fossil seems to be found, do not yet trust the account unless it is or can be traced back to an original and credible account given by the fossil discoverer, explaining exactly how the fossil was found. 
• Treat with great suspicion all accounts in which fragments are gathered up from an area larger than the claimed original organism, with your suspicion being proportional to the size of the gathering area (because in such cases we do not know the fragments are all from the same individual or even the same species). 
• Do not assume that some claimed skull corresponds to a typical skull shape of some species that existed long ago, because the skull could have been greatly distorted by thousands of years of geological pressure, and because the individual might have been one of those random variations that Darwinists so often appeal to, rather than a typical member of his own species. 
• Treat with great suspicion most estimates of the age of some fossil, as such estimates are often guesswork as unreliable as the volcano reasoning discussed above, and estimates that may be overthrown by later analysis (as in the case of Broken Hill fossil discussed above, where the dating changed from 500,000 years old to about 300,000 years old). 
• Realize that very many of the objects displayed in natural history museums are purely artificial constructions made by someone guessing about what a fossil of some imagined species would have looked like. 
• Recognize that advances in photorealistic 3D modeling and artificial intelligence image generation tools (such as Photoshop and ImageFX) make it particularly easy these days to create fake images of fossils, and that many press releases and "science news" articles are using such fake images (often bought from stock image houses such as Shutterstock). 
• Recognize that the faking of fossils is a lucrative "cottage industry" in some parts of the world, which casts doubt on the credibility of accounts of fossil finds in distant lands given by persons of unknown trustworthiness. 
• Realize that paleontologists are typically not objective unbiased scientists, but are members of a belief community passionately devoted to pushing particular narratives about the origin of species, rather like some person who analyzes crime scene bones while having an intense interest in proving some particular narrative, such as a claim of murder. 
• Realize also that paleontologists are often motivated by career advancement interests and desire for fame and self-glorification, factors that can severely affect their objectivity when analyzing hard-to-interpret and hard-to-age bone fragments, leading them to favor the most interesting-sounding claims and speculations about such bone fragments rather than the most well-justified claims. 

Postscript: Another day, another fake image used in a Darwinist article. This time it is the frequently misinforming IFLScience site, with an article having a headline senselessly claiming "4.4-Million-Year-Old Ankle Bone Suggests Humans Evolved From African Ape-Like Ancestor," as if a mere ankle bone could suggest such an idea. At the top of the article is a big image of what looks like a photo of some kind of skull of an ape-like organism. It seems to be not an actual photo of a fossil, but a Shutterstock image from anonymous user "Svet foto."  We have a Shutterstock image tag of "Ardipithecus ramidus is a species of australopithecine from the Afar region of Early Pliocene Ethiopia 4.4 million years ago." Since no claim is made that the image is a photo of an actual fossil, we can assume it is another piece of photorealistic artwork created by vector illustration software as described above (in other words, a fake).