One of the biggest fallacies in people's thinking about scientists is that scientists are people who "know all that science stuff." The different topics of science require very deep study to know well, and scientists these days tend to be specialists who concentrate their knowledge in a single field of study. A scientist very knowledgeable about physics may know little about biology, and vice versa. A scientist very knowledgeable about chemistry may know very little about biology, and vice versa. A scientist very knowledgeable about earth science may know little about psychology, and vice versa.
Keeping these limitations in mind, we should be very suspicious whenever we read an astronomer estimating the probability of extraterrestrial civilizations existing close enough for us to have any chance of us communicating with them. Properly estimating such a thing requires deep knowledge in very many subjects. But the typical astronomer may lack deep knowledge about most of those topics.
Adam Frank is an example of an astronomer who lectures us on the likelihood that intelligent life is common in the universe, but who sometimes sounds like someone who is a poor scholar of life and minds. In the article here, Frank makes this statement:
"So, in the end, there may be nothing mysterious about when we appeared on Earth. As the planet and the biosphere co-evolved, a series of 'windows' opened for different kinds of evolutionary adaptations. Humans for example need high levels of oxygen for our big brains. That means we could not have appeared 3, billion, two billion, or even 1 billion years ago. There simply was not enough oxygen in the air for us to evolve into existence. Once that window did open up, about half a billion years ago, the ball got rolling. And here we are."
This sounds like the kind of thing that would be written by someone who was not a good scholar of the vast levels of fine-tuned functional complexity in human bodies, not a good scholar of the many levels of hierarchical organization in a human body, not a good scholar of the innumerable molecular machines and innumerable interdependent marvels-of-engineering components in the human body, and not a good scholar of the innumerable problems in explaining human minds and their very many capabilities, particularly given all of the physical shortfalls of human brains which suggest that brains cannot be the source of the human mind. Frank's "just get oxygen and start the ball rolling" talk is the kind of pablum drivel we get from Darwinists who are so frequently very guilty of requirements underestimation. The co-founder of the theory of evolution (Alfred Russel Wallace) explained at length in an essay why so-called natural selection is not an adequate explanation for the human mind. The reasons he gave are only a very small fraction of the reasons why Darwinian explanations are hopelessly inadequate to explain the origin of the human race, some of which are explained here and here and here.
Not a good answer
In his article Frank is promoting a 17-page paper that is a poor piece of reasoning that gives us the impression that its authors are poor scholars of life and mind. We have this very false statement in the paper:
"The nature of the singularity of human intelligence is also very unclear. As discussed above, anthropologists struggle to find any single trait that can explain modern humans’ superlative capacity for technology that is unique to humans. Nearly all individual aspects of modern humans that seem necessary to our clearly special technological capabilities—tool use, creativity, abstraction, sense of self, social behaviors, transmission of learned behavior across generations, and communication—clearly exist in other lineages."
This is more of the "apes are pretty much just like us" nonsense that started when Charles Darwin told the big lie that "there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties." This extremely glaring falsehood was told by Darwin on page 99 of The Descent of Man. It is a very obvious fact of human experience that there are the most gigantic fundamental differences between the mental faculties of man and other higher mammals. Whenever anyone claims differently, he always sound like a very poor scholar of human minds. And when the authors of the paper state "the basis for seeing 'human intelligence' as a 'hard step' is uncertain," they sure sound like poor scholars of the human mind.
What the paper discusses is whether there were "hard steps" that needed to be climbed in order for you to end up with creatures such as humans. It is misleading to be using the term "steps" to refer to the giant leaps in organization needed to get to something like a human. The term "step" implies something simple. The things referred to as "hard steps" were more like miracles of organization and giant leaps of functional innovation. What is being referred to are things such as these:
(1) The origin of the first self-reproducing prokaryotic cells.
(2) The origin of the first self-reproducing eukaryotic cells, vastly more organized the prokaryotic cells.
(3) The origin of the multicellular organisms that were large visible organisms.
(4) The origin of land-dwelling organisms.
(5) The origin of sexual reproduction, something completely different from non-sexual reproduction.
(6) The origin of organisms capable of locomotion on land and the manipulation of tools by the use of limbs such as arms and legs.
(7) The origin of intelligent organisms with minds as good as humans.
(8) The appearance of civilized, city-building, language-using organisms.
Such progressions should not be called "steps" but huge revolutions of functionality or gigantic innovation breakthroughs. The purpose of the paper Frank is promoting is to persuade us that such revolutions of functionality were not "hard steps." The paper completely fails to do that.
Of supreme importance to the topic being discussed by the paper is the difficulty of explaining the origin of protein molecules, which are very complex inventions requiring hundreds or thousands of well-arranged parts, with there being a fine-tuning requirement as great as the fine-tuning that must go on for hundreds or thousands of characters to produce a useful, well-spelled paragraph. The human body has 20,000+ types of protein molecules, each its own separate complex invention. The 17-page paper makes no relevant mentions of protein molecules, failing to ever mention their complexity. The paper fails to ever mention protein complexes. The paper also has no description of the complexity of cells like in the human body, and no description of the complexity of the simplest cells. Nowhere in the paper do the authors sound like they are deep, thorough scholars of biological complexity and human minds.
For other examples of physicists and astronomers who sounded like poor scholars of life and mind, see my posts here and here and here. One of the astronomers was the late Carl Sagan, who made many a misstatement when talking about biology.
Sagan's 1963 book Intelligent Life in the Universe was a book in which Sagan often sounded like a poor scholar of life and minds. I can give some examples, which are only a portion of a much larger collection of misstatements in the book that I will discuss in a future post.
On page 9 Sagan made this very untrue statement: "It is now apparent that the origin of life can be explained, to a large extent, by studies in the field of chemistry." No such studies had occurred when that statement was written, and no such studies have ever occurred
On page 188 Sagan makes a false claim about a topic of the greatest importance: whether a cell contains instructions on how to make an entire organism and its cells. Sagan asserts that a cell must have such instructions, even though at the time no one had found such instructions in a cell. Such instructions have still not been found, even though DNA and its contents have been exhaustively cataloged. To support his claim, Sagan gives us a piece of bad, fallacious reasoning. He states this:
"It [a cell] reproduces. How does it reproduce? Think of the enormous number of characteristics which familiar animals have. There is the gross anatomy, the overall architecture of the organism. Then, there is the physiology, the dynamic functioning and articulation of the different parts of the organism in carrying out its functions. It has inherited behavior patterns -- how to build a nest, how to bury a bone. It has ten trillion or so cells, each one of which is itself an enormously complex structure. At the present time, we are making only the first fumbling steps towards assembling a cell from scratch. Yet the information to construct the entire organism is somehow contained in the genetic material, because, with striking regularity, animals look like their parents."
This was sophistry and falsehood -- misleading reasoning that reached a false conclusion. You are not entitled to conclude "the information to construct the entire organism is somehow contained in the genetic material, because, with striking regularity, animals look like their parents." The fact that animals look like their parents provide no warrant for such a conclusion. The only thing that could possibly justify a conclusion that "the information to construct the entire organism is somehow contained in the genetic material" would be the actual discovery of such instructions in the genetic material. And no such discovery has ever occurred. The only instructions that have ever been found in the genetic material (DNA and its genes) are low-level chemical instructions such as which amino acids make up a particular protein, not high-level anatomy construction instructions. DNA and its genes do not specify how to build a human body or any of its organs or any of its cells, as many scientists have confessed. DNA has no blueprint for making a body, and does not have any blueprint for building a cell.
Those who adequately understand the sky-high complexity and organization of human bodies and their components may realize why you could never explain the origin of a human body by speculating about a body specification in DNA -- the reality that if such a specification existed, it would be so complex that nothing in a womb would be capable of understanding such instructions and acting on them to produce a human body in a womb. We should always remember that blueprints don't build things, and that things get built with the help of blueprints only when there is an intelligent agent that reads and understands blueprints.
On page 238 of the book, Sagan said, "The laboratory synthesis of life, at least in the sense of a molecular system capable of evolution by natural selection, may be proved in a decade; some say it has already been accomplished." This was a very untrue statement. Nothing like any such thing had been done when the book was published in 1963, and nothing like any such thing has been done as of the year 2025.
On page 253 of his 1997 book Billions and Billions, the astronomer Sagan sounded like a third-rate scholar of life and mind when he made this hugely untrue statement: "The most significant aspect of the DNA story is that the fundamental processes of life now seem fully understandable in terms of physics and chemistry." To the contrary, scientists lack any credible explanation of even how human cells are able to reproduce; they lack any credible explanation of the most basic mental processes such as thinking and memory; and since DNA is not a specification for making a human, or any organ, cell or organelle, scientists lack any credible explanation for the progression from a speck-sized zygote to an adult human.
Problems a hundred miles over our heads
The newspaper article below suggests that another type of scientist (geologists) may sound like poor scholars of life and mind. We read of a geologist who merely asked a self-described psychic for her predictions about when and where earthquakes would occur. Apparently he lost his job at a university because the people at his geology department thought this was some great transgression. Notice the message being sent -- that it is strictly forbidden to test whether paranormal phenomena exist. Senselessly at some meeting 13 out of 16 of the geologists endorsed the extremely false claim that there is no such thing as a psychic phenomenon. The evidence for paranormal psychic phenomena is actually enormous, and the literature that documents such evidence is enormous and 200 years old. We can safely assume that none of that evidence was ever studied by any of the geologists who made this statement.
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