Astrobiologists Play "Keep Torturing the Data Until It Confesses"

 In 2023 Nikku Madhusudhan and four other scientists created quite a stir. They authored a paper entitled "Carbon-bearing Molecules in a Possible Hycean Atmosphere." Researching a planet called  K2-18 b revolving around another star, the paper claimed to have found "potential signs of dimethyl sulfide (DMS), which has been predicted to be an observable biomarker in Hycean worlds." The term "Hycean worlds" refers to planets in other solar systems that may be entirely covered by an ocean. The term "biomarker" refers to something that may be a sign of life. A very simple compound, dimethyl sulfide is not any type of building block of life. But on Earth dimethyl sulfide is sometimes produced by life. 

But there were some reasons why the attempt to insinuate a biomarker was very dubious. One reason was that the claims about "potential signs of dimethyl sulfide" was a kind of "reading tea leaves" affair, in which scientists were analyzing the faintest of faint signals, rather like someone squinting at something on the horizon miles away. That type of observation offers plenty of opportunity to see what you want to see, by interpreting marginal hard-to-interpret just-barely-detectable data in some way that fits your cherished desires, rather than a hundred other ways. 

Then there is the fact that when scientists do observations like this, they are picking up signals from many different chemical sources, with the signals being all mixed up. It's a recipe for false alarms, rather like someone in a very crowded high school cafeteria trying to listen to what someone at a different cafeteria table far away is saying. 

Then there is the fact that the paper failed to detect any water at this planet. The paper stated this:

"We do not find significant contributions due to H2O or NH3, but find 95% upper limits of -3.21 for log(XH2O) and -4.46 for log(XNH3 ) in the no-offset case. These upper limits are also consistent with those from the other retrieval cases, as shown in Table 2. The non-detections of both molecules are important considering their strong spectral features and detectability expected in the 0.9- 5.2 µm range (Madhusudhan et al. 2021; Constantinou & Madhusudhan 2022). The non-detection of H2O is at odds with its previous inference using the HST WFC3 spectrum in the 1.1-1.7 µm range (Tsiaras et al. 2019; Benneke et al. 2019a; Madhusudhan et al. 2020)."

It is generally agreed that water is absolutely necessary for any form of life of life to exist. The apparent non-presence of water at K2-18 b is a reason for thinking that life does not exist there.

Despite the paper's failure to detect water, and its weak mention of a mere mention of "potential signs of dimethyl sulfide," the world's "give us an inch and we'll take a mile" science news press began publishing a flood of misleading stories falsely claiming that some promising sign of life had been found. An example was this story on www.yahoo.com, which very badly misinformed us by stating this:

"The ability of a planet to support life depends on its temperature, the presence of carbon and probably liquid water. Observations from JWST seem to suggest that that K2-18b ticks all those boxes."

No, the scientific paper said that water was not detected on  K2-18b, even though a sensitive test was made that should have detected traces as low as 1 part in a billion. 

After the "sugar rush" of this flood of misleading stories, other scientists got busy examining the data on the distant planet K2-18 b, to see whether there was any decent evidence for dimethyl sulfide. In 2024 scientists produced a paper arguing that K2-18 b was not a "Hycaean" planet covered by an ocean, but instead a gas planet like Neptune with no ocean. The paper was "JWST Observations of K2-18b Can Be Explained by a Gas-rich Mini-Neptune with No Habitable Surface" authored by Nicholas F. Wogan and others. 

Then in early 2025 there was published the paper "A Comprehensive Reanalysis of K2-18 b's JWST NIRISS+NIRSpec Transmission Spectrum." It reanalyzed the data on K2-18 b and says "we find no statistically significant or reliable evidence for CO2 or DMS [dimethyl sulfide]." The paper had 16 authors, as compared to only five authors of Madhusudhan's paper. The 16 authors had found that Madhusudhan's claims about dimethyl sulfide at K2-18 b were unfounded. 

But now Madhusudhan is back with a new paper, trying to persuade us that dimethyl sulfide exists on K2-18 b. It is a paper entitled "New Constraints on DMS and DMDS in the Atmosphere of K2-18 b from JWST MIRI." He has some new observations, but only a scanty affair. It's a mere six hours of observations done with the James Webb Space Telescope, on April 26, 2025. Madhusudhan and his small team has put this data through some very arbitrary and gigantically convoluted analysis pipeline, one that was probably selected to maximize the chance of being able to claim that dimethyl sulfide exists on K2-18 b. The raw data gathered is shown below (Figure 1 from the paper).  Ignore the red line, which is not part of the raw data. 

Data like this does nothing to naturally suggest the existence of dimethyl sulfide. The James Webb Space Telescope has nothing like a "dimethyl sulfide detector" comparable to a carbon monoxide detector in a home. But it is possible for a scientist eagerly hoping to claim some evidence of dimethyl sulfide to arbitrarily analyze such data, to try and gin up something that can be claimed as evidence of dimethyl sulfide. 

At least seven long paragraphs of the paper discuss the incredibly elaborate rigmarole that is going on in Madhusudhan's analysis pathway.  It would be way, way too charitable to describe this analysis pathway as a Rube Goldberg machine. It would be more accurate to say that the analysis pathway is some incredibly weird analytic contraption that makes the crazy-looking machines of Rube Goldberg look simple and straightforward in comparison. Below is a paragraph giving us only one eighth of the "keep torturing the data until it confesses" craziness that was going on:

"We use the 1-D spectra time series to construct a white light curve (between 4.8-10 µm). We exclude the first 250 integrations, where the systematic trend is most extreme. We identify outliers on the white light curve, ± 2.5-σ from a rolling median, and replace the 1-D spectra corresponding to these outliers with linearly interpolated spectra from adjacent integrations. We scale the error bars on the light curve points such that the average error bar equals the observed standard deviation of the scatter in the out-of-transit residuals. We use emcee (Foreman-Mackey et al. 2013) to perform a Markov Chain Monte Carlo parameter estimation of the white light curve, fitting for a transit model with quadratic limb-darkening generated by pylightcurve (Tsiaras et al. 2016) multiplied by a systematic trend consisting of an exponential term and a linear term (as in section 2.1). In the white light curve, we fit for Rp/R∗, mid-transit time, a/R∗, i, quadratic limb-darkening coefficients and four parameters for the trend. Uniform priors are used except for a/R∗ and i, where we apply Gaussian priors based on values in Madhusudhan et al. (2023b) and use the Kipping parameterisation (Kipping 2013) for limb-darkening priors. We fix the period to 32.940045 days (Benneke et al. 2019a), the argument of periastron to 90o and the eccentricity to 0. The white light curve parameter estimates are given in Table 1." 

There are seven other paragraphs describing machinations and manipulations as bizarre and complex as these. It seems that at no point in these eight paragraphs do the authors give any justification for the weird convoluted spaghetti-code manipulations and transmogrifications that are occurring. There is nothing natural or straightforward about anything that is occurring.  Something comparable would be occurring if you took a photo of a pine tree, and passed it through forty different arbitrarily selected photo filters, to finally end up with a photo looking like a sexy woman, without ever justifying your use of any of those filters. 

Finally the authors create some "model" that is basically a collection of guesses about the atmosphere of this planet K2-18 b. Of course, their "model" includes their cherished gas dimethyl sulfide, because trying to gin up some evidence for that is the point of all these weird labors. Near the end of the paper, the authors triumphally announce that their model fits their pipeline-adjusted data to "three sigma," corresponding to 99.7%. 

This is pretty much just a big pile of baloney. No actual detection of dimethyl sulfide has occurred. The analysis pipeline is "keep torturing the data until it confesses" nonsense. There is no basis for any confidence in an analysis pipeline so convoluted and artificial.  We can conclude with 99% confidence that the described analysis pathway is untrustworthy. 

•  Nothing reliable has been done in this paper to show any likelihood of the existence of dimethyl sulfide on this planet K2-18 b. 
• Nothing reliable has been done in this paper to show any likelihood of the existence of any biomarker on this planet K2-18 b. 
• No observations have ever been done to show a likelihood that water exists on this planet  K2-18 b.
• In all likelihood (as suggested by the paper  of Wogan) the planet K2-18 b is a gas giant like Neptune, utterly incapable of supporting life. 

Imagine if you have took the six hours of data that Madhusudhan played with to get his results, and gave such data to ten different teams of astronomers, asking them to tell you what the data suggested, without telling where in space the data came from. Not even one of such teams would tell you that a biomarker had been found, and not one of them would say that any evidence of dimethyl sulfide had been found. Madhusudhan's funny business here merely shows that when scientists have their hearts set on reporting the existence of some thing they are eagerly hoping to find, and when they are willing to exert unlimited weird labors playing around with their data, then they may report finding some trace of what they were so fervently desiring to find. 

This is similar to what is going on in the world of neuroscience so frequently. Neuroscientists keep analyzing the noisy wavy blips of EEG readings, and they often report finding some faint sign of what they were eagerly hoping to find, after they subjected the data to many a strange convolution and contortion, in some arbitrary way, in a "keep torturing the data until it confesses" fashion. You can read about some examples of such a thing in my series of posts here. 

Fake Physics Salesmen Will Not Help Us Avoid Fakery in Science Research

An article from not long ago discusses fraud in science research. We read this shocking statement (I'll boldface part of it):

"The U.S. financial system is hardly the greatest edifice of justice in the world. Yet, it demonstrates a basic level of self-policing, effort to uphold professional standards, and accountability to the rest of society. Academic institutions fall far short of these minimal standards. Known serial frauds are sheltered by their bosses and feted by their peers. The culture encourages this at every step of the way, starting with PhD candidates ordered to produce a positive result by any means necessary, continuing with coauthors and grantmakers who can’t be bothered to look at the data and check whether it makes any sense, all the way to department heads and famous bestsellers being widely cited even after they’ve been caught. Those who do not commit fraud themselves usually tolerate it in their peers. The minority who will not tolerate frauds usually weed themselves out quietly. I have lost count of how many friends of friends entered a PhD program, had an adviser who tacitly or explicitly demanded they commit fraud to get publishable results, and quit in disgust without raising a public stink. What that says about those who remain is not encouraging....With some honorable exceptions, most academics don’t care very much about the capital-T Truth....More likely, fraud will grow more and more common as young scientists realize that lies are the best way to advance their careers and that serious punishment is about as likely as being struck by lightning."

Towards its end, the article suggests that "hope rests with truthseekers outside academia." The author states this:

"More likely, reform will come through circumvention from outside the academic system. There is no shortage of people who pursue the sacred quest for Truth. Increasingly, they are not pushing forward the frontiers of knowledge in peer-reviewed journals and university campuses, but in fringe niches of internet discourse. Because the internet commentariat’s intellectual elite is more attentive to an argument’s substance than whether it observes the bureaucratic forms, these circles are much less vulnerable to the problems which afflict academia."

The article then refers us to a blogger that it claims as a great example of a truth-seeker.  I started reading his posts at the blogger's site. I was not very encouraged by the first posts I read, in which the blogger lectures us at great length about rationality, and tries to pass himself off as a rationalist. My experience has been that people lecturing you about rationality are often people clinging to irrational dogmas.  Often lectures about rationality are excuses for avoiding observational reports that conflict with someone's worldview such as a materialist worldview. The self-described "rationalist" will claim that 1001 types of things are "irrational," on the grounds that they do not fit in with his idea of how nature works.  That's a defective approach. It's much better to closely study observations that defy your expectations about how nature works, and modify such expectations and assumptions when necessary, rather than throwing away such observations and calling them "irrational." 

In one post the blogger repeats one of the most glaring errors of today's Darwinism. He states, "Evolution is powered by a systematic correlation between the different ways that different genes construct organisms, and how many copies of those genes make it into the next generation. " Genes do not construct organisms.  Genes only specify the amino acids sequences that make up protein molecules.  Genes have no specification of anything larger than a protein molecule. An organism is built out of a skeletal system and organ systems. Organ systems are built from organs and other components. Organs are built from tissues, which are built from cells, which are built from organelles, which are built from protein complexes, which are built from individual protein molecules.  By claiming that genes construct organisms, the blogger is saying something as wrong as claiming that nails and screws construct apartment buildings. 

Later in the same essay the blogger refers most erroneously to "fox genes which construct foxes" and "rabbit genes which construct rabbits." Genes do not construct visible things, and have no specification of any anatomy or cells. In the same article we have very nonsensical shadow-speaking in which humans are described as the faintest shadows of themselves. The blogger states, "We are simply the embodied history of which organisms did in fact survive and reproduce." Oops, our "rationalist" has given us the silliest kind of irrational shadow-speaking, in which humans are depicted as a billion times less than what they are. 

In another essay the blogger repeats the same errors, erroneously claiming that "DNA constructs protein brains." DNA is an inert molecule with no power of construction, and no specification of anything bigger than a protein molecule. DNA does not even have a specification of a neuron or any of the organelles that make up a neuron. 

A big section of the blogger's blog posts is devoted to selling reductionism. Very strangely, he states in one of his posts, "Ultimately, reductionism is just disbelief in fundamentally complicated things." It is rather obvious that we do not have here a careful student of biology, which everywhere presents us with examples of mountainously complex and enormously complicated things. Nowhere at the site do we get a sign that this blogger is a very thorough scholar of biology or any of the sciences.  It sounds as if he is relying mainly on armchair reasoning rather than in-depth investigation of facts and observations.  

In a later essay, the blogger makes this confession:

"So by the laws of science, if psychic powers are discovered, non-reductionism wins. I am therefore confident in dismissing psychic powers as a priori implausible, despite all the claimed experimental evidence in favor of them."

The blogger is apparently a psi denialist, one of the many so-called "rationalists" who refuse to study and accept two hundred years of compelling written evidence for the existence of telepathy and clairvoyance.  Nowhere in his very many blog posts do we have any sign  that the blogger has studied the evidence for paranormal phenomena. 

In another long section on the site, the blogger starts giving us posts trying to sell one of the most absurd and extravagant pieces of nonsense that humans have ever constructed:  the Fake Physics of Hugh Everett's "many worlds" theory that there are an infinite number of copies of you in parallel universes. Supported by zero evidence, this Fake Physics lunacy is as irrational as any doctrine ever taught. It is also the exact opposite of reductionism. Instead of stripping things down by reducing, the believer in Everett's "many worlds" theory is doing the worst conceivable extravagance in needlessly postulating an infinity of unobservable things. 

After reading this section, it becomes crystal-clear that the recommended blogger is neither a rationalist nor a reductionist. No one who tries to get us to believe in about the most irrational doctrine ever constructed can claim to be a rationalist, unless we define that term so that it includes the most irrational thinkers.  And no one claiming that there are an infinite number of copies of you in parallel universes can credibly claim to be a reductionist. The blogger loses all credibility when he most ludicrously states, " I write as if the existence of many-worlds were an established fact, because it is," referring to the doctrine of parallel universes, which is not supported by the slightest speck of evidence. The blogger in question lacks even a high-school diploma, so we need not take seriously his opinion on this matter, which is a matter related to the most abstruse quantum mechanics he does not understand. 

Materialism at its maddest, Everett's fake physics "many worlds" lunacy is morally destructive nonsense. It is morally destructive because anyone believing in it will tend to lose any basis for moral action. For example, if you are driving in winter, and you see a small child without a coat wandering on the road, you may say to yourself, "There are an infinite number of parallel universes in which that child will survive, and an infinite number of parallel universe in which she freezes to death, so I need not bother to help the child."  Never expect moral behavior from anyone who believes in this loony nonsense. Always expect dishonest speech from such people, who tend to supply us with abundant examples of their deceptive speech. 

For  the blogger to teach this most nonsensical of doctrines and also to try and pass himself off as a rationalist and reductionist is the most laughable farce. We should classify all believers in Everett's "many worlds" nonsense as being the most irrational of thinkers, and also thinkers engaged in something the exact opposite of reductionism.  

The author of the article with the opening quote gave us a good article exposing the problem of fraud and misconduct in today's scientific research. But near the end of the article he has given us a very big bum steer by mentioning a particular blogger as someone outside of academia we should go to for guidance. We should seek out diligent scholars outside academia; but we won't help fight the problem of fake research in academia by reading the posts of Fake Physics salesmen such as the recommended blogger. 

Postscript: A recent scientific paper informs us about how universities and colleges are covering up evidence of fraud and researcher misconduct:

"The vast majority of misconduct investigation reports, however, remain hidden from view. While summaries from the ORI and the US National Science Foundation’s (NSF’s) Office of Inspector General are useful, they are not very detailed, and in the case of the NSF are carefully anonymized....And while public universities like Ohio State are subject to laws pertaining to the disclosure of public records, in our experience, such statutes in many states are not helpful for these types of records even for public universities. Some exempt investigation reports because they are considered personnel records; others require requesters to be residents of the relevant state; and still others consider all investigation reports to be drafts by claiming they are subject to revision until some final — and often malleable — decision by a state or federal agency... Universities often use exorbitant charges, based on the costs of legal review of relevant documents, to win their wars of attrition against requesters. And private universities are not subject to public records laws at all, of course....Recent experience suggests that in many cases, science is failing to self-regulate, prioritizing self-interests — on the part of both institutions and individuals — over reform. The existence of schemes such as citation cartels, paper mills, rigged peer review, and other abuses are clear indications many scientists are willing to take steps to game the publishing system. The rapid encroachment of artificial intelligence into the production of journal articles poses perhaps the largest threat yet to the integrity of scientific research."

Scientist Flubs and Flops, #2

 

                Press button to watch video

• "The origin of the amniotic egg and the amphibian - reptile transition is just another of the major vertebrate divisions for which clearly worked out evolutionary schemes have never been provided. Trying to work out, for example, how the heart and aortic arches of an amphibian could have been gradually converted to the reptilian and mammalian condition raises absolutely horrendous problems....The living world is full of innumerable other systems, particularly among the insects and invertebrates, for which gradual evolutionary explanations have never been provided."  -- Michael Denton, MD and biochemistry PhD, "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis," 1986, page 219.
• "Major transitions in biological evolution show the same pattern of sudden emergence of diverse forms at a new level of complexity. The relationships between major groups within an emergent new class of biological entities are hard to decipher and do not seem to fit the tree pattern that, following Darwin's original proposal, remains the dominant description of biological evolution. The cases in point include the origin of complex RNA molecules and protein folds; major groups of viruses; archaea and bacteria, and the principal lineages within each of these prokaryotic domains; eukaryotic supergroups; and animal phyla. In each of these pivotal nexuses in life's history, the principal 'types' seem to appear rapidly and fully equipped with the signature features of the respective new level of biological organization. No intermediate 'grades' or intermediate forms between different types are detectable." -- Biologist Eugene Koonin, "The Biological Big Bang model for the major transitions in evolution" (link).
• "This is the basic story of evolution, as recounted in countless textbooks and pop-science bestsellers. The problem, according to a growing number of scientists, is that it is absurdly crude and misleading." --Stephen Buranyi, science writer, "Do We Need a New Theory of Evolution?" in The Guardian. 
• "I may challenge the adherents of the strictly Darwinian view, which we are discussing here, to try to explain the evolution of the following features by accumulation and selection of small mutants: hair in mammals, feathers in birds, segmentation of arthropods and vertebrates, the transformation of gill arches in phylogeny, including the aortic arches, muscles, nerves, etc.; further, teeth, shells of mollusks, ectoskeletons, compound eyes, blood circulation, alternation of generations, statocysts, ambulacral system of echinoderms, pedicellaria of the same, cnidocysts, poison apparatus of snakes, whalebone, and, finally, primary chemical differences like hemoglobin vs. hemocyanin, etc. Corresponding examples from plants could be given." -- Biologist Richard Goldschmidt, "The Material Basis of Evolution," pages 6-7. 
• “While scientists are still working out the details of how the eye evolved, we are also still stuck on the question of how intelligence emerges in biology.” -- Scientists Rafael Yuste and Michael Levin, an article in Scientific American. 
• "Biological systems have evolved to amazingly complex states, yet we do not understand in general how evolution operates to generate increasing genetic and functional complexity." -- four scientists, "Adaptive ratchets and the evolution of molecular complexity."

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

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

Scientist: I understand how life originated.

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

Scientist: I understand how a human mind arises.

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

Scientist: I understand how the human species arose.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All of these projects have already been completed. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Psychic Experiences in the News, Part 4

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

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

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

Biology-Befuddled NASA Sounds Complexity-Clueless

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 HHCCHHCCHHCCHHCCHHCCHHCC

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exhibit A That Biologists Have No Credible Explanation for How Anatomically Complex Organisms Ever Appeared

 At Quanta Magazine there was a long interview entitled "How Did Multicellular Life Evolve?" After some introductory discussion between Janna Levin and Steve Strogratz, Strogratz makes the claim that multicellular life evolved independently 50 different times. If that is true, then the explanatory shortfalls of Darwinism are vastly worse than most people think.  Thinking of times long before mankind appeared, the average person thinks of maybe three main miracles of innovation that biologists have trouble explaining:

(1) The origin of prokaryotic cells. 

(2) The origin of vastly more complex eukaryotic cells.

(3) The origin of multicellular life. 

But if, as Strogratz suggests, multicellular life appeared independently 50 different times, then the number of required miracles of innovation is multiplied many times.  The situation would be like this:

Miracle #1: The origin of prokaryotic cells. 

Miracle #2:  The origin of vastly more complex eukaryotic cells.

Miracles #3, #4,#5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10, #11, #12, #13, #14,#15, #16, #17, #18, #19, #20, #21, #22, #23, #24,#25, #26, #27, #28, #29,  #30, #31, #32, #33, #34,#35, #36, #37, #38, #39, #40, #41, #42, #43, #44,#45, #46, #47, #48, #49, #50, #51, #52:  Fifty independent origins of different types of multicellular life. 

But if so many independent origins of different types of multicellular life were required, why is it that this is so rarely mentioned? Probably because it's another of the endless cases of biologists sweeping under the rug their explanatory shortfalls. But Strogratz lamely suggests a different answer, saying this:

"Well, I think when we were in high school and they were teaching us biology, they didn’t know that. But it’s now understood that, you know, in all these different kingdoms or whatever they call them in biology — so whether it’s animals, plants, fungi — they all figured out their own way to do it, to go multicellular."

 Strogratz should be scolded here for using language suggesting that one-celled life can "figure out" a way to become multicellular life,  which is rather like suggesting that bricks figure out a way to become ten-story apartment buildings with plumbing and electricity. 

We get some introductory comments about biologist Will Ratcliff, who we are told "wants to induce a multicellularity transition in a single-celled organism," a yeast. It's some "getting a little cell clumping and calling it multicellularity" nonsense, like that shown in the visual below. 

Nonsense like that shown in the visual above leverages ambiguity in the word "multicellularity." When you are talking about the main problem of explaining multicellular life, multicellular  life should be defined as visible self-mobile organisms consisting of complex anatomy requiring many different types of cells and higher levels of organization such as appendages and organs. Or better yet, use the term "anatomically complex organisms" rather than "multicellular life," which makes it clear that you are talking about something vastly more than just clumps of cells.

I am stunned to find that we get a little critical thinking from one of the interviewers (given the history of the staff at Quanta Magazine acting like scientist bootlickers). Strogratz says this:

"But as we’ll hear from Will, it is controversial. There are colleagues of his who feel what he’s doing is irrelevant to the history of life on Earth, that he’s just doing something in the lab, and it may be telling us very little about what happened in real biology."

We then get biologist Ratcliff beginning to talk, and he starts speaking in self-contradictory ways. First, he calls cells "fantastic biological machines," speaking as if he understood their very high complexity and organization. But he then very quickly reverts to engaging in the shadow-speaking language that biologists love to use, in which vastly organized and enormously fine-tuned things are described as if they were mere shadows of what they are -- this being done to help make tall tales of their accidental origins sound less far-fetched.  Ratcliff says, "And once sort-of cells evolved, they really took off, and it has been the sort-of basic building block of life for the last three-and-a-half billion years." There is nothing "sort-of-basic" about a cell, and it is profoundly misleading to call a cell a "building block," as building blocks such as bricks are very simple things without any complexity or information, and cells are enormously organized information-rich units with very high functional complexity. There is no reason why such misleading "building block" language needs to be used. You can express a similar idea without misleading people by saying things such as "cells are building components of organisms." 

Ratcliff later continues his misleading use of shadow-speaking in which extremely organized and information-rich things are misleadingly described as mere shadows of what they are. He says, "All these basic building blocks of life, like DNA, which contains the, sort-of, code of the organism." DNA is an extremely complex molecule, and human DNA has billions of base pairs of information. So it is extremely misleading to refer to DNA as a "basic building block," a phrase suitable for describing simple things without complexity (such as a brick), but utterly misleading when used to describe DNA or cells. It is also not true that DNA "contains the, sort-of, code of the organism." DNA has no specification of how to make an organism or any of its organs or any of its cells or any of the organelles of such cells. The myth that DNA is a blueprint or recipe or program for making an organism is a deception that biologists have long been guilty of telling, even though many scientists have stated that such claims are false. Beware of any scientist using the words "sort of" or "basically" or "essentially," terms that they often use when they are making claims that are untrue. 

Ratcliff reiterates the previous claim about 50 different origins of multicellularity, saying, "There’s at least 50 independent transitions to multicellularity that we know of." Ratcliff then engages in the same "figure out" nonsense talk that  Strogratz had previously used. Ratcliff says that "animals...just start to figure out all of these innovations which are hallmarks of extant animals." This is not what evolutionary biologists claim about the origin of biological innovations. Instead they claim that there occurred accidental variations that luckily led to all kinds of wonderful biological innovations such as lungs and hearts and legs and wings.  But a person hearing such claims of accidental inventions may recognize that such claims are nonsensical, intuitively sensing correctly that accidents do not produce complex inventions. So biologists such as Strogratz may have luck in fooling people if they claim that "animals...just start to figure out all of these innovations which are hallmarks of extant animals." But evolutionary biologists don't believe that any biological innovations of animals arose from animals literally "figuring out" anything. 

We then have from Ratcliff this confession about the Cambrian Explosion about 540 million years ago, in which all or almost all of the animal phyla appeared rather suddenly in the fossil record: 

"Before the Cambrian explosion, things were soft and gelatinous and didn’t have eyes or skeletons. It’s questionable if they had brains. They don’t have any of these things. And then in a relatively short period of time, just a few tens of millions of years, all of these things show up. And we think it’s probably due to these, like, ecological arms races, where you have predators attacking prey. The prey start evolving defensive mechanisms. So, you know, you have just this explosion of animal complexity in what appears to be a very short period of time in geological terms."

What we have here from Ratcliff is a very bad attempt at an explanation. He's basically saying all these marvels of biological innovation appeared, because creatures needed stuff. "They needed it" is not a credible explanation of why miracles of incredibly-hard-to-achieve organization would occur. Similarly, if you are at a junk yard, and you watch as 1000 scattered auto parts magically assemble into a car, you don't explain that miracle of organization by saying, "Well, I needed a car." The "arms race" metaphor is just another of the endless bad metaphors and bad analogies used by evolutionary biologists. An arms race is something that occurs between nations led by humans, not something that occurs in animals or imagined predecessors of animals. 

Ratcliff then makes a very bad misstatement by claiming that multicellular life is 3 billion years old. There is no convincing record of any anatomically complex organisms existing before 1 billion years ago. Ratcliff may be referring here to a few cells clumping together in an unimpressive way, but that isn't real multicellular life, something like animals with complex anatomy. As a recent biology textbook told us on its page 9, "Complex multicellular animals appear rather suddenly in the fossil record approximately 600 million years ago." 

Ratcliff then gives us this vacuous hand-waving attempt at explaining how multicellular life appeared:

"And you know, I think we should not think of it as one process, but something where there are ecological niches available for multicellular forms, and there has to be a benefit to forming groups and evolving large size. That benefit has to be fairly prolonged. And most of the time, there isn’t, but occasionally there will be an opportunity for a lineage to begin exploring that ecology and not be inhibited by something else that’s already in that space."

This is more vacuous "they got because it was useful" nonsense, that does not explain how miracles of innovation could have occurred. 

A bit later we get more hand-waving vacuity from Ratcliff, more talk along the lines of "they got it because it was useful":

"But, once you start forming multicellular groups, you can participate in a whole new ecology of larger size. You might be immune to the predators that were eating you previously, or maybe you’re able to overgrow competitors for a resource like light. If you imagine that you’re, you know, an algae growing on a rock in a stream, single-celled algae will get the light but, hey, if something can form groups, now they’re intercepting that resource before it gets to you. They win, right? Or, you know, groups also have advantages when it comes to motility and even division of labor and trading resources between cells. So, there’s many different reasons to become multicellular. And there isn’t just one reason why a lineage would evolve multicellularity. But what you need for this transition to occur is those reasons have to be there, and that benefit has to persist long enough that the lineage sort of stabilizes in a multicellular state and doesn’t just go back to being single-celled or die out."

When evolutionary biologists lack any credible "how" in explaining biological origins (which is pretty much all the time), they start giving us "why" explanations like this, hoping that we don't notice that they are not addressing a "how" but only addressing a "why."  And it is very strange that these believers that life arose through blind, unguided processes keep talking as if they believed in "why" driving everything. 

Ratcliff then lets his guard down by confessing that evolutionary biologists do not really understand how multicellular life arose.  He makes this confession:

"Big picture, we want to understand how initially dumb clumps of cells, cells that are one or two mutations away from being single-celled, don’t really know that they’re organisms — they don’t have any adaptations to being multicellular, they’re just a dumb clump — how those dumb clumps of cells can evolve into increasingly complex multicellular organisms, with new morphologies, with cell-level integration, division of labor, and differentiation amongst the cells. Just like, we want to watch that process of how do these simple groups become complex. And this is, like, one of the biggest knowledge gaps in evolutionary biology. I mean, in my opinion....We don’t really know the process through which simple groups evolve into increasingly complex organisms"

Ratcliff's commendable humility here lasts for about one minute. It is then immediately demolished and replaced by some ridiculous groundless boasting. He says this: "So, what we’re doing in the lab is, we are evolving new multicellular life using in-laboratory directed evolution over multi-10,000 generation timescales, to watch how our initially simple groups of cells — dumb clumps of cells — figure out some of these fundamental challenges." It's an unfounded boast. He is referring to mere cell clumping in yeast. There is no type of new organism produced by such experiments. Each of the little least clumps is just a crowd of one-celled organisms, not a new organism.  You are no more producing "new multicellular life" by such laboratory work than you would be producing "new human life" by shouting "Free 100-dollar bills!" in Times Square to attract a flash mob. Crowds of one-celled organisms are not multicellular life.  

I can understand why the Quanta Magazine interview has no photos showing the result of the Multicellularity Long-Term Evolution Experiment that Ratcliff is talking about. Showing a photo would show how trivial Ratcliff's results are. But doing a Google image search for that phrase, I find a university press release that shows the result of the experiment. It is the nothing-to-brag-about result shown below, about as impressive as getting a little algae slime buildup in your backyard swimming pool. 

Laughably, Strogratz refers to this silly little result by saying, "That is incredibly ambitious. I mean, I hope the listeners get a feeling of the courage it takes." Equally laughable are some of the paragraphs we soon get, in which Ratcliff speaks all rapturously about these little disorganized clumps of yeast he got, as if he was trying to use every term he can think of to make them sound grand and glorious. Misleadingly, Ratcliff talks about the yeast producing "babies" when he merely means other cells. Misleading us, Ratcliff says this of his tiny yeast clumps: "They’re solving all these fundamental multicellular problems." But he gives away how little he has got when he says this: "You know, they’re bigger than fruit flies now. They’re large." Fruit flies are about three millimeters in size, which is about half the width of the nail on your pinky finger. Ratcliff's test tube clumps are not large. 

Later in the interview Ratcliff complains about getting criticisms from either scientists. He suggests that other scientists were accusing him of inflating the importance of his work, and he sounds offended or indignant about having to defend the relevance of his work in growing test-tube yeast clumps.  He gives us this confession: "Anytime you critique a paper in my field, you might think you’re critiquing the senior scientists on the paper, but they usually have a graduate student or a postdoc who wrote the thing." So senior biologists are very often putting their names on papers that were really written by graduate students without a PhD? That's another reason for distrusting papers in evolutionary biology and neuroscience. Ratcliff seems to make a kind of "let's not hurt the feeling of the tender graduate students" plea. Wouldn't it be better to  help make them better scientists by giving them an idea of what kind of experimental research studies attract criticism because of their flaws? 

Nowhere in the long interview with this multicellularity origin specialist do we get any reason for thinking that scientists understand how large mobile organisms with organs and limbs could have ever evolved from mere one-celled organisms. To the contrary, the interview suggests that scientists have no such understanding at all.  The failure of scientists to give a credible account of the origin of anatomically complex organisms is only one of very many reasons why their "evolution explains us" and "Darwin explained how we got life so complex" claims are unfounded and untrue. 

To show the untruth of big boastful claims that someone makes, make a collection of all the confessions that person makes that he would not make if his big boasts  were true. For example, by noting how someone confessed that he owes very much money on his credit card, you can document that he's making unfounded boasts if he claims that he's doing great financially. To help show the untruth of claims that scientists make that they understand the origin of humans and other large enormously organized organisms, you can document as many cases you can find of scientists confessing that they don't understand how there ever arose things such as the first cells, eukaryotic cells, protein molecules, protein complexes,  anatomically complex organisms, human minds, human memory, the origin of language, and the origin of a full human body during the nine months of pregnancy. To help show the untruth of claims that scientists make that they understand the origin of humans and other large enormously organized organisms, you can document as many cases as you can find of scientists confessing that they don't even understand things such as how proteins fold into the 3D shapes needed for their functions,  how cells (lacking any DNA specification for how to make a cell) are able to reproduce, and how sexual reproduction ever arose.  You can find an extremely long set of such confessions in my "Candid Confessions of the Scientists" post here.  

Postscript: On the science news sites today (April 1), we have coverage of an Emory University press release entitled "A New Clue to How Multicellular Life May Have Evolved." It's about a scientist observing a type of one-celled life clumping into tiny disorganized swarms. We have no clear explanation of what this "new clue" is, and we get more suspicions that scientists without any real clue as to how multicellular life arose are grasping at straws.