Exhibit B That Developmental Biologists Have No Credible Explanation of Human Morphogenesis

 In August 2024 I published a post entitled "Exhibit A That Developmental Biologists Have No Credible Explanation of Human Morphogenesis." I discussed an article in the online magazine Aeon by  a molecular biologist (John Wallingford) who is the past president of the Society for Developmental Biology.  I discussed how the article provided no credible tale to explain the marvel of how a speck-sized zygote (existing just after impregnation of a female) is able to progress to become the vast state of organization that is the human body.  In November 2024 the same magazine (Aeon) published another article by different biologists trying to explain how this marvel of organization occurs. The article (entitled "Elusive But Everywhere") is by Duke University professor of biology  Daniel W. McShea and  Gunnar O. Babcock, a lecturer at Cornell University. The article by McShea and Babcock tells a completely different tale from the one told by Wallingford.  McShea and Babcock very much fail to tell a credible tale to explain the marvel of human development. 

The article begins with a few paragraphs of misleading claims such as the claim that Darwin did something to reduce the need for teleological explanations in biology. No, he didn't; but I need not get into the failures of Darwinism in this post, but to simply point out that the problem of explaining what happens in a womb is an almost entirely different problem from the problem of explaining the origin of the human species.  Whatever ideas a person may have about so-called natural selection and the origin of humans are not of any use in explaining how a speck-sized zygote is able to progress over nine months to become something vastly more organized: a full human body. In trying to explain the "how" of human development, the problem is to explain how it could happen that some great marvel of construction could occur inside the body of a pregnant woman. Claims about events that happened thousands or millions of years ago are of no use in explaining such a thing.  An explanation would have to involve describing events that are happening this year within the bodies of pregnant women. 

McShea and Babcock discuss the failure of mechanistic explanations to explain the appearance of a human body. They then give this grand-sounding announcement:

"So, caught between modern science and our intuitions about teleology, we seem to have only two ways of explaining the apparent goal directedness in some systems: teleology or mechanism. Both are troublesome. Both are inadequate. In recognition of this problem, philosophers of biology and others have, in recent decades, been struggling to find an alternative. We believe we have found it: a third way that reconciles Aristotelian thinking about goal directedness with the mechanistic view of a Newtonian universe. This alternative explains the apparent seeking of all goal-directed entities, from developing acorns and migrating sea turtles to self-driving cars and human intentions. It proposes that a hidden architecture connects these entities. It even explains falling rocks.

We call it ‘field theory.' "

Unfortunately, what follows is nothing but the most empty hand-waving. No real theory is presented.  All that the authors have done is to sprinkle a little physics jargon while engaging in the most vacuous hand-waving.  The term 'field' is a term used by physicists. It refers to some area of space that is under the influence of a force. 

McShea and Babcock state, "Our proposal is that fields direct the action of all goal-directed entities."  They give us nothing specific to back up this wild claim, which makes no sense. In physics, fields are mindless things, things which do not contain any type of detailed instructions.  A magnetic field does not tell how to make anything complex.  But the human body is a marvel of the highest organization.  In a body atoms are organized into not-very-complex molecules such as amino acids, which are organized into extremely complex molecules such as proteins, which are organized into far more organized protein complexes, which are organized into organelles, which are organized into cells, which are organized into tissues, which are organized into organs, which are organized into organs systems.  How could you ever get such a marvel of organization from some mere field, which has no power to produce complex organizations, and no blueprint of the final state of organization to be achieved?  Initially the idea of evoking "fields" to explain how we get human bodies seems as silly as the idea that some magnetic field built a skyscraper. McShea and Babcock do nothing to make the idea seem credible. 

But at least the authors give us a little candor, in which they reject the false claims about a DNA body blueprint that have been told by so many lying developmental biologists in the past. Immediately correcting a false statement they make, McShea and Babcock state this:

"A more challenging case for field theory involves the development of embryos. To all appearances, embryos seek their adult form guided by internal genes, not an external field. Think of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, one of the most well-studied animals in scientific research. The mother fruit fly guides the earliest development of her growing embryos, but soon the process seems to proceed almost autonomously, as the embryo partitions itself into segments and then into body regions, with limbs, mouth, and other parts forming later. How does it do it? No information about the overall architecture of these body parts is present in the cells and tissues of the parts themselves, or in each organism’s genes. Once again, the answer requires looking outside."

The statement that "to all appearances, embryos seek their adult form guided by internal genes, not an external field" is not true, because genes have no specification of how to make a body or any of its cells. The authors correct that false statement later in the paragraph, by confessing "no information about the overall architecture of these body parts is present in the cells and tissues of the parts themselves, or in each organism’s genes."

The correct relation between DNA and the different levels of organization in a human body is illustrated in the diagram below. The black bar makes it clear that none of the seven most complex levels of organization is specified by DNA or genes.

Explaining the arising of 200 types of cells in the human body (none specified by DNA or its genes) is a problem exponentially harder than the average person realizes, partially because cells are exponentially more complex than the average person realizes. The very imperfect diagram below fails to adequately depict such complexity, but at least helps to correct some of the misimpressions of typical cell diagrams that make human cells look a million times simpler than they are.  

The numbers in the diagram above are derived from a table on this page of the Human Protein Atlas.  We see a list of the types of organelles in the cells of the human body, and how many types of proteins are needed to make up such organelles

Later in the Aeon article, we get a paragraph that shows the "there's no there there" nature of  McShea and Babcock's explanation. They make it clear that they are not at all imagining some external force that directs human development, causing the huge marvel that is the construction of the human body.  Instead they are merely using the term "fields" to describe something that is purely internal to the human body. They state this:

"Guidance is external, but not in the way you might think. It is not external to the entire embryo, but external to each body part. Guidance comes from ‘morphogenetic fields’ that are set up by the embryo itself. It is these fields that supply the cells contained within them with guidance about what to do: where to move, what to secrete, when to divide. These fields are composed of molecules, produced by genes deep inside an embryo’s cells, but the genes are not the source of guidance. They are just factories. And the molecules they manufacture combine to produce a chemical field around the growing body parts, directing their behaviour."

There is nothing here in the way of any kind of substantive explanation. All that we have is the same old bottom-up baloney of "molecules built you," with the addition of a little jargon borrowed from physics. So the idea that your body arose from low-level mechanistic effects is being repackaged a bit, with lots of use of the physics term "field." There's nothing substantive that is being added to the explanation. And when the authors appeal to "fields" that are "composed of molecules," it is clear that their attempt to sound like physicists has gone off the rails.  The fields of physicists are not composed of molecules. This long article on "The Concept of a 'Field'  in Physics" tells us, "Quite generally, a field is defined as some quantity which can vary continuously in some domain (usually in the domain of space and time)."

"Genes guide your body to reach its final form" is a lie. Genes are inert mindless chemicals that have no specification of how to build anything bigger than a protein molecule. "Genes help make fields that guide your body to reach its final form" is just a variation on that lie. In the world of physics,  fields are mindless things that have no specification of how to build complex things.  So it makes no sense to imagine "morphogenetic fields" guiding the human body to reach its vastly organized state. 

In the final part of their article, McShea and Babcock take their hand-waving about fields into a different direction, speculating about fields generating mental effects in humans. Their speculation is all based on false ideas about the brain being the source of the human mind, an idea that is untenable because of many reasons explained in the posts of my blog here. The hand-waving of McShea and Babcock about fields controlling your mind is as vacuous and groundless as their talk about fields explaining the origin of human bodies during human development. 

How do human bodies arise, given the nonexistence of any blueprint, recipe or specification for how to make a human body (or any of its organs, cells or organelles) in DNA or its genes? Our biologists have no credible tale to tell to explain this miracle of organization. What they mainly do is lie to us very badly, by telling us fictions such as the lie that your DNA is a body blueprint.  Such a lie is a very childish lie, because even if the lie were true, it would not explain how there can arise a human body.  That is because blueprints don't build things. Things get built with the help of blueprints when intelligent agents read blueprints to get ideas on how to build things. 

There are many different versions of the "DNA is a body blueprint" lie, including the lie that genes "guide" or "direct" or "govern" the construction of a human body. Genes having no specification of a human body or any of its organs or cells cannot possibly be doing such a "guiding" or "directing" or "governing." 

Other than lying about DNA and genes, what developmental biologists mainly do is engage in empty hand-waving. And that is pretty much all that is going on in the article of McShea and Babcock. The progression from a speck-sized zygote to the vast organization of the human body is a miracle of coordinated construction a thousand miles over the heads of biologists.

Below are some relevant quotes by scientists and doctors:

• "Yet while these are several examples of well-understood processes, our study of animal morphogenesis is really in its infancy." -- David Bilder and Saori L. Haigo1, "Expanding the Morphogenetic Repertoire: Perspectives from the Drosophila Egg." 
• "Fundamentally, we have a poor understanding of how any internal organ forms." -- Timothy Saunders, developmental biologist (link).
• "An adult human body is made up of some 30 to 40 trillion cells, all of which stem from a single fertilized egg cell. The process by which the right cells appear to arrive in their right numbers at the right time at the right place -- development -- is only understood in the roughest of outlines." -- Five scientists (link). 
• "Our understanding of how our organs form is still in its infancy" -- A research project abstract written by scientists (link). 
• "Biochemistry cannot provide the spatial information needed to explain morphogenesis...Supracellular morphogenesis is mysterious...Nobody seems to understand the origin of biological and cellular order."  -- Six medical authorities (link).  "
• "Understanding the rules underlying organismal development is a major unsolved problem in biology. Each cell in a developing organism responds to signals in its local environment by dividing, excreting, consuming, or reorganizing, yet how these individual actions coordinate over a macroscopic number of cells to grow complex structures with exquisite functionality is unknown." - Five scientists (link). 
• "However, our understanding of the molecular and physical basis of morphogenesis in plants or in any other eukaryotic system [e.g. mammals] is still in its infancy due to the complexity and non-linearity of processes involved in morphogenesis dynamics (or Morphodynamics)." -- A description of a 2017-2021 scientific project, presumably written by scientists (link). 
• "Understanding morphogenesis in vertebrate tissues in development and disease poses one of the most significant challenges in the life sciences. Despite the impressive technical advances aimed at cellular and subcellular characterization and manipulation over the past half century, a clear picture of how form is created still remains in its infancy." -- Four scientists in 2025 (link). 
• "We don't know what dark matter is, we don't understand how the brain works or consciousness, we don't understand morphogenesis, we don't understand the origin of life." -- Physics PhD Michael Nielsen (link). 
• "You start off as a sperm and an egg, and nine months later [your body has been built], through a magical process of morphogenesis, which we don’t understand." -- Donald Hoffman, Professor Emeritus of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine (link). 
• "We take it for granted that we go to bed with two sets of fully functional kidneys and that we wake up with them the next morning but we don't understand the fundamental processes that give rise to this very well choreographed maintenance of an organism's form and function." -- Scientist Sanchéz Alvarado (link). 

Yet More Dreams, Visions or Spooky Events That Seemed to Predict a Death or Disaster

 In the series of 13 posts below, I discussed dreams, visions, premonitions 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

Dreams, Visions or Premonitions That Seemed to Foretell a Death

Additional Dreams or Visions or Apparitions That Seemed to Foretell a Death or Disaster

Sometimes Dreams, Visions or Premonitions Seem to Foretell a Death

A Spooky Event Seemed to Foretell or Coincide With Their Deaths

Let us look at some more cases of this type.

Below is an example of a dream that foretold a death. We read that two weeks before little Elizabeth Tarver died from burns, Hattie Warren had a dream that Elizabeth died from burns. 

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86090330/1909-01-02/ed-1/seq-2/

Below is an example of a dream that foretold a death. We read that Mrs. Julia French told an attorney that she had a dream that she was seized and thrown into an elevator well. Two weeks later Julia was found dead in an elevator well. 

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84028490/1902-03-25/ed-1/seq-6/

Below is an example of a dream that foretold a death. We read that a few days before John L. Griffith died in an automobile crash, a Mrs. Frye dreamed that he would die in an automobile crash. 

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85040310/1922-02-09/ed-1/seq-3/

Below is an example of a dream that foretold the exact time and date of the heart-related death of a boy who seemed healthy:

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84026749/1906-04-22/ed-1/seq-43/

Below is an account of a wife whose dream foretold her husband's sudden violent death:

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84026749/1903-07-22/ed-1/seq-5/

The accounts below were received by the publication Psychic News when it asked readers to supply cases of dreams that came true:

You can read the accounts here:

https://digitalcollections.lib.umanitoba.ca/islandora/object/uofm%3A2958057?

Below is a similar account from the same publication:

You can read the account here:

https://digitalcollections.lib.umanitoba.ca/islandora/object/uofm%3A2948779

Below we have what seems like one of the most solid cases of dreams foretelling a disaster, with the dream predicting the ZR-2 disaster occurring to more than one person in the weeks beforehand. 

You can read the account below:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84020657/1921-09-26/ed-1/seq-1/

Below is a newspaper account of a man (Robert Montgomery) who saw a ghost that he regarded as an omen of death. The man died very soon thereafter.

You can read the account below:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85025007/1896-08-19/ed-1/seq-1/

Below is an account from page 199 of the March 30, 1934 edition of the periodical Light, which you can read here:

CMB Anomalies: An Enduring "Wrong Way" Sign to Cosmologists

 It is sometimes said that the cosmic microwave background or CMB dates from the beginning of the universe. But in reality it dates from a time about 380,000 years after the Big Bang, a time called the Epoch of Recombination. 

What are called CMB anomalies are unexpected features in the cosmic background radiation that pervades all of space. The cosmic background radiation is also called the cosmic microwave background or CMB. Using their existing theories about the universe and its beginning, cosmologists (the scientists who study the universe as  whole) expect the cosmic background radiation to have particular qualities.  CMB anomalies are features in the cosmic background radiation that defy such expectations, hinting that cosmologists have got things wrong in some major way. 

My last major post on the topic of CMB anomalies was a 2017 post entitled "Shocking CMB Anomalies Contradict Guth's 'Empirical Success' Claims."  Below is a quote from that post:

"The first satellite to observe in detail the cosmic background radiation was the WMAP satellite launched in 2001. This satellite detected some very strange anomalies in the cosmic background radiation, anomalies that came as a surprise to scientists. One was an anomaly called the cosmic cold spot. Another was an anomaly that is technically known as the hemispherical variance asymmetry. Then there is an anomaly called the quadrupole-octopole alignment. There are nine other anomalies in the cosmic background radiation that are summarized in a table in this scientific paper. The table is below:

The p-values here give us a rough idea of the probability of finding such anomalies if standard ideas of cosmology (including cosmic inflation and dark matter) are correct.....Years after the WMAP satellite was launched, scientists launched another satellite called the Planck satellite. It was predicted that the troubling anomalies in the cosmic background radiation would go away after the more powerful Planck satellite did its work. But that did not happen. The Planck team reported the same anomalies. The table above is from a paper entitled, 'CMB Anomalies After Planck.' ”

A 2010 paper states the following about these anomalies in the cosmic background radiation:

"While not all of these alignments are statistically independent, their combined statistical significance is certainly greater than their individual significances. For example, given their mutual alignments, the conditional probability of the four normals lying so close to the ecliptic, is less than 2%; the combined probability of the four normals being both so aligned with each other and so close to the ecliptic is less than 0.4% × 2% = 0.008%. These are therefore clearly surprising, highly statistically significant anomalies — unexpected in the standard inflationary theory and the accepted cosmological model.

This is a probability of less than 1 in 10,000 under the assumptions of the theory of primordial cosmic inflation and the accepted cosmological model.

The quotes above are mainly from my 2017 post. What has happened in recent years in regard to these CMB anomalies? They seem to have mostly persisted. Recently a cosmologist named Subir Sarkar wrote an article discussing a paper he co-authored about one of these CMB anomalies, called the cosmic dipole anomaly. He wrote this, using CDM to refer to "cold dark matter":

"The cosmic dipole anomaly has thus established itself as a major challenge to the standard cosmological model, even if the astronomical community has chosen to largely ignore it. This may be because there is no easy way to patch up this problem. It requires abandoning not just the Lambda-CDM model but the FLRW description itself, and going back to square one."

Such talk about troubling anomalies and the possible overthrow of a prevailing paradigm reminds me of the theory of scientific revolutions presented by Thomas Kuhn in his much-referenced work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. According to Kuhn, there would arise among some large group of scientists a set of assumptions and belief traditions that Kuhn called a paradigm. But the paradigm might  be challenged by observations that conflicted with it, observations that Kuhn called anomalies. For a long time, conformist and habit-bound  scientists loyal to some prevailing paradigm would just ignore such anomalies, or try to "sweep them under the rug." But eventually the anomalies might become so abundant and so hard-to-ignore that there might occur a scientific revolution in which the old paradigm would be overthrown. The diagram below summarizes such ideas:

The corresponding scientific paper co-authored by Sarkar is a recent work that will be hard for the layman to read. There is one passage that is very noteworthy, the passage below:

"The simple FLRW-based ΛCDM lambda cold cark matter] model has been so successful in fitting data. However one of its ‘simple’ parameters is the Cosmological Constant Λ which, interpreted as the energy density of the quantum vacuum, would require fine-tuning of two unrelated terms to at least 60 decimal places to enable the Universe to exist in its present form. It is clear that simplicity is in the eye of the beholder." 

What does this reference to " fine-tuning of two unrelated terms to at least 60 decimal places" refer to? It refers to a degree of coincidental luck that you would have if you guessed the ten-digit phone numbers of six strangers visiting from very far away, and correctly guessed perfectly all of their phone numbers. My widely-read post here discusses the topic in greater detail. 

The fine-tuning referred to is only one of many examples of very precise fine-tuning revealed by physics and cosmology. Another one is a very precise fine-tuning involving the initial expansion rate of the universe. Cosmologists said the initial expansion rate of the universe must have been fine-tuned to about 50 decimal places, or we would not end up with a universe like the universe we have. They were so horrified by this that they wasted 45 years on a "primordial cosmic inflation" speculation misadventure trying to explain away the fine-tuning, a speculation that has failed to be confirmed, and has flunked observational tests such as the search for primordial b-modes. It is this very "primordial cosmic inflation" speculation regime that is discredited by the CMB anomalies mentioned above, which should not exist if such "primordial cosmic inflation" speculations are correct, as I explain in my 2017 post. 

Then there is the exact equality of the absolute value of the charge on every proton and the absolute value of the charge on every electron, which experiments show match to 20 decimal places. Below is a relevant quote:

"A mere 1 percent offset between the charge of the electron and that of the proton would lead to a catastrophic repulsion....My entire body would dissolve in a massive explosion...The very Earth itself, the planet as a whole, would crack open and fly apart in an annihilating explosion...This is what would happen were the electron's charge to exceed the proton's by 1 percent. The opposite case, in which the proton's charge exceeded the electron's, would lead to the identical situation...How precise must the balance be?...Relatively small things like atoms, people and the like would fly apart if the charges differed by as little as one part in 100 billion. Larger structures like the Earth and the Sun require for their existence a yet more perfect balance of one part in a billion billion." -- Astronomy professor emeritus George Greenstein, "The Symbiotic Universe: Life and Mind in the Cosmos," pages 63-64. 

You might think that physicists and cosmologists would be smart enough to put two and two together here. But mostly they act like the "Wheel of Fortune" contestant in the visual below. 

Bozzano's Pioneering Study of Out-of-Body Experiences

Out-of-body experiences became a well-known topic once the topic of near-death experiences became well-known in the 1970's, largely due to Raymond Moody's best-selling book on the topic (Life After Life). But the study of out-of-body experiences dates from well before the 1970's. One of the first serious works on the topic was a 1937 book by the Italian researcher Ernest Bozzano, one entitled "Les Phénomènes De Bilocation" or "The Phenomenon of Bilocation."  The book has attracted little attention, both because it has never been translated into English (to the best of my knowledge), and because instead of using the well-known phrase "out-of-body experience" in its title the author used the rarely recognized word "bilocation" (meaning to be in two different places at the same time). 

An encyclopedia article on Bozzano (link)

Using Google Translate, I can translate the very interesting cases Bozzano cites, which are mainly cases that appeared in English publications. The book I have at www.archive.org is a French translation of an Italian work. As I wish to avoid whenever possible  using Google Translate to translate the French into English (which would often end up being a possibly unreliable affair of going from Italian to French to English), I will track down whenever possible the original English text of the papers Bozzano is referring to. Luckily this is possible because Bozzano was very good about citing his sources, and the www.iapsop.com site is very good about preserving such sources. 

The type of experiences Bozzano documented were largely the same as what are now called out-of-body experiences.  If you have an experience in which your soul or spirit seems to float out of your body, and goes away from your body, you can either call that an out-of-body experience or a case of bilocation (being in two places in the same time). 

Early on the Bozzano book cites the very interesting case below, which sounds more like a typical out-of-body experience. The case is found on page 288 of the July, 1894 edition of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, which can be read here: 

"Whilst arguing with myself as to whether I was asleep or not, I suddenly seemed to divide into two distinct beings. The force that occasioned this was that which I have described above. One of these beings remained motionless on the sofa ; the other could move some little distance, and could actually look at the motionless body on the sofa. There existed between these two ' beings' an elastic force which prevented the one from severing its connection with the other. At will I could make the second ' being' lie on the floor, or move some distance about the room. As the distance between the two beings became greater, so did the elastic force seem to become more powerful. A limit was soon reached at which no effort of will could effect a further severance. This limit was about two yards. When this limit was reached, I could feel resistance to the separating efforts in both ' beings.'  During this time, as before, I retained perfect consciousness of what was happening in the room. De B. had returned. I saw and heard him come in ; he commenced to play the piano again, and H. was making wry faces at the music. After a great effort I managed to call H.'s name. He looked round and went on writing. Afterwards he gave as his reason for not answering that he thought I was ' fooling ' him. The dual condition continued for five minutes more. Then fusion seemed to set in. I resisted the feeling of fusion. It could be prevented at will. Eventually, with a curiosity to know 'what was going to happen next,' I allowed it to proceed. The two beings then rapidly united again. I tried to get into the dual condition again. This seemed to be prevented by the same force that ' inhibited ' me at first. I then began to think out a theory to account for all these sensations, and during this time the inhibiting force grew weaker and gradually disappeared. There was no sensation of waking, but simply a slow cessation of the conditions. The whole time I was actively engaged not only in theorising, but in recording events in the room, to see whether I observed them accurately or not. As it turned out, my observations had been minutely correct. I continued to remain in the same position on the sofa ; I was anxious to see 'if anything more was going to happen.' Nothing did happen, so in the course of ten minutes I got up and related my experiences to my friends. They were much amused, but very much inclined to doubt the whole affair. Their idea seemed to me to be that I had been all this time manufacturing something to tell them."

We have here an account that is entirely consistent with long-standing theories that each human has an "astral body" that is connected to the physical body by a seemingly elastic cord that is sometimes called "the silver cord."  Many similar accounts would later be collected by Robert Crookall, who was the main researcher of out-of-body experiences in the period between Bozzano's 1937 book and the rise of interest in out-of-body experiences occurring during the 1970's. In my post here I quote some very interesting passages from the works of Crookall, in which we hear of people describing such a "silver cord" or elastic band connecting a physical body and what has been called a spirit body or astral body. 

Bozzano then cites an account which can be found on page 34 of the January 17, 1903 edition of the periodical Light, which can be read here. The author is George Wyld MD.

"One day in the year 1874, as I took chloroform to relieve the intense agony I was suffering from the passage of a renal calculus, I suddenly lost all pain, and as suddenly saw my 'soul-form’ standing and contemplating my body as it lay motionless on the bed, about six or seven feet from where my ‘spirit-form’ stood. The revelation was only for a few seconds, but it was sufficient to convince me that I saw my soul-form outside the body. Shortly afterwards I called upon three medical men who were accustomed to administer anaesthetics, and they all said they had frequently heard their patients make the same remark as to their experiences as I had done. I also called at the Dental Hospital, and my experience was further confirmed, but the view there taken was that it was an illusion. But I knew it to be an experience, exactly such as happens in cases of drowning, when by manipulations the lungs are emptied of water, and the soul then returns to the body. If this be so, then we have in the use of anaesthetics a scientific means of proving the existence of the soul as an individuality external to the body, and the question that has engaged psychologists for thousands of years is solved ; and if so it is the most momentous discovery ever made. Impressed by these ideas I wrote to the editor of ‘ The Lancet ’ one day in 1895, and much to my surprise he replied that he would be happy to insert a paper from me on the subject, which he did, also drawing the attention of the profession to my views. Seeing that there are probably twenty thousand medical men who read ‘ The Lancet ’ ; and as perhaps not fewer than one thousand patients are placed under the influence of anaesthetics weekly in Great Britain, I expected to see an extensive correspondence in ‘ The Lancet’ on the subject; but, on the contrary, no serious notice was taken of the matter."

What Wyld encountered here is the senseless tendency of scientists and doctors to ignore important clues about nature which defy dogmas they were taught in school.  Such a tendency has been the most terrible impediment to the advance of science and knowledge. 

Bozzano then refers us to the article "Astral Excursions" by Franz Hartmann MD, which appears on page 159 of the March 1908 Occult Review, which can be read here. It begins with a third-hand account of an out-of-body experience, which I won't describe. Then Hartmann gives a first-hand account:

"To this I may be permitted to add a similar experience of my own which I had at Colombo (Ceylon) in 1884. I went with my friend B------ to a dentist, to have a tooth extracted. I took chloroform, and after getting under its influence I soon saw myself standing beside the dentist’s chair in which my body was lying. I appeared to myself just the same person as when in my normal state. I saw all the objects in the room, heard all that was spoken; but when I tried to lift one of the instruments on a little table next to the chair, I could not do so, as my fingers passed through it. Since then I have occasionally seen myself stepping out of my physical form, and this occurs in two ways; namely, if, while this separation takes place my consciousness is centred in the physical body, I see myself in the astral body standing before me at the side of my bed, and if my consciousness is centred in the astral body, I see my physical form lying in bed. I have never made consciously any astral excursions to distant places, but such experiences may be sufficient to convince one that man has an astral body capable of existing independently of the physical form, and to those who have experienced such things the doubts of those who have experienced nothing may appear quite as unworthy of consideration, as would the arguments of one who had never seen railways and were in consequence to deny their existence."

Next Bozzano quotes from an account that appeared on page 46 of the February 8, 1919 edition of the periodical Light, which can be read here. We hear an account by Captain Gilbert Nobbs of getting a severe head injury during World War I. A bullet passed out through his left eye, and he was permanently blinded. He gives this account of what happened:

"I hesitate to tell what followed. But as I am trying to record the sensations experienced at the time of receiving a head wound I will describe the next experience simply and leave the reader to form his own conclusions. 

 I was blind then as I am now : but the blackness which was then before me underwent a change. A voice from somewhere behind me said : ' This is death , will you come ?' Then gradually the blackness became more intense. A curtain seemed to be slowly falling ; there was space ; here was darkness blacker than my blindness ; everything was past. There was a peacefulness, a nothingness ; but a happiness indescribable . 

I seemed for a moment somewhere in the emptiness looking down at my body lying in the shell-hole, bleeding from the temple. I was dead, and that was my body ; but I was happy ! 

But the voice I had heard seemed to be waiting for answer. I seemed to exert myself by a frantic effort, like one in a dream  who is trying to awaken .  I said , ' No, not now ; I won't die .'  Then the curtain slowly lifted ; my body moved and I was moving it. I was alive ! There, my readers, I have told you , and I have hesitated to tell it before . More than that, I will tell you that I was not unconscious; neither did I lose consciousness until several minutes later , and then unconsciousness was quite rent.

I have told you how clear was my brain the moment I was hit, and I tell you also that after the sensation I have just related my brain was equally clear, as I will show you , until I became unconscious. Call it a hallucination , a trick of the brain , or what you will. I make no attempt to influence you...Whatever it was, I no longer feel there is any anxiety about death. Nor do I dread it." 

On pages 57-58 of the book we read that Mrs. Nathalie Annenkof wrote the following about two out-of-body experiences she had:

"You asked me to write down the two cases of 'exit from my body' that I told you about. I will try to do it as accurately as possible.   It is 4 years since the first case took place. I did not know then that it was possible, having no idea about such things. In the spring of 1926, on a very beautiful and warm day, I was sitting in the cemetery, on the edge of the grave of my little girl, whom I had just lost. I was depressed and sad, but in good health. I remember very well that while I was watching the bees gathering honey from the flowers I had just planted, I felt myself becoming light, then lighter and lighter physically and mentally. My first impression was that my legs and arms were no longer heavy, then my stomach, then my chest. And suddenly I found myself above and next to my body, which I saw sitting on the edge of the grave. I looked at my tired face. I even noticed that my coat was stained with dirt. And I had the sensation of hovering above my body in complete bliss. I had the sensation of a great and luminous joy of living, as if I were living a thousand lives at once, and of complete tranquility.

I could not move and did not feel the need to. But I could see, understand and feel an inner and happy life. My body looked like a rag, like an abandoned thing. I thought: 'This is death!' And yet I had the joy of living.

I saw the cemetery guard approach my body, touch it, feel it, call me and run away. He told me later that he had gone to call for an ambulance, and that my hands and face were starting to get cold.

When I saw him leave, I understood that he thought I was dead and suddenly I was seized with fear. 'This is death,' I thought. 'How will my husband live without me?'

But I felt so alive that I said to myself: 'I must get back into my body.' I tried to get back into it and was afraid of not being able to do so.

I began by feeling heaviness, then the pains, the little discomforts to which we are so accustomed that we no longer notice them. Then came the sadness and the desire to cry. I walked home.

Two weeks ago the same thing happened again. I was reading a cheerful book one evening in bed, laughing to myself...Suddenly, I had the impression of leaving myself, and I saw my body lying down, book in hand, while I felt myself in the air, very happy, with a feeling of inner life. I looked at my body, I found it good and I said to myself: 'It's a pity to die so young!'  I approached my lying body and tried to enter it. I immediately felt that it absorbed me, like a sheet of blotting paper, or like a sponge absorbs water.  My husband rang, I got up to open the door for him."

On page 63 of the book, we read an account by Joseph Costa:

"I had the clear and precise sensation of finding myself with my thinking 'self' alone, in the middle of the room, completely separated from the body, which continued to lie on the bed. I saw - if it is permissible to designate thus the sensation that I experienced - the things around me as if a radiation penetrated through the molecules of the objects on which my attention was fixed, as if matter had dissolved on contact with thought....I saw my body perfectly recognizable by its particularities, its profile, my figure, but also bundles of veins and nerves vibrating with a luminous tingling....My thinking 'me' was weightless, or, to put it better, without the impression of the force of gravity and the notion of volume or mass. I was no longer a body, since my body lay inert on the bed: I was like the tangible expression of a thought, of an abstraction, capable of transporting me to any place on earth, sea, or sky, faster than lightning, in the same instant that I would have formulated it at will, and without even the notion of time and space. If I said that I felt free, light, ethereal, I would only be expressing from afar the sensation that I felt in this moment of infinite liberation....I can assure the reader that until this moment, I had not read or heard of spiritualism: spiritualist theories, phenomena of bilocation, splitting of soul and body. Mediumistic experiences and spiritualist sessions were completely unknown to me. I can therefore absolutely exclude the hypothesis that for me it was simply a phenomenon of suggestion. Nor could it be a question of a dream, because of the enormous difference in the sensations remaining in the memory of the images provoked by a dream and those too dissimilar in their sensitive reception, which I had present to my mind at that moment. In fact, I did not encounter in this memory that nebulosity, that indistinct sensation between the chimerical and the reality that the impressions of a dream have. Because finally I never had such a vivid sensation of really existing as in the moment when I felt separated from my body."

Bozzano then cites the account on page 515 of the 1908 Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, which can be read here. A woman describes an out-of-body experience that includes a life review.  On page 70 Bozzano quotes Eugenie Garcia as having an out-of-body experience, apparently while being hypnotized:

"I saw myself suddenly standing in the middle of the room where I had just been put to sleep; 'Look, it seems to me that I was sitting only a moment ago; so I got up without knowing it, let's see.'  I cast my eyes on myself: 'Look! I am luminous, transparent, light as a feather.'  Suddenly, I saw my body lying motionless in an armchair. Three or four people surrounded me, watching me attentively. What are they looking at me like that? Let's see. I come closer and look at myself too. doing like everyone else. I could clearly see the inside of my body, I could see the heart beating, the blood circulating, the networks....Then I looked around me, but, instead of meeting with my eyes an opaque and non-transparent surface as houses or movable objects usually are, I saw everything clear as glass. I saw my neighbors' people and apartments as if we lived in a crystal house."

The report of being able to see inside a human body was one quite a few times reported by people hypnotized during the nineteenth century. In the literature of the time, such an ability was sometimes described as lucidity, clairvoyance or clairvoyant lucidity.  As discussed here, clairvoyants such as Alexis Didier passed very many successful tests in which a similar ability was demonstrated, with Alexis many times identifying what was inside the contents of locked boxes and folded pages inside sealed heavy envelopes. 

Bozzano then cites the case below, found on page 40 of the January 22, 1932 edition of the periodical Light:

"DOCTOR'S OUT-OF-THE-BODY EXPERIENCE 

An out-of-the-body experience which brought assurance of conscious life after death is related by Dr. Overend G. Rose, of 8 Roval Well Terrace, Cheltenham, in the first issue of the new and enlarged series of The Spiritualist, the organ of the Spiritualist Community, London, of which Mr. Ernest Hunt is now in editorial charge. Dr . Rose relates that, after being thrown from a horse and badly injured, he was ' picked up for dead ' by two men who witnessed the accident and five hours passed before he regained consciousness. 'Although I was insensible,' Dr. Rose writes, ' I could see my body lying there on the ground. I could see the men pick me up (heard them say I was dead) and carry me into the house. I was able to see the doctors trying to bring me ta, and all the time I was able to see myself lying there. I seemed to be floating in a summer sea. I cannot describe the sensation of peace and happiness and yet someone seemed to tell me I had to go back. And that is why I told the doctors I was not going to die.' Commenting on his experience, Dr. Rose writes : 'Now, the points I wish to make are-first, I had never seen the men who picked me up before and have never seen them since, as they were strangers to the district, just riding through. Yet I was able to describe them even to their clothes, and also their horses, which they had tied to the fence when they went to pick me up. Secondly, although I was totally unconscious, I was able to tell the doctors everything that had taken place, and what my injuries were. I am convinced that I was outside my body, yet I was able to see and hear. It makes me certain there is a life after death, which does not require a material body for us to be able to see and hear, and that we shall retain our personality.' " 

On page 79 Bozzano quotes an account of an out-of-body experience:

"I lay down on the bed and began to read. It was then that I was suddenly invaded by a wave of sleep which I could not resist. This upset me greatly, for I was reading Amiei's Journal, which interested me greatly, and I would have liked to continue. But it was all in vain, and I fell asleep suddenly. I immediately felt as if I had left my body. I turned over, and seeing my body curled up in an uncomfortable position, I wondered how one could fall asleep in such a posture. I had the idea of ​​leaving and I went into the corridor by going through the door, but this was evidently by force of habit, since I could just as well have gone through the wall, seeing that I did not open the door, but went through the wood. I did not move my feet, since to go to any place, I only had to desire it. Which did not prevent me from seeing myself in possession of legs, arms and body, and from feeling better than usual. There was no one in the corridor, except a negro who was polishing the floor. I confronted him, but he did not seem to see me. I understood that I must have become invisible, which increased my curiosity all the more. I then amused myself by passing in front of him, behind him, around him, brushing against him, but he never glanced at me. The thing amused me. But then I suddenly had the thought that if someone came to get me, and that my body should be awakened from its sleep while I was out of it, complications might result, probably not very pleasant. I immediately returned through the wood of the door and when I was near the bed, my body 'sucked' me imperiously, 'sheathing' me by the feet! It was fortunate that this idea came to my mind, because immediately there was a knock at the door and Mrs. Canfield, the landlady of the inn, came in and asked me permission to take my dressing gown."

On page 81 Bozzano quotes this account of an out-of-body experience:

"While I was ill in the great hospital of Pittsburgh, I was subjected to a serious operation. For the first time in my life, I had to be given an anesthetic. Scarcely had I begun to breathe it than I experienced a wonderful sensation of well-being and beatitude. But, to my great surprise, I found myself in the company of the doctor and the nurse, and in front of me, lying on the operating table, I saw my body inert and lifeless. I noted the surgical instruments and bottles placed next to it, and I even noticed that one nurse had her cap askew, which was rather comical.

I was led to look up and I saw coming towards me, through the ceiling, my dear grandmother, dead ten years ago. She approached me and took me by the hand, saying that I must hurry, because the time available was very short. We passed through the ceiling together, as easily as we would have passed through a smoke screen. We found ourselves outside, in a luminous atmosphere where my grandmother drew my attention to a landscape that was familiar to me, showing me where my home was, which emerged from magnificent trees. While I was ecstatic at this perspective, my grandmother exclaimed: 'We don't have time! Now we have to go back into your body!' And before I could even answer, I woke up in my bed and saw a nurse leaning anxiously over me.

This is what I have been able to report about my experience of out-of-body experience, which was for me a powerful revelation: If what happened to me must be repeated at the moment of death, then there is no point in fearing death."

"Best of 2025" Science Recaps Remind Us of How Badly Science Clickbait Misled Us

 Clickbait is a gigantic problem that mars the reliability of stories appearing on web pages that may be labeled as Science News. There currently exists an economic ecosystem that strongly incentivizes the appearance of interesting-sounding but misleading science stories. 

After a scientific paper has been written up and published, it is announced with a press release issued by the main academic institution involved in the research. Nowadays the press releases of universities and colleges are notorious for making sensationalized claims that are not warranted by anything discovered in the research being discovered. Often a tentative claim made in a scientific paper (basically a "perhaps" or a "maybe") will be stated as if it is was simply a discovery of a definite fact.  Other times a university press release will make some important-sounding claim that was never made in the scientific paper writing up the research.  

There are complex economic reasons why press releases so erroneous keep appearing so often, and why they are passed on in clickbait Internet stories that lead to pages containing ads that generate revenue. To understand those reasons you have to "follow the money" and look at which parties are profiting from such unreliable but interesting-sounding stories. The reasons are explained in this post, and sketched in the diagram below.

All year long we are misled by these hype-filled boasting stories appearing on "science news" pages. The stories are claiming the most glorious breakthroughs and the most wonderful progress. So when you go to read one of those "Best of the Year" stories on some science site, such as a page labeled "The Best Physics Results of 2025," you might then expect to get a mind-blowing recap, listing the most marvelous breakthroughs.   But you will be greatly disappointed. Reading such end-of-year recap stories with adequate critical scrutiny, you may shake your head in dismay and disappointment, and ask yourself, "Is that all they got done?"

Let us look at a few examples, starting with a PhysicsWorld article entitled "Top 10 Breakthroughs of the Year in physics for 2025 revealed."  We have no mention of any real breakthrough in the field of physics. The first item on the list is not anything even involving physics, but some research in astronomy. It is a report of finding life-related chemicals on the asteroid Bennu. But the levels reportedly detected are so low (only a few parts per billion) that nothing like any breakthrough has occurred. As I explain in my post here, the reported chemical levels are so low they probably result merely from earthly contamination, rather than a detection of such chemicals on the asteroid Bennu. 

We read of nine other claimed "breakthroughs," none of which are anything very interesting, and none of which are any actual "breakthroughs." The article is filled up with various results from technology and medicine. Reading the article, we may ask, "Where was all that grand progress we were promised would be coming soon?"  Not long ago, physicists were boasting the most grandiose boasts, mindlessly crowing about creating "theories of everything." What happened to such boasts? It seems they are "gone with the wind." 

A Harvard University page is entitled "Breakthroughs of 2025." Here are some of the items mentioned. 

• We read of how David Liu did work that helped some gene-fiddling genetic therapy for a certain type of very rare genetic disease . It sounds like good work, but it isn't that much of a breakthrough,  partially because of the rarity of the disease.
• There's a discussion of work on the origin of the "Uralic family of languages," with a very dubious claim that some DNA analysis has shed light on the origin of such languages. This is no breakthrough. The origin of language is a huge unsolved problem of science. 
• There's some mention of AI work on genomic analysis, something involving rare genetic variants that may increase disease risk. It's not any real breakthrough. 
• There are boasts about  a neuroscientist paper that does not qualify as either a breakthrough or a good neuroscience research paper, because its use of too-small study group sizes (often less than 15). 
• There is the claim that "Harvard scientists offer clues into how to treat deadly aortic aneurysms and hypertension," but it is not at all a breakthrough, because it is merely some rodent research, rather than something tested on humans. 
• There is the claim that "Through research and archeology, Harvard scientists got one step closer to understanding the origins of life and the early history of Earth’s largest animal group." The claim is unfounded. The claim links to a very misleading article in the Harvard Gazette entitled "A step toward solving central mystery of life on Earth." The article is debunked in my post here, entitled "Harvard Misrepresents Information-Empty Bubbles As Being Relevant to Life's Origin." Some scientists made some  artificial gizmo including green LED lights, and got some little bubbles bearing no real resemblance to anything living. One of them senselessly boasted that this was some breakthrough in understanding the origin of life. It sure was not. 

I fail to find any big breakthroughs listed on Harvard's page entitled "Breakthroughs of 2025." Another "end of year recap" article is entitled "Top Scientific Discoveries Of 2025: A Year of Quantum Leaps And Cosmic Revelations."  We don't read about any real "quantum leaps" in science (that term being one referring to an instantaneous change from one position to another).  We mainly merely read about various types of incremental progress. There is mention of a medical treatment that can supposedly prevent HIV transmission. That might qualify as a breakthrough, although  progress in fighting HIV has been steadily occurring for decades. 

Quanta Magazine has some "year in review" articles reviewing science progress in 2025. They fail to discuss any item that is very memorable and important. Specifically:

• A "The Year in Physics" article starts out by discussing a very dubious claim that dark energy is getting weaker. Scientists have never even observed dark energy, and it has no place in the Standard Model of Physics. So it is kind of like a "is the leprechaun population dwindling?" article. Then there's something about a big black hole, which we are told is "terribly exciting." But that's astronomy, not physics. Ditto for the section entitled "How Climate Scientists Saw the Future Before It Arrived." That isn't physics progress. Finally there's a section about AI dreaming up physics experiments, but that does not qualify as big physics progress.  Then the article ends. Where was all the big physics progress? The article fails to list any. 
• A "The Year in Biology" article starts out with a section "What Can a Cell Remember?"  No actual progress in biology is discussed in that section. Then there's a section "A Biography of Earth Across the Age of Animals." That also is not a discussion of biology progress. Then there's a section "AI Is Nothing Like a Brain, and That's OK," which also is not a discussion of progress in biology. Then there's a section entitled "How Paradoxical Questions and Simple Wonder Lead to Great Science," which also is not a discussion of biology progress. Then there's a section entitled "Touch, Our Most Complex Sense, Is a Landscape of Cellular Sensors." It is not a discussion of biology progress, and touch is not our most complex sense.  Then the article ends. Where was all the big biology progress? The article fails to list any progress very big. 

The journal Science has just announced its "2025 Breakthrough of the Year." It is: renewable energy. The page talks mainly about solar power, a technology that has existed for decades. We read this:

"So far, this is not a story of new technology. China is 'more or less relying on the same core [solar] technology that the United States invented half a century ago,'  Li says."

I guess in a year where there haven't been much in the way of real science breakthroughs,  this is what happens: the "Breakthrough" award goes to some old technology. 

You will probably be disappointed by such "best of 2025" articles, because you probably got the idea all year long that scientists were making so many great leaps forward. You  probably got such an idea by reading hype-filled misinforming "Science News" web pages that look rather like the page imagined below. 

When "Science Slop" Clickbait Runs Amok