Don't Trust a Science News Story Just Because You Read It At Some Prestigious Source

" The job of the NYT [New York Times]... is to protect the status quo and the ruling class by marginalizing anyone who seriously challenges it and its enabling institutions." -- Bruce Levine (link). 

The clickbait epidemic has hopelessly compromised the integrity of science news sites. More and more, we see so-called "science news" sites tending to look like the clickbait monstrosity imaginatively depicted below:

Some of the economic and professional factors that encourage misstatements in science papers, science press releases, and science news articles are shown in the diagram below. 

Some of the players in this profit complex include major respected institutions such as  NBC, CBS, Apple,  and the New York Times.  No doubt such institutions profit from all of the clickbait and shoddy "news stories" that are floating about on sites such the New York Times web site, the science news page of Google News, and science sections of Apple News.  

Today's so-called "science news" articles very often contain falsehoods, groundless hype and shameless exaggeration, largely because of economic motivations charted in the diagram above. It is a huge mistake to think that an article is probably correct or respectable because you see it on Apple News, the websites of CBS News or NBC News,  or the New York Times.  These sources often contain information that is unreliable or erroneous. 

Let's look at some recent examples of the junk that sometimes appears on such sources.  On the day I am writing this, one of the leading Science News pages is shamelessly and brazenly  passing off as "Science News" a phony old claim that a "humanzee" was made by mating a chimp with a human.  The claim comes from a Darwinism enthusiast Gordon Gallup (an evolutionary psychologist) who provides no evidence to back up the claim other than his assertion that some professor of his thought some rumor he heard about this was true. 

Gallup's assertion appears in a story in the Sun in which he says this, while failing to name the professor referred to: 

"Gallup said the professor worked at Yerkes before the research centre moved to Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia in 1930.

He added: 'He told me the rumour was true. And he was a credible scientist in his own right '.”

What is called second-hand evidence or hearsay evidence is  something not  directly observed by the person who saw it, but a claim by someone that he heard someone else say that he saw something.  When all we have is second-hand evidence reported by a single person, we have no good evidence that something occurred.  Much of the evidence for apparition sightings is good evidence, because there are very many first-hand accounts in the words of the people who claim to have seen apparitions., and who very often provided freshly written reports of what they had very recently seen.  A report from Gordon Gallup of something he claims to have heard long ago from someone else of what happened decades earlier has very little value as evidence, particularly given the failure of Gallup to name the person, and the fact that Gallup is someone with a strong motivation to be spreading the rumor, which would tend to bolster the dogmatic claims he likes to make.  Gallup has not even provided a second-hand claim of someone seeing something. He has merely given a claim that someone said that a rumor was true.   

If someone had actually mated a chimpanzee and a human, it would be something that Darwinists would be extremely eager to report, and it is very hard to imagine something like that being kept secret.  With very great likelihood, the rumor is groundless.  What we have on this day at a major Science News page is very old Fake News being passed off as Science News.  Shame on those controlling such a page for passing on such a groundless old rumor as Science News, not merely on one day, but on two consecutive days. 

The wikipedia.org page on the topic of "humanzees" (hypothetical man-chimp hybrids) fails to even mention Gallup, and states, "There have been no scientifically verified specimens of a human–chimpanzee hybrid, but there have been substantiated reports of unsuccessful attempts to create one in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, and various unsubstantiated reports on similar attempts during the second half of the 20th century."

Also on the same Science News page on the day I wrote this post is a link that is entitled "How Our Brain Produces Language and Thought, According to Neuroscientists."  It's one of those fake link title deals, in which the link title does not match the title of the article you reach upon clicking on the link.  We are getting such fake link titles very frequently these days on Science News sites. A link may say "Stunning New Evidence of Life on Mars," and the link may take you to some story with a much less interesting title such as "Scientists Think Mars May Have Been Wetter Long Ago." In this case the "How Our Brain Produces Language and Thought, According to Neuroscientists" link takes you to a New York Times story that does not match such a headline.  

In the story we get New York Times science reporter Carl Zimmer acting as he too often does, by falling "hook, line and sinker" for some poorly designed Questionable Research Practices brain scan study that does not use a decent study group size.  The study group size used was only four subjects.  It's a study involving people who were brain-scanned when reading real words and nonsense words, and Carl attempts to insinuate that it gives some evidence for brains being involved in word recognition.  Given the way-too-small study group size, it does no such thing. I discuss at length problems with this paper and the type of tricks that it uses in my post here. 

We read in Carl's article no mention of a study on the same topic, using a much higher sample size, 24 subjects. That study found no appreciable difference between brain scans of subjects being read real words and pseudowords, and being asked "Does it sound like a real word?"  The only differences were negligible differences of about 1 part in 500, differences we would expect from mere random variations. 

The image below from a New Scientist article states, "Most studies that have used MRI machines to find links between the brain's structure or function and complex mental traits have used fewer than 23 subjects, but thousands are needed to find reliable results."  So why are sources like the New York Times  still peddling poorly designed studies using way-too-small study group sizes, trying to pass them off as research telling us something about brains? 

Carl Zimmer's writings are almost entirely to be found behind paywalls, and books you have to pay for. But using Google Scholar, I can find some of his articles, which sometimes make false claims about very important topics. An example is his 2013 Scientific American article "The Surprising Origin of Life's Complexity." The article has a misleading title, and has nothing credible to say about the origin of life's complexity. Zimmer discusses the complexity of the eye, and tells us this untrue story consisting of a first sentence that is false, a second sentence that is true and important, and a third sentence that is false or unbelievable:

"Darwin’s musings on the origin of complexity have found support in modern biology. Today biologists can probe the eye and other organs in detail at the molecular level, where they find immensely complex proteins joining together to make structures that bear a striking resemblance to portals, conveyor belts and motors. Such intricate systems of proteins can evolve from simpler ones, with natural selection favoring the intermediates along the way."

To the contrary, Darwin's armchair musings about the origin of biological complexity are discredited by the facts of modern biology, something very different from the belief traditions of evolutionary biologists. Twentieth century biologists discovered endless oceans of biological organization on the microscopic level that Darwin never dreamed of.  Evolutionary biologists have no credible tales to tell about the origin of the 20,000+ types of protein molecules in the human body, each its own complex invention. The problem is that protein molecules require thousands of well-arranged atoms, and are so easily damaged by small changes that they are not functional in half-forms.  There is therefore no credible Darwinian tale that can be told to explain the origin of the 20,000 types+ of protein molecules in the human body. Gradualism fails to explain very high states of biological organization, because of reasons such as nonfunctional intermediates and the uselessness of early stages. The functional thresholds of protein molecules are too high to be explained by Darwinist explanations, a reality that evolutionary biologists ignore because they senselessly fail to pay attention to the topics of functional thresholds and interdependent components, topics that are of supreme importance in any realistic discussion of biological origins.  As some Harvard scientists stated not long ago, "A wide variety of protein structures exist in nature, however the evolutionary origins of this panoply of proteins remain unknown." 

Zimmer refers to "immensely complex proteins joining together to make structures that bear a striking resemblance to portals, conveyor belts and motors." This is a reference to protein complexes, extremely complex and fine-tuned arrangements of proteins, arrangements so complex and fine-tuned and precisely arranged for specific functions that scientists these days routinely call them "molecular machines," partially because they sometimes include components acting like real motors. Your body has thousands of different types of protein complexes, and your existence dependence on the continual formation of such fine-tuned teams of proteins.  The structure of protein complexes is not specified in DNA or its genes, which don't tell how to make any protein complex.  So there is no conceivable random mutations of DNA that can explain the origin of protein complexes. So-called natural selection promoting lucky DNA mutations is worthless in explaining protein complexes, because DNA has no specification of the structure of protein complexes.  So no conceivable "way back when" luck involving DNA or glacially slow so-called natural selection can explain the formation of protein complexes, which can only be explained by something going on every hour within your body. 

With protein complexes we have the reality that they very often require the combination of protein molecules that are individually worthless until they become team members of protein complexes that are systems of different types of proteins. It is a reality completely contrary to Zimmer's claim that "such intricate systems of proteins can evolve from simpler ones, with natural selection favoring the intermediates along the way." There would be no so-called natural selection favoring the formation of a protein molecule which only became functional "late in the game" after it became a team member of a protein complex requiring a special arrangement of several different types of proteins.  And since protein molecules are extremely sensitive-to-small-changes structures that only fold properly when almost all of their amino acid sequence exists, half-stages and quarter-stages of the individual protein molecules would be useless; so there would be multiple ways in which the intermediate stages would fail to be functional, and fail to be favored or explained by so-called natural selection. This is the issue of nonfunctional incipient stages and nonfunctional intermediates, which is a "show-stopper" for all gradualist Darwinian explanations of the most impressive types of complexity we see in the human body, as I explain at length in my post "Anatomically Uninformative DNA, Nonfunctional Intermediates and Useless Early Stages Are Why Gradualism Does Not Work." 

A protein complex with 2 microscopic motors, described here

 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). 
• "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.
• "It seems clear that even the smallest change in the sequence of amino acids of proteins usually has a deleterious effect on the physiology and metabolism of organisms." -- Evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin, "The triple helix : gene, organism, and environment," page 123.
• "Proteins are so precisely built that the change of even a few atoms in one amino acid can sometimes disrupt the structure of the whole molecule so severely that all function is lost." -- Science textbook "Molecular Biology of the Cell."
• "To quantitate protein tolerance to random change, it is vital to understand the probability that a random amino acid replacement will lead to a protein's functional inactivation. We define this probability as the 'x factor.' ...The x factor was found to be 34% ± 6%."  -- 3 scientists, "Protein tolerance to random amino acid change." 
• "Once again we see that proteins are fragile, are often only on the brink of stability." -- Columbia University scientists  Lawrence Chasin and Deborah Mowshowitz, "Introduction to Molecular and Cellular Biology," Lecture 5.
• "We predict 27–29% of amino acid changing (nonsynonymous) mutations are neutral or nearly neutral (|s|<0.01%), 30–42% are moderately deleterious (0.01%<|s|<1%), and nearly all the remainder are highly deleterious or lethal (|s|>1%).” -- "Assessing the Evolutionary Impact of Amino Acid Mutations in the Human Genome," a scientific paper by 14 scientists. 
• "An analysis of 8,653 proteins based on single mutations (Xavier et al., 2021) shows the following results: ~68% are destabilizing, ~24% are stabilizing, and ~8,0% are neutral mutations...while a similar analysis from the observed free-energy distribution from 328,691 out of 341,860 mutations (Tsuboyama et al., 2023)...indicates that ~71% are destabilizing, ~16% are stabilizing, and ~13% are neutral mutations, respectively." -- scientist Jorge A. Villa, "Analysis of proteins in the light of mutations." 2023.
• "Proteins are intricate, dynamic structures, and small changes in their amino acid sequences can lead to large effects on their folding, stability and dynamics. To facilitate the further development and evaluation of methods to predict these changes, we have developed ThermoMutDB, a manually curated database containing >14,669 experimental data of thermodynamic parameters for wild type and mutant proteins... Two thirds of mutations within the database are destabilising." -- Eight scientists, "ThermoMutDB: a thermodynamic database for missense mutations," 2020. 

On August 21, 2024 the University of  Houston issued a nonsensical press release with a title of "Life From a Drop of Rain." It was one of the worst examples that year of a university press release trying to make something out of nothing, a type of event that occurs almost every day.  Anyone familiar with the huge functional complexity and information richness of even the simplest type of life would tend to laugh hard at the nonsense stated in the press release, the idea that mere rainwater would somehow help explain how we got self-reproducing cells requiring hundreds of types of protein inventions, involving a total of more than 40,000 very well-arranged atoms, in an arrangement as unlikely to occur by chance as ink splashes creating a well-written book of 100 pages.  

What was going on was another example of the old deplorable  trick of creating or describing some utterly unimpressive liquid with bubbles, and then calling such bubbles "protocells," which is rather like gathering up some branches from a forest and calling those branches a "proto-novel" or a "proto-encyclopedia," on the grounds that paper may be made from wood pulp.  But Carl Zimmer wrote a New York Times news story that sounded as if he had fallen for the nonsense "hook, line and sinker."  It seemed like a rather typical effort from Zimmer, who seems to very often have a credulous trust towards scientists making the most unfounded triumphal boasts relevant to origins mysteries, and who seems to too rarely apply critical scrutiny to such boasts, no matter how silly,  groundless or mathematically untenable they may be.  

In a 2003 article in the journal Science, entitled "How and Where Did Life Arise?" Zimmer made a true statement, followed by a false statement:

"Today, many scientists argue that the early atmosphere was dominated by other gases, such as carbon  dioxide. But experiments in recent years have shown that under these conditions, many building blocks of life can be formed."

To the contrary, there have been no experiments realistically simulating the early Earth that ever produced any of the simplest building components of life, such as amino acids.  The much-touted Miller-Urey experiment was no such thing, as it failed to realistically simulate early Earth conditions, for reasons discussed here. The failures of experiments trying to produce such chemicals is discussed in my post here. An example of the type of experiments sometimes cited is the one here, which produced only the simplest of the 20 types of amino acids used by living things, and by means of some ridiculously artificial use of "the large laser facility at the terrawatt Prague Asterix Laser System," something which does not at all qualify as a realistic simulation of early Earth conditions. 

Anyone swallowing Zimmer's line about " natural selection favoring the intermediates along the way" should study the image below. Generically speaking, the intermediate stages of a complex biological component produce no benefit by themselves; and it is also typically true that such a complex biological component produces no benefit by itself until it becomes part of some much more complex system requiring many other components working as team members.