The Confessions of Scientists Burst Their Boasts

Scientists are always claiming to understand big important things that they do not actually understand, things such as the origin of the human race and how there arises human minds. Over and over again we read statements claiming "scientists know" some grand thing, and the statements are very often profoundly misleading. 

One way to get a good understanding of how relatively little scientists know is to study confession statements by scientists in which they state things inconsistent with their grand boasts of knowledge. Often the same scientist who makes in one place some grand boast of scientists understanding things will in some other place make a confession inconsistent with such a claim.  In other cases, knowledge boasts made by one scientist will be contradicted by statements of other scientists in the same field. 

My very long post "Candid Confessions of the Scientists" (which you can read here) is probably the most extensive collection anywhere of such scientist confessions.  I have been updating the post after its publication date. I try to add to the post whenever I read a good confession of knowledge limits by a scientist. 

Below are some recent additions to the post. I'll start with some quotes using the phrase "in its infancy." Whenever scientists confess that something is "in its infancy," they are effectively admitting they do not have good knowledge about such a topic.

• "Despite recent advancements in identifying engram cells, our understanding of their regulatory and functional mechanisms remains in its infancy." -- Scientists claiming erroneously in 2024 that there have been recent advancements in identifying engram cells, but confessing there is no understanding of how they work (link).
• "Study of the genetics of human memory is in its infancy though many genes have been investigated for their association to memory in humans and non-human animals."  -- Scientists in 2022 (link).
• "The neurobiology of memory is still in its infancy." -- Scientist in 2020 (link). 
• "The investigation of the neuroanatomical bases of semantic memory is in its infancy." -- 3 scientists, 2007 (link). 
• "Currently, our knowledge pertaining to the neural construct of intelligence and memory is in its infancy." -- Scientists, 2011 (link). 
• "Our understanding of how organelles physically interact and use cellular signaling systems to coordinate functional networks between each other is still in its infancy."  -- Two biologists (link).
• "As Mark Twain is reported to have said: 'It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't true.'  In contemporary neuroscience, the list of assumptions that just ain't true is long indeed, so patience is required as I expose each in turn." -- Henry Vin, neuroscientist and psychologist, "The Crisis in Neuroscience" (link)

By making such confessions, scientists are admitting that they do not actually understand how a brain could store or retrieve memories. The reason for such ignorance (despite billions of dollars on funding to try to answer such questions) is almost certainly that the brain does not actually store memories and is not the source of the human mind.  Very much brain tissue has been microscopically examined at the highest resolution, and such microscopic examination has never found any trace of learned information. As discussed here, there is no plausible explanation of how a brain could store a memory for decades; and I discuss here how the brain is lacking in anything that could explain the wonder of instant human relevant recall when someone is asked a question (as brains lack indexes, addresses and sorting, the three things that allow quick recall using devices humans make). 

In the paper here, a neuroscientist interviewed by the paper author makes this anonymous confession: "We still don't understand how molecules contribute to consciousness or the mind.”

Below is a juicy addition to the "Candid Confessions" post, in which a biologist specializing in the origin of multicellularity confesses that scientists do not understand how multicellular organisms arose:

"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."

-- Biologist Will Ratcliff (link). 

The addition below to the "Candid Confessions" post gives us some scientists confessing their utter inability to solve the cosmological constant problem. This is the problem that according to the predictions of quantum mechanics, empty space should be more than 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times denser than steel, something that would make the universe utterly uninhabitable. The problem is discussed in my widely read post "' Vacuum Catastrophe'   Should Be Called the Vacuum Miracle," which you can read here. The confession of the scientists is below, and is stated in dense jargon:

"There are no robust predictions for the CC [cosmological constant] value within the standard QFT [Quantum Field Theory] paradigm that account for all existing vacuum contributions from quantum field dynamics (i.e. condensates) at various scales – ranging from the quantum qravity scale, MPl ' 1.2 · 1019 GeV, to the quantum chromodynamics (QCD) confinement scale, MQCD ' 0.1 GeV. The well-studied quark-gluon and Higgs condensates alone (responsible for chiral and gauge symmetry-breaking in the SM respectively) have contributions to the ground state energy of the Universe that far exceed the observed absolute CC value today [5]. Regardless of how the observed CC is explained, these huge quantum vacuum contributions must be eliminated [to explain a habitable universe such as ours]. Any consistent solution of this problem, known as the 'vacuum catastrophe', must rely on a compensation of short-distance vacuum fluctuations by the ground state density of the Universe to many tens of decimal digits. A dynamical mechanism for such gross cancellations (without a major finetuning) is not known, and should be regarded as a new physical phenomenon anyway.....There is still no real consensus in the community on what the resolution to the CC [cosmological constant]  problem is or should be. This is quite an unusual situation in physics, where traditionally there has tended to be a consensus on at least a general direction to look in. " --  A 2016 confession by scientists (link, p. 21).  The reference to "many tens of decimal places" refers to a fine-tuning such as a coincidental perfect balance to 1 part in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

Below are some other recent additions to the "Candid Confessions of the Scientists" post:

• "But when it comes to our actual feelings, our thought, our emotions, our consciousness, we really don't have a good answer as to how the brain helps us to have those different experiences." -- Andrew Newberg, neuroscientist, Ancient Aliens, Episode 16 of Season 14, 6:52 mark. 
• "Dr Gregory Jefferis, of the Medical Research Council's Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge told BBC News that currently we have no idea how the network of brain cells in each of our heads enables us to interact with each other and the world around us."  -- BBC news article (link). 
• "It is now evident that genes play only a minor role in evolution....We now know that the gene-centered Modern Synthesis was quite wrong (see especially Shapiro 2011, 2022; Noble 2012, 2013; Noble and Noble 2023; Corning 2018, 2020). Over the past few decades there has been a growing body of contradictory evidence."  -- Scientist Peter A. Corning, "Cooperative genes in smart systems: Toward an inclusive new synthesis in evolution" (link). 
• "We have addressed a large body of evidence related to transitions (micro- and macro-) in proteins that have a pre-existing globular 3D-structure (and function), but how does structure and function evolve in de novo [new] proteins? ...Overall, the evolution of MIPSs, the recruitment of first enzymes, and de novo emergence of proteins are aspects where our knowledge is still at infancy." -- Scientists confessing in 2022 that we don't know how new proteins originate (link). 
• "How did science become so unscientific? To make a long story short, we have been sold a triple pseudo-intellectual flimflam for decades: if you want to be a respectable homo academicus, then you must embrace the unholy trinity of mechanistic reductive materialism, plus skepticism in its most dogmatic declination, and finally secularism in the mode of viciously naive atheism. In a word, scientism has been institutionalized in the name of science. But, in the end, scientism is more dangerous than pseudoscience because it is an inside job. Error, bias, and hype are minor sins compared to scientific hubris....Future scientists are the most indoctrinated of all, since most check-points in the stairway to academic heaven –from undergraduate students to postdoctoral researchers to tenured professors– select for such failings and implant us with an operating system stuck in our 19th century understanding of the world. The problem is deep, as it is entrenched in the triangular industrial complexes of academia, journalism, and education. In sum, scientistic televangelism is alienating genuine truth-seekers, eroding public trust in science, and indoctrinating young minds. Let us reject such terms of disservice and reverse the dead-ending of science from within and without. The truth is that true experts don’t know 'the truth.'  Nobody really knows what is going on. We live in a wild, weird, wonderful world....Preaching dogma in the name of science is a dagger at the heart of society."  -- Àlex Gómez-Marín, physicist and neuroscientist (link). 
• "It’s maddening when you see people cheat. And even if it involves grant money from the NIH, there’s very little punishment. Even with people who have been caught cheating, the punishment is super light. You are not eligible to apply for new grants for the next year or sometimes three years. It’s very rare that people lose jobs over it.” -- Scientist Elizabeth Bik (link).
• "Little is known on how the complexity of multicellular organisms evolved by elaborating developmental programs and inventing new cell types." -- Two scientists, 2021 (link). 
• "While a lot of studies have focused on memory processes such as memory consolidation and retrieval, very little is known about memory storage" -- scientific paper (link).
• "Little is known on how the complexity of multicellular organisms evolved by elaborating developmental programs and inventing new cell types." -- Two scientists, 2021 (link). 
• "The most fascinating thing about eukaryotes is that we still don’t understand how they came about." -- Evolutionary biologist Toni Gabaldon, referring to the type of cells found in human bodies (link). 
• "Cell biology is a mystery for many reasons one
  of which is the lack of basic knowledge. This may
  be the fault of scientists or simply a failure in basic
  information at the level of common contemporary
  knowledge. The well known sentence of Socrates:
  'I know that I know nothing' is as true in cell
  biology as in other scientific fields. This sentence
  was modified by Lloyd in 1986 who claimed: 'The
  closer we look, the less we see'. I would like to
  modify this sentence yet again as a cell biologist and
  microscopist: 'The closer we look, the less we know
  about.' ... Everyone involved in cell
  biology, is surprised how limited is our knowledge
  about the various cell compartments....It should now be mentioned that our knowledge even of basic cell organelles, including their various functions, is very limited....We know something about cell organelles, including various nuclear compartments, but most of their functions are waiting for further and better clarification....Depending on conditions, selected genes may be repressed or derepressed and activated giving to rise to the particular cell lineage with characteristic cell structures and functions. On the other hand, such transformations, including the homing of the transformed cells are also very mysterious although both these processes are empirically used in clinical medicine."  Karel Smetana, cell biologist, "To the Mystery of Cell Biology," (link). 
• "As for the explicit types of memory, the biological underpinning of this very long-lasting memory storage is not yet understood." -- Neuroscientist Cristina M. Alberini in a year 2025 paper (link). 
• "The distinguished Parisian Professor of Medicine, Rostan, gave at the time his corroborative testimony to the existence of this power in the article ' Magnetisme,' in the ' Dictionnaire de Medecine,'  wherein he remarked : 'There are few facts better demonstrated than clairvoyance' ....Innumerable instances are recorded of the possession of the faculty of clairvoyance by persons in the normal state, in sleep [hypnotism], and in some abnormal conditions of the system, " -- Edwin Lee, MD, "Animal Magnetism and Magnetic Lucid Somnambulism" page 103 and page 133.
• "It remains unclear where and how prior knowledge is represented in the brain." -- A large team of scientists, 2025 (link). 
• "How memory is stored in the brain is unknown." -- Research proposal abstract written by scientists, 2025 (link). 
• "The trends we expose forecast serious risks ahead for the scientific enterprise. Large groups of editors and authors appear to have cooperated to facilitate publishing fraud (Fig. 1). Networks of linked fraudulent articles suggest industrial scale of production (Fig. 2). Organizations selling contract cheating services anticipate and counter deindexing and other interventions by literature aggregators (Fig. 3). The literature in some fields may have already been irreparably damaged by fraud (Fig. 4). Finally, the scale of activity in the enterprise of scientific fraud already exceeds the scope of current punitive measures designed to prevent fraud (Fig. 5)." -- "The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly," a 2025 scientific paper by four scientists (link).

The "Candid Confessions of the Scientists" post has a new section dealing with galaxy formation and star formation. The newly added quotes are these:

• "Probably, a lot of people are impressed by these beautiful images that we get from Hubble Space Telescope, and they think that we must, by now, understand how galaxies work.  But the fact is that we don’t.  We don’t even understand how stars form.  There’s many different classes and theories of how stars form, and we don’t even know which class is right.  And if we don’t understand star formation and evolution, we can hardly understand how galaxies form."  -- Joel R. Primack, professor of physics and astrophysics (link).
• "It means we don’t understand, kind of fundamentally, how galaxy formation works.” -- Pieter von Dokkum, Yale astronomer (link). 
• "We don’t understand how a single star forms, yet we want to understand how 10 billion stars form." -- Cosmologist Carlos Frenk (link). 
• "We don't understand how stars form!" -- Matt Lehnert (link). 
• "We don't understand how supermassive black holes could have grown so huge in the relatively short time available since the universe existed." -- Günther Hasinger, science director at the European Space Agency, 2021 (link). 
• "There is much about the evolution of a typical galaxy we don’t understand, and the transition from their vibrant star-forming lives into quiescence is one of the least understood periods.” -- astronomer J. D. Smith (link). 
• "I got hooked on trying to figure things out; the fact that we don't understand how stars form is pretty mind-boggling considering we want to study things like galaxies."  -- Shari Breen, described as "an expert on star formation"  (link, page 24). 

I added these quotes discussing the low sensitivity of the brain to tissue removal, tissue loss or brain tumors (contrary to the dogma that the brain makes the mind):

• "Taken as a whole, the mean I.Q. of 95.55 for the 31 patients with lateralized frontal tumors suggests that neoplasms [tumors]  in either the right or left frontal lobe result in only slight impairment of intellectual functions as measured by the Wechsler Bellevue test." -- Aaron Smith (link). 
• "One more bizarre thing the researchers noticed was the bigger the lesions on the cortex, the better the mice performed. 'It was a strange result…' says Hong, who hesitates before adding: 'I wouldn't say that we're confident that if we [tested] a lot more animals we would see it. It was sort of a trend that we noticed. I guess the answer is, we don't know. Basically, it implied that the less the cortex is active, the better the animal is doing and the cortex was somehow interfering with the animal's ability to learn.' " -- Science article in Forbes magazine, quoting a scientist named Hong (link). 
• “O'Connor and colleagues reported that after diffuse brain injury, female rats performed better than males on the rotarod test of motor coordination and also incurred a slight advantage on the Barnes maze test of learning and memory.”  -- A paper by several scientists (link). 

Three of four quotes below are additions relating to the very low evidence of adaptive evolution in humans. Scientists claim that the human race arose through a process of so-called "natural selection." If that happened, you should be able to find a huge fingerprint of such "natural selection" by studying the human genome. No such thing can be found. Humans have about 20,000 genes. When scientists look for genes that show evidence of so-called "positive selection" in the human genome, they are only able to find a tiny number such as fewer than 10 or fewer than 20.  

• "There is little evidence of widespread adaptive evolution in our own species...Hominids appear to have undergone very little adaptive evolution." -- Biologist Adam Eyrie Walker, 2006, "The Genomic Rate of Adaptive Evolution.
• "Our overall estimate of the fraction of fixed adaptive substitutions (α) in the human lineage is very low, approximately 0.2%, which is consistent with previous studies." -- A paper by scientists finding that only 1 gene in 500 showed signs of being promoted by so-called "natural selection" (link). 
• "The sad truth is that it is possible to count on the fingers of two hands the examples like FOXP2 of mutations that increased in frequency in human ancestors under the pressure of natural selection and whose functions we partly understand.” -- Who We Are and How We Got Here by David Reich, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, page 9.
• "The proportion of PSGs [positively selected genes]  in the genome is 233/13,888 = 1.7% for the chimp lineage, significantly greater than that (154/13,888 = 1.1%) for the human lineage (P < 10−4, χ2 test). Because 13,888 statistical tests were conducted for each lineage, it is necessary to control for multiple testing. Under Bonferroni correction, two human genes and 21 chimp genes remain statistically significant (see SI Table 8). ....In sharp contrast to common belief, there were more adaptive genetic changes during chimp evolution than during human evolution."  -- Paper by scientists finding good evidence for "positive selection" in only two out of roughly 20,000 genes (link).