To Understand Why Chance Cannot Engineer Things, Understand Improbability Explosions

 Every computer programmer is aware or should be aware of the concept of a combinatorial explosion. The term refers to a situation where the number of possibilities rises exponentially, resulting in so many possibilities that it is impossible to test them all. For a computer programmer, the problem with a combinatorial explosion is that it results in so many possibilities that you cannot test them all before releasing your software.

For example, imagine a screen like the one below. There are two checkboxes, and a single radio button, which can have one of three possible values. The total number of possible states the form can be in before it is submitted is a mere 12 states. So it is easy to make a comprehensive test of whether the form works under all possible conditions. A programmer can simply test all 12 of the states. 

But consider the web page below. It has very many inputs, including lots of dropdown controls, each of which allow the selection of many possible options. There is now a combinatorial explosion. There are so many possible ways the form can be configured before pressing the Submit button that no software developer can test all of them. By merely multiplying by about ten the number of inputs on the form, the number of possible configurations has increased exponentially, rising to trillions or more. 

The same idea is relevant to a chemist. Let's imagine a chemist is trying to determine the safety of various combinations of chemicals. Imagine that the combinations consist of three different chemicals from a larger set of chemicals. If the set of chemicals consists of only 20 chemicals, the number of possible combinations isn't very large. It is 1140. We can calculate that using the web page below (you can do a Google search for "combinations calculator" to find similar sites).

But imagine the set of chemicals is much larger. Suppose that there can be any combination of three chemicals from a set of 1000 chemicals. This results in a number of combinations equal to 166,167,000, as shown on the screen below.

This is an example of a combinatorial explosion. By merely increasing the size of the available chemicals set from 20 to 1000, we made the number of possible combinations increase by more than 100,000,000. The result is a set of possibilities too large to be tested.

Below is a visual I got when I asked the Google Gemini AI to produce an infographic explaining the concept of a combinatorial explosion. The end of the visual lists some "real world consequences" such as the need to use long (e.g. 14-character) passwords, the difficulty of calculating the shortest route between more than a dozen locations, and the difficulty of testing software when there are many possible inputs. The most important real-world consequence of combinatorial explosions (not mentioned in the diagram) is that no theory of accidental origins of very organized fine-tuned systems is credible whenever such systems require a special arrangement of very many parts. 

Rather similar to the concept of a combinatorial explosion (but not too similar) is what we may call an improbability explosion. We can use the term “improbability explosion” to refer to cases in which the improbability of something skyrockets exponentially and geometrically, because of a simple linear increase in the number of things that must happen for the event to occur.

I can illustrate the concept by imagining that you and four friends buy five contiguous seats in the seats beyond the outfield of Yankee stadium. What is the chance that you will be able to catch a home run that falls and hits where you are seated? A reasonable rough estimate is about 1 in 4814. There are only 13,000 seats beyond the outfield in Yankee stadium, and there are  about 2.7 home runs hit per game. 13,000 divided by 2.7 is 4814. 

But what is the chance that you and the person to your right will both catch separate home runs in the same game? To roughly calculate this, we multiply this 1 in 4814 probability by itself. This results in a probability of about 1 in 23,174,596.

Suppose that we try to calculate the likelihood that a line consisting of you and two or more of your friends (seated in a line) will all each catch a separate home run that lands where you are seated? The math looks something like this:

Chance that you will catch a home run: 1 in 4814.

Chance that you will catch a home run, and that your friend to your right will also catch a separate home run: 1 in 23,174,596.

Chance that you will catch a home run, and that your two friends seated to your right will also each catch a separate home run: 1 in  111,562,505,144.

Chance that you will catch a home run, and that your three friends to your right will also each catch a separate home run: 1 in 5.37 X 10^14.

Chance that you will catch a home run, and that your four friends to your right will also each catch a separate home run: 1 in 2.58 X 10¹⁸

We see here a good example of an improbability explosion. Even though it is isn't terribly improbable that any one of you five catch a home run, when we have the requirement that all five of you have to each catch a separate home run, the improbability rises geometrically and exponentially, finally resulting in an improbability that is essentially zero. The final probability of about 1 in 2.58 in 10¹⁸ is a probability of only slightly more than 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000. That is something so improbable that it would be unlikely to ever occur even if they keep playing baseball games for a billion years.

Here is another example of an improbability explosion. Imagine you go to a crowded party, and don't know anyone's name. You play a game in which you guess the name of each person before asking the name of the person. The probability of success on the first try is not terribly low – maybe about 1 in 200. But imagine you are trying to get an unbroken series of correct guesses. The probability of guessing the first two person's names correctly would be about 1 in 200 times 1 in 200, or 1 in 40,000. But the odds would increase geometrically and exponentially, like this:

Chance of guessing correctly first person's name: 1 in 200.

Chance of guessing correctly names of first two persons: 1 in 40,000.

Chance of guessing correctly names of first three persons: 1 in 8 million.

Chance of guessing correctly names of first four persons: 1 in 1,600,000,000.

Chance of guessing correctly names of first five persons: 1 in 320,000,000,000

Chance of guessing correctly names of first six persons: 1 in 6.4 x 10¹³.

Again, we have an improbability explosion. Very quickly, we get to a situation where there is no reasonable chance of success. This required only a simple linear increase in the number of unlikely successes required. 

Pretty much the biggest improbability explosion we can imagine would be the origin of life from nonliving chemicals. Such a possibility is called abiogenesis. Scientists frequently claim that abiogenesis occurred, even though they have zero scientific evidence for such a claim.  

Scientists have never been able to make a living thing under conditions simulating the early earth, and scientists have not been able to even make any of the building components of a living thing under experimental conditions realistically simulating the early earth.  The building components of visible organisms are cells, and the building components of a microorganism are proteins. Scientists have not been able to produce from scratch proteins or cells in experiments simulating the early earth. In fact, scientists haven't even been able to make appreciable amounts of any of the 20 building components (amino acids) of the building components of microorganisms under conditions realistically simulating the early earth.  

The famed Miller-Urey experiment that produced some amino acids used a mixture of gases (heavy in ammonia and methane) that is now widely regarded as not being the correct atmosphere of the early earth (as discussed here).  Such an experiment was never a realistic simulation of early Earth conditions, because it used a special glass apparatus unlike anything that would have existed billions of years ago, and because the experiment used continuous electrical bombardment for a week; and there is no reason to believe that any place on Earth ever received such a bombardment (lightning being something that only strikes any natural square meter no more than once or twice in a century).  Sequels to the Miller-Urey experiment using more realistic atmospheric mixtures (such as nitrogen and carbon dioxide) have never been realistic simulations of the early Earth, because they have depended on things such as 2-hour proton beam bombardments or strong electrical charges or artificial hydrochloric hydrolysis, things that do not correspond to what existed on the early Earth. 

To imagine the simplest living thing, we cannot imagine something like a virus. Viruses require living cells to reproduce, and biologists tell us that viruses did not exist until after living self-reproducing cells existed.  Nor can we imagine some mere self-reproducing molecule existing as a living thing before a cell exists. No such living self-reproducing molecule has ever been observed outside of the framework of cells, so the concept of such a thing is pure fantasy. Since it is a basic fact of biology that cells are the basis of all living things, we must imagine some kind of cell as the simplest living thing. 

A team of 9 scientists wrote a scientific paper entitled, “Essential genes of a minimal bacterium.” It analyzed a type of bacteria (Mycoplasma genitalium) that has “the smallest genome of any organism that can be grown in pure culture.” According to wikipedia's article, this bacteria has 525 genes consisting of 580,070 base pairs. The paper concluded that 382 of this bacteria's protein-coding genes (72 percent) are essential. So multiplying that 580,070 by 72 percent, we get a figure of about 418,000 base pairs in the genome that are essential functionality. This is all information that must be arranged in just the right way for the tiny microbe to be capable of self-reproduction. 

We can compare this complexity of the simplest self-reproducing organism to the complexity of a book.  A book of 250 pages has about 300 words per page, or about 1800 characters (or letters) per page. Such a book has about 450,000 characters. A single base pair in the genome can be compared to a letter or character in a book. So a rather good analogy for the simplest imaginable living thing is to compare it to a 250-page technical book, such as a 250-page book on how to build bridges or a 250-page book on how to construct computer programs using Java.  

What is the chance that such a thing could ever arise from a chance combination of chemicals? Such a probability is essentially zero. We have here an improbability explosion so big it can be called galaxy-sized. 

We do not get out of this jam by imagining that instead of having an inconceivably improbable arrangement of low-level chemicals, there might have been merely a combination of various functional proteins that happened to be floating about.  The functional proteins would not have existed prior to the origin of the first living thing. Before it folds into a three-dimensional shape, a protein typically consists of a sequence of hundreds of amino acids arranged in just the right way to achieve a functional end. If the existing genetic code is used, there are 20 possible amino acids that may be used in any position of this sequence. The average protein consists of about 375 amino acids arranged in just the right way to achieve a functional effect. Even assuming that merely half of such amino acids have to match the existing sequence of amino acids for the same protein functionality to be achieved, the probability of a protein appearing with similar functionality (based on chance combinations of amino acids) is therefore something like 1 in 20 to the 187th power, which is equal to about 1 in 10 to the 243rd power, or 1 in 10²⁴³.  That probability is essentially zero. 

You could summarize this situation by saying that the origin of each new protein molecule would require its own improbability explosion like the other improbability explosions I have discussed.  The origin of a self-reproducing cell from chemicals (requiring at least 300 different types of protein molecules) would require an improbability super-explosion consisting of at least 300 individual improbability explosions, each fantastically unlikely to occur. 

Calculations such as these actually vastly underestimate how big an improbability explosion would be required, because they assume an existing genetic code that limits the number of possible amino acids in a protein to only twenty.  But as a recent scientific article states,  "There are millions of possible types of amino acids that could be found on Earth or elsewhere in the universe, each with its own distinctive chemical properties....there are 10⁴⁸ ways of making sets of 20 amino acids." 

What this means is that we vastly overestimate the likelihood of the first living thing appearing by chance if we imagine an analogy such as a typing monkey producing the book of 450,000 characters by randomly striking keys on a keyboard. For a monkey at such a keyboard would always have his keystrokes restricted so that there would be something like a 1/30 chance of typing a valid character. Given all the possibilities for the genetic code (with 10⁴⁸ ways of making sets of 20 amino acids), a much better analogy is to imagine a monkey equipped with a pen and a 250-page book of blank empty pages. In this analogy, the monkey can make any type of mark, which may or may not be a valid character.  Similarly, chemicals randomly forming into amino acids (or base pairs representing amino acids) could make a vast number of combinations, with only the tiniest fraction corresponding to the twenty amino acids used in earthly proteins.  

The overall probability of a self-reproducing cell being accidentally produced would be incomparably smaller than the probability of a monkey at a keyboard producing a 250-page technical book all filled with relevant and coherent technical instructions. It would instead be more like the probability of a monkey equipped with a pen handwriting such a book, and producing the coherent 250-page technical book of useful instructions by making random scribbles on the blank pages. 

A scribble

How often would we expect such a result to be achieved by chance? Never in the history of the universe, even if there are 100 billion galaxies each containing billions of planets, and even if there were 13 billion years for such chance combinations. And similarly, if there were 100 billion galaxies each filled with 100 billion planets, and they were all populated with countless billions of monkeys scribbling on blank pages, we would not expect that any such monkey would ever produce even one full page with hundreds of words giving coherent technical instructions on how to do anything, even if there were 13 billion years for monkeys to engage in such scribbling. I haven't even discussed the issue of homochirality, an entirely separate requirement for abiogenesis, one that worsens the chance of it by very many additional orders of magnitude, probably making such a thing even trillions of quadrillions of quintillions of times less likely. 

And so abiogenesis (the imagined accidental origin of biological life from lifeless chemicals) must be described not merely as an improbability explosion, but the mother of all improbability explosions. 

Most people do not understand the simple mathematics involved in estimating the likelihood of accidents producing useful inventions. Part of the reason is that while students are tortured in high school with required mathematics courses such as algebra and trigonometry (involving calculations that almost no one ever uses), schools do a poor job of teaching simple mathematics that are useful in real life (such as financial mathematics), and simple mathematics that are useful in evaluating the credibility of claims such as claims of accidental biological origins.  Our intellectual ruling class does not want you to know the relevant mathematical principles, because if you understand them well, you would not believe the biology dogmas they want you to believe. 

In a previous post I stated one of those principles, what I called the first rule of accidental construction:

The first rule of accidental construction: the credibility of any claim that an impressively organized final result was accidentally achieved is inversely proportional to the number of parts that had to be well-arranged to achieve such a result, and the amount of organization needed to achieve such a result.

Additional consideration of the complexity of living things and the improbability of them arising from accidental combinations will lead the thorough thinker to some firm conclusions:

(1) There are combinatorial explosions and improbability explosions everywhere in the progression from one-celled life to multicellular organisms such as mammals. 

(2) The appearance of organisms as complex and highly organized as humans requires stratospheric heights of engineering and the most special arrangement of interdependent components, things that are utterly beyond the reach of blind chance. 

(3) Organisms such as humans require the most precise engineering all over the place, and such engineering is utterly beyond the reach of random unguided processes. 

In general, Darwinist professors ignore the mountainous improbability of parts fitting together to make complex innovations. Our Darwinist experts typically speak as if having the parts for something is about as good as  having that thing, ignoring the reality that the more complex something is, the more improbable that parts would accidentally fit together to make that thing, even if all the parts were present.  How often have we heard SETI enthusiasts speaking as if having "the building blocks of life" in space (by which they mean mere amino acids) was almost as good as having a living thing (which requires  a fantastically improbable special arrangement of such building components utterly beyond the reach of chance)? 

Roughly speaking, we can say that the improbability of a complex innovation appearing accidentally usually rises exponentially and geometrically as the number of parts needed for that innovation undergoes a simple linear increase, in most cases when a special arrangement of the parts is required. Similarly, the improbability of you throwing a handful of cards into the air and having them all form into a house of cards will rise exponentially and geometrically as the number of cards in your hand undergoes a simple linear increase.  Getting a two-card house of cards by accident isn't too hard, by having two cards lean together diagonally. But if all the humans in the world spent their whole lives throwing a deck of cards into the air, none of these random throws would ever produce a triangular 26-card three-level house of cards by accident. 

In his interesting book Cosmological Koans, which has some nice flourishes of literary style, the physicist Anthony Aquirre tells us about just how complex biological life is. He states the following on page 338:

"On the physical level, biological creatures are so much more complex in a functional way than current artifacts of our technology that there's almost no comparison. The most elaborate and sophisticated human-designed machines, while quite impressive, are utter child's play compared with the workings of a cell: a cell contains on the order of 100 trillion atoms, and probably billions of quite complex molecules working with amazing precision. The most complex engineered machines -- modern jet aircraft, for example -- have several million parts. Thus, perhaps all the jetliners in the world (without people in them, of course) could compete in functional complexity with a lowly bacterium."

What is the chance of you getting such wonders of engineering by unguided processes? Zero or negligible. 

Below we see one of the "molecular machines" that appear constantly in human bodies, by some means that we do not understand. It is an example of what is called a protein complex, a special team of different types of proteins, well-arranged to achieve some functional purpose. DNA and its genes do not specify the structure of protein complexes, but merely specify lower-level information such as which amino acids make up particular proteins.  More than 7000 types of useful protein complexes have been identified. The origin of protein complexes is an unsolved mystery of biology. As two scientists confessed in 2019, "A general theoretical framework to understand protein complex formation and usage is still lacking."  The problem is not one of merely explaining how proteins could bind together to become protein complexes.  The problem is explaining how protein molecules act so consistently and so rapidly to produce well-engineered protein complexes (often called "molecular machines") that are so useful and vitally necessary for organisms such as humans to exist, with there occurring so abundantly throughout the body a fine-tuned and purposeful organization of protein molecules into functional and beneficial teams of different types of proteins that we would expect chance to never (or only very, very rarely) produce.  

They Use the Word "Delirium" to Gaslight the Dying

Dying people often report seeing visions or apparitions.  But skeptics often try to sweep under the rug such experiences, by dismissing them as "delirium." 

Researching the topic of deathbed visions, Karlis Osis and Erlendur Haraldsson conducted research surveys of hospital workers. In a July 1977 paper published in Volume 71, Number 3 of the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, they reported 178 cases of dying people who reported seeing an apparition of a dead person (Table 1). The number was much higher than the 68 who reported an apparition of a living person. The majority of these apparitions were described as having a purpose of being there to "take away" the dying person.  In the US there was a very high percentage of deathbed apparitions identified as a mother, father, spouse, sibling or offspring, while in India there was a relatively high percentage of apparitions identified as unidentified figures (Table 2). Roughly half of the people reporting such visions were characterized as having a consciousness of "clear," rather than "mildly impaired," "severely impaired" or "fluctuating" (Table 3). Registered users of www.archive.org can read the book describing this research, using the links here or here or here.  

We read the following on a page of the Psi Encylopedia describing deathbed visions:

"In 2017, Una MacConville carried out a study with Irish health care professionals. The carers reported that 45% of their patients spoke of visions of deceased relatives, often joyful experiences that bring a sense of peace and comfort."

 Some examples of deathbed visions can be found here and here and here.   A survey of family members of deceased Japanese found that 21% reported deathbed visions. A study of 103 subjects in India reports this: "Thirty of these dying persons displayed behavior consistent with deathbed visions-interacting or speaking with deceased relatives, mostly their dead parents." A study of 102 families in the Republic of Moldava found that "37 cases demonstrated classic features of deathbed visions--reports of seeing dead relatives or friends communicating to the dying person." 

A 1949 book states this: 

"It is a commonplace truth, observed by many physicians and clergymen, that a dying person, when conscious near the moment of death, acts or speaks as if he saw standing near loved ones who have already died. Dr. Russell Conwell told Bruce Barton in the interview quoted earlier in another connection, that he had witnessed this phenomenon 'literally hundreds of times.' "

The 2024 paper "Nurses' encounters with patients having end-of-life dreams and visions in an acute care setting – A cross-sectional survey study" reports this: "Fifty-seven nurses participated from a workforce of 169 (34% response rate), of whom 35 (61%) reported they had encountered end-of-life dreams and visions." We read this: 

"A meta-analysis of studies of estimates of patient reports indicated that 77% (95% confidence intervals [CI] 69%–84%) of people dying an ‘expected death’ may report an ELDV [end-of-life dream or vision]  (Hession et al., 2022). Across the world, studies provide consistent findings about ELDV." 

The survey gives us these interesting results for the 55 of 57 participants who answered "Yes" to one or more of the survey questions (I will round down the percentages). The percentages seem to refer to anything that the respondents either witnessed themselves or things the respondents observed other people reporting. 

• "Visions of dead relatives or religious figures ‘collecting’ or ‘taking away’ the dying person": 45%. 
• "Visions of dead relatives sitting on or near the patient's bed providing emotional warmth and comfort":  56%.
• "Patients reporting a sense of going back and forth from a different reality during the dying process": 32%
• "Coincidences, usually reported by friends and family of the person who is dying who say that the dying person has visited them at the time of death":  40%.
• "Dying dreams or visions through which the patient seems to be comforted and prepared for death": 38%
• "A comatose patient suddenly becomes alert enough to coherently say goodbye to loved ones at the bedside":  46%.

In the periodical here, the August 8, 1935 edition of the periodical Light, Constance Buttenshaw describes a deathbed vision of her dying mother:

"It was very clear that she saw two Beings standing at the foot of her bed. 'Who are those beautiful tall people at the foot of my bed? ' she asked, and from then she could hardly take her adoring and beseeching eyes away from them. She afterwards explained to us that they had come for her and were waiting to lead her Home. She was afraid, almost desperately at times, that they would go without her. She then began a most vivid description of what she saw. Her eyes left the confines of the room and seemed to be gazing beyond at the most stupendous scenes. She used words of beauty and description that she would not have used normally. In trying to describe colours she failed, saying: ' You have no words to describe the colours or beautiful sounds in your language.'  She saw beyond the Guardians at the bed a very lovely scene of river, valley, and mountain pass, through which she said she saw throngs of people passing. She said : ' I was here last year, I wonder if I ought to have stayed, don’t hold me back this time'  (see above) and, smiling to the Guardians, she said : ' I shall soon be ready, please don’t let them go without me.' ... All through these hours, from 3 p.m. to 11, she at no time had a distraught or strained look in her eyes nor any suspicion of senility....

There appeared to her to be, among many other things, people looking after and playing with many children in a beautiful garden full of flowers. Also, she several times mentioned a Being : ' It is not Alfred' (my husband), she said, ' but he is working out ideas, putting them into Alfred’s head and helping him to design things.'  And so on, hour after hour, using beautiful sentences, laughing at times at us and with us in the sweetest way, she crept nearer and nearer to the end (I prefer beginning), while we sat enthralled and oblivious of time.   She began to droop a little, quite pleasantly, just tired with all her wonderful marvels, but always saw vividly the waiting figures whom she from time to time unconsciously included by a look or word with us, so real they were to her. Her general anxiety was that her tenacious body would again prevent her spirit leaving. At last she sank back very gently. She appeared to be seeing and talking to my father, who had died some years before... Then she sank back smiling and passed on."

Many have heard about what are called veridical near-death experiences, which are cases in which someone seems to acquire knowledge during a near-death experience that he could not have got through normal sensory means. Many examples of such veridical near-death experiences are discussed here.  A lesser-known type of thing is what we may call a veridical deathbed vision. In such a vision a person may seem to learn of things he never discovered through normal sensory means. One example of a veridical deathbed vision is discussed in the 1921 newspaper account below, which you can read here. 

But there is a technique that materialists try to use to sweep under the rug such deathbed visions. The technique is to call them examples of delirium.  What is meant by the word "delirium"? It turns out that the word "delirium" is defined in a ridiculously broad way. It's a term meaning any change in mental state that comes on quickly. 

The Mayo Clinic page on the topic of delirium defines the term in a ridiculously broad way.  The page lists the following as symptoms of delirium:

"Anxiety, fear or distrust of others

Depression

A short temper or anger

A sense of feeling elated

Lack of interest and emotion

Quick changes in mood

Personality changes

Seeing things that others don't see

Being restless, anxious or combative

Calling out, moaning or making other sounds

Being quiet and withdrawn — especially in older adults

Slowed movement or being sluggish

Changes in sleep habits.

A switched night-day sleep-wake cycle"

A description of delirium so broad is just perfect for those who want to gaslight the dying by sweeping under the rug their reports  of  deathbed visions. You start out with a word "delirium" that suggests the idea of hallucinations to 90% of the people who hear the word. Then you stretch the definition so much so that it applies to almost anyone with the slightest deviation from perfect mental normality.  So then you can talk like this:

"Was your dying relative feeling a little anxious?  She was delirious. Was she feeling elated? She was delirious. Did she act a little restless in bed? She was delirious. Was there any change in her sleep habits? She was delirious. Did her mood change? She was delirious. Did she seem uninterested in what you were saying? She was delirious. Did she get a little angry some time? She was delirious."

Now, having defined "delirium" in so insanely broad a way, so that it applies to almost any slight deviation from perfect normality, the stage has been set for sweeping under the rug reports of deathbed visions.  The skeptic can then say that almost all dying people are delirious, so we shouldn't pay attention to anything they report.  Given that 90% of the people who hear the word "delirious" think of hallucinations, this technique may be effective.  But it is an appalling piece of word trickery and gaslighting. 

If you happen to be present at the deathbed of your relative, note carefully what they say, and do not tell them they are hallucinating or delirious, because you do not know such a thing. Tender affection is appropriate behavior to a dying relative, not gaslighting. 

Postscript: A web site today has an article on another type of deathbed phenomenon, one I discuss in my posts here.  The New York Times also has an article on this phenomenon.  We have an interesting quote by a major neuroscientist : 

"But in his 2024 book, 'Lucid Dying,'  Parnia firmly staked his position in the mind-body debate. 'We are at the cusp of the exploration of a new frontier in science,' he wrote, declaring himself 'quite optimistic that the nature of human consciousness — our very selfhood — will be discovered to be a flux of energy like electromagnetic waves that interacts with the brain and body but is not produced by them.' "

Science News BS Heat Map, July 16, 2026

                         

Recent Science News Article	BS Rating	Comment
"Is our intelligence rooted in how living organisms are organized?"		We have an interview in which one neuroscientist interviews another brain scholar who is promoting a book. The interview wanders all over the place, with no decent argument ever being formulated; and neither person sounds  like anyone who has a credible explanation of how human cognition arises. There's mention of a "constraint closure" explanation which sounds hopelessly inadequate as an explanation for the wonders of human minds.  The hierarchical organization of human bodies is one of the grandest marvels ever discovered, but it does not explain human minds or human memory. The author's book can be read online.  On page 10 she strangely states, "What makes organisms special, as I describe in chapter 10, is that the apparently invariant structures that constrain and enable these precarious flows of energy (processes) are also themselves reciprocally dependent on those flows of energy in turn."  There are 100 reasons why organisms such as you are special, many of which are a billion times deeper than that.
"The secret of human intelligence may lie in the power of a single brain cell"		We have the false claim that "researchers found that neurons in the human cortex are significantly more complex information-processing units ('microchips') than those of other mammals." Neurons are not anything like microchips. A scientist makes the false boast that his team discovered that "a single human neuron is itself an extraordinarily sophisticated computing device." The chain of reasoning used to try to justify this claim is a tortured mess. Brains are not computers, and (as discussed here) brains lack almost all of the characteristics of computers;  and individual neurons are not computing devices. See my post "11 Authorities Seem to Realize That 'Your Brain Is a Computer'  Is a Junk Metaphor."
"Dark matter's secret address revealed? Scientists say it may be hiding in fifth dimension."		Another "epicycle" to try and patch up the floundering theory of dark matter. When you have to imagine that something you fail to see is hiding in the fifth dimension, you are not in the realm of hard science.
"From friend to foe: How the brain updates feelings toward others"		We have a bad example of clickbait from the neuroscience magazine The Transmitter. In the article a neuroscientist makes the groundless boast "We found the neural mechanisms that underlie emotion toward others." The article quotes someone else saying, "“It’s truly unbelievable how much they did in this paper." A look at the paper being promoted shows exactly the type of schlock science work that predominates in today's experimental neuroscience research. The paper is behind a paywall but you can look at the Supplementary Information document, which shows the usual severe sins such as the use of way-too-small study group sizes such as only 5 rodents or only 9 rodents, and the use of the utterly unreliable technique of trying to judge "freezing behavior."  No neuroscientist has any credible tale to tell of how your feeling about something (such as your love or hate for someone or something)  could exist as a brain state.
"Detection of a four-carbon sugar in interstellar space"		The reported detection is not a very reliable one, for three reasons: (1) it is "bleeding edge" work using some new technology ("limitation has recently been overcome using ultrafast laser vaporization"); (2) the claimed detection is so far away (in the galactic center) that detection claims are relatively unreliable; (3) the reported amount is some tiniest trace amount that could easily be a false alarm.
"Scientists Say Gravity Has Been Holding Your Consciousness Together"		This is a bogus clickbait headline, provided by the Popular Mechanics site which so often publishes such headlines. As we know from astronauts living for many days in zero gravity, it is not true that gravity is necessary for either your consciousness or the continuation of your life (although the human race could not have arisen without gravity). Conversely, two of the other four fundamental forces of nature (electromagnetism and the strong nuclear force) are forces that you need for every hour of your bodily existence.
"Learning to identify new objects reshapes parts of the brain, research finds"		The press release from York University makes a false claim. Learning to identify new objects does not at all reshape any part of the brain. The research being promoted is a typical product from today's wasteland of cognitive neuroscience research: a study using a study group size of only 3 monkeys per study group (500% too small for any reliable result to be claimed).  The study has produced no evidence that any part of the brains of the monkeys it studied were reshaped in any substantial way.
"The 'Nuclear Nightmare' That Was Manufactured by the Media"		Yahoo.com has strangely offered this story today, under a label of "Science." The article is a nuclear power industry sales pitch, by a writer who writes like he never heard of the meltdown of the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl which poisoned so many square miles. He tells the false tale that concerns about nuclear power plants were "manufactured by the media" without warrant. We have here another reminder that much of what you read labeled as "Science" is not science, but dubious or misleading corporate propaganda.
"Birds are not descended from dinosaurs — they are dinosaurs."		Silly Darwinist slop cluttering up Google News' science news page.
"Scientists Say They’ve Identified an Earth-Like Planet Right Next Door"		The term "Earth-like planet" should never be used unless some planet was discovered with life on it; and no such thing occurred in this case. The planet is twice the mass of Earth, and does not even revolve around a star like the sun. It instead revolves around a very different type of star called a red dwarf. Many think the chance of advanced life on planets revolving around red dwarf stars is slim.
"The hidden brain trait that makes some people fall for extremism"		There is no brain trait that makes some people fall for extremism. We have an interview with a neuroscientist and psychologist who fails to mention any such trait. He's promoting a book. The neuroscientist claims to have "run experiments with thousands of participants," but those were not experiments yielding brain data. We have no link to any papers or any mention of a paper, and the experiments are described as "neuropyschological games."  They were presumably just people playing online games, which don't tell us anything about brains, and which should never have been called "neuropsychological."

Below is an idea for a movie comedy, based on real-life bungling and lazy efforts in the world of science research and science literature, such as the efforts of slacker neuroscientists who keep using fumbling, lazy methods and sleazy shortcuts such as way-too-small study group sizes,  and who lazily fail to adequately study minds, anomalous mental phenomena,  brain physical shortfalls and medical case histories defying their dogmas. 

Biosphere Shouts From 100 Directions About Its Purposeful Agency, But Mainstream Stays Deaf to Such Clues

 When I read a previous article written by science writer Phillip Ball at Quanta Magazine, an article on DNA, I felt like writing a post in response that would be entitled "Pondering DNA, Phillip Ball Drops the Ball" (a reference to fumbling). Phillip Ball is a writer who has figured out that the long-told story about DNA and its genes simply isn't true. But he seems to have completely failed to realize the enormous implications of such a thing. 

As an explanation for how human bodies arise, "DNA as body blueprint" was always a childish myth, both because DNA has neither any body blueprint nor any cell blueprint, and also because blueprints have no power to build things (as explained below). 

Not long after DNA was discovered about the middle of the twentieth century, scientists and science writers began spreading a false idea about DNA: the idea that DNA contains a specification for building an organism such as a human.  There are various ways in which this false idea is stated, all equally false:

• Many described DNA or the genome as a blueprint for an organism.
• Many said DNA or the genome is a recipe for making an organism.
• Many said DNA or the genome is a program for building an organism, making an analogy to a computer program.
• Many claimed that DNA or genomes specify the anatomy of an organism. 
• Many claimed that genotypes (the DNA in organisms) specify phenotypes (the observable characteristics of an organism), or that the genotype is a "map" of the phenotype. 
• Many claimed that phenotypes (the observable characteristics of an organism) are "expressions" of genotypes (the DNA in organisms). 
• Many claimed that genotypes (the DNA in organisms) "map"  phenotypes (the observable characteristics of an organism) or "map to" phenotypes.
• Many claimed that DNA contains "all the instructions needed to make an organism."
• Many claimed that there is a "genetic architecture" for an organism's body or some fraction of that body. 
• Many claimed that DNA or its genes "guide," "direct" or "control" the nine-month process by which a zygote progresses to become a full-sized human baby. 
• Using a little equation,  many claimed that a "genotype plus the environment equals the phenotype," a formulation as false  as the preceding statements, since we know of nothing in the environment that would cause phenotypes to arise from genotypes that do not specify such phenotypes. 

All of these claims were false. DNA is no such thing as a blueprint, recipe or program for making an organism or any of its organs or any of its cells or any of the organelles that make up such cells.  At the post here I have a list of 40+ statements by 50+ experts (almost all scientists and doctors) who confess that DNA is no such thing as a program, blueprint or recipe for making an organism. 

Phillip Ball has realized that the long-told story about DNA and its genes simply is not true.  In the very mainstream publication The Guardian, Ball said this about the Human Genome Project that ended in 2003, noting the failure of science figures to clean up their old misstatements about DNA after they were debunked by the Human Genome Project:

"But a blizzard of misleading rhetoric surrounded the project, contributing to the widespread and sometimes dangerous misunderstandings about genes that now bedevils the genomic age. So far, there have been few attempts to set the record straight. Even now, the National Human Genome Research Institute calls the HGP an effort to read 'nature’s complete genetic blueprint for building a human being' – the 'book of instructions' that 'determine our particular traits'. A genome, says the institute, 'contains all of the information needed to build and maintain that organism'. But this deterministic 'instruction book' image is precisely the fallacy that genomics has overturned, and the information in the genome is demonstrably incomplete. Yet no one associated with genomic research seems bothered about correcting these false claims...Plenty remain happy to propagate the misleading idea that we are 'gene machines' and our DNA is our 'blueprint'."

So Ball has realized that the long-told "DNA as body blueprint" story is bunk. The subtitle of his article "Why the Human Genome’s Tangled Physicality May Confound AI" is "Our genetic heritage is not a blueprint or an algorithm, as many biologists have imagined, but something else entirely." Ball discusses some of the enormous complexity of the processes involving DNA.   But Ball has failed to realize the gigantic implications of the fact DNA and its genes don't tell how to make anything bigger than protein molecules.  The problem is that once you get rid of the old lie that DNA is a blueprint for building bodies, organs and cells, you have no mechanistic explanation for how bodies, organs and cells get built. That explanatory failure explodes the pretensions of today's biologists, showing that their boasts of understanding the origin of the human species are groundless legends.  The truth is that scientists understand neither the origin of the human species, nor the origin of any full human body, nor the origin of any human mind. 

Ball gives us a little new bunk to replace the old bunk, saying, "Our cells are, in effect, making complex decisions about how to use their genes — both the information they contain and the structure they assume."  Cells don't make decisions; people make decisions.  If a cell had understanding, it would have no understanding of anything beyond itself. So we can never explain how human bodies get constructed by some idea of cells making a decision. A stem cell would not have any idea of what type of cell to become and where in the body to go to in order to serve the grand final purpose of helping to construct a mobile perceiving organism with a cardiovascular system and a digestive system and arms and legs and a vision system. 

Ball fails to perceive what the main explanatory problem is regarding the origin of individual human bodies. That problem is what I call the missing specifications problem. The missing specifications problem is the problem that the arising of adult human bodies requires at least six extremely complex specifications that are nowhere to be found in the human body. 

DNA and its genes only specify low-level chemical information, such as which amino acids make up a particular protein. DNA and its genes do not specify how to make anything larger than a protein molecule. In fact, DNA and its genes fail to even fully specify how to make a folded protein molecule of any particular type. To be functional, protein molecules require complex special three-dimensional shapes. DNA and its genes do not specify how such shapes arise.  The problem of how the special three-dimensional shapes of proteins arise is the unsolved problem known as the protein folding problem (not to be confused with a different problem called the protein folding prediction problem, which deep learning software has made some progress on). 

3D shape of a folded protein molecule

The "sister problem" of the protein folding problem is the protein complex origination problem, the problem of how proteins form into complex special teams so well-engineered and fine-tuned they are often called "molecular machines." No substantial progress has been made on that problem, as some scientists confess in quotes at the end of this post. Below we see one such protein complex, consisting of hundreds of protein molecules teaming up to become a special functional component. 

The nuclear pore complex (credit: Protein Data Bank, link)

So how does there arise over nine months of pregnancy a full human body, consisting of so many layers of physical organization above the layer of mere protein molecules? How does a mere speck-sized zygote (existing just after impregnation) progress to become a state of organization a billion times more impressive, the full organization of a human body? Such an origination is a miracle of organization a hundred miles over the heads of today's scientists. Their failure to explain this problem (the problem of morphogenesis) is a failure that makes a mockery of all claims that they understand the origin of the human species. If you do not understand the origin of any individual human body, you do not understand the origin of the human species. 

Given the utter lack of anything in a speck-sized zygote or the surrounding mother's womb that can sufficiently explain the progression from such a speck-sized object to a full human body, and given the lack of any credible explanation for the more impressive phenomena of human minds and human memory (none of which are credibly explained by brains), reality compels the inference that every human being arises because of transcendent agency. Nature never told us or even suggested that the universe is self-explanatory; nature never told us or even suggested that biological life is self-explanatory; nature never told us or even suggested that human bodies are self-explanatory; and nature never told us or even suggested that bodies or brains explain human minds.  Nature never told us or even suggested that the laws of nature are even a hundredth of what is needed to produce a human being.  We must postulate a purposeful agency acting throughout the biosphere to produce the stupendous wonders of biology, which mechanistic science is light-years away from explaining. I sometimes have used the acronym GOAL for such a transcendent agency. GOAL stands for Global Organizing Activity of a Life-force. The pillars of such an inference are shown in the diagram below. For a long explanation of why the pillar clues compel the two inferences listed at top, read my post here. 

By "transcendent agency" I mean purposeful intelligent agency beyond anything currently understood by humans.  The nature of such agency is mysterious. 

In another Quanta magazine article, Phillip Ball considers the issue of biological agency. He fails to address the issue with much insight, but at least inadvertently documents how clue-blind today's biologists are on this topic. His subtitle immediately goes astray, referring to, "The idea of ‘biological agency’ — that life devises its own goals and behaves accordingly." That is not a sensible definition of "biological agency."

We can give three sensible definitions of "biological agency":

(1) Organismic agency: the ability of organisms to act in ways that they will or decide to act, something that is the same as volition. There are endless mysteries of organismic agency, including the basic mystery of how any organism is able to choose a particular action (something not explained by anything we know about brains), and also endless mysteries of why organisms choose the particular path that they do (such as endless mysteries involving hard-to-explain instincts). 

(2) Component agency: the tendency (throughout the biosphere) for components in all layers of biology to act towards the achievement of purposeful goals (such as organization and homeostasis) that make possible the origination and continuation of biological organisms. 

(3) Morphogenetic agency: the agency driving the progression (over nine months) from a speck-sized zygote to a full human body. 

Today's scientists have no credible material and mechanistic explanation for any of these three types of agency. For example, no neuroscientist can explain why a human being may choose one type of life direction or one type of career rather than another. Such things can be explained by referring to minds and persons and personalities, but cannot be explained in terms of brains or neurons. 

In regard to component agency and morphogenetic agency, the explanation failures of biologists are gigantic and everywhere. Scientists lack any credible explanation of so simple a thing as how human cells are able to reproduce; they lack any credible explanation of the most basic mental processes such as thinking and memory; scientists lack any convincing explanation of how proteins are able to fold into the 3D shapes needed for their function; scientists are unable to explain how so many useful protein complexes (often called "molecular machines") are able to form; and since DNA is not a specification for making a human, or any organ, cell or organelle, scientists lack any credible explanation for the nine-month progression from a speck-sized zygote to an adult human. For a long discussion of some of these huge mysteries that physics, chemistry and biology have gigantically failed to solve, read my post "Problems a Hundred Miles Over Our Heads" here, and also read my posts here and here. 

No one can understand how badly scientists have failed to explain organismic agency unless he makes a deep study of topics such as brain physical shortfalls, a topic Ball never seems to have studied. No one can understand how vast is the explanatory gap involving component agency and morphogenetic agency unless he makes a thorough study of the endless stupendous marvels of purposeful construction that occur during human development and also every day in the human body. No one can be properly informed about the topic of biological agency if a writer discussing that topic is failing to discuss the marvels of organization occurring on so many different levels within the human body. But Ball makes little or no mention of such a reality. Guys like him almost always do a very bad job of explaining the vast levels of organization and dynamism within the bodies of organisms such as humans, just as they do a very bad job of explaining the extent of human mental powers and human mental capabilities. The reason is that the better such things are explained, the less likely you will be to believe in hand-waving vacuous sound bites such as Ball's claim that there are  "decision-making circuits in the brain." 

Below are some relevant quotations by scientists:

•   Scientists Walker and Davies state this in a scientific paper: "DNA is not a blueprint for an organism; no information is actively processed by DNA alone...DNA is a passive repository for transcription of stored data into RNA, some (but by no means all) of which goes on to be translated into proteins."
• Geneticist Adam Rutherford states that "DNA is not a blueprint," a statement also made by biochemistry professor Keith Fox. 
• "The genome is not a blueprint," says Kevin Mitchell, a geneticist and neuroscientist at Trinity College Dublin, noting "it doesn't encode some specific outcome."
• "DNA cannot be seen as the 'blueprint' for life," says Antony Jose, associate professor of cell biology and molecular genetics at the University of Maryland, who says, "It is at best an overlapping and potentially scrambled list of ingredients that is used differently by different cells at different times."  
• "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.
• "A general theoretical framework to understand protein complex formation and usage is still lacking." -- Two scientists, 2019 (link). 
• "The problem of protein folding is one of the most important problems of molecular biology. A central problem (the so called Levinthal's paradox) is that the protein is first synthesized as a linear molecule that must reach its native conformation in a short time (on the order of seconds or less). The protein can only perform its functions in this (often single) conformation. The problem, however, is that the number of possible conformational states is exponentially large for a long protein molecule. Despite almost 30 years of attempts to resolve this paradox, a solution has not yet been found." -- Two scientists, "On a generalized Levinthal's paradox," 2018. 
• "How proteins fold remains a central unsolved problem in biology. While the idea of a folding code embedded in the amino acid sequence was introduced more than 6 decades ago, this code remains undefined. While we now have powerful predictive tools to predict the final native structure of proteins, we still lack a predictive framework for how [amino acid] sequences dictate folding pathways....Almost seven decades of experimental and theoretical inquiry have not revealed a 'folding code' at the amino acid level, i.e., rules endowed with the generality and predictive power required to connect amino acid sequence to how the protein attains its structure....Machine learning made it possible to identify weak correlations to generate the structure most likely to correspond to a sequence. This tour-de-force effort has largely solved the problem of predicting protein structure from sequence...but with a key limitation: the algorithm that predicts the structure is a complex black box of pattern recognition that casts little light on the process of folding and that tells us nothing about why only some sequences fold, or how physics and evolution are coupled." -- Five scientists in the year 2025 (link). 
• "The real challenge—that remains unanswered after more than 50 years of research in the structural biology field—is understanding the mechanisms that lead proteins to fold into their native state. The reason for these difficulties is that the central question of the protein folding problem remains unresolved: specifically, how a sequence of amino acids encodes its folding pathways." -- Scientist Jorge A. Vila, 2025 (link). 
• "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).