The Ten Silliest Claims of Materialists

Despite thinking of themselves as Men of Reason, materialists make some of the goofiest and most ridiculous claims that humans have ever made. Below is a "top 10" list of the most glaringly false or absurd assertions of materialists. 

Claim #1:  The origin of species was explained by a man 170 years ago, before scientists knew anything about the complexity of cells, genes and protein molecules. 

This claim is the triumphal legend that Charles Darwin explained the origin of species such as our species. You can start to realize how absurd this claim is by considering the vast organization of the human body. 

A human body consists of a skeletal system and organ systems; organ systems  are made up of one or more organs and other components; organs are made up of tissues; tissues are made up of cells; cells are made up of many organelles of many types; organelles are made up of protein complexes and proteins; protein complexes are made up of many different types of proteins;  proteins consist of special well-arranged sequences of hundreds or thousands of amino acids, folded into 3D shapes; amino acids consist of atoms; and atoms consist of protons, neutrons and electrons.  The infographic below illustrates some of this hierarchical organization:

How much of this organization complexity did Darwin know about? He only knew about the anatomical complexity of the human body. Darwin knew nothing about the complexity of cells, nothing about the complexity of protein molecules, and nothing about the complexity of genes. So claiming that Darwin explained the origin of the human species (or any other species) is as silly as claiming that the ancient philosopher Plato explained the origin of smartphones.  Plato knew nothing about smartphones, and Darwin knew nothing about 90% of the information-rich complexity and organization of the human body. 

Claim #2:  Life (a state of very high organization and very great information richness, requiring hundreds of different complex inventions) arose from chemistry accidents billions of years ago. 

This silly claim is the doctrine of abiogenesis, that life arose accidentally from accidents of chemistry. Robust science provides not the slightest warrant for this dogma, which has no basis in observations or relevant experiments. Even the simplest self-reproducing cell is a very high state of organization and information richness, requiring hundreds of types of complex inventions. Those inventions are the hundreds of types of protein molecules and genes required for even the simplest one-celled life to exist and reproduce. Experiments realistically simulating the early Earth have never produced any of the protein molecules needed for life. Experiments realistically simulating the early Earth have never even produced any of the amino acid components that are the building components of such protein molecules. There was a widely discussed Miller-Urey experiment that produced some amino acids. But the experiment was not a realistic simulation of the early Earth, as it required a very special glass apparatus unlike anything that would have naturally existed in the early Earth, as well as a degree of electrical bombardment vastly greater than any volume of space would have ever naturally received. 

The paper "Fundamental behaviors emerge from simulations of a living minimal cell"  describes "a genetically minimal bacterial cell, consisting of only ... 493 genes on a single 543-kbp circular chromosome with 452 genes coding for proteins (Breuer et al., 2019 ), some of which are subunits of multi-domain complexes." Each of those genes is a complex invention with hundreds of fine-tuned parts that almost all have to be just right. The total number of amino acids that have to be arranged just right in the proteins partially specified by these genes is roughly 150,000, which is roughly the same as the number of characters or letters that have to be well-arranged to produce a 100-page technical manual. 

The amount of functional information required for even the simplest one-celled life is roughly equivalent to the amount of functional information in a hundred-page technical manual.  This shows all ideas of the accidental origin of life to be claims that are absurd, as absurd as the claim that you could get a well-written novel by throwing gobs of ink onto paper pages and collecting the luckier ink splashes. 

Claim #3:  Cells many times more organized than the simplest cells first appeared when there suddenly occurred a lucky accident in which one cell gulped up other cells, with all of the lucky cell's offspring having the characteristics of the original and the gulped up cells. 

The claim I refer to is the ridiculous tall tale known as endosymbiosis.  Human cells are a type of cell called a eukaryotic cell. A eukaryotic cell is vastly more organized than the simplest type of cell, called a prokaryotic cell. How did we ever get eukaryotic cells? Materialists have in recent decades developed a speech custom of claiming that eukaryotic cells first arose by some lucky accident involving one prokaryotic cell gulping one or more other prokaryotic cells, with the offspring of this gulping cell being vastly more complex. It's as silly a tale as the idea that a woman might eat a bird like a flying eagle, and then have flying children as her offspring. 

There are several reasons for thinking that such a thing is far too improbable to have ever happened. Among these are the following:

1. No one has ever observed any type of event like the supposed event in which prokaryotic cells combined to become a eukaryotic cell. Microbiologists have done innumerable experiments with prokaryotic cells, and have never observed any combination of prokaryotic cells become anything like a eukaryotic cell.
2. A prokaryotic cell injected with the DNA of a eukaryotic cell will not start producing eukaryotic cells as its offspring.
3. Nowhere in human DNA does it specify the overall shape of a human body, the structure of a human organ system, the structure of a particular human organ, the structure of a tissue, the structure of a cell, or even the structure of any organelle of a cell. Although genotypes influence phenotypes, genotypes do not specify phenotypes. Genotypes merely list chemicals used by an organism.  DNA does not specify the physical structure of an organism. We can therefore imagine no conceivable event by which some lucky combination of prokaryotic DNA could result in a cell that produced eukaryotic offspring, because the structure of a eukaryotic cell is not even specified in DNA.

  In the book Aliens, biologist Matthew Cobb gives a description of current thinking on this topic, emphasizing the improbability of it:

"What happened on Earth – known as eukaryogenesis – was not the product of random mutation and the subsequent sifting of acquired characters that have differential fitness (the essence of natural selection). Instead there appears to have been a single event of mind-boggling improbability, for it involved two life forms interacting in a most novel way....Prior to that moment, all life had consisted of small microbes with no cell nucleus and no mitochondria. Everything changed when one unicellular life form, known as an archaebacterium, ended up inside another, called a eubacterium."

On another page Cobb says this:

"We could in principle calculate the probability of the appearance of eukaryotes, but we would soon run out of zeros...That weird hybrid was our ancestor, and its existence – and therefore ours – was incredibly improbable. As far as we are aware, no such event happened before or since."

Obviously we have here a fairy tale, an "old wives' tale."  Scientists have no credible tale to tell of how eukaryotic cells originated, just as they have no credible tale to tell of how prokaryotic cells originated. 

Claim #4: Monkeys rafted across the Atlantic Ocean millions of years ago. 

There are many similarities between Old World monkeys and New World Monkeys.  Committed to the assumption that such similarities must be because of common descent, Darwinist professors maintain that the New World monkeys are descendants of the Old World monkeys, and that such an ancestry was able to occur because some Old World monkeys rafted across the Atlantic ocean something like 40 million years ago, arriving in the New World.  Such an idea is supremely unbelievable for several reasons: (1) the incredible improbability of a sea-worthy raft appearing accidentally from logs or vegetation; (2) the almost equally great improbability that any monkeys would ever swim out to sea and jump on such a raft; (3) the almost equally great improbability that such monkeys could ever survive a voyage across the Atlantic. 

Claim #5:  Iguanas rafted 5000 miles across the Pacific Ocean millions of years ago. 

The story below was one day the lead story on the ScienceNews.org site.

An unbelievable "just-so" story

The story above is the most laughable nonsense, asserting that iguanas (a type of lizard) made a 5000-mile rafting trip across the Pacific Ocean millions of years ago. Such is the nonsense that Darwinists are forced to spout to maintain their doctrine of common descent, the dogma that all species came from a common ancestor.  

In the article we read of the biological reality that was the seed of this nutty tale:

"All members of the iguana evolutionary family are found in the Americas, with one glaring exception: the Fijian iguanas (Brachylophus). The origins of the four living iguana species in Fiji have been a mystery for researchers, considering all the reptiles’ closest relatives are an ocean away."

The Fijis are a group of islands fairly close to Australia, so the distance between the Fijis and the Americas (North and South America) is roughly 5000 miles or 8000 kilometers.  The article then tries to tell us this crazy tale of a 5000-mile journey by rafting iguanas:

"These genetic results, combined with the geography of where iguana fossils have previously been found, point to ancestral iguanas rafting across the ocean from the shores of North America. The team thinks the lizards set sail between 31 million and 34 million years ago, possibly causing the evolutionary split between Brachylophus and Dipsosaurus."

The source of this laughable nonsense is a scientific paper. The title of the paper is a perfect example of scientists matter-of-factly asserting the factual truth of the most unbelievable claims. The paper is entitled "Iguanas rafted more than 8,000 km from North America to Fiji." In the article we have this example of witless reasoning from an evolutionary biologist:

"For Gyllenhaal, the findings illustrate how an incredibly rare, chance event — like iguanas successfully floating across an ocean — are more likely to play out as long as millions of years of time are available. 'When you’re dealing with evolutionary time, you’ve got a lot of opportunity for these very small probability things to occur.' ”

It's the same old witless reasoning that Darwinist biologists keep making over and over again: the claim that the most gigantically improbable things would happen as long as there were millions of years to happen. The claim is false. Given sufficiently low improbabilities, you can confidently say: that would not happen in a million years; that would not happen in a billion years; and that would not happen in a trillion years.

Claim #6: There is no fundamental difference between the minds of animals and the minds of humans. 

O page 99 of The Descent of Man. Charles Darwin made this hugely misleading claim: "My object in this chapter is to shew that there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties." That statement shows that Charles Darwin was either a very big liar or someone who was enormously self-deluded. It is a very obvious fact of human experience that there are the most gigantic fundamental differences between the mental faculties of man and other higher mammals.  We should have no confidence in anyone claiming the opposite. 

A very silly thing to say

Claim #7:  Millions of types of very complex inventions in the animal kingdom and the plant kingdom arose from an accumulation of random mutations. 

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

Scientist: I understand how life originated.

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

Scientist: I understand how a human mind arises.

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

Scientist: I understand how the human species arose.

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

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

The problem of the origin of protein molecules is one of the boast antagonist problems I referred to above. Inside each human body there are more than 20,000  different types of protein molecules, each a different type of complex invention requiring a very special arrangement of thousands of atoms.  Scientists lack any credible theory for the origin of protein molecules. 

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

When materialists attempt to explain the origin of different types of protein molecules by claiming an accidental accumulation of tiny random mutations, they are advancing an idea as silly as the claim that there arose functional, well-written paragraphs by ink splashes.  It's kind of like the conversation below, in which James fails to tell a credible tale. 

Mary: Wow, I see your living room wall has a large paragraph on it telling how to make a particular useful structure. 

James: Yes, that writing on my wall arose purely by accidental ink splashes.

Mary: You expect me to believe that some ink splash wrote that paragraph all at once?

James: Of course not. It was just hundreds of little ink splashes, occurring on different days, gradually over years. 

By appealing to gradual accumulation, James has not actually done anything to make his ridiculous claim any more credible. 

Below are quotes from a recent paper by a mathematics PhD, a paper I read today:

"The contemporary synthesis of biological evolution holds that the variety of life on Earth is mostly the outcome of random genetic changes sifted via the deterministic sieve of natural selection. Over the last century, this framework has served as the fundamental framework for biological sciences. However, mathematicians, biologists, and computer scientists have increasingly questioned the statistical and probabilistic mechanisms behind these assertions....Within this defined scope, we investigate the mathematical barriers that prevent gradual, step-wise mutations from traversing the vast fitness landscapes without falling into fatal functional degradation...We have demonstrated that the probability of random genetic mutations generating novel, functional structures is mathematically negligible....Ultimately, the mathematical constraints that govern complex systems cannot be bypassed by appealing to vast scales of cosmological time. The combinatorial explosion associated with biological constraint satisfaction problems presents an insurmountable barrier to the neo-Darwinian mechanism of unguided, gradualistic change."

Claim #8: Memories that can persist very well for 60 years are created by the strengthening of synapses, tiny unstable units that do not last for years, and are built of protein molecules that only last an average of a few weeks, synapses that are connected to short-lived dendritic spines that do not last for years.

Some of the reasons that this claim is very silly include these:

• the fact that there is no plausible account to be told of how brains could possibly be storing memories that last for fifty years, given the high protein turnover in synapses, where the average protein only lasts a few weeks;
• the fact that there is no understanding of how brains could achieve the instantaneous recall of distant, obscure memories that humans routinely show, given the lack of any coordinate system or indexing in a brain that might allow some exact position of a stored memory to be very quickly found (with synapses making this problem much worse, as trying to find something in a dense jungle of a trillion synapses would be like trying to find a particular vine in the middle of the billion tangled vines of the Amazon rainforest);
• the fact that there is no understanding whatsoever of how concepts, visual information, long series of words, and episodic memories could ever be physically stored by a brain in any way that would translate all these diverse types of information into synapse states or neuron states;
• the fact that the microscopic examination of very many thousands of brains of recently deceased people (and the microscopic examination of endless samples of brain tissue extracted from living people) has never produced the slightest trace of learned information, something that would have been discovered in brains 50 years ago if brains stored memories and brains are the source of the human mind;
• the fact that human brains (all very severely handicapped by cumulative synaptic delays and unreliable synaptic transmission) are way too slow and way too noisy to explain the wonders of human best mental performances, which include endless wonders of blazing fast calculation, blazing fast precise recall, blazing fast memorization,  and the recitation with perfect accuracy of very long bodies of text consisting of hundreds of pages;  
• the fact that for more than 50 years numerous people have reported vivid near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences occurring after their hearts stopped and their brains were inactive, during times when they had no brain waves, and they should have had no consciousness at all (under "brains make minds" assumptions), with many of the observation details they reported seeing during such brain-inexplicable should-have-been-utterly-unconscious experiences being independently verified (as described here).

Below are some quotes by scientists supporting my statements above about the short lifetimes of synaptic proteins and the instability of synapses and the dendritic spines they connect to.

• "Experiments indicate in absence of activity average life times ranging from minutes for immature synapses to two months for mature ones with large weights." -- Six scientists (link). 
• "The synaptic turnover rate is as high as 1% per day in the visual cortex." -- 7 scientists (link). 
• "A recent imaging study revealed that the synaptic turnover rate in hippocampal CA1 cells is very high, with an estimated lifetime of ~1–2 weeks (Attardo et al., 2015)." -- Scientist Yuichiro Hayashi (link).
• "We observed a two-fold higher spine density than previous studies and measured a [dendritic] spine turnover of ~40% within 4 days, which depended on spine size." -- Nine scientists (link).
• "We find that [dendritic] spines appear and disappear over periods of days to weeks, even though their average density remains constant (Fig. 5)....About 80% of synapses were detectable for a day or longer; about 60% belonged to the stable pool imaged for at least 8 days. Even this stable pool was found to turn over, with only ~50% of spines surviving for 30 days or longer. Assuming stochastic behaviour, we estimate that the mean lifetime of the stable pool [of synapses] would be on the order of 120 days." -- Seven scientists (link). 
• "Another study used in vitro metabolic labeling of primary cortical cultures to measure relatively shorter half-lives for 2802 brain proteins (average half-life =~5 days; (Cohen et al., 2013)."  Four scientists (link).
• "Very few studies report long-lasting structural changes of synapses induced by behavioral training." -- Three scientists (link).
• "Mathematical modeling revealed that the data best matched kinetic models with a single population of [dendritic] spines of mean lifetime ~1–2 weeks. This implies ~100% turnover in ~2–3 times this interval, a near full erasure of the synaptic connectivity pattern." -- Three scientists (link).
• "It has been shown that in the hippocampus in vivo, within a month the rate of [dendritic] spine turnover approaches 100% (Attardo et al., 2015; Pfeiffer et al., 2018)."  -- Three scientists (link). 
• "Experience-dependent behavioral memories can last a lifetime, whereas even a long-lived protein or mRNA molecule has a half-life of around 24 hrs. Thus, the constituent molecules that subserve the maintenance of a memory will have completely turned over, i.e. have been broken down and resynthesized, over the course of about 1 week. Yet memories can persist for years or decades."  -- Two scientists (link). 
•  "Recent studies have revealed that most proteins, including synaptic proteins, have half-lives that range between 5 and 7 days (Cohen et al., 2013, Dörrbaum et al., 2018)."  -- 7 scientists (link). 

• "Where skeletal muscle tissue has been shown to turnover at a rate of 1–2% per day, here we show that brain tissue turns over much faster at a rate of 3–4% per day. This would imply complete renewal of brain tissue proteins well within 4–5 weeks." 10+scientists (link).

Claim #9: Memories form in the hippocampus (a brain region of particularly high instability), and then migrate to the cortex so that they can exist where there is more stability. 

Having no real evidence on a cellular level or a synaptic level to support their claims of neural memory storage, neuroscientists sometimes resort to claims about parts of the brain, claiming that some-such part of the brain is needed for memory.  Such claims usually involve claims that the hippocampus is crucial for memory. The experimental evidence has never supported such claims.  People with no hippocampus or a damaged hippocampus usually perform fairly well on tests of memory. 

In my widely-read long post here (entitled "Studies Debunk Hippocampus Memory Myths")  I discuss very many scientific papers that discredit the claim that the hippocampus has some big relation to memory. Some clear speaking occurs in the 2004 paper "Relationship between hippocampal volume and memory ability in healthy individuals across the lifespan: review and meta-analysis."  Contradicting claims often made about the hippocampus and memory, the paper states this:

"A negative relationship between hippocampal volume and memory (smaller is better) was significant for studies with children, adolescents, and young adults. For studies with older adults, the most striking observation was extreme variability: the evidence for a positive relationship between hippocampal size and episodic memory ability in older adults was surprisingly weak."

One of the many reasons the "hippocampus as memory center" narrative does not hold up to scrutiny is that the hippocampus is particularly unstable in regard to things that have a relevance to whether a brain can store memories. Synapses are attached to little bumps on brain dendrites, bump called dendritic spines. The more unstable that dendritic spines are, the more unstable are synapses.  The 2015 paper "Impermanence of dendritic spines in live adult CA1 hippocampus" states the following, describing a 100% turnover of dendritic spines within about six weeks:

"Mathematical modeling revealed that the data best matched kinetic models with a single population of spines of mean lifetime ~1–2 weeks. This implies ~100% turnover in ~2–3 times this interval, a near full erasure of the synaptic connectivity pattern."

The paper here states, "It has been shown that in the hippocampus in vivo, within a month the rate of spine turnover approaches 100% (Attardo et al., 2015; Pfeiffer et al., 2018)." 

Because of this particularly rapid turnover in dendritic spines in the hippocampus, the hippocampus is particularly implausible as a site in the brain that might be storing memories lasting decades. But being eager to preserve the "hippocampus as memory center" myth, neuroscientists have created a tall tale to try and save this claim.  The tall tale is that memories are created in the hippocampus, and then migrate to the cortex of the brain. 

There is zero observational basis for this claim. Scientists have never actually seen a memory anywhere in the brain (despite "Jesus in my toast" pareidolia claims to the contrary), and scientists have never seen any memory migrating from the hippocampus to the cortex. This "memory migration" myth doubles the explanatory problems of neuroscientists.  Now they have to imagine two physical things in the brain corresponding to the formation of a memory: first, the creation of a memory and then its migration to a place elsewhere in the brain. 

The idea that memories stored in synapses could become stable if such memories migrated to the cortex is a fallacious idea. The same instability problems exist in the cortex. The proteins of synapses in the cortex have the same very short lifetimes of proteins in the hippocampus: lifetimes of only a few weeks. Synapses are connected to dendritic spines, and such dendritic spines are almost as unstable and short-lived in the cortex as they are in the hippocampus. 

Claim #10: Your body arose because cells read a blueprint in your DNA for how to construct your body.

For decades materialists have pushed an untenable misconception about the origin of an individual human body. They told the tall tale that DNA in a cell contains a blueprint or set of instructions for making a human, and that morphogenesis occurs when such instructions are read and carried out inside the human womb. But there are several reasons why this idea cannot possibly be true. They include the following:

1. Human DNA has been thoroughly studied, and no blueprint of a human form has ever been discovered in it, nor has anyone discovered anything in it like a program, algorithm, or set of instructions for making a human, or even any organ or cell of a human. There is not anything like a general blueprint for an overall human form in DNA, nor is there anything like a blueprint for making any large system of a human, nor is there anything like a blueprint for making any organ of a human, nor is there even anything like a blueprint for making a particular type of human cell. Similarly, there is not anything like a set of instructions or program for making an overall human form in DNA, nor is nor is there anything like a set of instructions or program for making any large system of a human, nor is there anything like a set of instructions or program for making any organ of a human, nor is there even anything like a set of instructions for making a particular type of human cell.
2. The actual information in DNA is merely very low level chemical information, information on the chemical ingredients that make up proteins and RNA. 
3. DNA is written in a minimalist bare-bones language in which the only things that can be expressed are things such as lists of amino acids. There is absolutely no high-level expressive capability in DNA that might ever allow it to be something that might be a blueprint for making humans or a set of instructions for making humans. 
4. The amount of information in human DNA and the number of genes in DNA are vastly smaller than we would expect if DNA was a specification of a human. For example, a simple rice plant has twice as many genes as a human. 
5. There is nothing in the human womb that could ever be capable of reading and executing the fantastically complicated instructions that would need to exist in DNA if DNA were to be a specification of a human. Blueprints don't build things; building construction occurs only when there's an intelligent blueprint reader and a construction crew. We know of nothing in the human womb that could act like an intelligent blueprint reader or a construction crew. If a human specification were to exist in DNA, it would need to be instructions so complicated it  would require an Einstein to understand it; and there's no Einstein in the womb of a pregnant woman. 

See this post, this post and this post for a very detailed discussion of why DNA cannot be a human specification. Those posts include quotes by dozens of biological experts supporting my statements on this topic.  Below are only a few of dozens of similar comments that I have collected at the end of this post.

On page 26 of the recent book The Developing Genome, Professor David S. Moore states, "The common belief that there are things inside of us that constitute a set of instructions for building bodies and minds -- things that are analogous to 'blueprints' or 'recipes' -- is undoubtedly false." 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. Rather, 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 press account of the thought of geneticist Sir Alec Jeffreys states, "DNA is not a blueprint, he says."  B.N. Queenan (the Executive Director of Research at the NSF-Simons Center for Mathematical & Statistical Analysis of Biology at Harvard University) tells us this:

"DNA is not a blueprint. A blueprint faithfully maps out each part of an envisioned structure. Unlike a battleship or a building, our bodies and minds are not static structures constructed to specification."

"The genome is not a blueprint," says Kevin Mitchell, a geneticist and neuroscientist at Trinity College Dublin. "It doesn't encode some specific outcome."  His statement was reiterated by another scientist. "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. He says, "It is at best an overlapping and potentially scrambled list of ingredients that is used differently by different cells at different times."  Sergio Pistoi (a science writer with a PhD in molecular biology) tells us, "DNA is not a blueprint," and tells us, "We do not inherit specific instructions on how to build a cell or an organ."  Biologist Steven Rose has stated, "DNA is not a blueprint, and the four dimensions of life (three of space, one of time) cannot be read off from its one-dimensional strand."

The visual below shows you the very humble reality about DNA (so much less than the grossly inflated myths so often spread about it): that DNA merely specifies low-level chemical information such as the amino acids that make up a protein.  Particular combinations of the "ladder rungs" of the DNA (the colored lines) represent particular amino acids (the "beads" in the polypeptide chain that is the starting point of a protein). 

Human bodies have multiple levels of organization beyond such simple polypeptide chains, including: 

• The three-dimensional structure of protein molecules
• The three-dimensional structure of protein complexes, teams of different proteins, which can be so specially arranged that they are often called "molecular machines"
• The three-dimensional structure of the many types of organelles used by cells
• The three-dimensional structure of the 200 types of cells in the human body, most of these cell types being fantastically complicated arrangements of matter (scientists have compared the complexity of a cell to the complexity of an airplane or city)
• The structure of tissues
• The structure of organ systems and skeletal systems
• The overall structure of the human body, what you see by looking at a naked human body

None of the structures listed above are specified by DNA or genomes or genes. How such structures arise is unknown.  The lack of any credible physical explanation for the progression from a speck-sized zygote to the vast hierarchical organization of the human body is one of the biggest reasons for rejecting materialism.

The idea that a human body gets built by the reading of a blueprint in cells was always an idea that was very silly, both because it fails to explain how 200 types of enormously organized cells in the human body originate (which is half of the difficulty of explaining how a human body arises from a speck-sized zygote), and also because blueprints don't build extremely complex things. Things get built with the help of blueprints only when there are one or more intelligent agents to read the blueprints and get ideas about how to build things. 

Unimpressive "Mars Jellyfish" Goes Viral, While Far Stronger Photos of the Spooky Are Ignored by Mainstream

I am seeing in my news feeds these days articles about a photographic anomaly on Mars. An example is an AOL article that appeared on the Yahoo site and also on Google's Science News page. It was entitled  "Jellyfish" Spotted In NASA Mars Photo Sparks Frenzy As People Dig For Explanation." 

We read that people on social media are getting all excited about a photo taken by the Curiosity rover "on August 20, 2023, during Sol 3924 of its mission while exploring Gale Crater on Mars." In any report like this, it is essential to look for the original NASA page containing the photo. That page is the one here.  That page has a 1024 by 512 image of the surface of Mars. The page has a Download button, but in this case the button is unnecessary, because when you click that button you get the same 1024 by 512 image displayed on the page. 

The 1024 by 512 image showing the photographic anomaly is the one below:

If you look in the bottom left, you may notice a little anomaly. Below is a crop of that portion of the photo, a crop that is 77 pixels by 71 pixels:

77 pixels by 71 pixels

You should not be impressed by this, given that the anomaly in the middle consists of a handful of pixels. The anomaly is maybe 10 pixels in width and 10 pixels in height. A good rule of thumb when dealing with anomalies in photos is: ignore any anomaly that consists of only a very small number of pixels in a photo, particularly if it is an anomaly that only appeared once. There are 1001 mundane reasons why you can get such "handful of pixels" anomalies. 

The NASA page here allows you to see other photos taken on the same day. Other photos from the same angle on the same day fail to show the anomaly. For example, one is below.

Can we think of a natural explanation for the anomaly appearing in the first photo shown above? We certainly can. The anomaly looks rather like something known to frequently occur on Mars: what is called a dust devil. Observed on both Earth and Mars, dust devils are fleeting little mini-storms that cause dust to rise in the air. Dust devils are thought to be more common on Mars, which is covered in fine, lightweight dust. The Google Gemini infographic below explains what causes dust devils on Mars. 

So in this case we have a known natural phenomenon on the surface of Mars (dust devils) that can easily be the cause of the so-called "Mars jellyfish." There is no need to assume that there's some weird undiscovered life form on Mars, merely because a photo shows on the horizon of Mars something that looks like a dust devil.  Another possibility is that a tiny bit of dust got on the camera lens, and was blown away by the time the next photo was taken. Because the surface of Mars is so abundantly filled with fine dust, such a thing would be not very improbable. 

We have three glaring failures of the "Mars jellyfish" photo to qualify as good evidence of the paranormal:

(1) The photo is a "one shot" affair, with there being only one photo showing the anomaly. 

(2) The photo is a "handful of pixels" affair, with the anomaly showing up as only a very small number of pixels (and almost all such "handful of pixels" things are dubious). 

(3) There is a known natural phenomenon on Mars (dust devils) that can produce something like what we seem to see in the "Mars jellyfish" photo. 

It is ironic that social media and mainstream sites get all excited about low-quality evidence such as a photo showing only a few spooky-looking pixels, while far more impressive photographic evidence of the spooky continues to be mostly ignored by social media and mainstream sites.  Back in my most productive days as a photographer of the anomalous, I got two types of very spooky anomalies that were very worthy of attention, but which were ignored by mainstream sites: (1) photos of dramatically repeating stripe patterns in mysterious orbs, taken under clean, dry conditions, and (2)  photos of dramatically repeating patterns in mysterious orbs, taken during photography of falling water drops. 

To read about the details of the first of these two things, you can read my post here or my post here. The visual below shows 36 types of repeating patterns I got in mysterious orbs I photographed in clean, dry air. The number under each photo is the number of times I photographed an orb with the stripe pattern shown. For example, under the first photo (showing an inverted Y pattern) we see "x11." That means that 11 times I photographed a mysterious orb with such a pattern. See my post here to see the photos that are the basis of this summary infographic. 

Almost all of these pattern repetitions would occur on different days, with in-between photos showing no such pattern. So, for example, the photos below (showing the same pattern) were taken on the different days shown in the caption, and there were very many other photos taken on the same days and days in-between these days, showing no such pattern:

 And the two repetitions of the "ballet dancer" pattern below occurred on different days mentioned in the caption below, with many in-between photos showing no such pattern:

 In the two photos above there was a most astonishing double pattern repetition, with both a "ballet dancer" pattern being repeated, and also below that a "vertical stripe" pattern being repeated. 

Altogether over the span of several years I got more than 800 photos of mysterious striped orbs, while photographing in clean dry air. You can conveniently see all of these photos using the link here, which takes you to a free online book which you can read by finger-swiping, after clicking on the [] icon at the bottom of the book viewer. The striped orbs appeared in a variety of colors. So, for example, I got 69 photos of striped blue orbs, 15 photos of striped pink orbs, 19 photos of striped purple orbs, 24 photos of striped red orbs, 15 photos of striped yellow orbs, 37 photos of striped green orbs, and 23 photos of striped orange orbs. 

A different type of very spooky photo anomaly I got in the most enormous abundance over the course of several years was the appearance and persistence of inexplicable and massively occurring orb patterns while I photographed ordinary drops of clean, pure water falling in front of a black, featureless background. Something like this would happen on very many different days. I would be photographing ordinary drops of pure, clean water falling in front of a black featureless background, using the protocol I describe in the second half of my post here. After quite a few photos showing nothing very notable, there would suddenly appear most mysteriously an unexpected pattern, repeating many times in circular shapes appearing in the photos.  An individual photo might show five or more very clear repetitions of the pattern. And exactly the same pattern would persist for many consecutive photos, often hundreds. 

The most convenient way to examine my photos of this phenomenon is to use the link here, which takes you to a free online book of 1495 pages, my book "Vast Precision of the Orb Patterns" which can be very conveniently read by finger-swiping, after the user has pressed the [] icon at the bottom of the book viewer. 

Some choice examples of the patterns I got with very great repetition can be seen in my summary posts here and here. On one day while doing photography of only ordinary drops of pure clean water falling, I photographed many hundreds of orbs with face-like details, such orbs appearing in most of hundreds of consecutive photos. Below is one example showing seven occurrences of the same face-like pattern.  At the link here you can see a video of my camera viewfinder while I took photos such as the one below and the next photo after it. See here and here for similar photos from the same day.

On another day while doing photography of only ordinary drops of pure clean water falling, I photographed  a series of hundreds of consecutive photos that almost all showed multiple instances of a breast-like shape, with this breast-like shape appearing a total of more than 1000 times.  Below is one example (see here and here and here for others).  At the link here you can see a video showing my camera viewfinder while I took many of these photos. I got a similar pattern on this other day.

On another day while doing photography of only ordinary drops of pure clean water falling, I took more than a thousand photos showing face-like details as we can see in the photo below.  Additional examples can be seen here.  A video showing my camera viewfinder while I took some of these photos can be seen here.

Striped orbs would often dramatically appear in great abundance when I photographed falling drops of pure, clean water. On one day I got the pattern shown below. We see 25 striped orbs in a single drip of pure, clean water.

On another day I got the pattern shown below while photographing only pure, clean water falling against a featureless background. 

On one day I got the two-part pattern below, which persisted through almost all of hundreds of consecutive photos. I can't explain how these colors showed up when photographing only pure, clean falling water drops. 

On one day while doing photography of only ordinary drops of pure clean water falling, I photographed a "snowman" motif consisting of a smaller circle on top of a larger circle, both on the right side of an orb.  Such a "snowman" motif appeared more than 5000 times in most of 1600+ consecutive photos I took, with the "snowman" motif appearing at least several times in most of these photos.  Below are two examples (see here for more). I photographed a similar pattern on this day.

All kinds of patterns would appear during such photography of falling drops of pure, clean water. A particular pattern might have up to seven  different parts. Below (from my post here) is an example of a five-part pattern that mysteriously arose one day while doing photography of only ordinary drops of pure clean water falling, with many repetitions in consecutive photos:

On another day I got the seven-part pattern shown below, which persisted through almost all of more than forty consecutive photos, appearing multiple times in most of such photos. 

On one day while doing photography of only ordinary drops of pure clean water falling, I got the photo below showing a motif repeating nine times.

The photographs I describe here are not "handful of pixels" stuff like the crummy 10-pixel by 10-pixel affair that makes up the anomalous part of the so-called "Mars Jellyfish" photo. The photos I describe above are high-resolution photos in which each anomaly involves many pixels. And while the "Mars Jellyfish" photo can easily be naturally explained by assuming that a distant dust devil was photographed, or that a little of the super-abundant Mars dust got on the camera lens for a while,  we have no such convenient explanation for the photos of mine I have described above. They are shockingly anomalous, and seem to be suggestive of some mysterious power capable of making inexplicable manifestations with the most enormously precise power of repetition and persistence. A person adequately studying biology should not be too surprised by such a phenomenon, because within each of our bodies there occurs every day a million miracles of high-speed assembly (as described here), in which "molecular machine" protein complexes needed for our continued lives are mysteriously assembled with the most enormous precision, by some means that scientists do not understand. 

The photos of mine I refer to above were published online over a span of seven years between about 2015 to 2022, long before there were any good AI image generators invented. No trick photography or Photoshop-like product was used to make any of these photos, which looked the same to my eyes when I first saw them as they appear above and in the sources above.  You can see the photos in their original posts by browsing through my "Orb Pro" blog here. The Wayback Machine at www.archive.org has taken many snapshots of that blog over the years, documenting the photos were published during that period. My several long youtube.com videos showing my camera viewfinder during the photography of such wonders help to show the authenticity of these photos. Two examples of such videos are below. 

Among my photos have been 1500+ photos of mysterious blue orbs. An example of one is the photo below I published in 2015 in the post here. The size of the blue anomaly in the photo is roughly 200 pixels by 200 pixels. That's an anomaly photo area of roughly 40,000 square pixels, which is roughly 400 times larger than the anomaly photo area of merely 100 pixels in the "Mars jellyfish" photo. My photo here (taken with a different camera) shows an equally striking anomaly with a size of about 60,000 square pixels. 

Why has the unimpressive "Mars Jellyfish" photo gone viral, while so much better photos of the spooky have been ignored by the mainstream? You can explain it in terms of people getting excited about something that fits in with their worldview, while ignoring something conflicting with their worldview. Our media is largely controlled by an academia-centered "Ministry of Materialism" that wishes to propagate materialist ideas (to use a metaphorical phrase I coined in a post).  Those who serve that ideology want very much to believe that life arose on Mars, a place incredibly inhospitable to life. Life on Mars (particularly large macroscopic life) might show that blind evolution may have a great power to beat the most prohibitive odds, producing wonders of biology. 

But the same powers controlling such a "Ministry of Materialism" do not want to believe that there can be a mysterious unseen power acting here on planet Earth, capable of somehow producing the most astonishingly repetitive spooky manifestations with the most enormous precision. So even when the most abundant evidence of such a thing has been published, such an ocean of evidence may be ignored by those controlling the articles that appear in our news feeds. Playing "phenomena amnesia," the same information overlords ignore two hundred years of convincing written evidence for the paranormal, very much of it written by scientists and doctors, as well as an enormous body of evidence conflicting with their cherished "brains make minds" ideas.  

It's kind of a situation where the operating principle is rather like this: "a few drops count as an ocean, if it seems to support what I believe; but an ocean of evidence doesn't even count as a few drops, if it seems to conflict with what I believe."