Coverups of the Unfitness of Biology Theories Resemble Coverups of Presidential Unfitness

 The American publication "The Atlantic" has long seemed to have been a supporter of the Democratic party in the United States. For many years the publication has published articles that tend to tell us about the failures of the Republican party in America, and gloss over failures of the Democratic party in America. So I was rather surprised to read the shocking story below:

The article was entitled "An Autopsy Report on Biden's In-Office Decline." It is about cognitive problems experienced by Joe Biden while he was US president from the year 2020 to the year 2024. 

The lines below the title read this:

“ 'Five people were running the country,'  a political insider told the authors of the new book Original Sin. 'And Joe Biden was at best a senior member of the board.' "

We read this in the article:

"[The book] Original Sin suggests...Biden may have been losing his grip before he took his oath of office [in early 2020].  If this is true, Americans unwittingly voted for and were led by a president who was not up to the job, a state of affairs that certain among the Biden faithful seemed committing to concealing."

We read about various cognitive and memory problems that Biden displayed while US president from the year 2020 to 2024. We read about how a certain shadowy group of people seemed to be dedicated to covering up this reality. Biden won enough delegates to secure the Democratic party nomination in the year 2024, without being challenged by any major figure in the party. No governor of a US state challenged him for the nomination, and no US senator challenged him for the nomination. The only governor, senator or congressman challenging Biden for the Democratic party nomination was a little-known US congressman.  The biggest figures in the Democratic party kept telling a story in the first half of 2024 that Joe Biden was fit to be president for another four years. That story was apparently not true. 

But after a disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump, Biden dropped out of the presidential race. His vice-president Kamala Harris then received the Democratic party nomination, and lost in the year 2024 election, losing to Donald Trump. 

You can summarize what went on like this: things were terribly wrong with the story line the Democratic party leaders were telling; but those party leaders kept telling that misleading story line. The thing that was terribly wrong was that Joe Biden was not fit to be running for re-election in the year 2024. But the leaders of the Democratic party kept their mouths shut about this unfitness, until Biden dropped out of the race. Such leaders misled us by telling us an "all is well" narrative that was not at all true. 

There is strong reason to suspect that many members of the other major US political party (the Republican party) are massively guilty of the same type of deception. These days the strange actions and strange speech of the current US president (Donald Trump) cause very many to worry that the current US president is unfit for his job. 

Very many are worried about the possibility of cognitive decline in the 79-year-old US president, including the Governor of California who not long ago said. "He's not all there." About July 16, 2025 President Trump complained about the appointment of Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, apparently forgetting that Trump himself had given Powell the job of Federal Reserve Chairman. In late July, 2025 President Trump gave us a weird angry rant denouncing wind-power, a rant that some interpreted as a sign of cognitive decline. It included senseless-sounding claims such as the statement, " We will will not allow a windmill to be built in the United States, they’re killing us." Trump has repeatedly been photographed at meetings, looking as if he had fallen asleep. In a recent speech he four times referred to "Iceland" when he actually meant "Greenland." But leaders of the Republican party keep pushing an "all is well" narrative that seems to defy what the public observes. 

An article mentions a letter Trump sent recently:

"Witness his recent unhinged letter to Norway’s prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, in which Trump implied that he was entitled to seize Greenland owing to Norway’s failure to award him the Nobel Peace Prize. Where to begin? Norway’s government doesn’t choose the winner of the prize. Nor does it own Greenland."

The same article notes that in a long speech at the Davos forum in Switzerland, Trump repeatedly referred to Greenland using the word "Iceland." Trump recently misidentified his own father's birthplace, saying his father was born in Germany. His father was actually born in New York City. Then there is Trump's recent hasty abandoning of aspirations to win a Nobel Peace Prize, by the reckless launching of an illegal unprovoked war against Iran, causing many who had once supported him to say that this was the opposite of what he had promised voters. The stupidity of the war quickly became apparent as we saw the bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh all-girls elementary school, with more than 170 being killed, a large fraction of them young Iranian girls. The launching of the war by Trump was illegal. The US constitution gives the US Congress the power to declare war, and there was not even any congressional vote authorizing the war. 

In April 2026, Trump's language became ever more unhinged. In a televised address to the nation on April 2, 2026, he said of the Iranians, "We're going to bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong." Trump then issued  on April 5, 2026 a social media post  threatening to make Iran a "hell," combined with obscene language, and the mocking statement, "Praise be to Allah."  Then on April 7, 2026 Trump said this about Iran in a social media post: "A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again." Very many were terrified that Trump would launch nuclear weapons on that night. Many in the US Congress responded by demanding that Trump be removed by means of the US Constitution's 25th Amendment, which allows for the removal of the president by a majority vote of his cabinet, whenever the president is unfit for office.  

Today there is an article on how Trump recently posted an AI-generated image depicting himself as a healing Jesus with a ball of light in his right hand. But the carnage he caused in Iran is the opposite of healing. 

There are some aspects of this situation comparable to the situation in biology today. When biologists attempt to explain things, they keep resorting to a very old theory of biology, the theory of Darwinism that was contrived in the middle of the 19th century, when no one understood the gigantically  organized complexity of cells and human biochemistry. It is now clear that such a theory is enormously unfit as a theory to explain the vast heights of biological organization we observe. Advances in biology have revealed the enormous levels of hierarchical organization, fine-tuning, information richness and component interdependence in living organisms. Such advances have shown that Darwin's theory of accidental biological origins is very much unfit to account for the wonders of biology we observe, which everywhere look like accidentally unachievable works of the most brilliant engineering. But our biology professors keep pushing a misleading "all is well" narrative, claiming their moldy old 19th century explanation explains things well. 

Just as the leaders of the Democratic party and the Republican party kept pushing a story line of "the very old guy is fit for the job" despite lots of evidence suggesting that this was not the case, the leaders of biology keep pushing a story line that the very old explanation of so-called natural selection is fit for the job of explaining wonders of biochemistry and cellular biology a billion times more impressive than anything Darwin ever learned about. We are being misled and misinformed by people who we trusted to tell us the truth. 

The leaders of biology also continue to sell us a "brains make minds" theory dating from centuries ago, despite a huge wealth of evidence that such a theory is just plain wrong. That evidence is discussed at the greatest length in the posts of my blog here.  The leaders of biology ignore such evidence, continuing to teach their outdated and discredited old theory of what causes minds, telling us "all is well." 

It seems these days the misleading "all is well" salesmen of very old and unfit biology theories are like this:

And it seems that in recent years the misleading "all is well" salesmen in both US political parties have been like someone who designs a presidential campaign ad like this:

NASA's Diminished Credibility on the Topic of Extraterrestrial Life

We hear these days quite a bit about "AI slop," error-containing output from AI programs. But it seems that an even worse problem is what we can call "science slop," and define as unbelievable news stories showing up on web sites or web pages claiming to give "science news." 

In September 2025 NASA made an utterly groundless boast of having discovered "potential biosignatures" on Mars. NASA had a press conference that received the most massive press coverage, even though it announced nothing new. All that was being discussed was the same utterly unimpressive find announced the previous year.  

The NASA press conference was devoted to trying to get people excited about the unimpressive-looking rock below, called the Cheyava Falls rock, which has no visual signs of life. The spot circled and called a "leopard spot" looks nothing like a leopard spot, and could have been formed by any of 1001 lifeless processes. 

Credit: NASA

The press conference was called to publicize a scientific paper about the Cheyava Falls rock and nearby rocks scanned in 2024. That paper has the dull title "Redox-driven mineral and organic associations in Jezero Crater, Mars." We hear no mention of any amino acids being found. Trying to boost excitement about something that is very probably no indication of life, the paper states, "In summary, our analysis leads us to conclude that the Bright Angel formation contains textures, chemical and mineral characteristics, and organic signatures that warrant consideration as ‘potential biosignatures’, that is, 'a feature that is consistent with biological processes and that, when encountered, challenges the researcher to attribute it either to inanimate or to biological processes, compelling them to gather more data before reaching a conclusion as to the presence or absence of life.' " 

The building components of one-celled life are many types of protein molecules, and the building components of protein molecules are twenty types of amino acids. Protein molecules used by living things are built from long sequences of twenty types of amino acids. Most types of protein molecules require a very special sequence of hundreds of amino acids. No amino acid used by life has ever been found on Mars.  It is therefore extremely misleading and arguably deceptive to be referring to something not looking like life found on a planet without any discovered amino acids, and to be calling such a thing a potential biosignature. 

I can give an analogy for how deceptive the use of such language is. Suppose you sent a spacecraft to orbit around some moon of a planet such as Jupiter and Saturn. Suppose you saw a little crater-like hole in the surface of the planet, something looking rather like this:

There would be three possibilities here:

(1) The feature might have been caused by some meteorite hitting the surface, the most common cause of craters. 

(2) The feature might be a sinkhole, caused by a sinking in of a little bit of the surface, as often is observed on our planet. 

(3) Or, maybe the feature was created by intelligent beings who were trying to start building a house, and were excavating as part of building the foundation of the house, and maybe the feature is a "potential signature" of purposeful engineering. 

In order to consider whether item (3) is a reasonable possibility, you would need to ask questions like this:

(1) Is this moon a place that can reasonably be postulated as a place where intelligent agents live, agents who might be starting to build a house for themselves?

(2) Are there any signs of building materials around or construction equipment around, things like shovels, bricks, pipes or boards?

If the answer to both of these questions is no, then there would be no reasonable chance that the observed feature is a potential signature of purposeful engineering. In that case anyone calling the feature a "potential signature of purposeful engineering" would be a deceiver, someone whose word should not be trusted. 

The situation I have described is analogous to what went on with the NASA press conference. Specifically:

(1) Just as the moon described in my analogy is a place profoundly hostile to life, Mars is a place profoundly hostile to life. 

(2) Just as the crater feature described in my analogy is at a place where there are no construction materials around lending credence to the possibility of a deliberate construction job, Mars is a place where no amino acids have ever been found, a place where none of the construction components for life have ever been found. 

The scientists and NASA personnel trying to persuade us that a "potential biosignature" had been found seemed as misleading as a scientist getting a photo of a mere crater, and describing it as potential signature of extraterrestrial intelligence. 

What has happened is predictable. The clickbait-hungry "science news" infosystem has followed their usual "give us an inch, and we'll take a mile" policy in its treatment of the NASA press conference. Now the Internet is filled with bogus stories groundlessly claiming or insinuating that life was discovered on Mars. 

Almost certainly NASA knew this would happen. The bogus stories are presumably exactly what it wanted, so that a Mars sample return mission would be funded. 

Without any warrant at all, NASA and some scientists have claimed "potential biosignatures," thereby misleading us very badly. If they had been honest they would have said something like this:

What we found could have been caused by life, but also could have been caused by lifeless geological processes. Given that we have searched hard for the lowest building components of life on Mars, and never found them, failing to ever find amino acids on Mars, we must reluctantly assume that almost certainly what we found is not any sign of life.

But they did not say that. Instead they used misleading language trying to cause people without any good warrant to believe or suspect that life had been found on Mars. This is not at all the first time this happened. NASA was involved in a similar affair of "crying wolf" during the 1990's, when it got the US President at that time (Bill Clinton) to do a press conference issuing a false claim that life had probably been found on Mars. 

So we should no longer regard NASA as an authority that has great credibility on the topic of extraterrestrial life. If the Mars sample return mission is funded, and NASA announces that the returned samples contain traces of life, we should be skeptical about what they tell us. We should instead suspect that anything found is the result of earthly contamination, or pareidolia by overeager NASA scientists. Ditto for NASA's missions to moons of Jupiter or Saturn. If NASA scientists ever announce they find life from any such missions, we should just roll our eyes, and say to ourselves, "On this topic you can't trust these guys as far as you can throw them." 

I now read that the Mars sample return mission has apparently lost its funding. NASA's attempt to whip up interest in the mission has failed to yield the desired funding. The failure to obtain the funding suggests that executive powers may have realized the "potential biosignatures" boast was unfounded.  Scientists have voiced relatively little protest about the cancellation. We can be rather sure that if scientists thought there was a good chance of detecting life by returning the Mars samples, that the scientific community would "scream bloody murder" about the cancellation. But the protest of the cancellation seems to have been faint, rather as if scientists realized the "potential biosignatures" boast was unfounded.  

Meanwhile, while an immoral and illegal war of aggression is raging in the Middle East courtesy of an unprovoked attack by the White House, NASA has a Big New Task it is eagerly working on: an Artemis II mission to have  astronauts go in orbit around the moon. This is something that was already accomplished quite a few times more than 50 years ago, when US astronauts not only orbited the moon, but walked on the moon, and drove around the moon in a little vehicle rather like a golf cart. The question we must ask about this  new Artemis II mission is the same question we must about the Iran war misadventure: why the hell are they doing that? 

In a 2022 post I pointed out that NASA's web page promoting the Artemis program miserably failed to articulate a convincing rationale for the program. But at least there was a page on the NASA site entitled "Why We Are Going to the Moon."  It was a fumbling, bungling attempt to explain a sound basis for the program -- but at least it was an attempt. Looking at the latest versions of the NASA pages promoting the Artemis program, I can't seem to find such a "Why We Are Going to the Moon" page. It seems that these days the guys in the Executive Branch of the US government are not very good at explaining reasons for their behavior.

Seeing that we cannot have much faith these days in the credibility of proclamations coming from the horribly-renamed US Department of War, should we have great faith in any proclamation of metaphysical significance coming from NASA? 

Postscript: Just after this post was published, I read a headline saying this:

"NASA to spend $20 billion to build a base on the moon

The agency is canceling plans to deploy a space station in lunar orbit and ​will instead use its components to construct the ‌base, NASA chief Jared Isaacman said."

We get rather an impression of minds that keep switching their plans. Replacing a space station orbiting the moon with a base on the surface of the moon is a case of replacing one boondoggle with another. I also read recently of a NASA plan to send a nuclear-powered spacecraft to land unmanned helicopters on Mars, supposedly for the sake of scouting around for a good landing site for a manned mission. It's another plan that makes me ask: why the hell are they doing that? The surface of Mars has already been thoroughly mapped, and we already know of quite a few places that would make good landing sites for a manned mission.  

The Latest Example of an Expert Group Thinking Stupidly

 I have published a series of 29 short videos on the topic of the errors of experts, which you can view by using the link here.  

My best post on this topic is my post "Disastrous Blunders of the Experts," which you can read here. The post discusses the following examples in which experts produced the most disastrous blunders:

Expert Fiasco #1: The Bay of Pigs Invasion

Expert Fiasco #2: The Vietnam War

Expert Fiasco #3: Eugenics

Expert Fiasco #4: The Housing Bubble of 2005, and Financial Meltdown of 2008

Expert Fiasco #5: Blunders of the Psychiatrists

Expert Fiasco #6: The Iraq War

Expert Fiasco #7: Vioxx

Expert Fiasco #8: The Opioid Overdose Epidemic

Expert Fiasco #9: Nuclear Weapons

The post also discusses quite a few other cases of the most disastrous blunders by experts, including the atomic testing fiasco (in which we were assured by experts that atomic testing was safe, with as many as 500,000 people dying from cancer caused by radiation from such testing), and also the COVID-19 blunders that probably resulted in more than 300,000 unnecessary deaths because of incompetent responses.  It is an open question whether the entire COVID-19 pandemic that killed millions was the result of overconfidence by gene-fiddling biology experts recklessly monkeying with viruses. 

It is not hard to find recent examples of blunders by experts.  One example is all the US military and US foreign policy experts who have unwisely supported providing super-destructive bombs to the State of Israel as it has engaged in an appalling bombing campaign in Gaza, resulting in more than 70,000 civilian deaths, mostly deaths of women and children, with innumerable other women and children being maimed or crippled, and as many as 500,000 put at risk of starvation, homelessness, severe malnutrition or severe lung damage from breathing dust from all the destroyed buildings.  With the help of such a blunder the appalling horrors of the October, 2023 Hamas attack have been dwarfed by a savage slaughter fifty times bloodier. Another example can be found in the recent World Economic Forum meeting. 

The World Economic Forum provides an annual report on global risks. After a meeting in Switzerland two years ago, this expert group  released its 2024 report on global risks.  Early 2024 was a time when the situation in the Middle East seemed like some time bomb that might explode, leading to a new world war, with the situation in Ukraine posing a similar danger. So what did the World Economic Forum list as the biggest current economic risk in early 2024?  The group of experts decided that the biggest global risk over the next two years was: misinformation and disinformation. 

Below is a visual from the 2024 report.  We see "misinformation and disinformation" at the top of the list of 2-year global risks.

Here is the report's description of this "misinformation and disinformation" risk, which fails to make it sound like anything to lose much sleep over:

"Misinformation and disinformation (#1) is a new leader of the top 10 rankings this year. No longer requiring a niche skill set, easy-to-use interfaces to large-scale artificial intelligence (AI) models have already enabled an explosion in falsified information and so-called ‘synthetic’ content, from sophisticated voice cloning to counterfeit websites. To combat growing risks, governments are beginning to roll out new and evolving regulations to target both hosts and creators of online disinformation and illegal content. Nascent regulation of generative AI will likely complement these efforts. For example, requirements in China to watermark AI-generated content may help identify false information, including unintentional misinformation through AI hallucinated content. Generally however, the speed and effectiveness of regulation is unlikely to match the pace of development." 

This sounds like nothing much to worry about, compared to threats such as nuclear war, pandemics arising from labs engaging in reckless gene-splicing, and global warming. So what on Earth were these experts thinking when they decided to proclaim "misinformation and disinformation" as the #1 global risk? In early 2024 Eve Ottenberg speculated about a possibility:

"The assorted billionaire geniuses and official intellectual luminaries who gathered in Davos Switzerland January 15-19 proved, for those who doubted, that neither singly nor as a group could these...find their way out of a paper bag. Weighing the world’s fate in their well-manicured fingers, did they seem concerned about the Ukraine War morphing into nuclear catastrophe, or ditto for a wider Middle East war? They did not. Did they tear their beautifully coiffed hair and rend their designer ensembles over the prospect of the earth heating up like a pancake on a griddle due to uncontrolled climate change? A disaster caused by rich countries gobbling up and belching out burnt fossil fuels? Or did they mouth vague platitudes about extreme weather? Yes, bromides were their plat du jour.

The most immediate threat to humanity, according to this assemblage of well-groomed ... (who paid $52,000 apiece to join the World Economic Forum and then $19,000 each for a ticket to the Davos shindig), is misinformation or disinformation – you pick. After all, these bigwigs can take to their pate de foie gras-stocked bunkers if the planet succumbs either to nuclear winter or high temperatures inhospitable to human life. So of course, they regard speech, that is, free speech, as the main threat to their luxurious creature comforts. After all, someone might say something bad about these oligarchs! "

After a meeting in Switzerland in January of this year, this same expert group recently released its 2026 report on global risks.  A long-standing nuclear arms treaty between Russia and the United States has recently expired, raising the threat of a nuclear arms race. Very many are worried about the health, stability and judgment of the frequently-ranting man whose finger is on  the nuclear button of the United States, who has made a long series of outrageous-sounding statements, threats and decisions that have caused many to wonder if he is fit for the grave responsibilities of being US president. 

So what has the World Economic Forum listed as the biggest current global risk?  The group of experts has decided that the biggest global risk over the next two years is: geoeconomic confrontration. 

What are they talking about by using such a term? We get an inkling in one part of the report:

"In highlighting Geoeconomic confrontation, respondents are indicating a deepening and broadening of their concerns: after a year of heightened uncertainty over trade policy there is now a growing recognition of the escalating use of other economic and political instruments, from sanctions and regulations to capital restrictions and weaponization of supply chains, as tools of geoeconomic strategy."

Figure 24 of the report has a big font boldface caption of this: Executive perceptions of Geoeconomic confrontation (sanctions, tariffs, investment screening etc.), Later in the report we have this definition of "geoeconomic confrontation." 

"Deployment of economic levers by global or regional powers to reshape economic interactions between nations, restricting goods, knowledge, services or technology with the intent of building self-sufficiency, constraining geopolitical rivals and/or consolidating spheres of influence. Includes, but is not limited to: currency measures; investment controls; sanctions; state aid and subsidies; and trade controls."

What did the group of experts list as the second most worrying global risk over the next two years? It was "misinformation and disinformation." Unbelievably (as shown in Figure 2 on page 8 of the report), the percentage of experts who listed "geoeconomic confrontation" as an economic risk was 18 times greater than the number who cited "biological, chemical or nuclear weapons or hazards" as an economic risk, and 18 times greater than the number who listed "infectious diseases" as a risk, and 9 times greater than the number who listed "critical changes to Earth systems" as a risk. And the number of experts who listed "misinformation and disinformation" as a risk was 7 times greater than the number who listed "biological, chemical or nuclear weapons or hazards" as an economic risk, and 7 times greater than the number who listed "infectious diseases" as a risk.

Once again, prestigious elite experts have acted in a way that makes us suspect that they are blind, bungling and biased, less likely to judge correctly than high-school dropouts.  

Asked to name the biggest global risk in the next two years, experts have stated a worry that only some fat-cat investor or some hopelessly out-of-touch clique member might list as his biggest worry. Our World Economic Forum experts have spoken as if they were vastly more worried about some red tape than about oceans of red blood being spilled. Our group of experts has utterly failed to perceive the severity of the biggest risk facing the world: a risk of nuclear war that helped cause the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists to recently set its famous doomsday clock to be only 85 seconds before midnight.  

Experts tend to exist in "echo chambers" where groupthink and herd effects may predominate. Often involving way-too-narrow and way-too-specialized fields of study (sometimes called silos), such echo chambers can be found in the ivory towers of academia or the ideological enclaves that are the Pentagon and the White House. Within such an echo chamber people will tend to hear only people who belong to the same belief community, people who share the same ideology. Existing in such an ideological enclave, absurd or immoral or unwarranted opinions may be voiced, and may be regarded as great wisdom by anyone who looks around and sees other members of the belief community nodding in agreement. 

Postscript: Tragically this post of February 16, 2026 has turned out to be rather prophetic. I said on that date, "Very many are worried about the health, stability and judgment of the frequently-ranting man whose finger is on  the nuclear button of the United States, who has made a long series of outrageous-sounding statements, threats and decisions that have caused many to wonder if he is fit for the grave responsibilities of being US president." At the end of that month Trump proved his poor judgment and unfitness for office by launching an illegal and immoral war against Iran, in an unprovoked act of aggression, before any such action had been sanctioned by the US Congress or the UN Security Council. The war started off with atrocities such as the horrendous bombing of a girl's elementary school in Iran, resulting in the death of more than 150 people, including many small girls.