The Swiss writer Erich von Däniken recently died at the age of 90 from natural causes. Many millions bought his books promoting a theory that Earth had been visited by astronauts in the past. Very prone to try to diminish contrarians outside of its intellectual "ruling class," the New York Times has an obituary on von Däniken with a subtitle claiming that his 1968 book "Chariots of the Gods?" sold "hundreds of thousands" of copies. But a Yahoo article tells us that von Däniken's books sold 70 million copies. And a 1970's version of "Chariots of the Gods?" claims that there are 4,000,000 copies of it in print.
The approach taken by von Däniken in his first best-selling book "Chariots of the Gods?" was not anything obviously unreasonable. Again and again he would discuss very impressive examples of ancient engineering or ancient architecture or ancient inventions. He would suggest that such works of engineering or architecture or invention were beyond the very limited capabilities of the humans living at the time, and he would suggest that this may be evidence that humans received assistance from extraterrestrial visitors. He would also draw attention to ancient artwork or ancient literary passages that could be interpreted as suggesting visitors from the sky.
There were many subsequent books by von Däniken and others that expounded on these ideas. Mainstream authorities noticed all the book sales of von Däniken, and expressed hostility. Much of that hostility can be explained as jealousy. I remember in the 1970's watching mainstream astronomer Carl Sagan on the Tonight Show denouncing von Däniken and his claims. There were two reasons for not trusting Sagan's criticisms. The first is that von Däniken's books dealt mainly with archaeology, and Sagan was no scholar of archaeology. The second reason was that Sagan himself had advanced speculations similar to those in von Däniken's books, a few years before the publication of von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods? book. In the pages preceding and following these two pages in his 1966 book Intelligent Life in the Universe, Sagan spent quite a bit of time speculating in the style of von Däniken. Maybe Sagan was jealous that von Däniken had made millions from a speculation that Sagan had earlier advanced, while Sagan had not profited from the idea.
A huge boon for the ideas of von Däniken occurred around 2009 with the premier of the Ancient Aliens TV show, which ran for many years. The show introduced many millions to his ideas, and he was frequently seen on the show promoting his theories. The theory that extraterrestrial visitations helped produce various ancient wonders was a good fit for a TV series. We got very many travelogue-type shows in which some series host would appear at some exotic world location, and speculate about how extraterrestrial visitors might have helped produce the ancient wonders at the visited site. This made watchable TV footage.
In his 1968 book "Chariot of the Gods?" von Däniken never mentioned DNA or genes. But an idea involving genes became a key part of the Ancient Aliens TV series. For more than a dozen years the show pushed the same central explanation for human beings, one that does not work well to explain who we are and how we got here. The core explanation offered by the show was that at one or more points in the past, extraterrestrials altered human DNA.
We had a presentation of this core explanation at the 38:55 mark in the "Alien Operations" episode of Season 6, which you can see on Netflix. At the 38:55 mark we had this presentation:
Klemens Hertel, molecular genetics phD: "What we don't know about humans in terms of evolutionary genetics is based on what we don't know about genetics nowadays. For example, we do not know the genetic basis of the thought process. We don't know memory. We cannot create any ideas of how changes occurred to evolve the human brain to the functional being that it is right now."
Narrator: Could this incredible map [of the human genome] eventually solve the great mystery of human evolution? Might it help explain why humans, unlike any other living species, can think, reason and have the power of speech, or why they can create art, music, and spend time contemplating the reason for their own existence?
Graham Hancock: "It's not until about 40,000 years ago that you get a very radical change in human behavior. Our hunting strategies get better. Our tools and our weapons get better. It's as though some untapped faculty of the human brain and of the human imagination switched on."
Narrator: "Is it possible that the reason humans suddenly evolved from primitive beasts to sentient humans is due to otherworldly intervention? According to ancient astronaut theorists, the answer is a profound yes."
Gorgio A. Tsoukalos: "One of the basic tenets of the ancient astronaut theory suggests that a long time ago, our DNA was artificially changed by extraterrestrials. And we can see that this is exactly what happened, because all of a sudden we made a giant intellectual leap, and all of a sudden we became Home sapiens sapiens. "
David Childress: "This was the time when the very first extraterrestrial genetic engineering took place. And in some ways, this was like phase one in the creation of modern humans beings as we know them."
Narrator: "Did extraterrestrials deliberately alter Homo sapiens DNA?"
The books of von Däniken contain similar speculations about DNA and genes. On this page and the next page of his 1976 book "Miracles of the Gods," von Däniken erroneously refers to DNA as containing "all the hereditary information and cell building plans of living creatures," a claim that is inaccurate because DNA does not have any plan or specification of how to build any cell or any of its organelles. On page 218 of the same book, von Däniken dogmatically states the shakiest of speculations, telling us, "Homo sapiens became intelligent only after the visit by extraterrestrial beings." On the same page he refers to "the extraterrestrial beings who made us intelligent by artificial mutations," referring most speculatively to gene tinkering of humans by visitors from some other planet.
On the page here of the same book, von Däniken speaks as if he fully believes in "brains make minds" dogma. On the page here of the same book, he says "when they 'grafted' their own genetic characteristics onto hominids," using "they" to refer to extraterrestrials, and hominids to refer to humans or human ancestors. Strangely, in the same sentence he claims that extraterrestrials transferred ESP powers from themselves to humans, by genetic manipulation. The speculation sounds like folly, because the well-established reality of telepathy and ESP has no neural or genetic or bodily explanation (which is part of the reason why materialists refuse to accept the strong evidence for ESP).
You can summarize the typical explanations of today's Darwin-venerating biologist like this: "Evolution explains DNA; DNA explains bodies; bodies explain minds." Every part of that explanation is wrong. Evolution in the form of unguided Darwinian natural selection does not offer a credible explanation of what we see in human DNA: about 20,000 types of genes that correspond to more than 20,000 human protein molecules. Each a repository of fine-tuned information representing a functional sequence of hundreds or thousands of well-arranged amino acid parts, such genes are too hard-to-achieve through an accumulation of random mutations as imagined by Darwinists. DNA does not explain human bodies. Contrary to the myth so often told by biologists and chemists, DNA is not any specification for how to build a human body or even any of its organs or cell types. DNA does not even specify how to make the main components of cells: organelles and protein complexes. All that DNA specifies is very low-level chemical information such as which amino acids make up particular proteins. Very many scientists have confessed this reality, and at the post here you can read a list of more than 30 scientists and doctors who tell us that DNA is not a specification, blueprint or program for making a human.
As for the claim that bodies make minds, it is false. There are very many reasons (discussed in the posts of the blog here) why the human brain fails to be an explanation for the human mind and human memory. Ironically, the molecular geneticist quoted above on the Ancient Aliens show actually pointed us a bit in the right direction by saying this:
"For example, we do not know the genetic basis of the thought process. We don't know memory. We cannot create any ideas of how changes occurred to evolve the human brain to the functional being that it is right now."
Yes, and neuroscientists do not have any substantive idea of how a brain could cause someone to think or remember. A very thorough study of the many physical shortfalls of the brain will lead to the idea that the brain cannot be the cause of human mental phenomena such as very fast thinking and instant recall and the lifetime preservation of memories.
What does the Ancient Alien series (and von Däniken in the 1976 book Miracles of the Gods) offer as a correction to the bungled explanations of typical biologists? You could explain it like this:
Bad old thinking: "Evolution explains DNA; DNA explains bodies; bodies explain minds."
Bad new thinking, "Ancient Aliens"/von Däniken style: "Evolution and gene-tinkering by extraterrestrial visitors explains DNA; DNA explains bodies; bodies explain minds."
What the Ancient Aliens series gives us is just a rather timid tweak on the old nonsensical explanations of 1960's biologists. So instead of the idea that we got the wonders of DNA by only blind unguided processes, we now have the idea that some of human DNA is the result of purposeful interventions by visiting extraterrestrials. That might be a move in the right direction towards a more credible theory of how we got human DNA. But a huge problem is the show's continual speaking as if some suitable DNA explains how we got humans. You cannot explain humans by the arising of suitable DNA. DNA does not explain the origin of the human body. And neither DNA nor human bodies explain the origin of the human mind.
DNA does not explain the origin of any human body because DNA merely specifies very low-level chemical information such as which amino acids constitute a protein. So we are left with the gigantic unanswered question: how is it that a speck-sized zygote in a newly impregnated woman is able to progress over nine months to become the vastly more organized state of hierarchical dynamical organization that is a full-sized human being? There is nothing in DNA and its genes and nothing known to biology that explains this progression, which is a miracle of organization a million times more impressive than a hotel-sized sandcastle with 100 ramparts and 20 turrets arising only from the wind and water at the edge of a beach. There is no hypothesis about extraterrestrials visiting long ago that can do anything to explain this ongoing marvel of hierarchical organization that is at the center of biology.
Neither DNA nor anything in the brain explains the wonders of human memory and the wonders of the human mind. DNA does not explain the arising of any human body, any human organ or any type of human cell, none of which is specified in DNA. So it does not work to claim that we got the marvels of our minds and memories because visiting extraterrestrials did something to alter our DNA. There is nothing in either our DNA or our brains that explains the main wonders of our minds.
To explain the wonders of the human body and the wonders of the human mind, we need ideas far bolder than the rather timid idea that visiting extraterrestrials tinkered with human DNA. It is very strange that we seem to never get from the Ancient Aliens series the kind of reasoning that would best support its main explanatory claim. Such reasoning would require educating TV viewers about the stratospheric levels of fine-tuning and functional complexity of genes and protein molecules, and the mountainous heights of dynamic hierarchical organization in the human body. TV viewers would get an explanation of why the average gene is something as unlikely to arise by unguided processes as a well-written useful grammatical paragraph of 100 or 200 words arising from an ink splash. TV viewers would get an explanation of why you cannot credibly explain the origin of such repositories of functional information by imagining an accumulation of random mutations. TV viewers would be educated in the relevant probability mathematics, and fundamental principles such as that the chance of the accidental origin of a functional structure skyrockets in a geometric and exponential fashion whenever there is a simple linear increase in the number of well-arranged parts needed for such a structure. After such an education, the viewers could be told that it is just too improbable that unguided Darwinian evolution could have produced such wonders of functional complexity, and that we must postulate some guided assistance, which could have occurred by extraterrestrial intervention.
But such a presentation seems to never occur on the Ancient Aliens show. Instead the show seems to spend the vast majority of its time trying to persuade us that various wonderful-seeming things (in history or in legend) are things suggesting extraterrestrial visitors in the past. The results rarely sound convincing, although the show does serve as an entertaining vehicle for educating us about facts and aspects of human history and bygone human culture.
Erich von Däniken had a very erroneous conception of the nature of DNA and its genes, and a very erroneous conception of the nature of brains and memory. For example, on page 48 of his book Gods from Outer Space, he falsely stated, "Today it is an accepted scientific fact that memories are stored in memory molecules and that RNA and DNA molecules transport memory molecules." No such thing was ever established by scientists. On page 23 of the same book he falsely stated, "DNA contains genetic information for building the cells, as well as all the other hereditary factors." On page 24 he just as falsely stated, "DNA is the perfect punched card for the structure of all life." On page 49 he falsely stated, "We know that the nucleus of the gene contains all the information needed for the construction of the organism."
Containing only low-level chemical information, DNA and its genes do not specify the structure of bodies, organs or cells, and do not have instructions for how to build such things (as I discussed in 2016 and in many other posts on this blog). We cannot blame von Däniken for these misstatements, because we was simply parroting misstatements that were being made by many scientists at the time he wrote. It is ironic that von Däniken was condemned by scientists such as Carl Sagan, when it was a situation where von Däniken was building a "castle in the clouds" of speculation largely based on DNA myths that scientists such as Sagan had been guilty of promoting.
For very much more on why the bad old thinking discussed above really is bad thinking, see my long post "Evolution Does Not Explain DNA, DNA Does Not Explain Bodies, and Bodies Do Not Explain Minds."
We should give some credit to von Däniken, despite his overconfident dogmatism and many errors. He was a very diligent person whose books sold in gigantic numbers, and you have to be doing some things right for that to happen. We can credit von Däniken with being smart enough to recognize that the standard account of human origins was not credible. But unfortunately von Däniken's scholarship of biology, brains, minds and human mental experiences was much weaker than his scholarship of archaeology. Having started out in the late 1960's with a weak theory attempting to fix the gigantic shortfall of scientific explanations of human origins, he stuck with that theory all of his life, never realizing that to bridge that ocean-sized shortfall you need a reality gigantically greater than just some extraterrestrial spaceships visiting long ago.
