The Faulty Figures in an Astrobiology Paper

 The 2022 science paper "Life beyond Earth: How will it first be detected?" by Chris Impey has some figures designed to cause us to be hopeful about the chances of detecting extraterrestrial life before the year 2035. But the figures are misleading, and the prospects of detecting such life before the year 2035 are dim. 

Let us look at some of these figures, and why they mislead us. Figure 1 in this paper is this cheerful visual:

Below are comments on some of the circles in the diagram.

• "Evidence that organic molecules form easily and readily." The trick of appealing to a supposed widespread existence of "organic molecules" is the oldest trick of astrobiologists. Saying there are  lots of "organic molecules" in outer space makes people think that outer space is life-friendly. But when scientists use the term "organic molecules" they merely mean molecules containing carbon. Most of these "organic molecules" are not components of life or any indicators of life. 
• "Evidence that planet and moon habitable locations are abundant." Before there was launched telescopes such as the Kepler telescope and the James Webb telescope, the hope was that many earth-sized planets would be found in the habitable zones around other stars. By now more than 5000 extrasolar planets have been discovered revolving around other stars. Only very few Earth-sized planets have been detected revolving around sun-like stars in habitable zones. When I ask Google how many, an AI overview lists only three (Kepler-452b, Kepler-1606b, and Kepler-1649b). So rather than using the phrase "abundant" here it might be better to use the term "rare." 
• "Evidence that Earth life can survive under a wide range of conditions." Such evidence does not tell us anything very important about the likelihood of an accidental appearance of life on another planet. 
• "Evidence that ingredients for life are widely available in time and space." It would be fallacious to argue that books can accidentally be printed in a book manufacturing plant,  on the grounds that "ingredients" for books (such as paper and ink) are widely available at such a spot. Similarly, even the simplest one-celled life is a state of very high organization, something requiring a very special engineering, not merely "ingredients." The amount of information and organization needed for even the simplest life is comparable to the amount of information and organization needed to produce a 100-page technical manual. 
• "Evidence that life appeared early in the history of the earth."  We do not know that life appeared very early in the history of the earth. Our planet is 4.6 billion years old, and claims are made that there are geological signs of life dating back to 3.5 billion years. But such claims are doubtful, as they rely on what are called stromatolites, unusual-looking geological features which some claim were formed by bacteria. We see no cells or biological structures in the oldest stromatolites. The claim that very old stromatolites (older than 3 billions years) are signs of ancient life relies on a rather complicated and debatable line of reasoning. It's quite possible that they are not signs of early life, and that there are alternate geological explanations. This scientific paper says the evidence for life older than 2.5 billion years is “meager and difficult to read.” If you were to prove that life arose on Earth in the first billion years that it could have arisen, that would not tell us anything about the unlikelihood of life accidentally arising. Extremely unlikely things that might happen in any of ten time periods often occur in the first of those time periods. For example, someone may be killed by lightning during the first of ten decades that he might have been killed by lightning. But that does not tell us anything about the likelihood of being killed by lightning. 

Later we have a Figure 5 which attempts to persuade us that there is a "basic foundation" for "biomarkers" on Enceladus and Titan, two moons of Saturn.  Biomarkers have not been detected on either of these moons. Later there is a Figure 9 which has a large title of "SETI Success." So far SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) has been a dismal failure. 

Later we have this as Figure 10:

The figure predicts that life would be detected by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) using "IR Spectroscopy" (infrared spectroscopy) by the year 2024. This discovery is judged to be something that would occur with "high" probability. It is now the year 2026 and no such detection has occurred. There was a false alarm announcement by a glory-seeking astrobiologist in the year 2025, but other scientists said the announcement was groundless. 

There is also no reason to think that the GMT (Giant Magellan Telescope) or that the ELT (Extremely Large Telescope) will have a "high" chance of detecting extraterrestrial life, as Impey assumes in the figure above. These GMT and ELT telescopes will be observatories in Chile that will be subject to distortion caused by Earth's atmosphere, something that the James Webb Space Telescope avoids. 

It seems the underlying  assumptions of astrobiologist author Chris Impey are very wrong. Making an equally bad blunder, Impey predicted that a Mars sample return would have "high" odds of life detection. There is no basis for such optimism. Life requires many types of protein molecules, and most types of protein molecule require a very special special arrangement of hundreds of amino acids. Amino acids have never been detected on Mars, and the surface of Mars is extremely inhospitable to life. Given such facts, there is no basis for thinking that a Mars sample return mission would be likely to detect life. 

It seems that astrobiologists such as Impey are people who are very  overoptimistic. A central tendency of materialists has been a tendency to vastly underestimate the complexity of living things and the complexity of minds. This tendency has led materialists to make bad predictions about when the origin of life would be understood and when extraterrestrial life would be discovered. 

So in the year 2006 on the page here chemist Robert Shapiro predicted that the origin of life would be understood within five years, this being a prediction that the origin of life would be understood by the year 2011.  Twenty years later the problem of explaining the origin of life is still a problem 100 miles over the heads of scientists. Even the simplest self-reproducing one-celled organism is a state of organization so high that we should never expect it to arise by chance anywhere in the universe. 

In the year 2015 Ellen Stofan (a chief scientist at NASA) predicted, “I think we are going to have strong indications of life beyond Earth within a decade, and I think we're going to have definitive evidence within 20 to 30 years.” It's now the year 2026, and the prediction of finding "strong indications" of extraterrestrial life by the year 2025 failed. In 2025 NASA tried to get people excited about some rocks found on Mars, using the term "potential biosignatures"; but it was purely verbal trickery and groundless hype. Nothing like any decent evidence for life had been discovered. 

In a 1964 report of the Rand Corporation a large group of  experts (largely Darwinist materialists) were asked when there would occur "creation of a primitive form of artificial life (at least in the form of self-replicating molecules)." Many of these experts gave estimates between 1980 and the year 2000. It is now the year 2026, and no such thing has happened. 

The experts were blinded by their allegiance to materialism. A proper study of the mountainous degree of organization and fine-tuned complexity in even the simplest thing would have led you to estimate that scientists would never be able to create artificial life from chemicals. But the experts did not make such a study, because they wanted to believe that self-reproduction is relatively easy to achieve. 

It is quite possible that the universe has very many other forms of intelligent life, but the chance of that seems very slim if unguided material processes are all that's going on. 

Failing Origin-of-Life Researchers May Console Themselves With Delusional-Sounding Fantasies

 For 70 years the mainstream science literature has presented enormously misleading coverage about origin-of-life research.  There has been a huge amount of bunk and baloney in the press coverage of origin-of-life research, and the statements made on this topic by scientists themselves have very often been wildly  inaccurate. Many examples of such misstatements can be found here and here and here and here and here and here and here. 

Never has so much boasting and hype been written by so many when the results were so minimal and meager.  It is not merely that no experiments have ever produced life from non-life. The reality is that no experiments realistically simulating the early Earth have ever produced any of the main building components of single-celled life, and that no experiments realistically simulating the early Earth have ever produced any of the building components of the building components of single-celled life. 

The research output: "peanuts" (i.e. "chickenfeed") 

The main building components of one-celled life are functional protein molecules, which have never been produced in any experiment realistically simulating the early Earth. The building components of such building components are amino acids, which have never been produced in any experiment realistically simulating the early Earth.  The widely-discussed Miller-Urey experiment (which did produce some amino acids) was not anything like a realistic simulation of early Earth conditions, requiring a very specially constructed glass gizmo unlike anything that would have existed on the early Earth, and requiring a degree of electricity exposure unlike any part of the early Earth would have experienced. 

The most recent example of press baloney and BS on this topic is an article entitled "How Life Solved Its 'Impossible' Problem: Leading Chemist Explains Life Doesn’t Need a Miracle to Appear."  The subtitle is sheer denialism: "Life may have emerged from a surprisingly simple network of chemical reactions long before cells or genes existed."  No, you need genes and a cell for life to get started.  Mortified by how high is the requirement threshold for even the simplest living thing (the required number of well-arranged parts), materialists are prone to engage in such misspeaking, by incorrectly describing some-sort-of-little-chemistry as "life." 

The article has an interview with chemist John D. Sutherland. The article makes this incorrect claim: "That question led to a breakthrough in 2009, when Sutherland and his colleagues showed that key building blocks of RNA could form without enzymes, under conditions that might have existed on early Earth." No such breakthrough occurred. The sentence above includes a link to a 2009 paper by Sutherland that does not describe any experiment simulating early Earth conditions. The paper merely describes work done by scientists purposefully trying to move things forward in a chemistry lab. Their output was mere ribonucleotides, which are not any of the building blocks of protein molecules. The paper (like so many in this field) has a misleading title, as it refers to "prebiotically plausible conditions," but does not describe any experimental attempt to realistically recreate early Earth conditions, with the paper's described outputs all requiring purposeful work by chemists enjoying the convenience of a modern laboratory. 

The article then refers us to an equally unimpressive 2015 paper co-authored by Sutherland, one claiming to have achieved not amino acids (the building components of proteins) but mere "precursors" of amino acids. Again, the paper has a misleading title, as the title refers to protein precursors, when it should have merely referred to something much simpler and much less impressive (mere amino acid precursors).  Again, we fail to have a description of any experiment simulating early Earth conditions.  All that is described is manual, intentional manipulations by chemists within a chemistry lab. 

Very badly misspeaking about this unimpressive result, the ZME Science article writer  states, "In other words, the same basic geochemical environment could generate all three major classes of biomolecules required for life." No, nothing of the sort was shown. No DNA or RNA was produced; no gene was produced; no protein molecule was produced; and not even one of the building components of a protein molecule was produced. 

We then have an interview with Sutherland. He starts out speaking candidly about the dismal lack of progress of origin-of-life scientists such as himself, stating this:

"When I started, as a young man, I confidently expected that we’d understand how the building blocks were made within a couple of years. I’m now approaching the last quarter of my life, and we’ve almost finished making the building blocks. It’s taken much longer than we expected."

The reality is that no experiments realistically simulating the early Earth have ever produced any of the lowest building blocks of life, components such as amino acids and nucleotides.  Sutherland has boasted about creating nucleotides (low-level building components of RNA), but this was through manual purposeful exertions in a chemistry lab, not through any experiments realistically simulating the early Earth. So that "hardly got anything done" statement of "I’m now approaching the last quarter of my life, and we’ve almost finished making the building blocks" should actually be something like "I spent 50 years and still haven't got the lowest building blocks through any realistic experiments." 

After making a very lame excuse of a lack of funding (very misleading because there has been tons of funding for such efforts), Sutherland changes his tune dramatically and goes into delusional-sounding fantasy mode, making a prediction that makes not the slightest speck of sense, given the very meager results of origin-of-life researchers such as himself.  Sutherland states this: 

"I would say we’re getting remarkably close to the point where someone will do an experiment where you start in a laboratory with a mixture of chemicals that is obviously not alive, and within a couple of weeks you end up with simple cells showing all the hallmarks of life.

That will be an extraordinary experiment. It will finally remove the last vestiges of vitalism—the idea that there’s something special about biology that means it can’t be recreated from chemistry. Wöhler’s synthesis of urea destroyed most of vitalism, but some elements still persist.

If we can demonstrate by experiment that we can kick-start biology just by mixing the appropriate chemicals in the right sequence in a way that simulates what happened on early Earth, that will dispel vitalism completely. Then we’ll have a rational explanation for how it all started and why we’re here."

Hogwash. Baloney. BS. Stating the most laughable of fantasies,  Sutherland here speaks like a physicist who has struggled all his life to invent a time machine, without getting anywhere, and who then consoles himself by saying, "I think I'm remarkably close to creating a machine that will transport me back to the Stone Age, and I should be able to make that in two weeks." 

The dismal failure of origin-of-life researchers provides not the slightest warrant for the grandiose predictions Sutherland has made, which sound like a delusional fantasy. Everything we know about the very high organization level and very high information richness of even the simplest life screams to us in the loudest voice that Sutherland's prediction is nonsense, an idea as false as claiming that someone throwing ink at a wall would produce a long technical manual by accidental ink splashes. 

As for the claim that the synthesis of urea did something to discredit vitalism, that is a groundless false claim long made by materialists. The inability of scientists such as Sutherland to make any of the major components of life from experiments realistically simulating the early Earth leaves vitalism intact as something that materialists have not discredited.  And the utter failure of scientists to explain the progression from a speck-sized zygote to the vast hierarchical organization of a human body (without resorting to childish lies about DNA body blueprints that do not actually exist) also leaves the credibility of vitalist ideas intact. 

When we hear Sutherland fantasizing about this type of eagerly-hoped-for miracle-like future event, we are reminded of how materialism is really a kind of religion-in-all-but-name. Imagining life suddenly popping out magically from lifeless chemicals, Sutherland sounds like a fundamentalist Christian eagerly predicting the Rapture in which the Elect are all suddenly levitated up into heaven.  In both cases there's an element of "on that day my ideological enemies will be vanquished!"

It helps if you can future-fantasize

In the 1964 report of the Rand Corporation a large group of  experts (largely Darwinist materialists) were asked when there would occur "creation of a primitive form of artificial life (at least in the form of self-replicating molecules)." Many of these experts gave estimates between 1980 and the year 2000. It is now about 2025, and no such thing has happened.  

The experts were blinded by their allegiance to materialism. A proper study of the mountainous degree of organization and fine-tuned complexity in even the simplest living thing would have led you to estimate that scientists would never be able to create artificial life from chemicals. But the experts did not make such a study, because they wanted to believe that creating life from non-life is relatively easy to achieve. 

In the year 2006 on the page here chemist Robert Shapiro predicted that the origin of life would be understood within five years, this being a prediction that the origin of life would be understood by the year 2011.  Twenty years later the problem of explaining the origin of life is still a problem 100 miles over the heads of scientists. Even the simplest self-reproducing one-celled organism is a state of organization so high that we should never expect it to arise by chance anywhere in the universe. 

The 12 Biggest "Overblown Hype" Science News Stories of 2025

This week I saw on various websites all kinds of science-related "best of 2025" articles. Many of them repeat some of the groundless achievement legends spread around during the year 2025.  As a corrective, I offer the list below of the 12  Biggest "Overblown Hype" Science News Stories of 2025. Each was a story about someone making big boasts about grand and glorious things that were not really done. 

#12: The Bennu "Building Blocks of Life" Story

NASA's Osiris-REx mission was one that gathered samples of soil and rock from the asteroid Bennu, and returned them to Earth. In 2025 many a news story announced that "building blocks of life" had been found on the asteroid Bennu. It was amazing that not one of the very many mainstream news accounts telling this story bothered to address the crucial question of how much of these "building blocks of life" were reported. It was like the publication of 100 news stories reporting that people had died in an accident in Peru, with none of them reporting how many people died. The reported levels of these "building blocks of life" was miniscule -- roughly a few parts in a billion. The levels were so small that they were probably due to earthly contamination, either in "clean rooms" analyzing the returned samples, or from a spacecraft which left Earth with such miniscule levels of the reported chemicals. We can have no confidence that anything was learned about the asteroid Bennu having such "building blocks of life" such as amino amino acids. A December 2025 LiveScience article tells us this:

 "Earlier this year, scientists identified more than two dozen previously unknown bacterial species lurking in the Kennedy Space Center cleanrooms in Florida, where NASA assembled its Phoenix Mars Lander in 2007. The discovery showed that despite constant scrubbing, harsh cleaning chemicals and extreme nutrient scarcity, some microbes....persist in these punishing environments."

If entire microbes can exist in such cleanrooms used to prepare spacecraft for biology-related missions and used to analyze samples returned by such spacecraft, how much more likely it is that amino acids much tinier than microbes would exist in such cleanrooms?

#11: The "Observation of Dark Matter" Story

In late 2025 a paper authored by  Tomonori Totani. was announced with a press release using this language:

"Scientists have searched for dark matter for decades. One thinks he may have caught a glimpse."

As I discuss in my post here, the boast does not hold up well to scrutiny. The paper was based on an analysis of Fermi data on gamma rays coming from the center of the galaxy. An article published after my post is entitled "Did we just see dark matter? Scientists express skepticism." We read this:

"We spoke to Case Western Reserve University astrophysicist Stacy McGaugh, an expert in galaxy dynamics and dark matter, who noted that we’ve been here before.

That is, the Fermi data used in the study has already been extensively studied, and a similar excess of gamma rays was identified as early as 2009. Over the past 16 years, numerous studies have failed to find strong evidence that this signal connects to dark matter. As McGaugh succinctly put it: 'It turned out to be wrong then, [and] I expect it is wrong now.' "

Referring to another scientist commenting on Totani's paper, we read this: "And for McGaugh, the methodology in this case doesn’t stand up to scrutiny."

#10: The "Fossil Rewriting Human Origins" Story

In 2025 there was a Science Daily article grandly announcing that a fossil discovery had rewritten the story of human origins.  The article had an image of a full human-like skull. But the image was fake. It was a Shutterstock image made by a graphics artist, not a photo of an actual fossil. The only fossils found were some fossils of teeth, which told us nothing very reliable or important about human origins. I discuss the affair in my post here. 

#9: The "Step Towards Solving Central Mystery of Life on Earth" Story

In the year 2025 we had an article in the Harvard Gazette trying to persuade us that some great advance had been made in understanding the origin of life.  We had a headline "A Step Towards Solving Central Mystery of Life on Earth." We have a subtitle of "Experiment with synthetic self-assembling materials suggests how it all might have begun." The boasts were groundless, as I discuss in my post here. All that was being discussed was the production of information-empty bubbles, with no appreciable organization. Even the simplest living thing, to the contrary, is a state of extremely high organization and very great information richness, requiring (among other things) the very special arrangement of very many thousands of amino acid parts, and the origination of hundreds of types of complex innovations (particular types of protein molecules).  

#8: The "Recreation of the Dance That Sparked Complex Life" Story

 In early 2025 we had in Quanta magazine an article  entitled "Scientists Re-Create the Microbial Dance That Sparked Complex Life." Here are the two misleading tricks involved in that title:

(1) The title is referring to the origin of eukaryotic cells, and refers to such an origin as the beginning of complex life. Such a reference is extremely misleading, as the cells believed to have preceded eukaryotic cells (prokaryotic cells) were themselves enormously complex and organized. 

(2) The title makes the groundless triumphal boast that something was done to recreate the origin of eukaryotic cells. Nothing of the sort occurred. 

The "Scientists Re-Create the Microbial Dance That Sparked Complex Life" article refers us to a paper that was not an experiment simulating natural conditions. Instead, what went on was that scientists used high-tech equipment to inject bacteria into fungi. It is misleading to be claiming that this directed high-tech intervention was something recreating a natural event. And it is particularly misleading to try to claim that such high-tech tinkering sheds any light on the origin of eukaryotic cells, partially because fungi are themselves  eukaryotic cells. 

#7: The Caltech SPHEREx Press Release

In March 2025 the California Institute of Technology issued a full-of-falsehoods and full-of-nonsense press release announcing the launch of a SPHEREx scientific satellite. In my post here I analyze all of the very bad examples of false statements, ridiculous predictions and groundless boasts in the press release. The SPHEREx satellite was launched in March, 2025. None of the grand predictions of the CalTech press release have been fulfilled. For example, the press release grandly predicted, "Among several big questions the [SPHEREx] mission is poised to answer is how our universe came to be.” No such thing has happened. 

#6: The "Epigenetic Switch to Turn Memories On and Off" Story

In 2025 scientists grandly announced that they had created an "epigenetic switch to turn memories on and off." The claim is debunked in my post here. The claim was based on the usual "mouse farce" of Questionable Research Practices, such as the use of way-too-small study group sizes and the use of an unreliable technique for trying to measure fear or recall in rodents, the worthless method of trying to judge "freezing behavior." 

#5: The "Mind Captioning" Story

In 2025 scientists grandly announced that they had created something they called "mind captioning" after analyzing brain scans of six subject who were brain scanned for 17 hours. The claims are debunked in the second half of my post  here. A study of this type requires at least 15 or 20 subjects to be considered decent evidence, but in this case the study group was a way-too-small study group size of only six.  

#4: The "Memories Linked in Time by Dendritic Spines" Story

In 2025  Ohio State University released a press release that had the fictional title "Dendritic spines: The key to understanding how memories are linked in time." For reasons I discuss in my post here, everything the press release states in the quote below is flight-of-fancy stuff without any solid basis in fact:

"The study shows that memories are stored in dendritic compartments: When one memory forms, the affected dendrites are primed to capture new information arriving within the next few hours, linking memories formed close in time.

'If you think of a neuron as a computer, dendrites are like tiny computers inside it, each performing its own calculations,' said lead author Megha Sehgal, assistant professor of psychology at The Ohio State University."

The press release was promoting the paper "Compartmentalized dendritic plasticity in the mouse retrosplenial cortex links contextual memories formed close in time" which you can read here. It is another comedy-of-errors rodent study so badly designed that we should call it a mouse farce. The study hinges upon the totally unreliable "freezing behavior" technique of trying to measure fear recall in rodents. That method is unreliable, for reasons I discuss at length in my post here.  The study group size used was the way-too-small study group size of only 10 mice per study group. 

Dendritic spines are about the smallest structures that humans can view in the brain. The microscopic examination of such spines gives not the slightest support for any claims that such spines have any relation to memory or thinking. Dendritic spines look no more like elements of a computing system or a memory storage system than do the little bumps on the skin of a teenager with a bad case of acne. And like acne pimples, dendritic spines have short average lifetimes of only  weeks and months, excluding them as being part of any explanation for human memories that can reliably last for decades. 

#3: The "Spaceship Looking Like a Comet" Story

The comet 3I/ATLAS approached the sun in 2025. Much of the year we saw the science news sites breathlessly repeating suggestions by astronomer Avi Loeb that the object was an extraterrestrial spaceship. Loeb's claims are discussed in my post here. Loeb's claims were based on avidly searching for anything in 3I/ATLAS that could be called an anomaly, and trying to kind of insinuate that "anomalous" implies "designed." It does not. There are a billion-and-one things in nature that are anomalous but not designed.  By the year's end it was clear to most scientists that 3I/ATLAS was a comet, not a spaceship. Below is 3I/ATLAS as viewed by the James Webb Space Telescope on August 6, 2025. 

Credit: NASA/James Webb Space Telescope

#2: The "Neuroscientific Model of Near-Death Experiences" Story

The press gave widespread coverage to the claim by researcher Charlotte Martial to have come up with a "neuroscientific model" of near-death experiences.  Martial's paper is debunked in my long post you can read here. After the publication of this post on 7/15/2025 there was published (in October 2025) a scientific paper criticizing the Martial paper: the paper "A Neuroscientific Model of Near-Death Experiences Reconsidered" by Bruce Greyson and Marieta Pehlivanova, which you can read here. The Greyson and Pehlivanova paper mostly consists of criticisms different from those I made, which is an indication of how many are the criticisms that can be made of the Martial paper and its "NEPTUNE" model. The article here summarizes the Greyson paper. 

At the center of Martial's explanation attempt was an appeal to the possibility of a surge of chemicals such as dopamine, serotonin, glutamate and endorphins, at the time of death, with the insinuation that such chemicals may cause hallucinations. There is no robust evidence that such chemicals surge in humans near the time of death, and such chemicals do not produce hallucinations. The paper here  involved experiments that increased by very many times (between 100 times and 1000 times, in other words 10000% to 100000%)  the serotonin levels in volunteers, by infusions of serotonin. No hallucinations were reported. The paper "Effects of Dopamine in Man" reports on the effects of 13 subjects who were given a 1% infusion of dopamine, causing dopamine levels many times higher than naturally occur. The paper makes no mention of any hallucinatory effects or any mental effects. A similar experimental result (reporting no hallucinations) is reported in the paper here, which tested artificially produced dopamine spikes as high as 1000 times higher than normal. Martial ignored the fundamental fact that near-death experiences are often reported in those undergoing cardiac arrest, at a time when brain waves flatline. An electrically inactive brain cannot hallucinate. 

#1: The "Biosignatures on Mars" Story

The story of this false alarm and the hype involving it is told in my July 2024 post "NASA's Groundless Boast About Finding a Potential Biosignature." and my September 2025 post "No, NASA Did Not Find Any Evidence of Life on Mars." NASA claimed to have "found intriguing minerals on the western edge of Jezero Crater, in the clay-rich, mudstone rocks of a valley called 'Neretva Vallis."  There was nothing very special found at all.  All that was found was something a little funny-looking, something that could have been formed by life, but also could have formed by lifeless geological processes. 

In 2024 NASA tried to get people thinking that something of biological relevance had been found. But the story "did not stick," attracting little attention.  Then in September 2025 NASA tried the "big press conference" approach. Scientists did a press conference, and the chief of NASA said "this very well could be the clearest sign of life that we’ve ever found on Mars, which is incredibly exciting.”  The "could be" part was ignored, and soon the press was filled with stories having misleading clickbait titles such as "NASA Says 'Clearest Sign of Life' Found." 

The scientists speaking at the press conference has made cautious, hedging statements such as "I want to remind everyone that what we're describing here is a potential biosignature that is a characteristic element, molecule, substance or feature that might have a biological origin but requires more data or further study before reaching a conclusion about the presence or absence of life."  The headline writers ignored such statements, giving us misleading or deceptive headlines such as  "NASA Says 'Clearest Sign of Life' Found." 

The explosion of misleading hype and deceptive headlines should have been predicted by anyone familiar with the "give them an inch and they'll take a mile" tactics of today's "science news" sites, which have an uncontrollable tendency to produce misleading clickbait headlines, in order to generate more advertising revenue from online sites packed with ads. 

The search of evidence of life on Mars has been a complete bust, with no convincing evidence ever being found for it. The main building components of one-celled life are protein molecules. No protein molecule has ever been found on Mars. The building components of protein molecules are amino acids. A functional protein molecule requires a very special arrangement of hundreds of amino acids, as unlikely to occur by chance as hundreds of fallen twigs in a forest accidentally forming into a functional, readable paragraph. No amino acids have ever been found on Mars. 

The fact remains that the chance that life ever existed on Mars is extremely low, because of the failure of all Mars missions to ever detect any proteins or amino acids on Mars. It is impossible to overestimate how much the failure to find any amino acids on Mars is a "show-stopper" for all conjectures about "potential biosignatures" on Mars. The amount of functional information in even the simplest living cell is comparable to the amount of functional information in a set of hundreds of long, well-written useful paragraphs. Speculating about life arising on a Mars without amino acids is like speculating that accidental arrangements of fallen twigs formed many long, functional and grammatical paragraphs at some place (like the North Pole) where there are no twigs. 

Why do misleading stories like these keep appearing on "Science News" pages? It's largely because when you click on some misleading but interesting-sounding headline, you typically go to a page with lots of ads; and someone makes lots of money from the public viewing such ads. The basic equation of today's science news pages is "Clickbait = $$$$."

Another big reason we got the very misleading NASA false alarm on this topic is that NASA was eager to get funding for a Mars sample return mission costing 10 billion dollars, and a few months before the "potential biosignatures" press conference, people were saying that the mission would be canceled.  What better way to keep 10 billion dollars in NASA's purse than some hot air hype press conference trying to make nothing very interesting sound like a "potential sign of life"? 

A Biologist's Monstrosity Yearnings

For twenty years the Edge Foundation seemed to exist mainly to publish an annual survey in which a group of people (mainly scientists) were asked some Annual Question, and wrote their answers at length.  These annual surveys were published in book form between 1998 and 2018, and you can read most of them for free on this page of the Edge Foundation's site.  Most of the financial contributions that funded the foundation came from Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced billionaire who committed suicide in jail after being charged with the sex trafficking of minors.  Epstein was convicted of procuring a child for prostitution in 2008, but he continued for quite a few years before and after that conviction to mingle with scientists and high-tech luminaries at exclusive social events such as dinner parties and cocktail parties, as his sex crimes continued.

What we always got in the yearly books answering the Annual Question were a group of people advancing an Epstein-friendly view of the world, by which I mean any viewpoint which would not trouble Jeffrey too much as he continued his predatory sex crimes (which seemed to have started long before 2008).  Typically humans would be depicted as accidental piles of chemicals rather than souls or bodies that are mysteriously arising marvels of biological organization. It was as if each of the 100+ essays in each book had been carefully chosen to avoid anything that might make Jeffrey Epstein uncomfortable.  Although occupation-wise the authors were a fairly diverse group, the books were a very monochrome affair, with almost no writers deviating from the Official Party Line of modern academia.  One of the worst examples of the Epstein-compatible viewpoints was the following appalling statement by biologist Richard Dawkins for the 2006 Annual Question:

"But doesn't a truly scientific, mechanistic view of the nervous system make nonsense of the very idea of responsibility, whether diminished or not? Any crime, however heinous, is in principle to be blamed on antecedent conditions acting through the accused's physiology, heredity and environment."

During the twenty years in which the Annual Question books were being published, we seemed to have heard scarcely a peep from any professor along the lines of "I don't want to participate in some book series mainly financed by a child-abusing sex criminal."  During the same period, the contributors to the Annual Questions were marketed as some kind of brilliant elite.  A page on the Edge Foundation web site describes the contributors in these worshipful words: "scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are." But the 2013 answers to the Annual Question serves as a testimony to the poor predictive powers of these supposedly brilliant minds. The question was "What Should We Be Worried About?" A great number of scientists gave not-very-brilliant answers, and virtually no mention was made of the risk of a pandemic.  The only three mentions of the word "pandemic" were passing references saying nothing substantive about pandemics. 

Among the not-very-brilliant answers given by scientists (to the question of what we should worry about) were the following:

• "One Universe" (Lawrence Krauss)
• "The Loss of Death" (Kate Jeffrey)
• "The Danger from Aliens" (Seth Shostak)
• "Can They Read My Brain?" (Stanislas Dehaene)
• "The 'Nightmare Scenario' for Fundamental Physics" (Peter Woit)

The 2006 Annual Question book featured such hilarious howlers as a chemistry professor predicting that the origin of life would be understood in five years (the year 2011), and a neuroscientist claiming that because he can use the internet,  he has "achieved omniscience for all practical purposes." There was also silliness such as the claim that "the purpose of life is to disperse energy,"  and a few statements of the evil nonsense that is free will denial. 

In 2009 the foundation's Annual Question was "What Will Change Everything?" In his answer to that question, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins speaks wistfully about some things he yearns to have, but does not have at all. 

The first thing on Dawkins' wish list is something he expresses with this odd sentence: "The discovery of relict populations of extinct hominins suchHomo erectus and Australopithecus."  I guess he meant "such as Homo erectus."   Dawkins does not explain why such a discovery (kind of like discovering a Bigfoot species) would "change everything."

The second thing on Dawkins' wish list is "a successful hybridization between a human and a chimpanzee," which Dawkins claims would send "salutary" shock waves throughout society, and "would change everything," although he quotes someone else as calling such a thing as being utterly immoral.  No such chimp-human has ever been produced, although we can understand why evolutionary biologists  (who frequently tell us the absurd falsehood that humans are apes or very apelike) would yearn for such a thing, as such a monstrosity might give some substance to their claims. 

The third thing on Dawkins' wish list is expressed by his statement below:

"What if we were to fashion a chimera of 50% human and 50% chimpanzee cells and grow it to adulthood? That would change everything."

The fourth thing on Dawkins' wish list is some silly nonsense  that suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of genomes. He states the following:

"The human genome and the chimpanzee genome are now known in full. Intermediate genomes of varying proportions can be interpolated on paper. Moving from paper to flesh and blood would require embryological technologies that will probably come on stream during the lifetime of some of my readers. I think it will be done, and an approximate reconstruction of the common ancestor of ourselves and chimpanzees will be brought to life. The intermediate genome between this reconstituted 'ancestor' and modern humans would, if implanted in an embryo, grow into something like a reborn Australopithecus: Lucy the Second. And that would (dare I say will?) change everything."

Scientists keep claiming that humans and chimpanzees had a common ancestor, but no one has ever found fossils of such a common ancestor.  Since the half-life of DNA is only about 521  years, we have nothing like even a quarter genome of any hominid species that lived more than 100,000 years ago. What Dawkins fantasizes about here is someone imaginatively creating some speculative genome thought to correspond to some alleged ancestor of humans and chimpanzees, and then creating some ape-like organism from that.  But why would that "change everything"?  Such a stunt would not prove that such a genome had ever existed in the real world. 

Dawkins presupposes here the utterly false claim that erring scientists have often taught: that genomes or DNA are a blueprint or recipe for anatomy.  They are no such thing. DNA merely specifies low-level chemical information, not high-level anatomical information.  Not being any specification of how to make a human, DNA does not even specify how to make any of the 200 types of cells in the human body. So the idea that you can bring back to life an extinct organism by recreating its DNA is an absurdity. This is the "Jurassic Park" fallacy.  If we were to find in some block of amber a drop of dinosaur blood containing the dinosaur's DNA, it would never allow you to bring a dinosaur back to life, because the DNA of a dinosaur does not specify how to build a dinosaur, or even how to build any one of its cells. And speculatively recreating the DNA of some alleged ancestor of humans and chimps would never allow you to bring such an organism back to life. 

Of course, Dawkins would not have all these yearnings and longings if the evidence for humans evolving from an ape-like ancestor was solid.  You only yearn for more evidence if the evidence you have is not good enough. Scientists lack any credible theory of how any very complex visible biological innovations could occur, or how any dramatic innovation of intellectual capability could occur.  The claim that Darwin advanced such a theory is merely a self-serving myth told over and over again by the tribe of legend-mongering evolutionary biologists like Dawkins, a piece of tribal folklore that serves to elevate their social status, causing us to falsely regard them as Lords of Explanation.  Darwin merely advanced a lame theory of accumulation, not a theory of organization. So the stratospheric levels of organization scientists have discovered all over the place at every level in biological organisms (almost all of which Darwin knew nothing about) are not explained by Darwinist ideas. 

The Dawkins essay mentioned above is quite like a prosecutor giving this closing argument:

"You should vote to convict Wilbur Kowalsky of murdering John Kenning, because we have established his guilt beyond any reasonable doubt. But it's interesting to think of some things I wish I had. I would like to have the body of John Kenning, which no one has found.  By proving that Kenning is actually dead, that would change everything. I would also like to have some eyewitness testimony that Kowalsky killed Kenning. That would change everything. I would also like to have some motive for why Kowalsky might have killed Kenning. That would change everything. I would also like to have some evidence that Kowalsky might have ever been on the same continent as Kenning, or that he might have touched some kind of weapon that might have killed him, or that he might have been physically capable of killing him without a weapon. That would change everything! But I digress. Please convict Wilbur Kowalsky of murdering John Kenning, because we have established his guilt beyond any reasonable doubt."

When a biologist with healthy thinking is asked what he yearns for, he might say something like a cure for malaria or a cure for cancer. When a biologist's thinking is debased, he may yearn instead for monstrosities such as something half-human and half-chimp. 

In an  answer to a 2007 Annual Question of "What Are You Optimistic About?" Dawkins speaks like he was a dupe  of groundless science progress legends.  He says he is optimistic that physicists will "discover the final theory of everything." There is no truth in the  widely repeated claim that scientists are working on such a theory.  What happened was that some scientists started to engage in wild speculations about a theory that might combine two not-very-compatible things: general relativity (basically a theory of gravity) and quantum mechanics.  Such a barely-even-started theory should have been called a Theory of Two Things. But most deceptively, some scientists started calling it a Theory of Everything. It was no such thing, being a theory that did not involve chemistry, psychology, biology, history and dozens of other disciplines. Dawkins sounds as if he's bought the baloney that some physicists are working on a theory that will explain everything.  

On the same page, Dawkins says that biology went on even after "Darwin solved its deep problem." There are actually very many deep unsolved problems in biology, such as the problem of how human mental phenomena can occur despite a brain showing no signs of explaining such phenomena, how life originated, how fantastically organized anatomical innovations originated at various points in natural history, why almost all of the animal phyla originated in a relatively short time, how so many millions of types of miracle-if-it-started-by-luck protein molecules could have originated, and how a speck-sized egg is able to progress to become a full grown adult, despite the lack of any specification of anatomy in DNA.  None of these problems was  solved by Darwin. The claim that Darwin solved one of these problems by a theory of "natural selection" is as groundless as the claim that physicists are working on a Theory of Everything. And just as the phrase "Theory of Everything" is a misleading phrase, so is the phrase "natural selection," which does not actually postulate any real selection (selection being a thing performed only by conscious agents who make a choice). 

A news story at today's mainstream science news sites makes it clear that many experts have been telling us groundless stories about human origins. The news story is entitled "Most human origins stories are not compatible with known fossils."  We read the following: " 'When you look at the narrative for hominin origins, it's just a big mess -- there's no consensus whatsoever,' said Sergio Almécija, a senior research scientist in the American Museum of Natural History's Division of Anthropology and the lead author of the review."