Nonsense in an Episode of "How the Universe Works"

The long-running TV series "How the Universe Works" can now be watched on HBO Max. Let us look at an episode where the series showed scientists saying things that were misleading or stupid. 

In Episode 4 of Season 10 we have an episode entitled "Dark History of Earth."  At the 23:56 we have a description of a Japanese experiment. We are told that Japanese scientists simulated the conditions of the early Earth and then tried to reproduce what would happen if you smashed a meteorite into the early Earth. We are told that amino acids were created (without any mention of the amounts). 

A look at the scientific paper ("Impact-induced amino acid formation on Hadean Earth and Noachian Mars") shows that the scientists tried to simulate a meteorite impact using a gun which fired at a speed of 1 kilometer per second. Meteorites hitting the earth hit the ground at a speed of only about 100 or 200 meters per second. The amino acids reportedly detected were claimed to have been detected at only the most negligible trace amounts of about 1 nanomole, roughly 1 part per billion (Figure 2). Because the reported levels were so miniscule, they probably are mere amino acids already present in the sample, before the gun fired. No robust evidence was provided that amino acids are created by meteorite impacts. The authors mention that amino acids supposedly produced by similar experiments may be the result of mere contamination, but fail to specify safeguards they took to prevent such contamination in their experiment. 

Around the 25:00 mark the TV show incorrectly claims, "The experiment proves that meteorite impacts can help build the components for life." No, it did not, because of the negligible amino acids amounts reported, and because of the impossibility of telling whether they arose from any activity simulating a meteorite impact. The narrator then says something more is needed for life to arise. We then hear around the 25:10 mark an astrophysicist compare the origin of life to making a cake from the right ingredients. This is an enormously misleading analogy. Even the simplest life would require a state of organization exponentially greater than the minimal amount of organization to make a cake. A three-layer cake with frosting is not a highly organized structure, but merely a structure with the most minimal organization. 

What would be a realistic analogy for the accidental origin of life from non-life? It would be the analogy of a 100-page technical manual arising from accidental ink splashes. Because even the simplest living thing requires hundreds of types of protein molecules each requiring hundreds of well-arranged amino acids, the probability of life accidentally arising from non-life is roughly comparable to the probability of accidental ink splashes producing a 100-page well-written useful technical manual. 

Misleading us very badly and teaching absurd nonsense, the narrator says at the 25:30 make, "We thought that the violence of asteroid impacts prevented life from forming. Now, we think they could be an essential ingredient." Senselessly, some woman talks about ideal "Petri dish" conditions for early life, just as we see some visual of a meteorite plunging into a sea of lava. The show has gone crazy, it seems. A Petri dish is a glass container protecting some microbes from harm, which is the exact opposite of the sterilizing conditions visually depicted while the woman refers to a Petri dish. It's like someone claiming that your poodle will have an ideal spot to relax if you put him in your tumble dryer for a 40-minute spinning cycle. 

We then around the 27:00 mark hear the astrobiologist Lewis Dartnell saying, "The sort of chemistry that goes on in these hydrothermal fluids seems to be the right kind of chemistry for creating life." That's baloney, BS. No scientist understands any such thing as a "kind of chemistry for creating life" from lifeless matter. Any scientists claiming to understand any such thing is misleading you very badly. All experiments trying to create life from lifeless matter have been the most dismal failures. The recent article here discusses a recent scientific study "Rethinking the origin of life at seafloor hydrothermal vents" finding that hydrothermal vents "lacked the fundamental conditions needed to spark early life."

The narrator then talks equally bad nonsense, saying around the 27:15 mark, "Once again Earth got lucky. Impacts that could have destroyed everything may have helped spark life into existence." The idea that you can "spark into existence" life from non-life is very bad nonsense. Even the simplest living thing is an information-rich state of very high organization. You can no more "spark into existence" such life than a thunderbolt striking a tree can produce a 100-page book. 

Around  the 30:20 mark the show starts to discuss homochirality, without decently explaining it. Chemicals such as amino acids and sugars can be either left-handed or right handed. A left handed amino acid looks like a mirror image of the right-handed amino acid, and a right-handed sugar looks like the mirror image of a left-handed sugar. Homochirality is the fact that in living things essentially all amino acids are left-handed, and all sugars in DNA are right-handed. But when such things are synthesized in a laboratory, you see equal amounts of left-handed and right-handed amino acids and equal amounts of left-handed and right-handed sugars.

Based on the fact that it is just as easy for left-handed amino acids to form in the laboratory as right-handed amino acids, and just as easy for left-handed sugars to form in the laboratory as right-handed sugars, we would expect for there to be a symmetry in the handedness of amino acids, with an equal amount of left-handed and right-handed amino acids. We would also would expect a symmetry in the handedness of sugars, with equal amounts of left-handed sugars and right-handed sugars. But what we see is a puzzling asymmetry, with living things having only left-handed amino acids and right-handed sugars in DNA. This puzzling asymmetry is the long-standing unresolved mystery of homochirality. Homochirality is a major reason for suspecting that the origin of life required purposeful design, and could not have occurred by accident. 

At the 30:30 mark the TV show laughably suggests cosmic rays as an explanation for homochirality, saying, "The reason may have been cosmic rays." I won't bother to summarize the speculation that followed, merely telling you that it is one of those "some scientists believe" affairs. You can read my post here for an explanation of why cosmic rays do nothing to remove the mystery of homochirality. 

In the last quarter of the show, we have all kinds of nonsense, such as the claim at 35:43 that an asteroid striking Earth 66 million years ago "gave us a push forward." At the 38:49 some scientist witlessly describes himself as a "furry primate," mentioning an asteroid impact, and claiming he is "here because of it." An event getting rid of dinosaurs does not actually explain the appearance of mammals, nor does it explain the appearance of humans. 

We have a nonsensical attempt to account for the origin of flowering plants.  We hear this:

"Before the asteroid strike, conifers and ferns dominated the tropical forests of South America. But afterwards, falling ash from the impact enriched the soil. And fast growing flowering plants took over. "

Actually, the fossil record shows flowering plants first appearing about 120 to 140 million years ago, long before the asteroid strike that killed the dinosaurs (believed to have occurred about 66 million years ago). Such plants appear in a sudden burst that is not explained by Darwinian evolution. Here is a relevant quote:

"Rather than emerging gradually, a few at a time, the evidence presented in these four papers suggests the occurrence of punctuated bursts. At every major phylogenetic node that was examined, the appearance of hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of novel homology groups was detected. Evolution by bursts is, of course, not expected if natural selection is the main driver....The fossil record depicts the appearance of the first angiosperms as a sudden event, with no clear progenitors...The nodes at the origin of the angiosperms are certainly striking in terms of the total number of novel genes that seem to have appeared in a short space of time....It seems that vast numbers of existing genes are jettisoned and replaced by entirely different ones. Such processes would represent a radical overhaul in the genetic composition of organisms. How this might be accomplished is another mystery." --"The Origin of Novel Genes,"  Richard Buggs, Professor of Evolutionary Genomics at Queen Mary University 

of London.

No one familiar with the Cambrian Explosion should be too shocked to read the quote above. In the Cambrian Explosion, almost all of the animal phyla (the main types of animals) appeared in a relatively short period of time, contrary to what is predicted by Darwinism. The diagram below depicts when animal phyla appeared during the past billion years. 

At the 41:06 mark in the TV show we hear a scientist saying "we need these disasters for evolution to work," thereby suggesting some giant hole in evolutionary explanations, which prior to the year 1980 did not appeal to disasters caused by things such as asteroid collisions. The truth is that with or without asteroid collisions, evolutionary ideas and Darwinist ideas fail to provide any credible explanations for the origin of species or the origin of very complex biological innovations. 

Postscript: There's another deus ex machina abiogenesis believers appeal to: the possibility of comets colliding with the early Earth and providing some of the "building blocks" of life. On the day of this post's publication, there was published the paper here. It states this:

"Taken together, the rapid decline in Earth’s cometary impact bombardment and the efficient destruction of fragile cometary organics indicate that the successful delivery of prebiotic feedstock molecules was an exceedingly rare event. Our results therefore challenge the long-held assumption that cometary impacts played an important role in the origins of life on Earth."

A New Study Fails to Fix the Problem of Few Signs of Impressive "Positive Selection" in Humans

According to Darwinist dogma, lucky random mutations occur and cause "classic sweeps" or "classic selective sweeps" in which some new trait (offering a survival or reproduction advantage) becomes more and more common in the gene pool, eventually so common that most organisms in the population have that trait. The idea is illustrated in the visual below, which illustrates an example of the type of evolution called "positive selection" (which is a misleading term because "selection" means a choice by a conscious agent, and no actual selection is involved when so-called "positive selection" occurs).  The visual depicts a white-color trait offering a camouflage advantage, with the trait becoming more and more common over a timespan of many generations. 

The idea of "selective sweeps" can credibly explain very simple changes in a species such as a color change. But the idea of selective sweeps fails to explain the origin of components, capabilities and systems requiring a great organization of many parts. 

Claims about the power of "selective sweeps" (also called "classic sweeps") have mostly struck out at the plate, as more sensitive scans of the human genome have found little evidence of  such classic sweeps. A scientific paper was entitled "Classic Selective Sweeps Were Rare in Recent Human Evolution." By "recent human evolution" the paper meant the past 250,000 years.

Another scientific study in 2014 found there was virtually no sign of adaptive evolution in the human genome. The paper published in a mainstream science journal looked for traces of natural selection by looking for something called “fixed adaptive substitutions” in human DNA. The paper stated, “Our overall estimate of the fraction of fixed adaptive substitutions (α) in the human lineage is very low, approximately 0.2%, which is consistent with previous studies.”  It's rather hard to imagine a bigger fail or flop for Darwinian explanations. If such explanations were correct, we would have expected to find such signs of adaptive evolution in a large fraction of the human genome, not a fifth of one percent. 

In the 2018 book Who We Are and How We Got Here by David Reich, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, the author makes this revealing confession on page 9: “The sad truth is that it is possible to count on the fingers of two hands the examples like FOXP2 of mutations that increased in frequency in human ancestors under the pressure of natural selection and whose functions we partly understand.” Judging from this statement, there are merely 10 or fewer cases where we know of some mutation that increased in the human population because of natural selection. The scientific paper “The Genomic Rate of Adaptive Evolution” tells us “there is little evidence of widespread adaptive evolution in our own species."

In the study here, an initial analysis found 154 positively selected genes in the human genome -- genes that seemed to show signs of being promoted by natural selection. But then the authors applied something they called "the Bonferroni correction" to get a more accurate number, and were left with only 2 genes in the human genome showing signs of positive selection (promotion by natural selection).  That's only 1 gene in 10,000. Call it the faintest whisper of a trace -- hardly something inspiring confidence in claims that we are mainly the product of natural selection. 

Recently some claimed this dismal situation has brightened, calling attention to a recently published paper entitled "Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia." An article on the Smithsonian site gives us lots of information about it. You can read the article here. 

Immediately the article tells us something that seems to confirm the "missing-in-action human adaptive evolution" story suggested at the beginning of this post. We read this:

"Previously, many scientists suspected that modern humans experienced relatively little evolution after arising in Africa around 300,000 years ago. They arrived at the idea by examining directional selection, a type of natural selection in which a specific variant of a gene, called an allele, provides an extreme version of a trait that is very beneficial to survival or reproduction. It continues getting passed to more offspring, and other forms of the gene appear less often in the population. Before the new study, only around 21 occurrences of directional selection had been identified."

Humans have more than 20,000 genes  The 21 occurrences referred to is a reference to only 21 genes. Such a picture of about "1 gene in a thousand" is a dismal picture for anyone wanting to claim evidence of adaptive evolution in humans. That is a "virtually no sign of adaptive evolution" type of picture. 

But the article then discusses that the new "Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia" paper claims to have detected more evidence of adaptive evolution in humans than the previously cited figure. We read the paper claims to have found "479 alleles that had been subjected to directional selection." 

But then the article gives us a reason for distrusting the new paper. We read this:

"However, 'the findings still require a leap of faith,' says Sasha Gusev, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School who was not involved in the work, to the Times. He is cautious about the vast natural selection the researchers say they’ve identified and takes issue with some of their statistical methods."

Also, the Smithsonian article fails to discuss any compelling examples of survival-improving adaptive evolution documented by the new study. The article headline has a mention of only trivial differences that do not improve human abilities or survival value. The headline is this:

Humans Are Still Evolving. Natural Selection Has Favored Genes Linked to Red Hair and Less Male-Pattern Baldness, a Study Suggests.

The article gives us only this listing of examples of human evolution claimed by the new paper: "Some of the alleles that natural selection has strongly favored are associated with traits including light skin tone, red hair, increased risk of celiac disease, lower chance of male-pattern baldness and lower risk of alcoholism." This does not seem to paint any picture conforming to ideas about natural selection as an explanation for the human race. Three of the five things mentioned are trivial and superficial things. One of the other things is something decreasing survival, and the other is one increasing survival (if we assume that alcoholic cavemen would be less likely to survive). We have no mention of any big important thing that fits in with some "this helps explain how you humans arose from ape-like ancestors" narrative. 

We read this: 

"Why were some alleles selected more often than others? 'My short answer is, I don’t know,'  Akbari tells the New York Times’ Carl Zimmer."

This sounds like odd little changes here and there, for reasons unknown, rather than any substantial confirmation of Darwinian claims about evolution being the cause of humanity.  And we don't even know whether the confusing story will stand up to scrutiny,  as the Harvard guy says the methodology is suspect.  

I looked at references to "positive selection" in the "Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia" paper.  The only specific references were these, none of which has any real relevance to explaining the origin of humans and their many unique mental powers:

• A claim of positive selection in some gene used by blood cells. 
• A claim of positive selection for some gene affecting tuberculosis risk. 
• A claim of positive selection for some gene affecting multiple sclerosis risk. 
• A claim of positive selection for some other gene relating to some iron buildup disease. 
• "Positive selection at an allele conferring immunity to HIV-1 infection."
• A claim of positive selection for some gene affecting cystic fibrosis risk. 
• A claim of "nominal evidence of positive selection" for something relating to years of schooling, although we should not take the claim seriously because "nominal" means "existing or being something in name or form only."

Figure 3 of the paper (shown below) gives us some reason for doubting the strength of the data and analysis in the paper. We have a figure showing lots of little line graphs supposedly showing "allele frequency trajectories." But each graph involves only 3 data items, meaning that claims of an increase or decrease in the alleles is not very solid. In general, line graphs plotting only 3 data points tend to be suspicious; but line graphs plotting 7 or 10 data points tend to be more reliable. 

So we seem to be left with no real evidence that there occurred selective sweeps or so-called "positive selection" that can explain the gigantic leap in intellectual function that mysteriously occurred around 50,000 years ago. We have some evidence for microevolution, but nothing that validates claims that Darwinian processes can produce macroevolution (dramatic evolutionary changes involving big leaps in functional capabilities). 

Regarding the study "Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia", evolutionary geneticist Arbel Harpak says, “The study is best viewed as offering amazing data and provocative hypotheses that will require much further scrutiny, rather than a settled account of recent adaptation in Eurasia."

The 3021 paper here is entitled "Two decades of suspect evidence for adaptive molecular evolution—negative selection confounding positive-selection signals." Using two species, the authors tested 100 genes that were identified by two of the main types of tests used to try to find genetic evidence of evolution.  They found " the >100 genes identified by the two tests do not overlap beyond random expectation."  This suggests that at least one of the tests was inaccurate, and also gives us reason for thinking that maybe both of the tests were inaccurate. 

No one should be too surprised about a lack of any genetic explanation for the origin of human minds (in the sense of some explanation involving so-called natural selection). In the 19th century the co-founder of the theory of natural selection (Alfred Russel Wallace) had very clearly explained why that  theory is incapable of explaining the wonders of human minds, in his essay here. That essay should be required reading in every class teaching the theory of evolution.

Biologists love to make unfounded boasts about the power of their explanations. But sometimes they are candid and tell us about how little their explanations work. For example, I recently discovered this quote by Cornell University evolutionary biologist Leslie S. Babonis: "The emergence of novel traits ─ traits that are unique to a group of organisms ─ is an important driver of organismal diversity, yet our understanding of how novel traits arise is still in its infancy." In the same year two biologists (James T. Stroud and William C. Ratcliff) confessed the lack of an evolutionary explanation for the original origin of multicellular organisms bigger than microbes. In a scientific paper they stated, "The evolution of multicellularity is among the most important transitions in the history of life, yet the processes that lead to it remain unresolved as all known transitions occurred more than 250 million years ago." Notice the "it was so long ago" excuse for the lack of an explanation, which sounds odd, given that similar guys have for so very long claimed to divine just what happened eons ago.  In a similar vein, a 2026 paper by several scientists confessed, "How animals evolved complex multicellularity from their unicellular ancestors remains unanswered."

Scientists tell us that the first three great leaps in the history of life were:

(1) The origin of prokaryotic cells (i.e. origin of life)

(2) The origin (eons later) of vastly more complex eukaryotic cells.

(3) The origin (eons later) of multicellularity (organisms with many cells arranged into an anatomy).

So-called natural selection and "selective sweeps" and "positive selection" fail to explain any of these things. The main scientist speculation about the origin of eukaryotic cells is not at all a Darwinian explanation. 

Common Ancestry Is a Severe Example of a Missing-Pillars Theory

There is a type of theory we can call a missing-pillars theory. A missing-pillars theory is a theory that lacks pillars of observation that should exist before the theory is asserted. To explain the idea, let me give a schematic diagram of a theory with a strong basis in observations:

Each one of the pillars is some observation that supports the theory. Here is an example. Imagine you are a prosecuting attorney, and your theory is that Johann Schmitzenkoler killed his wife by shooting her at her work. Observation Pillar #1 is a video showing the wife being fatally shot at work by a masked man the same height as the husband. Observation Pillar #2 is a witness saying Johann said he was going to kill his wife the day before the murder, to collect insurance money. Observation Pillar #3 is a video showing Johann approaching the wife's workplace just before the murder, and putting on a mask like the mask the killer wore.  Observation Pillar #4 is that you found buried in Johann's garden a gun that the ballistics division says is the same gun that killed the wife. 

A theory like the one just described is well-supported by evidence. But imagine a very different situation. Your theory is that Walter Willtowsky killed his wife Wilma. The wife has not been seen in a few days, but no one has found her body. In fact, it has not even been proven that the wife is dead.  When Walter is questioned, he says that his wife is just visiting her mother, and will be back before long.  You do not know any "when" involving the wife's murder. You do not know any "why" involving the wife's murder, and you do not know any "how" involving the wife's murder. In fact, you do not even know an "if" regarding the wife's murder, because you do not even know she is dead. In this case we have an example of a missing-pillars theory. The situation is illustrated below. Missing-pillars theories are like the two theories in the bottom row. 

I will give another example of a missing-pillars theory. Imagine Dave married his wife four weeks ago. Since then, Dave has never been apart from his wife. He was with his wife on a honeymoon for two weeks, and the next weeks they worked together at their business, and lived together. Dave for some reason develops the theory that his wife is being unfaithful to him. The problem is that he lacks a "when" and lacks a "where" and lacks a "how" to support this theory. He cannot think of when or where or how his wife could have been unfaithful since marrying him. All that Dave has is a "why." He speculates that maybe his wife is being unfaithful in order to have better sex with some other man. 

Lacking a "when," a "where" and a "how," Dave's theory of his wife's infidelity is a missing-pillars theory. Because all that Dave has is a "why" speculation, his theory is like the structure shown at the bottom right of the diagram above, a structure with only one pillar.  A structure so wobbly will not hold up well. 

Are there missing-pillars theories in the science departments of academia? There are many. In theoretical physics there are the various theories called string theory, all of which are completely lacking in any observational pillars. There is also a theory called supersymmetry theory that is lacking in any observational pillars. Theoretical physicists have written thousands of papers and spent endless thousands of man-hours on these dead ends. In cosmology there is a missing-pillars theory called the cosmic inflation theory (not to be confused with the Big Bang theory). There seems to be at least observational pillars of the Big Bang theory (the expansion of the universe and the observation of the cosmic microwave background). But there are no observational pillars supporting the cosmic inflation theory. 

In the field of astrophysics, there are at least two major missing-pillars theories: the theory of dark matter and the theory of dark energy. Neither has ever been supported by direct observations. The believers in these theories are reduced to appealing to claims of indirect evidence for such theories. 

Are there missing-pillars theories in the biology departments of academia? There are quite a few. One big example is the theory that the brain is the source of the human mind and the storage place of memories.  

To analyze whether a theory is a missing-pillars theory, we should not first look for things we can call pillars of the theory, but instead look for pillars of observation that should exist before someone asserts the theory. In the case of the theory that the brain is the source of the human mind and the storage place of memories, such missing pillars are "all over the place," pretty much everywhere. Below are some of the missing pillars of such a theory. 

• Neuroscientists have microscopically examined many thousands of brains of the recently deceased, and also microscopically examined very much tissue recently removed from living people who had operations such as operations in which brain tissue was removed to reduce seizures. Such microscopic examination has often been done with microscopes which should have been powerful enough to find learned knowledge if it existed in human brains. But such microscopic examination has never discovered the slightest trace of learned information. By microscopic examination no one has ever found a single word someone learned or even a single letter or character stored in a brain. By microscopic examination no one has ever found a single image someone ever saw, and no one has ever found a single pixel of such an image. 
• Neuroscientists lack any credible theory of how a brain could store a record of experiences someone had or how a brain could store something someone learned in school. When they are asked to discuss how such a thing could occur, neuroscientists merely engage in the vaguest hand-waving, such as muttering something about "synapse strengthening" (not a credible theory of how learned information could be stored in brains). 

• There seems to be no place in the brain suitable for storing memories that last for decades, and things like synapses and dendritic spines (alleged to be involved in memory storage) are unstable, "shifting sands" kind of things which do not last for years, and which consist of proteins that only last for weeks.

• The synapses that transmit signals in the brain are very noisy and unreliable,  in contrast to humans who can recall very large amounts of memorized information without error.

• Signal transmission in the brain must mainly be a snail's pace affair, because of very serious slowing factors such as synaptic delays and synaptic fatigue (wrongly ignored by those who write about the speed of brain signals), and also the relatively slow  transmission speed of dendrites, meaning brains are too slow to explain instantaneous human memory recall.

• The brain seems to have no mechanism for reading memories.

• The brain seems to have no mechanism for writing memories, nothing like the read-write heads found in computers.

• The brain has nothing that might explain the instantaneous recall of long-ago-learned information that humans routinely display, and has nothing like the things that allow instant data retrieval in computers. 

• There is no sign that the brain or the human genome has any of the vast genomic apparatus it would need to have to accomplish the gigantic task of converting learned conceptual knowledge and episodic memories into neural states or synapse states (the task would presumably require thousands of specialized proteins, and there's no real sign that such memory-encoding proteins exist).

• No neuroscientist has ever given a detailed explanation of how such a gigantic translation task of memory encoding could be accomplished (one that included precise, detailed examples).

• Despite frequent misleading claims that the brain is like a computer, no one has ever discovered in a brain most of the things that are used by computers to compute. The brain has nothing like a CPU, nothing like an operating system, and nothing like software. No neural foundation has been discovered for human thinking abilities, and neuroscientists are unable to credibly examine how a human could think or reason. 

• Neuroscientists are so lacking in an explanation of how a brain could hold a belief or store an idea or principle or rule that there does not even exist a term used by neuroscientists to describe a belief or idea or principle or rule that is stored in a brain. There exists the word "engram" to describe the idea of a memory stored in the brain, but there does not exist a similar word to describe a belief or idea or principle or rule stored in a brain. 

• It is nowadays widely confessed by neuroscientists that they lack any neural explanation for the basic reality of consciousness or experience. 

• Neuroscientists lack any explanation for how the chemical and electrical activity of the brain could give rise to a strong experience of a single unified self, an experience that persists even when the two hemispheres of the brain fail to be joined by the connecting fibers of the corpus callosum, and even when such fibers are severed in operations to reduce seizures. 

You can read in the most abundant detail about all of these missing pillars by reading the posts of my site here. All of these things are missing pillars of the theory that the brain generates the mind and that the brain stores memories. That theory is a very severe example of a missing-pillars theory. But there may be an even more extreme example of a missing-pillars theory in the world of biology: the theory of common ancestry, also called the theory of common descent. 

The theory of common ancestry is the theory that all life on Earth descends from a common ancestor.  The theory of common ancestry is one that is staggering in its presumptuousness.  You might realize this when we compare the theory of common ancestry to the neuroscientist's theory that brains make minds and that brains store memories. That neuroscientist theory is a theory that merely attempts to offer an origin for what goes on in the minds of humans. There are two basic problems in explaining any particular human: 

(1) how did he get his body?

(2) how did he get his mind?

The neuroscientist attempts to answer the second of these questions, but not the first. The great mystery of how a speck-sized zygote progresses to become the vast state of organization that is a human body is not one addressed by neuroscientists. 

But instead of being limited to trying to explain the mere mental side of humans (a single species), the theory of common ancestry is something that struts around like some biological Theory of Everything. That theory of common ancestry attempts to offer a theory of explanation for all species that now exist, both in the physical sense and the mental sense. It also claims that the same explanation explains every species that has ever existed. Instead of limiting itself to explaining the earthly biology that now exists, the theory of common ancestry promulgates a grand, sweeping dogma that it claims applies to every species that has ever existed: that they all are descendants of a common ancestor. It is hard to imagine any theory that could be more presumptuous, short of some general abstract Theory of Existence applying to everything that exists, living or dead. 

The bigger the theory, the more observational pillars that it requires. Here we should remember some basic principles along the lines of "you cannot run unless you can first walk" and also "you cannot walk unless you can first stand." Specifically:

• It makes no sense to claim that you understand the origin of all species unless you understand in full the origin of the human species. 
• It makes no sense to claim that you understand the origin of the human species unless you understand the origin of the human mind and all human mental capabilities. 
• It makes no sense to claim that that you understand the origin of the human species unless you understand both the physical origin and the mental origin of individual human beings. 
• It makes no sense to claim that that you understand the physical origin of an individual human being unless you can give a credible theory explaining the progression from a speck-sized zygote to a full adult body. 
• It makes no sense to claim that that you understand the mental origin of an individual human being unless you can give a credible theory or theories explaining such phenomena as human self-hood, imagination, thinking, the phenomenon of instant learning, the phenomenon of the lifelong persistence of memories, and the phenomenon of the instant recall of detailed correct answers when someone is asked a question. 
• It makes no sense to claim that that you understand the origin of all species unless you can credibly explain how there could have occurred a progression from one type of organism to some other type of organism with a vastly different structure and vastly different mental capabilities. 
• It makes no sense to claim that you have some grand theory explaining the natural origin of all species if you cannot explain the origin of life itself; because if the origin of life requires a miracle or purposeful intervention, then "all bets are off" and miracles or purposeful intervention cannot be excluded elsewhere in the history of life. 
• It makes no sense to claim that you have some grand theory explaining the natural origin of all species if you cannot explain a progression from microscopic life to macroscopic life in the form of large visible organisms. 
• If makes no sense to claim that you have some grand theory explaining the natural origin of all species if you cannot explain basic matters of biology a million times simpler, such as how a eukaryotic cell is able to reproduce. 

Realizing such things, we can start to make a list of the missing pillars of the theory of common ancestry. They are "all over the place" and pretty much everywhere. We can start by listing every single missing pillar of the theory that the brain is the source of the human mind and the storage place of memories. This is the 14-item bullet list that was the first bullet list of this post.

Why are all of these missing pillars of the theory of common ancestry? Such a theory makes no exclusions, making a claim about all species on Earth. If we do not understand the origin of human minds, we are not entitled to claim that we understand the origin of the human species. And if we do not understand the origin of the origin species, we are not entitled to claim that all species have a common ancestor. 

Below are some of the very many other missing pillars of the theory of common ancestry.

• There does not exist any credible theory explaining the natural origin of any very complex innovation in biology. Darwinism is no such theory, because it fails to credibly explain the vast leaps in organization and fine-tuned functional information needed for biological innovations. Such leaps cannot be explained by any gradualist theories, for reasons explained in my post "Anatomically Uninformative DNA, Nonfunctional Intermediates and Useless Early Stages Are Why Gradualism Does Not Work," which you can read here. 
• There does not exist any credible theory explaining the natural origin of any  complex anatomy innovation. The claim that such innovations are explained by random mutations in DNA is not tenable, largely because DNA does not specify the anatomy of any organism, contrary to the misstatements so often made by Darwinists. DNA only specifies low-level chemical information such as which amino acids make up a protein. 
• There does not exist any credible theory explaining the natural origin of any  type of very complex cell. The claim that such innovations are explained by random mutations in DNA is not tenable, largely because DNA does not specify the structure of any cell, and also does not specify the structure of any of the organelles that are the building components of cells. 
• Far from being able to explain the origin of any cell type, biologists are unable to even explain the reproduction of any of the more complex cells in human bodies. The total number of well-arranged parts in a eukaryotic cell (the type of cell that humans have) is greater than or roughly the same as the total number of well-arranged parts in an automobile. Every time a typical eukaryotic cell reproduces, it is a marvel as hard-to-explain as an automobile splitting into two working automobiles. 
• Scientists lack any credible explanation for the origin of new types of genes and new types of protein molecules. Requiring a very special arrangement of hundreds of amino acid parts (or a special arrangement of hundreds of nucleotide base pairs specifying such parts), the origin of a new type of gene or a new type of protein from accidental events is as unlikely as an ink splash producing a new paragraph of functional text that is well-written, well-spelled, useful and grammatical. One of the reasons why new types of genes and new types of protein molecules cannot be credibly explained by accidental natural processes is that they are both very sensitive to small changes and have very high functional thresholds, being non-functional in half-form. See my three posts marked "protein sensitivity" for a discussion of some of the scientific studies indicating that protein molecules are very sensitive to small changes. 

Does the common ancestry theory have any pillars at all? It has often been claimed that the fact that all life uses the same genetic code is a pillar of the common ancestry theory. But such a universal genetic code is not something that we would expect to occur only under a theory of common ancestry. If earthly species appeared because of purposeful action by some divine agency or superhuman power (perhaps some visiting extraterrestrial spaceships), we might well expect that earthly organisms would have a common genetic code. Pretty much the entire US internet uses the ASCII code for information storage and information transmission, a scheme of encoding that can be represented on a single page, just as the genetic code can be represented on a single page. But that is not a sign of common natural ancestry. It is a sign of deliberate standardization.  So the fact that all earthly life uses the same genetic code is not any real pillar of the theory of common ancestry. 

It is also claimed that the fossil record is a pillar of the theory of common ancestry. But fossils do not tell us whether one species descended from some other species. And it can be reasonably argued that the fossil record conflicts with the theory of common ancestry. The most dramatic feature of the fossil record is a sudden explosion of fossils that have been dated to about 540 millions ago. Such a sudden explosion in the appearance of fossils is known as the Cambrian Explosion. Almost all of the major groups of animals types (known as phyla) date back to the time of the Cambrian Era, where they suddenly appear in the fossil record.  For almost all of the animal phyla to have appeared with such relative suddenness is not what we would expect under the theory of common ancestry. So the fossil record is no real pillar of the theory of common ancestry. 

Not at all what we would expect under common ancestry

Claims have been made of a genetic similarity between one species and some other species. Such claims could never show anything more than a likelihood that one species was descended another species; and if that is done, it never proves that all species are descended from a common ancestor.  Similarly, you may show that you are descended from some US president of the nineteenth century; but that would never show that everyone in your town was descended from that president. Claims of a genetic similarity between one species and another should be received with skepticism. Darwinists long matter-of-factly claimed that the human genome and the chimpanzee genome are 98% similar. But (as discussed here) a recent paper suggests that the human genome and the chimpanzee genome differ by something like 14%. 

How can a missing pillars theory such as the common ancestry theory stay in circulation? What happens is that each new generation of scientists keeps getting recruited to hold up the socially constructed theory, by promoting it in their books and papers. So the theory stays hoisted up by a "keep the faith" process of the regimented perpetuation of dogma by a conformist belief community that  stigmatizes and sanctions all who deviate from its mandated speech conventions. 

The confessions below by scientists shed light on some of the missing pillars of the common ancestry theory. 

• "A wide variety of protein structures exist in nature, however the evolutionary origins of this panoply of proteins remain unknown."  -- Four Harvard scientists, "The role of evolutionary selection in the dynamics of protein structure evolution." 
• "Tawfik admits the issue of a first protein is 'a complete mystery' because it reveals a paradox: enzymatic function depends upon the well-defined, three-dimensional structure of a protein scaffold, yet the 3D structure is too complex, too intricate, and too coordinated to arise without simpler precursors and intermediates....Tawfik soberly recognizes the problem. The appearance of early protein families, he has remarked, is 'something like close to a miracle.'....'In fact, to our knowledge,' Tawfik and Tóth-Petróczy write, 'no macromutations ... that gave birth to novel proteins have yet been identified.' " -- Tyler Hampton, quoting Dan  S. Tawfik, professor in a Department of Biological Chemistry (link). 
• "We have addressed a large body of evidence related to transitions (micro- and macro-) in proteins that have a pre-existing globular 3D-structure (and function), but how does structure and function evolve in de novo [new] proteins? ...Overall, the evolution of MIPSs, the recruitment of first enzymes, and de novo emergence of proteins are aspects where our knowledge is still at infancy -- Scientists confessing in 2022 that we don't know how new proteins originate (link).    
• "The problem of protein folding is one of the most important problems of molecular biology. A central problem (the so called Levinthal's paradox) is that the protein is first synthesized as a linear molecule that must reach its native conformation in a short time (on the order of seconds or less). The protein can only perform its functions in this (often single) conformation. The problem, however, is that the number of possible conformational states is exponentially large for a long protein molecule. Despite almost 30 years of attempts to resolve this paradox, a solution has not yet been found." -- Two scientists, "On a generalized Levinthal's paradox," 2018.  
• "The majority of cellular proteins function as subunits in larger protein complexes. However, very little is known about how protein complexes form in vivo." Duncan and Mata, "Widespread Cotranslational Formation of Protein Complexes," 2011.
• "While the occurrence of multiprotein assemblies is ubiquitous, the understanding of pathways that dictate the formation of quaternary structure remains enigmatic." -- Two scientists (link). 
• "A general theoretical framework to understand protein complex formation and usage is still lacking." -- Two scientists, 2019 (link). 
• "Comparative genome analyses indicate that every taxonomic group so far studied contains 10–20% of genes that lack recognizable homologs in other species...It is surprising that orphans have been completely ignored by most comparative genomics studies." -- Several scientists, "More than just orphans: are taxonomically-restricted genes important in evolution?" 
• "Neo-Darwinism can't account for sexual reproduction."  -- biologist Josh Mittledorf PhD, "Cracking the Aging Code," page 31.
• "It is not sufficient to postulate an amazing feat of mis-copying that contrived to produce a highly beneficial structural change. We have to postulate the simultaneous occurrence of three miracles. Whatever miracle occurs to a male, say, there must be the even greater miracle that just the same structural change occurs, by a chance mis-copying to a female, and furthermore, that the two miracles must happen in the same place at much the same time, otherwise the changed male will not find the changed female. Mathematically, this means that the probability of an appreciable change being successfully propagated is the product of these three small numbers, making the result negligibly small." -- Scientist Fred Hoyle (link).  

• "Replication [of cells] is one of the deepest mysteries of biology. It is really something totally counterintuitive if cell is seen as a sack of water plus some chemicals. We have a lot [of] facts about what happens in the replication at DNA level but how this miracle happens is a mystery. At cell level the situation gets even more complex." -- M. Pitkanen, physics PhD, "Getting philosophical: some comments about the problems of physics, neuroscience, and biology."

• "How cells control their size and maintain stable size distributions is one of the most fundamental, unsolved problems in biology...Even for the bacterium E. coli, arguably the most extensively studied organism to date, no one has been able to answer this question."  --Suckjoon Jun, an assistant professor of physics and molecular biology (link).
• "Cell biology is a mystery for many reasons one
  of which is the lack of basic knowledge. This may
  be the fault of scientists or simply a failure in basic
  information at the level of common contemporary
  knowledge. The well known sentence of Socrates:
  'I know that I know nothing' is as true in cell
  biology as in other scientific fields. This sentence
  was modified by Lloyd in 1986 who claimed: 'The
  closer we look, the less we see'. I would like to
  modify this sentence yet again as a cell biologist and
  microscopist: 'The closer we look, the less we know
  about.' ... Everyone involved in cell
  biology, is surprised how limited is our knowledge
  about the various cell compartments....It should now be mentioned that our knowledge even of basic cell organelles, including their various functions, is very limited....We know something about cell organelles, including various nuclear compartments, but most of their functions are waiting for further and better clarification....Depending on conditions, selected genes may be repressed or derepressed and activated giving to rise to the particular cell lineage with characteristic cell structures and functions. On the other hand, such transformations, including the homing of the transformed cells are also very mysterious although both these processes are empirically used in clinical medicine."  Karel Smetana, cell biologist, "To the Mystery of Cell Biology.," (link). 
• "Despite the centrality of multicellularity and cell differentiation to animal biology, their origins are little understood." -- Two cell biologists (link).  
• "Protein assemblies are at the basis of numerous biological machines by performing actions that none of the individual proteins would be able to do. There are thousands, perhaps millions of different types and states of proteins in a living organism, and the number of possible interactions between them is enormous...The strong synergy within the protein complex makes it irreducible to an incremental process. They are rather to be acknowledged as fine-tuned initial conditions of the constituting protein sequences. These structures are biological examples of nano-engineering that surpass anything human engineers have created. Such systems pose a serious challenge to a Darwinian account of evolution, since irreducibly complex systems have no direct series of selectable intermediates, and in addition, as we saw in Section 4.1, each module (protein) is of low probability by itself." -- Steinar Thorvaldsen and Ola Hössjerm, "Using statistical methods to model the fine-tuning of molecular machines and systems,"  Journal of Theoretical Biology.
• "The greatest twentieth century paleontologist, George Gaylord Simpson, in midcentury had to admit to a reality of the fossil record: 'It remains true, as every paleontologist knows, that most new species, genera, and families, and that nearly all new categories above the level of families, appear in the record suddenly, and are not led up to by known, gradual, completely continuous transitional sequences.' " --"Lamarck's Revenge” by paleontologist Peter Ward , page 43. 
• "The first eye, the first wing, the first placenta. How they emerge. Explaining these is the foundational motivation of evolutionary biology. And yet, we still do not have a good answer. This classic idea of gradual change, one happy accident at a time, has so far fallen flat.”  -- Biologist Armin Moczek.
• "Considering that the total number of known fossil species is nearly one hundred thousand, the fact that the only relatively convincing morphological sequences are a handful of cases like the horse, which do not involve a great deal of change, and which in many cases like the elephant may not even represent phylogenetic sequences at all, serves to emphasize the remarkable lack of any direct evidence for major evolutionary transformations in the fossil record." -- Michael Denton, MD and biochemistry PhD, "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis," 1986, page 185. 
• "Major transitions in biological evolution show the same pattern of sudden emergence of diverse forms at a new level of complexity. The relationships between major groups within an emergent new class of biological entities are hard to decipher and do not seem to fit the tree pattern that, following Darwin's original proposal, remains the dominant description of biological evolution. The cases in point include the origin of complex RNA molecules and protein folds; major groups of viruses; archaea and bacteria, and the principal lineages within each of these prokaryotic domains; eukaryotic supergroups; and animal phyla. In each of these pivotal nexuses in life's history, the principal 'types' seem to appear rapidly and fully equipped with the signature features of the respective new level of biological organization. No intermediate 'grades' or intermediate forms between different types are detectable." -- Biologist Eugene Koonin, "The Biological Big Bang model for the major transitions in evolution" (link).
• "This is the basic story of evolution, as recounted in countless textbooks and pop-science bestsellers. The problem, according to a growing number of scientists, is that it is absurdly crude and misleading." --Stephen Buranyi, science writer, "Do We Need a New Theory of Evolution?" in The Guardian. 
• "I may challenge the adherents of the strictly Darwinian view, which we are discussing here, to try to explain the evolution of the following features by accumulation and selection of small mutants: hair in mammals, feathers in birds, segmentation of arthropods and vertebrates, the transformation of gill arches in phylogeny, including the aortic arches, muscles, nerves, etc.; further, teeth, shells of mollusks, ectoskeletons, compound eyes, blood circulation, alternation of generations, statocysts, ambulacral system of echinoderms, pedicellaria of the same, cnidocysts, poison apparatus of snakes, whalebone, and, finally, primary chemical differences like hemoglobin vs. hemocyanin, etc. Corresponding examples from plants could be given." -- Biologist Richard Goldschmidt, "The Material Basis of Evolution," pages 6-7. 
• “While scientists are still working out the details of how the eye evolved, we are also still stuck on the question of how intelligence emerges in biology.” -- Scientists Rafael Yuste and Michael Levin, an article in Scientific American. 
• "Biological systems have evolved to amazingly complex states, yet we do not understand in general how evolution operates to generate increasing genetic and functional complexity." -- four scientists, "Adaptive ratchets and the evolution of molecular complexity."
• "I should like to critically object that this model has not been supported by an affirmative estimate of probabilities so far. Such an estimate of the theoretical time scale of evolution as implied by the model should be compared with the empirical time scale. One would need to show that, according to the assumed model, the probability of de facto existing purposeful features to evolve was sufficiently high on the empirically known time scale. Such an estimate has nowhere been attempted though." -- Eminent physicist Wolfgang von Pauli, discoverer of the biologically crucial Pauli Exclusion Principle (link).
• "Until  reading  an  able  and valuable  article  in  the  North  British  Review  (June,  1867),  I did not  appreciate  how  rarely  single  variations,  whether  slight  or strongly  marked,  could  be  perpetuated." -- Charles Darwin (link).
• "The higher the organization, whether of an entire organism or of a single organ, the greater is the number of the parts that cooperate, and the more perfect is their cooperation ; and consequently, the more necessity there is for corresponding variations to take place in all the cooperating parts at once, and the more useless will be any variation whatever unless it is accompanied by corresponding variations in the cooperating parts; while it is obvious that the greater the number of variations which are needed in order to effect an improvement, the less will be the probability of their all occurring at once....There are improbabilities so great that the common-sense of mankind treats them as impossibilities. It is not, for instance, in the strictest sense of the word, impossible that a poem and a mathematical proposition should be obtained by the process of shaking letters out of a box ; but it is improbable to a degree that cannot be distinguished from impossibility ; and the improbability of obtaining an improvement in an organ by means of several spontaneous variations, all occurring together, is an improbability of the same kind." -- Joseph John Murphy, biology scholar, author of a massive biology tome (link). 
• "What gambler would be crazy enough to play roulette with random evolution? The probability of dust carried by the wind reproducing Durer's 'Melancholia' is less infinitesimal than the probability of copy errors in the DNA molecule leading to the formation of the eye...There is no law against daydreaming, but science must not indulge in it." -- Biologist Pierre-Paul Grasse (link). 
• "Natural selection acting on populations is incapable of guiding evolution." -- Biologist Pierre-Paul Grasse (link). 
• "Big picture, we want to understand how initially dumb clumps of cells, cells that are one or two mutations away from being single-celled, don’t really know that they’re organisms — they don’t have any adaptations to being multicellular, they’re just a dumb clump — how those dumb clumps of cells can evolve into increasingly complex multicellular organisms, with new morphologies, with cell-level integration, division of labor, and differentiation amongst the cells. Just like, we want to watch that process of how do these simple groups become complex. And this is, like, one of the biggest knowledge gaps in evolutionary biology. I mean, in my opinion.....We don’t really know the process through which simple groups evolve into increasingly complex organisms."-- Biologist Will Ratcliff (link). 
• "How animals evolved complex multicellularity from their unicellular ancestors remains unanswered." -- A 2026 paper by several scientists (link).
• "The evolutionary divergence of a single species into two has never been directly observed in nature, primarily because speciation can take a longtime to occur." -- Irwin, Bensch, and Price, "Speciation in a Ring," Nature, 2001.
• "Genetics might be adequate for explaining microevolution, but micro-evolutionary changes in gene frequency were not seen as able to turn a reptile into a mammal or to convert a fish into an amphibian. Microevolution looks at adaptations that concern only the survival of the fittest, not the arrival of the fittest. As Goodwin (1995) points out, 'the origin of species — Darwin's problem — remains unsolved." "Resynthesizing Evolutionary and Developmental Biology," Gilbert, Opitz and Raft, 1996.

Some types of experts acting as information overlords

Clearly the theory of common ancestry is a severe example of a missing-pillars theory. There does not exist a fifth of the pillars that would be needed for someone to convincingly advance such a theory that all organisms have a common ancestor. Consequently the theory of common ancestry is not one that you should feel right about advancing if you are a serious scholar of biological complexity and biological organization and the human brain and its severe physical shortfalls and the vast depths and staggering wonders of human mental experiences and human mental capabilities.  Far better for you to say: I do not understand how Earth's species arose, and I do not understand how the human species arose. Far better for you to say that such matters are mysteries a hundred miles over your head.