Explaining Wind, Heat and Lightning Were the Only Major Successes of Reductionists

There has long existed a type of person who has tried to explain phenomena through reductionism. Reductionism means basically attempts to explain things by using "nothing but" explanations. Reductionists make all kinds of boastful, untrue claims about the levels of success of reductionist explanations. But the truth is that almost nothing has been explained by reductionist explanations. In human history there have been only three great successes of reductionism: the explanation of wind, heat and lightning. 

For a long time scientists wondered about the nature of heat. Many postulated that heat was some kind of substance that somehow flowed into things that got hot. They called such a substance caloric. Scientists for a while thought that maybe when something got really cold, it was because that thing had somehow lost some of its caloric substance, and that things got hotter when they gained some caloric substance. We now know this idea is false. Things don't get hotter because they are gaining a caloric substance. 

We now have an explanation for heat, and it's an incredibly simple explanation. Heat is simply how fast the molecules in something are moving. For example, when your coffee is hot, it's simply that the molecules inside your coffee are moving around faster than when your coffee is cold. When you heat something up, you are not adding any substance called caloric; you are simply making the molecules in something move around faster. 

Another great triumph of reductionist explanation was the explanation of wind. To the ancient thinker, wind might have seemed very mysterious. We can imagine him asking: why is it windy on some days, and calm on other days; and are windstorms the wrath of the gods? Now we understand that wind is very simple. Wind is nothing but the flow between differences in air pressure. Whenever there is some region of the air which has greater air pressure, near some other region of the air that has lower air pressure, wind will tend to flow from the region of higher air pressure to the region of lower air pressure. That's all wind is: flows from regions of higher air pressure to regions of lower air pressure. Because it's so simple, a weatherman can reliably predict how much wind there will be, just by looking at a  map showing air pressure differences. If there's big differences, there will be lots of wind; and if there's no big differences, there will be very little or no wind.  For example, a weatherman looking at the map below will know that the low pressure area (marked by L) will be getting a strong wind coming from the high pressure area above it (marked by H). 

Then there was the explanation of lightning, which was another successful reductionist explanation rather similar to the explanation of wind.  Lightning is simply the very rapid flow of electrical charge from one area with a much higher electrical charge to another area with a much lower electrical charge. Just as wind tends to flow from regions of higher air pressure to regions of lower air pressure, electrical charge will tend to flow from one region of higher electrical charge to a nearby region of lower electrical charge. Lightning is simply electricity or electrical charge jumping spontaneously from a part of the sky with much higher electrical charge to some part of the sky (or the ground) with much lower electrical charge. 

Such explanations of nature had been completed by the year 1850. By about this time, there started to arise a group of thinkers with great explanatory greed, who hoped that the biggest mysteries of life and mind could be explained with simple "it's nothing but" reductionist explanations.  We can call this type of thinkers "the nothing butters," because of their love of reductionist "it's nothing but" explanations.

The nothing-butters tried to claim that more and more of nature was being explained by reductionist "it's nothing but" explanations, and they attempted to cite the success of Newtonian gravity theory as one of the triumphs of reductionist explanation. Citing Newton was not justified, because Newton's explanation of planetary motions was not really a reductionist explanation. Newton found it necessary to postulate a universal force of gravitational attraction acting between all massive bodies in the universe. Such a reality isn't something simple, but something quite complicated. According to the original Newtonian theory, to correctly calculate the gravitational force acting on any astronomical body (call it body X), you must know the masses of all astronomical bodies in the solar system, even objects billions of miles away. And you must also know the distances between all such bodies and body X, and also must know a hard-to-determine thing called the universal gravitational constant, and must also use a particular formula involving squaring the distances between objects.  Newton's theory of gravity was never really a "it's nothing but" reductionist theory, and its Einstein revision makes it even more complex. 

The nothing-butters claimed early versions of the atomic theory as a triumph of reductionism. "We're nothing but bunches of simple atoms," they began to chant. But it turned out the early versions of atomic theory advanced by people like John Dalton were not correct. The main building blocks of humans are not atoms, but much more complex things such as protein molecules consisting of thousands of atoms arranged in a very special way, and cells consisting of millions of protein molecules arranged in a very special way. Once humans found out the details of atoms, they found that atoms are not simple indivisible particles as imagined by thinkers such as Dalton, but instead usually units composed of many individual proton, neutron and electron parts. In additional, there were special fine-tuned forces needed for atoms to exist, such as the strong nuclear force and Coulomb's law. The details of atoms and nuclear physics are so complicated that what we know about atoms cannot be counted as any success of reductionist nothing-butters.

Earthquakes have been explained, but not by any simple "it's nothing but" explanation. The theory that explains earthquakes is a very complicated theory called plate tectonics. For a long time reductionists tried to persuade us that sunlight occurs for the simple reason that Earth has a nearby sun that is "just a big ball of hot gas." We now know that sunlight occurs not by some simple radiation of a hot gas, but from the complicated process of thermonuclear fusion, which involves some deep complexities of nuclear physics. 

Once cells were discovered, biologists tried to cite cells as an example of reductionist success. "We're nothing but bags of simple cells," cried the nothing-butters, who tried to depict cells as real simple things. We now know the folly of such ideas. It turns out that cells are fantastically complex structures so organized and rich in diverse functions that they have been compared to small factories. We now know that cells are made from very complex components called organelles, which are themselves made of extremely complex components called protein complexes, which themselves are made of proteins that each typically have hundreds of well-arranged amino acid parts. There is nothing simple about cells or their components. 

But the nothing-butters kept trying their best to claim explanatory success beyond their successes in explaining wind, heat and lightning. The nothing-butters built one of their biggest legends when they tried to claim the origin of species such as the human species had been  explained in a "it was nothing but" way. "We get new species from nothing but random variations" the nothing-butters began chanting.  The more we learned about all the vast levels of hierarchical organization, very precise fine-tuning, coded information and extremely coordinated functional complexity in living things, the less credible this claim sounded. But this claim that humans are just accumulations of random variations still lives and thrives, because a massive belief community has arisen around it, and the claim is enthusiastically taught by a priesthood of evolutionary biologists who are pillars of a church-like believer community within the halls of academia. 

The nothing-butters also tried to explain the human mind in a "it's nothing but" way. They tried to do this by arguing that all human mental activity is nothing but brain activity. Although very widely held, the idea that the mind is merely the brain is untenable for a host of reasons well-explained at the site here. Among the endless questions that cannot be answered by those claiming your mind is just brain activity (from a brain that arose by mere natural selection) are the questions below:

How are humans able to form abstract ideas, a capability that seems beyond anything that neurons could do?

Why do humans display empathy, compassion and guilt, things that have no clear survival value for an individual organism?

How are humans able to instantly form memories, much faster than can be explained by imagining that synapses are strengthened by protein formation (which takes minutes)?

How are humans able to remember things for 50 years, which is 1000 times longer than the average lifetime of the proteins in synapses?

Why do humans who have their brains shut down during cardiac arrest continue to have extremely vivid near-death experiences that they can remember very well?

Why do such experiences very often involve a visual perspective in which the self views the body from meters away, something that should be impossible if the brain is the source of the self?

Why do humans have so many traits (such as artistic creativity, spirituality and intellectual curiosity) that can never be explained on some natural selection basis?

How are humans able to instantly recall very old memories despite the lack of any known physical characteristic in the brain (such as sorting, indexing, neuron numbering, or a neuron coordinate system) that would allow the brain to perform the “instantly finding the needle in a mountain-sized haystack” operation needed to instantly find an obscure memory?

Why do humans even have a sense of selfhood, something not necessary for biological survival?

How could a conviction of a single self ever arise from the activity of two brain hemispheres which we would expect to create no sense of self, or maybe a sense of two selves? 

Why are savants (such as those described here and here) so often able to have astonishing mental skills far beyond those of ordinary people, even though such savants often have major brain damage?

How is that people with hyperthymesia (and brains not significantly different from ordinary people) are able to remember in great detail what happened to them every day since reaching adulthood?

Why do about five percent of the population (gay people) have a sexual drive completely different from what we would expect from Darwinian assumptions?

Why do some epilepsy patients who have had half of their brains removed (to stop seizures) show little damage to intelligence and memory?

Why do some humans show psychic abilities such as ESP in careful well-replicated scientific experiments, thereby showing capabilities completely inexplicable in terms of brain activity? 

How could a human ever be able to memorize vast amounts of words (such as 10 major operatic roles), when the words use a language that is less than a thousand years old, which human biology (having only very old genes) should never be able to store as neural states?

How could humans be able to perfectly recall very long texts (such as the entire Quran or the very long role of Hamlet) using a brain in which the vast majority of synapses are chemical synapses that do not reliably transmit signals, but only transmit nerve impulses with a reliability between 50% and 10%? 

How could a French civil servant (and the patients Lorber documented) have had either fairly good or above-average minds when almost of all their brains were destroyed by diseases?

How were humans (alone of all species) ever able to develop language, when it seems that you could never establish a language among a group unless you had an existing language to enforce the conventions of that language?

How are toddlers able to learn a language at a rate vastly faster than we should expect from their mere exposure to their parents speaking?

How could a brain store memories, when no memories have ever been discovered by examining brain tissue with high-powered high-tech microscopes that should have found such brain-stored memories if they existed?

How could a brain store memories, when it seems to have neither a mechanism for writing memories, nor a mechanism for reading memories?

Because none of these questions has been credibly answered in a way compatible with "the mind is just brain activity" claim, such a claim has no credibility. Explaining mind activity as just being brain activity is merely a speech custom of reductionists, not something that we should count as an accomplishment of reductionism.  But what about explanations of infectious disease as being caused by microbes? Even the simplest living bacteria is a very complicated thing, and the interaction of microbes and the human immune system (a fantastically complicated body system) is an extremely complicated story. So we can't count explaining infectious disease as any great triumph of reductionism. The full story of what goes on in your body when you get an infectious disease ends up being a story that would take many times longer to explain than an explanation of your symptoms, so there is no "it's nothing but..." triumph here. 

One of the greatest problems of biology is explaining human development, the mystery of how a speck-sized zygote is able to progress to become the enormously more organized reality of the human body. Before the discovery of DNA, the nothing-butters tried to explain this enormously impressive reality by various ridiculous sound bites such as the claim that the appearance of a human body is "nothing but growth" or  "nothing but unfolding" or some such slogan. After DNA was discovered, the nothing-butters started telling a huge lie that they kept telling for many decades: the lie that the appearance of a human body was nothing but the reading of instructions stored in DNA. We now know that DNA has no instructions for building a human body, no instructions for making any human organ, and no instructions for making any of the 200 types of cells in the human body. Clear off from the table all the lies told about genes, genomes and DNA, and we find that the progression from a speck-sized human zygote to a full human body is a miracle of progression and organization utterly beyond the explanation of reductionists, something vastly more impressive than a hundred symmetrical car-sized sandcastles arising on a beach where there is no sand castle builder we can see. 

We can now see that in its long history reductionism has had only three major successes: the explanation of wind, the explanation of heat and the explanation of lightning.  How has reductionism managed to retain its prestige in the halls of academia despite so little success? Because of reasons such as these:

• Reductionists have often practiced pareidolia in which they reported seeing things that they were eagerly hoping to see, things which were not well-supported by evidence. They were helped by loose evidence standards in which a result expected by chance 1 time in 20 is considered a "statistically significant" result good enough for science journal publication. As a result, if 100 scientists look for something not there, each doing 10 experiments,  then 50 of them will be able to publish "statistically significant" evidence for the thing that's not there.
• Reductionists often work in fields where poor research practices prevail, such as experimental neuroscience which these days is dominated by Questionable Research Practices such as using inadequate study group sizes.
• Reductionists have mastered a large variety of "shrink speaking" word tricks that try to make things of vast complexity or oceanic depth sound like things very simple. These included the tricks of referring to human mental phenomena (a topic of oceanic depth) using the diminutive term "consciousness," and the trick of referring to biological innovations (often involving huge leaps of hierarchical organization and great leaps of functional information) using diminutive terms such as "variations" or "diversification." 
• Keeping themselves in a filter bubble, reductionists practice various forms of evidence ignoring in which they pay no attention to fields of study such as parapsychology, and pay no attention to case histories that defy their dogmas.
• Reductionists have given us mountains of lies and misleading statements, such as claims or insinuations that DNA is an anatomy blueprint. Dozens of these lies and misleading statements are listed in my post here. An example of what I refer to in this paragraph is Jacques Monod's bible of reductionism Chance and Necessity, which another book calls "a  morass of undefined terms, contradictory statements and misleading rhetoric." For example, referring to a molecule (DNA) that does not at all specify anatomy, behavior or instincts, the book told us the huge lie that DNA is an alphabet specifying "all the diversity of structures and performances the biosphere contains."

The only major things that were ever successfully explained by reductionists are wind, heat and lightning, which were three very simple things. Our reductionists should have learned a lesson from this: that only very simple things can be explained by "it is nothing but..." explanations. Utterly failing to learn this lesson, the nothing-butters have kept trying to explain the most enormously complex things with their simplistic "it's nothing but" explanations. The more we learn about the complexity and mystifying intricacies of such things, the more absurd such reductionist explanation attempts sound. 

Cosmologists Hauling Heavy Speculative Baggage Sure Are Not Reductionists

The "Big Think" site at www.bigthink.com is a materialist propaganda site. The Big Think site likes to have philosophical essays such as a recent essay arguing that life on Earth has no purpose (one that absurdly offers the extinction of dinosaurs as its main evidence). The site is at least good for a few laughs, such as when we come to a page claiming in big bold letters that its articles (often very poorly reasoned essays) are written by "the world's greatest thinkers." Sometimes the site has essays that are unintentionally hilarious. An example is a recent essay by cosmologist Ethan Siegel, one entitled "Yes, the Universe really is 100% reductionist in nature."

Your first chuckle should come after considering that title. Reductionism is a tendency in philosophy or science to try to explain complex things only by appealing to simpler things. A philosopher or scientist can be a reductionist, but a universe cannot be. Claiming that the universe is reductionist is as laughable an error as claiming that the universe is atheist, theistic or agnostic.

Your second chuckle should come after reading Siegel's bad definition of reductionism. He states, "This simple idea — that all phenomena in the Universe are fundamentally physical phenomena — is known as reductionism." That is not a correct definition of reductionism. The claim that all phenomena in the Universe are fundamentally physical phenomena would be one way of definining materialism, a particular philosophical doctrine. Reductionism is not a philosophical doctrine, but merely a kind of strategy or tendency when dealing with scientific or philosophical questions: the tendency to try to explain complex realities by appealing to known simpler realities. 

But your biggest chuckle in reading the essay should come from reading Ethan Siegel try to sound like he supports reductionism. For many years Siegel and many other cosmologists have been operating in a way that is the exact opposite of reductionism. 

Reductionism involves trying to explain some complex reality by appealing only to a much simpler reality or much simpler realities. An example of reductionism is when neuroscientists try to explain human mental phenomena by saying they are caused only by chemical activity in the brain. You can write a kind of generic schema for reductionism (using algebraic placeholders) by saying that reductionism involves claiming that complex realilty X can be explained by a much simpler known reality Y (or maybe much simpler known realities Y and Z, or maybe much simpler known realities Y1, Y2, Z1 and Z2). 

What has gone on in cosmology and theoretical physics during Siegel's career is the opposite of reductionism. Some of the main events were these:

(1) After pondering a nice simple Big Bang as the origin of the universe, cosmologists were very bothered that this mysterious event seemed to require extraordinarily precise fine-tuning at the very beginning, with the expansion rate being fine-tuned to one part in ten to the fiftieth power.  Cosmologists responded by creating a theory called "cosmic inflation" that postulated an exponential expansion in the universe's first instant. Before long, they found that the theory didn't work in its simple initial form. Cosmologists then began advocating multiverse versions of the cosmic inflation theory, which postulated innumerable unobservable universes, or innumerable unobservable events like the Big Bang. This was all the opposite of reductionism. Reductionism is when you try to explain some complex reality by saying it is explained by known simpler realities. When you try to explain some complex reality by speculating that there exists some other vastly more complicated unobserved reality, that is the opposite of reductionism. 

(2) Finding that galaxies do not seem to rotate at the observed rates given only the amount of matter observed, cosmologists invented a theory of dark matter, speculating that dark matter makes up most of the matter in the universe. The dark matter theory required all kinds of very specific speculations about the distribution of dark matter, such as the claim that galaxies are surrounded by halos of invisible dark matter. Speculating about unproven unobserved realities is not reductionism, but the opposite of reductionism. Reductionism is when you try to explain a complex reality by appealing to observed  simpler realities. 

(3) Finding that the universe does not seem to expand at the rate predicted by theory, cosmologists invented a theory of dark energy, speculating that dark energy makes up most of the mass-energy in the universe. Just as dark matter has never been observed, dark energy has never been observed. Speculating about unproven unobserved realities is not reductionism, but the opposite of reductionism. Reductionism is when you try to explain a complex reality by appealing to observed  simpler realities. 

Throughout his career, Ethan Siegel has been an enthusiastic pitchman for the theory of cosmic inflation, the theory of dark matter and the theory of dark energy. Nowhere on the Internet can you find a more dogmatic and partisan apostle of these speculative theories, all of which involve the opposite of reductionism. So now Ethan Siegel is trying to make it sound like he favors reductionism? That's hilarious. 

It is also very funny when Siegel evokes this principle: "The fact that 'There exists this phenomenon that lies beyond my ability to make robust predictions about' is never to be construed as evidence in favor of 'This phenomenon requires additional laws, rules, substances, or interactions beyond what’s presently known.' ” For many years Siegel has been a dogmatic pitchman for the now-floundering theory of dark matter, which very much involved postulating a never-observed substance beyond what's presently known.

Siegel has very often spoke as if dark matter is fact, and has repeatedly made misstatements claiming that the theory of dark matter is well-established. It's becoming increasingly clear that he has misspoke on this topic. For example:

(1) A recent news story entitled "No trace of dark matter halos" quotes a scientist saying that "the number of publications showing incompatibilities between observations and the dark matter paradigm just keeps increasing every year."

(2) There recently appeared another science article with a headline of "Dark Matter Doesn't Exist."  That article (by an astrophysics professor) says there are multiple observations showing that dark matter cannot exist. The article says, "We need to scientifically understand why the dark-matter based model, being the most falsified physical theory in the history of humankind, continues to be religiously believed to be true by the vast majority of the modern, highly-educated scientists." This suggests all those dark matter stories we have read for so many years were just ivory tower tall tales. 

Scientist specialists such as cosmologists and cognitive neuroscientists are members of  belief communities involving very strong groupthink tendencies, in which "follow the herd" is the supreme rule. In such communities (resembling little sects) the members follow speech customs when they keep parroting dubious unproven claims, regardless of how much evidence has accumulated against such claims.  

After describing a doctrine of materialism, incorrectly referring to that as "reductionism," Siegel ignorantly states this: "There is no evidence for the existence of any phenomena that falls outside of what reductionism is capable of explaining." There is a mountain of evidence for very many phenomena that fall outside of what reductionism is capable of explaining, much of it undisputed biology and psychology such as ordinary mental capabilities, and much of it in experiments and human observational reports that materialists such as Siegel refuse to study.  A person who makes a statement as dead wrong as the one I just quoted will tend to be either a very big liar or a non-scholar of human mental phenomena.  Since Siegel has never shown the slightest sign of being a scholar of human mental phenomena in any of the many essays of his I have read, I will assume he is a non-scholar of human mental phenomena. 

But when Siegel ignores his own frequent explanatory appeals to never-observed dark matter (involving no discovered particle) to explain galaxy behavior, and also ignores his own frequent explanatory appeals to a never-observed dark energy (involving no discovered particle), and also ignores his own frequent explanatory appeals to a never-observed "inflaton field" force, and states that "the combination of the known particles that make up the Universe and the four fundamental forces through which they interact has been sufficient to explain, from atomic to stellar scales and beyond, everything we’ve ever encountered in this Universe," we have a statement that is both dead wrong and extremely inconsistent with its author's frequent statements. After reading so huge a misstatement, refuted by endless facts and observations I list in the post here and the dozens of posts here, you may stop laughing and simply cringe. 

The runaway boastful hubris of such claims matches the runaway boastful hubris of the large-type boldface claim on the Big Think site that its authors are "the world's greatest thinkers." An exponential expansion in the first instant of the universe is doubtful, but it sometimes sounds like there's been an exponential expansion of the egos and boasts of some scientists.   Meanwhile with each passing year humans discover and observe more and more huge mysteries and spooky anomalies and glaring defects of prevailing explanations and not-yet-materially-explained fine-tuned biological complexity and hierarchical organization that all make such boasts sound ever more hollow. 

The Complexity Concealments of Shrink-Speaking Professors

Let us imagine someone showed you some cards on a table in his backyard, some cards that had been arranged into something that looked like a house of cards. Suppose the person tried to persuade you that no one had purposefully arranged the cards into such a house-like structure, and that the structure had appeared because of purely random, accidental effects (such as say, friction or random wind gusts). The more complex such a house of cards was, the less likely you would be to believe such an explanation.

If the person showed you a “house of cards” consisting of only one card leaning against another card to make an upside-down “V” shape, you might easily be willing to believe the person's theory of accidental construction. But suppose the person showed you a “house of cards” consisting of twenty cards. You then would be vastly less likely to believe the person's theory of accidental construction. If the person showed you a “house of cards” consisting of 50 cards, like the one below, you would never accept any theory that such an intricate and hard-to-achieve arrangement had occurred by chance.

Speaking more generally, I can evoke a general rule: what I can call the first rule of accidental construction.

The first rule of accidental construction: the credibility of any claim that an impressively organized final result was accidentally achieved is inversely proportional to the number of parts that had to be well-arranged to achieve such a result, and the amount of organization needed to achieve such a result.

Because of this general rule, the rule that the more functionally organized something is the less likely it arose accidentally, there is a very important relation between the degree of organization and complexity in biological organisms and the credibility of Darwin's theory of natural biological origins. The relation is that the credibility of Darwin's theory of natural biological origins is inversely proportional to the degree of organization and functional complexity in biological organisms. The more organized and functionally complex that biological organisms are, the less likely that they might have appeared because of any accidental process.

Biological organisms have enormously high levels of organization. We know how to put together piece by piece aircraft carriers equipped with all their jets, but there is no team of scientists that could ever put together from scratch a living human body, by a molecule by molecule arrangement of parts.  The human body has a more impressive degree of organization and complexity than any machines humans have ever manufactured. So the advocates of Darwinism have a tough situation. If they realistically depict organisms such as humans as being as functionally complex and hierarchically organized as they are, all attempts to sell Darwinism will be undermined. So the advocates of Darwinism routinely attempt to portray organisms and their parts as being vastly less complex than they are.

Again and again (particularly when speaking to the general public), mainstream biologists will give us kind of kindergarten sketches of biological life, in which organisms or their parts are depicted as being enormously simpler than they are. They use a series of tricks by which people may be fooled into thinking that organisms and their parts are a hundred times simpler or a thousand times simpler or a million times simpler than they are.

To perform such a concealment, biologists very often engage in what I call shrink-speaking, which is misleadingly describing something as if it were vastly simpler than it is.  A person who describes the United States of America as "just a bunch of buildings" is engaging in shrink-speaking, as does a scientist who refers to you as "a bunch of chemical compounds." The same shrink-speaking would occur if someone described the volumes of a public library as "just some ink marks on paper."

Below are some of the tricks that are used as part of this gigantic complexity concealment. The tricks are most commonly used when professors are writing books for the general public or articles designed to be read mainly by the general public. Conversely, inside scientific papers rarely read by the public, professors often discuss the vast amount of organization and functional complexity of living things. 

Trick #1: The Frequent Mention of “Building Blocks of Life”

Scientists and science writers have long claimed that “building blocks of life” were produced by certain experiments, although the claims made along these lines are very erroneous and misleading. More baloney has been written about the Miller-Urey experiment (an experiment claimed to have produced “building blocks of life”) than almost any other scientific topic.

Without reviewing the huge number of misstatements that have been made about origin-of-life research, we can merely consider how utterly misleading is the very phase “building blocks of life.” The very term suggests that the simplest life would be something very simple. When we think of what is made from building blocks, we can think of something as simple as a wall or a simple house made of cinder blocks or bricks. But all cells are incomparably more complex than a simple house.

The building blocks of cells are organelles, which make up even the simplest prokaryotic cells. The building blocks of organelles are proteins, and the building blocks of proteins are mere amino acids. Whenever anyone describes an amino acid or a nucleobase as a “building block of life.” that person is misrepresenting the complexity of life. An amino acid is merely the building block of a building block (a protein) of a building block (an organelle) of a cell.

Trick #2: Misleading Cell Diagrams

A staple of biological instruction materials is a diagram showing the contents of a cell. Such diagrams are usually profoundly misleading, because they make it look like a cell is hundreds or thousands of times simpler than it actually is.

Specifically:

• A cell diagram will typically depict a cell as having only a few mitochondria, but cells typically have many thousands of mitochondria, as many as a million.
• A cell diagram will typically depict a cell as having only a few lysosomes, but cells typically have hundreds of lysosomes.
• A cell diagram will typically depict a cell as having only a few ribosomes, but a cell may have up to 10 million ribosomes.
• A cell diagram will typically depict one or a few stacks of a Golgi appartus, each with only a few cisternae, but a cell will typically have between 10 and 20 stacks, each having as many as 60 cisternae.
• Cell diagrams create in the mind the idea of a cell as a static thing, when actual cells are centers of continuous activity, like some active factory or a building that is undergoing continous construction and remodeling. 

Trick #3: Claiming that a Human Could Be Specified by a Mere “Blueprint” or “Recipe,” and Claiming DNA Has Such a Thing

The idea that DNA is a blueprint or recipe for making a human being is a claim that is both false and profoundly misleading, giving people a totally incorrect idea about the complexity of human being. It is false that DNA has any such thing as a recipe or blueprint for making a human. DNA contains only low-level chemical information such as information about the amino acids that make up proteins. DNA does not contain high-level structural information. DNA does not specify the overall body plan of a human, does not specify how to make any organ system or organ of a human, and does not even specify how to make any of the 200 types of cells in the human body. See this post for the statements of 18 science authorities telling you that DNA is not a blueprint or a recipe for making organisms.

Besides giving us an utterly false idea about the contents of DNA, claims such as “DNA is a blueprint for making humans” or “DNA is a recipe for making humans” create false ideas about the complexity of human beings. A blueprint is a large sheet of paper for doing a relatively simple construction job. A recipe is a single page for doing a relatively simple food preparation job. So whenever we hear people say something “DNA is a blueprint for making a human” or “DNA is a recipe for making a human,” we think that the construction of a human is a relatively simple affair. In reality, a human body is many thousands or millions of times too complex to be constructed from any blueprint or recipe.

If you were to give an analogy that would properly convey how complex would be the instructions needed for building a human, you might refer to something like a “a long bookshelf filled with many volumes of construction blueprints" or a “long bookshelf filled with recipe books.” But even such analogies would poorly describe the instructions for making a human, as they would be give you the idea of a human being as something merely static, rather than something that is internally dynamic to the highest degree.

Trick #4: Trying to Conceal the Complexities of Human Minds, by Claiming that Human Minds Are Like Animal Minds

Humans are enormously complex not only in their physical bodies, but in their minds. The human mind is its own separate ocean of mental complexity apart from the ocean of physical complexity that is the human body. Darwinists have always had the greatest difficulty in accounting for the subtleties and complexities of human thinking and human behavior. Very much of our mental activity seems like something inexplicable under any theory of natural selection. Much of what our minds do (such as mathematical ability, artistic creativity and philosophical reasoning) is of no survival value, and cannot be explained under any reasoning of survival-of-the-fittest or natural selection.

Darwinists have usually dealt with this problem by taking an approach of claiming that mentally humans are like animals. Such a claim is a gigantic example of complexity concealment, a case of trying to cover-up the complexities of the human mind, by sweeping them under the rug. Darwin committed this error most egregiously in a passage of The Descent of Man in which he made the extremely absurd claim that " there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties." 

Trick #5: Using the Shrink-Speaking Term "Consciousness" To Refer to Human Mentality

A very common trick of modern scientists is to refer to the human mind (an extremely multifaceted and complex reality) by the minimalist term "consciousness,"  which would be a suitable term for describing the mind of an insect. A dictionary defines consciousess as being awake and aware of your surroundings. But human mentality is something vastly more complex and multifaceted than that. So using the term "consciousness" for human mentality is an example of shrink-speaking, language that makes something look vastly simpler or smaller than it is. 

While the term "problem of consciousness" is often used, what we actually have is not some mere "problem of consciousness" but an extremely large “problem of explaining human mental capabilities and human mental experiences” that is vastly larger than merely explaining consciousness. The problem includes all the following difficulties and many others:

1. the problem of explaining how humans are able to have abstract ideas;
2. the problem of explaining how humans are able to store learned information, despite the lack of any detailed theory as to how learned knowledge could ever be translated into neural states or synapse states;
3. the problem of explaining how humans are able to reliably remember things for more than 50 years, despite extremely rapid protein turnover in synapses, which should prevent brain-based storage of memories for any period of time longer than a few weeks;
4. the problem of how humans are able to instantly retrieve little accessed information, despite the lack of anything like an addressing system or an indexing system in the brain;
5. the problem of how humans are able to produce great works of creativity and imagination;
6. the problem of how humans are able to be conscious at all;
7. the problem of why humans have such a large variety of paranormal psychic experiences and capabilities such as ESP capabilities that have been well-established by laboratory tests, and near-death experiences that are very common, often occurring when brain activity has shut down;
8. the problem of how humans have such diverse skills and experiences as mathematical reasoning, moral insight, philosophical reasoning, and refined emotional and spiritual experiences;
9. the problem of self-hood and personal identity, why it is that we always continue to have the experience of being the same person, rather than just experiencing a bundle of miscellaneous sensations;
10. the problem of intention and will, how is it that a mind can will particular physical outcomes.

It is therefore an example of a complexity cover-up and concealment for someone to refer to the human mind as merely "consciousness" or to speak as if there is some mere "problem of consciousness" when there is the vastly larger problem of explaining human minds that are so much more than mere consciousness.  Calling a human mind "consciousness" (a good term for describing the mind of a mouse) is like calling a city a bunch of bricks and lumber. 

Our minds are so much more than just "consciousness"

Trick #6: Trying to Conceal the Complexities of Human Minds, by Denying the Evidence for Psi and Paranormal Abilities

As you can see by reading the 41 posts here, we have two hundred years of very good observational and experimental evidence for paranormal human abilities such as clairvoyance and ESP, very much of it published in the writings of distinguished scientists and physicians. But the existence of such abilities is senselessly denied by very many of our professors. Denying the reality of psi is essentially a cover-up, a case of sweeping under the rug complexities of the human mind that you would prefer not to deal with it, for the sake of depicting human minds as being much simpler than they are.  

Trick #7: Failing to Describe the Complexity of Typical Protein Molecules or Larger Protein Molecules

When biologists and writers on biology describe protein molecules, they typically tell us that protein molecules have "many" amino acids. But almost never are we given a statement that informs about how complex protein molecules are.  It is very easy to do such a thing. 

The first way to do such a thing is by simply mentioning that the average protein molecule has about 370 amino acids, and that very many protein molecules consist of more than 600 amino acids. Another way to do this by an analogy. If we compare an amino acid to a letter, we can say that the average protein has the information complexity of a well-written paragraph, and that the larger protein molecules have the information complexity of a well-written page of text.  

But we almost never are told such facts. Nine times out of ten a reader will simply be vaguely told that there are "many" amino acids in a a protein. The complexity of protein molecules are almost always hidden from readers, who may go away with the very incorrect idea that a protein molecule consists of only 10 or 20 amino acids. 

Trick #8: Failing to Discuss the Sensitivity of Protein Molecules

There are two ways to get an understanding of how organized and fine-tuned protein molecules are. The first is to learn how many parts they have (typically several hundred amino acid parts). The second is to learn how sensitive such molecules are to small changes, how easy it is to break the functionality of a protein by changing some of its amino acids. Some important papers have been written shedding light on how the functionality of protein molecules tends to be destroyed when only a small percentage of the molecule is changed. One such paper is the paper here, estimating that making a random change in a single amino acid of a protein (most of which have hundreds of amino acids) will have a 34% chance of leading to a protein's "functional inactivation."  Such papers tell us the very important truth that protein molecules are very sensitive to small changes, which means that they are exceptionally fine-tuned and functionally organized. But we almost never hear our professors discuss this extremely relevant truth. 

Trick #9: Failing to Tell Us Protein Molecules Are Very Often Functional Only As a Part of Protein Complexes Involving Multiple Proteins

Protein complexes occur when a protein is not functional unless it combines with one or more other proteins, which act like a team to create a particular effect or do a particular job.  When writing for the general public, our biology authorities conveniently mention as infrequently as they can the extremely relevant fact that a significant fraction of proteins are nonfunctional unless acting as team members inside a protein complex, a fact that makes Darwinian explanations of human biochemistry seem exponentially more improbable.  An example is a recent paper estimating the likelihood of photosynthesis on other planets,  which very misleadingly refers to photosynthesis as being something with "overall simplicity," conveniently failing to mention that photosynthesis requires at least four different protein complexes, making it something that can only be achieved by extremely organized functional arrangements of matter, incredibly unlikely to ever appear by chance of Darwinian processes. 

Trick #10: Not Telling Us How Many Protein Molecules Are in a Typical Cell

How many protein molecules are in a typical cell? I doubt whether one high-school graduate in 10 could correctly answer this question within a factor of 100. Biology's concealment aces are good about hiding this important information from us.  The answer (about 40 million) almost never appears in print.  We do sometimes hear mention of the fact that the human body contains more than 20,000 different types of protein molecules (each a separate complex invention), but not nearly as often as we should. 

Trick #11: Misleading "Cell Types" Diagrams Suggesting There Are Only a Few Cell Types

How many different cell types are there in the human body? Our biologists frequently publish "cell types" diagrams listing only a few types of cells. Such charts cause people to think there are maybe 5 or 10 types of cells in the human body.  The actual number of cell types in the human body is something like 200. When did we ever see a diagram suggesting this reality?

Trick #12: Describing Human Bodies As If They Were Static Things, Ignoring the Vast Internal Dynamism of Organisms and Cells

Inside the human body and each of its cells there are a thousand simultaneous choreographies of activity.  The physical structure of a cell is as complex as the physical structure of a factory, and the internal activity inside a cell is as complex as all of the many types of worker activities going on inside a large factory. Such a very important reality is almost never discussed by our professors when writing for the public. Such people love to describe cells as "building blocks," as if they were static things like bricks or cinder blocks.  

Trick #13: Failing to Describe the Hierarchical Organization of Human Bodies

The organization of organisms is extremely hierarchical.  Subatomic particles are organized into atoms, which are organized into relatively simple molecules such as amino acids, which are organized into complex molecules such as proteins, which are organized into more complex units such as protein complexes and cell structures called organelles, which are organized into cells, which are organized into tissues, which are organized into organs, which are organized into organ systems, which (along with skeletal systems) are organized into organisms.  You will virtually never read a sentence like the previous one in something written by a professor, and we may wonder that this is because a sentence like that one makes too clear the extremely hierarchical organization of organisms, something many of our biologists rather seem to want us not to know about. 

Trick #14: Making It Sound As If Particular Organs Accomplish What Actually Requires Organ Systems and Fine-Tuned Biochemistry

In discussions involving biological origins, our professors often speak as if an eye will give you vision or a heart will give you blood circulation, or a stomach will give you food digestion.  But nobody sees just by eyes; they see by means of extremely complicated vision systems that require eyes, optic nerves, parts of the brain involved in vision, and very complex protein molecules.  And hearts are useless unless they are working with extremely complex cardiovascular systems that include lung, veins, arteries and very complex biochemistry.  And nobody digests food simply through a stomach, but through an extremely complicated digestive system consisting of many physical parts and very complex biochemistry. Our professors do an extremely poor job of explaining that things get done in organisms only when there are extremely complex systems consisting of many diverse parts working like a team to accomplish a particular effect. 

Trick #15: Making Scarce Mention of the Countless Different Types of Incredibly Fine-Tuned Biochemistry Needed for Organismic Function

Everywhere biological functionality requires exquisitely fine-tuned biochemistry. But we rarely hear about that in the articles and books of professors written for the general public.  An example of such fine-tuned biochemistry is the biochemistry involved in vision, which a biochemistry textbook describes like this:

1. Light-absorption converts 11-cis retinal to all-trans-retinal, activating rhodopsin.
2. Activated rhodopsin catalyzes replacement of GDP by GTP on transducin (T), which then disassociates into T_a-GTP and T_by.
3. T_a-GTP activates cGMP phosphodiesterase (PDE) by binding and removing its inhibitory subunit (I).
4. Active PDE reduces [cGMP] to below the level needed to keep cation channels open.
5. Cation channels close, preventing influx of Na⁺ and Ca2⁺; membrane is hyperpolarized. This signal passes to the brain.
6. Continued efflux of Ca²⁺ through the Na⁺-Ca2⁺ exchanger reduces cytosolic [Ca²⁺].
7. Reduction of [CA²⁺] activates guanylyl cyclase (CG) and inhibits PDE; [cGMP] rises toward “dark” level, reopening cation channels and returning V_m to prestimulus level.
8. Rhodopsin kinase (RK) phosphorylates “bleached” rhodopsin; low [Ca²⁺] and recoverin (Recov) stimulate this reaction. Arrestin (Arr) binds phosphorylated carboxyl terminus, reactivating rhodopsin.
9. Slowly, arrestin dissociates, rhodopsin is dephosphorylated, and all-trans-retinal is replaced with 11-cis-retinal. Rhodopsin is ready for another phototransduction cycle.

We hear no mention of such requirements in typical discussions of the origin of vision, nor do we hear a discussion of how vision requires certain protein molecules consisting of hundreds of parts arranged in just the right way.  Instead, our professors often speak as if vision could have kind of got started if something very simple existed.  Such insinuations are absurdly false. 

Such biochemical requirements are all over the place in biology. In general, any physical function of a body requires a vast amount of enormously complicated biochemistry which has to be just right. But you would hardly know such a thing from reading a typical article or book written by a professor.  The mountainous fine-tuned biochemistry complexity of every physical operation of living things is rarely mentioned, just as if our professors were trying to portray organisms as a thousand times simpler and less organized than they are.  

Darwinism seems to be of very little value in explaining such biochemistry. For example, the thirtieth edition of Harper's Illustrated Biochemistry is an 800-page textbook describing cells, genes, enzymes, proteins, metabolism, hormones, and biochemistry in the greatest detail, with abundant illustrations. The book makes no mention of Darwin, no mention of natural selection, and only a single mention of evolution, on a page talking only about whether evolution had anything to do with limited lifespans.

In papers and textbooks professors may accurately describe the complexities of humans, but so often in books and articles for the public such professors use sentences that can be compared to crude cartoon sketches.   Human minds have oceanic depths of complexity, and human bodies have oceanic depths of organization. But very often it is as if reductionist shrink-speaking professors describe such oceanic realities as if they were crummy little puddles. 

"Chimera" Charade Was Just Kooky Injections

There are many serious problems plaguing the people advancing the claim that all organisms share a common ancestor.  One of the biggest problems is the appearance in natural history of some types of organism without any clear evolutionary path that might explain their appearance. For example:

• Almost all animal phyla (the main divisions of animals) appear suddenly in the fossil record at the time of the Cambrian Explosion about 540 million years ago, without any known antecedents that were very much like them.
• Birds appear suddenly in the fossil record, without any known antecedents that were very much like them.
• Flying insects and flying dinosaurs appear suddenly in the fossil record, without any known antecedents that were very much like them.
• Humans appear suddenly in the natural history record about 100,000 years ago, when we first start to see signs of the symbolic activity that is the true hallmark of humans (fossils long before that are often called human fossils without warrant, in cases where there is no corresponding evidence of symbolic activity). 

Darwinists have long had a strategy for dealing with such problems, the strategy of trying to assert that one group of organisms "really is" just an example of some other group of organisms that preceded it.  This strategy hasn't been used in connection with the first item on the bullet list below, there being almost nothing in the way of known animal predecessors of all the animal types appearing in the Cambrian Explosion. But the strategy has been used very much on the last three items on that list. Specifically:

• The nonsensical claim has often been made that "birds are dinosaurs."
• The nonsensical claim has sometimes been made that "insects are crustaceans."
• The nonsensical claim has often been made that "humans are apes" or that "men are really just apes."

You can call this type of talk Darwinist Equivalency Nonsense, and you can call the people who advance such nonsense DENiers. That seems like an appropriate term, since advancing Darwinist Equivalency Nonsense is very much a case of denying facts.  The facts are that there are a great many dramatic physical differences between birds and dinosaurs, that there are some huge physical differences between crustaceans and insects (particularly flying insects), and that there are a host of physical and mental differences between apes and men. The absurd claim that "humans are apes" or that "men are really just apes" has always been a claim that facilitated racism, because once a man believes that some other men are "just apes" or "just animals," he may be more likely to abuse other humans on grounds that "their race is more apelike" or to abuse or destroy such men, thinking that such actions are not much different from slaughtering cattle. 

It is easy to see the reason why Darwinist Equivalency Nonsense occurs. When you have a giant leap you can't credibly explain, it helps to try to portray the leap as no leap at all. So if you want to maintain that a  heap of auto parts naturally and accidentally transformed into a working car, it sure helps if you can say, "a heap of auto parts is a working car," or "a working car is just a heap of auto parts." And if you want to maintain that some dinosaurs transformed into birds, it helps if you can say "birds are really dinosaurs," a phrase that is a classic example of ivory tower inanity. 

One of the strangest DENiers was a Soviet biologist named Ilya Ivanov who developed plans to secretly inseminate women in French Guinea with chimp sperm, under the guise of a physical examination. He hoped that this would result in a chimp-man hybrid.  The French governor did not permit this. 

Later Ivanov actually got five women to agree to be inseminated with chimp sperm.  You can only wonder what was going on in their minds. Maybe some zealot sold them on the need to prove the claim that men are really just apes, by having a baby that was half-chimp.  Nothing resulted from Ivanov's nutty schemes. But it is rather obvious what his motivation was. A New Scientist story says, "When Ivanov put his proposal to the Academy of Sciences he painted it as the experiment that would prove men had evolved from apes."

Recently there was something in the science news that made me say "shades of Ivanov." Some scientists injected some human cells into some very early monkey embryo. Only 25 human cells were injected into each such very early monkey embryo, which is not a visible amount. This was reported with news headlines such as "Scientists generate human-monkey chimeric embryos."  But such headlines suggested that something was going on much bigger than what actually occurred. 

When you think of an embryo, you visualize something with at least a shape a little like that of a baby.  But no, all we see at the end of the video provided in the scientific paper is a formless round blob.

The scientists injected only 25 human cells into each monkey embryo blob grown in a lab. Most of these tiny embryo blobs died before 20 days, but some lasted 20 days, never developing beyond a round blob-like shape.  The press coverage and the scientific paper avoid telling us how big these blobs were, and we may presume they were barely even visible. Calling such things "chimeras" is quite misleading. They are properly described as monkey embryos injected with a tiniest trace of human cells.  A wikipedia article on biological chimera says " animal chimeras are produced by the merger of multiple fertilized eggs," but that was not done in this case, so the press stories calling these wacky blobs "chimeras" are not accurate. 

Why on Earth did the scientists perform such a stunt? Perhaps so that the DENiers could have a new talking point.  We can imagine how they will enthuse about this result:

"Didn't we tell you that humans are just apes or monkeys? Why now they've even made something that is part-monkey and part human. That shows we were right all along."

But such reasoning would be baloney. You probably could have done the same silly stunt with monkeys and sharks, injecting some shark cells into a monkey embryo, to get a mangled blob of cells that might survive for a few weeks.  But that would do nothing to show that monkeys are really sharks.  And putting some human cells into a mangled monkey embryo living for a few weeks does nothing to show that humans are really just apes or monkeys, just like a man getting some intestinal worms does not show that men are kind of worms.  

Everytime someone brings up the topic of embryonic development in the connection of Darwinism, they should be reminded of the most important relevant truths:

• There is no specification or blueprint or recipe for making an  adult human being in DNA or the fertilized egg that is the beginning of the process of embryonic development (contrary to the untrue statements that Darwin enthusiasts often make about such a topic, statements many biologists and professors have refuted by reminding us that DNA has only low-level chemical information, not anatomical specifications). 
• The progression of such a speck-sized cell to a full grown human with so many levels of stunning hierarchical organization is therefore a miracle of origination utterly beyond the understanding of today's scientists, no more understandable than a tornado passing through a lumber yard and hardware store, and creating from its materials a large house with working electricity and plumbing. 
• Lacking any such understanding of how the body or the mind of a single adult human being arises from a speck-sized egg cell, there is no basis for claiming that we understand the vastly harder problem of the origin of the human race, or that random  changes in DNA can explain the origin of species, since their anatomy is not specified by DNA. 
• Because there are a host of dramatic differences between the minds and behavior of humans and the minds and behavior of apes, statements such as "humans are just apes" are nonsensical and are violently contrary to a multitude of human observations.  

The tactic of claiming that "men are apes" is an example of what we may call shrink-speaking. Shrink-speaking is when someone describes some reality as being vastly less than what it actually is. Below are some examples of shrink-speaking, all absurd examples of reductionism: 

"Mentally you are just a bundle of sensations."

"Humans are just apes."

"The United States is just a bunch of addresses."

"A human body is just a heap of cells."

"Living your life is just hanging around."

"History is just some lines on pages."

"Earth is just a rock with a little extra gas and water." 

"You're just some nerve impulses bouncing around in a brain, like pinballs bouncing around in a pinball machine."

Shrink-speaking is one of the the main tactics of a certain type of thinker, a thinker who also uses very often an opposite type of technique we may call humbug hype. Humbug hype is when some thing small or relatively insignificant is trumpeted as if it were something extremely important. Nowadays our science news sites are overflowing with humbug hype, as such sites (financially motivated to maximize their web page hits to increase advertising revenue) give us a constant stream of stories in which insignificant, unimpressive or flawed and poorly designed studies are heralded as if they were major breakthroughs. 

Through a combination of shrink-speaking and humbug hype, many on-the-wrong-track thinkers try to persuade us that they are on the right track.   Their general strategy is often kind of like this: try to verbally shrink something or someone to a mere shadow of itself or himself, and then hype up some crummy little thing until it sounds like it might explain such a shadow.  Combining shrink-speaking and humbug hype is kind of the "rinse and repeat" of some people. 

Chemical Reductionism Prospers as the Morgues Fill Up

The United States is in the midst of a frightening opioid crisis. A story in the New York Times this year states that last year more than 59,000 died from drug overdoses. The story has a graph showing drug overdoses skyrocketing, growing from only 20,000 a year around the year 2000 to more than 59,000 last year.

A CDC site says, "We now know that overdoses from prescription opioids are a driving factor in the 15-year increase in opioid overdose deaths."  Why are so many opioids being prescribed?

Let's consider a viewpoint that is popular among many in the mainstream, a viewpoint that we may call chemical reductionism. The idea is that a person is little more than a bag of chemicals. Chemical reductionism is popular among many doctors and psychiatrists. Psychiatrists sometimes push the idea that mental problems are caused by chemical imbalances. The evidence for this claim is weak.

 Thankfully only a minority of doctors think like this

Let's imagine a doctor has been trained to think along the lines of chemical reductionism. What is he going to do when a patient comes in complaining of some pain? His first inclination will be: prescribe some powerful chemicals to treat the pain.

But there are quite a few alternate techniques for treating pain, techniques that do not involve the risks of prescribing opioids. They include the following:

• Surgery. Some types of pain (such as dental pain) can be reduced by permanently dulling nerves.
• Meditation.
• Hypnosis.
• Acupuncture. The World Health Organization says acupuncture can be effective in reducing pain.
• Marijuana. Many states now allow medical marijuana for pain relief. People using it sometimes say they still have the pain, but it doesn't bother them when they use marijuana.
• Chiropractic care. Chiropractic care can be effective in reducing lower back pain.
• Massage. Massage can be effective in reducing muscle pain.
• Exercise.
• Biofeedback.
• Guided imagery.
• Music therapy.
• Yoga.

With so many non-opioid pain techniques, why have so many doctors tended to prescribe addictive opioids as soon as a patient complains of pain?  One reason is that such an approach is convenient from a profit standpoint. A doctor can write a prescription in just a minute, a much shorter time than the many minutes that might be needed to explain some non-drug program of pain treatment.  The more patients handled in a day, the greater the profit for a clinic.  Another reason is that pharmaceutical companies are constantly influencing doctors, to help keep them thinking that pills are the solution to almost any medical problem not requiring surgery  -- largely because the more medicine is chemistry-centered, the higher the profits of pharmaceutical companies.

The enormous influence that pharmaceutical companies have on doctors is documented in the book “White Coat Black Hat” by Carl Elliott. We learn about the enormous number of pharmaceutical sales reps who often arrive at doctor's offices offering free samples or minor gifts like a box of donuts or perhaps a pizza for the staff. Then there are the pharmaceutical companies that pay for doctors to attend conferences or meetings that may have free food and luxury lodging, which often amount to a kind of bribe to the doctor in the form of a paid travel junket.

Then there are the pharmaceutical companies that pay for “ghost-written” research articles. A doctor may put his name on a scientific paper that was conceived and largely written by some “medical ghost-writer” funded by a pharmaceutical company. The benefit for the doctor is that it is an easy way of increasing his number of published papers (the more published papers, the more prestige for the doctor). A 2009 New York Times article guessed that 11% of New England Journal of Medicine articles used medical ghost-writing. The worst abuse occurred when medical ghost-writing was used to help gin up research studies for the pain-killing drug Vioxx. An NPR article says, “Research published in the medical journal Lancet estimates that 88,000 Americans had heart attacks from taking Vioxx, and 38,000 of them died.”

All these bribes and conditioning from the pharmaceutical companies help reinforce in many a doctor's mind the idea that pills are the only non-surgical way to treat pain. The result has been a great excess of prescriptions for opioid medications, which in turn has led to massive cases of addiction, and tens of thousands of overdose deaths per year. 

Given this situation, it would seem sensible for the government to fund additional research into alternative methods of relieving pain, and for doctors to give greater consideration to such non-chemical alternatives when first hearing a patient's complaint of pain. You will hear some people argue the opposite. They will tell us: just because so many thousands are dying of opioid overdoses, that's no reason for us to pay more attention to alternative medicine or integrative medicine. The question we must always ask such people is: are you receiving any money or benefits from the pharmaceutical industry?