A Search of "Genetic Architecture" Papers Helps Show DNA Is No Body Blueprint

What I call the Great DNA Myth is a false teaching that continues to be spread by innumerable people in the world of biology, even though there are very many other authorities in that same world who are telling us the teaching is false.  The Great DNA Myth is the myth that inside DNA is some blueprint or recipe that specifies how to make a human body.  

There are various ways in which this false idea is stated, all equally false:

• Someone may describe DNA or the genome as a blueprint for an organism.
• Someone may describe DNA or the genome as a recipe for making an organism.
• Someone may describe DNA or the genome as a program for building an organism.
• Someone may claim that DNA or genomes specify the anatomy of an organism. 
• Someone may claim that genotypes (the DNA in organisms) specify phenotypes (the observable characteristics of an organism).
• Someone may claim that phenotypes (the observable characteristics of an organism) are "expressions" of genotypes (the DNA in organisms). 
• Someone may claim that genotypes (the DNA in organisms) "map"  phenotypes (the observable characteristics of an organism) or "map to" phenotypes.
• Someone may claim that DNA contains "all the instructions needed to make an organism."
• Someone may claim that there is a "genetic architecture" for an organism's body or some fraction of that body. 
• Using a little equation, someone may claim that a "genotype plus the environment equals the phenotype," a formulation as false  as the preceding statements, since we know of nothing in the environment that would cause phenotypes to arise from genotypes that do not specify such phenotypes. 

Weaker formulations of this false idea include claims that DNA is "life's instruction book" or "the key to life" or "the book of life" or "the secret of life." While such rather vague assertions are not as explicitly false as the statements in the bullet list above, such formulations are equally misleading, as they insinuate the false claims in such a bullet list. 

There is no truth to the claim that DNA is a specification for anatomy.  DNA merely specifies low-level chemical information such as which sequences of amino acids make up polypeptide chains that are the starting points of protein molecules.

There are various ways to demonstrate the untruthfulness of claims that DNA is a blueprint for making human bodies or human minds. One way is to quote scientists who deny such a claim. I have a long list of quotes from biologists and chemists and doctors who deny that DNA is any such thing as a blueprint or recipe or program for making humans. You can read that list at the end of the post here.

Another way to debunk the claim that DNA is a blueprint for making a human body is to point out the simple fact that blueprints don't build things. Buildings get built when agents intelligent enough to read and understand blueprints act by reading blueprints and then start using them as guides for how to construct something.  So the idea that a human body arises from a one-cell zygote because of the reading of a blueprint is nonsensical. Even if such a blueprint existed in DNA, it would not cause the construction of a human body. If such a blueprint existed, it would be a fantastically complex set of constructions, given the enormous complexity and hierarchical organization of the human body. There would be nothing inside the womb of a mother capable of reading and understanding a body blueprint if it existed inside DNA. 

Another way to debunk the claim that DNA is a blueprint for making a human body is to simply describe what we know about the coding system in DNA, and mention how such a coding system is an extremely simple system that is purely concerned with low-level chemicals, and has no handling at all of high-level anatomy. The only coding system discovered in DNA is what is called the genetic code. That is a coding system so simple it can be depicted in a simple diagram. Below is a diagram depicting the genetic code:

The letters such as A, C, T and G are the four types of nucleotides that can exist in DNA. Different triplets of these nucleotides stand for different amino acids such as lysine and leucine. Under such a coding system, the only thing that can be represented in DNA is low level chemical information such as which amino acids make up a protein. No one has ever discovered any high-level coding system in DNA under which parts of DNA can stand for things more complicated than lowly amino acids. 

It is impossible to even represent in DNA one of the lowly organelles that are the building blocks of cells. It is also impossible to represent in DNA a cell or an organ or a bone or a body structure.  The very low-level coding system used by DNA is utterly incapable of such representations. Similarly, under a primitive coding system such as "thumbs up means I like it" and "thumbs down means I don't like it," you can indicate your approval or disapproval of things. But so primitive a coding system is utterly incapable of transmitting complex construction information such as how to build a house. 

The diagram below shows the hierarchical organization of the human body, and which parts of it are not specified by DNA. 

There is an additional way to show how groundless are claims that DNA is a blueprint or recipe or program for making human bodies or minds. We can search the scholarly literature for papers using the phrase "genetic architecture" or "DNA architecture."  Such a search will show that no robust evidence has ever been reported of any such thing as a genetic architecture for a body or a genetic architecture for an organ or a genetic architecture for a mind or even a genetic architecture of a cell.  

Before discussing the results of such searches, I can discuss a type of study called a Genome-Wide Association Study or GWAS.  In this study no attempt will be made to describe how genes could be the cause of some trait or structure. What will merely go on is that some statistical analysis will be made from some database of genomes and physical or mental characteristics.  The results reported in such studies are typically small effects that you would expect to get by chance, even if DNA and genes entirely fail to specify body structure and minds. 

Attempt #1: Searching for Papers Using the Phrase "Genetic Architecture"

First, I went to the Google Scholar page and used a search phrase of only "genetic architecture."  Using this phrase and looking at the first 100 search results, I found no papers claiming a genetic architecture of the human structure or any organ or cell in the human body. The results were mainly papers claiming a genetic architecture of low-level things.  Some of the papers are listed below:

• The genetic architecture of Type 2 diabetes
• The genetic architecture of Parkinson's disease
• The genetic architecture of multiple myeloma
• The genetic architecture of COVID-19
• The genetic architecture of colorectal cancer

There was a paper with the nonsensical title "The genetic architecture of economic and political preferences."  The paper title is nonsensical because of the utter impossibility of expressing such preferences in DNA or the genes that are part of DNA. The paper did not produce findings justifying its title. To the contrary, the paper states this:

"Our analysis of individual SNPs does not reveal any associations that are significant at the conventional threshold of genome-wide significance required in genetic association studies. This is unsurprising in light of the accumulating evidence that the effects of common variants on complex outcomes are small (47), especially in the context of social science traits."

A 2013 paper discusses the lack of evidence for any genetic basis for social traits:

"Despite the extraordinary promise of extending genetic research to behavioral traits, results of studies that have searched for genetic variants associated with these traits have so far been disappointing: No strong, replicable associations have been discovered. Most of the claims of genetic associations with such traits have turned out to be false positives, or at best vast overestimates of true effect sizes. Chabris et al. (11)  found that across 3 independent samples, only 1 of 12 published associations of particular genes with general intelligence replicated, and this association replicated in only 1 of the samples. Worse, the new samples were considerably larger than the originals, which suggests that all of these reports were probably false positives. Similarly, Benjamin et al. (4)  found a SNP associated with educational attainment and cognitive function but could not replicate it in 3 independent samples. Benjamin et al. (12a)  likewise found no significant associations with any member of a set of traits involving economic and political behavior. Finally, Beauchamp et al. (12b)  conducted a GWAS of educational attainment (i.e., years of education completed) and found no hits that met conventional genome-wide significance levels; those that approached significance did not replicate in a second sample." 

There was a paper with the misleading title "Insights into the genetic architecture of the human face." See the post here for a lengthy discussion of why this paper failed to show any such thing as a genetic architecture of the human face. 

There is a paper with the title "Uncovering the Genetic Architecture of Major Depression." The title is misleading, because the paper does not describe any such genetic architecture. For example, we read this in the paper:

"But, what of candidate genes for MD [major depression]? Recently, Border et al. (2019) evaluated 18 major depressive disorder candidate genes (e.g., SLC6A5, BDNF, COMT, and HTR2A). In an extensive set of analyses of empirical data, they did not find much support for any candidate gene. We refer the reader to this paper for full details, but these authors concluded: 'The study results do not support previous depression candidate gene findings, in which large genetic effects are frequently reported in samples orders of magnitude smaller than those examined here. Instead, the results suggest that early hypotheses about depression candidate genes were incorrect and that the large number of associations reported in the depression candidate gene literature are likely to be false positives. ' ”

Any attempt to show a genetic cause of depression by showing that genomes may make a person more prone to depression will fail to show a direct genetic cause of mental attitudes. What happens is that people with various types of physical ailments or birth defects are more likely to be depressed, because of their physical shortcomings or afflictions. So you can't identify any gene directly causing depression (as opposed to a gene causing some physical problem that may contribute to depression).  

Another paper produced by the search is a 2006 paper entitled "The molecular genetic architecture of human personality: beyond self-report questionnaires." The paper claims this: "Several new paradigms especially functional neuroimaging or ‘imaging genomics’ have strengthened the connection between 5-HTTLPR and anxiety-related personality traits." But the association is not valid. Here is a quote by an expert I quoted in a post I wrote in 2019:

"Using data from large groups of volunteers -- between 62,000 and 443,000 people -- the scientific study attempted to find whether there was any evidence that any of the genes (such as SLC6A4 and 5-HTTLPR) linked to depression were more common in people who had depression. 'We didn't find a smidge of evidence,' says Matthew Keller, the scientist who led the study.  'How on Earth could we have spent 20 years and hundreds of millions of dollars studying pure noise?' asks Keller, suggesting that hundreds of millions of dollars had been spent trying to show a genetic correlation (between genes such as SLC6A4 and depression) that didn't actually exist. "

The search also reveals a paper entitled "The Genetic Architecture of the Human Cerebral Cortex."  The paper fails to discuss any specification of the structure of the human cerebral cortex in genes, and fails to discuss any way in which DNA or genes could specify any of the neuron cells that make up the cortex.  What we have is simply another GWAS study attempting to statistically associate variations in DNA with tiny differences in brains. As it failed to show any actual specification of brain structure by genes or DNA, the paper should have been entitled something like "DNA Differences Can Affect Brain Structure."

Going through the first 100 papers that appear after a search on Google Scholar using only the term "genetic architecture," I found nothing to support claims that DNA is a blueprint or recipe or program for making a human body or making a human mind. Almost all of the papers were those claiming a genetic architecture of diseases. The few papers that referred to a genetic architecture of some large structure (such as eyes or the cerebral cortex) were simply mistitled papers. For example, the paper with a title referring to a "genetic architecture of the human face" should have been titled something "Genomic effects on face appearance." And the paper entitled "The Genetic Architecture of the Human Cerebral Cortex" should have been titled "Gene effects on brain structure." 

Attempt #2:  Searching for Papers Using the Phrase "DNA Architecture of"

Looking through 100 science papers that show up after doing a Google Scholar search using the phrase "DNA architecture of," I found not a single one with a title that claims to have found any such thing as a DNA architecture of the human body or the human mind or any organ in the human body or any cell in the human body. 

Attempt #3: Searching for Papers Using the Phrase "Genetic Architecture of Eyes"

Looking through 100 science papers that show up after doing a Google Scholar search using the phrase "genetic architecture of eyes," I found not a single one that claims to have found any such thing as a genetic architecture of eyes. All that I find are a few claiming a genetic architecture of eye color. 

Attempt #4: Searching for Papers Using the Phrase "DNA Architecture of Eyes"

Looking through 100 science papers that show up after doing a Google Scholar search using the phrase "DNA architecture of eyes," I found not a single one that claims to have found any such thing as a DNA architecture of eyes

Attempt #5: Searching for Papers Using the Phrase "Genetic Architecture of Hearts"

Looking through 100 science papers that show up after doing a Google Scholar search using the phrase "genetic architecture of hearts," I found not a single one that claims to have found any such thing as a genetic architecture of hearts. All that I find are a few claiming a genetic effect on some types of heart disease.

Attempt #6: Searching for Papers Using the Phrase "DNA  Architecture of Hearts"

Looking through 100 science papers that show up after doing a Google Scholar search using the phrase "DNA architecture of hearts," I found not a single one that claims to have found any such thing as a DNA architecture of hearts. 

Attempt #7: Searching for Papers Using the Phrase "Genetic Architecture of Human Body"

Looking through 100 science papers that show up after doing a Google Scholar search using the phrase "genetic architecture of human body," I found not a single one that claims to have found any such thing as a genetic architecture of the human body. 

Attempt #8: Searching for Papers Using the Phrase "DNA  Architecture of Human Body"

Looking through 100 science papers that show up after doing a Google Scholar search using the phrase "DNA architecture of human body," I found not a single one that claims to have found any such thing as a DNA architecture of the human body. 

Attempt #9: Searching for Papers Using the Phrase "Genetic Architecture of Human Structure"

Looking through 100 science papers that show up after doing a Google Scholar search using the phrase "genetic architecture of human structure," I found not a single one that claims to have found any such thing as a genetic architecture of the human structure.

Attempt #10:  Searching for Papers Using the Phrase "Genetic Architecture of Human Skeleton"

Looking through 100 science papers that show up after doing a Google Scholar search using the phrase "genetic architecture of human skeleton," I found only a single one that refers to a genetic architecture of the human skeleton. One paper has the title "The Genetic Architecture of the Human Skeletal Form." The paper attempts to find associations between genes and things such as height and skeletal defects.  No claim is made of genes that actually specify the human skeleton or any bone in the human skeleton. The human body has 206 bones. The paper makes no claim that any gene specifies the structure of any one of these bones.  The title "The Genetic Architecture of the Human Skeletal Form" does not match any claims made in the paper. 

Attempt #11:  Searching for Papers Using the Phrase "Genetic Architecture of Cells"

Looking through 100 science papers that show up after doing a Google Scholar search using the phrase "genetic architecture of cells," I found not a single one that claims to have found any such thing as a genetic architecture of cells.

Attempt #12:  Searching for Papers Using the Phrase "DNA  Architecture of Cells"

Looking through 100 science papers that show up after doing a Google Scholar search using the phrase "DNA architecture of cells," I found not a single one that claims to have found any such thing as a DNA architecture of human cells. I did find a paper entitled "DNA Replication and Genomic Architecture of Very Large Bacteria." The paper gives us a good example of an inappropriate use of the phrase "genetic architecture." The paper does nothing to show there is a genetic architecture for bacteria, showing no such thing as a DNA plan for making a bacteria. It merely claims that very large bacteria have larger DNA.  Neither DNA nor its genes contain any specification of how to make a bacteria, or even any of the organelles that make up such a bacteria. 

 Conclusion

The searches above help show that claims that DNA is a blueprint, recipe or program for making human bodies are groundless.  If such claims were true, then doing the searches above would reveal a great abundance of substantive papers that showed something like a  genetic architecture of the human body or the genetic architecture of cells or the genetic architecture of the human skeleton or the genetic architecture of human structure or the genetic architecture of eyes or the genetic architecture of the heart. The searches above produce no such thing. The closest matches found are simply papers that establish how genes influence things such as the structure of cells or the structure of eyes or the structure of the skeleton or the structure of the heart or the overall human structure. None of the papers establish that genes or DNA specify any such thing as a specification of the structure of cells or the structure of eyes or the structure of the skeleton or the structure of the heart or the overall human structure.

A great technique to help show that baloney is baloney and that bunk is bunk and that lies are lies is to dismantle a big lie by asking smaller related questions. Here is an example of using such a technique, in which John debunks a false boast made about someone living in a grand home like a mansion.  

John: So where do you live?

Bill:  I live in such a magnificent house! I think of it as my mansion. I'm living like a king. 

John: So how many bedrooms are there?

Bill:  Uh, just one.

John: And how many bathrooms do you have?

Bill: Uh, just one. 

John: So you must have a big living room, right?

Bill: Well, it fits me and my wife in it. 

John:  How big is the back yard and front yard?

Bill: Well, we don't actually have a back yard. But we have a little front yard. It's big enough to fit 2 plastic patio chairs. 

John: Do you have one of those big kitchens?

Bill: Well, it's more like a kitchenette with a hot plate and a mini-fridge, on the left side of our little living room.

John: It sounds like you're actually living in a mobile home, right?

Bill: But I'm very proud of it. It's one of the best in our trailer park. 

I have used a similar technique in this post. To help dismantle the claim that DNA is a specification for making human bodies, I have asked smaller questions such as:

• Is there someone showing DNA specifies how to make a cell?
• Is there someone showing DNA specifies how to make a skeleton?
• Is there someone showing DNA specifies how to make an eye?
• Is there someone showing DNA specifies how to make a heart?
• Is there someone showing DNA specifies how to make a brain?

The answers to all these questions are: no, there isn't. The "no" answers to such questions help show how bogus and phony are claims that DNA is a specification for making a human body.  For insight on  why we were told for so long the lie that DNA is a specification for making a body, read my post here. 

Below is a diagram of Darwinist theory that I took from page 69 of the source here, and annotated in red. The diagram shows how an appeal to luck is at the core of Darwinism. At the top of the diagram we have an appeal to "fortuitous mutations," "fortuitous" being a word meaning "lucky." Since the so-called "natural selection" of Darwinism is not actually selection (as it involves no actual choice), a better description of Darwinism is "Darwin's theory of insanely lucky luck."  With the annotations in red, the diagram explains why Darwinism fails as a theory trying to explain very complex anatomy innovations and very complex cell innovations. Because DNA does not specify the structure of cells and does not specify anatomy, there are no possible lucky mutations in DNA that can explain how we got the enormously complex biology innovations that we see in the natural world. 

A biologist once compared the progression from a speck-sized zygote (existing just after human conception) to a full human body as being something like a pile of bricks forming into a house. Such an analogy was very misleading, for two reasons. The first is that while a brick is an unorganized thing (a mere block of clay), a cell is a fantastically organized component typically capable of the marvel of self-reproduction, which (given the cell's complexity) is a marvel as astonishing as an automobile splitting into two working automobiles.  So it is extremely misleading to compare cells to bricks.  Secondly, the organization of a human body is a state of vast organization requiring almost infinitely more coordinated organization than the amount of organization needed to make a house from bricks. 

The walls of a house can be built with about 10,000 bricks.  An adult human requires about 37 trillion cells of about 200 types, most of which must be placed in the right places in the body.  Most of these cells are gigantically more organized than a brick wall, with the average cell requiring a special arrangement of about 100 trillion atoms. Given such a reality, the progression from a speck-sized zygote to the full organization of the human body is not like a pile of bricks progressing to become a house, but something more like a million piles of bricks, wires, doors, glass panes, pipes, floor boards and electrical wires gradually progressing to become a city as organized as New York City, without any visible builders being around.  How there can occur such a marvel of organization is a mystery a thousand miles over the heads of today's biologists. 

When Scientists Claim to See Things They Never Saw

For decades scientists "bet the farm" on the Lambda Cold Dark Matter theory, a move which made little sense. There were never any direct observations of any such thing as cold dark matter, so scientists had to claim it was invisible.  And even though cosmologists and astrophysicists believed in it with a fervor, cold dark matter never had any place in the Standard Model of Physics. How ironic that scientists often blast people for having faith in important invisible realities, when they have put such unquestioning faith in things they say are important, invisible and never directly observed: dark matter and dark energy.  Maybe their thinking is: "you can believe in important invisibles but only OUR important invisibles." 

Nowadays some items in the press have been profoundly discouraging to believers in the dogma of dark matter. Specifically: 

ITEM 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."

ITEM 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.

ITEM 3: A recent paper discussing observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) notes that "early observations with JWST have led to the discovery of an unexpected large density...of massive galaxies... at extremely high redshifts z ≈ 10, " and finds in its Section 7 that the most-popular model of cosmology (called lambda cold dark matter or LCDM) is "excluded" (in other words, ruled out) at a moderately strong two-sigma level by the latest observations.

ITEM 4: A recent NASA press release announces some report based on 30 years of observations from the Hubble Space Telescope. You would never guess from the press release that the report is one finding a gigantic failure of one of the top theories of modern physical science, the Lambda Cold Dark Matter theory. The failure is also all-but-buried by the corresponding scientific paper, which refers to the observations with the Hubble Space Telescope, and compares them to predictions from the Lambda Cold Dark Matter theory, telling us this (using some jargon that I will translate):

"The inclusion of high-redshift SNe Ia yields H0 = 73.30 ± 1.04 km s−1 Mpc−1 and q0 = −0.51 ± 0.024. We find a 5σ difference with the prediction of H0 from Planck CMB observations under ΛCDM, with no indication that the discrepancy arises from measurement uncertainties or analysis variations considered to date."

The "5σ difference" is a big five sigma difference between the Hubble constant (H0, the universe's expansion rate) as determined by the Hubble telescope observations and the Hubble constant as predicted by the Lambda Cold Dark Matter theory, cryptically referenced as "ΛCDM." On page 54 we are told that the "5σ difference" is one that we would expect to get by chance only one time in a million. 

So it seems the Lambda Cold Dark Matter theory has flopped big time. What the theory predicts about the universe's expansion rate does not match the latest and greatest measurements of that rate. But you cannot find a plain English mention of that flop in either the press release or the scientific paper. The scientific paper mentions the failure of the  Lambda Cold Dark Matter theory, but in a way that could only be understood by a physicist or a cosmologist (or someone like myself who has read cosmology papers for decades). The NASA press release makes no mention of a failure of theory, and fails to even mention the Lambda Cold Dark Matter theory. The NASA press release attempts to suggest the discrepancy may suggest "new physics," rather than frankly telling us that the results suggest we have bad old flopping physics theories. 

How is it that despite such problems and failures, the theory of cold dark matter is still reverently preached in academia, like some religious dogma that each generation of authorities must pass on to the next? What happens is that scientists and science journalists periodically mislead us by claiming that dark matter has been observed.  The reports they give on this topic are very misleading. 

Let us look at a recent example. This summer there appeared a paper entitled "First Identification of a CMB Lensing Signal Produced by 1.5 Million Galaxies at z ∼4: Constraints on Matter Density Fluctuations at High Redshift." On August 2, 2022 a science journalist carelessly reported on this paper by writing a story with the untrue title "Dark  matter from 12 billion years ago detected for the 1st time," which appeared on www.space.com.  No dark matter was actually detected. 

We can unravel some of the wobbly analysis that was occurring by analyzing use of the phrase "dark matter" in the paper. We find this:

(1) The title makes no claim at all about detecting dark matter.

(2) The abstract of the paper makes it sound as if dark matter was detected, stating "We report the first detection of the dark matter distribution around Lyman break galaxies (LBGs) at high redshift through the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) lensing measurements with the public Planck PR3 κ map."

(3) The text of the paper makes no claim about observing dark matter. 

Let me back up claim (3) made above. I will quote all of the uses of the phrase "dark matter" in the text of the paper (the part below the abstract). There are only three uses of that phrase, which are quoted below:

(1) "Since galaxies are formed in dark matter halos through gas cooling, such an interplay can be studied by measuring the connection between dark matter halos and galaxies [see reviews by 1, 2]."

(2) "Galaxy-galaxy lensing, the cross-correlation between galaxy positions and weak lensing shear of background galaxies, is rapidly emerging as another powerful probe because it enables the direct measurement of dark matter distribution around galaxies [e.g., 8–11]"

(3) "In the halo model approach, the convergence profile is composed of 1-halo and 2-halo terms; κ(θ) = κ1h(θ) + κ2h(θ), where κ1h(θ) and κ2h(θ) are the contribution from dark matter halos around galaxies and neighboring halos, respectively."   

Those are the only references the body of the paper make to dark matter. None of them contain any mention of a detection or observation of dark matter. And the title of the paper makes no claim to have observed dark matter. Statement (2) above is incorrect: you cannot make "a direct measurement" of dark matter by studying "galaxy-galaxy" gravitational lensing.  So why did the abstract of the paper claim "we report the first detection of the dark matter distribution around Lyman break galaxies"? What seems to have gone on is that the scientists saw some sort of something, and interpreted what they saw within some speculative theoretical framework ("the halo model approach") assuming dark matter. That's rather like some believer that animal ghosts live in the clouds describing his latest cloud photo, and describing it as a nice photo of an animal ghost in the sky. 

This kind of thing goes on all the time. Nowadays very many scientists make claims in both the titles of their papers and the abstracts of their papers that are not justified by any observations mentioned in their papers. If dark matter had been detected, it would have been the scientific find of the decade, and we cannot believe that such a detection would go unmentioned in the title of the paper "First Identification of a CMB Lensing Signal Produced by 1.5 Million Galaxies at z ∼4: Constraints on Matter Density Fluctuations at High Redshift." All that occurred was some believers in dark matter seeing something and speculating that it was dark matter, which should not be confused with a dark matter observation. 

The extremely questionable space.com story on this paper is filled with dubious boasts that seems to be coming in equal amounts from the writer of the story and a scientist who is quoted. The reader is given the impression that dark matter was detected. No such thing occurred. Scientists merely saw some kind of gravitational lensing effect, and interpreted what they saw within some speculative framework involving a belief in dark matter. It was like some believer in magic fairies seeing a heavy rainstorm, and saying, "My, my, the magic fairies are very busy today producing rainfall." 

On August 30 we had a science story entitled "We don’t know if dark matter exists. So why do astronomers keep looking?" The story (written by a postdoctoral fellow) told us this: 

" 'Dark matter' is just a hypothesis. Physicists and astronomers may be chasing a phantom – but that doesn’t stop us from looking."

This was 28 days after www.space.com had reported on August 2 that dark matter had been detected. What explains the discrepancy? The likely explanation is that the August 2 story was baloney, and that no one has detected any dark matter. 

In 2018 there appeared this statement in the journal Science about a long-made claim of dark matter detection that didn't hold up:

"For 2 decades, physicists with an experiment called DAMA have claimed that particles of dark matter—the unseen stuff whose gravity appears to bind our galaxy—are bumping into atomic nuclei in their subterranean particle detector, even as other dark matter hunts come up empty. Now, physicists with a detector called COSINE-100, designed to mimic DAMA, present the most direct refutation yet of the findings. And in 2020, theorists identified a way in which the DAMA signal could have arisen inadvertently in the team’s analysis."

In 2021 it was reported that the DAMA claims had been even more thoroughly shot down. We read this statement:

"At last, the critical test has been performed: a completely independent team, ANAIS, has carried out an identical experiment to DAMA/LIBRA, replicating the study and testing its validity. With three complete years of data collected, ANAIS has ruled out the DAMA/LIBRA results in a model-independent way to better than 99% confidence. The world’s most controversial dark matter experiment has been busted, and it’s an incredible success for the scientific method."

On the same page the scientist author makes the self-contradictory claim that "while the astrophysical evidence supporting the existence of dark matter is overwhelming, every experiment designed and built to directly detect whatever particle might be responsible for dark matter has come up empty." The first part of the statement is false, and is contradicted by the second part of the statement. This just goes to show that no matter how many erroneous claims about dark matter have been revealed, scientists will just keep speaking carelessly on this topic. 

A notable example of scientists claiming to see things they never saw was when scientists in the BICEP2 project claimed with a great fanfare a few years ago that they had discovered evidence of gravitational waves from the very early universe. It is now generally recognized that such observations can be plausibly explained as something entirely different: mere dust observations. 

In the world of neuroscience, we get some examples of scientists claiming to see things they never saw. Over the course of a week, some scientists will cause a rodent to learn something, by doing something such as fear conditioning an animal so that it associates a metal shock plate with an electrical shock. Then the scientists will examine some very tiny synapses  in the animal, and look for some tiny bit of brain matter that is very slightly different after the animal was taught something. The scientists will then claim that they have observed an engram, some cells or synapses where a memory was stored. The observations never justify such a claim. Synaptic matter in the brain is constantly changing, because of what is called random remodeling. The average lifetimes of proteins in the brain are only a few weeks or less. Synapses are attached to dendritic spines that often have short lifetimes, and change their shapes or disappear over the space of a few weeks. If you examine some tiny part of an animal's brain (a few synapses), looking for changes over the course of a week, you will very often see changes even if the animal has not learned anything. So observing some very tiny change somewhere in a brain never justifies a claim that an engram (a storage place of a new memory) has been observed. 

Discussing erroneous ideas about a "depression gene," a psychiatrist commented on a case of scientists seeing things that were not there:

"First, what bothers me isn’t just that people said 5-HTTLPR mattered and it didn’t. It’s that we built whole imaginary edifices, whole castles in the air on top of this idea of 5-HTTLPR mattering. We 'figured out' how 5-HTTLPR exerted its effects, what parts of the brain it was active in, what sorts of things it interacted with, how its effects were enhanced or suppressed by the effects of other imaginary depression genes. This isn’t just an explorer coming back from the Orient and claiming there are unicorns there. It’s the explorer describing the life cycle of unicorns, what unicorns eat, all the different subspecies of unicorn, which cuts of unicorn meat are tastiest, and a blow-by-blow account of a wrestling match between unicorns and Bigfoot." 

A very common case of scientists claiming to see things they never saw is when neuroscientists claim without warrant to have observed "neural representations." We have robust evidence for only one type of representation in the brain: the low-level chemical representation in genes, where particular sets of nucleotides represent particular amino acids, according to the representation rules of the genetic code. Such representation occurs in the DNA of most cells (neurons as well as hundreds of other types of cells). There is no robust evidence for any other type of representation in the brain. No encoding system comparable to the genetic code but outside of DNA has ever been discovered in the brain. But neuroscientists just love to talk about "neural representations," as if brains had little depictions of things experienced or observed.  Whenever neuroscientists claim to have seen such a thing, they have no robust evidence to back up such a claim. As a paper states, "We still lack a clear, universal and widely accepted view on what it means for a nervous system to represent something, on what makes a neural activity a representation, and on what is represented." 

In the paper "The Dubious Credibility of Scientific Studies" by Natalie Ferrante of Stanford University, we read this:

"The current process of undertaking, implementing, reviewing, and finally publishing a scientific study is riddled with flaws, as study results are subjected to many biases and interpretations at every level between inception and publication. As a result, when these studies finally reach the public, they are often depicted in ways that fail to reflect the genuine results and are at times utterly incorrect. Industries touting their products, scientists influenced by grants and prestige, reviewers adhering to personal

political agendas, and journalists pressed to sell papers all in turn contribute to the inherently skewed depiction of scientific results to the public. These factors have allowed for a highly unpredictable credibility in scientific reporting, an observation that has been highly overlooked and disregarded. The dissemination and publicity of this incorrect or skewed information, which is believed to be scientifically accurate, can have a detrimental effect on the public in their everyday lives." 

Be skeptical when scientists have a passionate belief in X, and then claim that some shadowy thing they dimly detected (which could be any of a large variety of things) was an observation of X. 

Wishful Thinking Often Drives Science Activity

A recent article in The Atlantic is entitled "A Waste of 1000 Research Papers." The article is about how scientists wrote a thousand research papers trying to suggest that genes such as SLC6A4 were a partial cause of depression, one of the leading mental afflictions.  The article tells us, "But a new study—the biggest and most comprehensive of its kind yet—shows that this seemingly sturdy mountain of research is actually a house of cards, built on nonexistent foundations." 

Using data from large groups of volunteers -- between 62,000 and 443,000 people -- the scientific study attempted to find whether there was any evidence that any of the genes (such as SLC6A4 and 5-HTTLPR) linked to depression were more common in people who had depression. "We didn't find a smidge of evidence," says Matthew Keller, the scientist who led the study.  "How on Earth could we have spent 20 years and hundreds of millions of dollars studying pure noise?" asks Keller, suggesting that hundreds of millions of dollars had been spent trying to show a genetic correlation (between genes such as SLC6A4 and depression) that didn't actually exist. 

The article refers us to a blog post on the Keller study, one that comments on how scientists had tried to build up the gene 5-HTTLPR as a causal factor of depression. Below is a quote from the blog post by Scott Alexander:

"What bothers me isn’t just that people said 5-HTTLPR mattered and it didn’t. It’s that we built whole imaginary edifices, whole castles in the air on top of this idea of 5-HTTLPR mattering. We 'figured out' how 5-HTTLPR exerted its effects, what parts of the brain it was active in, what sorts of things it interacted with, how its effects were enhanced or suppressed by the effects of other imaginary depression genes. This isn’t just an explorer coming back from the Orient and claiming there are unicorns there. It’s the explorer describing the life cycle of unicorns, what unicorns eat, all the different subspecies of unicorn, which cuts of unicorn meat are tastiest, and a blow-by-blow account of a wrestling match between unicorns and Bigfoot."

How is it that so many scientists came up with an answer so wrong?  One reason is that they used sample sizes too small. The article in The Atlantic explains it like this:

"When geneticists finally gained the power to cost-efficiently analyze entire genomes, they realized that most disorders and diseases are influenced by thousands of genes, each of which has a tiny effect. To reliably detect these miniscule effects, you need to compare hundreds of thousands of volunteers. By contrast, the candidate-gene studies of the 2000s looked at an average of 345 people! They couldn’t possibly have found effects as large as they did, using samples as small as they had. Those results must have been flukes—mirages produced by a lack of statistical power. "

Is this type of problem limited to the study of genes? Not at all. The "lack of statistical power" problem (pretty much the same as the "too small sample sizes" problem) is rampant and epidemic in modern neuroscience. Today's neuroscientists very frequently produce studies with way-too-low statistical power, studies in which there is a very high chance of a false alarm, because too-small sample sizes were used. 

It is well known that at least 15 animals per study group should be used to get a moderately convincing result. But very often neuroscience studies will use only about 8 animals per study group. If you use only 8 animals per study group, there's a very high chance you'll get a false alarm, in which the result is due merely to chance variations rather than a real effect in nature.  In fact, in her post "Why Most Published Neuroscience Studies Are False," neuroscientist Kelly Zalocusky suggests that neuroscientists really should be using 31 animals per study group to get a not-very-strong statistical power of .5, and 60 animals per study group to get a fairly strong statistical power of .8.  

This is the same “too small sample size” problem (discussed here) that plagues very many or most neuroscience experiments involving animals. Neuroscientists have known about this problem for many years, but year after year they continue in their errant ways, foisting upon the public too-small-sample-size studies with low statistical power that don't prove anything because of a high chance of false alarms.  Such studies may claim to provide evidence that brains are producing thinking or storing memories, but the evidence is "junk science" stuff that does not stand up to critical scrutiny. 

So part of the explanation for why the "depression gene" scientists were so wrong is that they used too-small sample sizes, producing results with way-too-low statistical power. But there's another big reason why they were so wrong: their research activity was driven by wishful thinking.  Showing that genes drive behavior or mental states has always been one of the major items on the wish list of scientists who favor reductionist materialism.  

If you're an orthodox Darwinist, you're pretty much locked in to the idea that genes control everything.  Darwinists believe that a progression from ape-like ancestors to humans occurred solely because of a change in DNA caused by random mutations.  So if you think that some difference in DNA is the sole explanation for the difference between humans and apes,  you've pretty much boxed yourself into the silly idea that every difference between a human and an ape boils down to some gene difference or DNA difference.  I call the idea silly because the genes that make up DNA basically specify proteins, but no one has a coherent idea for how a protein could cause a mental state such as sadness, imagination,  spirituality or curiosity, nor a coherent idea of how a three-dimensional body plan could ever be stored in DNA (written in a "bare bones" language limiting it to only very low-level chemical information such as the amino acids that make up a polypeptide chain that is the beginning of a three-dimensional protein molecule). 

So the scientists wanted very much to believe there were "genes for depression," and genes for almost every other human mental characteristic; and they let their belief desires drive their research activities. 

Does this happen rarely in the world of science? No, it happens all the time. Very much of modern scientific activity is driven by wishful thinking. It is easy to come up with examples that remind us of this "depression genes" misadventure:

• Countless “low statistical power” neuroscience papers have been written trying to suggest that LTP has something to do with memory, an idea which makes no sense given that LTP is an artificially produced effect produced by high-frequency stimulation, and given that LTP typically lasts only hours or days, in contrast to human memories that can persist for 50 years.
• Countless “low statistical power” neuroscience papers have been written trying to suggest that synapses or dendritic spines are involved in memory storage, an idea which makes no sense given that synapses and dendritic spines are made up of proteins with lifetimes of only a few weeks or less, and that neither synapses nor dendritic spines last for even a tenth of the time that humans can remember things (50 years or more).
• Countless “low statistical power” brain imaging studies have tried to show neural correlates of thinking or recall, but they typically show that such activities do not cause more than a 1% change in signal strength, consistent with random variations that we would see even if brains do not produce thinking or memory recall.
• Having a desire to reconcile the mutually incompatible theories of quantum mechanics and general relativity, physicists wrote thousands of papers filled with ornate speculations about something called string theory, a theory for which no evidence has ever been produced.
• Faced with biological organisms having functionally complex systems far more complex than any found in the most complex human inventions, and wishing fervently to avoid any hypothesis of design, scientists engaged in countless speculations about how such innovations might have been produced by random mutations of genomes, ignoring not merely the mathematical improbability of such "miracle of luck" events happening so many times, but also the fact that genomes do not specify body plans (contrary to the "DNA is a blueprint for your body" myth advanced to support such speculations).  
• Faced with an undesired case of very strong fine-tuning involving the Higgs boson or Higgs field, scientists wrote more than 1000 papers speculating about a theory called supersymmetry which tries to explain away this fine-tuning; but the theory has failed all experimental tests at the Large Hadron Collider.  Many of the same scientists want many billions more for the construction of a new and more powerful particle collider, so that their fervent wishes on this matter can be fulfilled. 
• Faced with an undesired result that the universe's expansion rate at the time of the Big Bang was apparently fine-tuned to more than 1 part in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, scientists wrote more than a thousand speculative “cosmic inflation” cosmology papers trying to explain away this thing they didn't want to believe in, by imagining a never-observed instant in which the universe expanded at an exponential rate (with the speculations often veering into multiverse speculations about other unseen universes). 
• According to this paper, scientists have written some 15,000 papers on the topic of "neural coding," something that scientists want to believe in because they want to believe the brain is like a computer (which uses coding).  But there is not any real evidence that the brain uses any type of coding other than the genetic code used by all cells, and no one has been able to discover any neural code used for either transmitting information in the brain or storing information in the brain.  Referring to spikes in brain electricity, this paper concludes "the view that spikes are messages is generally not tenable," contrary to the speculations of thousands of neuroscience papers. 
• Scientists have had no luck in trying to create a living thing in experiments simulating the early Earth, and have failed to create even a single protein molecule in such experiments. But because scientists really, really wish to find extraterrestrial life somewhere (to prove to themselves that the origin of life is easy to naturally occur), scientists want billions of dollars for a long-shot ice-drilling space mission looking for life on Jupiter's moon Europa.
• When the Large Hadron Collider produced some results that might have been preliminary signs of some new particle, physicists wrote more than 500 papers speculating about the interesting new particle they wanted to believe in, only to find the new particle was a false alarm. 
• Scientists ran many very expensive experiments attempting to look for dark matter, something that has never been observed, but which scientists devoutly hoped to find, largely to prove to themselves that their knowledge of large-scale cosmic structure is not so small. 

Quite a few of these cases seem to be "imaginary edifices" in which the main controlling factor is what a scientist wants to believe or does not want to believe. 

NASA visual of a long-shot mission to look for life on Europa

The article in The Atlantic states the following, painting a portrait of a science world with very serious problems: 

“ 'We’re told that science self-corrects, but what the candidate gene literature demonstrates is that it often self-corrects very slowly, and very wastefully, even when the writing has been on the wall for a very long time,' Munafo adds. Many fields of science, from psychology to cancer biology, have been dealing with similar problems: Entire lines of research may be based on faulty results. The reasons for this so-called “reproducibility crisis” are manifold. Sometimes, researchers futz with their data until they get something interesting, or retrofit their questions to match their answers. Other times, they selectively publish positive results while sweeping negative ones under the rug, creating a false impression of building evidence."

In the world of science academia, bad ideas arise, and often hang around way too long, even after the evidence has turned against such ideas, because what is really driving things is what scientists want to believe or do not want to believe.  Wishful thinking is in the driver's seat, and the result of that is quite a few houses of cards, quite a few castles in the air, quite a few imaginary edifices that are often sold as "science knowledge."