Primordial B-Mode Seekers Are Like Bigfoot Listeners

In March 2014 scientists of the BICEP2 study claimed to have found evidence for something called primordial B-modes. In great unison the science news began proclaiming that this was an epic discovery that confirmed the theory of cosmic inflation, a theory about what went on during the universe's first second. For the next few months very many scientists and “household name” news sources described the dubious claims of the BICEP2 scientists as if they were scientific fact. During these months this blog was one of a only tiny handful of sources disputing such claims.  During these months I published more than seven posts saying that the results were unreliable, that no evidence had been found to support the theory of cosmic inflation, and that no robust evidence had yet been found for either primordial B-modes or gravitational waves. 

By January 2015 the roof had caved in on this claimed breakthrough, with the journal Nature publishing a headline declaring the  discovery as "officially dead." Further analysis by scientists found that the results of the BICEP2 team can plausibly be explained as being the result of ordinary dust and something called gravitational lensing, without imagining that the observations are caused by anything having to do with gravitational waves, primordial B-modes, the Big Bang, or primordial cosmic inflation.  

Since then much additional effort has been expended trying to detect evidence for these primordial B-modes.  The effort (including a BICEP 3 project) has failed to find any evidence of such things. 

A telescope used to search for primordial B-modes (source)

To get an analogy for the scientists who spent all this effort looking for primordial B-modes, we might imagine some scientists planting lots of microphones in the deep woods, to listen for evidence of Bigfoot.  We can imagine a conference in which the scheme might have been hatched:

Professor Jones: How can we prove that Bigfoot exists? We're not getting anywhere with those cameras we planted in the woods. 

Professor Smith: I've got it! We'll plant lots of microphones in the woods, to listen for the sound of big heavy Bigfoot feet crushing leaves underneath them. 

Professor Jones: Oh, come on. There are deer and bears that walk around in the woods, and also hunters with big heavy boots. They would sound just like Bigfoot walking around. 

Professor Smith: Well, we can write analytic software that might be able to distinguish between the sound of deer crushing leaves underfoot, the sound of bears crushing leaves underfoot, the sound of heavy-booted hunters crushing leaves underfoot, and the sound of Bigfoot crushing leaves underfoot. 

Such a zany undertaking is a pretty good analogy for what is going on with the primordial B-mode seekers.  They are looking for incredibly faint trace signs of these primordial B-modes, but the problem is that wherever they look they find tons of noise from three other things that produce observational effects like would be produced by these primordial B-modes.  Those three things are dust (which is all over the place in space), synchrotron radiation and gravitational lensing.  So the scientists looking for such primordial B-modes are like people who have taken tape recordings in the deep woods, and are trying to distinguish the sound of Bigfoot feet crushing leaves from the sound of deer and bears and hunters crushing leaves.  

Is it fair to compare these primordial B-modes to Bigfoot? Yes, because these primordial B-modes and the theory behind them (the theory of cosmic inflation) are fanciful and unfounded in observations. We actually have some people who claimed to have seen Bigfoot and who have not recanted their observations, while no one has claimed to have observed primordial B-modes or cosmic inflation except some 2014 scientists who recanted their claims.  

The theory of cosmic inflation (originating around 1979) is an unnecessary add-on to the theory of the Big Bang that gained  substantial observation support by around 1965.  The theory of cosmic inflation is the theory that the universe underwent some astonishing transmogrification during its first second, transforming from an exponentially expanding universe to a universe undergoing only linear expansion (as we now observe it doing).  Transmogrification means to suddenly change dramatically as if by magic.  Since the theory of theory of cosmic inflation imagines such a thing, it would be more accurate to call it the theory of primordial cosmic transmogrification. 

For many decades cosmologists have been lost in a strange little world of fantasy whenever they dealt with this cosmic inflation theory. No evidence has ever existed that the theory is true. As different versions of the theory have kept failing, cosmologists keep producing new versions of the theory; and by now there are hundreds of versions of it, making predictions all over the map.  All attempts to provide some empirical support for it have failed, as nothing has come from searches for primordial B-modes that have gone on for years with fancy expensive equipment.  A 2019 article states, "Models such as natural and quadratic inflation that were popular several years ago no longer seem tenable, says theorist Marc Kamionkowski of Johns Hopkins University."  But rather than discarding a theoretical approach that isn't working, our  cosmologists keep spinning out more and more speculative ornate versions of the theory (which already has hundreds of different versions).  Cosmic inflation theory is correctly described as tribal folklore, the tribe being the very small band of people who describe themselves as cosmologists. 

We are often told that scientists abandon theories that fail observational tests, but in reality scientists often just respond to such failures by stubbornly creating ever-more-ornate and speculative versions of such theories. Similarly, if some detective thinks that Waldo Billerson killed his mother, but if the only blood found at the crime scene is found to be that of the mother and Abner Venders, the detective may try to patch up the observational failure by engaging in wild speculations, such as suggesting that maybe Waldo first bloodied Abner and then killed Waldo's mother, causing the blood of Abner not Waldo to be found at the crime scene where Abner never was. The speculations of cosmologists trying to patch up failing cosmic inflation models are far more ornate and complicated than the speculation I just mentioned. 

Noting the complete failure of searches for the primordial B-modes, a scientist recently stated, "If, however, future measurements continue to find no gravitational-wave signal, it will likely imply that we must seriously reconsider our inflationary models or perhaps dismiss inflation altogether, which would be a significant paradigm shift."  A more candid version of that statement would say something like this: "All these observational failures are making it pretty clear that cosmologists have been wasting their time for forty years messing around with groudless theories of primordial cosmic inflation." 

The 2015 discovery of gravitational waves from stellar objects was not a discovery of cosmology. There have been no important discoveries in cosmology in the past twenty years.  In a page entitled "The Pathologies of Cosmology," scientist M. J. Disney has stated the following:

"Cosmology must be the slowest moving branch of science. The number of practitioners per relevant observation is ridiculous. Consequently the same old things have to be said by the same old people (and by new ones) over and over and over again. For instance 'Cold Dark Matter' now sounds to me like a religious liturgy which its adherents chant like a mantra in the mindless hope that it will spring into existence. Much of cosmology is unhealthily self-referencing and it seems to an outsider like myself that cosmological fashions and reputations are made more by acclamation than by genuine scientific debate."

What he said about cold dark matter could be said just as rightfully  about primordial cosmic inflation. 

How Far Have Our Biology Origins Researchers Got?

Let us consider the question: how much progress has been made in resolving questions of biological origins? An interesting way of considering this question is to use a baseball analogy. We can ask: have our biology origins researchers scored a home run? Or have they merely reached third base, second base or a result less impressive?

We might reasonably say that we should not regard our biology origin researchers as having reached home plate until they've proven the origin of all biological organisms and all observed complex biological innovations. But let's use an easier standard. Let's merely say this: we should not regard our biology as having reached home plate until they've proven the origin of most biological organisms and most observed complex biological innovations. Under this standard, it must be judged that our biology origins researchers have not at all reached home plate.

But what about third base? Let's consider out biology researchers as having reached third base if they have proven the origin of many biological organisms and many complex visible biological innovations. Under this standard, it must be judged that our biology origins researchers have not at all reached third base.

But what about second base? Let's consider out biology researchers as having reached second base if they have proven the origin of some long-observed biological organisms and some long-observed complex visible  biological innovations. Under this standard, it must be judged that our biology origins researchers have not at all reached second base.

Our biologists have the theory that biological organisms and complex biological innovations arise because of random mutations and what they call natural selection (which is really just random mutations and the increased survival rate or reproduction rate of fitter organisms). But our biologists have not been able to prove that any long-observed biological organisms or long-observed very complex biological innovations appeared because of such a reason.

But what about first base? Generously granting three different possibilities, let's consider out biology researchers as having reached first base if they have proven that some kind of natural effect can produce some kind of complex visible biological innovation, or if they have credibly explained the origin of life from non-life, or if they have credibly explained the appearance of any single full-grown human body from a speck-sized egg. Under this standard, it must be judged that our biology origins researchers have not at all reached first base. 

We would say that this first-base would have been reached if scientists had been able to do some experiment showing that random mutations or so-called "natural selection" can produce some new type of never-before-observed complex visible biological innovation. Scientists have tried such experiments for many years, but no impressive results have come from them. Scientists have spent many years bombarding fruit flies with radiation, hoping to produce beneficial new random mutations. This has never resulted in any new complex visible inheritable biological innovation in a fruit fly. One very long-running evolution experiment claims to have produced a biochemical tweak in microscopic organisms that is slightly useful. But such a change in invisible microscopic organisms does not at all qualify as a complex visible biological innovation.

As for origin-of-life experiments, they have all failed to produce life from non-life. One occasionally hears about “building blocks of life” being created in such experiments, but such claims are inaccurate. The real “building blocks" of microscopic life are proteins, and the simplest living thing requires more than 100 different types of proteins. No one has ever created a protein in a laboratory experiment designed to simulate early Earth conditions. In fact, no experiment realistically simulating early Earth conditions has ever even produced any of the building blocks of the building blocks of life (amino acids or nucleotides). The famous Miller-Urey experiment certainly was not a realistic simulation of early Earth conditions. 

Considerable progress has been made in excavating and classifying fossils, but that is paleontology progress, not biology origins progress. A fossil merely tells us that some type of species lived at some particular time. Fossils don't tell us how a species came into existence. By far the most prominent occurrence in the fossil record is the Cambrian Explosion, when most of the animal phyla came into existence rather suddenly. Our biology origins researchers have no credible explanation for such an explosion of biological innovation and new functional information, an occurrence contrary to their "evolution by random mutations" explanations. 

A very important point is that the credibility of Darwinist explanations for biological origins is inversely proportional to the amount of organization, information, and fine-tuned complexity of living things.  The more organized and functionally complex and information-rich biological organisms are, the less credible Darwinism is as an explanation for such organisms and their features.  During the past hundred years the amount of organization biologists have discovered in living thing has increased exponentially.  We know know that organisms are millions of times more organized and functionally complex and information-rich than Darwin ever dreamed. There is no sign of this trend slowing, and we have every reason to suspect that each decade will continue to reveal ever-more-astonishing levels of organization and dynamic functional wizardry in living things.  The more such discoveries continue, the more justified we are in saying that biologists have not got to first base in explaining biological origins.  

A very notable failure of our biologists is their complete failure to credibly explain morphogenesis, the progression from a speck-sized fertilized egg to a full grown newborn baby. For many years many biologists have told us a childish lie about this topic: the lie that a human arises because a blueprint for how to make a human is read from DNA. DNA contains no such blueprint.  DNA does not specify how to make a human body or any organ of that body or any cell in that body.  DNA merely specifies very low-level chemical information such as which amino acids make up a protein molecule.  The lie that our bodies arise from the reading of a blueprint in DNA is a very childish lie, both because of the nonexistence of such a body structure blueprint in DNA, and the fact that blueprints don't build things. Things only get built from blueprints because there are intelligent agents that read blueprints and then get ideas about how to build based on such blueprints. There is nothing we know of below the neck of a female that could read and understand a blueprint for making humans if it happened to exist in a DNA molecule.  The claims that humans arise from the reading of DNA blueprints for making humans is therefore as childish as the claim that astronauts reached the moon by riding a giant balloon.  

You may realize the "barely a few steps beyond the batter's box" status of biological origins explanations when you consider that each eukaryotic cell is so complex it has been compared to a factory, and scientists cannot even explain how a single eukaryotic cell is able to reproduce (something as marvelous as a factory splitting into two copies of itself, or a jet aiplane splitting into two copies of itself). Scientists also cannot explain how the vast hierarchical organization of a  full-grown human body is able to arise from the simplicity of a speck-sized fertilized ovum. There is no blueprint or recipe or program for how to make a human in such an ovum or its DNA, contrary to the outrageous misstatements on this topic that many biologists have made (statements contradicted by many other scientists telling us that such statements are very false indeed).  

Going from the physical side to the mental side, we find that biology origins researchers have no credible explanations for the origin of human minds or any minds. Their attempts to explain the principal  human mental phenomena as brain activity fail as badly as some child trying to jump to the top of the clouds.  There is still nothing like any credible theory for how a brain could store memories for a lifetime or even a year, and no credible theory for how a brain could instantly retrieve a detailed memory after someone hears a name or sees an image. As discussed at this site, the low-level facts we have learned about the brain reveal it to be an organ with enormous signal noise, unreliable synaptic transmission, billions of synaptic-gap signal slowers, and very high molecular turnover, an organ bearing no resemblance to a system for permanently storing and instantly retrieving memories with high information accuracy. There are no credible neural explanations for any such things as self-hood or beliefs or the arising of abstract ideas. 

The sad truth is that because they have failed to provide a single credible narrative of a natural origin of any very organized and complex visible biological innovation, have failed to credibly explain the origin of life, and have failed to credibly explain morphogenesis, our biology origins researchers have never even got to first base. But they brag and strut about as if they were frequent home-run hitters. It's kind of as if some member of a baseball team were to frequently brag about playing on the team, and often pose (after the games) for staged photos of himself sliding into home plate with a big proud smile, even though he had played season after season without even hitting a single, and without ever even getting to first base.

But there are many biologists who have made great accomplishments, including: 

• cellular biologists who have categorized the roughly 200 types of cells in the human body and the enormous fine-tuned complexity of such cells;
• biochemists who have documented the fantastically intricate chemistry involved in every living process; 
• protein experts and geneticists who have documented the specialized functions of many thousands of types of protein molecules in the human body, each type its own separate complex invention;
• systems biology experts who have documented the enormous complexity and functional inter-dependence of very complex biological systems such as protein complexes that require many different proteins acting together like team members to produce a particular effect. 

As such scientists continue to discover ever-more stratospheric levels of organization and fine-tuned intricacy and dynamic coordinated component choreography within organisms, the explanatory boasts of biology origins researchers sound more-and-more hollow. 

You will find few biologists candidly confessing to the lack of biological origins explanatory progress described above. But occasionally you will find some who make statements pointing in such a direction.  This can happen when it is confessed that the study of some thing is "in its infancy."  For example, a scientist may confess that the study of cell reproduction is "in its infancy," or that the study of organ formation is "in its infancy" or that the study of how humans recall memories is "in its infancy," or that the study of how memories persist through a lifetime is "in its infancy."  For example, one mainstream scientific paper states that "our study of animal morphogenesis is really in its infancy." Such confessions  point in the direction of what I have written in this post.   "In its infancy" is equivalent to "haven't yet got to first base." Very strangely, we may hear from the same person inconsistent combinations of humility and hubris.  A scientist may try to insinuate in one sentence that scientists understand human origins, and may elsewhere confess that the study of morphogenesis is in its infancy or that the study of how minds arise is in its infancy, failing to see the contradiction between these claims, like someone claiming in one sentence that he is a geology expert and confessing elsewhere that he does not know what causes earthquakes or volcanoes. 

A New "After Death Communication" Study Flip-Flops Around

Reports of the paranormal come in an extremely wide variety.  One interesting type of report is one that is sometimes given the rather poorly chosen name "After Death Communication."  In such a report someone may experience some mysterious effect he may regard as having come from some person who died. For example:

• Someone may report that while awake he heard the voice of someone who died.
• Someone may report that while awake he saw some human form that looked like someone who died.
• Someone may report some mysterious hard-to-explain event occurring at the time someone died or shortly thereafter. 
• Someone may report having some "feeling of presence" in which he someone gets the idea that some deceased person is near. 
• Someone may report some hard-to-explain event that he regards as some kind of sign of manifestation of someone who died. 
• Someone may have an unusually high number of dreams about someone who died. 
• Someone may have some particularly vivid dream about someone who died. 

The term "After Death Communication" is a poor term to use for the objective study of such reports, because: 

(1) The term is too limiting. Having only some vague "feeling of presence" of a deceased person is not actually communication in the sense of words, thoughts or ideas transmitted.  Also, seeing something  or hearing something that is interpreted as a manifestion of some spiritual power (possibly a deceased person) is not communication in the sense of words, thoughts or ideas transmitted.  And dreaming (either very often or sometimes vividly) of some deceased person is not typically communication in the sense of words, thoughts or ideas transmitted. 

(2) The term "After Death Communication" is not an objective term for the discussion of reports such as those mentioned in the bullet list above, because such a term seems to presuppose one particular explanation of such reports (that they come from some deceased person).  It is much better to have a neutral term that does not suggest any conclusion about the cause of such reports, a term as neutral as the noncommittal term "Unidentified Flying Object." A good noncommittal term for the type of reports listed above might be some term such as "Death-Related and Deceased-Related Anomalies" (DRADRA).  Such a term involves no presupposition about the cause of the phenomena, and the relation referred to may or may not be purely some mental association made by the observer.

A recent scientific paper made a survey of people reporting things like that in the bullet list above.  We end up with quite a bit of waffling about in regard to the results. Specifically:

(1) The survey form uses mainly the term "ADC" or "After Death Communication" as if the authors had the idea (or were trying to suggest to the survey participants) that certain phenomena involve some type of communication between deceased people and the living. 

(2) One of the papers discussing the survey results is entitled "The phenomenology and impact of hallucinations concerning the deceased," just as if the authors had an interpretation completely the opposite of what is suggested by the survey form. 

(3) Another of the papers discussing the survey results (by essentially the same authors as the other paper) is entitled "Perceptual phenomena associated with spontaneous experiences of after-death communication: Analysis of visual, tactile, auditory and olfactory sensations." This paper mentions three possible explanations: "(1) they are the result of hallucinations or day-to-day thoughts about the deceased; (2) they are subjective phenomena reflecting the extrasensory perception of remote events; or (3) they constitute objective phenomena, perceived more solidly, as if within the physical world." The synopsis ends by saying, "These elements are more compatible with hypotheses 2 and 3 than hypothesis 1." 

So this paper seems to be arguing (or presenting evidence) against the hypothesis that such phenomena are caused by hallucinations. So why then did basically the same set of authors entitle their first paper (about the same survey data) as "The phenomenology and impact of hallucinations concerning the deceased"? 

The practice of using the term "hallucinations" to describe reports of hard-to-explain events is an appalling one.  The authors have provided no justification for the use of the word "hallucinations" to report such events, and should not have used such a word in the title of one of their papers.  The paper states the following:

"Surprisingly, 36.4% of our respondents reported that they were not alone at the time of their ADC, and of these, 21.0% asserted that the ADC was witnessed by their companions. Also related to the perceived evidentiality of the experiences, 24.4% of respondents stated that they had received information that was previously unknown to them (often concerning circumstances of the deceased's passing)."

Such results don't sound like hallucinations, so why have our study authors used the word "hallucinations" in their title?

The study authors report getting very many affirmative answers from their study, and would have got more affirmative answers if they had asked additional types of questions. No questions are asked about mysterious anomalies on the day of someone's death or the day of someone's funeral, and no questions are asked about hard-to-explain item appearances or item movements that an observer thinks is somehow associated with a deceased person. For example, someone may mysteriously see a picture of a deceased person falling or moving, or mysteriously find some item associated with a deceased person, in some way that cannot be accounted for, as if it "appeared out of nowhere" or was teleported to where it was found. 

I have observed quite a few interesting anomalies that may be classified as examples of "Death-Related and Deceased-Related Anomalies" (DRADRA).  My long and interesting post here discusses such anomalies, along with many spooky and inexplicable things I have seen. 

Yesterday I had an experience that could be classified as another example of a DRADRA. Just after having a dream in which a kind of shadowy indistinct human figure seemed to approach my bed, I woke up and found myself feeling colder than I have ever felt in bed. At the time (about 12:30 AM) no running fan was pointed at me, the nearby windows were all closed and the outdoor temperature was about 62  degrees. I was fully clothed, wearing both a cotton tee-shirt and silk pants. 

Feeling chilled to the bone, I put on an extra shirt, an extra pair of sweat pants, and put a blanket and a sheet on my body. For about a minute, I thought that I was still too cold and that I would have to retrieve another blanket. But then I felt warm enough. Within about 5 or 10 minutes I had taken off the blanket and the sheet, and not many minutes later I took off the second shirt and the second pair of pants, returning to the same dress state I was in when I woke up.  It was just as if the temperature around me had suddenly dropped by 30 degrees, and then had gradually returned to normal in the next twenty minutes.  The same baffling coldness was reported by my wife as occurring at around the same time that I noticed it. 

What could have caused the extreme chill? It wasn't any fever coming on, because I have had no fever in the past week. We may wonder whether the anomaly was related to my dream (just before waking up) of a shadowy indistinct human figure approaching my bed.  It is said that a ghost may appear by drawing the heat from a small space, causing a sudden chill.  Accounts of ghost sightings often involve reports of strange drops in temperature. 

Near my bed was an air conditioner, but it was not running in air conditioning mode during the incident, and is set to turn off at 71 degrees, meaning it could not have been the source of a cold room. 

Lacking any actual sighting (outside of a dream) of a ghost-like figure, we cannot classify this as an apparition sighting.  It can merely be classified as yet another DRADRA anomaly in my experience. 

The figure I saw in my dream (just before waking up) had a shadowy indistinct appearance like that of the visual below from a clip art site.

False Headlines in This Month's Astronomy News

Nowadays a large fraction of the neuroscience news and the psychology news and the natural history news is clickbait making untrue or unreliable claims. We may hear of basically worthless experimental studies suffering from one or more grave procedural defects such as insufficient sample sizes, a lack of a blinding protocol, unreliable subjective methods for judging fear in animals, dubious "slice and dice" statistical manipulations or a lack of a hypothesis to be tested before gathering data. Or we may hear of some natural history claim based on the skimpiest fossil fragments or dubious projections or doubtful assumptions derived after guesswork was done on fragmentary data about the genomes of extinct species.  But it is not merely neuroscience news and psychology news and natural history news that is infested with untrue headlines. Many of the headlines we read in the astronomy news are untrue.

Let us look at some examples, using only examples from this month (September 2021).  It will come as no suprise that the first example comes from the Daily Galaxy site at www.dailygalaxy.com, an "astronomy news" web site where there very often appears untrue  clickbait headlines.  In many cases the headlines simply fail to match what is stated in the story under the headlines. In many other cases, what is stated in the story is just plane wrong. 

A recent story on the site had this headline: "Fingerprints of the Big Bang: SphereX Mission Will Probe First Seconds of the Universe." But the NASA page describing the SphereX mission mentions nothing at all about it having anything to do with studying the Big Bang. The NASA page describes SphereX as a mission that will "collect data on more than 300 million galaxies along with more than 100 million stars in the Milky Way in order to explore the origins of the universe." The phrase "to explore the origins of the universe" is inappropriate and inaccurate here, and is not repeated later on the page, when we merely read "Astronomers will use the mission to gather data on more than 300 million galaxies, as well as more than 100 million stars in our own Milky Way," without using the phrase "to explore the origins of the universe." There is a type of telescopic mission that helps to shed light on the universe's very early years: one that studies what is called the cosmic background radiation.  The SphereX mission is not such a mission. 

There is actually a reason why it is physically impossible that anyone will ever build a telescope that probes the first seconds of the universe. The reason is that the first 300,000 years of the universe's is forever blocked from being observed.  Cosmologists say that during the first 300,000 years of the universe's history, before any atoms formed, the universe was so dense with matter and energy that any light from the first 300,000 years most have been hopelessly scattered, making observation of the first 300,000 years physically impossible.  Light from the first 300,000 years must have been scattered so bad it would be like passing light through a million prisms, or passing an email message through a million email message scramblers. 

So it will forever be impossible to invent a telescope that "probes the first seconds of the universe," just as it will forever be impossible to invent a telescope that even probes any of the first hundred thousand years of the universe.  You can't look back that far, because the density blocks all observations from the universe's first 100,000 years. 

Another Daily Galaxy article this month had this headline: "Mysteries of the Primordial Universe Before the Big Bang." Nothing whatsoever is known of any state of the universe before the Big Bang, which was, as far as we know, the absolute beginning of the universe. 

Then there is a recent Daily Galaxy story entitled "NASA's ENIGMA: 'We Have Found the Building Blocks of Life.' "  This headline is misleading, and it does not correspond to any discovery made by NASA of any building blocks of life.  The building blocks of macroscopic life are cells, and the building blocks of one-celled microscopic life are mainly functional proteins. Neither cells nor functional proteins have ever been observed in space except in spaceships of space stations built by humans.  The story does not even mention any discovery of the building blocks of the building blocks of life (amino acids).  

In the text of the story we read a statement that is half false and half true. After someone refers to proteins as "nanomachines," we read: "We are making huge strides in understanding the evolution of the smallest nano machines that enabled biological metabolism and designing their analogues in the laboratory." To the contrary, while scientists are making some progress in designing artificial proteins, scientists have never made any real progress in understanding the origin of the millions of different types of protein molecules in the animal and plant kingdoms.  The origin of each one of these types of protein molecules is something we would never expect to occur under Darwinian assumptions.  

Most types of protein molecules are arrangements of hundreds of amino acids in just the right way to achieve a functional end. We would no more expect any such protein molecule to arise accidentally than we would expect a functional paragraph of text to arise from some horde of typing monkeys.  You do not get around this difficulty by evoking "natural selection," for appealing to such a thing is like imagining some quality judge among the typing monkeys who will make copies whenever one of them produces a functional paragraph by random keystrokes. There will be no accidental functional paragraph with or without such a presence. In the scientific paper here, a Harvard scientist says, "A wide variety of protein structures exist in nature, however the evolutionary origins of this panoply of proteins remain unknown."

Then in early September there was a story on www.scitechdaily.com entitled "Astrophysicists Identify 'Significant Reservoirs' of Organic Molecules Necessary To Form the Basis of Life."  The story discussed University of Leeds observations of three chemicals (cyanoacetylene, acetonitrile, and cyclopropenylidene) that are neither the building blocks of life nor the building blocks of the building blocks of one-celled life. It is not at all true that these chemicals are "necessary to form the basis of life." I can find no mention of cyanoacetylene being present in any organism. Acetonitrile is a toxic substance.  A wikipedia.org article on cyclopropenylidene says, "On Earth, cyclopropenylidene is only seen in the laboratory due to its reactivity."

A person being interviewed by the story mentions some chemicals (amino acids and sugars) that are actually building blocks of the building blocks of microscopic life, but these chemicals were not detected when the reported observations were made (and are mentioned only once in the scientific paper, in an extraneous "name dropping" type of way not referring to an observation). A clumsy attempt is made to associate the observed biologically worthless chemicals with important unobserved molecules on kind of grounds like the grounds that the first could be rearranged into the second.  This is as lame as trying to suggest that the sentence "dsdgsaiu weasdg owqeweqow nsdosa ndgodenw qoenewqn qwent weqodr tnqwe oqowent weqt nqwe odsan odgagns" is kind of a useful instruction because the letters could be rearranged into a useful instruction.  

Another press report on this University of Leeds study uses the common shady reporting technique of the unattributed quote. The press report has the false news headline "Chances of alien life in our galaxy are ‘far more likely than first thought.’" But who is it said this? The story does not mention anyone saying such a thing, and we should suspect that no one actually said that.  The observations did nothing to show that life is more likely than we thought. The story makes the incorrect statement, "They found large reservoirs of precursor molecules which are 'stepping stones' to complex molecules needed for life, such as sugars, amino acids and ribonucleic acid." No, the three molecules observed are not "stepping stones" to sugars, amino acids or ribonucleic acids. You cannot make any of those things by tweaking cyanoacetylene, acetonitrile, or  cyclopropenylidene. 

The original press release by the University of Leeds began with this statement: "Analysis of unique fingerprints in light emitted from material surrounding young stars has revealed 'significant reservoirs' of large organic molecules necessary to form the basis of life, say researchers."  This single sentence contains three errors.  First, the molecules in question (cyanoacetylene, acetonitrile, and cyclopropenylidene) are not at all necessary for life, and  are neither building blocks of life nor any of the building blocks of the building blocks of one-celled life or multicellular life. Second, none of the three molecules is a large organic molecule. Large organic molecules contains scores or hundreds or thousands of atoms  (most protein molecules have thousands of atoms); but none of the three molecules in question (cyanoacetylene, acetonitrile, and cyclopropenylidene) has more than six atoms in it. The three molecules in question (cyanoacetylene, acetonitrile, and cyclopropenylidene) are correctly described as some of the smallest of all known organic molecules.  The error of calling such molecules "large organic molecules" occurs in the title of the scientific paper. Nowadays the titles of scientific papers often contain erroneous language. 

Third, nothing remotely like "reservoirs" were detected (the term referring to a lake-like supply). The observations of these organic molecules are observations of extremely tenuous amounts roughly 100 million trillion times less dense than the density of matter in a reservoir.   Table 3 of the relevant paper lists a total of roughly 10²¹ grams of the three chemicals occurring over a length of 50 astronomical units.  An astronomical unit is the distance between the earth and the sun. A cube with a size of 50 astronomical units contains 10⁴¹ cubic centimeters, to use a figure I get when doing a Google search for "50 astronomical units in cubic centimeters."  So the so-called "reservoirs" contain the three organic molecules in an amount of roughly .00000000000000000001 gram per cubic centimeter, which is a density about 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 times less than the density of matter in a reservoir of water. 

The densities of these molecules (cyanoacetylene, acetonitrile, and cyclopropenylidene) in space are clarified by Figure 1 of the paper here, where we get some figures on fractional abundances of various chemicals in the interstellar medium between stars. Using the figures in that table, and the commonly stated figure that molecular clouds have a density of about 300 molecules per cubic centimeter (300 million molecules per cubic meter), we can make the table below:

Molecule	Sym-bol	Relative abundance in molecular clouds	Absolute abundance in a molecular cloud with an average density of 300 million molecules per cubic meter
cyanoacetylene	HC3N	About 1 particle in 100 million	Roughly 3 molecules per cubic meter
acetonitrile	CH3CN	About 1 particle in a billion	Less than 1 molecule per cubic meter
cyclopropenylidene	C3H2	Negligible	Negligible

So the densities of these molecules in the so-called "reservoirs" is something like  100,000,000,000,000,000,000 times less dense than an actual reservoir  (which contains about 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 water molecules per cubic centimeter). Both the press release and the scientific paper  have misled us greatly by referring to "reservoirs" of such chemicals, a falsehood about as bad as calling a sneeze a "gigantic flash flood thunderstorm downpour." 

There has long been in use a term in astronomy to refer to extremely sparse scatterings of molecules in space: the term "cloud," as used in the phrase "molecular cloud." The term has always been objectionable, because such "molecular clouds" are vastly less dense than earthly clouds. According to the source here, molecular clouds in space have a density of about 2 x 10^-22 gram per cubic centimeter, which is roughly 10,000,000,000,000,000 times less dense than the density of earthly clouds (only about .000001 gram per cubic centimeter). Earthly clouds are very roughly about a million times less dense than liquid water.  When astronomers eager for publicity start using the term "reservoir" rather than "cloud" to refer to  molecular clouds, they are making it sound as if certain units of space are a million times more dense than earthly clouds, when such units of space are  roughly 10,000,000,000,000,000 times less dense than earthly clouds. Such language is something like a billionfold trillionfold deception, and is numerically far more outrageous than some pauper with a net worth of a few pennies insinuating he is one of the world's richest billionaires. 

 I have referred above to only stories from September 2021. Documenting all of the misleading news clickbait astronomy stories of the past five years would require a long volume. 

Let us compare the amount of clickbait and misleading news in two different areas: astronomy and high technology.  There is some clickbait and hype on sites such as www.wired.com devoted mainly to covering developments in high technology, but not that much. Why? Because the high-tech world has been very good over the years at providing a steady stream of impressive new devices and software. So you can have a very exciting site discussing developments in high technology, without having to do much hype and clickbait.  Nowadays there's always some exciting new app or phone model or gaming device or game that can be discussed.  Things have worked better than anyone dreamed back around 1990, when few dreamed that palm-sized devices would be far more powerful than any desktop computer then available. 

But in the astronomy world, we have a different situation.  Things haven't worked out as well as people hoped around 1960. It was hoped that Mars or Venus might be fairly habitable. That didn't work out. It was hoped that life would be found on Mars. That did not occur, according to most experts. It was greatly hoped that attempts to listen to radio signals from other civilizations living on other planets would be successful. This has not occurred, despite decades of efforts. So in some ways the situation in astronomy (not very much exciting happening since 1970) has been rather the opposite of what happened in the high tech world (a steady stream of very  exciting outcomes occurring since about 1977). 

So what do you do if you have some astronomy web site, trying to keep up your readership (or an agency like NASA trying to keep up your funding)? You may feel a need to resort to hype and clickbait and "carnival barking" to keep people interested. If this only involved people wasting some screen time checking out "not much there" headlines, it would not be so bad.  But sometimes this hype and clickbait and "carnival barking" involves leading people to false ideas about matters of great philosophical importance.  Very much of the misleading astronomy news has been helping to spread the erroneous idea that scientists are gaining an understanding of natural origins of life or intelligent life, something that has not at all been occurring.  

In a recent essay on science, a writer states, " In my experience, it is the norm, rather than the exception, for cited claims in popular science books and review papers to misstate the claims of their sources." You might reasonably make the same claim about university press releases, which nowadays tend to have ridiculous  amounts of hype, exaggeration and untruth about the studies they are discussing (like the case I just discussed of three different errors in the first sentence of a university press release).  It would be naive to place the blame for this entirely on careless writers in university press offices. The blame also must be placed on the authors of scientific papers, who often give inaccurate titles to their papers, and often allow wildly inaccurate press releases about their research to be published by their universities, without making sure their research is described by an accurate press release.  It is rather obvious why such oversight conveniently occurs: when a sensationalized misleading  news press release goes out, more people will read and cite a scientific study (to the benefit of the authors of the paper, who are judged partially by how many people have cited their papers).  

So the scientist said while laughing loudly