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. 

Will Artemis Be an Utter Miss?

Viewed from a scientific results perspective, the Apollo progam was a very low "bang for the buck" undertaking. The cost of the progam in 1960's dollars was 24 billion dollars, an amount that has been estimated as about $194 billion dollars in 2020 dollars. Nothing of any scientific interest was discovered. If you doubt this, just try to name a single thing that was ever discovered by Apollo astronauts. You will not be able to think of anything. 

President John Kennedy made the Apollo program one of his top priorities. He should have instead made civil rights that type of priority. Kennedy failed to advance civil rights at a time when the US was ripe for progress in this area. Thankfully his successor Lyndon Johnson pushed through great progress in civil rights, and the results were monumental achievements such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. The same Cold War rationale given for the Apollo program could have been given for passing civil rights legislation in the early 1960's.  A strong argument could have been made about the necessity of fixing civil rights to deprive the Soviets of one of their major anti-US talking points, involving racial injustice in the US. 

The rationale for the Apollo program was basically a Cold War rationale, not a scientific rationale. It was all about "winning the Space Race" to try to show the superiority of US capitalism over Soviet communism. This rationale now seems very strange to thinkers in the twenty-first century. Why did people think that you could show capitalism was better than communism by landing men on the moon?

Now NASA has a new program called Artemis, with a giant new type of rocket. They plan to land more astronauts on the moon. Why would someone want to land more people on this lifeless rock, about the dullest place imaginable?

NASA has a page trying to justify the Artemis project, but it fails to make any convincing case for it. 

When you click on the links shown above, you get only the skimpiest statements that sound like vaporous PR fluff. Clicking on the "Discovery" link merely gives you this sentence: "With Artemis, we’re building on more than 50 years of exploration experience to reignite America’s passion for discovery." No substance there. That "more than 50 years of exploration experience" includes previous trips to the moon, so why bother going again? Clicking on "Economic Opportunity" merely gives you this sentence: "Artemis missions enable a growing lunar economy by fueling new industries, supporting job growth, and furthering the demand for a skilled workforce." This is pretty much a "welfare for rocket builders" rationale, a "big handout" to wealthy corporations. That's no persuasive reason. Clicking on "Inspiration for a new generation" merely gives you this little piece of PR fluff:

"We will explore more of the Moon than ever before with our commercial and international partners. Along the way, we will engage and inspire new audiences – we are the Artemis Generation."

There's no need to explore the moon with astronauts. The moon has nothing interesting, and has already been thoroughly mapped with unmanned probes and telescopes. The prediction about audiences being engaged seems dubious. During the last two moon landings, TV audience ratings plummeted. People quickly lost interest in moon landings after a few successful moon landings had occurred. 

We have on the same page an unconvincing video. We have an astronomer claim that the moon is a "treasure trove of science." That's baloney. Science with a capital "S" can be defined as facts obtained by observations and experiments, and science with a small "S" can be defined as the process of searching for truth by systematically observing and doing experiments. In neither sense is the moon "a treasure trove of science." In fact, no important scientific discoveries came from NASA's manned missions to the moon. There are no treasures of any type to be found on the moon: just dull lifeless rocks. 

We next hear the untrue claim that the moon "holds opportunities for us to make discoveries about our home planet, about our sun," and our solar system. No, it doesn't. We won't learn important new truths about the sun or Earth by landing more people on the moon. The rest of the video is just PR fluff with no more weight than a moonbeam. NASA has  failed to present a compelling online rationale for the Artemis project. What we are given has the intellectual weight of a cornflake commercial, and sounds about as truthful as some used car salesman's pitch. 

Equally unconvincing is an article on www.nbcnews.com entitled "Why putting people on the moon (again) is so worth the expense." We hear that a woman and a person of color will be sent to the moon. Much better to spend the Artemis money helping women and people of color so they can help pay their soaring rents here on Earth.  We read this: "The last stage of the three-part plan for Artemis is to set up a moon base, possibly by 2034, that will serve as a test run for sending humans to Mars." You don't justify one boondoggle (sending people to live on the moon) by insinuating that it will help with another boondoggle (sending people to live on Mars).  And sending people to the moon is not a decent "test run" for sending people to Mars, just as sending people to Vermont in the winter is not a test run for sending people to live in Antarctica.  

Conditions on Mars are very different from conditions on the moon. One of the biggest hazards in building a Mars base is the presence of dust storms that might cause astronauts and their bases to be plagued by fine dust. You can't do a "test run" for that by putting up a base on the airless moon, which has zero winds.  The idea that you need to spend tens of billions building a moon base as a "test run" for a Mars base is fallacious. Spending only 1 percent of such funds, NASA could create on Earth a Mars simulator that would properly simulate conditions on Mars (including dust storms). 

On another web page we read the first Briton in space (Helen Sharman) give some unpersuasive reasoning claiming that the Artemis program will help humans on Earth. We read this:

" 'Sending people to the Moon means we’ve got to invest in radiation protection,' Dr Sharman says. 'This gives us an understanding of how we might protect people on Earth who are undergoing cancer treatment. And it may help us to deal with a radiation incident on Earth, be it intended, say in warfare, or an accident such as Fukushima.' ”

This statement is an insult to the intelligence of everyone who reads it. Americans have understood the simple facts of radiation protection since the earliest days of the Cold War, in the late 1940's. Those facts are very simple: the more matter you have between yourself and some radiation source, and the denser the matter, the better you are protected. It's good to have three inches of steel, and if you don't have that, two meters of dirt or two meters of solid walls will work as well.  The idea that we need to go to the moon to understand the very simple matter of radiation protection (something we have understood since the 1940's) is preposterous. 

Sharman uses the "spinoff" reasoning that has so long been used to try to justify the Apollo project. NASA let spread  legends that it had invented Teflon (invented in 1941 before NASA existed), and the powered drink Tang (invented a year before NASA's birth). In the Chicago Tribune we read this:

"One widely held myth is that NASA, during the race to the moon, developed miniaturized computing circuits and personal computers. In reality, the first tiny transistor-laden chips were developed more than a decade before Apollo astronauts landed on the moon." 

And personal computers were invented by small private companies such as MITS and Apple in the 1970's, not by NASA. Sharman says, "AI, robotics, automation, miniaturisation and sensors came out of the Apollo missions," which is a give-you-the-wrong-idea kind of claim, because none of these things were invented by the Apollo program, and Apollo did not involve substantial advances in AI or robotics or automation. Apollo involved manned landings, not automated robotic landings. The long wikipedia.org article on the history of artificial intelligence (AI) does not mention the Apollo program or NASA, nor does the 24-page paper here. 

NASA is a privileged fiefdom where people have somehow got the idea that they are entitled to many billions of dollars per year in funding, even for projects of very little value (like some billionaire's teenage son who believes he is entitled to a $5000 weekly allowance). If billions have to be spent on space, rather than wasting billions on low-value boondoggle projects (such as Artemis or a Uranus orbiter or NASA's poorly-designed recent Mars mission), it would be better to spend such funds on useful space projects such as some system for protecting our planet from the very real danger of asteroid collisions or comet collisions that might make our planet all but uninhabitable. Or money could be spent on something that might have a big economic impact, such as space-based solar energy satellites or asteroid mining. 

As for doing scientific work producing important discoveries, that will never come from the Artemis project. There are 1000 unfunded scientific projects that are not being done which would all give more important results than anything Artemis will produce. Many of these projects are not being funded because scientists are afraid to do research that might upset their cherished beliefs, and because so much money is being wasted on very expensive boondoogle projects such as Artemis. We should cut a large fraction of NASA's budget, and reassign part of that to something like a National Discovery Administration, which would have a goal of funding many small research projects, all high "bang for the buck" research projects, mostly projects researching important unanswered questions of life and mind. Carried out with sufficient scope, in a way that disregards research taboos that are keeping us in the dark, research into minds can involve a hundred important mysteries related to our welfare and fundamental questions about who we are. Minds are vastly more worthy of investigation than dull lifeless rocks such as the moon. 

The Artemis project of returning astronauts to the lifeless moon is a prominent example of what you might call "dead end science." There are many examples of dead end science, including:

• physicists wasting endless hours writing speculative papers on impossible-to-verify versions of string theory;
• cosmologists wasting endless hours making impossible-to-verify speculations about the universe's first second (utterly unobservable because of the extreme density at such a time);
• biologists endlessly shocking the feet of rodents in memory experiments that tell us nothing because they are so poorly designed;
• neuroscientists doing endless MRI scans of people looking for neural correlates of thinking or recall that fail to show up in appreciable variations in signal strength (the variations generally being no greater than we would expect to occur by chance);
• physicists endlessly colliding together particles at nearly the speed of light in super-expensive machinery, trying without success to find evidence of their beloved but groundless theory of supersymmetry;
• neuroscientists endlessly doing intricate studies of brain wiring hoping without success that such wiring analysis will shed light on how humans think, imagine and remember (things that can never be explained by wiring arrangements);
• biologists wasting ending research dollars looking for genes for some mental condition or mental problem, with predictably failing results because genes merely specify low-level chemicals rather than high-level mental states; 
• evolutionary biologists gluing together scattered bone fragments (not even known to have come from the same organism), and trying to pass off their speculative adhesive constructions as important evidence of our ancestry;
• cosmologists building super-expensive machinery to search without success for dark matter or dark energy;
• finally, according to a scientific paper, "investment in functional neuroimaging as a research tool in psychiatry dwarfs that of other recent innovations, with more than 16,000 published articles over the past three decades...yet, it is sobering to acknowledge that functional neuroimaging, in particular modalities such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and magnetoencephalography/electroencephalography (MEG/EEG), plays no role in clinical psychiatric decision making, nor has it defined a neurobiological basis for any psychiatric condition."  

Perhaps scientists keep going down such blind alleys over and over again because they lack the imagination to conceive novel experiments that might reveal new truths about reality or human nature, or because they are afraid of what such experiments might reveal (results suggesting their cherished assumptions are wrong). 

During the 1980's we were told that the Space Shuttle launches were justified, because NASA was proving the feasibility of reusable space vehicles. But a page on CNET tells us, "In this world of reusable rockets, the Artemis vehicle isn't one." This is progress? Don't be fooled by the first search result you get after typing "Is Artemis reusable?" The first result will be a wikipedia page that mentions reusability, but is talking about a different rocket, Elon Musk's Starship rocket. It seems that the Artemis launch system (called SLS) will soon be technologically surpassed by some reusable rocket Elon Musk is developing, one that is not part of the Artemis project.  

James Webb Telescope Finds a Universe Getting Orderly Too Fast

Launched on Christmas last year, the James Webb Space Telescope (or JWST for short) is a big fancy new space telescope that is the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. The James Webb Space Telescope can see farther into distant space than any other telescope. Scientists believe that when a telescope like this looks at the farthest reaches of its limits, it is actually looking far back in time. That's because light travels at a speed of one light-year per year. So if a telescope such as the James Webb Space Telescope observes a very distant galaxy about 13 billion light-years away, that light should be the light the galaxy emitted 13 billion years ago. 

A recent news story is entitled "SCIENTISTS PUZZLED BECAUSE JAMES WEBB IS SEEING STUFF THAT SHOULDN'T BE THERE." We read this:

"For a long time, for instance, scientists believed the universe's earliest, oldest galaxies to be small, slightly chaotic, and misshapen systems. But according to the Washington Post, JWST-captured imagery has revealed those galaxies to be shockingly massive, not to mention balanced and well-formed — a finding that challenges, and will likely rewrite, long-held understandings about the origins of our universe. 'The models just don't predict this,' Garth Illingworth, an astronomer at the University of California at Santa Cruz, told WaPo. 'How do you do this in the universe at such an early time? How do you form so many stars so quickly?' "

In the Washington Post article (which a paywall may prevent you from reading), we read this comment about observations of galaxies at very high redshifts, believed to be observations of galaxies appearing soon after the Big Bang:

"What has surprised astronomer Dan Coe of the Space Telescope Science Institute are the number of nicely shaped, disclike galaxies. 'We thought the early universe was this chaotic place where there's all these clumps of star formation, and things are all a jumble,' Coe said." 

A galaxy as seen by the James Webb Space Telescope (credit:NASA)

You can find the latest papers on this topic by going to the Cornell physics paper server, and using a search phrase of "JWST+high-redshift" or "JWST+earliest galaxies." Among the recent papers are these:

• The paper "A Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away: A Candidate z ~ 14 Galaxy in Early JWST CEERS Imaging" by dozens of different authors tells us this: "Should followup spectroscopy validate this redshift, our Universe was already aglow with fairly massive galaxies less than 300 Myr [million years] after the Big Bang." This contradicts what scientists have long told us, that such galaxies would take a billion years or longer to form. 
• Another recent paper tells us, "Neither the high number of such objects found nor the high redshifts they reside at are expected from the previously favored predictions."
• Another paper reports the observation of "remarkably luminous" galaxies that already had a billion stars by the time the universe was only about 300 to 400 million years old. 
• A very recent paper is entitled "On the stunning abundance of super-early, massive galaxies revealed by JWST." We read of the detection of "of two very bright" galaxies at "super-early epochs," with masses of at least a billion solar masses.  We are told "this detection poses a serious challenge to essentially all models," and that what is observed deviates by some ten times from what is predicted.  The authors resort to a "conspiracy theory" to explain these findings, telling us, "The weak evolution from z = 7 to z ≈ 14 of the LF bright end arises from the conspiracy between a decreasing dust attenuation, making galaxies brighter, that almost exactly compensates for the increasing shortage of their host halos." 
• A very recent paper tells us, "The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has discovered a surprising abundance of bright galaxy candidates in the very early Universe (<500Myrs after the Big Bang), calling into question current galaxy formation models." 
• Another recent paper is entitled "Schrodinger's Galaxy Candidate: Puzzlingly Luminous at z≈17, or Dusty/Quenched at z≈5?" The paper mentions a galaxy that seems to have about 5 billion stars, observed at a time when the universe was only about 200 million years old, noting that this "challenges virtually every early galaxy evolution model." The authors also resort to a "conspiracy theory" to try to explain this embarrassing finding, using the word "conspire" in their abstract. 
• Another recent paper 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. 
• Another recent paper entitled "A very early onset of massive galaxy formation" refers to high redshift galaxies (believed to be the earliest galaxies formed), and notes that "the mass density in the most massive galaxies exceeds the total previously-estimated mass density... by a factor of ∼ 2 at z ∼ 8 and by two orders of magnitude at z ∼ 10." This being wrong by two orders of magnitude refers to predictions being wrong by a factor of about 100 times. 

You can tell how inconsistent these observations are with predictions by going to a NASA page dated January 19, 2021. On that page a scientist says, "Galaxies, we think, begin building up in the first billion years after the big bang, and sort of reach adolescence at 1 to 2 billion years." 

Gravity working to form galaxies would act very slowly. Galaxies seemed to have formed far more quickly after the Big Bang than scientists can account for, even when scientists are allowed to plug in to their scenarios some imaginary unproven things such as dark energy and dark matter. Sticking to known discovered particles, scientists cannot even explain how spiral galaxies retain their structure over many billions of years, despite galaxy rotations that should cause the spiral arms of galaxies to get broken up within a billion years. The problem becomes ten times worse when you consider "super spiral galaxies" much bigger than our galaxy. But you can hear a thousand scientists talk and none of them will say something like what they should be saying, which is: "We've been pretending for so long to understand so much, but we understand so little." 

Postscript: Scientific American has a new story entitled "JWST’s First Glimpses of Early Galaxies Could Break Cosmology." We read this:

"Another team, meanwhile, found evidence for galaxies the size of our Milky Way at a redshift of 10, less than 500 million years after the big bang. Such behemoths emerging so rapidly defies expectations set by cosmologists’ standard model of the universe’s evolution. Called Lambda CDM (LCDM), this model incorporates scientists’ best estimates for the properties of dark energy and dark matter, which collectively act to dominate the emergence of large-scale cosmic structures. ('Lambda' refers to dark energy and 'CDM' refers to dark matter that is relatively sluggish, or 'cold.') 'Even if you took everything that was available to form stars and snapped your fingers instantaneously, you still wouldn’t be able to get that big that early,' says Michael Boylan-Kolchin, a cosmologist at the University of Texas at Austin...The most startling explanation is that the canonical LCDM cosmological model is wrong and requires revision. 'These results are very surprising and hard to get in our standard model of cosmology,' Boylan-Kolchin says. 'And it’s probably not a small change. We’d have to go back to the drawing board.' ”

A Critique of Morphogen Gradients, a Tall Tale of Developmental Biologists

When people discuss the mathematician Alan Turing, the word that is most commonly used is "brilliant." Turing did act very brilliantly during the 1940's when he led a secret British effort during World War Two to figure out how to decipher messages from a machine the Nazis were using to transmit secret messages. The Nazis were using a complicated machine called Enigma to transmit their secret messages.  Devising novel technology that rather resembled a digital computer, before any digital computer had been invented, Turing devised machinery that eventually was capable of deciphering the secret Nazi messages, so that the British could read and understand them. The efforts of Turing and his colleagues played a large role in helping the Allies win World War Two. 

But in the 1950's Turing did not act brilliantly when he addressed the problem of morphogenesis, the problem of how a speck-sized human zygote (a fertilized ovum) is able to progress to become a full-sized human body.  In 1952 Turing wrote a paper with the misleading title "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis." The first sentence of the abstract was this: "It is suggested that a system of chemical substances, called morphogens, reacting together and diffusing through a tissue, is adequate to account for the main phenomena of morphogenesis." But the theory he suggested in the paper did nothing to explain any of the harder-to-explain wonders of morphogenesis. 

The theory Turing suggested explained so little that it is misleading to even call it a theory of morphogenesis.  It would be more accurate to call it a theory relating to morphogenesis. Turing's theory was scarcely more than a mere claimed explanation of the arising of a few simple ring-like structures. Of course, within biological organisms we see a vast diversity of functional structures, almost all of which are not ring-like. 

The beginning of the paper should have alerted the careful reader that something very suspicious and shady was going on. The first lines of the abstract are below:

"In this section a mathematical model of the growing embryo will be described. This model will be a simplification and an idealization, and consequently a falsification. It is to be hoped that the features retained for discussion are those of greatest importance in the present state of knowledge. The model takes two slightly different forms. In one of them the cell theory is recognized but the cells are idealized into geometrical points. In the other the matter of the organism is imagined as continuously distributed."

We see some gigantic "red flags" here. By telling us that in one form of the theory cells would be "idealized into geometrical points," Turing was revealing that what would be going is kind of "biological baby talk" rather than a realistic treatment of the problem of morphogenesis. The origin of fantastically organized and intricate cell structures is one of the chief aspects of the problem of morphogenesis. Cells are units so complex they have been compared to factories and jet planes. When someone tells us that he is going to be treating cells as mere "geometrical points," that is an indication that the person will not be realistically assessing the complexities of biological organization.  Also, when someone says that he is going to imagine matter in an organism as being "continuously distributed" (which means having the same concentrations everywhere), it is also an indication that he is not dealing with organisms realistically. By calling his model a "simplification," "idealization," and "falsification,"  Turing was also hinting that he was in some kind of theoretical fantasy world. 

On the second page of his paper, Turing introduces the term "morphogens," a term meaning chemicals that produce a form. He introduced the term in a way that suggested the term had no precise meaning. He stated this:

"These substances will be called morphogens, the word being intended to convey the idea of a form producer. It is not intended to have any very exact meaning, but is simply the kind of substance concerned in this theory. The evocators of Waddington provide a good example of morphogens (Waddington 1940). These evocators diffusing into a tissue somehow persuade it to develop along different lines from those which would have been followed in its absence. The genes themselves may also be considered to be morphogens. But they certainly form rather a special class. They are quite indiffusible. Moreover, it is only by courtesy that genes can be regarded as separate molecules. It would be more accurate (at any rate at mitosis) to regard them as radicals of the giant molecules known as chromosomes. But presumably these radicals act almost independently, so that it is unlikely that serious errors will arise through regarding the genes as molecules. Hormones may also be regarded as quite typical morphogens. Skin pigments may be regarded as morphogens if desired." 

Introducing this concept of morphogens, Turing was all fuzzy and imprecise. After defining a morphogen as a "form producer," he told us skin pigments may be regarded as morphogens. But skin pigments do nothing to produce biological forms.

On page 41 Turing very strangely says, "According to the cell model then, the number and positions of the cells are given in advance, and so are the rates at which the various morphogens diffuse between the cells."  There did not exist during his life and still does not exist any "cell model" in which "the number and positions of the cells are given in advance." Neither the number nor the positions of any cells are specified in DNA, which also does not specify the structure of any cell. Turing seems to have been just confabulating here. He excused himself from explaining the great mystery of how cells arise in particular numbers and particular positions by claiming that some "cell model" specified such things "in advance," when no such thing was true. 

On page 42 of the paper, Turing shows that he is in a kind of puerile fantasy land by stating this: "The contents of either cell will be supposed describable by giving the concentrations X and Y of two morphogens." Cells are units of enormously high complexity, and often described as being complex as factories. Claiming their contents are "describable by giving the concentrations X and Y of two morphogens" is a statement indicating a complete lack of insight into the complexity of cells. 

In the paper's last paragraph, Turing basically admits that his theory only applies to a very small number of biological structures. He states this:

"It must be admitted that the biological examples which it has been possible to give in the present paper are very limited. This can be ascribed quite simply to the fact that biological phenomena are usually very complicated. Taking this in combination with the relatively elementary mathematics used in this paper one could hardly expect to find that many observed biological phenomena would be covered. It is thought, however, that the imaginary biological systems which have been treated, and the principles which have been discussed, should be of some help in interpreting real biological forms." 

So in the last paragraph of the paper, Turing gets all modest and humbly speaks as if his theory is only applicable to a few cases, saying "one could hardly expect to find that many observed biological phenomena would be covered," which conflicts with the delusional claim he made at the beginning of the paper, the groundless boast that his theory "is adequate to account for the main phenomena of morphogenesis." 

Similarly, in a letter to a colleague quoted here, Turing made only very modest claims about his morphogenesis theory, merely claiming that it would explain a few things here and there. He stated this:

"At present I am not working on the problem at all, but on my mathematical theory of embryology, which I think I described to you at one time. This is yielding to treatment, and it will so far as I can see, give satisfactory explanations of --

(i) Gastrulation

(ii) Polygonally symmetric structures, e.g. starfish, flowers.

(iii) Leaf arrangement, in particular the way the Fibonacci series

 (0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13...) comes to be involved.

(iv) Colour patterns on animals, e.g. stripes spots and dappling.

(v) Pattern on nearly spherical structures such as some 

  Radiolaria, but this is more difficult and doubtful."

If you explained such things, you would have solved less than a thousandth of the problem of morphogenesis; for you would not have explained how protein molecules achieve folded three-dimensional shapes, how immensely organized cells arise, how tissues arise, how organs arise, or how something like the human body arises. Gastrulation takes only about 1 week, less than 3% of the 273 days needed for a human baby to form in a womb. So why did Turing write a paper with the title "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis" when his theory explained so little?  And why did he make the hugely inaccurate claim that his theory "is adequate to account for the main phenomena of morphogenesis," so contrary to what he said in the letter to his colleague? 

Nowhere in Turing's paper did he show that he had insight or understanding of the complexity and organization of living things. The paper failed to even use the words "organization" or "organized."  Turing acted like a mathematician who could not be bothered to study the complexity of cells and protein molecules and anatomy, which had been well-discovered by the time his paper was written.  

Turing certainly did not do a hundredth of what would be needed to explain the appearance of even simpler animals such as a starfish. Explaining how a starfish arises would involve explaining how the thousands of types of protein molecules used by starfish manage to get their three-dimensional shapes needed for their functionality, shapes vastly more complicated than the simple shape of a starfish. Explaining how a starfish arises would also involve explaining how a starfish gets all of the different cell types it has, each an organization of matter vastly more intricate than the simple shape of a starfish. Turing did nothing to explain either of these things. 

Eager to claim some progress on a problem that is a thousand miles over their heads (the problem of how a speck-sized human egg manages to progress to become a full-grown human body), biologists have tried to look for places where theories such as Turing's could help explain morphogenesis. But such places have been few and far-between. A leading expert in developmental biology (L. Wolpert) stated in 2017, "It is still not clear whether diffusible morphogens provide cells with positional information and so pattern a tissue during development."  Another paper ("Biological notion of positional information/value in morphogenesis theory") states this:  "The fundamental role of morphogens as a basis for positional information in a complicated living body is still questionable."  Claims that morphogen gradients encode positional information are not well founded, and are examples of the extremely common phenomena of biologists making unwarranted claims, such as when they claim that memories form by synapse strengthening.   

The often advanced idea that a "morphogen gradient" (the mere intensity of some chemical) could tell cells where to go in three-dimensional space has always been a ludicrous one. Such a gradient would at best supply a single number, but you need three different numbers to specify a position in three-dimensional space. And if a cell were to receive three different numbers telling it where to go in three-dimensional space, it would have no way of acting on such information. Not knowing its own position in three-dimensional space, the cell would have no way of knowing how to modify that position to go to some other position.  

We can compare the theory of morphogen gradients to the theory of panspermia, the theory that life on Earth came from outer space. Panspermia does not solve the problem of how life arose, because it leaves you with this unanswered problem:  how could life have originated in outer space? That's just as hard as the problem of how life could have originated on Earth, so there's no real explanatory progress made if you imagine life came from outer space. Similarly, the theory of morphogen gradients attempts to solve the problem of how cells find their correct position in a forming human body by imagining that their correct position is told them by signals from some external chemicals (morphogen gradients). But that leaves unanswered the equally big question: how could such chemicals know what the correct positions of the cells should be?  They could not have got the information from DNA or genes, which specify neither how to make cells nor how cells should be arranged.  So imagining signaling chemicals that tell cells where to go accomplishes nothing, because no explanation is given as to how such chemicals knew where the cells should go.  We've simply gone from "inexplicably high-knowledge cells" to "inexplicably high-knowledge signaling chemicals," which accomplishes nothing in reducing the mystery of how a fertilized ovum progresses to become an adult organism.

The teacher felt confident...

...until the student asked this

Worthless for reducing the mystery of how a fertilized ovum progresses to become an adult organism, the concept of morphogen gradients serves mainly as "busy work" for developmental biologists.  Endless chemicals can be tested by them to see whether they act like morphogen gradients, by scientists failing to realize that very rare successes in such searches can be best explained as mere coincidences they should expect to get given all that searching, even if morphogen gradients is a mythical concept. When we read developmental biologists make statements such as "secreted signals, known as morphogens, provide the positional information that organizes gene expression and cellular differentiation in many developing tissues," or "morphogen gradients play a crucial role in development," we are reading folklore with no robust evidence to support it, and we seeing an example of an unwarranted speech custom of a small ivory tower tribe that is very susceptible to groupthink effects and ideological contagion phenomena. 

Around the 25:00 mark in the video here, a scientist tells us this about a morphogen gradient, which supposedly works through diffusion: 

"The diffusion constants are.. ten-fold, twenty-fold less than what you'd actually need to visually establish the gradient... So we simply don't have enough time in development for a gradient to be established with diffusion constants that we see." 

On the page here, a PhD in chemical physics lists many problems with claims about morphogen gradients, and repeatedly compares those who advance such claims to the advocates of the Ptolemaic theory of the solar system, who would keep complexifying their theory by postulating speculative details (epicycles) when their theory failed tests. We read, "Many doubts about the functioning or existence of these so-called 'morphogen' gradients have been raised." Turing appealed to morphogen diffusion, but another paper states that "arguments against morphogen movement by diffusion have been raised by many." 

The scanty observational evidence commonly cited for morphogen gradients (involving appeals to Drosphilia,  decapentaplegic/transforming growth factor beta, Hedgehog/Sonic hedgehog, Wingless/Wnt, epidermal growth factor, and fibroblast growth factor) will not seem convincing after you consider that there are countless millions of protein molecules and biological chemicals scientists can study, and that given a large body of developmental biologists eagerly seeking for evidence for "morphogen gradients," we would expect that a few chemicals or proteins could be found that sometimes seem to act rather like morphogen gradients purely by chance, even if the concept of morphogen gradients is a myth that has no foundation in reality. Similarly, given some large community believing that animal ghosts live in the clouds, and searching eagerly for evidence of such ghosts by taking many photos of clouds, we would expect such a community to occasionally produce some cloud photos that look like animals, even if there are no ghosts of animals in the clouds. Pareidolia (the tendency of humans to find patterns they are eagerly seeking) can plausibly explain all of the few examples given of evidence for morphogen gradients. 

The purveyors of morphogen gradients folklore have papers with line graphs supposedly showing some relation between a concentration of a morphogen gradient and the position of something in a developing embryo. The lines in these graphs are very rarely diagonal lines showing a straight-line relationship, but other types of lines which may look a little diagonal. In general, the papers providing such graphs fail to qualify as good evidence, because (1) there so often is no indication of the number of observations that were used to make the graph; (2) we have no way of knowing whether the graphed data points were cherry-picked to produce such a graph, with data points that did not fit the hoped-for story line being discarded. It is extremely common for scientists to discard data points that do not fit their story line, justifying such conclusion as "outlier elimination." In general, line graphs made from only a few data points are not convincing evidence of a causal relation.  

Some of the graphs you see in the morphogen gradient literature involve a "lying with lines" type of procedure in which only a few data points are graphed, but some kind of curve-fitting software is used to project a line using the small number of points (using linear interpolation). If there is no listing of the exact number of observations, such graphs are deceptive, because they make it look like there were many observations, when there were actually few.  In general, in papers of the morphogen gradient literature you will find no mention that a blinding protocol was followed. But the crucial measurements that are made are very much the type of measurements in which subjective observational bias might come into play, particularly seeing that the measurements are usually of very small distances such as nanometers (billionths of a meter), and particularly since the measurements often involve subjective  judgments about very tiny distances between two microscopic things without precise edges (rather like judging the distance between two clouds or two waves or two cold fronts, but far more subjective). So we must always suspect that the researchers were gathering and analyzing information in a biased way, trying to fit observations to some hoped-for curve so that some nice line graph could be produced suggesting a relationship between the intensity of the gradient and a position of some cells during development. Any such paper that fails to mention the following of a detailed blinding protocol has little value as evidence. Given so many observers acting so oblivious to good scientific protocols (by failing to follow a blinding protocol), we may wonder: has anyone ever really reliably observed any chemical behaving like a morphogen gradient? 

Although his original paper merely referred to a "French Flag" problem rather than a model, we are repeatedly told that the biologist Lewis Wolpert tried to advance some "French Flag" model  that molecules might encode positional information telling cells where to go to. But in later years he was candid about admitting the lack of evidence for such an idea. In 2015 he was asked this: "Where do you think the French Flag model fits with our current understanding of positional information, and what do you think are the exciting questions at the moment?" He answered this:

"There are problems we haven’t solved. It is terrible, but we still don’t have a molecular basis for it. If I still had an active lab, finding the molecular basis for positional information would be my objective, but would be quite tricky, since I’m not a biochemist or molecular biologist. There is one case of a molecule that might encode positional information, Prod 1, which is graded along the amphibian limb and was discovered by Jeremy Brockes. But it would be nice to find similar molecules in other systems."

This is the most damning confession. By saying "we still don't have a molecular basis for it," Lewis Wolpert pretty much confessed here that the "positional information" claim that he had encouraged innumerable times in his career was basically baloney. We should remember how good detectives act when they analyze the transcripts of suspects being questioned. Such detectives look for "letting down the guard" moments when lying suspects say something that contradicts the claims they have repeatedly made. That is just what we seem to get here. 

I know exactly why Wolpert said "it is terrible" in the statement "it is terrible, but we still don't have a molecular basis for it."  The reasons are:

(1) First, it is terrible because it shows that Wolpert was guilty of very bad misrepresentation and misleading by encouraging an idea of molecules passing around "positional information" that had no real evidential support. 

(2) Second, it is terrible because without any such evidence of "positional information" helping to explain how cells get to the right places in development, it seems that the progression from a speck-size zygote to the vast organization of the human body is a miracle of organization light-years beyond anything scientists can explain, a reality that is profoundly upsetting to atheist zealots such as Wolpert, as it implies some transcendent agency in the origin of every adult human body. 

The next year Wolpert would make a similar confession:

"Central problems are how positional information is set up, how it is recorded, and then how it is interpreted by the cells. A number of models have been proposed for the setting up of positional gradients, and most are based on diffusion of a morphogen and its interactions with extracellular molecules; however, diffusion may not be reliable mechanism. There are also mechanisms based on timing. There is no good evidence for the quantitative aspects of any of the proposed gradients and details how they are set up." 

Figure 3 of the paper here  helps to make clear that sociological effects caused a myth to arise on this matter.  Wolpert's original 1969 paper merely referred to a "French flag problem," and never mentioned a "French flag model." The term "French flag model" was almost never used in the scientific literature until about 1998. Then between 1998 and the year 2010 more and more scientific papers started to refer to a "French flag model," with about 60 papers a year referring to such a thing by the year 2010. A myth had been socially constructed, that a scientist (Wolpert) had advanced some "French flag model" when his paper never even used such a term.  This is the same Wolpert who confessed in 2015 (in the quote above) that "we still don't have a molecular basis for it."

In the wikipedia.org article on the "French flag model," we read the following reasons for doubting it:

"The difficulties with all gradient based models of morphogenesis were extensively reviewed by Natalie and Richard Gordon and include seven^[5] specific points:

1. In order to maintain a gradient at steady state there has to be a sink i.e. a way in which diffusing molecules are destroyed or removed along the way and/or at some boundaries. Sinks are rarely, if ever, even considered when the gradient model is invoked.
2. Diffusion must occur in a confined space if a gradient is to be established. However, many organisms such as the axolotl develop normally even if the vitelline membrane and jelly layers are removed and development occurs in flowing water.
3. Diffusion is temperature dependent yet development can proceed normally over a wide variety of temperatures in animals whose eggs develop external to the mother.
4. Diffusion gradients do not scale well yet embryos come in variety of sizes.
5. Diffusion gradients follow the superposition principle. This means that a gradient of one substance in one direction, and a gradient of the same substance in a perpendicular direction, result in a single one-dimensional gradient in the diagonal direction, not a two dimensional gradient. Developmental biologists frequently invoke a two dimensional gradient even though a two dimensional gradient system requires two morphogen gradients with two different sources and sinks placed approximately perpendicular to one another.
6. Fluctuations in gradients always occur, especially at the low concentrations commonly found during embryogenesis, making a specific response by an individual cell to particular concentration thresholds problematic.
7. Each cell has to be able to 'read' the morphogen concentration accurately, otherwise boundaries between tissues become ragged. Yet such ragged boundaries are rare in development."

A French flag is a two-dimensional arrangement of matter, and it was always absurd to be suggesting that a three-dimensional positioning of cells could be explained by referring to the positioning of squares on a two-dimensional flag. The work that has been done on "morphogen gradients" is a "grasping at straws" wild goose chase affair, something that often goes on in the world of science. The claim that scientists have helped explain morphogenesis by postulating "morphogen gradients" by which cells reach the correct positions is a socially constructed triumphal legend that is not well-grounded by observations, one of very many such legends in the world of modern science.