Clump-Fooled Press Calls It Multicellularity Evolution, But It Was Neither

For many decades evolutionary biology has been characterized by language abuse, deceptive speech and misleading practices. Some of the worst abuses over the past 160 years have been the following:

• More than 160 years of using the misleading phrase "natural selection," which does not actually refer to any selection (selection is a word meaning a choice by a conscious agent). Darwin himself in a letter to Charles Lyell dated June 6, 1860 said, "I suppose  'natural selection' was a bad term ; but to change it now, I think, would make confusion worse confounded." 
• Many decades of false claims that DNA is a blueprint or recipe or program specifying how to make an organism, claims that are utterly fictional because neither DNA nor the genes in it even specify how to make any of the cells that are the main components of an organism, or any of the organelles that make up such cells.  
• The use of very deceptive claims that there is no fundamental difference between humans and animals, or only quantitative differences.
• The frequent use of misleading language trying to make animals sound like they have minds like humans, and trying to make humans sound like beings who have minds like animals. 
• The frequent use of misleading cell diagrams that depict cells as being thousands of times simpler than they are. A Nature article says that "textbook depictions of the cell’s innards have changed little since 1896," and quotes a scientist saying, "Nothing is drawn the way the cell actually looks."
• Misstatements about the complexity of protein molecules,  such as documented here and here,  in which an author claims that a typical protein molecule involves only about 100 amino acids, when the median number of amino acids in a human protein molecule is about 431, exponentially harder to achieve than merely 100. 
• Deceptive appeals to artificial selection (a purposeful guidance of breeding) to try to support claims about so-called "natural selection" (claimed to involve no purposeful agency).
• Frequent misleading uses of the term "early human" to describe long-extinct organisms without any evidence to show that such organisms had any of the defining characteristics of humans (such as language and the ability to use symbols). 
• Extremely misleading statements that Darwinian evolution is not random, evoking some special, uncommon definition of the word "random" different from the normal definition of that term: "happening, done, or chosen by chance rather than according to a plan."
• Misleading claims that when scientists say something is a theory, it means it is well-established (a claim that can be refuted by many examples, such as the common example of the term "string theory" to describe a completely unsubstantiated type of physicist speculation).
• Deceptive claims about chance protein evolution, such as the assertion by one authority that if you have "trillions" of random protein molecules you can get "any function you want" (because the average amino acid length of a human protein is more than 400 amino acids, and because there are 20 possible amino acids in each position of a protein, such a statement underestimated by about 10 to the 500th power the difficulty of getting by chance "any function you want"). 
• Frequent appeals to an utterly erroneous principle that any fantastically improbable bonanza of luck can happen as long as there are millions of years of chance events. 
• Misleading language about natural history, such as failing to describe enormous leaps of organization and complexity as very complex innovations, but merely describing them as "variants" or "diversification."
• Misleading language using the phrase "missing link," often referring to things that are not credible evolutionary missing links, such as claiming that a type of dinosaur is a missing link between dinosaurs and birds, because it has a triangular membrane on its front similar to a triangular membrane on the back of birds.
• Misleading claims that evolution might have occurred before life existed, claims evoking a special use of the word "evolution" very different from  normal definitions. 
• Frequent claims that certain parts of the human body are "vestigial structures" with no current use, despite evidence that such structures do actually have a function. 
• A massive repetition by Darwinists of a doubtful claim that human genomes and chimp genomes are 98% or 98.6% the same, ignoring a 2005 paper with the title "Eighty percent of proteins are different between humans and chimpanzees." A 2021 study found that "1.5% to 7% of the human genome is unique to Homo sapiens," suggesting the 98% claim may have been much in error.   
• Misrepresentations involving fossils, often including gluing together (using a mixture such as superglue and baking soda) fossil fragments not known to be from one organism and claiming they are from a single organism.
• Misleading statements about the quality of evidence for spiritual and psychical phenomena that tend to contradict Darwinist explanations, typically made by people who have never seriously studied such evidence, combined with misleading stereotypical or gaslighting characterizations of the people who have reported such phenomena.
• Deceptive drawings of embryos such as used by Darwinist zealot Ernst Haeckel, to try to create some impression that a study of embryos supports Darwinist claims, and the use of such drawings in Darwinist literature to the present day, decades after they had been debunked.  
• Misleading language about the origin of life, such as referring to amino acids as "seeds of life" (which is as misleading as saying bricks are the seeds of cathedrals). 
• The very frequent use by natural history museums of "fossil exhibits" that are entirely plaster or fiberglass, with countless visitors getting the idea that such things were real fossils.
• Frequent evocation of an utterly fallacious principle which one Darwinist evoked by saying "let us suppose instead that each step made in the good direction provides a small advantage in terms of survival or fecundity to the being that makes it," a principle extremely erroneous because improvements in survival or fecundity (reproduction) almost always require many coordinated changes before any such advantage is achieved. 

In the press we had recently another example of misleading language about evolution. An experiment was described as telling us something about "multicellularity evolution." The results of the experiment were neither multicellularity nor Darwinian evolution. 

The term "multicellularity" refers to organisms consisting of many different types of cells, organized to have structures such as organs. The origin of multicellularity has always been one of the biggest problems in explaining the appearance of visible organisms. Pretty much the first large appearance of multicellular life in the fossil record occurs around the time of the Cambrian Explosion. The fossil record suggests that large organisms appeared rather abruptly about 540 million years ago, with all or almost all of the main types of animals (called phyla) originating about the same time. How could you ever got so many types of multicellular organisms showing up so suddenly? A jump from single-cell organisms to organisms consisting of very many billions of very well-organized cells (with different types of organ systems and many different types of cells) would have been a transition as baffling and hard-to-explain as a jump from only aquatic organisms to both aquatic organisms and land-based organism, or a jump from only non-flying animals to the existence of both non-flying and flying animals. 

As described in this paper, some experimenters did an experiment with yeast cells in a test tube. Over 600 days they did some manual selection process, saving only the microscopic cells which were largest. Such a thing is called artificial selection. It is the type of manual, purposeful selection that went on when dog breeders made specific decisions designed to produce particular types of dogs. Artificial selection is not so-called "natural selection," which is a purposeless, unguided thing.  Artificial selection is not Darwinian evolution, claimed to be a purely natural process not involving any willful intention. 

What was the result of this experiment? Just some clumps of yeast cells. That isn't multicellularity, which is when you have an organism consisting of many different types of cells.  The yeast clumps were not an organism. They were merely disorganized clumps consisting of many one-celled organisms. 

Following its Standard Operating Procedure of parroting  any insinuations made by scientific papers, no matter how phony-sounding they may be, the press has hailed this experiment. Inexplicably categorizing their article under "Trilobites," The New York Times had an article called "An Experiment Repeated 600 Times Finds Hints to Evolution’s Secrets," with a subtitle entitled "Snowflakes of yeast in a lab offer insights into how life on Earth transitioned from single-celled into multicellular organisms."  No, we got no "insights into how life on Earth transitioned from single-celled into multicellular organisms." because (1) no multicellular organisms were produced, only clumps of one-celled organisms, and (2) what was going on was artificial selection involving constant intentional human fiddling, not natural evolution. 

We are told this about a Ratcliff: "Every day, he swirled yeast cells in a test tube, sucked up the ones that sank to the bottom quickest, then used them to grow the next day’s population of yeast." We hear of nothing to justify the title, merely the production of "clumps," a word the article uses repeatedly in discussing the results. The last two sentences of the article lets us know how misleading the article's title and subtitle were. We read this:

"The team is now exploring whether dense clumps of snowflake yeast might develop ways to get nutrients to their innermost members. If they do, these yeast in their test tubes in Atlanta might tell us something about what it was like, eons ago, when the ancestors of you and many living things around you first began to build bodies from cells. The team is now exploring whether dense clumps of snowflake yeast might develop ways to get nutrients to their innermost members. If they do, these yeast in their test tubes in Atlanta might tell us something about what it was like, eons ago, when the ancestors of you and many living things around you first began to build bodies from cells."

So there's something that could possibly happen in the future, and if that were to happen, it "might tell us something" -- but that thing hasn't yet happened yet. And if the imagined thing were to happen, it would not actually tell us about the origin of multicellular organisms, because the clumps of yeast cells were not multicellular organisms. So why did the New York Times make the untrue claim that this experiment "offer insights into how life on Earth transitioned from single-celled into multicellular organisms" when nothing like that has happened? 

The site phys.org  habitually passes on dubious press releases word-for-word while creating many an untrue headline to hype up the results. The phys.org site gives us an equally misleading headline on this experiment, a headline of "A journey to the origins of multicellular life: Long-term experimental evolution in the lab." No, we didn't get any multicellular life (which means an organism built from many cells of different types), and we didn't get any experimental evolution, because the kind of artificial selection that occurred is not experimental evolution. An example of experimental evolution would be if you built a screened cage housing fruit flies, and you put in some extra radiation, watching the natural results that occurred over multiple generations. 

The web site of the Atlantic magazine (www.atlantic.com) has long been known for its credulous "hook, line and sinker" parroting of the most unbelievable boasts of professors. We typically get gullible "swallow any hype" science journalism from this site.   At the site we have the false headline "One of Evolution's Biggest Moments Was Re-Created in a Year," followed by the misleading subtitle "A unique experiment shows how multicellular organisms might have evolved from single-celled ancestors."  No, there were not any multicellular organisms produced by the experiment, and what was going on was artificial selection, not Darwinian evolution. 

As is so often the case, the blame for these misleading articles should be placed not merely on today's ever-gullible science journalists but on the authors of the scientific paper. We have another example here of what occurs so very often these days: a science paper that has a misleading title. The title of the paper was "De novo evolution of macroscopic multicellularity." There was no real Darwinian evolution (just artificial selection not natural selection), and no real multicellularity (since no multicellular organism appeared). The abstract of the paper makes a statement trying to fool you into thinking that the yeast became 20,000 times larger. No such increase in the size of the yeast cells occurred. The size increase was almost all simply a clumping effect produced by thousands of yeast cells clumping together. Figure 2C of the paper makes clear that after 600 rounds of artificial selection (not actual evolution), the only change in the average individual size of the yeast cells was a change in length of about 200% to 300%. 

The article at the Atlantic site quotes an evolutionary biologist as saying, "This is the most exciting study I've seen in a long time." If making some clumps of yeast cells through 600 rounds of artificial manual manipulation is the most exciting thing evolutionary biologists have to report "in a long time," you can count that as Exhibit A that our evolutionary biologists are lost in the woods. 

The arising of multicellular organisms with such gigantic levels of hierarchical organization is a mystery a thousand miles over the heads of today's scientists. To properly understand the dismal failure of scientists to explain the arising of multicellular organisms,  simply consider the failure of scientists to explain the origin of any mammal individual. Scientists do not understand the progression from the single cell of a speck-sized zygote to the vast state of organization that is a full-grown human body.  Their failure to explain such a progression is shown by the huge lies they have told on this topic, such as the lie that a human body arises because a blueprint for constructing a body is read from DNA. DNA contains no such blueprint, no recipe or program for building a human. DNA does not have any anatomy construction information, does not specify any cell in the body, and does not even specify how to make the components from which cells are constructed (organelles and protein complexes).  DNA merely contains low-level chemical information such as which amino acids make up a protein. Never think that people telling big lies about something understand that topic. The fact that so many biologists have told us such outrageous lies about DNA and its genes (such as the lie that DNA is a body blueprint or a program for building bodies) is a clear sign of how "lost in the woods" biologists are when it comes to explaining the arising of any mammal body. 

There are many scientists who have confessed the truth about DNA and its genes, telling us that DNA is no blueprint or program or recipe for making a body. The great majority of such scientists have failed to realize the gargantuan implications of such a thing, just like the great majority of neuroscientists have failed to realize the gargantuan implications of the reality that a significant fraction of humans report out-of-body experiences. The lack of any anatomy specification in DNA implies that the origin of every human body (a state of enormously high hierarchical organization) must be a top-down event driven by some enormous causal agency beyond our understanding, not some bottom-up event caused by mechanistic molecular events. Out-of-body experiences and the lack in the brain of any physical characteristics that can explain any of the main powers of human minds (such as instant recall, instant learning, and preservation of memories for half a century) imply something similar, that the origin of the mind of each human is a top-down event driven by some enormous causal agency beyond our understanding, not some bottom-up event caused by mechanistic molecular events.

Six Ways Scientific Academia Is Like the Old Movie "Things to Come"

At www.youtube.com using the link here, you can watch for free the 1936 movie "Things to Come," a science fiction movie that attempted to predict the future. There are six ways in which  scientific academia resembles this old movie. 

#1 Both "Things to Come" and Scientific Academia Had Amazing Successes

No one will doubt that scientific academia has had some stunning  successes, so to justify the statement above I need merely describe some stunning predictive successes of the movie "Things to Come." 

For one thing, the movie pretty much predicted a conflict like World War II, a few years before World War II started in Europe. Also, the movie predicted large flatscreen televisions before anyone had a television in their house. Below is the part of the movie showing a flatscreen TV, and in the movie the boat shown on the TV is moving. 

Things to Come also predicted tablet devices like the iPad. In the scene below a character is watching a live TV show on the thin tablet device. 

Things to Come predicted very lightweight communication devices, such as the scene below where we see someone telephoning another person using a wristband device:

Things to Come also predicted  helicopters years before the first helicopter was invented. In the movie characters ride in the vehicle below, which has a whirling top rotor blade just like that of a helicopter. 

#2 Scientific Academia Suffers From Huge Conceptual Errors Just Like "Things to Come" 

The Things to Come movie was guilty of a huge conceptual error: the idea that the first mission to the moon would occur by a gigantic space gun shooting astronauts into space:

There was no excuse for this kind of error, because anyone could have figured out that such a gun would have caused acceleration that would kill any astronauts shot out from the gun. Long before 1936, Robert Goddard had done his famous experiments showing that rocketry was a powerful technology for reaching very high altitudes. There was no excuse for the author (H. G. Wells) failing to depict a moon mission as a rocket rather than a firing of a space gun. 

Today's scientific academia is guilty of errors as silly as the moon gun silliness of Things to Come. Science professors continue to teach utterly unbelievable claims that the vast organization and fine-tuned machinery of the human body (more impressive than any invention of humans) arose because of mere accidental factors such as random mutations and survival of the fittest. Science professors also continue to teach utterly unbelievable claims that the human mind is merely the product of brain activity, or the same thing as brain activity. Just as H. G. Wells ignored the obvious reality that a giant space gun would kill anyone shot from it, today's professors ignore a host of reasons for rejecting their claims about brains, including the short lifetimes of synapse proteins, the lack of anything in a brain that could explain instant recall, the unreliability of synaptic signal transmission, the failure of scientists to find any trace of learned information by examining brain tissue, and a host of observational reports indicating that human consciousness can exist when a mind is separated from a body and a brain (near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences). 

#3 Scientific Academia Paints Critics Using Cardboard Caricatures, Just Like "Things to Come"

In the movie Things to Come one of the characters is a critic of some of the work of scientists, a character named Theotocopulos. Theotocopulos is depicted as a cardboard caricature of critics of scientific activity. Theotocopulos makes almost nothing but bad arguments, and is depicted as being opposed to all progress. Talking like no sensible critic of scientist activity would, he states this:

"What is this progress? What is the good of all this progress, onward and onward? We demand a halt. We demand a rest...Is man never to rest?...Make an end to this progress now. Let this be the last day of the scientific age."

Similar to this cardboard caricature depiction of  Theotocopulos, the professors of scientific academia depict their critics in wildly distorted ways. Professors depict those who advise caution in genetic engineering as being anti-progress or anti-science.  Professors try to depict those who reject the boasts of evolutionary biologists as being motivated by scriptural considerations, even when such critics make no mention of scripture but make arguments based solely on the oceanic depths of accidentally unachievable organization, fine-tuning and functional complexity in biological organisms. Professors depict as wild-eyed conspiracy theorists those with reasonable suspicions about lab leaks (supported by the conclusions of some US government agencies).  If you show some serous interest in common and important mysterious human experiences that have been well-documented for hundreds of years (experiences that most science professors senselessly avoid seriously studying), you may be dismissed as a "zealot," "mystic" or "crank" (the latter being a particularly empty epithet meaning nothing other than a source of irritation). We almost never hear a science professor refer to a critic of his dogmas as a scholar, even when such a person has done  more study of the relevant topics than a newly minted PhD. 

#4 Scientific Academia Pushes Scientific Authoritarianism, Just Like "Things to Come"

Doing a Google search for "authoritarianism" produces this definition at the top of the search results: "the enforcement or advocacy of strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom." The movie Things to Come was a sales job for scientific authoritarianism. In the movie the world is taken over by a group of scientists and technocrats called Wings Over the World, one that uses a "Gas of Peace" to achieve its end. At the 39:34 mark of the movie, a representative of this Wings Over the World organization says, "We don't approve of independent sovereign states."  Similarly, scientific academia often pushes a form of scientific authoritarianism, in which the idea is that crucial decisions about how people should live and be educated are to be made by scientists or politicians who follow whatever scientists recommend, and in which people are encouraged to adopt worldviews shaped not by lengthy philosophical and scholarly analysis but by meekly following ideas about themselves, their species and the universe suggested by scientists. The power structure in academia is a hierarchical structure resembling authoritarian power structures such as those of the Catholic Church and totalitarian regimes, with the hierarchy of lecturers, PhD candidates/postdocs, assistant or associate professors, tenured professors, committee chairpersons, department heads, and deans or NAS members resembling the hierarchical organization of the Catholic Church (consisting of levels such as nuns, deacons, priests, bishops, archbishops, cardinals and a pope).  See here for a look at academia's and the NSF's recent aiding online censorship, with the censoring activity or thought diversity suppression activity labeled with noble-sounding slogans such as "fighting misinformation" or "content policing."   

#5 The Heroes of Scientific Academia Can be Guilty of Cold Callousness,  Just Like a Hero of "Things to Come"

In the movie Things to Come the character of Cabal lets his daughter be one of two guinea pig astronauts who will be shot into space using a giant space gun, in an attempt to reach the moon. This is after the same Cabal character says this to someone: "Do you realize there's an even chance of not coming back alive -- a still greater chance of coming back a cripple?" We then have this dialog showing Cabal's icy callousness, and the reference to not coming back is a reference to death in outer space:

Passworthy: "If they don't come back, my son and your daughter, what of that, Cabal?" 

Cabal: "Then, presently, others will go."

As a father this made me shudder. To any parent the death of their child is like the Earth crashing into the sun, not something to be brushed off with an icy "there can be others to do their job" comment. 

The same cold callousness was involved when scientists filled the world with hydrogen bombs, without paying much attention to how such a thing was putting a knife to the throat of mankind. I could give many examples of cold callousness in scientific academia, such as exposing great numbers of subjects (and sometimes the general public) to unnecessary risks through reckless scientific experimentation, which often occurs mainly to advance career goals or private interests of scientists. I have written about the oppression and inhumanity that has arisen as consequences of professors callously depicting humans in dehumanizing ways.  

#6 Scientific Academia Pushes Hubris, Like the Closing Hubris of "Things to Come"

The movie "Things to Come" ends with a speech that epitomizes scientific overconfidence and hubris. We have this dialog:

Passworthy: "Oh God, is there never to be any age of happiness? Is there never to be any rest?"

Cabal: "Rest enough for the individual. Too much, too soon and we call it death. But for man no rest and no ending.  He must go on, conquest beyond conquest. First this little planet with its wind and its ways. And then all the laws of mind and matter that restrain him. Then the planets about him. And at last out across the immensity of the stars. And when he has conquered all the deeps of space and all the mysteries of time, still he will be beginning."

Cabal is guilty here of very great hubris. He thinks that science is something that will allow man to conquer the entire universe. The idea is ridiculous. The universe has billions of galaxies, and there are scientific reasons why travel between galaxies is very probably impossible (the average distance between galaxies being about 10 million light-years). And if there are many other planets with intelligent life, the idea of one planet conquering the universe is hubris as bad as the idea of one nation conquering planet Earth. 

Scientific academia is guilty of similar hubris. The professors of scientific academia keep reciting boastful achievement legends that claim scientists accomplished things they never actually accomplished, such as figuring out the composition of the universe, figuring out how mankind arose, and figuring out how humans have minds. None of these things are understood by professors, who also often speak as if they had some understanding of a mystery a thousand miles over their heads: the mystery of how a speck-sized zygote is able to progress to become the vast organization of a full-grown human body. A proper study of the complexities of nature and the shortfall of current scientist explanatory claims (something requiring very many hours of study) will lead you to a great humility that is the opposite of the hubris of today's professors, a humility in which you recognize that man's knowledge of reality is merely fragmentary.  

NASA Replaces the Old Origin-of-Life Bunk With Some New Origin-of-Life Bunk

One of my favorite jokes about computer programming is one in which one programmer asks another programmer what he is doing, and the programmer says this: 

"I've been very busy. I've been replacing lots of the crummy old code with crummy new code."

I was reminded of such a joke when I saw a recent NASA page that rather seemed like it was trying to replace some of the old hogwash bunk told about the origin of life with some new hogwash bunk. 

The Miller-Urey experiment was an experiment done in the early 1950's which was falsely claimed to be a big advance relating to the origin of life. The coverage of this experiment in the scientific mainstream is one of the most egregious cases of deception, erroneous information and faulty analysis to be found anywhere in science-related literature. For 70 years mainstream sources have been shamelessly spouting bunk and incorrect information on this topic.

The Miller-Urey experiment used a glass apparatus (shown below) with two different glass chambers connected by tubes. The top glass chamber was filled with a mixture of gases consisting mainly of ammonia and methane. This chamber had an electrical spark unit that continually bombarded these gases with electricity. If you imagine the electrical sparks coming from a half-severed power line, you will get an idea of how this electrical spark unit worked. The lower chamber consisted of  warm water. After a week of electrical discharges delivered to the gases, amino acids were found in the water of the lower chamber.

The glass apparatus used by the Miller-Urey experiment

For seventy years this experiment has been deceptively hailed as something that had shown that “building blocks of life could naturally form,” or that before life appeared there once existed on Earth some "primordial soup" rich in such "building blocks of life." For the past 70 years, this phrase of “building blocks of life” was constantly used in discussions of the Miller-Urey experiment. But it was never an accurate or appropriate term to be using to describe the amino acids that were produced. The real building blocks of visible organisms are cells, which are built up from the building blocks of protein molecules. The real building blocks of a microscopic microbe are protein molecules, chemical units that usually consist of hundreds of amino acids arranged in just the right way. Amino acids are merely the building blocks of the building blocks of one-celled organisms, and are merely the building blocks of the building blocks of the building blocks of human beings. So it was never accurate to be calling amino acids “building blocks of life.” Calling an amino acid a “building block of life” is as misleading as calling a tiny clay speck “a building block of a house.” Such clay specks are merely the building blocks of a brick, which is a building block of a house.

There is another reason why it is a very misleading analogy to describe amino acids as “building blocks of life.” A building block can be used in any order. If I have a dump truck dump a huge pile of bricks on the lot of my construction site, I can use those bricks in any order to create a brick wall that is the beginning of a house. But amino acids are very different. To make some functional protein, amino acids must be added in just the right order. Shuffle the amino acid sequence of a protein molecule, and you will destroy its functionality. A good and fair analogy would be to compare a protein molecule to an ordered and fine-tuned sequence such as the ordered sequence of characters that make up an essay, a chapter, or a computer program. An amino acid can then be compared to a particular character in such a sequence. Rather than using such a good analogy (appropriate for a case that requires a special arrangement that is an ordered fine-tuned sequence), the science literature has for 70 years used an inappropriate and misleading analogy in which amino acids are compared to building blocks (things that do not require some special arrangement).

Very few of the countless discussions of the Miller-Urey experiment clearly stated the important fact that the experiment had produced amino acids with an equal mixture of right-handed and left-handed amino acids, unlike what is found in earthly organisms. An article in Astrobiology magazine puts it this way:

“A curious aspect of Earth’s life forms is that they contain (with few exceptions) only left-handed amino acids. In contrast, when scientists synthesize amino acids from nonchiral precursors, the result is always a 'racemic' mixture – equal numbers of right- and left-handed forms. Scientists have been unable to perform any experiment that, when starting with conditions believed to emulate those of early Earth, results in a near-total dominance of left-handed amino acids, says George Cody, a geochemist at the Carnegie Institute of Washington.”

Once the Miller-Urey experiment occurred, the world of science literature began to repeat again and again the groundless claim that such an experiment had shown that there must have been some “primordial soup” filled with amino acids. In fact, the experiment actually provided no warrant for any such claim. This is partially because the experiment had involved week-long continuous electrical bombardment of gases, something that has never naturally occurred in the history of planet Earth.

There is no reason to believe that lightning was any more common in the early Earth than it is today. The chance of someone being hit by lightning is about 1 in 700,000 per year. The chance of a particular man-sized spot being hit twice by lightning in the same year is about 1 in 14,000,000,000,000. But the Miller-Urey experiment used an electrode to provide continuous electricity for a week. During that week, very many thousands of electrical jolts were transmitted into the apparatus. In the history of Earth there has never been any area that got even a millionth of that frequency of electrical stimulation from natural lightning, which lasts for only about 30 millionths of a second when it strikes. The length of electrical stimulation in the Miller-Urey experiment was about 20 billion times longer than the length of time that any natural spot on Earth would have been electrically stimulated by lightning. This by itself is sufficient reason for saying that the Miller-Urey experiment was not a realistic simulation of early Earth conditions. This huge problem with the experiment was ignored by 99% of the treatments of the Miller-Urey experiment in science literature. 

Another reason for doubting the relevancy of the Miller-Urey results is that the electricity was created in a closed glass apparatus chamber. Natural lightning is never created in such a closed environment, but arises instead in the open air, where there is ample opportunity for dissipation of the energy.  The Miller-Urey apparatus included a special "cold trap" that isolated the amino acids created from being disrupted by the energy source. Such a thing does not correspond to anything that existed on the early Earth. It was obvious from Day One (1953) that an experiment using so special a glass apparatus was not a realistic simulation of early Earth conditions. But believers in an accidental origin of life just saw what they wanted to see, ignoring the utter artificiality of the experimental setup. It was partially because the paper originally announcing the experiment had contained a huge lie in its title. The title of the paper was "A Production of Amino Acids under Possible Primitive Earth Conditions." 

It was very obvious from the beginning that the special glass apparatus used by Miller (with its long glass tubes and special double-sphere arrangement and week-long continuous electrical bombardments) had created extremely artificial conditions unlike conditions that ever existed on the early Earth. So it was deceptive for Miller to have claimed that he had used "Possible Primitive Earth Conditions." 

Eventually more and more evidence piled up that the gases used by Miller and Urey were not the right mixture. It became more and more evident that the early Earth's atmosphere was a totally different mixture, one corresponding pretty closely to actual outputs of volcanoes (a mixture of mainly nitrogen and carbon dioxide, along with considerable water vapor and sulfur dioxide).

A 2011 press release preserved on a NASA site states the following:  "We can now say with some certainty that many scientists studying the origins of life on Earth simply picked the wrong atmosphere,' said Bruce Watson, Institute Professor of Science at Rensselaer."  The "many scientists" referred to include Miller and Urey.  The press release tells us that the correct atmosphere (derived from a study of volcanic emissions) would have been "an atmosphere dominated by the more oxygen-rich compounds found within our current atmosphere — including water, carbon dioxide, and sulfur dioxide."  A 2007 scientific paper says, "the early Earth is likely to have had a CO2-rich atmosphere, and not a ‘Milley–Urey'’ atmosphere, since at least 4 Ga [4 gigayears] (Canil, 1997; Delano, 2001; Kasting and Catling, 2003)."

Once it became apparent that the Miller-Urey experiment had used the wrong set of gases, a deceptive convention was adopted by writers who wanted to continue to make the phony claim that the Miller-Urey experiment was relevant to the origin of life.  The convention was to refer to something like the intention of the scientists. So in countless articles and books we would get statements such as  "Miller and Urey filled their apparatus with gases intended to simulate the early Earth."  Again and again, the reader would be left with the impression that the experiment had used gases correctly simulating the early Earth, without being told that the gases did not correctly simulate the early Earth atmosphere. The writers who have adopted this deceptive convention include many of the most well-known names in the world of science. 

A new NASA web page lets us know some of the reasons why the Miller-Urey experiment was irrelevant, but it offers a replacement idea that is just as much baloney and bunk. The page has the ridiculous title "A Stormy, Active Sun May Have Kickstarted Life on Earth." The page refers to some recent paper, and quotes one of its authors (Vladimir Airapetian) as giving us the same old baloney about the Miller-Urey experiment that people have been pushing for 70 years. We read:

" 'That was a big revelation' said Vladimir Airapetian, a stellar astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and coauthor of the new paper. 'From the basic components of early Earth’s atmosphere, you can synthesize these complex organic molecules.' ”

Not true, for Airapetian failed to mention the special glass apparatus and week-long electrical bombardment unlike anything that would have been around on the early Earth. The scientist is then immediately contradicted by the NASA page, which tells us that the Miller-Urey experiment did not use the right gases to simulate the early Earth's atmosphere. Then (oddly promoting the person it just scolded) the NASA page claims this:

"In 2016, Airapetian published a study suggesting that during Earth’s first 100 million years, the Sun was about 30% dimmer. But solar 'superflares' – powerful eruptions we only see once every 100 years or so today – would have erupted once every 3-10 days. These superflares launch near-light speed particles that would regularly collide with our atmosphere, kickstarting chemical reactions."

The 2016 paper by Airapetian was a speculative model, and I will soon explain in this post how a 2020 paper (based on hard observations) gives us data very much contradicting the speculation quoted above that the early sun would have had such superflare behavior. 

Airapetian has co-authored with quite a few other scientists a study entitled "Formation of Amino Acids and Carboxylic Acids in Weakly Reducing Planetary Atmospheres by Solar Energetic Particles from the Young Sun." In its first paragraph the May 2 NASA page "A Stormy, Active Sun May Have Kickstarted Life on Earth" refers to this 2023 paper.  In this study the authors did some experiment bombarding gases with protons, trying to simulate what might happen in a superflare hundreds of times more powerful than the most powerful flares our sun ever emits. 

The authors give no photograph or drawing of the apparatus used in the proton bombardment part of their experiment. We merely read this:

"We introduced a gas mixture of N2, CO2, and CH4 in a Pyrex glass tube (400 mL) with a Havar foil window (purchased from Nilaco Co., Japan) [38] and 5 mL of pure water. Then, the gas mixture was irradiated with a 2.5 MeV proton beam from a Tandem accelerator (Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan) at ambient temperature....The proton irradiation time was about 1–2 h, during which the total quantity of protons was controlled at 2 mC. The total energy deposit to each gas mixture was estimated to be 3.16 kJ. This corresponded to the input proton intensity of 1.97 × 1018 eV cm−2 s−1. The experimental input proton flux is comparable with the estimation of the proton flux at E > 10 MeV, associated with an energetic superflare based on the size distribution of solar and stellar flares."

The authors have failed to exactly or visually specify the experimental apparatus used with these proton bombardments meant to simulate superflares, and so we have no reason to assume that any realistic simulation of early Earth conditions took place in their experiments, particularly since the authors made no claim to have realistically simulated early Earth conditions. Presumably the experimental apparatus was some special gizmo unlike anything that would have ever existed on the early Earth, just as the Miller-Urey apparatus was such a gizmo. The authors have assumed "superflare events with energy ~3 × 1034 erg," which is  30 million times larger than a normal solar flare (with only 1027 erg). and 300 times more powerful than the most powerful solar flares (with only 1032erg).

What was the amino acid output from such proton bombardment? It was only negligible trace amounts. Figure 4 of the paper shows amino acids outputs. For three of the four amino acids produced, the output was less than 120 nanomoles, which you can think of as less than 120 parts per billion. For the other amino acid, the output was less than 600 parts per billion. Only 4 of the 20 amino acids needed for life were produced. 

What was the amino acid output when a realistic methane amount was used in the experimental apparatus? Figure 4 makes clear that no amino acids were produced by the "superflare" apparatus unless the gas mixture was at least 1% methane. And the 2010 paper "Earth's Earliest Atmospheres" tells us this, indicating that no such 1% methane level would have existed in the Earth's early atmosphere: 

"However, photochemical studies showed that any methane (Lasaga et al. 1971) or ammonia (Kuhn and Atreya 1979; Kasting 1982) in the atmosphere would quickly be destroyed. Meanwhile geologically based arguments, which treat the atmosphere as outgassed from the solid Earth, were taken as strongly suggesting that Earth’s original atmosphere was composed mostly of H2O, CO2, and N2, with only small amounts of CO and H2, and essentially no CH4 [methane] or NH3 [ammonia](Poole 1951; Holland 1962; Abelson 1966; Holland 1984)."

The 2020 paper "Superflares on solar-type stars from the first year observations of TESS" analyzed 25,734 solar-type stars looking for evidence of superflares.  The paper states this:

"The majority of the solar-type stars in our data set are rapidly rotating stars with stellar periodicities shorter than 10 days. Moreover, as only seven superflares are detected on Sun-like stars, we may not be able to give a convincing conclusion on the frequency of superflares for Sun-like stars."

So apparently fewer than 1 in 3000 solar-type stars produced superflares. None of the 20 stars listed in Table 5 or Table 6 of the paper have a rotation period of more than 5 days. The paper says, "it is clear that the flare frequency decreases with an increase of the rotation period." Conversely, the sun takes 27 days to rotate. Given such facts, which suggest superflares are very rare in sun-like stars and that they only occur in stars rotating much more slowly than the sun,  it is very unlikely that the sun ever produced superflares anything near as powerful as the superflares assumed in the Airapetian paper; and there is no reasonable basis for suspecting that superflares would have occurred in the early history of the solar system to an extent that would have had any appreciable effect on the amount of amino acids that could be produced. Also, there is no reason to think the early Earth atmosphere had 1% methane, and the experiment suggests without such a methane level, no amino acids would have been produced from superflares. NASA's headline of "A Stormy, Active Sun May Have Kickstarted Life on Earth" is bunk. 

The idea that superflares (destructive, disruptive events) would have "kickstarted" the origin of life (requiring vast levels of organization) should seem nonsensical to anyone who has studied the complexity of even the simplest cell. The simplest self-reproducing cell requires several hundreds of different types of functional proteins, and most of these proteins require several hundreds of amino acids arranged in just the right way to produce a particular effect. The simplest cell requires more than 50,000 well-arranged amino acids. Since there are 26 letters in the English alphabet and 20 amino acids used by living things, you can get a good rough analogy by considering that the simplest self-reproducing cell requires an organization of parts as impressive as the organization of letters needed to produce a well-written 50-page book (in which each page had about 1000 letters, the same as 1000 characters).  What you would need to produce such a thing is an organizer, or an enormously strong organization effect.  Neither Miller's lightning nor Airapetian's superflares are organizers. In fact, both are the opposite of organizers.  

How can institutions such as NASA get away with "biological baby talk" headlines such as "A Stormy, Active Sun May Have Kickstarted Life on Earth"? Because such organizations have always done a very bad, no good, horrible job at educating the public about the complexity of living things. Our professors and high school biology teachers have often acted like very incompetent biology educators. And so they get away with the nonsense of talking about "building blocks of life," as if life could be assembled by components arranged in any order (like the building blocks of a wall), rather than components that have to be arranged as carefully as the letters in a well-written book.      

Don't Be Impressed by Equation Spraying That Does Not Really Calculate

 Recently we got from a Harvard professor of evolutionary biology (Lloyd  A. Demetrius) a pair of papers announcing what the author apparently considers some grand new insight. He announces something he calls Directionality Theory, which claims there is an "Entropic Principle of Self-Organization." The claims Demetrius makes about this principle are not at all cautious. Hinting his principle is something that explains one or more of the biggest mysteries of nature, Demetrius makes this boast in his paper "Self–Organization, Evolutionary Entropy and Directionality Theory": 

"This principle is a universal rule, applicable to the self–assembly of structures ranging from the folding of proteins, to branching morphogenesis, and the emergence of social organization. The principle also elucidates the origin of cellular life: the transition from inorganic matter to the emergence of cells, capable of replication and metabolism."

Like the term "emergence," the term "self-organization" has always been a "last resort" term of desperation pulled out by scientists when they have no credible tale to tell of how some amount of organization arose. On page 5 of the paper, Demetrius gives this rather vacuous definition of "self-organization":  "Self–organization is a process of assembly in which the formation of macroscopic patterns spontaneously emerge from the collective behavior of the individual components." Demetrius gives two examples of what he calls "static self-assembly": the formation of crystals and "the folding of small proteins." We do not know why proteins form into three-dimensional shapes that are necessary for their function. Claims that such events occur because of "energy minimization" are not credible. Calling protein folding "self-assembly" or "self-organization" does nothing to explain why protein folding occurs. We have no understanding of anything within a polypeptide chain (a sequence of amino acids) that would cause it to form into some functional shape that would be incredibly improbable to arise from chance conformations.  Protein folding is not a known example of "self-assembly." 

We later read this: 

"The central concept in this study of self–organization is evolutionary entropy, Demetrius (1974), (2013). This concept is a statistical measure of cooperativity, which we define as the extent to which the individual components of the network are held together by the interacting forces. These forces may be intermolecular, modulated by molecular recognition; intercellular, encoded in terms of morphology or physiology; or organismic, cooperation driven by individual behavior."

We can start to suspect here that Demetrius is attempting some kind of mashup between physics and biology. We can understand why he might want to do such a thing. Physics has always been a hard science, based on equations and mathematics. Evolutionary theory was born in the nineteenth century as an utterly unmathematical ideology. Darwin had little interest or ability in mathematics, and his work The Origin of Species shows not the slightest interest in physics or mathematics. Totally shunning mathematics was one of Darwin's ways of avoiding probability calculations that would have been fatal to his explanatory boasts. Many Darwinists have  had a kind of "physics envy," and many of them hoped to one day make Darwinism sound like some kind of "hard science," which it definitely is not. So many a Darwinist has tried to mix some physics or math in with Darwinian theory, to make it sound more scientific-sounding. 

The phase "evolutionary entropy" as used by Demetrius sounds very clumsy indeed. Below are the first two definitions of "entropy" I get when doing a Google search for "entropy definition":

"(1) PHYSICS: a thermodynamic quantity representing the unavailability of a system's thermal energy for conversion into mechanical work, often interpreted as the degree of disorder or randomness in the system.

(2) lack of order or predictability; gradual decline into disorder."

But in one of his many definitions of the term, which don't agree with each other, Demetrius has defined "evolutionary entropy" as a  "statistical measure of cooperativity, which we define as the extent to which the individual components of the network are held together by the interacting forces." That sounds like rather the opposite of how a physicist would define entropy.  I guess this is what we might expect from an evolutionary biologist. From the group that keeps talking about the selection that isn't really selection, we now have talk about the entropy that is kind of the opposite of entropy. So whenever we read Demetrius talk about "evolutionary entropy" perhaps we should regard it as kind of an Orwellian Newspeak term, like referring to the government torture center as the Ministry of Love. 

And also we should not take too seriously a principle Demetrius defines like this: "The Entropic Principle of Self–Organization: The equilibrium states of a self–assembly process is contingent on the external resource constraints, and characterized by the maximization of evolutionary entropy." Entropy isn't self-organization, but something like the opposite, so the term "Entropic Principle of Self–Organization" sounds like someone talking about "the peaceful use of city detonations by hydrogen bomb explosions." 

In a paper Demetrius gives varying different definitions of "evolutionary entropy," definitions which seem to conflict with each other, and all definitions never  matching the physics idea of entropy.  Here are the paper's definitions of "evolutionary entropy" (I have added boldface to some of the text):

 "Evolutionary entropy describes the rate at which a network of interacting metabolic units convert an external energy source into mechanical energy and work" (page 2).

"A statistical measure of cooperativity, which we define as the extent to which the individual components of the network are held together by the interacting forces" (page 8).

"Evolutionary entropy, a statistical measure of the cooperativity of the individuals of a given genotype" (page 9).

 "Evolutionary entropy describes the rate at which a population converts the external resources into metabolic energy and biomass" (page 9).

"Evolutionary entropy, in the context of this class of models, depicts the variability in the age at which individuals in a population reproduce and die" (page 10).

"Evolutionary entropy is a statistical measure of Darwinian fitness" (page 21).

"Evolutionary entropy, a fundamental parameter of the extent to which the component share and distribute the internal energy of macroscopic aggregate, describes the rate at which the components transform the external energy into mechanical energy and biological work." (page 21). 

"The statistical parameter, evolutionary entropy, is a measure of the geometry of convection patterns" (page 35). 

"Evolutionary entropy, a measure of cooperativity — the extent to which the internal energy of the system is shared and distributed between the interacting components" (page 36).

In another paper  "Evolutionary Entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics," the same author defined "evolutionary entropy" like this:

• "Evolutionary entropy, a statistical measure which describes the number and diversity of metabolic cycles in a population of replicating organisms" (page 2). 
• "Evolutionary entropy describes the multiplicity of cyclic pathways of energy flow between the different metabolic states in a population of replicating organisms" (page 3).
• "Evolutionary entropy can be considered a measure of temporal order, and organized state of energy" (page 4) -- a statement that oddly contrasts with the statement on page 3 that "thermodynamic entropy can be considered a measure of positional disorder."
• "Evolutionary entropy, i.e., the number of replicating cycles generated by the interaction between the individuals" (page 25).
• "Evolutionary entropy describes the rate at which the population appropriates chemical energy from the external environment and converts this energy into biological work" (page 33). 

In another paper  "Evolutionary Entropy: A Predictor of Body Size, Metabolic Rate and Maximal Life Span" the same author defined "evolutionary entropy" like this: "Evolutionary entropy is a function of the age-specific fecundity and mortality variables and has an information-theoretic interpretation: the uncertainty in the age of the mother of a randomly chosen newborn." It rather seems that Demetrius loves very much using the term "evolutionary entropy," but that he keeps changing around his definition of the term, wandering "all over the map," as if he can't make up his mind about what evolutionary entropy is. Unfortunately, since he has written several papers all centered upon this inconsistently-defined phrase "evolutionary entropy," it rather seems that such papers fall short. 

What we seem to get in these papers (and another I will discuss) is lots of what I may call equation spraying. I may define equation spraying as the abundant use of arcane equations to create some superficial impression of deep thought and intelligent analysis, particularly when such mystifying symbolism is not necessary, or when it obfuscates or distracts you from realizing the author is speculating or hand waving or engaging in dubious logic. The biggest equation sprayers are theoretical cosmologists and theoretical physicists. They love to use equation spraying to fill up their papers with so many arcane symbols that you might be impressed unless you realize that they're just speculating like crazy. Biologists may engage in equation spraying when they are trying to fool you into thinking that their hazy unbelievable speculations are some kind of rigorous thought like that used to calculate the gravitational influences on spacecraft or the energy that would be released by an asteroid striking Earth at a particular speed. 

Some symptoms suggesting the possibility of equation spraying are below:

(1) We get equations that are not well documented, in which there are obscure symbols in strange fonts, without any decent explanation of what some or most of the symbols mean. If an explanation is given, it may be merely some imprecise phrase with no clear meaning. An example would be when Demetrius says on page 9 of this paper this: "The function Φ represents the resource production rate; γ denote the temporal correlation in resource production." Another example would be on page 13 of the same paper where he says, "The quantity W denote the total number of microstates of a system consistent with a given macrostate." Another example would be on page where we get something ("ϕ") very vaguely defined as "a potential function on Ω which describes the interaction between the individual components."  Equally obscure examples could be quoted from papers of the same author. When you see the parts of equations described so imprecisely, or not described at all, you may get the impression an author never actually intended to calculate using such equations, and you may get the suspicion the equations are largely decorations intended to impress us. 

(2) Some obscure concept that does not correspond to a quantifiable reality known to exist in nature (such as "cooperativity" or "the inflaton field") is represented by some symbol, often a letter of the Greek alphabet. There may be multiple occurrences of such a thing in the same paper. 

(3) There are very few or no worked examples that show a case of how the equations would specifically work in the real world to produce a particular calculated number. Basically no concrete use is made of the equations to produce some particular calculated number or numerical output.

(4) Key terms may be inconsistently defined in different ways that do not agree with each other.  

Looking at the four papers Demetrius has on the Cornell science paper preprint server, the ones here, here, here and here, I find very many equations (more than 200?), but I seem to find only one case in which such equations are used to calculate anything: on page 10 of the paper here, there is a specific calculation which produces the not-very-grand calculation that a particular plant (dipsacus sylvestris, the wild teasel) has a generation time of 2.91 years. 

The wild teasel

Another recent paper by Demetrius is entitled "Directionality Theory and the Origin of Life." In this paper he announces, "The main tenet of Directionality Theory is the Entropic Principle of Collective Behavior: The collective behavior of aggregates of organic matter is contingent on the population size and the external energy source, and characterized by extremal states of evolutionary entropy." 

The first sentence in the section entitled "Introduction" is this very bad misstatement: "Cellular life, the fundamental unit of living organisms, consists of an elaborate set of self– reproducing chemical reactions." No cellular life consists of something vastly more: various states of enormously high organization, such as the existence of hundreds of different types of protein molecules that each have an average of hundreds of well-arranged parts. Saying that cellular life consists of chemical reactions is as bad an error as saying that jet aircraft consist of energy use. Just as jet aircraft are something vastly more than just energy use, cellular life is something vastly more than just chemical reactions. 

Later in the paper, Demetrius tries to make use of one of the shadiest rhetorical devices of origin-of-life theorists: appealing to the concept of "protocells." The sleazy trick works like this: you get some description of a disorganized bubble, and try to call that a "protocell." A similar trick might be to find a little metal junk in a junkyard, and call that a "proto-jetliner." The difference in organization between the little bubbles labeled as "protocells" and self-reproducing cells is like the difference between a handful of junk parts and a modern 747 aircraft capable of carrying more than 100 passengers across the Atlantic ocean. The membranes of cells are actually extremely complex things requiring many different types of specialized protein molecules (each consisting of thousands of well-arranged atoms) in order for such membranes to act the way they do (rather like some intelligent gatekeeper). 

Demetrius tells us this: "Protocells are compartmented systems composed of two types of RNA polymers, namely the information units, the precursors to DNA, and the catalytic units, the precursors to proteins." The precursors to DNA are nucleosides (combinations of ribose sugar and pyrimidines or purines) and nucleotides (a nucleoside plus a phosphate).  The precursors to protein molecules are amino acids. No experiments realistically simulating the early Earth have produced either nucleosides or any of the twenty amino acids used by living things, so there is no reason to believe that protocells (as described by Demetrius) ever would have existed. Like so many other other origin-of-life theorists, Demetrius appeals to the Miller-Urey experiments, but such appeals are fallacious. The Miller-Urey experiment never realistically simulated early Earth conditions. That experiment used "every other day" continuous electrical bombardment within a glass sphere, unlike anything that would have occurred on the early Earth. The mixture of gases it used to try to simulate the early Earth did not match the early Earth's atmosphere as scientists now understand it, and the specially constructed glass apparatus used by the Miller-Urey experiment did not correspond to anything that ever would have existed before humans existed.   

What would you have if you had some so-called "protocell" consisting of "the precursors of DNA" and "the precursors of proteins"?  That would be like a balloon filled with some Scrabble letters. But that would do nothing to explain the origin of life, which requires tens of thousands of very well-arranged amino acids (to make hundreds of different types of proteins), and tens of thousands of very well-arranged nucleosides (to make a DNA molecule specifying the amino acid contents of such proteins). Claiming that some so-called "protocell" consisting of "the precursors of DNA" and "the precursors of proteins"  explains the origin of cells is like claiming that well-written books can accidentally arise merely because you have some  Scrabble sets or some boxes of Alpha Bits consisting of disordered letters not arranged into sentences.   

Figure 3 of the paper by Demetrius ("Directionality Theory and the Origin of Life") is a misleading diagram that has as its bottom something that is the equivalent of this:

Protocells --> Darwinian evolution -->  Cellular life

This is nonsensical. As very many Darwinists have admitted, Darwinian evolution requires life to first exist, so it cannot possibly explain a transition from nonliving protocells to living reproducing cells.  The predecessors of a self-reproducing cell would not be disorganized protocells but enormously organized things such as protein molecules and organelles.