Authorities Spur Wrong Ideas About the Complexity of Proteins

Protein molecules are the most basic functional components of living things. In the human body there are more than 20,000 different types of protein molecules. Each is a different type of invention in our bodies. How many amino acids are in the most complex human proteins? This question has great relevance to the credibility of claims such as Darwinism. If protein molecules consisted of only a few amino acids, then we might easily believe that the different types of protein molecules arose by chance. But if each type of protein molecule consists of a specific arrangement of very many amino acids, such a claim is much harder to believe. 

In general, the more well-arranged parts something has, the harder it is to believe that such a thing arose by chance rather by design or deliberate intention. For example, suppose you enter someone's house and see a bunch of Scrabble blocks on someone's table. If you see the word "cat" consisting of three letters, it's not too hard to believe the word appeared by chance, perhaps by someone just dumping the Scrabble letters on the table. But if you see on the table written in Scrabble letters a full sentence such as "I very much love the purring sound my cat makes," then it is vastly harder to believe such an arrangement appeared by chance.  And suppose you see on the table  written in Scrabble letters a long sentence such as this: "The day that my mother gave me my wonderful cat Mittens as an adorable young kitten was the happiest day of my life, and every day that my cat Mittens has lived with me has been a better day because of her wonderful presence and her soothing purring sound."  Then it becomes quite impossible to logically believe that such a sentence appeared by chance. 

As these examples show, the more well-arranged parts something has, the harder it is to believe that such a thing arose by chance rather by design or deliberate intention. So the question of how many amino acids are in proteins is a question of very great relevance to the credibility of Darwinism. What kind of answers do we get upon using a search engine to search for how many amino acids are in a protein? We often get some answers that give us very wrong ideas. Doing a Google search using the phrase "number of amino acids in a protein," we get many a bum steer. 

The main answers you get when using a search phrase of "number of amino acids in a protein" are utterly wrong answers of 20.  That is an answer to a different question: the question of how many types of amino acids are used by proteins. 

We can only imagine how many millions of people have been misled on this very important matter by the bad answer Google gives here. How many times have there been conversations like this?

Joe: Jane, I think large organisms such as humans are too complex to have arisen by blind processes such as Darwinian evolution. Take protein molecules, for example. We're built from protein molecules, but they're just too complex to have formed by blind processes. 

Jane: No, you're wrong. Protein molecules are simple. Look I'll Google for the answer. Here's what you get when you type "number of amino acids in a protein." You see? It's only 20.

Joe: Well, I'll be a monkey's uncle. I would have SWORN I read somewhere that protein molecules consist of very many well-arranged parts. But you can't argue with Google. If Google says protein molecules have only 20 parts, I guess that must be right. 

To get the right answer about the number of amino acids parts in a protein molecule, you must be careful to ask just exactly the right question:

Google search phrase	First answer Google gives	Is answer correct?
Number of amino acids in a protein	20	No. 20 is the answer to a different question: “how many types of amino acids are used by proteins?”
How many parts in a protein molecule	The only number you get in the first answer is 20: “All proteins are made up of different arrangements of the same 20 kinds of amino acids.”	Technically correct, but prone to give the wrong idea, since most protein molecules consist of hundreds or thousands of amino acids parts, each of which consist of 10 to 20 atoms.
How complex is a protein molecule	The only number you get in the first answers is 20.	The answers are technically correct, but tend to give quick readers the wrong idea that protein molecules consist of only 20 amino acids
Average number of amino acids in a protein	“Proteins come in a wide variety of shapes, and they are generally between 50 and 2000 amino acids long.”	Yes.

Since people searching for information about the complexity of protein molecules would be far more likely to use the first three of these searches rather than the last one, a very large fraction of people searching for information about the complexity of protein molecules will be given a wrong idea. 

Below are the results with the Microsoft Bing search engine (www.bing.com), which are even worse than the results from Google.

Bing search phrase	First answer Bing gives	Is answer correct?
Number of amino acids in a protein	20 "according to 5 sources"	No. 20 is the answer to a different question: “how many types of amino acids are used by proteins?”
How many parts in a protein molecule	Twenty amino acids.	No.  20 is the answer to a different question: “how many types of amino acids are used by proteins?"
How complex is a protein molecule	After a bad large-font answer of "amino acids," there is a small font answer saying "Proteins are made up of hundreds or thousands of smaller units called amino acids, which are attached to one another in long chains."	After a bad and confusing answer in a large font, we get a right answer in a small font.
Average number of amino acids in a protein	20.	No.  20 is an entirely inappropriate response to this search phrase, but is a correct answer to the question: “how many types of amino acids are used by proteins?”

Why are the results above so bad? One may reasonably wonder whether nothing has been done to prevent bad or misleading answers to these crucially important search phrases because our authorities do not want us to know how many well-arranged parts are in protein molecules.  Perhaps this is because the better you understand the complexity of protein molecules, the less likely you will be to believe mainstream accounts of their unguided origin. 

There is another way for trying to look into the complexity of protein molecules: a person can inquire about how large are the largest protein molecules. In Google a straightforward way to use the search phrase "most complex protein molecules." The first page of search results will not give you a single answer telling you that the most complex protein molecules have thousands of amino acids. The first answer is a bad answer of "quaternary structure." That is the most complex of four types of protein structure, but not an indication of how complex the most complex protein molecules are.  Then there are the other answers in the search results that refer to the important topic of protein complexes. But nowhere on the first page of search results do we get the simple correct answer: that the most complex protein molecules consist of thousands of amino acids. The same thing happens on the Bing search engine. If you type the search phrase "most complex protein molecules," you will get a page of search results, none of which tell you that the most complex protein molecules consist of thousands of amino acids. 

Another way in which authorities give us misleading ideas about protein complexity is by their visuals of proteins. Visuals of protein structure follow an odd set of conventions:

(1) Proteins structure visuals are not made in a way that give you any idea about how many amino acids the proteins consist of. 

(2) Proteins structure visuals are not made in a way that give you any idea about how many atoms the proteins consist of.

(3) Proteins structure visuals typically are in a way that gives you the incorrect idea that the protein molecule consists of only a small number of parts, even when the molecules usually consists of 400 or more well-arranged amino acids, which altogether consists of more than 5000 well-arranged atoms.  

I can give you an example. The link here takes you to a page depicting an IMKO protein. On the page we have this protein structure visual:

If you are an average person judging how complex this molecule is, how many amino acids would you guess the molecule has, based on this visual? Maybe about four, because we see about four different units, each with a different color. But this protein molecule consists of 574 amino acids and 4904 atoms. 

Can it be that modern 3D graphics software systems are not up to the job of depicting a molecule with hundreds of parts, in a way that suggests that there are hundreds of parts? Not at all. For today's 3D graphics software, it's a breeze to depict something with thousands of parts. What is going on is that academia has settled on visual protein molecule depiction conventions. Such conventions make protein molecules appear vastly simpler than they are.  It's just as if the mainstream was intent on visually fooling us into thinking that protein molecules are vastly simpler than they are. 

We can imagine a way of visually depicting protein molecules that would give us a correct idea about their complexity.  Each type of amino acid would be depicted with a different color. Then there would be a color key at the bottom of each visual, which would tell you which amino acid corresponded to each of the colors. Since there are 20 types of amino acids used by living things, and also roughly 20 colors of the rainbow that a human eye can distinguish, it would be easy enough to depict protein molecules in such a way.  Such a depiction could easily be done given the power of today's 3D graphics. 

But protein molecules are never depicted in such a way. Instead of having realistic visuals that give us the correct idea that protein molecules typically consist of hundreds of amino acids, we are given visuals that leave the average person with the idea that protein molecules have only maybe 5 or 10 or 15 parts. Even without having a more sophisticated type of display that identifies each amino acid in a different color, there is a much simpler way of displaying models of proteins and protein complexes, which would give us correct ideas about the number of parts in such a things. You could have visuals exactly like the visuals that are now used, but with a color-coded legend box in the right corner. The legend box would tell us how many amino acid parts are involved in each of the areas with a particular color. The legend might look something like this:

But we never see such legends in visuals of protein structure. Again and again, we are given protein structure visuals that tend to give someone the impression that protein molecules have only a small number of parts. It is just as if our science authorities were trying to make the casual reader think that protein molecules are vastly simpler than they are.  

A way in which mainstream authorities very frequently mislead us about the complexity of proteins is to refer to amino acids as "building blocks" of proteins or "building blocks of life."  Such a phrase plants in people's minds the extremely erroneous idea that proteins or living things can be created by an unordered assemblage of amino acids, because building blocks such as bricks do not need to be placed in any special order to make something like a wall of a house.  Functional proteins actually require arrangements of amino acids as special and hard-to-randomly-achieve as the arrangement of letters needed to make a functional well-written paragraph.  

A Google image search using the phrase "protein complexity" produces a bunch of images, none of which gives any insight about the complexity of proteins.  A constant feature of Darwinian biology is its underrepresentation and misrepresentation of how high are the organizational requirements for biological function. In countless  different ways Darwinists try to fool us into thinking that incredibly complex and incredibly organized things are simple, or that functions requiring millions or many thousands of well-arranged parts can be achieved by getting an arrangement of only a few parts. Often this involves talking as if small parts of a system give functionality that requires some well-organized system vastly more complicated than such small parts. 

I will now tell you how to get an authoritative answer about how many human protein molecules have more than 2000 well-arranged amino acid parts. Using the UniProt protein database that anyone can use without a login, you go to www.uniprot.org, and type in the following search phrase (or, using less effort, just click on the link below):

(length:[2000 TO 50000]) AND (organism_name:"Homo sapiens")

This gives you a results screen like the one below.

You will see more than 1000 rows in the result set. The results will first show the simplest proteins with more than 2000 amino acids. Click on the Length column header, and the results will be sorted like we see above, with the most complex proteins shown first. 

There seem to be some duplicates in the results, or cases of proteins that are minor variations of the same protein.  But scrolling through the results, you will be able to see two things:

(1) There are at least hundreds of types of proteins in the human body that each have thousands of amino acids.

(2) The most complex proteins in the human body have more than 10,000 well-arranged amino acids. For example, the Titin protein consists of more than 30,000 well-arranged amino acids. 

Using a variation of the search string above, you can get an idea of how many types of human protein molecules have more than 1000 amino acids each. For example, suppose you change the www.uniprot.org search string to be the one below (or just click on the link below):

(length:[1000 TO 50000]) AND (organism_name:"Homo sapiens")

You will get a result set of more than 8000 rows. Allowing for many duplicates, we can assume that human bodies contain more than 1000 types of "highest complexity" protein molecules, where "highest complexity" means having more than 1000 amino acids. 

The facts about protein molecule complexity are these:

• The human body uses many than 20,000 types of protein molecules, most requiring hundreds of well-arranged amino acids. 
• The average human protein molecule has roughly 500 amino acids. Human cells are eukaryotic cells, and according to the scientific paper here, "Eukaryotic proteins have an average size of 472" amino acids. 
• More than 1000 types of human protein molecules consist of more than 1000 amino acids each.
• Hundreds of types of human protein molecules consist of more  than 2000 amino acids. 
• It is misleading to call amino acids "building blocks of proteins," because unlike building blocks which can be added in any order to make a wall of a building, new types of functional proteins require special arrangements of amino acids in very specific sequences.  A non-misleading analogy is to compare a type of protein molecule to an essay, chapter or computer program, and to compare the protein molecule's amino acids to the special sequence of letters used to make such an essay, chapter or computer program,
• DNA and its genes (the same as the genome) merely specify which amino acids are in particular proteins.  To be functional, protein molecules must be folded in very specific ways to make a 3D shape. It is unknown how such 3D shapes arise from mere sequences or chains of amino acids. This is known as the protein folding problem, and is still unsolved.  Progress with software such as AlphaFold is not progress in solving the protein folding problem, but merely progress in a different problem called the protein folding prediction problem.  
• A cell holds an average of something like 40 million protein molecules (not to be confused with 40 million types of protein molecules).  Protein molecules must be arranged in very special ways in a cell for the cell to be functional.  A cell is not at all some disordered bag of protein molecules.  Protein molecules are arranged into teams called protein complexes; special arrangements of such teams can make larger structures called organelles; and a cell may require thousands of well-arranged organelles physically arranged in the right way for the cell to function properly. 
• DNA does not specify which proteins make up protein complexes, nor does it specify how organelles form, nor does it specify the structure of any cell. 
• Darwin knew nothing about the complexity of protein molecules, and did nothing to explain them. Claiming that Darwin explained protein molecules is like claiming that Plato explained smartphones or that Aristotle explained television. 
• Scientists have attempted to strip microbes down to the smallest level in which they can still reproduce, and find that even when microbes are reduced to their smallest complexity, they still require several hundred different types of proteins, most requiring hundreds of well-arranged amino acids. 
• Within the possibility space of all possible amino acid arrangements, functional protein molecules are as rare as functional architectural instructions within the space of all possible letter combinations. 
• Evolutionary biologists lack any credible explanation for how we get so many protein molecules that are so vastly unlikely to appear through unguided processes. As four Harvard scientists stated in a scientific paper, "A wide variety of protein structures exist in nature, however the evolutionary origins of this panoply of proteins remain unknown." 

Number of letters in the English alphabet	Number of different types of amino acids used in proteins
26	20
How many well-arranged letters do you need to make a useful paragraph?	How many well-arranged amino acids do you need to make a useful protein?
About 500	About 500
How many different paragraphs (each with a different function) do you need to make a long book?	How many different types of proteins (each with a different function) do you need to make an adult human body?
About 2000	About 20,000
How many well-arranged letter parts do you need to make a long book?	How many well-arranged amino acids do you need to make a human body?
About 1,000,000	Very many times more than 10,000,000 (20,000 times 500), because 10,000,000 is merely the number we get when ignoring duplicate protein molecules of the same type, which have to be very specifically arranged in just the right way for the body to work. The requirement for multiple copies of the same protein type to be well-arranged causes an exponential increase in the total arrangement requirements.

Starship Smithereens? There's Nothing Special About Loeb's Spherules

Our news media shows the most enormous bias in its skepticism.  When covering observations that conflict with the cherished dogmas of materialism, our science media get hyper-skeptical. But when discussing the claims of its favored priesthood, the science professors of academia, the science news media shows gigantic levels of credulity. 

Consider the case of Avi Loeb's recent expedition to try to search for evidence of a crashed extraterrestrial spaceship.  A Harvard astronomy professor, Loeb somehow got the idea that a  2014 meteor (the CNEOS 2014-01-08 meteor) may have been an interstellar spacecraft that blew up high in the sky. Loeb has recently finished his million-dollar oceanic expedition looking for what he hoped would be remnants of a crashed extraterrestrial spaceship, an expedition he organized.  He found no sign of anything like a spaceship or any of its parts. Loeb claims to have found tiny round specks only about a tenth of a millimeter in size. Loeb says (incorrectly, as I will show) that there's something unusual about such specks. He apparently wants us to believe that the specks are from an extraterrestrial spacecraft that blew up into smithereens after entering the Earth's atmosphere in 2014 (or so many recent news stories have suggested). 

Before discussing how there's nothing at all unusual about the unimpressive specks Loeb has collected from the ocean, let us consider how preposterous the underlying theory is.  

(1) The universe is believed to be about 13 billion years old, and if intelligent life were to arise on some other planet, such a thing might have occurred at any time in the past billion years. Human civilization is less than ten thousand years old.  So mathematically it seems far more likely that civilized life arising on some other planet would have arisen very many thousands or millions of years before civilized life first appeared on planet Earth.  Since a billion years is a length of time 100,000 times longer than 10,000 years, it would seem to require about a 1 in 100,000 coincidence for Earth to be visited by some extraterrestrial civilization that was only a few thousand years more advanced than ours. It would seem to be vastly more likely that a visiting spacecraft would come come from a civilization very many thousands or millions of years older than ours.   

(2). Any type of travel between stars would require technology vastly greater than anything humans have. While the distance to the planet Saturn is almost a billion miles, the distance to the nearest star is about 23 trillion miles, a distance 25,000 times farther than the distance to Saturn. Traveling such a distance would require some technology vastly beyond what humans have. Moreover, there is every reason to suspect that travel between two different solar systems that independently evolved intelligent life would require journeys many times farther than the distance between our solar system and the nearest solar system. There are all kinds of reasons for thinking that the appearance of life and intelligent life should be rare blessings rather than something we would expect to find in every solar system. So a spaceship from another solar system would probably have to travel a distance many times greater than 23 trillion miles.  This would be all the more reason for assuming that such a journey could only be made by some civilization vastly more advanced than ours.  

(3) Since it is known that the  CNEOS 2014-01-08 meteor exploded very high in the atmosphere in 2014, Loeb's theory requires us to believe that the CNEOS 2014-01-08 meteor was an extraterrestrial spaceship that exploded into the tiniest smithereens the instant it entered the Earth's atmosphere.  Can you imagine how bad rocket engineers would have to be to make an interstellar spaceship that blew up into the tiniest pieces the instant it entered Earth's atmosphere? Believing in such a thing is like believing that someone made an ocean liner ten times bigger than the Titanic, and that such a giant ship blew up into a billion tiny pieces on the first day that it was launched into the ocean. 

A dialog like the one below fits the scenario Loeb asks us to believe in:

Helmsman:  Oh no! Even though we just entered the upper atmosphere of this planet, the whole ship is about explode into tiny pieces!

Captain:   This is horrible. It seems that our vast godlike minds never anticipated that a planet with intelligent life would have exactly the kind of atmosphere we would expect such a planet to have, and that we built a starship that blows up as soon as it makes contact with such an atmosphere!  The explosion will be so bad that only the tiniest speck-like traces of our mighty starship will be found!

Loeb's theory about the CNEOS 2014-01-08 meteor makes not the slightest bit of sense. If an extraterrestrial civilization had the technology to accomplish the incredibly hard feat of traveling between inhabited solar systems, it would surely have the ability to create spacecraft that could enter the atmosphere of a planet without blowing up into the tiniest smithereens upon first entering into such an atmosphere.  

The coverage of Loeb's latest claims by the science press has been almost uniformly credulous.  An example is a CBS News story entitled "Harvard professor Avi Loeb believes he's found fragments of alien technology." I don't think Loeb believes any such thing, given that his results are about as unimpressive as  results could be.  The first sentence of the article shows what a clickbait lie the headline is, for it immediately changes the claim to be merely that "Loeb believes he may have found fragments of alien technology."   

Nothing in the article gives any justification for such claims. The article incorrectly tells us "The U.S. Space Command confirmed with almost near certainty, 99.999%, that the material came from another solar system." No such thing occurred. An example of Avi Loeb making a similar incorrect claim is his post here, where he states this about about the CNEOS 2014-01-08 meteor, "Its interstellar origin was formally confirmed at the 99.999% confidence in an official letter from the US Space Command under DoD to NASA on March 1, 2022."  Loeb gives a copy of this letter, and in the letter someone mentions that Loeb wrote a paper claiming (with 99.999% confidence) that the meteor was "from an unbound hyperbolic orbit (defined as interstellar space hereafter)." The paper then merely says that "Dr. Mozer confirmed that the velocity estimate reported to NASA is sufficiently accurate to indicate an interstellar trajectory." No one at the US Space Command or US government made any determination (with 99.999% confidence or any high level of confidence) that the meteor was interstellar or from another solar system. The statement by someone at the US Space Command has no accuracy estimate and no estimate of a degree of confidence. Deplorably, Loeb has inaccurately represented his own 99.999% confidence  estimate as being some estimate of the US Space Command, which was not the case.  Particularly appalling is the untrue CBS News claim that the US Space Command said the meteor came from another solar system.  The memo in question cited by Loeb does not even use the phrase "solar system."  Coming from interstellar space is not the same as coming from another solar system. 

Two other scientists recently published a paper saying that the simplest explanation for the CNEOS 2014-01-08 meteor is that it was not from some other solar system, and that its speed was simply overestimated. Beware of anyone ever claiming something with a 99.999% certainty, as such claims usually involve debatable assumptions; and when you remove one or more of those debatable assumptions, the certainty may fall to below 50%. 

In the CBS News story we have a quote from Loeb:

" 'We found ten spherules. These are almost perfect spheres, or metallic marbles. When you look at them through a microscope, they look very distinct from the background,' explained Loeb, 'They have colors of gold, blue, brown, and some of them resemble a miniature of the Earth.' "

What imagination! The photos show some tiny specks, none of which resembles a miniature of the Earth; and they are all much tinier than marbles. And since Loeb is insinuating such specks are wreckage, resemblance to the Earth is irrelevant. We read, "An analysis of the composition showed that the spherules are made of 84% iron, 8% silicon, 4% magnesium, and 2% titanium, plus trace elements." Is there anything unusual about that? No, there isn't. 

A 2001 scientific paper ("Magnetic spherules: cosmic dust or markers of a meteoric impact?") reports that tiny magnetic spherules have been found all over the world:

"In the past hundred years, magnetic spherules were found in various geological environments, namely in the Antarctic and Greenland ice and glacial sediments, in deep-sea floor cores, in meteorite fall areas...in volcanic and ..metamorphic rocks. Magnetic spherules found in recent sediments and oceanic floor around the industrial centers may also be the products of air pollution (probably over 99%)." 

The paper reports that these magnetic spherules were more than 80% iron, with additional amounts of aluminum and silicon (a few percent each) along with phosphorus and titanium. The element composition sounds very similar to what Loeb has reported. 

In a June 21st post, Loeb attempts to make some big deal of the fact that some of his specks are missing the metal nickel:

"We found a composition of mostly iron with some magnesium and titanium but no nickel. This composition is anomalous compared to human-made alloys, known asteroids and familiar astrophysical sources."

No, in its Table 2 the paper cited above tells us no nickel was found in 16 of the speck-like spherules it examined (consisting of mostly iron with some magnesium and titanium). The paper tells us this:

"It is widely accepted that Ni [nickel] content of magnetic spherules indicates extraterrestrial origin, although opposite views are also known. The so-called fission crust, which can be found on the surface of micrometeorites and impactite spherules, does not contain Ni [nickel]."

So there's nothing anomalous about finding spherules like this without any nickel and with the composition Loeb reports. There's apparently nothing special or anomalous about Loeb's specks. They're very much like specks already detected in a variety of places around the world.

The paper "Morphological aspects, textural features and chemical composition of spherules from the Colônia impact crater, São Paulo, Brazil" shows pictures that look like the spherules found by Loeb. We read this:

"Using morphological, textural and compositional variation parameters, four types of spherules can be identified: (i) iron spherules and (ii) silicate-iron spherules, both dominant, and scarce (iii) titanium-silicate-iron spherules and (iv) copper-nickel-iron spherules. The spherules range in size from 0.1 mm up to 0.5 mm, and exhibit noticeable splash kinematic shapes with variations for spherical, oval, prolate and droplets." 

The paper on these Brazil spherules gives us this visual, which shows some spherules with the same shape and size reported by Loeb:

The 2021 paper on Brazil spherules reports "the main variations are usually the high Ti content (>4 wt%) and the significant presence of Si (5.4–24 wt%), Al (0.9–5.2 wt%) and Mn (2.1–3,9 wt%)."  What that line is saying is that some of the spherules it found have more than 4% titanium, some have more than 5% silicon, some have more than 5% aluminum, and some have up to 4% magnesium.  So there's special about the element composition reported by Loeb of "84% iron, 8% silicon, 4% magnesium, and 2% titanium." Table 1 of the paper tells us very many of the spherules lack nickel, like Loeb's spherules. 

There's nothing special about Loeb's tiny spherules, and they are just like similar spherules found in many other places around the world. A scientist cited here says pollution is the most likely source of Loeb's spherules.  There's not the slightest reason to suspect that they are smithereens of a starship. 

A July 3 post by Loeb has the title "Summary of the Successful Interstellar Expedition," and the subtitle "Diary of an Interstellar Voyage, Report 35." The sea expedition Loeb organized was merely a sea voyage, not an interstellar voyage; and there's no reason to believe it recovered anything interstellar or even anything new. There is something pathetic about the attempts of the science news media to squeeze a little clickbait voltage out of these lackluster results.  

Postscript: Just after publishing this post, I read the following in a LiveScience.com article by Joanna Thompson entitled " 'Anomalous' metal spheres unlikely to be alien technology, despite Harvard scientist's claim."

"However, many scientists harbor doubts about the spherules' origin. In fact, they say these particular pellets might not be associated with the 2014 fireball at all.  'It's been known for a century that if you take a magnetic rake and run it over the ocean floor, you will pull up extraterrestrial spherules,' Peter Brown, a meteorite specialist at the University of Western Ontario in Canada, told Live Science. Such debris has accumulated worldwide on the seafloor over millions of years from meteors dropping tiny bits of molten metal as they pass overhead, Brown added. Factoring in shifting ocean currents and sedimentary movements, 'it essentially would be impossible to say that this particular spherule comes from a particular event.' "

Cosmologist Ethan Siegel has written a post disputing Loeb's claims. Siegel states this:

"None of Loeb’s prior 'aliens' claims have held up under scrutiny, and as many others have pointed out, there is no evidence for an 'alien technology' explanation for these spherules, either. Furthermore is there no good evidence to support that what Loeb recovered is part of the bolide that fell on January 8, 2014, nor is there good evidence that this object was even of interstellar origin."

Postscript: See my post here analyzing the preprint of Loeb's paper on the findings of his sea expedition. 

Euclid Won't Actually Scan Dark Matter or Dark Energy

Have you heard the recent news report claiming that scientists launched a big telescope to study dark matter and dark energy? With a single voice, the science news sites passed on the claim of  the European Space Agency, that their big new Euclid telescope will serve to study dark matter and dark energy. The only problem is the story is false.  The European Space Agency did launch their Euclid telescope, but it is not a telescope that will study or scan either dark matter or dark energy. 

The Euclid telescope is not some type of new telescope that will search the sky in a way that has never been done before, some way that might detect previously unseen dark matter or dark energy.  The Euclid telescope is just a regular-style telescope that will study regular visible matter and energy, not invisible dark matter or dark energy.  

But you would never know that from reading the science news reports, which had headlines such as this:

• "The space telescope surveying the entire universe to understand dark matter and dark energy" (Euclid will actually only survey 35% of the universe, and has no power to observe dark matter or dark energy). 
• "What to Know About Euclid, Europe’s Space Telescope Launched to Study the ‘Dark Universe’"
• "Euclid launch: dark-energy mapper poised to probe cosmic mysteries" (Euclid has no power to either observe or map dark energy or dark matter.)

Euclid is an ordinary space telescope that will be able to only observe regular visible matter and regular visible energy. Scientists tell us that the dark matter and dark energy they claim to exist are both invisible, and incapable of being detected by regular telescopes. The Euclid site says something trying to get us to believe that scientists will be able to "infer"  something about dark matter or dark energy from the observations Euclid makes. But such claims are very dubious. It's rather like someone who believes that Chinese satellites make heat waves claiming that he will be able to infer something about Chinese satellites by studying heat waves. 

A dark matter detection device is a type of instrument totally different from Euclid. A 2020 press story describes a device that will attempt to detect dark matter:

"This spring, ten tons of liquid xenon will be pumped into a tank nestled nearly a mile underground at the heart of a former gold mine in South Dakota. With this giant vat of chemicals, scientists hope to detect the historically undetectable, a mysterious substance that makes up more than 85 percent of all mass in our universe: dark matter. 'One of the annoying features of dark matter is we have really no idea [what it is],” says Murdock Gilchriese, project director of this experiment, known as LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ). 'We know it exists, but as a particle and what its mass is, there’s a huge range.' "

Gilchriese was not speaking correctly. We do not at all know that dark matter exists. Alas, scientists keep making incorrect statements claiming that they know certain things exist that they have never observed. They do not know that such things exist. Be very suspicious when you hear a scientist saying, "We know it exists." The theory of dark matter is only one of two competing theories trying to explain observation anomalies in deep space. The dark matter theory is opposed by a modified gravity theory called MOND, and quite a few scientists argue that the belief in dark matter is groundless. When someone confesses that he has no idea what something that he believes in is, that's big a red flag that should cause you to doubt that such a thing exists.   

It's a similar story for dark energy. No one has observed either dark matter or dark energy. We do not know that either dark matter or dark energy exist. The LZ project mentioned above has now run for years, finding no evidence yet of dark matter. Theoretically, the situation in regard to dark matter is much different than for dark energy. There are theoretical reasons why dark energy should exist, but in quantities so great that empty space should be so filled with dark energy that all space should be denser than steel. We know we don't live in any such universe. This unsolved problem is called the vacuum catastrophe problem, and it's impossible to imagine any way that Euclid could solve it. 

When scientists tell you that they have reasons for thinking that dark energy exists, they fail to tell that the reasons actually lead to thinking that dark energy should be 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times more dense that it is, so dense that none of us should ever have existed, because all of outer space would be denser than steel.  They don't tell you that part. 

The web site describing the Euclid project gives us an uncritical presentation of the belief tenets of the LCDM ideology (the theory of cold dark matter and dark energy). Nowhere are we told of the very important fact that there is a very well-established framework called the Standard Model of Physics, and that neither dark energy nor dark matter have any place in that Standard Model. Nowhere are we told that claims about dark matter are vigorously disputed by quite  a few scientists saying that things are more economically explained by a theory of modified Newtonian gravity (MOND). The site conflates  "finding more about the universe's expansion" with "finding more about dark energy" and "finding more about galaxies" with "finding more about dark matter."  That's how it goes when someone has an ideology intractably entangling two things that should be distinguished. For example, if you believe that the warm weather is caused by invisible fire spirits, then you may believe that every time you check the temperature outside, you are measuring today's work performance of the invisible fire spirits. 

The ESA scientists trying to get funding for their Euclid telescope were probably rather like some movie executives trying to sell their latest superhero movie:

Executive John: Okay, let's milk our favorite cash cow once again. But how do we sell yet another superhero movie? People are getting sick of superhero movies. 

Executive Jane: I got it! We can market it as a multiverse movie. The multiverse idea hasn't been around so long, so it isn't as stale. 

Something similar may have happened with the Euclid telescope. The scientists may have figured that there would not be much support for a regular sky mapping telescope, because that's been done several times. So they marketed the project as a telescope specialized for studying dark matter and dark energy. It isn't any such thing. Euclid is just a regular old sky-mapper. 

A press release last year on the previously mentioned LZ project was a prime example of the clickbait lies of university press headlines. The press release had the phony clickbait headline "Dark matter mysteries unraveled by researchers in underground South Dakota mine." In the same press release a professor confessed, "We did not see any dark matter." Now it's a year later, and still no dark matter detection from the big "dark matter detector." 

The Euclid telescope consists of a regular telescope for observing visible matter, and a telescope for detecting hot ordinary matter by observing near-infrared radiation emitted by such matter. It is believed that neither dark matter nor dark energy emit near-infrared radiation.  A Scientific American article puts it this way:

"Dark matter does not reveal its presence by emitting any type of electromagnetic radiation. It emits no infrared radiation, nor does it give off radio waves, ultraviolet radiation, X-rays or gamma rays. It is truly 'dark.' "

The Bioelectric Code Seems Like New Bunk to Replace the Old Bunk

I spent most of my working life as a computer programmer. One of my favorite jokes about software programming goes like this:

Manager: What have you been doing lately?

Programmer: I've been very productive. I've been busy replacing the crummy old code with crummy new code. 

I am reminded of this joke when studying biologist Michael Levin's attempts to sell the notion of a "bioelectric code" as an explanation for morphogenesis, the mystery of a how a tiny speck-sized zygote progresses to become the vastly organized state of a full human body. Like more than 25 other science and medical authorities I quote in the "Some Scientists and Doctors Who Told the Truth About DNA " section of my post here, Levin has recognized that the old story that we arise from the reading of a body blueprint in DNA is just plain false (DNA has no such blueprint, no such specification of how to make a body). Levin has attempted to suggest a new story, using the term "bioelectric code." Unfortunately Levin's new story seems like some new baloney that is just as much bunk as the old "your DNA made you" baloney. 

Let's take a look at Levin's 2018 paper "The Bioelectric Code: An Ancient Computational Medium for Dynamic Control of Growth and Form," co-written with Christopher J. Martyniuk. I will attempt to "throw a yellow flag" on all of the main dubious or incorrect statements he makes. The first paragraph makes a big mistake by claiming that we know something from "first principles" that we do not at all know. We read this:

"DNA simply encodes specific proteins – there is no direct encoding of anatomical structure. Thus, it is clear from first principles that pattern control involves a code: the encoding of anatomical positions and structures within the egg or other cell type, and the progressive decoding of this information as cells implement invariant morphogenesis (Fig. 1B)." 

No, such a thing is not all "clear from first principles," nor is it even obviously likely. From the fact that DNA does not have any code specifying the organization of a human body, we are not entitled to deduce that there must be some other code in a fertilized egg that specifies such things, particularly since no such code has been found. Always be  very suspicious of either a scientist or a philosopher who attempts to make gigantic claims on the basis that they are "clear from first principles." Levin's next sentence is: "It should be noted that the current understanding of these codes is in its infancy and many fundamental questions remain to be addressed." When you hear statements like that, alarm bells should go off in your head, and you should suspect that you are about to hear some cobwebs of speculation that are not even half-baked, but much less than tenth-baked. 

In the next paragraph Levin states this: "The mainstream consensus is that there is no overall encoding of the target morphology: the process is controlled by local events, and the resulting complex pattern is the result of emergence and self-organization."  Since "emergence" and "self-organization" are just empty phrases that don't amount to anything, if this statement is true, it is a shocking truth, for it would mean that scientists have no credible tale to tell of how a zygote is able to progress to become a full human body.  The truth is that rather than presenting so vacuous a tale -- telling us that a human body arises from mere "emergence and self-organization,"  sounding like they were very empty-handed -- very many scientists keep telling us the old lie that a body arises from a DNA blueprint. The current situation can be described like this: the left hand of biology is still telling us the lie that our bodies result from a reading of a DNA blueprint or program, but the right hand of biology is telling us that such a claim is false. When biology can't get its story straight on how morphogenesis occurs, we should note that discrepancy, and not claim that there is any such thing as a "mainstream consensus" on this topic. See my post here for a discussion of how the old lie about DNA as an anatomy blueprint continues to be told on US government web sites (the same post contrasts such statements with many opposing statements by biologists and doctors).  

Levin discusses some anomalies of biology, such as amphibians that can regenerate a limb after it was cut off. At the end of page 4, Levin makes this very shaky-sounding claim:

"Here, we argue that it is time to consider the possibility that the known emergent features of cell behavior are augmented by a complementary set of top-down controls in which at least some aspects of target anatomical states are encoded within tissue properties (Pezzulo and Levin, 2015). If tissues must somehow remember at least some aspect of a target state in their physico-chemical properties, then encoding and decoding is necessary, since living tissues are storing information about a future (counterfactual) state in their current structure – this is the quintessential context of a code."

Sounds like Levin hasn't discovered any body organizing code, but he's arguing that there must be such a code. Rather than saying "here is the code I found," he says, "encoding and decoding is necessary." This is more arguing from "first principles," which resembles the reasoning of neuroscientists who claim that since a brain must store ideas, there must be a neural code by which ideas are stored in brain states. That isn't good reasoning, for we only know that minds create ideas, not that they are created or transmitted by brains; and no sign of such a neural code can be found. 

My suspicion that Levin is arguing like a metaphysician is confirmed by the next sentences in his paper, where he keeps arguing from alleged "first principles," rather like some Hegel-style metaphysician trying to deduce the nature of Being from first principles:

"What mechanisms could underlie such a morphogenetic code? Based on the observed examples of stable yet re-writeable anatomical structure, it would have to be a system that supported long-term but labile memory, with capability to sense/measure large-scale spatiotemporal signals. It would also have to have holographic properties (storing information about the whole in individual pieces) and be able to harness individual cell activities toward grouplevel goals. While many architectures could in principle support this kind of control system, two well-studied examples do all of the above: cognition in the living brain, and engineered artificial information-processing devices (computers)." 

When philosophers or biologists claim that some hypothesized code "would have to have holographic properties," it is rather clear that we are not in the midst of careful scientific reasoning. The reasoning about the brain is unsound. We do not know that the brain is the cause of cognition, and have very good reasons for doubting that it is (discussed in the posts of this blog). 

The next three pages of Levin's paper are mainly just a discussion of various electrical events going on in different parts of the body. None of that discussion does anything to substantiate Levin's claim that the structure of our body comes from some "bioelectric code."  Yes, electricity is very important in the body, but that does nothing to support Levin's claims. Similarly, if I were arguing that human memories are stored in cell membranes, I would do nothing to substantiate that erroneous idea by filling up three pages telling you how cell membranes are very important in the human body. 

On pages 9 and 10 Levin discusses some research he and others have done involving electrically zapping developing organisms to try to get them to change their form.  Such experiments seem to have been done only with less-advanced organisms such as amphibians and reptiles and worms. It seems rather that he is trying to persuade us that you were built by a bioelectric code, because the development of some organisms can be changed by zapping them with electricity in certain ways. The line of reasoning is not a sound one. For example:

(1) You could change the structure of a developing amphibian by applying hammer blows, but that does not mean that the organism's form arose because of hammer blows.

(2)  You could change the structure of a developing amphibian by zapping it with gamma ray radiation, producing some weird mutant, but that does not mean that the organism's form arose because of gamma ray radiation. 

Not a very fruitful method

On page 11 Levin refers to "the bioelectric code model." In science a model means an exact mathematical speculation. From what I have read of his papers, Levin has not produced any model of a bioelectric code, but merely made some vague sounds about a "bioelectric code." Claiming that you have a model when you don't have a model is a common sin of scientists. Typically when scientists have a model, they write papers including equations; but there are no equations in Levin's paper.  Near the end of the paper Levin confesses "the encoding of pattern outcomes to bioelectric states is only known for a small handful of examples." That's pretty much a confession that this "bioelectric code" idea is not well substantiated by observations. Levin has not at all advanced any theory of how hierarchically organized three-dimensional structures  could be represented by some electricity code. What he has mainly done is just handwaving, decorated with irrelevant talk about various ways in which the body uses electricity. None of this amounts to a detailed theory of how the structure of a human body could arise from electricity or a bioelectric code. 

There is no real substance involved when Levin makes statements like this: "The main point is that biological pattern regulation is a combination of emergent features that fill in local features and top-down controls that make decisions about large-scale patterning." That's just hand-waving. And the idea that we can explain the growth from a speck-sized zygote to a full-grown human by some concept of "patterning" is just another example of reductionist nonsense. The human body is no mere pattern, but a case of mountainous levels of organization all over the place, with the organization occurring in an extremely hierarchical manner, resulting in a dynamic three-dimensional system of mind-boggling complexity. Atoms are organized into small molecules such as amino acids, which are organized into very large molecules such as proteins, which are organized into teams of protein molecules called protein complexes, which are organized into much larger units called organelles, which are organized into hundreds of different types of fantastically complex cells, which are organized into tissues, which are organized into organs, which are organized into organ systems such as the digestive system or the nervous system, which (along with the skeletal system) are organized into a full organism body like the human body. You do not explain such organization by some mere two-dimensional idea of "patterning." What is needed is a theory explaining gigantic amounts of three-dimensional hierarchical organization and stratospheric heights of systemic coordination and component interdependence, but Levin has not presented one. 

The word "code" has different meanings. The word "code" refers to software instructions written in some particular programming language. Hallmarks of software code are things such as local variables and if/then logic and control structures such as loops. We know of no software code of this type in the human body. DNA is not at all code in this sense of the word. There is also another meaning of the word "code": a system of representations under which particular symbols (called tokens) stand for other things. Two examples of such codes are below: the Morse Code used to transmit information by telegraph, and the genetic code used by DNA, under which nucleotide base pairs represent amino acids used by proteins.

Talking repeatedly about a "bioelectric code," Levin has failed to specify any such code, and fails to give us any code-specifying diagram anything like the ones above. He hasn't even specified some hypothetical arrangement such as an arrangement under which different types of electrical pulses represent particular movements a cell should make. If someone talks about a code without mentioning any specifics, without giving a simple example of "this particular combination represents this particular thing," then they haven't provided any model or theory of a code, and such a person is merely engaging in vague hand waving that uses the word "code."  

In a 2016 paper ("Reading and Writing the Morphogenetic Code") Levin had referred to a "morphogenetic code" which he defined like this: "the mechanisms and information structures by which cellular networks internally represent the target morphology, and compute the cell activities needed at each time point to bring the body closer to that morphology." No one has discovered any information structures by which cellular networks represent a target morphology. 

On page 7 Levin makes this claim: "This body of work has revealed that in parallel with the genetic code (ideal for making sure the right protein components are available in the right place and time), and the epigenetic code (used for tweaking gene expression as a function of physiological history), there is also a bioelectric code – a dynamic distribution of electrical properties in somatic cell networks which mediates large-scale coordinated information processing in pattern homeostasis, orchestrating cell activity toward large-scale anatomical states." No such anatomy-orchestrating "bioelectric code" has been discovered, and pretty much the only people using this phrase are Levin and science journalists writing about his theorizing. And contrary to what Levin suggests in that statement, the genetic code does nothing to specify the time or place where any protein ends up (DNA not having any specification of when or where to use a protein).

On page 8 Levin defines this "bioelectric code" like this: "The 'bioelectric code' is defined as the mapping of real-time electric circuit dynamics among tissues to the pattern-regulatory functions that cells carry out."  That doesn't sound like anything that could explain the mountainous mysteries of human development, which involves a thousand different things vastly beyond mere "pattern regulatory functions that cells carry out."  One of the innumerable problems of explaining the growth from a speck-sized zygote to a full human body is explaining how cells themselves originate, and you don't explain that by appealing to some possibility that cells perform pattern regulation. That's like trying to explain the origination of your TV set by mentioning an "auto-off" feature in your TV set. "Circuit dynamics" is the kind of vaporous terminology that neuroscientists use to make it sound like they know something about things they do not understand. When you ask a neuroscientist something like "how could a brain without addressing or indexing ever be able to instantly retrieve a memory," a neuroscientist may say something, "Well, you know, it's some circuit dynamics at work." That doesn't really mean anything. 

In his 2016 paper Levin predicts that "by year 2 we will be constructing quantitative models of the bioelectric code at several levels." But his 2018 paper about this "bioelectric code" does not have any such quantitative models, and I did not find any such  quantitative model looking at Levin's papers written in the past five years. It seems that this idea of a bioelectric code controlling human development has yet to progress beyond a vague wooly catchphrase.  

In a Youtube.com video entitled "The Electrical Blueprints That Orchestrate Life," we have Levin going way out on a limb of speculation. Here is part of the transcript:

Levin: "And so these cells are basically communicating with each other who is going to be head, who is going to be tail, who is going to be left and right and make eyes and brain and so on. And so it is this software that allows these living systems to achieve specific goals, goals such as building an embryo or regenerating a limb for animals that do this, and the ability to see these electrical conversations gives us some really remarkable opportunities to target or to rewrite the goals towards which these living systems are operating."

CA: "OK, so this is pretty radical. Let me see if I understand this. What you're saying is that when an organism starts to develop, as soon as a cell divides, electrical signals are shared between them. But as you get to, what, a hundred, a few hundred cells, that somehow these signals end up forming essentially like a computer program, a program that somehow includes all the information needed to tell that organism what its destiny is? Is that the right way to think about it?"

Levin: "Yes, quite. Basically, what happens is that these cells, by forming electrical networks much like networks in the brain, they form electrical networks, and these networks process information including pattern memories. They include representation of large-scale anatomical structures where various organs will go, what the different axes of the animal -- front and back, head and tail -- are going to be, and these are literally held in the electrical circuits across large tissues in the same way that brains hold other kinds of memories and learning."

There is no robust evidence for such claims, which seem to be made by hardly anyone other than Levin. The story above seems like a piece of blueprint mythology every bit as untrue as the "DNA as body blueprint" mythology. It sounds like some new bunk to replace the old bunk. In the rest of the video Levin mainly talks about weird behavior of flatworms, such as how they can regenerate their form when you've cut off a large piece of them. None of that backs up any of the claims quoted above.  Ironically, at the end of the quote above Levin appeals to the theory that memories are held in the brain by storage in "electrical circuits" to try to bolster his theory of what is happening in cells outside of the brain.  This is unsound for two reasons: (1) the theory of storage of memories in synapses (electrical connections between brain cells) is untenable because of 30 reasons discussed here; (2) between the cells below the neck (outside of the nervous system) there are no "electrical networks much like networks in the brain," because between such cells there are no electrical connections comparable to the synapses or axons that connect neurons. Trying to make us think that cells that are not wired together have networks like cells that are wired together, Levin speaks here as inappropriately as someone saying, "I can move super-fast in my town because the sidewalks are like subways." Beware of scientists using the word "basically" as Levin does twice in the quote above.   

It's a situation similar to the groundless claims of neuroscientists that human memories are stored in neural circuits. No such memories can be found in neural circuits. Dissecting the brain of a newly deceased person, you cannot find anything at all about what that person learned or what experiences he had. Just as no sign of any learned information can be found by microscopically examining a brain, no sign of "representation of large-scale anatomical structures" can be found by searching for some "electrical network" between cells. 

In the brain at least we know that there is some kind of electrical network, for neurons are connected by synapses that transmit electrical signals between neurons. Such signals are transmitted too slowly and unreliably to explain instant human recall and 100% accurate memory recall, such as when someone playing Hamlet correctly recalls all of his lines.  But at least there is some kind of electrical network (a slow, very noisy and unreliable one) connecting the cells of the brain. Between the cells of a developing body outside of the nervous system, which are not wired together, electrical communication is maybe a thousand times more tenuous than in the brain. That makes Levin's claims extremely unbelievable. 

In general, the idea that you can explain the origin of a human body by imagining some kind of signal code being transmitted between cells is an extremely misguided one. There are more than seven levels of organization that need to be explained in order for you to get a human body: (1) the formation of amino acid sequences into the 3D shapes of protein molecules, called the protein folding problem; (2) the formation of protein complexes from protein molecules; (3) the formation and correct positioning of organelles that are much bigger than protein complexes; (4) the formation and correct positioning of cells often built from many thousands of organelles arranged in a suitable way; (5) the formation and correct positioning of tissues from cells; (6) the formation and correct positioning of organs from tissues; (7) the formation of organ systems; (8) the formation of full organism bodies from organ systems and a skeletal system.  Postulating signals between cells could never explain the first four of these things. If some stem cell were to receive coded signals telling it  how to become a specialized cell and where in a body to go to, you would need to imagine both some miracle of coding allowing instructions vastly complex (unlike anything that can plausibly be passing between cells outside of the nervous system), and also another miracle of coding interpretation, under which simple microscopic stem cells would have powers of interpretation greater than a human mind, allowing them to act on fantastically complicated instructions telling them how to become super-complex specialized cells, and where to go to in a human body.  Now you are in the nonsense of imagining microscopic cells with something like the interpretation powers of an Einstein. 

Under the old "DNA as body blueprint" lie, there at least was an answer to the question of where the imagined blueprint came from: an answer of "the original zygote had such a blueprint in its chromosomes." Under this idea of a bioelectric code, there is no such answer. If cells are sending electrical messages to other cells telling them how to make the vast organization of the human body, why would such signal- transmitting cells be sending signals so precise and appropriate, just right for making a human body so organized? In Levin's speculation, there seems to be no answer to this question. We are left with the idea of cells that "just happen" to send exactly the right signals, which is as implausible as imagining that a star in a solar system without life would just happen to transmit radio signals telling how to make some extremely complex invention such as an interstellar spaceship.

In every attempt to explain the origin of a human by mere bottom-up mechanistic effects, there are problems such as these:

(1)The "blueprint would be too complex to ever form" problem. The human body is a state of such vast hierarchical organization involving so many billions of well-arranged parts that if you had a specification for making a human body, it would require something infinitely more complicated than a DNA molecule with its mere low-level chemical information such as linear sequences of amino acids; and it seems that anything that complex (vastly more complicated than a blueprint used to make a tall office tower) could never have arisen through accidental processes.

(2) The "blueprints don't build things" problem. Blueprints don't cause complex things to be built. Complex things can get built from blueprints only when intelligent agents study blueprints and get ideas on how to proceed. But there are no such constructive intelligent blueprint readers inside the human body below the neck.  

(3) The "no Einstein to understand the super-complex blueprint" problem. The human body is such a state of enormously complex hierarchical organization (with 200 types of cells, each as complex as a factory) that if there were to exist in the human body a specification for making a human body, such a specification would be so complex that nothing in the human body (below the neck) could understand it, which would prevent such a specification from being part of a causal explanation for why human bodies appear.  

We do not understand the great mystery of how a speck-sized zygote containing no specification for making a human is able to progress to become the vast hierarchical organization of a human body, consisting of billions of very complex well-arranged cellular components and protein complexes. We have every reason to doubt that mere mechanistic effects can explain such a progression. The old story told to try to explain such a thing (that a body blueprint is read from DNA) was a lie, a lie told for a particular reason explained here. No such blueprint or program for making a human is found in DNA, as dozens of scientists I quote (including Levin) have confessed. We should not be replacing that old bunk blueprint story with some new bunk blueprint story seemingly consisting of 97% hazy far-fetched speculation and a few bare threads of fact. Until we can credibly explain the great mystery of how a human body is able to originate, we should candidly confess that it is a mystery a hundred miles over our heads.