Science Sites Mislead Us, Trying to Persuade Us That Innovative Visible Evolution Can Work Fast

The dogmas of materialism are spread these days largely by a huge internet-based information infrastructure that is scattered across the globe. That infrastructure gives us a mixture of news, facts, hype, speculation, data, dogma and BS, with enough profitable clickbait and corporate PR for the infrastructure to mostly pay for itself. 

One of the web sites involved in pushing materialist propaganda is the ad-heavy site www.livescience.com, where we mostly get true headlines, but often get science headlines that simply are not true, typically written by writers who are not scientists. To give some examples:

• On the Livescience site we had the utterly untrue headline "'Building blocks of life' discovered on Mars in 10 different rock samples." The story discusses some observations of biologically irrelevant chemicals on Mars, none of which are ingredients of life or building blocks on life.  
• A story at the LiveScience site was entitled " 'This might be the seeds of life': Organic matter found on asteroid Ryugu could explain where life on Earth came from." The story was misleading for several reasons: (1) Scientists do not believe that life ever existed on the asteroid  Ryugu or on any other asteroid. (2) There is no scientific concept of any such thing as a "seed of life," in the sense of something causing life to arise from non-life (with the exception of plant seeds, and plant seeds were not found on Ryugu).  (3) No actual components of life were found on the asteroid Ryugu, and most organic molecules are not components of life. 

• Another story at the LiveScience site referred to a claimed discovery of the simplest amino acid (uracil) on an asteroid, in the faintest trace amount of only 13 parts per billion. The headline at the LiveScience site made the very untrue claim that this "could explain the origin of life." Living things require twenty types of amino acids, which must be massively arranged in very specially ordered arrangements to make many types of the very hard-to-achieve molecules called proteins.  The discovery of one type of amino acid in the faintest trace amounts no more explains the origin of life than the discovery of a twig on the ground (making the letter "I") explains the origin of books consisting of vey much well-constructed prose. 

• Another article on the LiveScience site was devoted to selling the groundless idea that there is a "dark mirror" universe inside ours. 

• Another article on the LiveScience site had the nutty title "The 1st life in the universe could have formed seconds after the Big Bang."  Anyone familiar with the incredibly high temperatures and density at such a time (preventing all chemistry and even the existence of atoms) should understand how crazy such a claim is. 

• Another article on the LiveScience site had the phony title "Here's what we learned about aliens in 2020," a reference to extraterrestrials. Of course, we did not learn anything about extraterrestrials in that year. 

• Another article on the LiveScience site had the phony title "These weird lumps of 'inflatons' could be the very first structures in the universe."  We saw a visual of some strange structure that looked like a planetary nebula. The caption read, "Shown here, one of the dense clumps of inflatons that emerged during the inflation phase of the Big Bang, in the infant universe."  The caption led the reader to believe he was looking at some photo of something in space.  But the photo was not a photo of anything observed in space.  It was merely a photo of some junk generated by an entirely speculative computer program. No actual "inflatons" have ever been observed, and the program was based on one of the innumerable speculative models of the unproven cosmic inflation theory.

• The Livescience site had an article with the groundless headline "The brain stores at least 3 copies of every memory." Human beings recall things, but no scientist has ever discovered even one memory in a brain.  The study the article referred to was a very bad example of Questionable Research Practices.

Livescience.com is a for-profit web site with the main purpose of generating profits for the media company that owns it. 

Let us look at a recent story on the Livescience site that was a kind of textbook example of the type of misleading statements found in Darwinist literature. We have an article entitled "How fast does evolution happen?"  Below the title is a subtitle stating this: "Measuring the pace of evolution is tricky, but some species can evolve as quickly as a few generations."  

Right off the bat, we are being tricked.  The average person reading that subtitle will think that the article will show that a new type of species can originate within a few generations.  But when you carefully consider the exact wording,  you should  realize no such claim is being unambiguously made.  The word "evolution" is a word of almost infinite flexibility, which can mean 101 different things.  So when stating "some species can evolve as quickly as a few generations" an author might merely mean that some type of change -- perhaps some very trivial and not even visible change -- can occur in a species over such a time span.  

Darwinists are constantly exploiting the ambiguity and flexibility of the term "evolution."  The writers of Darwinist literature are constantly making statements which can be interpreted in many very different ways.  They often play a game of making a statement that means little interpreted in one way, but means something gigantic when interpreted in another way.  You might call this a game of "refer to something that may be a pebble or a mountain, and hope the reader  interprets that as if I meant a mountain." 

The Livescience article gives us this attempt to give an example of evolution, stating "In the famous example of Darwin's finches on the Galápagos Islands, different species evolved different beak shapes and sizes within a few decades to specialize in feeding on different types of nuts and insects." 

The claim that observations of differences in finches sparked Darwin's theory is incorrect. The differences between the finches was not even mentioned in The Origin of Species. On page 134 of his biography of Darwin, A.N. Wilson states the following:

"Peter and Rosemary Grant, evolutionary biologists from Harvard University, spent twenty-five summers studying these birds....They revealed that the beak changes were reversible -- this is hardly 'evolution.'  Beaks adapted from season to season, depending on whether droughts left large, tough seeds, or heavy rainfall resulted in smaller, softer seeds."

We then have a textbook example of one of the leading deceptions of Darwinist literature, the deception of trying to pass off examples of human-directed artificial selection as examples showing the power of natural, unguided evolution. We read this:

"By the early to mid-20th century, scientists realized that evolution can happen much more quickly than Darwin ever thought by using the theory of natural selection to make crops more palatable in as few as seven years and domesticate dogs over a few generations. 'We made evolution happen,' Bonnet told Live Science. 'We could see that the change happening at this scale of a few generations (can) be quite dramatic.' "

Since these references are to human-directed artificial selection, you should not be using the term "evolution" to refer to them, and you should not be citing such things as examples showing the power of natural evolution.  

We then have some examples that do nothing to show any power of natural evolution to create any type of innovations or structural improvements in organisms. We read this:

"To find out, Bonnet and an international team of researchers analyzed decades of genetic data for 19 bird and mammal species. They found that the rate of adaptive evolution was two to four times faster than previous estimates. More specifically, each generation increased its survival and reproduction by 18.5%, on average, under completely stable conditions. This means that if survival and reproduction decreased by a third, adaptive evolution would help a population recover in three to seven generations. Bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis) evolved horns that were 0.7 inches (2 centimeters) shorter than before over 20 years, or three generations, because hunters had targeted those with larger horns. Snow voles (Chionomys nivalis) shrank by up to 0.1 ounces (3 grams) over 10 years, or eight generations, probably because of changes in snowfall."

None of the statements above refer to any type of innovative evolution.  We have a link to a scientific paper that does not mention any type of innovative evolution.  All that has gone on is that the authors have analyzed the population of 19 species scattered around the world (mostly birds), and claimed that these 19 species are doing fairly well in improving the size of their population. But why were these 19 species chosen among the 32,000 species whose population is  been tracked (according to the Living Planet Index)? The authors make no claim to have made a random selection of 19 species. Nor did they pre-register a group of species before analyzing data.  So we should suspect that they chose a group of species that would support the thesis they were trying to advance. No evidence of a power of evolution has been given. 

We then have a statement by an evolutionary biologist that "evolution is always occurring," but such a statement is true only about evolution with the tiniest of small e's (gene pool variation), not innovative evolution.  There is no evidence that visible innovative evolution is occurring anywhere in the world. We have the profoundly misleading statement quoted below:

" ' Rates of evolution can be fantastically fast because of that constant environmental change,' Michael Benton, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Bristol, told Live Science. But 'the shorter the time scale, the faster the rate, and this is after you have corrected for time,' he added."

Whatever is being referred to here, it is not innovative evolution in the sense of the origin of new types of proteins, the origin of new types of cells,  the origin of new types of visible body structures, or the origin of new species very different from any previous species. No such things have been observed by humans studying nature.  So making claims like the ones quoted above are profoundly misleading. 

We then have in the LiveScience article this laughably weak bit of evidence:

"Stroud and his colleagues at the University of Miami are now using nonnative green iguanas as a case study for rapid evolution. The warm-adapted lizards are known to freeze and fall out of trees during Miami's infrequent cold snaps. 'What we saw is that some die, but some survive — and the ones that survive can actually tolerate colder temperatures than the ones we measured before,'  Stroud said. 'So it suggests that evolution might be happening.' "

Evolution might be happening? A look at the paper reveals the reason for Stroud's hesitance here. The sample sizes are so small (only about a dozen animals per species) that no robust evidence has been provided that there has been any improvement in the ability of iguanas to survive in the cold. 

Then the LiveScience article gives us this little attempt to provide evidence of the power of evolution to produce rapid results: " In the Triassic period (251.9 million to 201.3 million years ago), after the Permian extinction, large marine reptiles called ichthyosaurs evolved to be gigantic in less than 3 million years — more quickly than whales did — because they became the ocean's top predators."  Endless similar examples could be provided of cases in which some type of dramatic innovation seems to suddenly appear in the fossil record, with little or no record of transitional intermediate forms. But no such cases prove any evidence of the power of innovative evolution or rapid evolution. To the contrary, such cases undermine the claims of Darwinists. The more rapidly things appear in the fossil record, the less credible are Darwinist claims of such things appearing because of Darwinian evolution, which cannot credibly explain complex biological innovations occurring over any time scale, and fails particularly bad in trying to explain dramatic biological innovations occurring over rapid timescales. 

The person who made the previous misleading statement that "rates of evolution can be fantastically fast" was Michael Benton, who is not a biologist, but a paleontologist, a guy who studies fossils. The Livescience article ends with him making an equally misleading statement by saying, "Maybe the answer is that everything is capable of enormously crazy fast evolution, if it has to." Pretty much the only way you could get such an idea is by studying bones,  for the fossil record gives us endless examples of dramatic biological innovations seemingly occurring "out of nowhere." Such cases contradict Darwinist biology, which predict that no such things should ever happen.  The more you study biology and the vast level of organization required for biological innovations, the more you will dismiss the possibility of unguided processes such as Darwinian evolution producing such results.  

Bone guys like Benton usually fail to study the mountainous levels of organization, fine-tuning and component interdependence in living things. The incredibly high requirements thresholds for biological innovations mean  the odds against biological innovations by accidental random mutations are everywhere prohibitive. 

Trying to sell us on the idea of rapid Darwinian evolution, our Livescience article has failed to provide any decent evidence for it, and has failed to provide any decent evidence for any power of Darwinian evolution to explain dramatic biological innovations. Another article on the Livescience site (by the same author as article discussed above) also tries to persuade us that evolution can work fast. It is an article entitled "Which animals are evolving fastest?" 

We have a claim that some scientists think that the fastest evolving animal is "tuataras (Sphenodon punctatus), lizard-like animals found only in modern-day New Zealand." But then we are told there has been little change in the appearance of this animal, and no mention is made of anything new that the animal evolved during human history. An evolutionary biologist named Lee says such animals  "have not evolved that much anatomically." The same biologist suggests that the fastest evolving animal is "the Lake Victoria cichlids."

We hear the claim that "More than 500 species of cichlids (Cichlidae, a family of fish) have evolved there over the past 15,000 years."  The claim is unverifiable. We don't know how many cichlids there were or what types there were 15,000 or 10,000 or 5,000 or 2000 years ago. No mention is made of any biological innovation occurring during this time. We also hear a claim that guppies are evolving quickly, but we get no specifics about this, and only get a reference to a paper behind a paywall. It seems that our author is unable to find a single animal species that is evolving in any very impressive way. We hear no mention of any new anatomical structure in any species that appeared during human history, with humans observing such a feature gradually appearing. 

Read between the lines here, and you get the truth: Darwinian evolution is impotent as an explanation for visible biological innovations. We do not see Darwinian evolution acting in any very impressive way anywhere in the world, in any species. 

Having the phony headline of "An Incredible Lifeform Is Evolving at Lightning Speed—Faster Than We Ever Imagined Possible," the headline above is from the Popular Mechanics site (nowadays a notorious purveyor of untrue clickbait "science news" headlines). A person reading the article about a 10-year study of water fleas will get this confession: 

"Across a 10-year span, the study analyzed the genetic variance of D. pulex in a stable environment. The study showed that the organisms experienced changing selection pressures, but that they all eventually canceled out, meaning no dominant trait took over and influenced the organism’s evolution." 

One of the very many reasons why Darwinism fails to explain innovative evolution is that generally speaking the early stages of new innovations are useless; and such early stages cannot be explained by gradualist ideas of a series of tiny steps, each giving a benefit. 

The oldest known depictions of humans show humans looking just like current humans. There has been no major evolution of human abilities since ancient times, with the possible exception of a few minor things not visible. The ancient Greeks were as smart as anyone living today. Masterpieces of subtle philosophy such as the Dialogues of Plato are proof that before the time of Jesus there lived minds as intelligent as any living today. 

Below is a diagram illustrating a very severe problem for Darwinist explanations. Each brick in the diagram represents roughly one million human lives. It has been estimated that about 100 billion people have lived since about 10,000 BC. It is also believed that the human or pre-human population was very small prior to 10,000 BC, consisting of only about 10,000 people at any one time. So under the claims of Darwinism, there was some enormous leap of macroevolution between 200,000 BC and 10,000 BC, resulting in humans that could speak, philosophize and build cities; but there has been no major evolution in humans since 8000 BC. That makes no sense; it is not believable. Why would there be evolution so enormous in only a relatively small number of lifetimes, but no major human evolution during a period in which the number of human lifetimes was many times greater? 

Why do our scientists believe so devoutly in many things never observed, while refusing so stubbornly to believe in many other things very often observed?

Postscript: Don't be fooled by the recent headlines such as "Scientists Say Humans Are Going Through a Major Evolution Right Now." The evolution discussed is cultural evolution, not Darwinian evolution. 

When Clocks Stop Mysteriously at the Time of Someone's Death

 I recalled reading vague claims that sometimes clocks mysteriously stop at the hour of someone's death. I decided to look for old newspaper accounts that might verify this claim. I found quite a few cases. 

Below is an account of a grandfather clock that worked fine for 30 years before mysteriously stopping and catastrophically failing at the hour of its owner's death. 

You can read the account below:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045462/1934-02-28/ed-1/seq-9/

Below is a very similar account of a clock stopping at someone's death:

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn82014519/1919-10-11/ed-1/seq-1/

Below is another similar account of a clock stopping at someone's death:

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85042243/1928-09-18/ed-1/seq-7/

Below is an account of a clock that seemed to foretell or announce deaths of members of the Danbury Hat Makers Association (presumably having few members):

You can read the story here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn92073908/1907-05-23/ed-1/seq-1/

Below is a newspaper account of two clocks stopping at the time of the same person's death:

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn92053934/1907-12-14/ed-1/seq-2/

On the page here, we read, "The New York papers also give a good deal of space to the fact that John Judge, a New York saloon keeper,

died in his saloon and at the very moment of his death the

saloon clock stopped."

Below is a newspaper account of a clock that stopped once at the hour of a family member's death, and also stopped at a very different hour when another member of the same family died.

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn89051168/1902-03-31/ed-1/seq-1/

Below is another newspaper account of a clock that stopped at the hour of a family member's death.

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/2010270509/1891-06-25/ed-1/seq-2/

Below is another newspaper account of a clock that stopped at the hour of a family member's death.

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn88076432/1892-12-29/ed-1/seq-8/

Below is another newspaper account of a clock that stopped at the hour of a family member's death.

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85053343/1923-05-31/ed-1/seq-5/

On the page here we have an account saying that Lynda Barton's father died at 9:30 PM on a Sunday, and that all of the clocks in the house stopped at 9:30 PM. We are also told that on the following Sunday all of the clocks again stopped at 9:30 PM. 

Below we have an account of a clock which makes strange noises at the time of a family member's death, not just once but twice. It is followed by an account of a long-broken clock which mysteriously starts running shortly after a family member's death

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85060004/1925-11-08/ed-1/seq-79/

On the same page we have the account below,  which has nothing to do with clocks, but may offer better evidence for life after death than any of the accounts above. Click to read the account better. In the account Sir Edward Marshall Hall says he took a recent letter from his brother, folded it, and sealed it in an envelope with no outside indication of the letter's author. He gave the sealed envelope to his sister, requesting her to take it to the medium Miss Wingfield, to see whether she could determine the author of the letter.  An answer comes back from the medium that the author is dead. When then asked where and when the death occurred, an answer comes back from the medium in early March that the author of the letter died yesterday in South Africa. Soon Sir Edward learns by letter that his brother did die in South Africa, in early March.  

A matching account occurs in a biography of Sir Edward Marshall Hall. We have a reference to automatic writing, a technique in which a medium may go into a light trance, and produce writings, which seem to come from her subconscious or from some external source, perhaps some deceased spirit. On pages 111-112 we read this about Sir Edward Marshall Hall:

"On March 10th, 1894, he was staying with his sister at Hampton. Mrs. Labouchere had been for some time an intimate friend of Miss Wingfield. On this occasion the latter was answering, by automatic writing, questions put to her. Marshall was sceptical, and it occurred to him that he had the means of testing her powers. He had in his pocket a most unpleasant letter, received a day or two before from his elder brother. John Cressy Hall was much older than Marshall, and had long since fallen, from high prosperity as a merchant, into poverty; in 1894, he was living in South Africa on remittances sent him by Marshall. For his own protection, the money was sent through a certain Archdeacon Gaul: this was strongly resented, and the letter in Marshall’s pocket was the culmination of a very offensive correspondence on the subject, and was dated February 1894. Marshall had said nothing about this unpleasant letter to his sister, and decided to ask Miss Wingfield as to the authorship of it; he sealed it in a blank envelope, and handed it to Miss Wingfield. After some delay a message was spelt out: 'The writer of this letter is dead.'  To the question, ' When and where did the writer die? ' the answer came, ' He died yesterday in South Africa.' 

The seance made only a temporary impression on Marshall’s mind....On April 2nd, 1891, he received a second letter from Gaul, bearing a Kimberley postmark of March 8th, to the following effect: 'Dear Sir, — I little thought when I wrote last week that I should have this week the melancholy duty laid on me of informing you of the death of your brother, which occurred yesterday.' Poor Cressy Hall had, indeed, been found on March 8th dead in his bed. The message received through Miss Wingfield on March 10th had stated that the writer of the letter had died in South Africa ' yesterday ' — that is, March 9th. But, even with this slight discrepancy, it was a very strange experience."

Scientist Flubs and Flops #12

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• "Direct evidence that synaptic plasticity is the actual cellular mechanism for human learning and memory is lacking." -- 3 scientists, "Synaptic plasticity in human cortical circuits: cellular mechanisms of learning and memory in the human brain?" 
• "The fundamental problem is that we don't really know where or how thoughts are stored in the brain. We can't read thoughts if we don't understand the neuroscience behind them." -- Juan Alvaro Gallego, neuroscientist. 
• "The search for the neuroanatomical locus of semantic memory has simultaneously led us nowhere and everywhere. There is no compelling evidence that any one brain region plays a dedicated and privileged role in the representation or retrieval of all sorts of semantic knowledge."  Psychologist Sharon L. Thompson-Schill, "Neuroimaging studies of semantic memory: inferring 'how' from 'where' ".
• "How the brain stores and retrieves memories is an important unsolved problem in neuroscience." --Achint Kumar, "A Model For Hierarchical Memory Storage in Piriform Cortex." 
• "We are still far from identifying the 'double helix' of memory—if one even exists. We do not have a clear idea of how long-term, specific information may be stored in the brain, into separate engrams that can be reactivated when relevant."  -- Two scientists, "Understanding the physical basis of memory: Molecular mechanisms of the engram."
• "There is no chain of reasonable inferences by means of which our present, albeit highly imperfect, view of the functional organization of the brain can be reconciled with the possibility of its acquiring, storing and retrieving nervous information by encoding such information in molecules of nucleic acid or protein." -- Molecular geneticist G. S. Stent, quoted in the paper here. 
• "Up to this point, we still don’t understand how we maintain memories in our brains for up to our entire lifetimes.”  --neuroscientist Sakina Palida.
• "The available evidence makes it extremely unlikely that synapses are the site of long-term memory storage for representational content (i.e., memory for 'facts'’ about quantities like space, time, and number)." --Samuel J. Gershman,  "The molecular memory code and synaptic plasticity: A synthesis."
• "Synapses are signal conductors, not symbols. They do not stand for anything. They convey information bearing signals between neurons, but they do not themselves convey information forward in time, as does, for example, a gene or a register in computer memory. No specifiable fact about the animal’s experience can be read off from the synapses that have been altered by that experience.” -- Two scientists, "Locating the engram: Should we look for plastic synapses or information- storing molecules?
• " If I wanted to transfer my memories into a machine, I would need to know what my memories are made of. But nobody knows." -- neuroscientist Guillaume Thierry (link). 
• "Many who work within the SMC [standard model of consciousness] assume that a nervous system is necessary and sufficient for an existential consciousness. While this is a common stance...we have yet to see a coherent defense of this proposition or a well-developed biomolecular argument for it. For most, it is simply a proclamation. Moreover, we have not seen any effort to identify what features of neural mechanisms 'create' consciousness while non-neural ones cannot. This too is simply a pronouncement." -- Four scientists, "The CBC theory and its entailments," (link).

For a 62-page free E-book filled with confessions like the ones above, use the link here 

No, NASA Did Not Find Any Evidence of Life on Mars

The search of evidence of life on Mars has been a complete bust, with no convincing evidence ever being found for it. The main building components of one-celled life are protein molecules. No protein molecule has ever been found on Mars. The building components of protein molecules are amino acids. A functional protein molecule requires a very special arrangement of hundreds of amino acids, as unlikely to occur by chance as hundreds of twigs in a forest accidentally forming into a functional, readable paragraph. No amino acids have ever been found on Mars. 

But this utter failure to find convincing evidence that life ever existed on Mars has not stopped glory-hungry scientists from trying to insinuate that they found something that could be a sign of life on Mars. An example of this is described in my July 2024 post "NASA's Groundless Boast About Finding a Potential Biosignature." We see in a NASA press release the unimpressive-looking rock below, called the Cheyava Falls rock, which has no visual signs of life. Someone trying to suggest something like life has named some tiny spot a "leopard spot," trying to suggest something biological. The maneuver is ridiculous. The spot circled and called a "leopard spot" looks nothing like a leopard spot, and could have been formed by any of 1001 lifeless processes. 

Credit: NASA

Today we had a NASA press conference trying to create the impression that some possible evidence for life has been found on Mars. At www.space.com today we read this about the press conference: 

"On Wednesday (Sept. 10), researchers presented a study that describes how Perseverance found intriguing minerals on the western edge of Jezero Crater, in the clay-rich, mudstone rocks of a valley called 'Neretva Vallis.'

'When we see features like this in sediment on Earth, these minerals are often the byproduct of microbial metabolisms that are consuming organic matter,' Joel Hurowitz, a planetary scientist at Stony Brook University in New York and lead author of the new study, said during a NASA press conference held on Wednesday."

But this means little. Minerals are not fossils of life. Later at www.space.com we read this: 

" 'I want to remind everyone that what we're describing here is a potential biosignature that is a characteristic element, molecule, substance or feature that might have a biological origin but requires more data or further study before reaching a conclusion about the presence or absence of life,' Lindsay Hayes, Senior Scientist for Mars Exploration in the Planetary Science Division at NASA Headquarters, said during the conference."

Today's press conference does not announce any new news. Nothing new has been discovered. The press conference was called to publicize a scientific paper about the Cheyava Falls rock and nearby rocks scanned in 2024. That paper has the dull title "Redox-driven mineral and organic associations in Jezero Crater, Mars." We hear no mention of any amino acids being found. Trying to boost excitement about something that is very probably no indication of life, the paper states, "In summary, our analysis leads us to conclude that the Bright Angel formation contains textures, chemical and mineral characteristics, and organic signatures that warrant consideration as ‘potential biosignatures’, that is, 'a feature that is consistent with biological processes and that, when encountered, challenges the researcher to attribute it either to inanimate or to biological processes, compelling them to gather more data before reaching a conclusion as to the presence or absence of life.' " 

This boils down to: we found something a little funny, and it might have been produced by life, or it might not have been. That is not evidence for life. Similarly, if I find on a tree a very-old apple that looks kind of half gone, that might be evidence that a squirrel once existed to chew on the apple, or maybe it's no evidence there were ever any squirrels nearby, and maybe the apple is just half-rotted, or half-eaten by worms. But I might call that half-gone apple "a potential squirrel biosignature."

The paper "False biosignatures on Mars: anticipating ambiguity" alerted us about the type of groundless hype that would be happening, saying, "It is often acknowledged that the search for life on Mars might produce false positive results, particularly via the detection of objects, patterns or substances that resemble the products of life in some way but are not biogenic." It states this:

"What concerns us here is the risk of false positive errors in the detection of life, specifically those arising from the misinterpretation of abiotic geological and chemical features that are misleadingly life-like (rather than analytical false positives or spacecraft contamination). One reason for concern is that such errors have been frequent in the history of palaeobiology and astrobiology down to the present day."

An example of the errors the article refers to is when two NASA scientists convinced US President Bill Clinton to do a press conference announcing that life had been found on Mars, on the basis of the scientists' analysis of a meteorite believed to have come from Mars. The consensus now is that such scientists were guilty of glory-hounding pareidolia, and that they produced no real evidence that life existed on Mars. 

Another scientific paper states this:

"Astrobiology’s core notion of indirectness invites the danger of false positives, as many candidate biosignatures – such as methane, oxygen, or phosphine – can arise from purely abiotic [lifeless] processes....False positives mark Astrobiology's history: the Allan Hills 84001 meteorite (McKay et al., 1996), Viking's ambiguous life detection results (Levin & Straat, 1976), Mars methane variations (Webster et al., 2015), and the controversial phosphine detection on Venus (Greaves et al.,2020)."

In addition to the four cases of astrobiology false positives discussed above, there are three cases of "visitor to the solar system" astrobiology false positives mentioned in my post here, and also the K2-18b astrobiology false positive discussed here. Add the famous case of the false alarm about Martian canals (involving Percival Lowell), and the false alarm of the "face on Mars" which did not survive a more high-resolution photo of the same spot, and you have ten examples of astrobiology false positives or false alarms. 

We simply cannot trust any NASA officials or any Mars specialists talking about this topic, because they are examples of vested interests, people who have lots of "skin in the game" rather than impartial judges. NASA and its scientists are very much hoping that the government funds a sample return mission that will spend 10 billion dollars or more to return soil samples and rock samples that the Perseverance Mars rover has gathered up and dumped on Mars. The funding of such a mission is in jeopardy, and it is now said that it will probably never occur. So we can expect that NASA and its scientists will try to exaggerate findings on Mars, trying to make unconvincing evidence for life on Mars seem like more compelling evidence. The greater the hype, and the greater the groundless boasting of finding a "tantalizing potential biosignature," the more likely the 10 billion dollar funding will occur. 

The fact remains that the chance that life ever existed on Mars is extremely low, because of the failure of all Mars missions to ever detect any proteins or amino acids on Mars. It is impossible to overestimate how much the failure to find any amino acids on Mars is a "show-stopper" for all conjectures about "potential biosignatures" on Mars. The amount of functional information in even the simplest living cell is comparable to the amount of functional information in a set of hundreds of long, well-written useful paragraphs. Speculating about life arising on a Mars without amino acids is like speculating that accidental arrangements of twigs formed many long, functional and grammatical paragraphs at some place (like the North Pole) where there are no twigs. 

The press coverage of today's NASA conference is full of the usual clickbait deceptions that litter the coverage of science in today's mainstream press. A shameless example is a CNN headline saying, "Rock discovery contains ‘clearest sign’ yet of ancient life on Mars, NASA says." The actual quote from the head of NASA is this: "So this very well could be the clearest sign of life that we’ve ever found on Mars, which is incredibly exciting.” The headlines are dropping out the "could be" qualifier. There is no compelling reason to think the evidence discussed is an actual sign of life. The "qualified superlative" trick by the NASA administrator is the kind of misleading language someone might use when saying, "This photo could well be the best evidence ever found that fairies live in the clouds." 

Postscript: An article at www.space.com says this: "But ancient Red Planet microbes aren't the only explanation for the vivianite and greigite; they can also form via geological processes, Perseverance team members stressed."

In cases such as this, our clickbait-hungry online press follows a rule of  "Give us an inch, and we'll take a mile." The website The Debrief has a false headline saying, "NASA Says Perseverance Rover Found Biosignatures Most Likely From Ancient Microbes." No one at NASA said that. The hedging statement from the NASA head was "this very well could be the clearest sign of life that we’ve ever found" which is not a statement claiming any likelihood that life was found. The article says the lead author of the paper stated, "But just because we saw all these compelling chemical signatures in the data didn’t mean we had a potential biosignature." So The Debrief has taken a "maybe a maybe" and represented it as a likelihood. 

Even worse is a shameless headline on the Futurism site, making a fictional claim there was a discovery of life on Mars: "Now That NASA Found Signs of Life on Mars, It's Clear Trump Made a Massive Error."  I must emphasize: no solid evidence has been found that life ever existed on Mars, and the lack of any discovery of amino acids on Mars is a very strong reason for thinking that life never existed on Mars.  The Futurism site article reminds us what is driving the announcement: besides scientists seeking glory, it is mainly about NASA trying to get people interested in funding a 10 billion dollar Mars sample return mission. 

When the site Phys.org has an untrue headline of "Mars Perseverance rover data suggests presence of past microbial life," we should analyze what is going on. Despite the site title suggesting some official physics organization, both the Phys.org site and the MedicalXPress sites are sites part of a "Science X" network owned by the for-profit publisher Omicron Limited, a company that stays afloat by having quite a few misleading or hyped clickbait headlines on its sites, interesting-sounding headlines that attract readers and generate advertising revenue. The more sensational the headlines, the more money the company makes from ads. In this case the article claims to be based on materials provided by Texas A&M University; but when I track down the press release issued by that university, I find a press release  much more hedging, something merely mentioning "potential biosignatures," and never claiming any likelihood of life.  

Even phonier is the bogus clickbait headline on the notoriously untrustworthy clickbait site Earth.com, a bogus headline of "NASA announces discovery of life on Mars with high degree of confidence." No one at NASA said anything about a high degree of confidence. In the body of the story we get the reality, with the quote of a scientist saying, "We cannot claim this is more than a potential biosignature." 

Give them an inch, and they'll take a mile

Ethan Siegel here has a good explanation of why merely finding organic molecules on Mars does nothing to show that life ever existed there. He says that using a 7-level "Confidence of Life Detection" scale, the evidence discussed in the recent Mars press conference merely reaches Level 1 (the lowest level). 

The NASA official statement here merely refers to a "potential biosignature," not a likely biosignature. We have a misleading statement by NASA chief Sean Duffy who says, "this finding... is the closest we have ever come to discovering life on Mars." If you have not found any good reason for thinking something exists, it is misleading to talk about "the closest we have ever come to discovering" that thing. For example, if John has never seen a ghost but merely seen mist, it is misleading for him to claim his mist observations are "the closest I have come to discovering ghosts."

Entitled "Enceladus, The Life Signs That Weren't," a recent article at the Universe Today site discusses another astrobiology false alarm, one I did not mention above:

Post-postscript: Forbes now has an article entitled "NASA’s Mars Biosignature Claims Are Best Explained Without Invoking Life." We read this:

"NASA's news that its Perseverance Rover found potential biosignatures in rocks at Mars’ Jezero Crater is somewhat down for the count as the findings are now being challenged by leading geoastronomer Stephen Mojzsis. Mojzsis may be best known for throwing cold water on NASA’s 1996 announcement detailing putative evidence that the 'Allan Hills' Mars meteorite contained evidence of ancient microfossils.

Mojzsis, currently at the University of Bayreuth’s Bavarian Geoinstitute in Germany, is now disputing the Perseverance Rover’s 'potential biosignature' hypothesis which was published only a couple of weeks ago in the journal Nature.

There is nothing about this chemistry that cannot be explained by reactions that can happen in the absence of life, Mojzsis told me via email. The documented organic matter, phosphate minerals and proto-sulfide minerals are all found in meteorites, Mojzsis, who was not one of the Nature paper’s referees, told me."