SETI Success Before 2035 Is Very Unlikely Unless There Is Teleology

In my favorite spot for finding unwarranted claims by scientists (the Nautilus web site), there is a recent post by astronomer Seth Shostak entitled “Why We’ll Have Evidence of Aliens—If They Exist—By 2035.” Shostak tries to argue that the great big pie-in-the-sky of “signals from extraterrestrials” will be delivered within a decade or two. But his argument is very unconvincing.

Shostak's argument essentially boils down to merely saying something kind of along the lines of we're looking real hard, in more ways, in more places, and with more frequencies, and that will do the trick. Shostak mentions optical SETI, the search for optical pulses from extraterrestrials (a bit like getting a flashlight signal across the stars). The way he describes things, you might think that this type of search was in its infancy. But, to the contrary, a scientific paper not mentioned by Shostak reported on a search for optical signals coming from sun-like stars. Almost 5,000 such stars were searched over the course of two years, but no such signal was found.

Shostak also tells us, “There is a completely different approach that has yet to be explored in much detail: to look for artifacts—engineering projects of an advanced society.” From the way he writes, you'd think that no one had done such a search. But Shostak fails to mention a search of 100,000 nearby galaxies looking for signs of extraterrestrial engineering, a search that came up empty.

The main way of searching for extraterrestrial civilizations is to attempt to pick up radio signals from other planets. Shostak tells us, “Within two decades, SETI experiments will be able to complete a reconnaissance of 1 million star systems, which is hundreds of times more than have been carefully examined so far.” Hundreds of times more? That would only be true if fewer than 5000 stars had been searched so far. But this paper alone discusses 9293 stars that were unsuccessfully searched for extraterrestrial signals. Were we to add up the total number of stars searched for radio signals by astronomers, in 50 years of SETI efforts, it would be a number much greater than 9293.

Shostak talks about two approaches to searching for extraterrestrial signals: “One is to scan as much of the sky as possible; the other is to zero in on nearby star systems.” He suggests the second approach is better, saying that if extraterrestrials live on planets, “It’s better to devote precious telescope time to examining nearby star systems.” But a 2006 article says, “Recent work confirms long-standing suspicions that star-by-star targeting should be abandoned in favor of scanning the richest star fields to encompass very large numbers of stars, even if most of them are very far away.” That's the approach that has already been taken by projects such as the SERENDIP project. But they came up empty.

Shostak then states the following:

SETI practitioners from Frank Drake to Carl Sagan have estimated that the galaxy currently houses somewhere between 10,000 and a few million broadcasting societies. If these estimates are right, then examining 1 million star systems could well lead to a discovery. So, if the premise of SETI has merit, we should find a broadcast from E.T. within a generation.

Such estimates are just examples of picking numbers out of a hat, and both of the people Shostak sites were astronomers, not people with degrees in biology. There are very strong reasons for believing that unless there is something special going on in terms of cosmic teleology, something to better the long odds, the chance of extraterrestrial civilizations arising anywhere else in our galaxy are very low.

Lets consider some of the things that need to go right in order for a communicating civilization to arise on another planet:

1. Life has to begin, consisting of cells that would have to be very complex for even the simplest life.
2. At about the same time, a genetic code has to somehow arise.
3. Life has to progress from the simplest cells (prokaryotes) to the vastly more complicated cells called eukaryotes.
4. Life has to progress to macroscopic life with complicated organ systems.
5. Macroscopic life has to evolve into intelligent life.
6. Intelligent life has to develop both language and limbs sufficient to make tools, as well as the advanced consciousness and abstract thinking needed for a species to have an interest in communicating with other species on other planets.

The first of these things is something that seems so unlikely to occur by chance that we should not assume it has accidentally occurred even one other time on billions of other planets in our galaxy. Darwinian ideas are of no value in explaining life's origin, since natural selection can only occur when life exists. Even the most primitive microorganism known to us seems to need a minimum of more than 200,000 base pairs in its DNA (as discussed here).

The origin of even the simplest life seems to require fantastically improbable events. Protein molecules have to be just-right to be functional. It has been calculated that something like 10⁷⁰ random trials would be needed for a functional protein molecule to appear; and many such protein molecules are needed for life to get started. And so much more is also needed: cells, self-replicating molecules, a genetic code that is an elaborate system of symbolic representations, and also some fantastically improbable luck in regard to homochirality. Homochirality is the fact that in a laboratory the components of sugars and amino acids are chemicals that are “left-handed” or “right-handed” in equal numbers, but in living things essentially all sugars are made of “right-handed” components and all proteins made of “left-handed” components – a situation that seems fantastically unlikely to have occurred by chance.

If by some miracle life were to arise on a planet, from a naturalistic perspective it seems extremely likely that cells would simply stay stuck in a prokaryotic state, rather than making the leap to the much more complicated eukaryotic cells. The prevailing theory (or perhaps one should say “fairy tale”) on how such a leap occurred is not even a Darwinian explanation, but a very far-fetched endosymbiosis story involving “incorporation by ingestion” that tries to kind of say, “Cells got vastly more complicated by eating other cells.” We are asked to think that a biological organism could become vastly more complex just by gobbling up other things. In the recent book Aliens, biologist Matthew Cobb gives a description of current thinking on this topic, emphasizing the improbability of it:

What happened on Earth – known as eukaryogenesis – was not the product of random mutation and the subsequent sifting of acquired characters that have differential fitness (the essence of natural selection). Instead there appears to have been a single event of mind-boggling improbability, for it involved two life forms interacting in a most novel way....Prior to that moment, all life had consisted of small microbes with no cell nucleus and no mitochondria. Everything changed when one unicellular life form, known as an archaebacterium, ended up inside another, called a eubacterium.

On another page Cobb says this:

We could in principle calculate the probability of the appearance of eukaryotes, but we would soon run out of zeros...That weird hybrid was our ancestor, and its existence – and therefore ours – was incredibly improbable. As far as we are aware, no such event happened before or since.

It also seems extremely likely that life would just stay in a microscopic state rather than making the leap to multi-cellular life forms consisting of multiple layers of organization such as cells, tissues, organs and organ systems. On Earth this seems to have happened in a sudden burst, at about the Cambrian Explosion about 540 million years ago. Scientists have never adequately explained this sudden blossoming, in which most major phyla of animals suddenly appeared.

To plausibly explain the appearance of large, multi-cellular, macroscopic life consisting of cells, tissues, limbs, organs, and organ systems, we would need a theory explaining gigantic amounts of biological organization. But we don't have that – merely something vastly less, the theory of accumulation that is Darwinism (a theory of the accumulation of favorable random mutations). 

To clarify the difference between the two (organization and accumulation), below we see a depiction of organization, the metabolic pathways in the human body:

    Credit: US Department of Energy

And here is an example of accumulation:

Then there are the difficulties of explaining the appearance of intelligent life, the type of life that might be interested and capable of interstellar communication. In the case of humanity, we have a species with about 10 fundamental mental characteristics that separate us from the animals: things such as abstract thinking, language ability, mathematical ability, philosophical ability, spirituality, ethics, altruism, self-consciousness, and intellectual curiosity. As argued here, none of these things increased the ability of humans to survive in the wild, so we cannot explain such things as being due to natural selection. 

In moments of candor, some evolution experts such as George Gaylord Simpson and Ernst Mayr argued that the appearance of humanity was such a fluke that we should not at all expect it to happen on any other planet in the galaxy. In the recent book Aliens, biologist Matthew Cobb states that “a study of the key points in life's history” leads us to the pessimistic conclusion that “there are no alien civilizations.”

You can summarize the situation as follows: based only on what we currently know for sure, if an extraterrestrial planet existed the right distance from its sun, with overwhelming likelihood no life would arise on the planet; and if life did by great luck appear on the planet, it would with overwhelming likelihood stay in the simple prokaryotic microscopic state; and if the vastly more complex eukaryotic microscopic state did by great luck arise, with overwhelming likelihood the planet would never see multi-cellular life with limbs and tissues and organ systems; and if by great luck very organized multi-cellular life arose, it would with overwhelming likelihood not reach anything like the consciousness, linguistic fluency and manual dexterity needed for interstellar communication.

Given such a reality, there is no basis for the estimates Shostak cites for the number of communicating civilizations in our galaxy (between 10,000 and a million). If we realistically consider things based purely on known biology and chemistry, without assuming anything special helps life along, our best guess should be that there is no other civilization in our galaxy. There are billions of other galaxies, so such an estimate would not preclude there being many other civilizations scattered across the universe's galaxies. But the chance of communicating with a civilization in another galaxy is remote. The fact that SETI has been searching for extraterrestrial civilizations for decades without finding anything is consistent with an estimate that we are the only civilization in our galaxy, and is rather inconsistent with claims that there are 10,000 or more extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy.

But there is one reason for thinking that there might be many civilizations in our galaxy. Given the seemingly terrible odds of intelligent life appearing even once in a galaxy, it may be best to assume that there must have been some special “X factor” that helped intelligent life appear. We can use the vague term “cosmic teleology” to describe such a thing. A kind of “big umbrella” term that can cover many possibilities, the term “cosmic teleology” covers everything from the possibility of deliberate supernatural assistance to the possibility that there is some kind of cosmic life-force that causes biological life to become progressively more organized. The fact that many a biologist has declared such a concept to be taboo and forbidden is no reason at all why we should avoid it.

A believer in cosmic teleology can be a believable optimist when it comes to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). For example, such a person might maintain that we will succeed in finding extraterrestrials within 50 years, because there is some cosmic life-force that acts throughout the galaxy, causing life to appear on every habitable planet, and also causing life to become  ever-more organized. But someone who has not articulated any doctrine of cosmic teleology is not a believable short-term optimist about SETI. Similarly, if you have for some reason a compelling theory you can count cards or read minds or influence the rolls of dice with mind-over-matter, you might have a good basis for optimism about going to Las Vegas and coming back with $100,000 in winnings; but if you have no such theory, you have no business being optimistic about such an outcome.

As for Shostak's claim that we will make contact with intelligent extraterrestrials within 20 years (because the search technology is getting better and better), it seems no more convincing than the claim that we will be able to telephone the dead within 20 years, because smartphones are getting better and better. 50 years of SETI failure suggests that if extraterrestrial civilizations exist, they are very hard to find, and that it is unlikely that we will find any extraterrestrial civilizations within the next 20 years.

A Very Strong Effect of Repeating Patterns in Mysterious Striped Orbs

Post updated in September 2018 to have the latest observations numbers. 

Orbs are mysterious circular anomalies that appear in photographs without any obvious explanations. Such anomalies have been appearing in photographs taken around the world for decades, with equal frequency indoors and outdoors (where the air is much cleaner than indoors). There is no relation at all between the appearance of such anomalies and the cleanness of air. In almost all cases such anomalies show up in photographs taken in completely ordinary air.

Skeptics claim that such orbs are merely out-of-focus dust particles. Before discussing and showing a consideration that completely defeats such a claim (a very strong effect of recurring patterns in mysterious striped orbs), I will briefly discuss the general reasons for rejecting the skeptical “orbs are just dust” explanation. Most of the more remarkable orbs that have been photographed cannot be explained as dust, because they are either too big to be dust, too bright to be dust, too fast-moving to be dust, too colorful to be dust, too regularly observed to be dust, too surrounded by clean air to be dust, or having too many sharp, clear details to be dust. When you actually look into the size of dust particles in ordinary air, you will find that they are thousands of times too small to produce orbs of the size frequently seen in the better orb photographs.

Orb photographers often publish photos showing orbs that are about 10% to 15% of the width or height of the original photos. To produce such an orb, a particle in front of the camera would need to block more than 1% of the area in front of the camera lens. But dust particles in ordinary air (being only about 1 micron outdoors and 10 microns indoors) are only big enough to block about a millionth of the area in front of a camera lens (about 100 million microns). If it were true that dust particles in ordinary air were sufficient to produce orbs, then people would constantly be getting orbs in their flash photos. But fewer than 1 percent of photographers get orbs in their photos. It is true that you can get small unimpressive-looking dust orbs in photos by vigorous efforts such as by putting a shirt under your bed and then whipping the shirt around, but that proves nothing to discredit photos taken in ordinary air (because when you do such a drop-and-shake stunt you are briefly raising the average particle size in the air by a hundred-fold). Then there is the fact that mysterious orbs photographed indoors often show what looks exactly like extremely fast motion, of a type we would never see from dust particles (which move at only 2 miles per hour indoors) – a kind of “string of pearls” motion (shown here) in which we can seem to see multiple position states of an object hurtling at incredible speeds. Skeptics have a variety of ingenious explanations to try to explain away such photos, but none of these attempts work, for the reasons discussed in detail here. 

The fact that mysterious orbs so often appear with colors of blue, pink, purple, green, orange, red, and yellow is another fact completely inconsistent with a dust explanation.  For example, I have photographed more than 1400 mysterious blue orbs both indoors and outdoors, as well as more than 400 mysterious purple orbs (as shown here).  Attempts to naturally explain such colors do not work, for reasons discussed here. 

Before noticing recurring patterns in mysterious orbs I photographed, I started to get a striping effect in mysterious orbs that is in itself sufficient to rule out a dust explanation. The effect I saw was that again and again mysterious orbs that I photographed would have sharp, clear stripes, often stretching from one side of the orb to the other. A large fraction of the stripes were straight, but just as many of the stripes were curved. I may note that prior to the time I reported this effect in 2015, no one ever reported seeing stripes in any type of airborne particles. So you can't say “those were just dust stripes” – because if it is possible to photograph stripes in airborne dust, how could it be that no one reported such a thing prior to 2015?

By now I have photographed more than 700 mysterious orbs with stripes, all photographed in dry air. You can see all of these photos (posted between July 2015 and the present) by using this link and continuing to press on the “Older Posts” button at the bottom. One reason why such orb stripes cannot be explained through any type of dust explanation is that such stripes are an example of clear, sharp details – and such clear, sharp details are exactly not what we would expect to see in out-of-focus particles appearing near the camera.

Things got even more interesting when I started to notice many repeating patterns in mysterious orbs that I photographed. I have so far noticed 32 of these repeating patterns in striped orbs I have photographed. The best way to see examples of all of these patterns is to look at the long blog post here, which includes two or more examples of each of these patterns (in some case as many as 47 examples of a particular pattern). If you are not energetic enough to click on the link and scroll down, you can instead merely look at the grid below, which combines many of these photos. The best way to see the grid below is to click on it to open it in a separate browser tab (which will show the grid in higher resolution).

None of the items we see above are patterns that showed up in consecutive photos. So I am sure that none of these photos was caused by some camera irregularity (such as cracks or lines on the camera lens). Such an irregularity would cause a photo anomaly that would show up in consecutive photos; but none of these anomalies appeared in consecutive photos.

Within the blue rectangle in this grid, you see 10 examples of a pattern I call the umbilical cord pattern (it also rather resembles a pig tail or a cul-de-sac seen from above). A  close-up example of the extremely distinctive pattern is below:

Within the red rectangle of the grid, we see 8 examples of an inverted-Y pattern. Inside the yellow rectangle of the grid, we see 10 examples of a curved stripe pattern appearing either at the top or the bottom of an orb. Within the purple rectangle of the grid, we see 13 examples of a horizontal stripe pattern, in which we see a belt-like stripe on an orb.

Inside the green rectangle of the grid (at its lower left part), and the row below it, we see 7 T-shaped stripes, three of them having a break between the lines and a slanted top. Inside the pink rectangle we see three r-shaped stripes. Inside the light blue rectangle at the bottom left of the grid we see three J-shaped stripes. Inside the orange rectangle of the grid, we see 8 cases of a pattern consisting of a vertical stripe stretching down from the top of the orb, with a little circular feature directly underneath that stripe.

The pattern appearing most often is shown inside the green rectangle of the grid, where we see 28 examples of mysterious orbs with a stripe stretching from the top right corner of the orb down to the opposite side of the orb, on the bottom left corner.

Assuming that only natural particles were being photographed, how often would a photographer expect to see this many pattern repetitions? Not once in a thousand reincarnated lifetimes. That's simply because there are so many ways in which random marks might be arranged within natural or random particles.

Consider the following math. Imagine there are two strangers in different houses who are each told to randomly arrange 23 black tiles on a scrabble board that is a 15 by 15 grid. There are 225 places for the first person to arrange his first tile, so the chance that they will both place the first tile in the same spot on the grid is 1 in 225. The chance that they both will put the second tile on the same spot on the 15 by 15 grid is 1 in 224, because now one of the spots on the grid is already filled. We can calculate the chance of the two strangers randomly positioning their tiles on exactly the same 23 spots on the 15 by 15 grid as follows: it is (1/225) *(1/224) *(1/223)*(1/222)*(1/221)*(1/220)*(1/219)*(1/218)*(1/217)*(1/216)*(1/215) *(1/214) *(1/213)*(1/212)*(1/211)*(1/210)*(1/209)*(1/208)*(1/207)*(1/206)*(1/205) *(1/204) *(1/203).

This equals 1 in 2 x 10⁵⁴ -- which is about 1 chance in 1 followed by 54 zeroes. This is about the chance of you meeting 6 strangers, and correctly guessing all of their 9-digit Social Security numbers on the first try.

This calculation simply gives us a hint of how fantastically improbable it is that two random patterns will coincidentally match. Given that type of math, we absolutely should not expect for a single photographer in the world to get even a single case of distinctive random patterns repeating 8 times or more in mysterious orbs he photographed. The chance of anyone getting 32 repeating patterns, with some repeating as many as 47 times, is some probability so microscopic it can scarcely be calculated.

Here's another example to show how improbable is that random patterns might match, but in this example an exact match will not be required. Let's imagine 3000 people in a large auditorium. What is the chance that even two of them would have a Social Security number differing by only one digit?

A Social Security number is 9 digits. There are 81 different 9-digit numbers that differ by only one digit from any Social Security number. We can consider these “matching patterns.” There are about a billion possible Social Security numbers. So the chance that one person will have a Social Security number with a pattern matching that of the person next to him (considering a 1-digit deviation as a pattern match) is about 1 in a billion divided by 81, or 0.000000081. But with 3000 people in the auditorium, the chance that one particular person will have a Social Security matching the pattern of another person in the auditorium is about 0.000000081 multiplied by 3000, or 0.000243.

But what about the probability that as many as 25 of these 3000 people would have a Social Security number with the same pattern (differing by less than one digit)? To calculate that you would need to use a thing called a binomial probability calculator. When we use the one at StatTrek.com, which you can access here, it tells us that the chance of this is less than 1 in a million.

The StatTrek calculator actually won't show any probability less than 1 in a million, and simply displays such a probability as less than .000001. I have a Java binomial probability calculator that I have tested successfully with benchmarks. When I try this example, it tells me that the probability is 2.6177844832578667E-28, which is roughly 1 in 10 to the twenty-eighth power (about than 1 in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000).

The example here very roughly corresponds to the probability of some orb photographer taking 3000 photos of mysterious orbs (such as I have), and getting a matching pattern on 28 of them (such as I have done in the case of orbs with a stripe stretching from the top right corner to the lower bottom corner, as you can see in the green rectangle of the grid above). But the probability of getting so many matching patterns as I have got would actually be much smaller, since the chance of getting a matching pattern on a Social Security number (with a match of 8 out of 9 digits) is actually much greater than the chance of getting a matching pattern on a circular object which might have marks or lines arranged in any of a trillion quadrillion different ways. So the chance of getting only the pattern recurrence shown in the green rectangle in the grid above seems to be less than 2.6177844832578667E-28 (about 1 in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000), and the chance of also getting all of the other pattern matches in addition seems like some number even more microscopic.

The math above merely hints that the chance of getting as many pattern repetitions as I have got is essentially zero, if only chance was involved. The same thing is suggested by human experience with snowflakes. These are natural objects that can have a vast variety of appearances. But no one ever observes the same pattern repeated.

On two days I have twice photographed the exact same pattern repeating on the same day. Below is one example (reported here) showing a “T” letter inside two mysterious orbs I photographed. Note how both "T" shapes have the same distinctive look, with a slanted top.

Below is another example (reported here) in which we see an “H” letter in two orbs I photographed on the same day. In both cases the right “leg” of the “H” letter curves upward.

In both of these cases I took many ordinary photos between the photo on the left and the right, and such ordinary photos showed no such pattern.

The repeating patterns phenomenon described here seems to be a novel and unprecedented observational effect, and seems to have been reported by no previous observer. Given the extremely high degree of pattern repetition in these photos I have taken of mysterious striped orbs, there is a great temptation to interpret these dramatically repeating patterns as being some mysterious signaling effect. But if a person makes such a guess, he should add to that guess the last line of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey: “...its origin and purpose: still a total mystery.”

Postscript: Below is a 26-minute youtube.com video I created, compiling more than 500 photos I have taken of mysterious striped orbs. Click on the icon at bottom right to watch the video in full screen mode. 

The photos here show a dramatic case of an orb pattern that repeated within the same hour. Photos taken between the times listed showed no such anomaly. 

Below is another very dramatic case of a repeating orb pattern, with the pattern repetition occurring within 90 minutes. The pattern at the top resembles a stick figure of a leaping dancer. 

Post-postscript: By the end of 2020 I have taken 800 photos of such mysterious striped orbs. You can see them all by using the link here, which takes you to a free online book of mine with very many photos. 

Facebook Is Great for Venting and Buy-Bragging, Not So Good for Thoughtful Essays

Let us imagine a Facebook user named Jack who decides to think very deeply about some topic – perhaps a moral topic or a philosophical topic. Let us suppose that Jack does quite a bit of research and reflection on the topic, and then writes a 2000-word essay displaying some original thinking on the topic. Then Jack posts his essay on Facebook. He imagines that his Facebook friends will recognize the depth of thought in his essay, and respond with quite a few likes or comments.

But Jack will have no control over the way this essay appears on the Facebook feeds of his friends. He will be at the mercy of Facebook's news feed presentation algorithms. Facebook will treat this essay in a way that almost guarantees it will receive little attention. On their news feeds, Jack's friends will see a little block of text giving a few words from the start of Jack's long reflective post, with a little link at the bottom leading to a page giving the entirety of the text. But these friends of Jack's will be given no initial indication of how long Jack's post is. So unless they click on the link, Jack's friends won't know that Jack has bothered to put down 2000 words of deep reflection on some topic. Probably almost all of them won't bother to click on the link, and will suppose that the link only gives a few more words, rather than many paragraphs of prose. Facebook will do nothing to highlight Jack's long post in the news feeds of Jack's friends. Jack's long essay will be given the same size in those feeds as trivial little 50-word posts, and may get smaller space in those news feeds than trivial run-of-the-mill selfies.

Jack will then probably find that his thoughtful 2000-word essay has been largely ignored. But if instead he puts up some shallow little post with a photograph (perhaps a selfie or a picture of some little thing he bought), he will probably get just as much attention as he got from his long thoughtful post.

Before long, Jack will kind of realize that Facebook is not a platform that does much to reward complex reflective thinking, and that he can get much more “bang for his buck” by putting up shallow little “look where I was” or “look what I bought” posts. Jack won't be likely to put up many more deep, reflective posts. Looking at how his friends post almost nothing but short, shallow posts, Jack will probably follow that way of using Facebook, rather than being a “Facebook oddball” who posts long, thoughtful posts.

Facebook is a good platform for expressing emotion, particularly short-lived emotions caused by events in the news. Facebook is good for venting little bursts of anger at things that annoy you, by writing tiny little posts like this:

The Giants blew a 10-point lead in the fourth quarter. How much can a fan take?!

Facebook also can be good for expressing sadness at things that happen in your personal life. Facebook is also an almost ideal platform for anyone who spends lots of money, and who wants to brag about his conspicuous consumption by posting lots of little “look what I bought” posts and “look where I went” posts.

A typical "buy-brag" social media post

You might put it this way: Facebook is a fine platform for feelers and spenders, but it's not a very good platform for thinkers. Particularly appalling is the lack of control a Facebook user has over his own Facebook page. If you happen to have written a long Facebook post detailing your philosophy of life, there is no way for you to highlight that post so that it always appears prominently to anyone who comes to your page. Such a post will get “lost in the stream” after you post ten or twenty trivial little posts and photos.

If Facebook may encourage us to produce short and shallow social media contributions, the same thing can be said about Twitter. By limiting the length of a tweet (a message posted on Twitter) to 140 characters, Twitter has rather been encouraging people to make short soundbites about topics, rather than deep, complex reflections. This problem has only been slightly alleviated by the fact that Twitter recently increased its maximum tweet length to 280 characters. It's all but impossible to state an argument of any depth or complexity using only 280 characters.

A platform such as Twitter is ideal for someone who rose to public prominence despite a lack of depth, a type of person who might cringe at the idea of writing a complex thousand-word essay, but who enjoys the opportunity to vent his ire at various people or things that annoy him, by tweeting short little bursts of angry prose.

Thankfully we still have the blogosphere, where people can write posts that appear in a way that the author can control, without being at the mercy of some automatic formatting process that makes everything you post look like some blip in a stream of consciousness, with most people seeing your stream of consciousness getting all mixed up with other people's stream of consciousness. If you want to do some serious online writing about something, put it in your own blog, using easy-to-use tools like blogger.com,  rather than relying on Facebook presentation algorithms that disfavor the reflective thinker and favor instead short little brags and outbursts. 

 The blogosphere is deeper

The Bioscience "Hypedemic" Continues

There is an ever-worsening hype problem and exaggeration problem involving scientific research.  One problem is what is called medical ghost-writing, in which pharmaceutical companies will hire people to write up a study, and then recruit doctors to sign their names to the study, even if the doctors had little or no involvement in the study.  A wikipedia.org article on the topic says, "A 2009 New York Times article estimated that 11% of New England Journal of Medicine articles, 8% of JAMA, Lancet and PLoS Medicine articles, 5% of Annals of Internal Medicine articles and 2% of Nature Medicine were ghost written."  It was revealed that medical ghost-writers had written some of the scientific papers promoting Vioxx, a drug that caused many thousands to have unnecessary heart attacks before they died. 

Another problem is that press releases issued by universities, colleges, and various other institutions are frequently announcing scientific research in ways that include exaggerations, unwarranted claims or outright falsehoods.

A study published in the British Medical Journal highlighted the problem. The study examined 462 press releases issued by 20 leading institutions. Here is one site's summary of this study:

Overall, 40% of those releases contained health advice that was more explicit than anything found in the actual article. One-third emphasized possible cause and effects when the paper merely reported correlations. And 36% of releases about studies of cells or animals over-inflated the relevance to humans.

Such exaggeration and poor reporting is common not merely in press releases about biomedical research, but also all kinds of other research. A recent example of an erring university press release was a press release issued by Brandeis University. The press release announced what would be a monumental achievement if it were true: “After a 30-year quest, a Brandeis professor has discovered the molecule that stores long-term memories — it's called calcium/calmodulin dependent protein kinase, or CaMKII for short.” Scientists have been trying to understand how memory works for many decades. So if it were true that a scientist had actually discovered that memory is stored in some specific molecule, that would be an epic discovery on the same scale as the discovery of DNA. The press release claims, "The discovery of the memory molecule resolves one of the oldest mysteries in neuroscience — how do our brains create and retain long-term memories?"

But, funny thing, there has been almost no press coverage of this supposed epic breakthrough. Which is good, because the supposed breakthrough is not at all a breakthrough. Nothing has been observed or discovered that warrants any claim that human memory is stored in some particular molecule.

There are two general reasons why it is nonsensical to claim that very long-term memory could be stored in a protein molecule such as CaMKII. The first is that protein molecules are not suitable for storing information (other than which amino acids ingredients make up the protein itself). A nucleic acid such as DNA or RNA has millions of nucleotide base pairs which make an area that can be used for information storage. One DNA molecule can store different information from another DNA molecule, because its sequence of nucleotide base pairs might be different from some other DNA molecule's sequence of base pairs. But a protein molecule has no string of nucleotide base pairs that might store information. Unlike 20 DNA molecules that might each be different, 20 protein molecules of a particular type will be the same. So there's no way a protein molecule can store some unique set of information in the same way that a blank page can or a DNA molecule can.

Another reason why it is invalid to claim that very long-term memory could be stored in a molecule such as CaMKII is that such a molecule is way too short-lived. Protein molecules in the brain have short lifetimes averaging a few weeks or less. But humans can remember things for 60 years. The CaMKII protein has an average lifetime of only about 30 hours.  

Some memory theorists have tried to salvage the notion that memories could be stored in molecules such as CaMKII, by resorting to extremely far-fetched speculations. They speculate that there could be some kind of network of such molecules that could somehow store information in a stable way, even though the individual parts of the network were constantly being replaced. There is no evidence for such speculations, and they seem to be a case of resorting to speculative extremes to avoid believing what we have discovered about the lifetimes of protein molecules. It's kind of like “pull out all the stops to avoid facing reality.”

We can compare such theories to a theory of permanent information storage in maple tree leaves. We know that maple tree leaves fall to the ground and decay every year. So nature has firmly told us: maple tree leaves are not suitable for storing information for decades. But suppose someone had his heart set on believing that maple tree leaves can store information for decades. Using all of his powers of imagination and speculation, a person might come up with a weird theory that might speculate that there is some type of animal or tree spirit that writes down all the information someone might write on a tree leaf, and then rewrites such information back on the leaf when the leaf regrows in the spring, after falling and rotting in the previous fall. So, according to such a theory, you can write a love letter to your sweetheart on maple tree leaves, and such a love letter will persist decades into the future, because the information is preserved, even though the particular items that stored the information are constantly being replaced.

Of course, such a theory would be extremely ridiculous. The theories that try to suggest ways in which short-lived protein molecules can be the building blocks of stable, permanent information storage structures are no less ridiculous. The protein molecules are like the leaves with short lifetimes, except that protein molecules have much shorter lifetimes than leaves. 

The memory theories I refer to manage to be both extremely detailed (imagining all kinds of undiscovered complex molecular arrangements) and also very half-baked, because they say nothing at all about how memory encoding might work. Imagine that there was some complex arrangement of molecules that might act as a kind of toggle or bit-switch (to use the “bistability” idea of some of these theories). That wouldn't explain memory, since our experience isn't binary and isn't digital. We know of no way by which a brain could convert something like word inputs and sight inputs into a digital or binary form that might allow such a storage system to work. Computers can store things in binary because they have a whole series of encoding schemes (such as the English alphabet, the ASCII code, and the ASCII-to-binary code) that have been carefully designed. But brains that naturally arose should have no such encoding schemes, which would be a hundred times harder-to-explain (if they existed) than the hard-to-explain genetic code. 

 

The book here makes a statement that contradicts the claims of the Brandeis press release:

In the mid-1980's there was much excitement about the idea that autophosphorlyated CaMKII might serve as a self-perpetuating signal that could subserve permanent memory storage. However, a variety of experimental results generated since then suggests that perpetual activation of CaMKII does not occur with LTP-inducing stimulation or memory storage.

This scientific paper also contradicts the claims of the Brandeis press release:

Previous models have suggested that CaMKII functions as a bistable switch that could be the molecular correlate of long-term memory, but experiments have failed to validate these predictions....The CaMKII model system is never bistable at resting calcium concentrations, which suggests that CaMKII activity does not function as the biochemical switch underlying long-term memory.

What does the Brandeis press release cite to try to back up its claim of a memory breakthrough? It cites evidence so meager it is laughable: what sounds like an experiment with a single rat. I use the phrase “single rat” because the press release talks just exactly as if only a single rat was tested. Here is what it says:

He and his team placed a rat on a rotating platform. Every time the animal passed a designated location it got a small shock. Eventually the animal learned to avoid the shock zone by running in the opposite direction. Lisman and his team then turned off the CaMKII molecules inside the rodent's brain. The rat ceased getting off the platform to avoid the shock. The animal's memory of the location of the shock zone had been erased.

The last line in this paragraph (“the animal's memory of the location of the shock zone had been erased”) is just a case of jumping to a conclusion without adequate evidence. You are not entitled to draw any conclusion at all from a memory experiment with a single animal. Even if a result like this had been reported with each of 100 rats tested, that would still not justify drawing any conclusion about memory erasing. We have no idea whether this process of “turning off the CaMKII molecules inside the rodent's brain” might have had some effect that might have produced a result that could be incorrectly interpreted as forgetting – an effect such as distraction or confusion or dulled perception or dulled concentration or dulled spatial orientation. Nor do we have any idea whether this "ceased getting off the platform to avoid the shock" is something that would show up repeatedly and consistently in repeated experiments with lots of rats. 

I looked at the abstract of the scientific paper mentioned in the Brandeis release. The abstract does not mention experiments with multiple rats. The paper is hidden behind a paywall.

The wikipedia.org article on this CAMKII molecule tells us the following, which is incompatible with the claims of the Brandeis press release:

Irvine and colleagues in 2006 showed that preventing autophosphorylation of CaMKII cause mice to have impaired initial learning of fear conditioning. However, after repeated trials, the impaired mice exhibited similar fear memory formation as the control mice.

This is a result that would not have been reported were it true that this CaMKII is storing long-term memories.

In short, there is no sound basis for the claim of the Brandeis press release that “a Brandeis professor has discovered the molecule that stores long-term memories.” We do not understand how memories are formed, and do not even understand whether they are actually stored in brains.  We have been constantly taught the unproven dogma that all memories are stored in brains. But when we actually subject such an idea to detailed scrutiny, pondering such things as 50-year-old memories, the short lifetimes of protein molecules,  instantaneous memory recall, and the issue of encoding protocols, we encounter a host of grave difficulties discussed in this series of posts,  difficulties so great as to cast great doubt on such a dogma.

Because the CaMKII molecule in question is a very short-lived molecule with a half-life of less than a month, it is an extraordinarily implausible candidate as a molecule that might store memories that last for 50 years. No one has ever presented a remotely plausible theory describing in detail how long-term human memories could be stored in molecules (something that would require a wealth of encoding schemes and translation schemes that would be a “miracle of design” if it existed). No one has done even so much as storing a tiny bit of information (such as the word "cat") in one or more protein molecules such as CaMKII.  CaMKII is an enzyme, a molecule that serves to speed up reactions. Trying to portray a short-lived enzyme as a long-term storage site is like trying to claim that your skateboard is a bank. 

Who is it who wrote this inaccurate press release making this  claim that “a Brandeis professor has discovered the molecule that stores long-term memories”? The press release was written by Lawrence Goodman. You can use this link to see his profile. The profile describes his previous writing work, which is all for non-scientific publications. Goodman's profile does not suggest that he did any science writing or science study or science work before getting his current “Science Content Editor” job at Brandeis. So we should not attach any great weight or authority to his interpretation of this matter.

When reading university press releases on science topics, we should remember that the press release might well have been written by someone with only a fragmentary understanding of the complex subject he is writing about. 

Postscript:  The memory theories I have criticized here try to suggest that some hypothetical binary 2-state switch might be storing our memories.  Such an idea involves an assumption that memories are stored as binary data -- that, for example, your memory of your first kiss is stored somehow as something like:

00101010001110101010110110101010101010010101100

The assumption in question is nonsensical. Human memories could never be stored in binary form. If humans could store memories in binary form, then brain cells would necessarily have encoding schemes and translation schemes so precise and sophisticated -- so much like designed computers -- that it would be a "miracle of design" absolutely beyond any possible naturalistic explanation.