Disastrous Blunders of the Experts

Often when someone wants to get you to believe in some dubious doctrine popular among some current group of experts, that person will basically tell you, “Trust the experts!” The reasoning is that when some group of experts reaches a consensus, it is very likely to be true. But history is full of examples in which the opinions of experts were not merely wrong, but disastrously wrong. Below are some examples, many from recent history.

Expert Fiasco #1: The Bay of Pigs Invasion

When John Kennedy assumed the office of US President in 1961, he found that his experts were unanimously (or all but unanimously) in favor of the Bay of Pigs invasion. This was a harebrained scheme of dumping on the shores of communist Cuba a group of 1400 Cuban exiles. The experts believed that this small group could whip up an insurrection that would lead to the downfall of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. The invasion very quickly failed, with more than 1000 being captured. Commenting on how wrong the advice was, Kennedy later said, “The advice of those who were brought in on the executive branch was also unanimous, and the advice was wrong.” By creating worries of Cuba being invaded, the failed Bay of Pigs invasion helped to sow the seeds of the Cuban Missile Crisis of the next year, in which the world was brought to the brink of atomic destruction.

Expert Fiasco #2: The Vietnam War

In his book The Best and the Brightest, journalist David Halberstam documented the disastrous role of expert advice in the Vietnam War. A group of intellectually brilliant US experts (many with Ivy League credentials) urged full American military involvement in the conflict between North Vietnam and South Vietnam. President Kennedy to some degree and Presidents Johnson and Nixon to a much larger degree took the advice of the experts. The result was a disastrous treasury-draining war that ended up costing more than 58,000 US lives, and many times more Vietnamese and Cambodian lives. The war ended in defeat for the United States, as South Vietnam was taken over by communist North Vietnam. The experts kept pushing a “Domino Theory” which maintained all of Southeast Asia would go communist if South Vietnam become communist. After the war was lost, the theory's prediction did not come true.

Expert Fiasco #3: Eugenics

In the decades prior to World War II, the academic scientific community embraced theories of eugenics, including ideas that certain “inferior” people should be encouraged or forced to be sterilized. Almost every major college or university offered a course in eugenics. Over 62,000 people were forcibly sterilized in the United States alone. After it became clear that the Nazis had embraced eugenics, and used it to try to justify their senseless slaughter of millions in concentration camps, eugenics started to fall out of favor.

Expert Fiasco #4: The Housing Bubble of 2005, and Financial Meltdown of 2008

In the years 2003 to 2005 a huge bubble arose in the US housing market, with housing prices inflating to unreasonable heights. Quite a few independent bloggers who were not financial experts began to raise alarm bells that a housing bubble had arisen, and was about to pop, causing prices to plunge. But the financial experts on Wall Street almost completely failed to alert people to such a possibility. When house prices started to fall between 2006 and 2008, the experts on Wall Street almost all failed to understand the financial disaster that was unfolding. At one point the experts at Standard and Poor's agency gave an AAA rating to CDO securities, which officially signified that there was only about 1 chance in 800 that such securities would default. But it turned out that 28% of these same securities defaulted. Based largely on the astonishingly bad judgments of financial experts, the financial meltdown of 2008 ended up causing countless home foreclosures, a sharp rise in unemployment that lasted for years, and a huge stock market decline that wiped out a good fraction of the retirement savings of millions of people.

Expert Fiasco #5: Blunders of the Psychiatrists

In the field of psychiatry there have since 1950 been three huge blunders supported by experts. One was support for lobotomies as a treatment for mental illness. Lobotomy surgeries were widely supported for decades, although they are now generally regarded as a grotesque horror. Another error was classification of homosexuality as a mental disease. It was only in 1973 that psychiatrists stopped classifying homosexuality as a mental disorder. For decades before that, people discovered to be homosexuals were often forced into bizarre treatments that are now looked on as senseless interventions. A third blunder of the psychiatrists was a dogmatic embrace of the dubious doctrines of Freud, such as his weird theory that much of mental illness was caused by sex-related conflicts stemming from early childhood. The popularity of Freudianism is declining, but for decades his farfetched dogmas were embraced by a large fraction of psychiatrists.

Expert Fiasco #6: The Iraq War

In 2002 and early 2003 the United States government led by George W. Bush tried to whip up public support for an unprovoked invasion of Iraq. The rationale given was that Iraq had assembled terrifying “weapons of mass destruction” that were a threat to the United States. In the time between October 2002 and March 2003 I remember seeing a long parade of experts on my television screen, almost all of which assured us that the coming invasion of Iraq was a wise step that was vitally necessary. Many of these experts said that the invasion was something that would be a breeze. Even though United Nations weapons inspectors had searched the country in the months before March 2003, finding no weapons of mass destruction, the experts told us such weapons would be found.

In March 2003 the unprovoked invasion was launched. No Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were found. The war ended up being a big treasury-draining disaster, leading to more than 4000 US soldier deaths, and more than 30,000 US soldier injuries. The total number of Iraqis that died from the invasion and its resulting unrest has been estimated between 151,000 and more than a million. In the following years, the nation of Iraq suffered very frequent suicide bombings and almost constant violent unrest, with the eventual loss of a large fraction of the country to crazed ISIS fanatics. The price tag for this misadventure was trillions of US dollars. 

Expert Fiasco #7: Vioxx

The drug called Vioxx (also known as rofecoxib) was developed by Merck to treat arthritis and its associated pain. The scientific experts at the Food and Drug Administration gave Vioxx their approval in 1999. In the following years doctors also gave the drug their approval, writing some 80 million prescriptions for the drug. But the drug was actually very dangerous, and the wikipedia.org article on the drug says that it caused “between 88,000 and 140,000 cases of serious heart disease.” Finally in 2004 Merck withdrew the drug. 

Expert Fiasco #8: The Opioid Overdose Epidemic

We are currently in the middle of an opioid overdose epidemic. A CDC site tells us, "From 2000 to 2015 more than half a million people died from drug overdoses." Very many of these come from prescription pain medicines that were over-prescribed by doctors. The CDC site says this:

We now know that overdoses from prescription opioids are a driving factor in the 15-year increase in opioid overdose deaths. The amount of prescription opioids sold to pharmacies, hospitals, and doctors’ offices nearly quadrupled from 1999 to 2010, yet there had not been an overall change in the amount of pain that Americans reported.

Clearly the experts writing prescriptions made a big blunder, writing far too many prescriptions for opioids.

Expert Fiasco #9: Nuclear Weapons

When the atomic bomb was being developed, physicists thought there was a substantial chance that the first atomic explosion might ignite the atmosphere, destroying all life on earth. This fact has been whitewashed by many accounts claiming that they made calculations that there was no chance of such an ignition. But Chapter 17 of Daniel Ellsberg's book The Doomsday Machine makes quite clear that physicists still thought there was a significant chance of such a planet-killing event when the first atomic bomb was exploded in July, 1945. At one point Enrico Fermi estimated the chance at 10 percent, according to one source. 

Physicists should have advised that exploding an atomic bomb was an unacceptable risk. Instead, they allowed the testing to occur. They then supported the creation of ever more destructive bombs including hydrogen bombs vastly more powerful than atomic bombs. For decades the world was put at grave risk of nuclear destruction -- all of which could have been avoided if Fermi and his colleagues had done the right thing and said that any test of any atomic bomb was an unacceptable risk.  The atomic bomb was not needed for Japan's defeat, as a naval blockade and relentless aerial firebombing were creating equivalent military pressure in the summer of 1945. 

 

Why Experts Are So Often Wrong

We still see spectacular errors being committed by experts. A very recent example was the fact that prior to the 2016 election of Donald Trump, the great majority of political pundits predicted very confidently that Trump would lose the election. Then there was the BICEP2 affair. In March 2014 scientists announced they had proof of primordial gravitational waves proving the cosmic inflation theory. Almost the entire community of physicists and cosmologists endorsed this claim. By the end of 2014 it had become clear that BICEP2 had detected something that could just as easily be mere dust, and the claims of an important scientific finding were retracted. In this case the red flags were there from March 2014, so there was no excuse for this erroneous bandwagon effect. Then there was the 2016 affair of the 750 GeV diphoton resonance. A certain signal blip showed up at the Large Hadron Collider, and physicists wrote more than 500 scientific papers about this blip, speaking as if this was some matter of great cosmic importance. By July 2016 it had become clear that the signal blip was mere random noise, of no significance at all. 

Is there some general reason why experts often get things wrong? There seems to be such a reason. It is the fact that experts often are trained in ideological enclaves. An expert typically becomes an expert by volunteering for some particular graduate or specialized training program at a university or in the military. These graduate programs are often ideological enclaves, places where there predominates some particular ideology not embraced by most people.

The fact that the graduates of such programs are volunteers creates the opportunity for sociological selection effects. Let's imagine an extreme example. Let's imagine there arises some new discipline called tricostics. It might be the opinion of 90% of those who have read about tricostics that tricostics is pure nonsense. But tricostics might be “all the rage” at some Graduate Program in Tricostics Studies at a particular university, or some Pentagon training program specialized in tricostics. The people who sign up for such a program might almost all be from the tiny fraction of the population that believes in tricostics. At this particular program there might then be tremendous sociological pressure for students to embrace tricostics. So 90% of the graduates of this tricostics program might be believers in tricostics, even though a randomly selected jury from the general population would probably conclude tricostics is worthless nonsense.

 

An expert existing in some ideological enclave may get be filled with dogmatic overconfidence about some opinion that is popular within his little ideological enclave. He may think something along the lines of: “No doubt it is true, because almost all my peers and teachers agree that it is true.” But the idea may seem senseless to someone who has not been conditioned inside this ideological enclave, this sheltered thought bubble. 

A good rule is: decide based on the facts, and not merely because there is some consensus of experts.   

Postscript: It is interesting that a government web site gives us a "hierarchy of evidence" pyramid, one of a number of similar pyramids you can find by doing a Google image search for "hierarchy of evidence."  In the hierarchy of evidence (ranging from weakest at the bottom to strongest at the top), "expert opinion" is at the very bottom of the pyramid. So why is it we are so often asked to believe this or that explanation for some important matter, based on expert opinions?

Post-postscript: See this post for another case of a disastrous blunder by experts.  The post states that there were between 340,000 to 690,000 US deaths caused by atomic testing. The US government presumably polled the experts about whether it was safe to test atomic weapons above ground, and there was presumably a consensus of experts that such above-ground testing was safe.  The result was probably more US deaths than from the bombs dropped on Japan. 

The reaction to the research of Ignaz Semmelweis was a case of a disastrous expert blunder in the nineteenth century. Semmelweis accumulated evidence that cases of a certain kind of deadly fever could be greatly reduced if physicians would simply wash their hands with an antiseptic solution, particularly after touching corpses. According to a wikipedia.org article on him, "Despite various publications of results where hand washing reduced mortality to below 1%, Semmelweis's observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the medical community." Thousands died unnecessarily, because of the stubbornness of experts, who were too attached to long-standing myths and cherished fantasies such as the idea that physicians had special "healing hands" that would never be the source of death. The wikipedia article tells us, "At a conference of German physicians and natural scientists, most of the speakers rejected his doctrine, including the celebrated Rudolf Virchow, who was a scientist of the highest authority of his time."  Decades later, it was found that Semmelweis was correct, and his recommendations were finally adopted.   The wikipedia.org article notes, "The so-called Semmelweis reflex — a metaphor for a certain type of human behavior characterized by reflex-like rejection of new knowledge because it contradicts entrenched norms, beliefs, or paradigms — is named after Semmelweis, whose ideas were ridiculed and rejected by his contemporaries." 

Post-post-postscript: Very sadly, the year 2020 has given us a new example of a disastrous blunder by experts. In the US a deadly coronavirus began to explosively spread in the second half of February 2020. For the next six weeks leading expert such as Anthony Fauci kept telling us that ordinary people did not need to wear face masks to prevent the virus from spreading. Around April 3, experts reversed their previous position, and started teaching that it was very important for everyone to wear face masks to prevent the virus from spreading.  A full discussion of the erring statements by experts can be found here. By now more than a million Americans have died from coronavirus. A large fraction of this death toll could have been prevented if the experts had started giving us back about March 1, 2020 the correct advice that everyone should be wearing face masks.

The World Health Organization's blunder in this matter was gigantic. From the beginning of the global coronavirus pandemic around March 1, 2020 to June 2, 2020, the World Health Organization senselessly taught on its website that there was no need for ordinary people to wear face masks as a global pandemic raged. A meta-analysis published in the leading medical journal The Lancet on June 2, 2020 concluded that "face mask use could result in a large reduction in risk of infection." This was an analysis of studies that had already been published.  A CNN story on this meta-analysis says, "The chance of transmission without a face mask or respirator (like an N95 mask) was 17.4%, while that fell to 3.1% when a mask was worn." The World Health Organization's disastrous blunder of telling people they did not need to wear face masks during a pandemic is an example of the stubborn persistence of errant biological dogmatism, something that we see all over place in biology. Finally in early June, 2020 the WHO reversed its position, telling us we should wear face masks to prevent coronavirus. 

In February 2021 a group of experts wrote a letter to the CDC and leading authorities, complaining that the CDC had bungled things by not correctly describing the airborne nature of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes coronavirus:

"CDC guidance and recommendations have not yet been updated or strengthened to address and limit inhalation exposure to small aerosol particles. CDC continues to use the outdated and

confusing term 'respiratory droplets' to describe both larger propelled droplet sprays and smaller inhalable aerosol particles. It also confuses matters with 'airborne transmission' to indicate inhalation exposure exclusively at long distances and does not consider inhalation exposure via the same aerosols at short distances....CDC guidance and recommendations do not include the control measures necessary for protecting the public

and workers from inhalation exposure to SARS-CoV-2."

The blunders of experts such as Anthony Fauci continued even after COVID-19 vaccines were developed. In May 2021 Fauci went on television saying that fully vaccinated people with COVID-19 did not need to wear masks, because they become "dead ends" for COVID-19. Fauci stated this: "So even though there are breakthrough infections with vaccinated people, almost always the people are asymptomatic and the level of virus is so low it makes it extremely unlikely — not impossible but very, very low likelihood — that they’re going to transmit it,”  But now a CDC page says, "People who get vaccine breakthrough infections can spread COVID-19 to other people."

Biconsciousness: Could There Be a Part of Your Mind Living Outside of Earth?

We have some ideas about the self that may not be warranted. One idea about the self is that your self is whatever corresponds to the perceptions of your body. But near-death experiences challenge that assumption. In a near-death experience a person may report having perceptions as an entity outside of his physical body.

Another idea about the self is that your self consists only of whatever you are experiencing now on planet Earth, and whatever your earthly mind can remember, think about and see at this moment. This idea may seem axiomatic, and it is probably true. But it's just possible that this idea is wrong. It is possible that your current self could consist of much, much more than what you are experiencing now in your earthly body, and what your earthly mind can remember, perceive and think about.

In this post I will consider an extremely unusual possibility. The idea is a concept I will call biconsciousness. I do not think this possibility is likely to be true, but it is an interesting scenario to ponder. Pondering this possibility will be a mind-stretching exercise that may make your head hurt.

Let us consider a man who dies and then finds his soul preserved. After undergoing some near-death experience, the man may find himself in some post-mortal realm. For referential convenience, I will mainly call this post-mortal realm “heaven,” although perhaps it is very different from conventional ideas about heaven. After enjoying many years of heavenly bliss, the man may be encouraged to return to Earth for an additional life. The man may do that multiple times. We can imagine a person who died, went to some post-mortal realm for 200 years, then chose to return to Earth to be reincarnated, then died again to go back to the post-mortal realm.

The diagram below illustrates the idea. 

 

The scenario above is fairly easy to understand. First, you live on Earth as a regular human, then you die, then you live for maybe 200 years in heaven, then you are born again on Earth, then you die, then you live for maybe 200 years in heaven, then you are born again on Earth, then you die, and then you live for maybe 200 years in heaven.

But let us imagine a radical possibility. Suppose when you went to reincarnate on Earth again, it wasn't your entire self involved in that. Perhaps you might have a strange kind of mental state we can call biconsciousness, in which your self splits up. So half of your self might go to live on Earth, while the other half stays in heaven.

The following diagram illustrates this radical idea.

The weird possibility of biconsciousness

We can describe this strange scenario like this. During your first earthly life, only half of your total self may have gone to live on Earth, while the other half was living in heaven. Then after you died you lived in heaven for 200 years. Then you reincarnated again, but with only half of your total self living on Earth, while the other half kept living in heaven. Then after you died you lived in heaven for 200 years. Then you reincarnated again, but with only half of your total self living on Earth, while the other half kept living in heaven.

This possibility is very hard to grasp. It is very easy to imagine that there might be some being like yourself living in heaven while you live on Earth, some being who is a separate self. But it is very hard to imagine that these two might be parts of the same self. We tend to assume that a self is a single stream of thoughts, perceptions, ideas, and feelings located in one place. But we don't know really know how consciousness and self-hood and souls work. It could conceivably be that a self can be split up so that two simultaneous existences can be experienced by the same self.

It could be that what you experience on Earth is a mere fragment of the total existence that your total self is currently having. If you had some expanded consciousness in heaven, you might be able to experience simultaneously your heavenly existence and your earthly existence. Whatever sadness you felt here on Earth during any moment might be overshadowed by the happiness your total self was feeling in heaven. Being bad at multitasking and at thinking about more than one thing at a time, we cannot imagine such a reality. But it could be some greatly more intelligent version of yourself in some heavenly realm would have no problem at all experiencing two simultaneous lives, a heavenly life and an earthly life.

Under this scenario we can refer to the heavenly part of your consciousness as Major You and the earthly part of your consciousness as Minor You. How might consciousness be for this heavenly Major You? There's a thought experiment we can do to get a crude idea of such a thing.

Let us imagine a future technology in which fancy electronic glasses provide a real-time video feed of your experience, which appears as a window in the right corner of the fancy electronic glasses worn by your spouse. So your spouse is getting a real-time feed of your experience in a little corner of the visual field, and you are getting a real-time feed of your spouse's experience in a little corner of your visual field. Besides being a good way for spouses to keep each other from straying, this would almost be a method of living two lifetimes at once. You might be stuck doing some boring job, but might enjoy seeing the video feed of something more interesting that your spouse was doing, seeing that in the right corner of your fancy electronic glasses.

Conceivably it could be a little like that for Major You living in some heavenly realm. That aspect of your consciousness might have a kind of real-time feed of everything you were seeing, feeling, thinking about and experiencing here on Earth. For this Major You it might be kind of like having two blended streams of experience, one of a heavenly life and one of an earthly life.

Under this biconsciousness scenario, accounting for life after death would be particularly easy. We would not even need to imagine that some kind of special soul transit occurs, in which a soul travels from Earth to a heavenly realm. It would simply be that your life would continue after your earthly death, because only Minor You has perished, while Major You continues to live.

Could this concept of biconsciousness be useful in some sense? I can think of one use for such a concept. Consider the hypothesis of reincarnation, an idea many would prefer to avoid. The problem is that there actually seems to be some evidence that reincarnation may well actually occur for some people. The strongest evidence are cases gathered by people such as Ian Stevenson, in which young children claim they are reincarnations of people who lived before. Surprisingly, there is often corroboration. For example, a child may claim to have been a particular person who experienced particular events. An investigation may show that just such a person lived and experienced such events. The child may be able to recognize the names of relatives of the person who died, who the child claims to have been in a previous life.

But there's a problem with the idea of reincarnation. If someone were to be reincarnated, it would seem that there could be no real continuity of identity. A person's identity seems to be tied up with his memories, outlooks and feelings. If that person is then reborn as a baby, there seems to be break in continuity, so much that it's like you can't really say the reincarnated baby is the same person who lived before.

The hypothesis of biconsciousness may offer a potential solution to this problem. Let us imagine that after you die, you find yourself living for 200 years in a heavenly realm, and then decide to reincarnate on Earth. Imagine if your self is split up into parts, one staying in the heavenly realm, and another being reborn on Earth as a baby. In that case (the biconsciousness scenario we have discussed), there would be a continuity of identity and self-hood. Your memories, feelings, and outlook would be preserved in the Major You living on in the heavenly realm.

There's another potential use for the hypothesis of biconsciousness. Consider the theological problem of evil, as to why an omnipotent God might allow various types of earthly suffering. It could be that every time such suffering occurs, we are merely seeing suffering in a fraction of a self, with the other fraction of the self enjoying heavenly bliss because of biconsciousness. It might therefore be that the current net happiness of every person is always positive rather than negative. The sorrows of the earthly Minor You may be always greatly outweighed by the happiness and pleasure of Major You existing in some blissful heavenly realm.

Although the hypothesis of biconsciousness may be somewhat useful for these reasons, it still seems like a rather unlikely possibility. We have nothing that directly suggests that biconsciousness ever occurs. Until then we should not embrace biconsciousness as a likelihood. It is, however, an interesting possibility to ponder. 

Perhaps such a possibility may be relevant to the concept of guardian angels. Many a person thinks that each of us has a guardian angel. But perhaps rather than being a separate being,  a guardian angel may be simply the heavenly Major You that might co-exist with the Minor You existing here on Earth. So your guardian angel might be a higher aspect of yourself.  Of course, such a notion involves heaping a speculation upon a speculation, and is merely something remotely possible.  

Their “Darwin's Aliens” Aren't Really That

Recently a scientific journal published a paper entitled “Darwin's Aliens” that was a strange inconsistent mishmash with highfalutin pretensions. The authors claimed in their synopsis that they would “show how evolutionary theory can be used to make predictions about aliens.” But their paper is an odd blend of orthodox recitations from the Darwinist catechism, statements that conflict with Darwinist claims,  misleading graphics, and discussions of marvelous cooperation and sudden transitions that are non-Darwinian or in conflict with Darwinian ideas.

The paper starts out by discussing Darwin's theory of natural selection, but the diagram it gives to illustrate the idea is misleading. We see three animals, one of which has a tiny neck, the other a medium-sized neck, and the third with a long neck like a giraffe. These are given as examples of “variation.” There's some lines under the long-neck giraffe, labeled “differential success," leading to three similar animals with very long necks.

This visual gives the completely erroneous idea that you might see some huge beneficial change in the structure of an organism due to some random variation within a generation. That is untrue. If there were a horse-like species with a small neck, it would need very many muscle and bone changes to become an animal with a long neck like a giraffe – not merely many changes in the neck, but changes in the main skeletal structure to support such a neck. It could never be that some random mutation or variation within a generation would cause such a change. You would need many random mutations across multiple generations, all coincidentally conspiring to achieve the same end – something vastly harder to account for than what is shown in the visual the paper provides. The paper's visual is a kind of visualization of the discredited idea of “hopeful monsters” (also called saltations or macromutations), which many evolution experts have rejected as unrealistic, and which is inconsistent with the Darwinian slogan that “nature does not make leaps.”

The paper occasionally states some standard Darwinist dogma, such as the claim that natural selection can produce design without a designer, something that has not actually been demonstrated as we have no proof that any complex visible biological innovations have been produced by natural selection. And why should we be so eager to believe in design without a designer, like someone believing that the cooking he is served comes from no cook, or that the heat in his apartment comes from no heat source? What is the intellectual virtue in believing that nature is some huge counterfeiter, that has engaged in some gigantic fake-out by making all these thing that look like designs, but are not? You cannot answer with some anti-theistic answer, seeing that you could still postulate a design source for some earthly organism by imagining extraterrestrial visitors as the design source.

The paper contradicts its earlier claims about natural selection and design by stating that “The theory of natural selection itself is silent about whether complexity will arise.” How's that? If natural selection actually could produce design (which is functional complexity), then how could natural selection be silent about whether complexity will arise?

The paper then considers the origin of complexity. It attempts to argue that complexity increases during “major transitions,” an idea that is pretty vacuous. For example, if simple cells evolved into far more complex eukaryotic cells, or one-celled life evolved into multi-cellular life, those would be “major transitions,” but by classifying them as major transitions we are not shedding any light on how such things happened.

The paper also suggests the idea that complexity increases when there is an “alignment of interests.” The authors speak rather like someone describing soldiers selflessly enlisting or September 11^th volunteers selflessly sacrificing their individual interests for the common good, in some altruistic way. The paper states this:

For example, the evolution of multicellularity involved a transition from an entity with one part (the single-celled organism) working for the success of itself, to an entity with many parts (the multicellular organism), working for the success of the whole group. The cells can now have very different functions (a division of labour), as each is just a component of a multicellular machine, sacrificing itself for the good of the group, to get a sperm or egg cell into the next generation....The rise in complexity on Earth has been mediated by a handful of such jumps, when units with different goals (genes, single cells, individual insects) became intricately linked collectives with a single common goal (genomes, multicellular organisms, eusocial societies)...Major transitions involve the original entities completely subjugating their own interests for the interests of the new collective. This represents an incredibly extreme form of cooperation.

You will be excused for having a big chuckle while reading this excerpt, which is kind of a sociological-sounding attempt to explain biological organization. Unlike human beings with minds, cells don't have individual goals, interests, or self-interest drives, and don't nobly engage in self-sacrifice. We cannot explain cells entering into fantastically more organized systems as some form of altruistic loss of selfishness, similar to that of volunteers joining up to form a search party looking for lost mountain hikers, or a soldier volunteering to join an army. What we have here is a kind of fallacy of personification, as when the authors say, “Complexity requires multiple parts of an organism striving to the same purpose.”

Not a good explanation for biological organization

Even if there were to be some noble self-sacrifice among cells, that still wouldn't explain biological organization. You may nobly join an army for the common good, but there's always higher planners who come up with a plan, and direct the volunteers into particular functions, telling one volunteer to fly a plane and fight at some location, and another to become an infantryman and fight in some other location. If we had a trillion volunteer self-sacrificing cells, how would we account for their organizational orders directing them to so many different complex specific purposes, according to such intelligent plans?

We may also note that what the authors are talking about sounds like cooperation, goals and purpose within nature, and there's nothing Darwinian about that. Darwin was constantly emphasizing the opposite idea of the “struggle for existence,” in which life is always at war with other life in a dark purposeless struggle. I think the authors have given a title of “Darwin's Aliens” to ideas that are largely non-Darwinian, like a Chinese leader in 1980 saying, “Let's do something very Marxist and Maoist: we'll let people own their businesses, own their apartments, and let many of them become millionaires.”

In their conclusion, the authors (claiming to be using “evolutionary theory to make predictions about extraterrestrial life”) say that “complex aliens will be composed of a nested hierarchy of entities, with the conditions required to eliminate conflict at each of those levels.” But this cannot be claimed as something that Darwinism predicts about alien life.

Life on our planet is organized in an extremely hierarchical way, with the hierarchy going from organelles to cells to tissues to organs to organ systems to organisms, as shown in the diagram below. 

But such hierarchical organization is a thorn in the sign of Darwinism, which does nothing to explain it. Darwinism is not a theory of organization, but merely a theory of accumulation (that life evolves when favorable variations or mutations accumulate). Organization is something vastly more complicated and hard-to-explain than accumulation. A heap of auto parts in a junkyard is an example of accumulation; your car parked in the junkyard parking lot is an example of organization. As an evolutionary biologist confessed recently, referring to the “modern synthesis” that is Darwinism combined with genetics, “Indeed, the MS [modern synthesis] theory lacks a theory of organization that can account for the characteristic features of phenotypic evolution, such as novelty, modularity, homology, homoplasy or the origin of lineage-defining body plans.”

We can actually imagine a type of alien life-form that would be the most compatible with Darwinian theory. It would be some life form that might have appeared because of gradual accumulations. For example, we can imagine some ocean life form consisting of a giant blob of cells. It might be the size of a dolphin, but consist only of a blob of tiny little units, kind of like the type of rock that is called a conglomerate, and merely consists of an accumulation of little pebbles. There would be no organized body plan like we see in typical mammals, the type of thing so hard-to-explain under Darwinian assumptions. Such an organism would not at all consist of a “nested hierarchy of entities.” We can imagine an organism simply starting out as one tiny little unit, and then simply growing bigger and bigger as more of these units appeared. 

Such an organism would have no organ systems and no appendages, both of which are very hard to account for using Darwinian explanations. The problem is that the first tenth of an appendage or the first tenth of an organ system will always be useless, and Darwin assured us that nature is always discarding useless variations or mutations; hence the difficulty of explaining how a useless tenth could ever evolve into a functional unit by Darwinian natural selection. 

Interestingly, there are very few earthly organisms with such a simple arrangement, even though we can imagine 1001 relatively easy ways for large-scale life to progress to such simple arrangements. The only examples I can think of are jellfyish and sponges, which are pretty simple from a structural standpoint. It is as if earthly life was following some law of maximum complexity, almost always having an arrangement the least likely to be explicable through very simple ideas such as natural selection.

The authors give an illustration of a hypothetical creature they call the octomite. Was this some organism that resulted from a computer experiment they did, an experiment simulating evolution? No, it is merely an imaginary organism they drew (or had drawn) rather like kids doodling a monster picture during a boring class. But that's fine. When a science paper is speckled with dubious logic, it's a nice improvement to add a cool drawing of an imaginary alien creature.

Their imaginary creature has about 12 appendages protruding out of its thorax. Since appendages are hard-to-explain by Darwinian explanations, for the reason previously given, their imaginary organism is exactly not what we should be calling one of “Darwin's aliens.” 

Synaptic Density Studies Contradict Prevailing Memory Model

The leading doctrine concerning how memory is stored is the doctrine that memory is stored by a process of the strengthening of synapses of brains. But what we know about the lifetimes of proteins and synapses contradicts this doctrine. The proteins in synapses have lifetimes no longer than a few weeks (this paper finds that they have turnover at a rate of about 17% per day). The synapses themselves are short-lived compared to the 50-year time span that human memories can last.

The two main structural components that can increase in size or number when a synapse is strengthened are called boutons and dendritic spines. Stettler and his colleagues found that the boutons of synapses turn over at a rate of about 7% per week. Dendritic spines in synapses last no more than about a month in the hippocampus, and less than two years in the cortex. This study found that dendritic spines in the hippocampus last for only about 30 days. This study found that dendritic spines in the cortex of mice brains have a half-life of only 120 days. 

So what we know about the lifetime of synapse components contradicts the claim that human memories (lasting as long as 50 years) are stored in synapses. There is another neuroscience finding that contradicts such a dogma: the finding that there is no increase in synaptic density corresponding to an increase in human knowledge.

What should we expect from the idea that our memories are stored in synapses? We would expect that the density of synapses in the brain would increase as more memories accumulated. But that is not what we observe. In 1979 a scientific paper by Huffenlocher reached these conclusions:

1. Synaptic density was constant throughout adult life (age 16 to 72 years), with a density of about 1100 million synapses per cubic millimeter.
2. There was only a slight decrease in old age, with density decreasing to about 900 million synapses per cubic millimeter.
3. “Synaptic density increased during infancy, reaching a maximum at age 1--2 years which was about 50% above the adult mean.”

So according to the paper, the density of synapses sharply decreases as you grow up. The following image from a US government web site tells essentially the same story. The red line shows spine density, roughly the same as synapse density. We see this density declining after age 5. 

Here is a comparable graph from a National Academies Press online book. We see synaptic densities declining after age 5:

 

Why are such findings inconsistent with the idea that memories are stored in synapses? If our memories are stored in synapses, synaptic densities should increase as memories accumulate. A 40-year old has many more memories than a 5-year old. But instead of synaptic densities increasing between age 5 and 16, we see synaptic densities falling sharply.

But what about that study of London cab drivers, the one that supposedly showed they had “bigger brains” after learning lots of location information? To become a London cab driver, you have to memorize a great deal of geographical information. A study followed London cab drivers for 4 years, taking MRI scans of their brains.

But the study did not find that such cab drivers have bigger brains, or brains more dense with synapses. The study has been misrepresented in some leading press organs. The National Geographic misreported the findings in a post entitled “The Bigger Brains of London Cab Drivers.” Scientific American also inaccurately told us, “Taxi Drivers' Brains Grow to Navigate London's Streets.” 

But when we actually look at a scientific paper stating the results, the paper says no such thing. The study found no notable difference outside of the hippocampus, a tiny region of the brain. Even in that area, the study says “the analysis revealed no difference in the overall volume of the hippocampi between taxi drivers and controls.” The study's unremarkable results are shown in the graph below. 

The anterior part of the left half of the hippocampus was about 25% smaller for taxi drivers (100 versus 80), but the posterior part of the right half of the hippocampus was slightly larger (about 77 versus 67). Overall, the hippocampus of the taxi drivers was about the same as for the controls who were not taxi drivers, as we can see from the graph above, in which the dark bars have about the same area as the lighter bars. So clearly the paper provides no support for the claim that these London cab drivers had bigger brains, or brains more dense with synapses.

In this case, the carelessness of our major science news media is remarkable. They've created a “London cab drivers have bigger brains” myth that is not accurate. 

The facts in this matter are completely at odds with the "synapses store memory" dogma that neuroscientists keep teaching (like theologians promulgating some tenet in their creed). The structural materials in synapses are way too short-lived for synapses to be a plausible place where 50-year-old memories could be stored. And instead of our synapses growing denser and denser as we accumulate memories, we have synapses much denser when we are very young with few memories than when we are adults with many times more memories.  Why do our neuroscientists keep advancing an unproven theory inconsistent with the facts?  Perhaps because otherwise they might have to concede that memory may well involve some spiritual component that cannot be explained through  neuroscience. 

See here for 10 posts explaining why current ideas about mind and memory are in need of radical revision.