Our Current Intellectual Overlords Are Much Like Their Ecclesiastical Predecessors

Recently I watched on TV the 2015 film "The Hunger Games -- Mockingjay Part 2."  The film has a fascinating plot twist near its end (spoilers ahead), although to properly understand the plot twist you have to watch the last part of the film very carefully.  

The movie involves the participation of the hero of the film series (Katniss) in the overthrow of the tyrant Coriolanus Snow, who started the "Hunger Games" rather resembling the games of the old Roman Colosseum.  Katniss (played by Jennifer Lawrence) works with a rebel leader named Alma Coin to try to achieve the overthrow of the tyrant Snow. A large crowd of rebels surrounds Snow's palace. We see a scene in which what looks like gift packages are dropped from the air, the packages hanging from balloons. Children run towards the gift packages, which then explode, killing many including the sister of Katniss, and leaving Katniss unconscious. 

When Katniss wakes up, she is told the regime of the tyrant Snow has been overthrown. It seems the bombing of the children was so terrible that Snow's men revolted against him. Katniss meets the captured Snow, who says that he did not order the bombing (which did nothing to help him), but that it was instead ordered by the rebel leader Katniss has been working with: Alma Coin. He says Coin ordered the slaughter to whip up sentiment against Snow, to help defeat him. 

Later at a meeting including Katniss we see Alma Coin urging that the horrible Hunger Games be restored, this time using the children of Snow's henchmen as the participants.  In an implausibly quick insight, Katniss seems to realize the sad truth: that the supposedly virtuous Alma Coin is really just another tyrant like Coriolanus Snow, the tyrant she has replaced.  It's a situation that can be described by the old saying, "Meet the new Boss, very much like the old Boss." 

The Hunger Games series is fiction, but the situation we see at the end of the film is like a situation that has tragically occurred again and again in history:  a hated regime is replaced by some supposedly superior regime that ends up having most of the faults of the old regime. So, for example, when the ruthless regime of the Russian Czars was replaced with the regime of the Communists, the Russians ended up with a regime as cruel as the regime that had been replaced (and actually far crueler). 

It often happens that a hated political regime is replaced by some new political regime that ends up having most of the same faults as the regime it replaced. It may also happen that an old ideological regime (a reigning structure of belief) gets gradually eclipsed by some new ideological regime that brags about its intellectual virtues, but which ends up having most of the same faults as the old ideological regime it superseded. 

To describe a particular system of belief that gained some ascendancy,  we may use the term "ideological regime."  An ideological regime is some structure of belief and related social structures and habits that have become popular in a particular place.  In a particular country there may exist more than one ideological regime.  For example, in the United States there are currently multiple ideological regimes, such as these:

(1) the belief tradition and social structure of Catholicism;

(2) the belief tradition and social structures of Protestantism, taking several different forms;

(3) the belief tradition and social structures of Darwinist materialism;

(4) the belief tradition and social structures of what we may call money-centered consumerist capitalism.

It seems that in today's press the ideological regime of Darwinist materialism has gained ascendancy. Such an ideological regime is centered around four unproven dogmas:  the dogma of the accidental origin of life, the dogma of the  accidental origin of species by so-called “natural selection,” the dogma that  brains are the source of minds or that mind activity is the same thing as brain activity, and the dogma that brains are the storage places of human memories. The average person has heard these claims so many times that he may think of one or more of them as "facts of science," but none of them is a fact. There are actually strong reasons for doubting each one of these dogmas. In particular:

• Scientists discovered the genetic information in all cells around 1950, but it is now the year 2024, and no has ever used a microscope to discover any stored memory information in a brain of a human being, even through brain tissue has been examined at resolutions vastly greater than the resolutions sufficient to discover DNA in cells. 
• Many humans (both children and adults) have had half of their brains removed to stop very bad and frequent epileptic seizures, but when such surgery is done, it has little effect on intelligence or memory, with learned knowledge being well preserved. 
• Many humans can remember very well things they learned or experienced 50 years ago, but the average lifetime of the proteins in synapses (claimed to be the storage place of memories) is 1000 times shorter than 50 years (less than two weeks). 
• Humans are able to form new memories instantly, in contradiction to all theories of brain memory storage, which typically postulate "synapse strengthening" that would take at lease quite a few minutes.
• Even though the brain has no physical characteristics that might help allow any such thing as instant memory retrieval (something like an indexing system or a position notation system or coordinate system that might allow stored information to be quickly found), humans are able to retrieve learned information instantly upon hearing some person name or event name or place name, even if they haven't heard such a name in many years.
• Very many humans (as many as 10 percent or 20 percent of the population) report floating out of their bodies, and observing their bodies from above them in space. 
• Inside brains there is very severe noise of several different types that should prevent humans from being able to reliably recall large bodies of information stored in a brain, but it is a fact that many people (such as actors playing the role of Hamlet) can recall very large bodies of textual information with perfect accuracy. 
• There are hundreds of documented cases of people who saw an apparition of someone who died, but who they did not know was dead, only to soon learn that the person had died about the time when the apparition was seen. 
• There are also very many cases of apparitions seen by more than one person at the same time, something we should expect to never or virtually never happen if a mere brain hallucination was causing the sighting of the apparition. 
• Instead of having some vastly greater brain connectivity that might help explain the superiority of the human mind, a study found that brain connectivity is about the same in all mammals; so we have about the brain connectivity of mice. 
• As discussed here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here, there is two hundred years of written evidence (often written by very weighty figures such as scientists and doctors) for the reality of clairvoyance, an ability that is not explicable under any theory that minds are created by brains. 
• Quite a few people who have lost  half of their brains due to disease or epilepsy surgery have average or above average intelligence; and the physician John Lorber showed that some people have above-average intelligence despite having the great majority of their brain tissue destroyed by disease. 
• Besides a wealth of narrative evidence that some humans can have ESP (an ability inexplicable as a brain effect), there is abundant robust laboratory experimental evidence for ESP (discussed here, here and here). 
• No one has any credible detailed theory of how a brain could ever store learned information (such as academic information) or episodic memories as neuron states or synapse states; and if such a thing were happening, it would require a whole host of very specialized memory-encoding proteins, which have never been discovered (along with some not-yet-discovered encoding scheme millions of times more complicated than the genetic code discovered around 1950). 
• Brains show no signs of working harder during heavy thinking or memory recall, and brain scan attempts to find signs of such greater activity merely report variations such as half of one per cent, the kind of variations we would expect to get by chance, even if brains don't produce thinking or recall. 
• Because of numerous severe slowing factors such as the cumulative slowing effect of synaptic delays and dendrites, signal transmission in the brain should be way too slow to account for the blazing fast thinking speed of some people able to do mathematical calculations at incredible speeds, and also the instant memory recall humans routinely show. 
• People with dramatically higher recall of episodic memories or learned information seem to have no larger brains or brain superiority that could explain this.
• Contrary to the dogma that brains produce minds, ravens with tiny brains can do as well on quite a few mental tasks as apes with large brains; and also tiny mouse lemurs do just as well on quite a few cognitive tests as mammals with brains 200 times larger. 
• As discussed here and here, scientists have very well documented inexplicable physical effects occurring around some people, suggesting they either have powers that cannot be explained in terms of brains and bodies, or are somehow in contact with others who have such powers. 
• There are numerous reasons for suspecting some source of a human soul or spirit outside of the human body, including the sudden unexplained origin of the universe with just the right expansion rate to allow eventual planet formation, the very precise fine-tuning of fundamental physical constants and laws of nature needed for biological habitability, the origin of life so hard to credibly explain as an accidental chemical event, the extremely hierarchical organization of biological organisms, the great abundance of complex fine-tuned protein molecules in organisms (each seeming to involve a vast mathematical improbability), the great abundance of immensely organized biological forms that are not explained by genomes that merely specify low-level chemical information, and abundant photographic evidence for paranormal effects that seem to suggest some unfathomable intelligence beyond any human understanding (see here and here for examples). 
• People (sometimes called autistic savants) with very serious brain defects sometimes have astonishing powers of memory almost no one else has. 
• Dying people commonly report seeing apparitions of the dead (usually their relatives), as reported here, here, and here; people having near-death experiences very frequently report encountering their deceased relatives; and widows and widowers frequently report voices or apparitions corresponding to their deceased spouses -- all just exactly as we would expect if we have souls that survive death. 
• Many decades ago Leonora Piper was studied at great length for many years by scientists and scholars, and for many years she reported information about deceased people that should have been unknown to her. 
• Human beings have many subtle and refined mental abilities (such as philosophical imagination, artistic creativity, musical ability, and subtle spirituality) that are inexplicable as results of brain evolution, such things having no value in increasing survival or reproduction. 
• Despite more than seventy years of experiments trying to reproduce a natural origin of life from non-life, all such experiments have failed to produce anything living, and have also failed to produce any of the main components of microscopic living things (functional protein molecules). In fact, all experiments realistically simulating the early Earth have produced neither the "building blocks" of microscopic life (functional protein molecules, things vastly more organized than mere building blocks) nor the building blocks of the building blocks of microscopic life (amino acids). There are multiple reasons why the famed Miller-Urey experiment (producing amino acids) was not a realistic simulation of early Earth conditions.  
• Claims that we have an explanation for the physical origin of species tend to be made by those who have not paid adequate attention to two supremely important considerations: the matter of functional thresholds and the matter of interdependent components, as I discuss here. 

Once we understand that the four main teachings of Darwinist materialism are belief dogmas rather than scientific facts, we can start to understand how this currently dominant ideological regime  acts today largely as a kind of stealth religion, pretty much as a kind of church-in-all-but-name. Religions have many different forms, only some theistic, and it is possible to reasonably define religion in a way that applies to many diverse systems of belief and dogma. For example, anthropologist Clifford Geertz defined a religion as " a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic." 

Using a definition similar to that of Geertz, I have previously defined a religion as " a set of beliefs about the fundamental nature of reality and life, or a recommended way of living, typically stemming from the teachings of an authority, along with norms, ethics, rituals, roles or social organizations that may arise from such beliefs." This definition covers Christianity, Islam, Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism, and Scientology, religions which stem from authority figures such as Jesus, Muhammad, Moses, the writers of the Bible, Lao-Tzu, Gautama Buddha, Confucius, and L. Ron Hubbard. Interestingly, using the same definition of religion, it seems we should also classify Darwinist materialism as a religion. It is a fundamental way of looking at the nature of life, stemming from the teachings of an authority figure (Charles Darwin).

The table below gives some reasons why Darwinist materialism is like Roman Catholicism.

	Darwinist Materialism	Roman Catholic Church
Physical Bases	University buildings, high schools, natural history museums	Churches, monasteries, convents, seminaries, Catholic schools
Old Revered Texts	Books of Charles Darwin	The Bible and works of the Church Fathers (Augustine, Aquinas, etc.)
Sacred Dogmas	Accidental origin of life, accidental origin of species by “natural selection,” brains as the source of minds, brains as storage places of memories	The Trinity, the resurrection of Jesus, the divine inspiration of the Bible, papal infallibility, dogmas about Mary, mother of Jesus
Lower Prestige Workers	High school biology teachers, experimental subjects, paid lab workers	Nuns, deacons
Middle Prestige Workers	PhD candidates, college instructors, assistant professors	Priests
High Prestige Workers	Tenured professors	Bishops
Highest Prestige Persons	National Academy of Science members, Royal Society members, Nobel Prize winners	Cardinals, the Pope
Arcane Speech	Jargon-filled scientific papers	Jargon-filled theology papers, Holy Mass language
Indoctrin-ation Meetings	Biology classes, psychology classes	Sunday sermons, Sunday school
Financial Base	Countless billions in old university endowments, tuition, government funding, with $800 billion in US university endowments alone	Billions in old endowments, church property,  Sunday donations, tithes
Rituals	PhD dissertations, experiments (often poorly designed and implemented), science conferences, rituals of science paper writing, countless legend and dogma recitations	Sunday Mass, baptisms, weddings, First Communion, funerals
Speculations	Abundant	Abundant
Persecution or Libeling of Heretics	Frequent (currently non-physical, including gaslighting, slander, libel, accusatory insinuations, and stereotyping of ideological opponents and witnesses of the paranormal)	Frequent in the past
Censorship	Massive “soft” censorship and repression of undesired observations such as witnessing of paranormal phenomena and successful ESP experiments	Once very frequent, such as Legion of Decency
Speech Taboos	Very many (including fair discussion of the paranormal or evidence for design in nature)	Very many
Miracle Stories	Accidental origin of life, and accidental origin of billions of types of protein molecules in the animal kingdom, most having hundreds or thousands of well-arranged parts, requiring many miracles of accidental organization, like hundreds of falling logs forming into extensive log cabin hotels or a row of fifty tall sand castles forming from random wind and waves	Miracle stories involving Jesus, Catholic saints and the Virgin Mary (Fatima, Lourdes, etc.)
Officials in Fancy Robes?	Yes (professors during graduation ceremonies)	Yes
Despised Deviants	Witnesses of the paranormal, Darwinism critics, teleology theorists, those having spiritual experiences	In previous years, Protestants and gays
Chanting?	Very much, such as “blind evolution explains it all” chant and “it's all just brain activity” chant	Very much, such as Hail Mary prayers and the chants of monks
Art Forms	Materialist science fiction	Sculpture, painting, sacred music, sacred architecture
Saints	Many science figures whose work is described reverently	Many canonized saints
Catechisms	College textbooks and biased Wikipedia articles	Official catechisms teaching Catholic dogma
Legends	Many “just so” legends such as the legend of trans-Atlantic rafting monkeys, and many achievement legends such as the legend Darwin explained biological origins	Many legends about saints and their miracles or legends about miraculous healings or the Virgin Mary
Helper Workers	Unquestioning conformist science journalists	Laymen volunteers
Iconography	Sparse iconography including endlessly repeated side-profile “Evolution of man” diagram with four or five figures facing right	Vast iconography

The enormous current success of Darwinist materialism in getting people to believe in its main dogmas comes from a failure of people to perceive that Darwinist materialism is pretty much a kind of stealth religion, basically a kind of church-in-all-but-name that has infiltrated the halls and rooms of our universities.  Once you recognize the strong similarities between Darwinist materialism and an organized religion such as the Roman Catholic Church, there is a kind of "Toto pulling back the Wizard's curtain" effect in which we can suddenly see how much bluffing and bluster is going on when unproven belief community dogmas are marketed as scientific facts.

The research communities of scientific academia and the clergy of religions both are what can be called ideological enclaves. An ideological enclave is some small subset of the population in which some particular belief system is required. The diagram below illustrates how ideological enclaves get new members and keep the enclave committed to its ideology:

An expert existing in some "echo chamber" ideological enclave may 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 long-conditioned inside this ideological enclave, this sheltered thought bubble. 

Do you want to read some of the "ignored conflicting evidence" depicted at the left of the visual above? Read the posts of this blog and this blog. To read more about the resemblance of biologists to clergy, read my post "Scientists and Clergy Have Much in Common."  

Academia serves as a kind of "Ministry of Materialism" that has quite a few similarities with the structure of organized religions.

The hierarchical structure of Darwinist materialism is depicted below. The structure maintains its dominance because it is funded by gigantic sums that we may call "Darwin dollars" and "materialist money."

In the table above I claim that censorship is common in scientific academia. This conclusion is backed up by a paper "Prosocial motives underlie scientific censorship by scientists: A perspective and research agenda."  We read this:

"A recent national survey of US faculty at four-year colleges and universities found the following: 1) 4 to 11% had been disciplined or threatened with discipline for teaching or research; 2) 6 to 36% supported soft punishment (condemnation, investigations) for peers who make controversial claims, with higher support among younger, more left-leaning, and female faculty; 3) 34% had been pressured by peers to avoid controversial research; 4) 25% reported being 'very' or 'extremely' likely to self-censor in academic publications; and 5) 91% reported being at least somewhat likely to self-censor in publications, meetings,...In a 2023 survey of academics in New Zealand, 53% reported that they were not free to state controversial or unpopular opinions, 48% reported that they were not free to raise differing perspectives or argue against the consensus among their colleagues, and 26% reported that they were not free to engage in the research of their choice."

The paper gives us a great visual, looking like the one below. We see how censorship and bias by peer reviewers and self-censorship by scientists can cause the scientific literature to present a false version of reality, leading us to think that something is true when it is not true. This is just what is happening in the world of neuroscience. Innumerable facts and observations defying the "brains make minds" dogma are excluded from scientific papers, particularly observations of the paranormal. 

In previous centuries, Roman Catholicism or Protestantism were the dominant ideological regimes.  In today's world Darwinist materialism seems to be the dominant ideological regime. But it's a "meet the new Boss, very much like the old Boss" situation. Darwinist materialism sold itself as something intellectually superior. In reality it is a dogmatic belief system that suffers from most of the same flaws of the ecclesiastical regimes of thought that preceded it.  But we all love myths with a flavor of "Progress Marches Gloriously Onward." So it's hard for people to realize that our current intellectual overlords have chained us to a tyranny of dogmas as oppressive as those in medieval times. 

That's why the conference scene near the end of "The Hunger Games -- Mockingjay Part 2" is so implausible. In an instant flash of insight, Katniss seems to realize that the new regime she has served is something with the same glaring defects as the old regime that it superseded. Such an insight comes only after lengthy deep thought and analysis, not in some flash of insight that instantly occurs as an epiphany.  The movie then follows with a semi-final scene that has dramatic impact but fails as a moral example and also by suggesting the misguided and unrealistic idea that regrettable regimes can be overthrown merely by a little muscle action.  

Some Accounts of Out-of-Body Experiences

 Using the search link below, you can search for references to particular topics that appeared in the British publication Psychic News.  

https://digitalcollections.lib.umanitoba.ca/islandora/object/uofm%3A2939726

Below are some interesting accounts that I got after searching for the phrase "out-of-body," as in "out-of-body experiences." (It worked much better to type the phrase in quotation marks rather than without them.) 

• A researcher who sent out a survey asking people if they had an out-of-body experience was surprised to find that 70 out of 110 people reporting such experiences reported them occurring more than once (link). 
• Elizabeth Kubler-Ross (a leading researcher on death) reported that she had a spontaneous out-of-body experience after one of her exhausting five-day seminars (link). 
• A woman who had been blind from birth had an out-of-body experience during surgery, and after the surgery was able to report details of the operation that should have been unknown to her (link, link). 
• A patient who had an out-of-body experience during a dental operation reported seeing two pennies on top of a high shelf while the patient floated above her body. The dentist got a ladder, and found that the two pennies were really there (link). 
• An actor named Richard Squires reported that while doing a frantic dance while playing a role on stage, he suddenly had an out-of-body experience, and began viewing the audience from high above them, from what is known in the theater as the rafters (link). 
• Anthony Chamberlaine-Brothers reported having a similar out-of-body experience during his acting performance, with an additional twist making the story more interesting (link). 
• Marcel Picard reported having an out-of-body experience in which he floated above his body, eventually reaching other apartments below his (link). 
• A retired army major named Derek Scull reported having two out-of-body experiences in which he viewed his body from outside of it (link). 
•  Barbara Lambert said that during a difficult labor she floated out of her body to the ceiling, and saw her body from above, temporarily thinking that the body below her was her twin sister (link). 
• A person being viciously beaten by the Nazis reportedly had an out-of-body experience in which he returned to his home, only to see his wife cavorting there with another man (link). 
• A man having an out-of-body experience said that he felt more alive than ever before (link). 
• A woman (W.H. Westley) said that at her son's funeral her heart fluttered, and she found herself high above the funeral attendees, addressed by the very son who had died (link). 
• Arthur Sanders said he had an out-of-body experience during an operation. He says he felt himself "floating up, away from my  body," and then found himself in an open landscape, glittering with light (link). 
• Ami Greenstead suffered from a rare illness causing many fainting experiences, but reported to her mother that she had out-of-body experiences during such events, going up to the ceiling and observing her body from above (link). 
• Bryce Bond reports that when hospitalized from an allergic reaction, he rose up out of his body to the ceiling, before traveling through a dark tunnel, and meeting a dead relative he recognized (link). 
• Psychologist E. E. Bernard claims to have left his body, and says he verified the accuracy of details given by someone reporting an out-of-body experience to a place he had never been (link). 
• A wheelchair-bound young celebrity reported out-of-body experiences that may involve traveling far away from her body (link). 
• A nurse claimed that three different times she had an out-of-body experience when one of her patients was dying, saying that she kind of mystically traveled with them towards some otherworldly destination, before being told she must go back (link).
• Dick Battista reported floating above the operating table during a transplant operation and watching the surgeons do their work (link). 
• The well-known movie actress Gloria Swanson reported an out-of-body experience (link). 
• A road accident victim recalled separating from his body and watching from a distance as medical workers tried to revive him (link). 
• While suffering a pulmonary embolism and days of unconsciousness in a hospital, Alan Cheek reported having an out-of-body experience in which he first saw medical workers working on his body and then encountered seeing his dead father and mother (link). 
• Jason Winters reported that during an operation "I was aware that I had left my body," and found himself on a misty bridge before turning back (link). 
• Soosie Holbeche reported that during a Caesarean section operation she found herself looking down on her body, feeling as if she had taken a dress off, later passing through a tunnel and having an expansion of consciousness before returning to her body (link, link). 
• Olivia Robertson reported having an out-of-body experience that included a "long, long tunnel" and an encounter with her deceased mother (link). 
• Young Kanta Smith reported an out-of-body experience while "dead" for 15 minutes before being revived. She described meeting a grandfather she had never even seen in a photo, and a parent says the description matched that of the grandfather (link). 
• Stefan von Jankovich reported having an out-of-body experience during a car accident in which his heart stopped for six minutes. He reports floating out of his body, having a great feeling of peace, seeing accident bystanders and even reading their thoughts, hearing someone claim  it was too late and that Stefan was dead,  hearing heavenly music and having a life review in reverse order (link). 
• Tommy Clack reported having an out-of-body experience when his legs and one of his arms were blown off during the Vietnam war. He reported looking down on his body as people gathered it for medical evacuation, and also reported communicating with soldiers who had died (link). 
• Virginia Falce reported having an out-of-body experience as doctors were massaging her heart for three minutes, trying to revive her. She reported "I felt this absolute sense of love and peace embracing me, pulling me from somewhere. I looked over and could see it was coming from a glowing circle of light." 
• German government official Annamarie Renger reported leaving her body, and said that when she returned, it was like passing through a small tube (link). 
• Marjorie Hall reported that she had an out-of-body experience during childbirth. She says, "I felt myself lift out of my body and float upward, " She reported seeing from above her body giving birth, at a height about 15 feet (about five meters) above the scene (link). 
• A student claiming out-of-body experiences reportedly described correctly the home of her professor, which she had never physically seen, but claimed to have visited in an out-of-body experience (link). 

On page 77 of the February, 1926 edition of The International Psychic Gazette, we have an article by William A. Reid entitled "Out of the Body." He describes out-of-body experiences by himself and others, some of which may be near-death experiences. Below are some excerpts:

"I would confine my attention to the claim made by living persons that they have been out of the body. Mr. Oaten, the respected Editor of The Two Worlds, in the issue of his paper for January 1st, 1926, writes, ' I remember seeing my body on that bed, and saying to myself, " That left arm will be stiff and sore when I wake up." '  Then he describes what he saw—green fields, wonderful flowers, etc...There is a very large number of good solid folks, still in the flesh, who assert that they have been out of their bodies, and say that they saw their bodies in full consciousness and came back to reoccupy them. They have no story to tell of wonderful spirit journeys and experiences, as in the above instances. They merely assert that they saw their own bodies. I have had this simple experience ; and give it largely because of its unpretentiousness....I was fully awake. I looked down on my body, and felt tremendously elated. I should not describe the feeling as ecstasy or rapture ; it was rather that of joy and intense satisfaction. I was in no sense carried away by the feeling. I thought I was dead, and said to myself, ' Well, it’s all over, and I’m very glad.' Now I know that some will find fault with me for, so to speak, entering the Other World with a jest in my heart; but so it was. I seem to have become startled almost at once, for the next thing I felt was re-entering my body, gasping and panting and coughing. I thought I should have choked; but gradually the trouble subsided. Now this experience not only gave me the satisfactory proof that I am a spirit living in a body, but also that when the spirit leaves the body it experiences an exhilaration and uplift."

Those having an out-of-body experience may report being up near the ceiling....

        ...or a journey to some mystical realm 

When Abiogenesis-Related Experiments Fail Dismally, the Science Press Hails Them as Glorious Successes

 For 70 years people have been told one of the most outrageous fictions of materialism: the groundless claim that lightning did something to "jump-start" life. This fairy tale began when the Miller-Urey experiment occurred.  Using a very specially constructed glass apparatus bearing no resemblance to anything that would have existed in the early Earth, an apparatus they filled with gases that did not match the atmosphere of the early Earth, Miller and Urey subjected the gases to intense levels of lightning-like electrical bombardment vastly greater than any part of Earth ever would have experienced billions of years ago.  Running this utterly unnatural contraption for a week, they succeeded in producing some amino acids, which are some of the components of proteins. 

Because of its utterly unnatural arrangement, the experiment did nothing to support the idea of abiogenesis, the idea that life can naturally arise from non-life. But materialists began hailing the Miller-Urey experiment as some great breakthrough showing that lightning could produce what they called "building blocks of life."  For the next seventy years, the science press told us the groundless fiction that the Miller-Urey experiment did something to show that lightning could have produced "building blocks of life."  The lies about the Miller-Urey experiment continued full blast, for many years after scientists reached a consensus that the early Earth had an atmosphere vastly different from the gases used in the Miller-Urey experiment.  That's how things go in the ideology-entangled world of science literature. When stories seem to provide useful talking points that help bolster some cherished dogma of scientists, the stories just keep being told year after year,  no matter how clearly the stories have been debunked. 

Recently the science press gave us additional evidence that it has no credibility when writing on topics related to the origin of life. Harvard researchers did an experiment trying to see what chemicals might arise from lightning strikes in the early Earth. The experiment was a dismal failure, failing to produce even one of the amino acids produced by the Miller-Urey experiment. The experiment produced no chemicals that are any type of building block of life, and produced only outputs very, very slightly more complex than its inputs. But the science press reported this failure as glorious evidence that lightning can jump-start the origin of life. 

The experiment is described in the paper "Mimicking lightning-induced electrochemistry on the early Earth." The paper is behind a paywall, but in a case like this you can very safely assume that the best results are described in the paper's abstract, which you can read here. The abstract states this:

"To test the hypothesis that an abiotic Earth and its inert atmosphere could form chemically reactive carbon- and nitrogen-containing compounds, we designed a plasma electrochemical setup to mimic lightning-induced electrochemistry under steady-state conditions of the early Earth. Air-gap electrochemical reactions at air–water–ground interfaces lead to remarkable yields, with up to 40 moles of carbon dioxide being reduced into carbon monoxide and formic acid, and 3 moles of gaseous nitrogen being fixed into nitrate, nitrite, and ammonium ions, per mole of transmitted electrons. Interfaces enable reactants (e.g., minerals) that may have been on land, in lakes, and in oceans to participate in radical and redox reactions, leading to higher yields compared to gas-phase-only reactions. Cloud-to-ground lightning strikes could have generated high concentrations of reactive molecules locally, establishing diverse feedstocks for early life to emerge and survive globally."

Don't be fooled by that last sentence, which is actually an indication of failure. When people doing origin-of-life experiments fail to produce anything interesting, they lamely appeal to "feedstocks," a term meaning raw material. The result described above is a failure to produce anything that encourages the idea that life could have arisen naturally from non-life.  We have no mention of the production of any amino acid, and the authors surely would have reported such a production in their abstract if any amino acids had been produced. We have no mention of anything other than the simplest chemicals. 

The "formic acid" referred to is a very simple five-atom chemical with a formula of CH202. The "nitrate" referred to is a very simple chemical with a formula of N03. The "nitrite" referred  to is a very simple chemical with a formula of N02. The "ammonium" referred  to is a very simple chemical with a formula of NH4. We can contrast these chemicals (each having five atoms or fewer) with amino acids. There are twenty types of amino acids used by living things. The simplest (glycine) has ten atoms, and has a formula of C2H5N02. The most complex amino acid (tryptophan) has a formula of C11H12N202, and has a total of 27 atoms.

So the experiment mentioned failed to produce any of the simplest components of living things, failing to produce any amino acids.  But how did the science press describe this failure? With utterly misleading headlines or with articles containing false claims about what the experiment produced. Newsweek gave us a phony headline of "Scientists Explain How Lightning May Have Kick-Started Life on Earth," along with the false claim that "a new study suggests that cloud-to-ground lightning might have been key in creating the building blocks essential for life on Earth from nitrogen and carbon."  Similarly, www.phys.org gave us an equally bogus headline of "Study suggests cloud-to-ground lightning strikes may have generated building blocks for life on Earth." An article on the experiment at www.space.com tells us the experiment "performed an updated version of the Urey-Miller experiment" and tells us incorrectly that the experiment "created the right building blocks for life." None of the chemicals yielded by the experiment can truthfully be called building blocks of life.  Even the simplest one-celled life is a state of enormous complexity requiring a very special arrangement of more than 100,000 atoms. The experiment produced only outputs very, very slightly more complex than its inputs.

None of the press stories on this experiment gave us the truth here: that the latest experiment trying to produce results like that of the Miller-Urey experiment has in fact completely failed to produce any of the amino acids produced by that experiment. The performance of science journalists in covering the "Mimicking lightning-induced electrochemistry on the early Earth" paper has been appalling. We are left with the impression of science journalists acting as the most careless cheerleaders. Their dismal performance was similar to their recent handling of a NASA announcement about a rock discovered on Mars.  There was zero evidence provided that the rock was any sign of life, but the science press parroted the groundless "potential sign of life" storyline, one that seemed to have been created to help drum up funding for a floundering Mars sample return mission. The failure to discover any amino acids on Mars makes the claim of "potential sign of life" unbelievable. 

The past seventy years of literature about origin-of-life research has been a literature filled with deceit and misleading statements. Never has so much boasting and hype been written by so many when the results were so minimal and meager. 

Next year's science headline?

Postscript: What I have documented above is science journalists following a senseless rule of "when an experiment fails, it can be reported as a glorious success." Another recent science news story provides evidence of a science journalist following an equally senseless rule, a rule of "when scientists speculate about something never observed, that can be reported as a discovery." The story discussed the groundless speculation that some other universe is influencing the expansion of our universe. The article had the headline "Scientists discover mysterious 'twin' could be behind rapid expansion of the universe." A groundless speculation about a never-observed mysterious "twin" of our universe is reported as a "discovery."

The Latest Geneticist Bunk About the Human Genome

The popular American English expression or meme "you had one job" or "you had only one job" refers to examples of incompetence when someone has a relatively simple task to do. For example, if you hire someone to paint a wall in your house, and he gets paint all over your floor because he failed to use a drop cloth to protect the floor,  you might cringe at such incompetence and say, "You had only one job!" We can use such an expression to describe the misrepresentations of geneticists in describing DNA and the genes in it. 

Ever since the Human Genome Project was completed around 2001, and the contents of human DNA and genes have been well-mapped,  it's pretty much been something like a "you have one job" situation for geneticists, the scientists who specialize in studying genes and DNA.  That job is for them to correctly inform the public about what DNA and its genes are.  At this simple job our geneticists have failed time and time again. Over and over again geneticists have told us the most outrageous fictions about what DNA and its genes are. 

Some of these fictions are described in a new science paper that itself is guilty of giving us baloney about DNA.  The paper is entitled "The Genomic Code: The genome instantiates a generative model of the organism." The title itself makes a bunk claim. The human genome is not any model of a human body or any of its organs or cells, and the human genome (DNA) is not any specification of how to make a human body. Nor is the genome a "generative model," which is a type of advanced high-tech software utterly unlike the genome. 

The paper starts out fumbling by asking, "How does the genome encode the form of the organism?" There has never been any evidence that the genome encodes the form of the organism. When biologists start out their papers asking questions such as this, they are acting as foolishly as when they start out papers by asking, "How does the brain create the mind?" There is no proof that the brain creates the mind, and there are very many weighty reasons for thinking that the brain cannot possibly be the source of the human mind. Similarly, there are many weighty reasons for thinking that the genome cannot possibly encode the form or structure of an organism. Just as nature never told us that brains make minds, nature never told us that genomes encode the structure of an organism. It was merely scientists who told us that the genome (DNA) encodes the structure of an organism, and scientists who told us that brains make minds. In both cases such scientists were making claims that were never warranted, claims contradicted by many facts. 

The main body of the paper starts out by giving us this very bad example of non sequitur reasoning, stating this:

"Cats have kittens and dogs have puppies. This is despite, in each case, new individuals starting out as a single, undifferentiated cell – the fertilised egg, or zygote. The complex form of the parents is thus not transmitted to their offspring – instead, it must be reconstructed in each new individual. Clearly then, the zygotes of cats and dogs must contain some substance – the genetic material – that is inherited from the parents, which somehow directs the development of the growing organism so as to produce a new token of the feline or canine type. The question is: how? What is the nature of this genomic encoding of form?"

No, the fact that dogs have puppies and cats have kittens absolutely does not provide any warrant for the claim that "the zygotes of cats and dogs must contain some substance – the genetic material – that is inherited from the parents, which somehow directs the development of the growing organism so as to produce a new token of the feline or canine type." Such a claim cannot be justified by any a priori armchair arguments, but could only be justified by the discovery of something in the genome that consists of such incredibly complex instructions. Nothing like any such instructions have ever been found in any genome or DNA or in any genes.  All that exists in DNA (the genome) is low-level chemical information, not high-level information such as how to construct anatomical structures, or how to build cells or any of the organelles that make up cells. 

Before introducing its groundless and silly claim that a genome (DNA) is a type of AI technology called a "generative model," the paper describes how previous claims about the genome (DNA) were untrue. We read this:

"Over the years, various metaphors have been used to conceptualise the nature of what we will call the genomic code – i.e., how the genome specifies the form of an organism (Keller 2020; Nijhout 1990). These include, among others, a codescript (Schrödinger 1944), blueprint (Plomin 2018), program (Keller 1999; Peluffo 2015), recipe (Mitchell 2018), or resource that the developing organism can draw on (Oyama 2000). One of the most enduring of these, especially common in popular science treatments, is the idea that the genome constitutes a 'blueprint'  of the organism (e.g., Plomin 2018). This metaphor conveys the idea of a detailed but miniaturised plan that can in some way be referred to, in order to direct the development or construction of a pre-specified final product."

Noting "the metaphor quickly falls down in several ways," the next paragraph starts to explain why the blueprint metaphor is inappropriate, but does a very bad job of doing so. A much clearer explanation would go something like this:

(1) Blueprints contain images of how the final output of some construction process should look, but nothing like any such images or specifications are found in the genome (DNA). 

(2) Blueprints specify the appearance of particular visible parts and the physical arrangement of such parts within a complex architectural structure, but there is no such specification to be found in the genome (DNA). 

The paper then tells us how claims were made since at least 1961 that the genome (DNA) is a "program" for making a human body. We read this discussion of why such a metaphor is inappropriate:

"The word 'program' also carries some unsupported connotations. Regarding the means by which the steps of development are encoded, 'program' is in modern times also defined as: “a series of coded software instructions to control the operation of a computer or other machine” (Oxford Languages). The usage of the term 'genetic program' may thus seem to imply a regular, explicit, and interpretable set of instructions, logically laid out and executed in series. As with a blueprint, it can be taken as implying a kind of isomorphism, this time between elements of the genome and elements of the developmental program. Moreover, it again suggests a kind of algorithmic determinism, with all the details somehow spelled out in advance. Neither of these properties is observed."

The genome (DNA) is in no sense a program for producing anatomical structures. DNA does not have a series of instructions to be executed to make a human body or any of its organs or cells. 

The paper then discusses the metaphor that the genome (DNA) is a recipe for making a human body, giving us some weak criticism (such as a criticism of vagueness) that fails to explain what a huge lie it always was to claim that DNA is a recipe for making a human. We hear nothing of the main reasons why such a claim is deceptive, such as the fact that recipes are only simple one-page instructions that only specify how to make very simple non-living things such as salads, soups and cakes, with human bodies being states of internally dynamic organization 1,000,000,000,000 times more complex than what is produced by recipes.  The famous biologists who told us that DNA is a recipe for making a human were therefore huge liars telling us a lie as outrageous as the claim that a tricycle is an interstellar starship. 

There are two types of recipes:

(1) A recipe may specify how to make a completely unorganized thing such as a soup, salad or drink. Referring to that type of recipe, the human genome (DNA) cannot be called a recipe for making a human body, as the human body is something enormously organized, with  many levels of very complex organization. 

(2) Other types of recipes may specify exactly how to position things when creating an ordered structure (for example, a recipe for making a 3-layer chocolate cake may specify how to make the layers, how to position the layers, how to separate them with frosting, and how to cover the layers with frosting and put pieces of chocolate and marshmallow on the top). That type of recipe includes specifications of the positions of particular items to achieve the final structure; and the human genome (DNA) has no such specifications, not doing anything to specify either the structure of a human body or the structure of any cell. 

Although the genome might be crudely compared to a chef's shopping list of food ingredients, the genome cannot truthfully be described as a recipe for making a human body or any of its organs or cells. 

Having discussed some of the big fictions that biologists and geneticists have told about DNA, the paper co-authored by a geneticist then gives us the latest in the long series of scientist bunk statements  about DNA: a silly claim that DNA is a "generative model of the organism." DNA is not actually any type of model of a human being, and is certainly not the type of hi-tech software model that is called a "generative model."

The term "generative model" refers to so-called "artificial intelligence" software systems that are able to train on a large body of supplied examples, and provide two-dimensional output like the examples.  So, for example, you might have a "generative model" for making pictures of dogs. You might train the "generative model" by giving it 10,000 photos of dogs, telling the model that those were dogs, as well as 10,000 photos that were not dogs, telling the model that those photos were not photos of dogs. You might then ask the model to generate a picture of dog, and the model might be able to generate a flat two-dimensional image, something looking rather like a dog.  Such a "generative model" typically requires an advanced type of software facility called a "neural net."  Nothing like that exists in the genome or even in any cell of the body. Even the human brain is not at all a "neural net" as that term is used by software designers, because a software "neural net" involves various things and characteristics not found in the brain. 

The paper then gives paragraph after paragraph of gobbledygook trying to draw some similarity between genomes and the "generative models" of AI systems, with the result sounding like someone trying to argue that his tricycle is really like an interstellar spaceship. Don't be fooled by all the digressions and jargon. The human genome bears no resemblance to the "generative models" AI systems use nowadays.

The "generative models" used by AI systems produce outputs such as two-dimensional images that fit on a particular computer screen. They do not produce complex three-dimensional structures. There is not an AI "generative model" in existence that can produce very complex tangible three-dimensional objects after training on examples of such objects. If such AI software is ever developed, it would have to have very complex hi-tech features unlike anything found in the genome (DNA). Today's most widely-used generative models require huge server farms taking up very many times more space than a human body. 

All that we have in the new paper is the latest in a series of bunk statements geneticists have made while describing genomes.  Always be very suspicious when biologists offer any type of analogy, and be particularly suspicion when a biologist offers any analogy regarding either evolution or DNA. There is a very long trail of profoundly misleading analogies made by biologists about DNA, and an equally long trail of profoundly misleading analogies made by biologists about evolution. 

An imaginary conversation

What would we find if we looked at the programming code for some "generative model" used by a software company? We would find code making abundant use of the conveniences and language constructs of modern programming systems: things such as if/then logic, "for" loops, "do while" loops, switch statements, function calls, C++-style classes, instantiation, variable assignment, numerical return values of functions, and so forth. No such things exist in DNA, which consists of simple lists of chemicals. So DNA cannot possibly be a "generative model" like that used in AI systems.  The web page here shows some Python code for a generative model. We see function calls, parameter passing, for loops, if statements, variable assignment, object-oriented classes and various other aspects of software programming unlike anything found in the human genome (DNA and its genes). 

A generative model is a type of computer program, as shown in the link above, which lists the code for a Python computer program that is a generative model. Very strangely, the paper authors have first spoken against the claim that the genome is a program, and have then given a type of computer program as what they think is a good description of the genome. That's as goofy as someone saying, "Of course, my skateboard isn't an automobile; it's a Cadillac," as if he didn't know that a Cadillac is a type of automobile. 

The outputs of "generative models" like those used to make the image below are static two-dimensional things such as images. A human body is something vastly different: a three-dimensional structure in which there occurs constantly the most complex fine-tuned dynamic activity. The ongoing marvels of fantastically complicated human biochemistry and the continual construction of protein complexes and vastly complicated cells are some of the reasons why a human body is a far more complex and fine-tuned reality than a 747 jet.  A corporation knows how to construct 747 jets, but there is not a nation or corporation in the world that could construct a living human body from raw materials.   "Generative models" like those used in AI systems typically produce their outputs instantly, which bears no  resemblance to the construction of a human body, which requires nine months and then continues for years as a baby grows to an adult.  

Two of the words most misused by scientists are the words "plausible" and "model." Scientists very frequently use the word "plausible" to describe scenarios ranging from likely to unlikely to all-but-impossible to downright impossible. The word "plausible" is used so carelessly and "at the drop of a hat" in scientific papers that it means basically nothing when a scientific paper calls something "plausible." Scientific papers misuse the term "model" just as frequently. The term is very often used for the vaguest hand-waving, to try and make vacuous verbiage sound more substantial. 

The dictionary defines a model as "a three-dimensional representation of a person or thing or of a proposed structure, typically on a smaller scale than the original." The genome is no such model of a human body or any of its cells or organelles or protein complexes. There are also mathematical models, which are centered around equations. The genome doesn't have any equations, and does not have any math. The genome is not a model of the human body or any of its organs or cells. DNA specifies which amino acids make up a protein, but does not even specify the complex three-dimensional shape of a protein molecule. How such shapes arise is the unsolved mystery called the protein folding problem. DNA is an inert molecule containing only very low-level chemical information, so spinning grand fictions about it is rather like saying your broomstick is a transatlantic crossing device. 

Why do geneticists keep making glaring misstatements about DNA? It's largely because they don't want to face the shocking truth: that a speck-sized human zygote somehow progresses to become the enormous state of organization and vastly fine-tuned dynamism that is the human body, without having any set of bodily instructions for how to organize anything bigger than a protein molecule. If they realized this shocking truth, they might be on the doorstep of understanding the folly of all bottom-up explanations for the origin of human bodies and human minds. 

Postscript: Two other scientists say this:

"We see no valid use for definitions of the genotype

and phenotype in terms of blueprints, programs, or

sets of instructions, and their realizations or

manifestation....The program/manifestation metaphor is factually misleading, because it suggests that the genotype uniquely determines an organism’s phenotype. However, as is well known, all it does is specify an organism’s norm of reaction to environmental conditions (Rieger et al., 1991, Lewontin, 1992)."