Scientist Flubs and Flops, #6

 

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• "Natural selection can explain much about why species are the way they are, but it does not necessarily offer a specific explanation for human intellectual powers, much less any sort of basis for confidence in the reliability of science." -- Biologist Austin L. Hughes, "The Folly of Scientistm."
• "Natural selection has been shown to have occurred (for example, among populations of Darwin's finches), but there is no evidence that it accumulates over longer periods of time to produce speciation in the Darwinian sense." Cambridge University biology professor K. D. Bennett,  Evolution and Ecology: The Pace of Life , page 75. 
• "Natural selection is a sieve. It creates nothing, as is so often assumed; it only sifts." -- Botanist Hugo de Vries, "The Mutation Theory. Volume II, page 609. 
• "Natural Selection could only have endowed savage man with a brain a little superior to that of an ape, whereas he actually possesses one very little inferior to that of a philosopher." -- Alfred Russel Wallace, co-founder of the theory of evolution by natural selection, "The Limits of Natural Selection as Applied to Man."
• " 'Natural Selection,' simply and by itself, is potent  to explain the maintenance or the further extension and  development of favorable variations, which are at once sufficiently considerable to be useful from the first to the individual possessing them. But Natural Selection utterly fails to account for the conservation and development of the minute and rudimentary beginnings, the slight and infinitesimal commencements of structures, however useful those structures may afterward become." -- Biologist St. George Mivart, "On The Genesis of Species," Chapter II, 1871 (link). 
• "Rather than emerging gradually, a few at a time, the evidence presented in these four papers suggests the occurrence of punctuated bursts. At every major phylogenetic node that was examined, the appearance of hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of novel homology groups was detected. Evolution by bursts is, of course, not expected if natural selection is the main driver....The fossil record depicts the appearance of the first angiosperms as a sudden event, with no clear progenitors...The nodes at the origin of the angiosperms are certainly striking in terms of the total number of novel genes that seem to have appeared in a short space of time....It seems that vast numbers of existing genes are jettisoned and replaced by entirely different ones. Such processes would represent a radical overhaul in the genetic composition of organisms. How this might be accomplished is another mystery." --"The Origin of Novel Genes,"  Richard Buggs, Professor of Evolutionary Genomics at Queen Mary University of London.
•  "It  seems  doubtful  whether  any  organ  having  the function  of  a foot  or  of  a hand  could  be  changed  by  a gradual process  into  a wing,  without  passing  through  an  intermediate state,  in  which  it  would  be  inefficient  for  either  purpose ; — and such  a change  would  be  immediately  detrimental,  and  could  not be  effected  by  natural  selection."  --Joseph John Murphy, biology scholar, author of a massive biology tome   (link).
• "It is well known that the instincts of animals are as innumerable as they are marvelous. They have in common the characteristic that they allow the creature to act spontaneously, without reasoned thought, without hesitation or groping, and to attain the desired end with a certainty with which neither reason, nor training, nor impulse, can compare....Now the origin of instincts is no more explicable by natural selection or by the influence of the environment than the formation of species."  Gustave Geley, physician and mind researcher (link).

Articles on the Fermi Paradox Are Flub-Filled

What is called the Fermi Paradox is the supposed paradox between the non-observation of extraterrestrials living outside of Earth, and the supposed likelihood that our galaxy would be filled with intelligent civilized extraterrestrials. The Fermi Paradox has long been a kind of tool of stealth indoctrination for those advancing the tenets of Darwinist materialism. People are most effectively indoctrinated when they are not told they are being indoctrinated. If you start out an article saying "I will now explain at length why you should believe in the doctrines of Darwinist materialism," many people will skip the article. But in an article discussing the Fermi Paradox, a reader can avoid any such introduction. Instead he may start out sounding like an open-minded answer seeker, by saying, "Let me tell you why there's a big unresolved question that we don't understand." 

Typically while the Fermi Paradox is explained, we will be indoctrinated in various extremely doubtful or untrue or untenable claims, claims that we might Fermi Flubs.

Fermi Flub #1: The Claim Our Galaxy Is Filled With Earthlike Planets

The first mistake typically made in Fermi Paradox discussions is the claim that we know our galaxy is filled with planets like Earth. We do not know any such thing. No planet should ever be called "like Earth" or "earthlike" unless life has been discovered on it, and life has never been discovered on any other planet. It is true that thousands of planets have been discovered revolving around other stars. But almost none of them have been found to be Earth-sized planets revolving in the habitable zone around stars like the sun. The habitable zone is a zone a planet must be in to allow the existence of liquid water. It is depicted in the schematic diagram below, in which the yellow circle represents a sun or star, and the green area represents the habitable zone, and the brown circles represent planets. 

So far about 5000 planets have been discovered revolving around other stars. But only about 80 of these are thought to be planets that might allow the existence of life. You can see the list here. For a planet to allow intelligent beings, numerous conditions must be met:

(1) The planet must be in the habitable zone of a solar system, allowing liquid water to exist.

(2) The planet must revolve around a suitable star. A G-class star like the sun would be a suitable star, but only about 7% of stars are G-class stars. We don't know whether intelligent life could ever exist in a planet revolving around a white dwarf star or a red dwarf star, although that might be a possibility. 

(3) The planet might have to have the right tilt or obliquity (Earth's is 23 degrees), allowing seasons so that the surface is not too hot or too cold. 

(4) The planet might need to exist in a solar system with a large Jupiter-sized planet that would act as a gravitational magnet to attract asteroids and comets, thereby preventing excessive asteroid collisions or comet collisions on the planet, which might be devastating. 

(5) The planet might need to have a large moon like Earth has (the reasons for that are complicated). 

(6) According to a recent scientific study, a planet producing intelligent life would need to have "oceans, continents and plate tectonics." The paper estimates that the chance of a planet having such things is small, something like < 0.00003–0.002.  

It is true that since our galaxy has more than 100 billion stars, it could easily be that there are quite a few planets meeting all of the necessary conditions. A reasonable rough guess might be that there are probably between a few hundred and a few thousand planets in our galaxy with all the right conditions for the eventual appearance of intelligent life. 

Fermi Flub #2: Claims That Abiogenesis Is Likely on Suitable Planets

The second big mistake in Fermi Paradox discussions is the claim that life is expected to appear on any suitable planet in the habitable zone that has liquid water. This claim is groundless. The fact is that even the simplest self-reproducing cell is an incredibly high state of organization requiring hundreds of complex inventions within it: the hundreds of different types of protein molecules required for even the simplest cell. 

Below are some relevant quotes:

• "The transformation of an ensemble of appropriately chosen biological monomers (e.g. amino acids, nucleotides) into a primitive living cell capable of further evolution appears to require overcoming an information hurdle of superastronomical proportions (Appendix A), an event that could not have happened within the time frame of the Earth except, we believe, as a miracle (Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, 1981, 1982, 2000). All laboratory experiments attempting to simulate such an event have so far led to dismal failure (Deamer, 2011; Walker and Wickramasinghe, 2015)." -- "Cause of Cambrian Explosion - Terrestrial or Cosmic?," a paper by 21 scientists,  2018. 
• "Biochemistry's orthodox account of how life emerged from a primordial soup of such chemicals lacks experimental support and is invalid because, among other reasons, there is an overwhelming statistical improbability that random reactions in an aqueous solution could have produced self-replicating RNA molecules."  John Hands MD, "Cosmo Sapiens: Human Evolution From the Origin of the Universe," page 411. 
• "The ongoing insistence on defending scientific orthodoxies on these matters, even against a formidable tide of contrary evidence, has turned out to be no less repressive than the discarded superstitions in earlier times. For instance, although all attempts to demonstrate spontaneous generation in the laboratory have led to failure for over half a century, strident assertions of its necessary operation against the most incredible odds continue to dominate the literature." -- 3 scientists (link).
• "The interconnected nature of DNA, RNA, and proteins means that it could not have sprung up ab initio from the primordial ooze, because if only one component is missing then the whole system falls apart – a three-legged table with one missing cannot stand." -- "The Improbable Origins of Life on Earth" by astronomer Paul Sutter. 
• "Even the simplest of these substances [proteins} represent extremely complex compounds, containing many thousands of atoms of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen arranged in absolutely definite patterns, which are specific for each separate substance. To the student of protein structure the spontaneous formation of such an atomic arrangement in the protein molecule would seem as improbable as would the accidental origin of the text of Virgil's 'Aeneid'  from scattered letter type." -- Chemist A. I. Oparin, "The Origin of Life," pages 132-133.
• "The expected number of abiogenesis events is much smaller than unity when we observe a star, a galaxy, or even the whole observable universe." -- Scientist Tomonori Totani, "Emergence of life in an inflationary universe," a paper confessing we would not expect one natural origin of life (abiogenesis) even in the entire observable universe (link).
• "We now know not only of the existence of a break between the living and non-living world, but also that it represents the most dramatic and fundamental of all the discontinuities of nature. Between a living cell and the most highly ordered non-biological system, such as a crystal or a snowflake, there is a chasm as vast and absolute as it is possible to conceive." --  -- Michael Denton, MD and biochemistry PhD, "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis," page 250.

The Fermi Flub #2 claim will typically be made by some person making dubious appeals to authority. A writer will typically claim that most scientists believe that abiogenesis (a natural origin of life from non-life) is likely when planetary conditions are right. Such a writer will never back this up with any opinion poll of scientists. We must remember that in general claims about what scientists believe on any matter remotely controversial are claims that are not well-supported. One reason is that scientists are very bad about measuring the opinions of scientists on controversial topics. There are very few well-designed polls asking scientists of their opinions about controversial topics such as whether the natural origin of life is likely on an Earth-sized planet. 

Often we are told that scientist Frank Drake estimated that the chance of life appearing on a suitable planet was 1.00. But Drake was an astronomer, not a specialist in biology; so his opinion on this matter should be given no great weight. 

The enormous unlikelihood of abiogenesis (an unguided origin of life from non-life) is by itself sufficient to make the Fermi Paradox disappear. Even the simplest life requires a very high purposeful organization of matter that we should never expect chance events to produce on even 1 planet in 1,000,000,000,000,000.  Based on such an unlikelihood, there is nothing surprising about our failure thus far to observe life in outer space. 

Fermi Flub #3: Claims That Large Multicellular Life Is Likely Once Life of Some Type Exists

People talking about the Fermi Paradox and the chance of intelligent extraterrestrials routinely suggest that once life got started on a planet, we should expect that large multicellular life forms should arrive. We should expect no such thing. The origin of large multicellular life forms (even when microscopic life existed earlier) is something not credibly explained by scientific theory. The leap from microscopic life forms too small to see to large vastly organized multicellular life forms is a giant leap not credibly explained by Darwinism or the idea of natural selection. Contrary to Darwin's often-repeated slogan that nature does not make leaps, a change from merely microscopic life forms to large life forms such as fish is a gigantic leap that cannot be credibly explained under gradualist ideas such as Darwinism. 

In the history of planet Earth, there is the long-standing and still unresolved mystery of the Cambrian Explosion.  Scientists say that in a relatively short period of time of only a few tens of millions of years, there suddenly appeared all of almost all of the major types of multicellular organisms, what are called phyla (including the Chordates phylum that mankind belongs to).  There has never been a credible Darwinist explanation for such a vast leap of organization and biological innovation, which cannot be explained under ideas of tiny changes produced by so-called natural selection. 

The arising of multicellular organisms with such gigantic levels of hierarchical organization is a mystery a thousand miles over the heads of today's scientists. To properly understand the dismal failure of scientists to explain the arising of multicellular organisms,  simply consider the failure of scientists to explain the origin of any mammal individual. Scientists do not understand the progression from the single cell of a speck-sized zygote to the vast state of organization that is a full-grown human body.  Their failure to explain such a progression is shown by the huge lies they have told on this topic, such as the lie that a human body arises because a blueprint for constructing a body is read from DNA. DNA contains no such blueprint, no recipe or program for building a human. DNA does not have any anatomy construction information, does not specify how to make any cell in the body, and does not even specify how to make the components from which cells are constructed (organelles and protein complexes).  DNA merely contains low-level chemical information such as which amino acids make up a protein. Never think that people telling big lies about something understand that topic. The fact that so many biologists have told us such outrageous lies about DNA and its genes (such as the lie that DNA is a body blueprint or a program for building bodies) is a clear sign of how "lost in the woods" biologists are when it comes to explaining the arising of any mammal body. 

There are many scientists who have confessed the truth about DNA and its genes, telling us that DNA is no blueprint or program or recipe for making a body. The great majority of such scientists have failed to realize the gargantuan implications of such a thing, just like the great majority of neuroscientists have failed to realize the gargantuan implications of the reality that a significant fraction of humans report out-of-body experiences. The lack of any anatomy specification in DNA implies that the origin of every human body (a state of enormously high hierarchical organization) must be a top-down event driven by some enormous causal agency beyond our understanding, not some bottom-up event caused by mechanistic molecular events.

Because we lack any naturalistic explanation of how one-celled life could progress to become the vast organization of a multicellular organism capable of building tools, spaceships and radio antennae,  no one can say with any confidence that one-celled life would  have a decent chance of progressing to become multicellular life capable of creating civilizations. 

Fermi Flub #4: The Claim That Intelligent Life Is Likely to Arise on a Planet After Multicellular Life Exists on It

Almost no one gets it right when discussing the likelihood of intelligent life arising on a planet once multicellular life existed on it. The truth is that we cannot estimate what the likelihood is of such a thing, because we do not have a credible theory of how intelligent minds arise by any kind of bottom-up process.  The claim that human minds arise from the action of the human brain is not a credible claim.  The reasons for disbelieving in such a claim are very many, including these: 

• Scientists discovered the genetic information in all cells around 1950, but it is now the year 2025, 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. 

Here are some relevant quotes:

• "The fundamental problem is that we don't really know where or how thoughts are stored in the brain. We can't read thoughts if we don't understand the neuroscience behind them." -- Juan Alvaro Gallego, neuroscientist. 
• "Synaptic transmission and axonal transfer of nerve impulses are too slow to organize coordinated activity in large areas of the central nervous system. Numerous observations confirm this view [73]. The duration of a synaptic transmission is at least 0.5 ms, thus the transmission across thousands of synapses takes about hundreds or even thousands of milliseconds. The transmission speed of action potentials varies between 0.5 m/s and 120 m/s along an axon. More than 50% of the nerves fibers in the corpus callosum are without myelin, thus their speed is reduced to 0.5 m/s. How can these low velocities (i.e. classical signals) explain the fast processing in the nervous system?" -- The paper "Emission of Mitochondrial Biophotons and their Effect on Electrical Activity of Membrane via Microtubules" by 7 scientists.
• "The search for the neuroanatomical locus of semantic memory has simultaneously led us nowhere and everywhere. There is no compelling evidence that any one brain region plays a dedicated and privileged role in the representation or retrieval of all sorts of semantic knowledge."  Psychologist Sharon L. Thompson-Schill, "Neuroimaging studies of semantic memory: inferring 'how' from 'where' ".
• "How the brain stores and retrieves memories is an important unsolved problem in neuroscience." --Achint Kumar, "A Model For Hierarchical Memory Storage in Piriform Cortex." 
• "We are still far from identifying the 'double helix' of memory—if one even exists. We do not have a clear idea of how long-term, specific information may be stored in the brain, into separate engrams that can be reactivated when relevant."  -- Two scientists, "Understanding the physical basis of memory: Molecular mechanisms of the engram."
• "There is no chain of reasonable inferences by means of which our present, albeit highly imperfect, view of the functional organization of the brain can be reconciled with the possibility of its acquiring, storing and retrieving nervous information by encoding such information in molecules of nucleic acid or protein." -- Molecular geneticist G. S. Stent, quoted in the paper here. 
• "Up to this point, we still don’t understand how we maintain memories in our brains for up to our entire lifetimes.”  --neuroscientist Sakina Palida.
• "The available evidence makes it extremely unlikely that synapses are the site of long-term memory storage for representational content (i.e., memory for 'facts'’ about quantities like space, time, and number)." --Samuel J. Gershman,  "The molecular memory code and synaptic plasticity: A synthesis."
• "Synapses are signal conductors, not symbols. They do not stand for anything. They convey information bearing signals between neurons, but they do not themselves convey information forward in time, as does, for example, a gene or a register in computer memory. No specifiable fact about the animal’s experience can be read off from the synapses that have been altered by that experience.” -- Two scientists, "Locating the engram: Should we look for plastic synapses or information- storing molecules?
• " If I wanted to transfer my memories into a machine, I would need to know what my memories are made of. But nobody knows." -- neuroscientist Guillaume Thierry (link). 
• "Memory retrieval is even more mysterious than storage. When I ask if you know Alex Ritchie, the answer is immediately obvious to you, and there is no good theory to explain how memory retrieval can happen so quickly." -- Neuroscientist David Eagleman.
• "How could that encoded information be retrieved and transcribed from the enduring structure into the transient signals that carry that same information to the computational machinery that acts on the information?....In the voluminous contemporary literature on the neurobiology of memory, there is no discussion of these questions."  ---  Neuroscientists C. R. Gallistel and Adam Philip King, "Memory and the Computational Brain: Why Cognitive Science Will Transform Neuroscience,"  preface. 
• "The very first thing that any computer scientist would want to know about a computer is how it writes to memory and reads from memory....Yet we do not really know how this most foundational element of computation is implemented in the brain."  -- Noam Chomsky and Robert C. Berwick, "Why Only Us? Language and Evolution," page 50. 
• "When we are looking for a mechanism that implements a read/write memory in the nervous system, looking at synaptic strength and connectivity patterns might be misleading for many reasons...Tentative evidence for the (classical) cognitive scientists' reservations toward the synapse as the locus of memory in the brain has accumulated....Changes in synaptic strength are not directly related to storage of new information in memory....The rate of synaptic turnover in absence of learning is actually so high that the newly formed connections (which supposedly encode the new memory) will have vanished in due time. It is worth noticing that these findings actually are to be expected when considering that synapses are made of proteins which are generally known to have a short lifetime...Synapses have been found to be constantly turning over in all parts of cortex that have been examined using two-photon microscopy so far...The synapse is probably an ill fit when looking for a basic memory mechanism in the nervous system." -- Scientist Patrick C. Trettenbrein, "The Demise of the Synapse As the Locus of Memory: A Looming Paradigm Shift? (link).
• "Most neuroscientists believe that memories are encoded by changing the strength of synaptic connections between neurons....Nevertheless, the question of whether memories are stored locally at synapses remains a point of contention. Some cognitive neuroscientists have argued that for the brain to work as a computational device, it must have the equivalent of a read/write memory and the synapse is far too complex to serve this purpose (Gaallistel and King, 2009; Trettenbrein, 2016). While it is conceptually simple for computers to store synaptic weights digitally using their read/write capabilities during deep learning, for biological systems no realistic biological mechanism has yet been proposed, or in my opinion could be envisioned, that would decode symbolic information in a series of molecular switches (Gaallistel and King, 2009) and then transform this information into specific synaptic weights." -- Neuroscientist Wayne S. Sossin (link).
• "We take up the question that will have been pressing on the minds of many readers ever since it became clear that we are profoundly skeptical about the hypothesis that the physical basis of memory is some form of synaptic plasticity, the only hypothesis that has ever been seriously considered by the neuroscience community. The obvious question is: Well, if it’s not synaptic plasticity, what is it? Here, we refuse to be drawn. We do not think we know what the mechanism of an addressable read/write memory is, and we have no faith in our ability to conjecture a correct answer."  -- Neuroscientists C. R. Gallistel and Adam Philip King, "Memory and the Computational Brain Why Cognitive Science Will Transform Neuroscience."  page Xvi (preface). 
• "Current theories of synaptic plasticity and network activity cannot explain learning, memory, and cognition."  -- Neuroscientist Hessameddin Akhlaghpourƚ (link). 
• "We don’t know how the brain stores anything, let alone words." -- Scientists David Poeppel and, William Idsardi, 2022 (link).
• "If we believe that memories are made of patterns of synaptic connections sculpted by experience, and if we know, behaviorally, that motor memories last a lifetime, then how can we explain the fact that individual synaptic spines are constantly turning over and that aggregate synaptic strengths are constantly fluctuating? How can the memories outlast their putative constitutive components?" --Neuroscientists Emilio Bizzi and Robert Ajemian (link).
• "After more than 70 years of research efforts by cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists, the question of where memory information is stored in the brain remains unresolved." -- Psychologist James Tee and engineering expert Desmond P. Taylor, "Where Is Memory Information Stored in the Brain?"
• "There is no such thing as encoding a perception...There is no such thing as a neural code...Nothing that one might find in the brain could possibly be a representation of the fact that one was told that Hastings was fought in 1066." -- M. R.  Bennett, Professor of Physiology at the University of Sydney (link).
• "No sense has been given to the idea of encoding or representing factual information in the neurons and synapses of the brain." -- M. R. Bennett, Professor of Physiology at the University of Sydney (link).
• ""Despite over a hundred years of research, the cellular/molecular mechanisms underlying learning and memory are still not completely understood. Many hypotheses have been proposed, but there is no consensus for any of these."  -- Two scientists in a 2024 paper (link). 
• "We have still not discovered the physical basis of memory, despite more than a century of efforts by many leading figures. Researchers searching for the physical basis of memory are looking for the wrong thing (the associative bond) in the wrong place (the synaptic junction), guided by an erroneous conception of what memory is and the role it plays in computation." --Neuroscientist C.R. Gallistel, "The Physical Basis of Memory," 2021.
• "To name but a few examples, the formation of memories and the basis of conscious  perception, crossing  the threshold  of  awareness, the  interplay  of  electrical  and  molecular-biochemical mechanisms of signal transduction at synapses, the role of glial cells in signal transduction and metabolism, the role of different brain states in the life-long reorganization of the synaptic structure or  the mechanism of how  cell  assemblies  generate a  concrete  cognitive  function are  all important processes that remain to be characterized." -- "The coming decade of digital brain research, a 2023 paper co-authored by more than 100 neuroscientists, one confessing scientists don't understand how a brain could store memories. 
• "The human brain isn’t really empty, of course. But it does not contain most of the things people think it does – not even simple things such as ‘memories’....We don’t create representations of visual stimuli, store them in a short-term memory buffer, and then transfer the representation into a long-term memory device. We don’t retrieve information or images or words from memory registers. Computers do all of these things, but organisms do not." -- Robert Epstein,  senior research psychologist, "The Empty Brain." 

The fact is that humans lack any credible material explanation for human minds, human memory, and the mental capabilities of humans.  So we have no basis for estimating what the chance would be of non-intelligent life on a planet progressing to become intelligent life on a planet. 

 

Fermi Flub #5: Paying No Attention to the Topic of Cosmic Teleology When Estimating the Likelihood of Extraterrestrial Civilizations

Articles on the topic of the Fermi Paradox pay no attention to the topic of cosmic teleology. This is the topic of whether we live in a purposeful universe that was deliberately designed to allow intelligent beings like us to exist. There is very much relevant evidence that can be produced on this topic, such as the evidence for cosmic fine-tuning. But writers on the Fermi Paradox never discuss such evidence, even though it is supremely relevant to the topic of the estimation of the likelihood of intelligent life on other planets.  

For example, considering purely mechanistic factors, you might estimate that there is virtually no chance of intelligent life existing on other planets in our galaxy, based on consideration of prohibitive odds. But once you consider the possibility of purposeful cosmic teleology, then it's an "all bets are off" affair, in which gloomy estimates of prohibitive odds no longer control things.  Despite all of the reasons above suggesting that blind processes would never produce a civilization on another planet, it is still quite possible that civilizations are abundant on other planets, because there is a purposeful cosmic agency interested in the appearance of such civilizations. 

But senselessly writers about Fermi's Paradox never seem to mention the topic of cosmic teleology.  They sound like people writing about the likelihood of tall buildings arising on other planets, who only consider the probability of chance processes producing such buildings, without ever considering the factor that intelligent agency might help produce such buildings. 

More Newspaper Accounts of Spiritual Manifestations

Let us look at some newspaper accounts of spiritual manifestations, accounts different from those in my earlier post "Newspaper Accounts of Spiritual Manifestations." Below is a newspaper account of spiritual manifestations from 1867.  We read of mysterious rap sounds that seemed to be able to answer questions correctly. 

"The people of our neighborhood have been for a week past very much excited by spiritual manifestations in a house at the Springfield Furnace Mine Bank. The inmates of the house are persons of integrity and good standing. An orphan girl, a member of the family, who was the special medium or victim of this phenomenon of spiritual communication, also bears a good character. The rapping always commenced about nine o'clock in the evening, and continued until after midnight. Before appearing each night, the medium experienced a dullness beginning at her feet and extending upwards. Then a low tapping was heard over the floor, like some one walking, growing louder as it approached the girl, ending in loud knocks, like the stroke of a mallet. One moment, it was overhead, then under the floor, on the wall, &c. It would respond by distinct raps to every question. It was asked how long since Mr. Lincoln died, and the number of years was immediately given. So in regard to the lapse of years since Stephen A. Douglas died.

A member of the family becoming vexed at the noise and confusion, remarked, 'I am not afraid of you, my trust is in God,' when there was such a succession of 'thundering knocks' that a portion of the plastering fell from the wall. People came from a distance to investigate the matter, believing it to be collusion or trickery, and went away firmly convinced that it was an intangible, unsubstantial
spirit, and found that 'there are more things in heaven and earth than were dreamed of in their philosophy.'  The rappings continued one week. The girl had several convulsions, after which she
sank into a partial trance and the noises  were heard no more."

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85054846/1867-09-12/ed-1/seq-1/

N. P. Tallmadge served two terms as the US Senator from New York and served as the governor of a US territory.  A newspaper account  from 1853 has a letter by Tallmadge. Tallmadge describes a seance in which there were communications claiming to be from the then-deceased US senator John Calhoun. He describes movements and levitations of a heavy table, which very many respectable witnesses claimed to see during this period. Tallmadge states this:

"During the above communication of Calhoun, the table moved occasionally, perhaps a foot; first one way and then the other. After the communication closed, we all moved back

from the table, from two to four feet—so that

no one touched the table. Suddenly the table

moved from the position it occupied some three

or four feet, rested a few moments, and then

moved back to its original position. Then it

again moved as far the other way, and returned to the place

 it started from. One side of

the table was then raised, and stood for a few

moments at an angle of about thirty-five degrees,

 and then again rested on the floor as us

usual.

The table was a large, heavy, round table, at

which ten or a dozen persons might be seated

at dinner. During all these movements no person 

touched the table, nor was any one near it.

After seeing it raised in the manner above mentioned. 

I had the curiosity to test its weight

by raising it myself. I accordingly took my

seat by it, placed my hands under the leaf, and

exerted as much force as I was capable of in

that sitting posture, and could not raise it a

particle from the floor. I then stood up in the

best possible position to exert the greatest

force, took hold of the leaf, and still could not

raise it with all the strength I could apply. I

then requested the three ladies to take hold

around the table, and try altogether to lift it.

We lifted... and did not raise it a particle. We

then desisted, fearing we should break the table. I then said, 'Will the spirits permit me to raise the table?' I took hold alone, and raised it without difficulty. After this the following conversation ensued:

'Q,. Can you raise the table entirely from

the floor? A. Yes - '

'Q. Will you raise me with it? A. Yes;

get me the square table.'

The square table was of cherry, with four

legs, a large size tea table. It was brought out

and substituted for the round one, the leaves

being raised. I took my seat on the centre;

the three ladies sat at the sides and arms resting upon it. This, of course, added to the weight to be raised, namely, my own weight of the table. Two legs of the table were then

raised about six inches from the floor, and then

the other two legs were raised to a level of the

first, so that the whole table was suspended in the

air about six inches above the floor. While thus

seated on it, I could feel a gentle vibratory motion as if floating in the atmosphere. After being thus suspended in the air for a few moments, the table ... let down again to the floor....

I was then directed to put the guitar on the

drawer. We were all seated as before, with

our hands and arms resting on the table.

The guitar was touched softly and gently,

and gave forth sweet and delicious sounds like

the accompaniment to a beautiful and exquisite

piece of music. It then played a sort of symphony, in much 

louder and bolder tones. And

as it played these harmonious sounds, becoming

soft and sweet, and low, began to recede, and

grew fainter and fainter till they died away on

the ear in the distance. Then they returned

and grew louder and nearer, till they were

heard again in full and gushing volume as when

they commenced.

I am utterly incapable of giving any adequate

idea of the beauty and harmony of this music.

I have heard the guitar touched by the most

delicate and scientific hands, and heard from it

under such guidance, the most splendid performances. But never did I hear any thing that fastened upon the very soul like these prophetic strains drawn out by an invisible hand from the Spirit World."

The account by Tallmadge has further astonishing details, such as the mysterious production of a line of text, written in handwriting matching Calhoun's.  You can read the rest of the account using the link here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn88064476/1853-06-11/ed-1/seq-1/

Accounts like the one above were very commonly given by many distinguished witnesses at this time, as you can read about by reading my posts   here, here, here, here and here.  Accounts like the one above were often the best type of testimony, in the sense that they appeared as newspaper accounts published a small number of days after the claimed observations, accounts signed by multiple named witnesses, often more than four. 

The account below appeared in the February 22, 1851 edition of the widely respected anti-slavery newspaper The Liberator. We have an account of events on January 22, 1851, which were received by the newspaper with a cover letter dated January 25, 1851, which means the account below must have been written within a few days of the occurrence of the events. The first sentence of the account implies it was written on the same day as the events reported. We read this:

"We, the undersigned, having witnessed, this day,

at the house of Mr. Leroy Sunderland, (No. 28

Eliot street, Boston,) the following phenomena, deem

it proper, in this way, to make mention of them.

When we entered the room, there were some ten

persons surrounding a table, conversing with the

spirits; and as many more in the room as spectators, 

watching the movements of the others. Mrs.

M. Cooper was the medium. There were constant

and frequent rappings upon the table, and responses

to various and ingenious test questions, all of which

were admitted to be answered correctly; and the

company expressed themselves as being satisfied

with the answers given. We saw no motion of the

medium which would indicate that she had, personally, any thing to do with the responses given ; and we think she could not have had. The rappings were made on the table, without exception.

After this circle had retired, we, the undersigned,

surrounded the same table, when the following occurrences were observed:—

1. In answer to the question, ‘If any of our

guardian spirits were present?’ loud and prompt responses were heard

 upon the table, the vibrations of

which were distinctly felt by our hands ; and we are

positive that Mrs. Cooper did not touch the table at

all.

2. We then asked the spirits if they would give

us some physical manifestations, and we were promptly answered by raps in the affirmative. The table

was then immediately moved in various directions,

from one to two feet; and, at our request, was, quite

a number of times, turned over into the laps of those

surrounding it. In two instances, it was raised entirely from off the floor, and we are positive that no human instrumentality was employed in producing these results.

For the purpose of varying the experiment, we all

took hold of the top of the table, holding it clear of

the floor in our hands, when it was violently shaken,

while yet so suspended, as if its standard had been

seized by strong hands, and it apparently varied in

weight from twenty to two hundred pounds.

3. Among the test questions proposed and satisfactorily answered, 

was one by G. F. Farley, Esq., of

Groton, Mass , substantially as follows: —

‘ What relation is this spirit to me?’ 

Ans. ‘Your brother.’

‘ What was your given name?’ 

Ans. ‘Perez' which was spelled out promptly by the alphabet. Mr. Farley then stated, to the astonishment of the company,

that this was his brother’s name, and that he died

some fifty years ago—facts unknown to any other

person present.

[Mr. Farley himself may be referred to for the

truth of what is here stated.]

In the evening of the same day, we met again,

with an addition to our circle. [Mr. Farley, of Groton, and G. A. Somerby, of Wayland, were present

at both sittings,] and in the evening, Mr. George E.

Haskell, Dr. Z. Rogers, Moses Babcock, and Dr. L.

B. Larkin, of Wrentham, were also present. The

circle was formed in Mr. Sunderland’s back parlor,

as before, when the following, among other phenomena, were produced. On holding each other’s hands,

so that no hand was at liberty in the room, a centre

table, around which we were sitting, was raised up from

the floor five times, and let down with considerable

force, so as to shake the floor. Once or twice, the

raps were made, not on the table, but with it, the

table being used by the spirits, as we were assured,

to rap with, on the floor. Five times the table was upset and turned over, so that it fell sideways upon the floor, with violence....

We can only say, that we have been profoundly

impressed with the conviction that no human agency whatever was used in the production of  the phenomena we have described.

Signed, Boston, Jan. 22, 1851.

C. P. Kibbee, M. D., Springfield, Mass.

Rufus Elmer, 

Nelson L. Elmer, 

Theodore M. Smith, Boston,

George E. Haskell, 

Z. Rogers, Charlestown, 

Moses Babcock"

You can read the full account using the link below:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84031524/1851-02-28/ed-1/seq-4/

An 1876 newspaper article notes the death of the medium Daniel Dunglas Home. Below is a quote from the article (I'll correct the misspelling of Home's middle name):

"The death of Daniel Dunglas Home, as reported by cable dispatch from Paris, recently, terminates the career of the most famous Spiritualist and medium of modern times. The New York World affects to doubt his departure from this life, as if only the half of what has been told of Mr. Home is true. To suppose him dead merely because he happened to leave his corpse would be as absurd as to suppose so because he happened to leave his great-coat or his umbrella behind him.

He was born in Scotland, and came to this country when a mere child. He made his first conspicuous successes in Springfield and in Boston between the years 1851 and 1853. In this city he was hailed as a prophet by numbers of highly-educated persons, but finally in 1855 he went to Europe. In London he was warmly welcomed by several coteries of the aristocracy, and he made a very strong impression upon the mind of Queen Victoria herself. The Duchess of Sutherland was one of his most open proselytes and believers. In Paris be was made for a time 'the rage' by the undisguised interest which the Emperor Napoleon took in him and in his alleged miracles. He was frequently summoned to the Tuileries, and he gradually acquired a very considerable influence with the Emperor.

He married a Russian lady of noble birth in 1856. She died in 1862, and Mr. Home married a Russian princess. He was a particular favorite at the court of the Czar, and claimed in private to have converted the Czar to spiritualism. The many strange tales of spiritual phenomena contain nothing to rival the demonstrations of Mr. Home. Besides the ordinary phenomena of rapping, table tipping, writing and playing upon musical instruments, they include in his case visions seen by the medium, appearances of hands, arms and spirit forms seen by other persons, 'levitation' or the preternatural uplifting of the medium, elongation and shortening of his body by several inches, and his handling of fire and heated objects without hurt. It has been again and again affirmed of Mr. Home by witnesses of unimpeached character that they have seen him plunge his hands with impunity into a blazing coal fire, seat himself upon heavy mahogany dinner-tables and rise with them several feet into the air, and after floating horizontally head foremost out of the window at a height of many yards from the ground, sail tranquilly around a castle tower and come in again unharmed at the other side."

Home being tested by a leading scientist (in tests described here)

Such was the fame of Daniel Dunglas Home in 1874 that when Scientific American on January 31, 1874 published a summary of the investigations of the eminent scientist William Crookes regarding Home, Scientific American merely referred to "the medium Home," without giving his first name, as if it thought everyone knew his first name. At the time Scientific American was more of a newspaper than a magazine. The first part of the summary is below:

Most of the second part of the summary is below:

The third part of the summary is below:

The items above are all a summary of the book of William Crookes that can be read here, where you can read the details in nice clear type. Crookes (discoverer of the element thallium) said he detected no trickery from Home, who he had subjected to very careful tests. By the 20th century a publication such as Scientific American always showed a complete amnesia about such observations. Its writers never mentioned a word about such matters. It became a taboo to ever mention that one of the leading scientists of the 19th century (William Crookes) had reported observing such wonders as levitation and the appearance of luminous spirit hands floating about.