Erring Experts #18

 Here is the latest in a series of videos I am making. 

We Keep Getting Signs of Expert Blunders

Recently I have been publishing a series of short videos on the topic of the errors of experts, which you can view by using the links here and here. My best post on this topic is my post "Disastrous Blunders of the Experts," which you can read here. The post discusses the following examples in which experts produced the most disastrous blunders:

Expert Fiasco #1: The Bay of Pigs Invasion

Expert Fiasco #2: The Vietnam War

Expert Fiasco #3: Eugenics

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

Expert Fiasco #5: Blunders of the Psychiatrists

Expert Fiasco #6: The Iraq War

Expert Fiasco #7: Vioxx

Expert Fiasco #8: The Opioid Overdose Epidemic

Expert Fiasco #9: Nuclear Weapons

The post also discusses quite a few other cases of the most disastrous blunders by experts, including the atomic testing fiasco (in which we were assured by experts that atomic testing was safe, with as many as 500,000 people dying from cancer caused by radiation from such testing), and also the COVID-19 blunders that probably resulted in more than 300,000 unnecessary deaths because of incompetent responses.  It is an open question whether the entire COVID-19 pandemic that killed millions was the result of overconfidence by gene-fiddling biology experts recklessly monkeying with viruses. 

It is not hard to find recent examples of blunders by experts.  One example is all the US military and US foreign policy experts who have unwisely supported providing super-destructive bombs to the State of Israel as it has engaged in an appalling bombing campaign in Gaza, resulting in more than 27,000 civilian deaths, mostly deaths of women and children, with innumerable other women and children being maimed or crippled, and as many as 500,000 put at risk of starvation, homelessness, severe malnutrition or severe lung damage from breathing dust from all the destroyed buildings.  With the help of such a blunder the appalling horrors of the October, 2023 Hamas attack have been dwarfed by a savage slaughter twenty times bloodier. Another example can be found in the recent World Economic Forum meeting. 

The World Economic Forum provides an annual report on global risks. After a meeting in Switzerland in January, this expert group recently released its 2024 report on global risks.  Early 2024 is a time when the situation in the Middle East seems like some time bomb that may explode, leading to a new world war, with the situation in Ukraine posing a similar danger. So what has the World Economic Forum listed as the biggest current economic risk?  The group of experts has decided that the biggest global risk over the next two years is: misinformation and disinformation. 

You are probably thinking: you must be joking. No, I'm not. This is literally what the World Economic Forum lists as the top global risk over the next two years.  Below is a visual from the report.  We see "misinformation and disinformation" at the top of the list of 2-year global risks.

Here is the report's description of this "misinformation and disinformation" risk, which fails to make it sound like anything to lose much sleep over:

"Misinformation and disinformation (#1) is a new leader of the top 10 rankings this year. No longer requiring a niche skill set, easy-to-use interfaces to large-scale artificial intelligence (AI) models have already enabled an explosion in falsified information and so-called ‘synthetic’ content, from sophisticated voice cloning to counterfeit websites. To combat growing risks, governments are beginning to roll out new and evolving regulations to target both hosts and creators of online disinformation and illegal content. Nascent regulation of generative AI will likely complement these efforts. For example, requirements in China to watermark AI-generated content may help identify false information, including unintentional misinformation through AI hallucinated content. Generally however, the speed and effectiveness of regulation is unlikely to match the pace of development." 

This sounds like nothing much to worry about, compared to threats such as nuclear war, pandemics arising from labs engaging in reckless gene-splicing, and global warming. So what on Earth were these experts thinking when they decided to proclaim "misinformation and disinformation" as the #1 global risk? Eve Ottenberg speculates about a possibility:

"The assorted billionaire geniuses and official intellectual luminaries who gathered in Davos Switzerland January 15-19 proved, for those who doubted, that neither singly nor as a group could these...find their way out of a paper bag. Weighing the world’s fate in their well-manicured fingers, did they seem concerned about the Ukraine War morphing into nuclear catastrophe, or ditto for a wider Middle East war? They did not. Did they tear their beautifully coiffed hair and rend their designer ensembles over the prospect of the earth heating up like a pancake on a griddle due to uncontrolled climate change? A disaster caused by rich countries gobbling up and belching out burnt fossil fuels? Or did they mouth vague platitudes about extreme weather? Yes, bromides were their plat du jour.

The most immediate threat to humanity, according to this assemblage of well-groomed ... (who paid $52,000 apiece to join the World Economic Forum and then $19,000 each for a ticket to the Davos shindig), is misinformation or disinformation – you pick. After all, these bigwigs can take to their pate de foie gras-stocked bunkers if the planet succumbs either to nuclear winter or high temperatures inhospitable to human life. So of course, they regard speech, that is, free speech, as the main threat to their luxurious creature comforts. After all, someone might say something bad about these oligarchs! "

What we seem to have here is a great example of why experts so often go very badly wrong. Experts tend to exist in "echo chambers" where groupthink and herd effects may predominate. Such echo chambers can be found in the ivory towers of academia or the ideological enclaves that are the Pentagon and the White House. Within such an echo chamber people will tend to hear only people who belong to the same belief community, people who share the same ideology. Existing in such an ideological enclave, absurd or immoral opinions may be voiced, and may be regarded as great wisdom by anyone who looks around and sees other members of the belief community voicing such an opinion. 

Conferences have always been affairs that tended to promote dubious examples of groupthink. You can put a few hundred academics or a few hundred clergy members or a few hundred CEOs at some conference, and let them hobnob with each other. An attendee will soon get signals about which opinions are acceptable to the group and which opinions are taboo.  Such  signals can come in a variety of ways, such as the amount of applause that a particular speech gets, and snickers and groans that come from an audience when an unpopular opinion is stated. The conference has the effect of turning its attendees into rubber stamps of whatever silly idea may be perceived to be the majority opinion of its attendees. Then some report may be issued announcing the opinions of the attendees. The report should be distrusted because of sociological effects.  A better way to poll the opinions of the attendees at the very beginning of the conference, before any sociological effects came into play. 

In the article here, we have an example of how sociological effects such as herding behavior can lead tiny groups of experts to produce blundering results. A conference of neuroscientists was called on the very tiny topic of "representational drift." So-called "representational drift" is a cover-story phrase that neuroscientists have invented to excuse the failure of neuroscientists to produce consistent reports in favor of supposed non-genetic representations they claim to see in the brain (things that are almost certainly the result of mere pareidolia, as I discuss here).  Early in the conference attendees were polled about their thoughts on this concept of "representational drift," and a significant fraction issued dismissive opinions, as if they thought that no such thing really existed.  But by the end of the conference, according to the article, the minority group had vanished, and the attendees reported agreement. This seemed to be sociological effects at work.  The experts holding the minority opinion got the message -- fall in line, and go with the herd.  

It seems that by groupthink effects a consensus emerged. The consensus was the groundless opinion that there are non-genetic representations in the brain that are drifting about. A correct analysis would have been that there is no evidence for any non-genetic representations in the brain, and that the reported "drifting" occurs because of the unreliability of reports of such representations.  But we got a dumb opinion as the consensus. That often happens from little enclaves of experts where herd effects predominate. 

A key factor driving the opinions of experts is "social proof." Social proof is when the likelihood of someone adopting a belief or doing something becomes proportional to how many other people adopted that belief of did that thing. If we were to write a kind of equation for social proof, it would be something like this:

Social proof of belief or action (s) = number of people believing that or doing that (x) multiplied by the average prestige of such people (y) multiplied by how much such people are like yourself (z).

If lots of people adopt a belief or do some thing,  there will be a larger amount of social proof. If some of those people are famous or popular or prestigious or influential, there will be a larger amount of social proof. If some or lots of those people are like yourself, there will be a larger amount of social proof. So, for example, we might not be influenced if told that most Mongolians water their lawns every week, but if we live on Long Island, and we hear that most Long Island residents water their lawns every week, we may well start doing such a thing.

Given these factors, it is rather easy to see how erring overconfidence communities can get started in the academic world, even when the communities are rather tiny. A physics professor may advance some far-fetched theory, and get a few supporters among other physics professors. These few professors each has a high prestige, since our society has adulation for physics professors. If you are then another physics professor, you may be drawn into the overconfidence community which will already have two of the three “social proof” factors in its favor – because the few adherents are just like you, and are high-prestige people. So even with only a few believers, it may be possible for the overconfidence community to get started. The more people who start believing in the idea, the more of a “social proof” snowball effect is created.

When you belong to an overconfidence community, it can cast a spell on you, and make you accept bad reasoning you would never accept if you were outside of the community. Once you leave the community, there can be a kind of “the scales fall from your eyes” effect, and you can ask yourself: what was I thinking when I believed that?  In the future, as it becomes ever more clear that the members of overconfidence communities in academia are making unsound claims, and pretending to know things they don't actually know, there will be many people who drift out of such overconfidence communities, and experience “the scales fall from your eyes” moments. And in such moments the questions they will ask will be something like “what the hell was I thinking?” or “how could I have believed in something so unbelievable?”

A recent survey of experts about the origins of COVID-19 gives us some reasons for doubting the opinions of experts. The survey (mainly of virologists and epidemic experts, with about 15% being biosecurity experts) found that 21.5% thought that the cause of COVID-19 was a "research-related accident," with 77% percent saying a "natural zoonotic" event was the origin.  Anyone considering such a survey should remember that the community of virologists and epidemic experts is a vested interest, a group of stakeholders with career stakes affecting whether they would proclaim that COVID-19 had natural causes. The survey (Annex Table F3) asked the respondents about whether they were familiar with some of the key pieces of literature used by advocates of the different positions. The survey found that the vast majority of the experts (78%) were not familiar with one of the chief items of evidence used by advocates of the lab leak theory (the DEFUSE grant proposal that proposed risky gene-splicing research that might have produced something like the COVID-19 virus).  

We are left with an impression of experts who form an opinion when there are two sides, but who don't bother to study the main evidence presented by those who oppose the opinion they hold. Nothing could be less surprising. A failure to study evidence in defiance of your opinions is one of the chief characteristics of experts. For example, in general neuroscientists who believe that you are just your brain and that you don't have a soul tend to be people who have never bothered to seriously study the very abundant evidence suggesting that you do have a soul (such as the evidence for apparitions, out-of-body experiences and anomalous knowledge acquisition by mediums).  In the same survey,  33% of the respondents stated that they were familiar with a nonexistent study that the respondents had been asked about to test their honesty. 

Erring Experts #16

 Here is the latest in a series of short videos I am making. 

The Top 10 Unsolved Problems of Science: A Candid List

In general scientists are bad at listing unsolved problems of  science. Probably we can largely explain this on the grounds that scientists have several huge myths that they are trying to uphold. The first myth is the myth that the human mind can be explained by the brain. The second myth is that biological origins can all be explained by Darwinian evolution. The more candidly scientists list their unsolved problems, the harder it is to uphold such myths. And the more fully scientists describe unsolved problems of science, the harder it is to uphold such myths. 

Consequently we see several different shortfalls:

(1) There rarely appear papers or lengthy thoughtful articles dealing intelligently and candidly with the topic of unsolved problems in science. 

(2) When there appear articles or papers dealing with the topic of unsolved problems in science, most of the problems discussed are usually not the main unsolved problems of science. 

(3) When there appear articles or papers dealing with the topic of unsolved problems in science, the problems discussed tend to be discussed in a skimpy shorthand way, so that people will be unlikely to realize how big some particular explanatory shortfall is.

(4) Scientists tend to avoid discussing anomalous phenomena they cannot explain.

(5) Instead of using articles about unsolved problems in science as an opportunity for a rare display of humility, scientists often use such articles to try to perpetuate their unfounded boasts, engaging in "humble brags," which one dictionary defines as "an ostensibly modest or self-deprecating statement whose actual purpose is to draw attention to something of which one is proud."   

The latest example of a bad list of unsolved problems in science is an article on the Big Think site, one entitled "10 of the most mystifying open questions in science."  We have some bad defects in the article by physicist Marcelo Gleiser:

• While listing an unsolved problem of "What is the universe made of?" Gleiser turns the discussion into an unfounded boast that scientists understand that the universe is 27% dark matter and 68% dark energy, something that scientists don't actually know, because no one knows whether dark matter or dark energy even exist. 
• It seems like Gleiser's sole mention of a problem of biology is listing the problem of the origin of life. All of biology is filled with unsolved problems, because scientists do not have any credible theory of the origin of any species, and also lack any credible explanation of the origin of any adult human organism, there being no credible theory of how a speck-sized zygote could progress to become the vast organization of the human body. 
• Gleiser lists as one of his ten biggest unsolved problems a  problem he states as "what makes us human?" He acts as if he is puzzled by what makes a human different from a gorilla, asking,  "So, what exactly differentiates us from them?" There are the most gigantic and obvious differences between humans and gorillas, so the discussion here makes no sense. 
• Gleiser lists as one of his ten biggest unsolved problems "what is consciousness?" This is not an unsolved problem. We know what consciousness is.  
• Gleiser lists as one of his ten biggest unsolved problems "why do we dream?" That is an interesting unsolved problem, but not at all one of the ten biggest unsolved problems of science. 
• Gleiser lists as one of his ten biggest unsolved problems "Are there other universes?" There are no observations anyone could have in this universe showing there are other universes. No matter how strange the event observed, it would merely be evidence for some mysterious reality in our own universe.  So "are there other universes?" is not an unsolved problem of science, but some kind of metaphysical question. 
• Gleiser lists as one of his ten biggest unsolved problems "Where will we put all the carbon?"  That is not one of the biggest unsolved problems of science. 
• Gleiser lists as one of his ten biggest unsolved problems "How can we get more energy from the sun?" That is an engineering problem, not an unsolved problem of science.  

You can make a much better list of unsolved problems in science if you pay no attention to the groundless boasts of scientists, and list problems without trying to cover up things that have embarrassing consequences for the dogmas of scientists.  Below is such a list:

(1) How are humans instantly able to retrieve lots of information after seeing a single sight or hearing a single name?

We take for granted the wonder of instant memory recall. A person can be shown a photo of a person, and instantly recite very many details about that person. Or a person may hear the name of another person or a place, and instantly recall many facts about that person or place. But instant memory recall should be impossible if our memories are stored in brains. If our memories were stored in our brains, there would be in the brain very many thousands of places where knowledge was stored, so how could you ever find exactly the right spot instantly to be able to retrieve the right information? We know fast retrieval can occur using things constructed by humans, such as books and computers, by the use of addressing, sorting and indexing. There is no addressing, sorting or indexing in the brain. Neurons don't have addresses, and the physical arrangement of the brain (with each neuron entangled with many others) makes a sorting of neurons impossible.  For such reasons, scientists have zero understanding of how a brain could ever instantly find a memory. They also have zero understanding of how knowledge stored as neuron states or synapse states could ever be translated into some knowledge that would cause you to instantly start talking about some topic such as Napoleon or Venice once such a topic had been mentioned.  Neuroscientist David Eagleman put it this way: 

"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." 

(2) How are the most complex cells able to reproduce?

Scientists do not understand how any complex cell like those in a human body is able to reproduce. Scientists list stages of cell reproduction, but listing stages of something is not an understanding how it occurs. If cells were simple things, we might have no big problem in understanding cell reproduction. But the cells in the human body are fantastically complex things consisting of very many thousands of subunits called organelles (of many different types).  The complexity of cells has been compared to the complexity of a factory or the complexity of a full-sized jet aircraft. When a eukaryotic cell reproduces, it is therefore an event as astonishing as some 747 jet turning into two full-sized 747 jets. 

At a web page that is now a dead link, there was a confession about how scientists do not understand how cells are able to reproduce. The page stated this:

"Scientists have been trying to understand how cells are built since the 1800s. This does not surprise us and, as scientists ourselves, we have always been puzzled at how cells, such complex structures, are able to reproduce over and over again. Even more astonishing is that, despite the frequency of cell division, mistakes are relatively rare and almost always corrected. According to Professor David Morgan from University of California, the complexity that we observe in cells can be compared to that of airplanes."

One of the main reasons why scientists cannot explain how cells reproduce is that the DNA in the nucleus of cells does not contain any instructions for how to build a cell. Neither DNA nor its genes even specify how to make any of the organelles that are the main building components of cells. DNA merely specifies low-level chemical information such as which amino acids make up a protein.  So we cannot at all explain the reproduction of cells by imagining that a cell reads from DNA some blueprint on how to make a cell. 

(3) How did the 20,000+ types of protein molecules in the human body ever originate?

Living things require very many different types of protein molecules. In the human body there are more than 20,000 different types of protein molecules, each a different type of complex invention. Most types of protein molecules require hundreds of well-arranged amino acid parts, and that altogether requires thousands of very well-arranged atoms. How did such protein molecules originate? Scientists do not understand how this occurred. You do not have any credible explanation if you merely refer us to Darwin or natural selection or evolution. The problem is that the functional thresholds of protein molecules are very high, as is their sensitivity to losing function by small random changes, ruling out a Darwinian explanation for their origin, one appealing to an accumulation of countless tiny changes that are each useful.  Darwin knew nothing about the complexity of protein molecules, and certainly did not explain their origin. For a good explanation of why Darwinism fails to explain the origin of protein molecules, read computer scientist David Gelernter's widely discussed book review entitled "Giving Up Darwin."  I may note that in that  book review, Gelernter misstated the average amino acid length of a protein molecule, listing it as merely 250. For the type of cells humans have, the average length of a human protein molecule is about 450, meaning the probability of evolution producing a successful protein molecule (estimated by Gelernter as basically zero)  is very, very many orders of magnitude smaller than Gelernter suggests.  As four Harvard scientists stated in a paper, "A wide variety of protein structures exist in nature, however the evolutionary origins of this panoply of proteins remain unknown."  

(4) How do protein molecules fold correctly to form into the 3D shapes needed for their function, and why do they form into the organized protein complexes so often needed for them to function?

DNA merely specifies which amino acids make up particular protein molecules, and does not specify the three-dimensional shapes that such molecules must have to function properly. How do protein molecules form into such shapes? That is the long-standing problem called the protein folding problem, and it has never been solved. Don't be fooled by false claims that some AlphaFold2 software solved the protein problem. Such software merely made progress on a different problem, called the protein folding prediction problem. The quotes below tell us the truth on this matter:

• "In real time how the chaperones fold the newly synthesized polypeptide sequences into a particular three-dimensional shape within a fraction of second is still a mystery for biologists as well as mathematicians."   -- Arun Upadhyay, "Structure of proteins: Evolution with unsolved mysteries," 2019.
• "The problem of protein folding is one of the most important problems of molecular biology. A central problem (the so called Levinthal's paradox) is that the protein is first synthesized as a linear molecule that must reach its native conformation in a short time (on the order of seconds or less). The protein can only perform its functions in this (often single) conformation. The problem, however, is that the number of possible conformational states is exponentially large for a long protein molecule. Despite almost 30 years of attempts to resolve this paradox, a solution has not yet been found." -- Two scientists, "On a generalized Levinthal's paradox," 2018. 

Very closely related to this problem is a problem we might call the protein complex formation problem. This is the problem of why it is that protein molecules so often form into very organized protein complexes needed for the protein molecules to be functional. Such complexes are often so organized they are called "molecular machines." We cannot explain their formation merely by referring to DNA. Neither DNA nor its genes specify which protein molecules belong to particular protein complexes, nor do they specify how the intricate arrangement should occur. Here are some relevant quotes: 

• "The majority of cellular proteins function as subunits in larger protein complexes. However, very little is known about how protein complexes form in vivo." Duncan and Mata, "Widespread Cotranslational Formation of Protein Complexes," 2011.
• "While the occurrence of multiprotein assemblies is ubiquitous, the understanding of pathways that dictate the formation of quaternary structure remains enigmatic." -- Two scientists (link). 
• "A general theoretical framework to understand protein complex formation and usage is still lacking." -- Two scientists, 2019 (link). 
• "Protein assemblies are at the basis of numerous biological machines by performing actions that none of the individual proteins would be able to do. There are thousands, perhaps millions of different types and states of proteins in a living organism, and the number of possible interactions between them is enormous...The strong synergy within the protein complex makes it irreducible to an incremental process. They are rather to be acknowledged as fine-tuned initial conditions of the constituting protein sequences. These structures are biological examples of nano-engineering that surpass anything human engineers have created. Such systems pose a serious challenge to a Darwinian account of evolution, since irreducibly complex systems have no direct series of selectable intermediates, and in addition, as we saw in Section 4.1, each module (protein) is of low probability by itself." -- Steinar Thorvaldsen and Ola Hössjerm, "Using statistical methods to model the fine-tuning of molecular machines and systems,"  Journal of Theoretical Biology

(5) How are humans ever able to learn new things, and form new memories that can last a lifetime?

Scientists have got nowhere in trying to explain how learning and the formation of new memories can occur by some change in a brain. Any sound bites they utter when being asked about such a thing are examples of vacuous hand-waving.  When asked about how learning occurs, a scientist may mention LTP.  LTP is an acronym misleadingly standing for long-term potentiation. This so-called long-term potentiation is actually a very short-lived effect typically lasting only hours or days.  There is no good evidence that LTP is any brain mechanism for the creation of memories, and we have very good reasons for concluding that LTP cannot be any explanation for human memories that can last for decades.  When scientists try to explain memory formation by mentioning "synapse strengthening," they are also engaged in vacuous hand-waving. 

There is nothing in a brain that can explain either the creation of memories or the persistence of memory for decades. The brain has nothing like some mobile read-write head that a computer may use to write data to some particular place, or read data from some particular place. No one has ever discovered any encoding system by which the very many types of things that humans learn and remember could ever be translated into neuron states or synapse states.  The proteins that make up synapses (claimed to be a storage site for memory) have average lifetimes 1000 times shorter than the longest length of time humans can remember things (more than sixty years). 

Below are some relevant quotes:

• "Direct evidence that synaptic plasticity is the actual cellular mechanism for human learning and memory is lacking." -- 3 scientists, "Synaptic plasticity in human cortical circuits: cellular mechanisms of learning and memory in the human brain?" 
• "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.
• " 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). 
• "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. 
• "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).
• "We have still not discovered the physical basis of memory, despite more than a century of efforts by many leading figures." --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. 

(6) How is a speck-sized zygote ever able to progress to become the vast organization of an adult human body?

If someone defines a fertilized human egg as a human being, a definition that is very debatable, you might be able to say, "I understand the physical origin of a human being," and merely refer to a sperm uniting with an egg cell as such an origin.  But a more challenging question is whether anyone understands the physical origin of an adult human being. The physical structure of an adult human being is a state of organization many millions of times more complex than a mere fertilized speck-sized egg cell.  (A human egg cell is about a tenth of a millimeter in length, but a human body occupies a volume of about 75 million cubic millimeters.) So you don't explain the physical origin of an adult human being by merely referring to the fertilization of an egg cell during or after sexual intercourse. 

We cannot explain the origin of an adult human body by merely using words such as "development" or "growth." Trying to explain the origin of an adult human body by merely mentioning a starting cell and mentioning "growth" or "development" is as vacuous as trying to explain the mysterious appearance of a building by saying that it appeared through "origination" or "construction."  If we were to find some mysterious huge building on Mars, we would hardly be explaining it by merely saying that it arose from "origination" or by saying that it appeared through "construction." When a person tries to explain the origin of a human body by merely mentioning "growth" or "development" or "morphogenesis," he is giving as empty an explanation as someone who tells you he knows how World War II started, because he knows that it was caused by "historical events."

There is a more specific account often told to try to explain the origin of an adult human body. The account goes something like this:

"Every cell contains a DNA molecule that is a blueprint for constructing a human, all the information that is needed. So what happens is that inside the body of a mother, this DNA plan for a human body is read, and the body of a baby is gradually constructed. It's kind of like a construction crew working from a blueprint to make a building."

The problem with this account is that while it has been told very many times, the story is just plain false. There is no such blueprint for a human being in human DNA. We know exactly what is in human DNA. It is merely low-level chemical information such as the sequence of amino acids that make up polypeptide chains that are the starting points of protein molecules. DNA does not specify anatomy. DNA is not a blueprint for making a human. DNA is not a recipe for making a human. DNA is not a program or algorithm for making a human. 

Not only does DNA not specify how to make a human, DNA does not even specify how to make any organ or appendage or cell of a human. There are more than 200 types of cells in human beings, each an incredibly organized thing (cells are so complex they are sometimes compared to factories or cities).  DNA does not specify how to make any of these hundreds of types of cells. Cells are built from smaller structural units called organelles. DNA does not even specify how to make such low-level organelles. 

Below are some relevant quotes:

• "Yet while these are several examples of well-understood processes, our study of animal morphogenesis is really in its infancy." -- David Bilder and Saori L. Haigo1, "Expanding the Morphogenetic Repertoire: Perspectives from the Drosophila Egg." 
• "Fundamentally, we have a poor understanding of how any internal organ forms." -- Timothy Saunders, developmental biologist (link).
• "Biochemistry cannot provide the spatial information needed to explain morphogenesis...Supracellular morphogenesis is mysterious...Nobody seems to understand the origin of biological and cellular order."  -- Six medical authorities (link).  

(7) How is a human able to think and understand? 

Humans lack any understanding of how a human being is able to understand things. Human understanding is not explained by brain activity.  All attempts to explain human understanding by comparing the human brain to a computer are entirely fallacious, because computers do not understand anything. Computers process data and retrieve data and run computer programs, without having any understanding of anything. 

Using the term "thinking" rather loosely, we can say that computers think in the sense of being able to perform logic and process data. But all attempts to explain human thinking by appealing to computers are fallacious. Computers are able to process data because they have various types of things that human brains do not have, such as an operating system and application software. Brains have no such things. 

In fact, there is nothing in the human brain that can explain how humans can think and perform reasoning.  Moreover, there are many humans who can think at a speed and reliability that should be impossible for any brain (as I discuss here, here and here). The reliability and speed of any thinking occurring by a brain should be severely limited by three brain shortfalls:

(1) Signals do not transmit across chemical synapses with 100% reliability, but instead transmit across chemical synapses with less than 50% reliability, as discussed here.

(2) There are many types of signal noise within the brain that should very greatly limit the reliability of signal transmission in brains. 

(3) There are many signal slowing factors within the brain (such as cumulative synaptic delays and the relatively slow transmission within dendrites) that should cause the average speed of brain signals to be relatively slow, very roughly about 1 centimeter per second, way too slow to allow for very fast thinking. 

But despite such physical limitations, which should prevent reliable and fast thinking from occurring in any brain, it is a fact that many humans can perform very accurate math calculations at blazing fast speeds, as discussed in my post here. In short, we do not know how humans are able to think or understand, and all claims that such things occur by brain processes are untenable. 

(8) How were the cells and anatomy of any complex visible organism ever able to originate?

For more than 100 years biologists have been teaching the groundless triumphal legend that the origin of species was explained by the 19th century biologist Charles Darwin. The claims were first vague, based on woolly notions that nature produces random variations and that the better variations survived more. Around the middle of the twentieth century, DNA was discovered, and the claims of Darwinists started to get more specific. They started to teach that DNA of organisms had a blueprint or recipe or program for making the organisms, and that the random variations were mutations in which the subunits of DNA were randomly changed.  The story was a big lie from the beginning. No blueprint or recipe or program for making an organism's body had ever been discovered in DNA. 

By now DNA has been thoroughly studied and analyzed by big projects such as the Human Genome Project. We now know that neither DNA nor its genes have any blueprint or recipe or program for making an organism or any of its organs or even any of its cells. So how did the fantastically complex anatomy of any visible organism arise? We do not know. How did any large multicellular organism get any of its cells. We do not know. The answer is not to be found in any ideas of evolution or natural selection. 

(9) How was human language ever able to originate?

There does not exist any credible theory of the origin of human language.  Any attempt to naturally explain the origin of human language faces insurmountable difficulties. One difficulty is that the establishment of a language in a particular place requires a kind of very elaborate social compact in which many people agree that a very complex set of rules will be followed. But there is no way to explain how so complex a social compact could have got started unless there already existed a language. So once you have a group of humans using a language, you can explain them adopting a new language. But you could never explain the origin of the first language. It's a situation that can be described as "it takes a language to establish a language."  The difficulty is discussed at greater length in my post "Why the Origin of Language Is Inexplicable Under Orthodox Assumptions." 

(10) Why does there occur the many well-established things that so many scientists senselessly refuse to believe in?

Here I could list innumerable types of paranormal phenomena which we have many decades of very good observational evidence for, including ESP, clairvoyance, near-death experiences, spiritual manifestations near mediums, out-of-body experiences, and so forth. I could also list the simple existence of a unified human self, something that could not be more obvious from direct personal experience, but which many a scientist senselessly denies because he has no credible explanation of how such a thing could arise from billions of tiny chemical reactions or electricity fluctuations coming from neurons.