"Seeing What Was Not There" Pareidolia of Astrobiologists Resembles "Seeing What Was Not There" Pareidolia of Neuroscientists

 Phosphine is a gas mainly produced on Earth by living things. On September 14, 2020, a scientific paper entitled "Phosphine gas in the cloud decks of Venus" claimed to have detected the "apparent presence" of phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus. The lead author was Jane S. Greaves. The claimed abundance level was very tiny, only about 10 parts per billion. Following their long-standing tendency to hype like crazy any story that may serve as clickbait to produce more page views and advertising revenue, a host of web sites began proclaiming that life or a sign of life had been discovered at Venus.  

I may have been the first one in the blogosphere to make a substantive criticism of this claim, since I published on the next day a post entitled "No, They Haven't Detected Life at Venus," in which I cited several reasons for doubting the idea that the paper had provided any evidence of life at Venus.  I said on September 15, 2020 that an alternate explanation was that "an error in interpretation could have occurred in spectral data that is hard-to-interpret because of overlapping signals from a variety of different gases in the atmosphere of Venus," and that such a possibility was "not very unlikely." I also pointed out the substantial chance that merely geological processes could have produced phosphine, and pointed out the lack of any plausible scenario for life on Venus, given the incredibly hostile conditions both on its hot-enough-to-melt-lead surface and its clouds (having almost no water but lots of sulfuric acid vapor). 

Days after my post, we began seeing on some sites such as www.liveScience.com and the National Geographic web site some articles (such as this one) questioning whether any sign of life had really been discovered on Venus.  On October 19, 2020 there appeared a scientific paper with the title "Re-analysis of the 267-GHz ALMA observations of Venus: No statistically significant detection of phosphine."  The paper doesn't merely question whether evidence of life on Venus has been found. The paper tells us that no robust evidence of phosphine has been discovered in the atmosphere of Venus. 

The five authors of the scientific paper provide a critique of the  September 14, 2020 paper claiming evidence for phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus,  saying that the paper used a dubious statistical technique that "leads to spurious results." The five authors state that the data actually provides "no statistical evidence for phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus." 

Four additional recent papers (published after the widely discussed "phosphine at Venus" paper) said that there is no phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus. One paper by a single author states, "There is thus no significant evidence for phosphine absorption in the JCMT Venus spectra." Another paper with many co-authors is entitled, "No phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus." A third paper states there is "no statistical evidence for phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus."  Another paper says, "These findings, along with the recent papers by Encrenaz et al. (2020), Snellen et al. (2020), Lincowski et al. (2020), and Villanueva et al. (2020) undermine the reported detection of PH3 [phosphine] by Greaves et al. (2020a,b) and its possible biogenic origin."  A news account of this paper says, "The team concluded that what the scientists probably saw was just sulfur dioxide, which is a common gas around Venus and would not indicate the possible presence of life."

What was going on in the Greaves paper claiming phosphine on Venus seems to have been pareidolia fueled by wishful thinking.  Scientists looked at some noisy borderline data produced at the limits of observations, and interpreted the data in a way so that they could claim something they were eagerly hoping to find. Pareidolia typically occurs when someone looks at noisy, hard-to-interpret frequently-changing data, and then claims to see some important thing that is not really there.  The example of someone claiming to have found a Jesus image in his toast is an example of pareidolia. Another example of pareidolia is shown below:

A few years later we had another case resembling the subsequently-discredited report of detecting phosphine on Venus. It was another case of a scientist claiming to have found something of great significance in the field of astrobiology, the search for life in outer space.  In 2023 Nikku Madhusudhan and four other scientists created quite a stir. They authored a paper entitled "Carbon-bearing Molecules in a Possible Hycean Atmosphere." Researching a planet called  K2-18 b revolving around another star, the paper claimed to have found "potential signs of dimethyl sulfide (DMS), which has been predicted to be an observable biomarker in Hycean worlds." The term "Hycean worlds" refers to planets in other solar systems that may be entirely covered by an ocean. The term "biomarker" refers to something that may be a sign of life. A very simple compound, dimethyl sulfide is not any type of building block of life. But on Earth dimethyl sulfide is sometimes produced by life. 

But there were some reasons why the attempt to insinuate a biomarker was very dubious. One reason was that the claims about "potential signs of dimethyl sulfide" was a kind of "reading tea leaves" affair, in which scientists were analyzing the faintest of faint signals, rather like someone squinting at something on the horizon miles away. That type of observation offers plenty of opportunity to see what you want to see, by interpreting marginal hard-to-interpret just-barely-detectable data in some way that fits your cherished desires, rather than interpreting that data in a hundred other ways. 

Then there is the fact that when scientists do observations like this, they are picking up signals from many different chemical sources, with the signals being all mixed up. It's a recipe for false alarms, rather like someone in a very crowded high school cafeteria trying to listen to what someone at a different cafeteria table far away is saying. 

Despite the paper's failure to detect water, and its weak mention of a mere mention of "potential signs of dimethyl sulfide," the world's "give us an inch and we'll take a mile" science news press began publishing a flood of misleading stories falsely claiming that some promising sign of life had been found. After the "sugar rush" of this flood of misleading stories, other scientists got busy examining the data on the distant planet K2-18 b, to see whether there was any decent evidence for dimethyl sulfide. In 2024 scientists produced a paper arguing that K2-18 b was not a "Hycaean" planet covered by an ocean, but instead a gas planet like Neptune with no ocean. The paper was "JWST Observations of K2-18b Can Be Explained by a Gas-rich Mini-Neptune with No Habitable Surface" authored by Nicholas F. Wogan and others. 

Then in early 2025 there was published the paper "A Comprehensive Reanalysis of K2-18 b's JWST NIRISS+NIRSpec Transmission Spectrum." It reanalyzed the data on K2-18 b and says "we find no statistically significant or reliable evidence for CO2 or DMS [dimethyl sulfide]." The paper had 16 authors, as compared to only five authors of Madhusudhan's paper. The 16 authors had found that Madhusudhan's claims about dimethyl sulfide at K2-18 b were unfounded. 

In April 2025 Madhusudhan released a new paper, based on some new observations. He claimed to have found stronger evidence for dimethyl sulfide at the planet K2-18 b. For a few days the world's science news sites spread a Madhusudhan-crafted narrative that the "strongest evidence yet for extraterrestrial life" had been found. But Madhusudhan's claims were soon shot down by other scientists. An An Ars Technica article soon appeared entitled "Skepticism greets claims of a possible biosignature on a distant world." We read this:

"The last issue is whether, if dimethyl sulfide is really present on K2-18b, it was produced by life as it is here on Earth. The answer appears to be 'possibly not': A 2024 paper indicates it's possible to produce the chemical through light-activated reactions."

Referring to Madhusudhan's team, an Atlantic article soon stated this:

"The chemical [dimethyl sulfide] is one of several that could be responsible for the signal they found. And while it's the most likely one according to their models, others disagree." 

The article notes that dimethyl sulfide was found "in the dead, icy spray of a comet," meaning it isn't any reliable biomarker. "Abiotic" refers to something not involving life.  One paper is entitled "On the abiotic origin of dimethyl sulfide: discovery of DMS in the Interstellar Medium." Another paper is entitled "Evidence for Abiotic Dimethyl Sulfide in Cometary Matter." In the Atlantic article we read a quote by astronomer Ignas Snellen stating that Madhusudhan's framing of his research is "irresponsible nonsense."

A National Geographic page interviews some experts about Madhusudhan's recent claims. Some excerpts:

" 'I'm pretty skeptical of this claim, and I wish the press coverage better reflected the skepticism of the astronomical and astrobiological community,' wrote astrobiologist Joshua Krissansen-Totton of the University of Washington in an email....Another researcher, astronomer Ryan MacDonald at the University of Michigan went further, criticizing the three sigma claim as 'statistical hacking' on Bluesky....'The simplest explanation of this planet is a very thick gas-giant atmosphere with no habitable surface,' says exoplanet scientist Nick Wogan of NASA Ames. ...And we already know that nature can produce DMS [dimethyl sulfide] without life. Last year, chemist Nora Hänni at the University of Bern and her colleagues found DMS on comet 67P—not exactly a habitable world. Other researchers have found it in interstellar space. And last year, chemist Eleanor Browne of the University of Colorado, Boulder and her colleagues showed that DMS can be produced in light-fueled chemical reactions in lab experiments with synthetic atmospheres.

'There's no reason to understand [DMS] as a unique consequence of life,' says Mathis. 'I just, for the life of me, cannot figure out exactly what the argument is about: why they think this could even potentially be indicative of life, given that we've seen abiotic sources.' ”

An article at Gizmodo.com quotes some experts discussing Madhusudhan's paper.  Planetary chemist Oliver Shorttle says "I do not believe the report of DMS in the spectrum of K2-18 b moves the astrobiological needle." He states this:

"There is presently no requirement from the data that this planet hosts liquid water oceans and a climate amenable to life. In fact, based on the data there is every reason to believe the climate will be far too hot for liquid water oceans, with the deep atmosphere potentially being underlain by oceans of magma, not liquid water. For this reason, even if 1 and 2 return a DMS detection, our expectation should be that this [molecule] has emerged in a lifeless, hot, sulfur and hydrogen rich atmosphere and ask ourselves what the atmospheric chemistry is that would have enabled this. Believing instead that this is DMS of biological origin would require overturning our every expectation as to the climate of this planet, without any other reason to do this from the data."

In the same article, astrophysicist Ignas Snellen says this:

"The whole thing is completely blown out of proportions.... The research team finds bumps in their spectrum. It is not clear whether these are real, and if so, what they could be caused by. There could be dozens of molecules (if real), or even cloud features. What do the authors do? They just look whether DMS [dimethyl sulfide] could cause this (and add DMDS). They ignore the dozens of other species [i.e. non-biological sources of molecules] that could cause this bump and call it a day. If I had been the referee, I would have stopped this publication right there. There is no reason to invoke astrobiology, let alone call it the biggest breakthrough or whatever....In the long run this will hurt astronomy when nobody will take us seriously anymore."

An NPR story says that  a scientist has analyzed the most recent data from K2-18 b, and has found it has no signal of any kind. We read this:

"The results he got suggested that there's too much noise in the data to draw any conclusions. Rather than seeing a bump or a wiggle that indicated a signal, 'the data is consistent with a flat line,' says Taylor, adding that more observations from the telescope are needed to know what can be reliably said about this planet's atmosphere."

Madhusudhan's overenthusiasm and pareidolia reminds me of the overenthusiasm and pareidolia of another astronomer, Avi Loeb. Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb somehow got the idea that a  2014 meteor (the CNEOS 2014-01-08 meteor) may have been an interstellar spacecraft that blew up high in the sky. Loeb ran a million-dollar oceanic expedition looking for what he hoped would be remnants of a crashed extraterrestrial spaceship, an expedition he organized.  He found no sign of anything looking like a spaceship or any of its parts. Loeb claims to have found tiny round specks only about a millimeter in size. All that he recovered were some tiny metal specks. The metal specks he found are just like metal sea specks found all over the world.  But  Loeb tried to suggest that he may have discovered smithereens of an exploded interstellar spacecraft. 

There was nothing special about the specks Loeb and his team gathered (as I discuss here), and there is nothing special about the data Madhusudhan got from K2-18 b.

We have above three examples of glory-seeking astronomers or astrobiologists making grand announcements of having observed something that they did not really observe, apparently as an effect of pareidolia, in which a person guilty of wishful thinking examines some hard-to-interpret, borderline data at the limit of observations, and claims that he has found something of grand significance.  Such a thing occurs not only in the world of astronomy, but also in the world of neuroscience.  Nowadays pareidolia is occurring very massively in experimental neuroscience. Eagerly hoping to find evidence of things they fervently believe in, neuroscientists are again and again claiming to have observed things they did not really observe. 

What we should never forget is that when you're a scientist, there are always a hundred ways for you to get some illusory evidence that is just a false alarm.  This doesn't require or typically involve any outright deception. It merely requires for a scientist to use some method that isn't quite right. 

One extremely common way for a scientist to conjure up a phantasm is to use too small a sample size or too small a study group size, which tends to result in false alarms. Scientists know how they can avoid this sin: by doing a sample size calculation to determine the minimum study group size needed to produce a moderately persuasive result, and to only use study groups with such a size. But a large fraction of scientific studies (particularly animal neuroscience studies) fail to include such a calculation, and fail to have adequate study group sizes. 

Another way for a scientist to conjure up a phantasm is to prune or filter his data until the desired thing seems to appear. It might be that when considering his full data set, there will seem to be no evidence of some thing (call it X) that the scientist wants the data to show evidence for.  But the scientist can prune the data at its beginning or end, until some evidence of X seems to show up. For example, if there were 4 weeks of data collection, the scientist can just get rid of the week 1 data or the week 4 data, or maybe both weeks of data. Or, the scientist can apply some "data filter" which gets rid of certain data points, until some evidence of X seems to show up.  The decision to apply such a data filter can often be rationalized in various ways, to make it sound like some "quality filter" excluding "bad data" or "outlier data."

Another way for a scientist to conjure up a phantasm is to collect data in a biased way that will maximize the chance that the desired result will appear. I will give a hypothetical example. Let us imagine that you are a scientist who wants to show that rainy days in New York City cause a higher chance of 300-point drops in a stock market indicator such as the Dow Jones Industrial Average.  You might begin recording daily stock market results on a rainy day in which there was a 300-point drop in the stock market.  You might then continue to record daily results, and conveniently end your data collection on a rainy day in which there was more than a 300-point drop in the stock market.  Given such convenient start and stop points of your data collection, you may well be able to write up a "statistically significant" correlation between rainy days in New York and 300-point drops in the stock market. But if you had resolved beforehand to start collecting data on some day 14 days in the future, and continue collecting data for exactly 100 days, then the desired result would probably not show up. 

Once so-called "raw data" has been collected, there are 1001 ways to "massage" the data before it is analyzed, some of which may make sense and some of which are dubious. A scientist can produce all kinds of rationalizations for particular data exclusions and data inclusions and use of data averages or "data smoothing" and use of "weighted averages" that may have been used, which can have a huge effect on whether some illusory phantasm shows up. 

Moving from the topic of data collection to data analysis, there are innumerable ways in which a scientist can conjure up phantasms by some kind of data analysis that isn't quite right. Don't be reassured when some science paper claims that it uses some kind of "standard software" for data analysis. There is almost always no such thing as a "standard analysis" of data. There are standard software tools used for data analysis, but such tools can be used in a million valid ways, and a million dubious ways. An example is Microsoft Excel, the leading spreadsheet program.  There are a million bad ways to use it, as well as a million good ways. 

When neuroscientists attempt to judge whether a rodent recalled by using the faulty "freezing behavior" method and manual inspection of how many seconds the rodent was immobile (within some arbitrarily chosen interval that can be anything between 30 seconds and five minutes), it's pretty much the perfect recipe for "see whatever you want to see" analysis. And when such analysis is done by people who are not blind to whether the observed rodents are in the experimental group or the control group, you have a likelihood of "see whatever you are hoping to see." Blinding fails to occur in most cognitive neuroscience studies, and almost never do we get a detailed statement giving us confidence that an effective protocol for blinding occurred. As for pre-registration (which can reduce some of the problems discussed in this post), a neuroscientist recently confessed it is rare in neuroscience. 

A science paper may try to reassure you that it used some standard software for doing some type of data analysis (such as measuring brain scan data or trying to measure "freezing behavior" in mice).  But there are always countless different ways to use such software, some good and some bad.  Every software program has program settings or startup options or menu options that allow you to customize how the program is used. Software programmers usually ask "how can I give the user the freedom to do exactly what he wants," and almost never ask "how I can make it so that there's no way to use the software in a stupid way." 

Nowadays neuroscientists often use "roll your own" customized computer programming to operate on gathered data in a way we can describe as "keep torturing the data until it confesses."  AI programs make it easier than ever to create such software, which is often of low quality.

Another way a scientist can conjure up phantasms is by failing to do a preregistered study that announces an experiment will be testing one very specific hypothesis, and going on a kind of "fishing expedition" within his analytic activity. For example, let's imagine the scientist does brain scans looking for some correlation between some behavior (or some aspect of thinking) and activity in some tiny brain region, some particular hundredth of a brain. By failing to limit himself to checking one small specific part of the brain corresponding to a previously declared hypothesis, and giving himself the freedom to check any of 100 small parts of the brain, he will have a good chance of finding some tiny region that weakly correlates with the behavior or aspect of mentality.  That's simply because given 100 parameters that show random variations, and the freedom to check any of them, it's easy to get something that looks like a slight correlation, even if only chance and not causation is involved.  The name sometimes given for this procedural sin is HARKing, which stands for Hypothesizing After Results are Known. 

Scientists have a hundred ways to conjure up illusory phantasms, and once a phantasm has been conjured up, there are many tricks by which the phantasm may be made to seem like something real, such as the use of complex charts and thick jargon which make the problematic presentation seem very scientific. All in all, we may say that the power of scientists to give you an impression of the reality of something illusory is comparable to the similar power of Hollywood's CGI special effects wizards. 

Very much of the more interesting-sounding neuroscience research results are examples of "seeing what was not there" pareidolia, in which some false alarm is conjured up using one of the techniques discussed above. There is no actual evidence for non-genetic representations in the brain. But neuroscientists often claim to have found faint traces of such things. Such neuroscientists are doing work similar to the false alarm generation work of Greaves, Madhusudhan and Loeb. 

In considering matters such as these, I like to remember a particular rule:

The rule of well-funded and highly motivated research communities: almost any large well-funded research community eagerly desiring to prove some particular claim can be expected to  occasionally produce superficially persuasive evidence in support of such a claim, even if the claim is untrue.  

We can consider an example of this rule, one involving astrology, the claim that the stars and planets exert a mysterious occult influence on the destiny of humans. Let us imagine that instead of there being merely a handful of poorly funded astrology researchers in the United States, there were instead 10,000 or more very well-funded astrology researchers, with billions of dollars in research grants to use to try to support their belief in astrology, by doing things like crunching statistics in various ways with computers.  It would then occur that we would occasionally read in the press stories presenting superficially persuasive evidence for astrology.  Such evidence probably would not stand up well to very close scrutiny, but it would be sufficient to give some talking points to astrology supporters. 

Similarly, if there was a large community of 10,000 ardent fairy researchers who were funded with billions of dollars, we would probably occasionally see superficially persuasive papers offering evidence for fairies. For example, with such an army of researchers, and so much money to spend, there might be occasional infrared heat signature studies suggesting anomalous little blobs of heat floating about that might be interpreted as fairies.  The researchers would be helped by the research rule that says, "Torture the data sufficiently, and it will confess to almost anything." 

And so it is for the 10,000 or more US neuroscientists funded with billions of dollars of research money (more than 5 billion dollars each year, according to this site).  Such scientists are able to occasionally produce studies providing superficially persuasive evidence for the dogmas the neuroscientists want to believe in, such as the idea that there is a physical hallmark of conceptual learning in the brain. Such evidence does not hold up well to very close scrutiny, but it is at least sufficient to provide some talking points for the neuroscientists.  Such evidence is actually no greater than the evidence we would expect to be produced for an untrue claim, given the "rule of well-funded and highly motivated research communities" cited above. 

An example of the schlock being typically produced by today's cognitive neuroscientists is the very low-quality paper being promoted in today's science news, the paper "Creating true and false memories from forgotten information in Drosophila." We have scientists experimenting with fruit flies, but the sample sizes used are way-too-small, almost always less than 15 (with study group sizes as low as 8 or 9). What excuse could someone have for not using a decent study group size such as 20 when experimenting with fruit flies? The authors confess, "No statistical methods were used to determine the sample size." A sample size calculation would have revealed how inadequate the study group sizes were. We have the confession, "Investigators were not blinded to group allocation during data collection." I doubt that anyone has devised a reliable method for measuring whether a fruit fly remembered something; and anything a neuroscientist claims about memory performance of fruit flies should be received with the greatest suspicion. The title of the paper is a groundless boast. 

When Neuroscientists Matter-of-Factly Tell "Old Wives' Tale" Explanations

Why do cells reproduce? Why does a cell split into two to become two cells? Our biologists don't even understand this.

On a web page entitled "The Mystery of Cell Division," a scientist confesses that scientists don't understand how cells -- with a complexity of "airplanes" -- could self-reproduce. 

"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."

If you do a Google search for “why do cells divide,” you will get various answers referring to "grand purpose" type of causes -- what are called "final causes" in the terminology of Aristotle's philosophy. A web site may state that cells divide to replace old, dead or damaged cells, or that cells divide so that an organism can grow, or that cells divide so that an organism can reproduce. But these are all “grand purpose” reasons, and none of them is a low-level reason. What we do not understand is: what cell-level reason is it that very complex cells divide into two identical complex cells? Considering only the cell itself, and not some higher purpose, what would cause a very complex cell to reproduce by splitting into two?

Scientists do not understand such a thing. They have identified particular stages in the most common type of cell reproduction (called mitosis): stages such as prophase, metaphase, anaphase and telophase. But without referring to higher-level “grand purpose” reasons, scientists do not understand why (on the individual cell level) a cell would pass through such phases and reproduce. A university press release confesses that "there are many remaining mysteries about how cells perform this remarkable feat." The answer is not at all "the cells follow the instructions in DNA." DNA and its genes do not contain any instructions for making cells or any specification or blueprint of a cell (contrary to the misstatements so often made about DNA and genes). 

M. Pitkanen (who has a PhD in theoretical physics) has written the following about cell division:

"Replication is one of the deepest mysteries of biology. It is really something totally counterintuitive if cell is seen as a sack of water plus some chemicals. We have a lot [of] facts about what happens in the replication at DNA level but how this miracle happens is a mystery. At cell level the situation gets even more complex."

A university press release discusses scientific ignorance about the basic question of cell division. It states the following:

"When a rapidly-growing cell divides into two smaller cells, what triggers the split? Is it the size the growing cell eventually reaches? Or is the real trigger the time period over which the cell keeps growing ever larger?...'How cells control their size and maintain stable size distributions is one of the most fundamental, unsolved problems in biology,' said Suckjoon Jun, an assistant professor of physics and molecular biology at UC San Diego...'Even for the bacterium E. coli, arguably the most extensively studied organism to date, no one has been able to answer this question.' ”

The press release claims that some study has "shed light" on this mystery, but the study mentioned doesn't sound very impressive, merely being something that mathematically analyzed cell growth, and claimed to have found a "principle of cell-size control," without discussing a cause for such a thing. 

It would be easy to understand cell reproduction if cells were very simple. Imagine if a cells were just uncomplicated little blobs kind of like little bubbles. Then a cell might be able to reproduce easily enough by a simple collision. When one cell collided with another, it might cause a large cell to break up two smaller cells. But what goes on in cell reproduction is gigantically more complicated than that.

Cells are so complicated that they are sometimes compared to cities, and the organelles in cells (such as the mitochondria, ribosomes and Golgi apparatus) are sometimes compared to buildings in a city. You will vastly underestimate the complexity of a eukaryotic cell (the type of cells in the human body) if you look at one of those cell diagrams that shows only a few organelles in the cell. In some cells there are millions of ribosomes, and thousands of mitochondria, as well as many other types of organelles. So when a cell reproduces, it's like some complicated machine made an exact copy of itself. Using Morgan's statement that cells are as complex as airplanes, this is as much a wonder as if some airplane were able to make an exact copy of itself.

The discussion above clarifies a point of the greatest importance: scientists do not understand the origin of cells. Specifically:

•  Scientists do not understand the origin of the simplest types of cells, called prokaryotic cells. The question of the origin of the first prokaryotic is pretty much equivalent to the question of the origin of life. Scientists have made no real progress in understanding the origin of life.  Even the simplest prokaryotic cell is an enormously complex thing, with roughly the same amount of functional information as a 100-page technical manual. Even the simplest self-reproducing cell scientists study is a cell requiring hundreds of different types of proteins, each a separate complex invention requiring hundreds of well-arranged parts.  The total number of well-arranged parts needed for even the simplest life is greater than 10,000. No experiments realistically simulating early Earth conditions have ever produced life from non-life. No experiments realistically simulating early Earth conditions have ever produced  the building components of one-celled life (protein molecules).  If fact, no experiments realistically simulating early Earth conditions have ever even produced  the building components (amino acids) of the building components of one-celled life (protein molecules). The much discussed Miller-Urey experiment did produce amino acids, but that experiment was not a realistic simulation of early Earth conditions. 
• Scientists do not understand the origin of eukaryotic cells, the more complex type of cells used by humans and other mammals. The problem of explaining the origin of eukaryotic cells is gigantically greater than the problem of explaining the origin of prokaryotic cells, because  eukaryotic cells are many thousands or millions of time more complex than prokaryotic cells. 
• Scientists do not understand how extremely complex eukaryotic cells are able to reproduce.  The answer is not that cells read instructions in DNA specifying how to build  eukaryotic cells. There is no such set of instructions in DNA or its genes. DNA merely specifies low-level chemical information, such as which amino acids make up a particular protein molecule. Eukaryotic cells are built of building components called organelles. DNA and its genes do not even specify how to construct organelles.  In fact, DNA and its genes do not even specify a layer of structure between protein molecules and organelles: the layer of protein complexes (specialized teams of proteins). 

In the book Aliens, biologist Matthew Cobb gives a description of current thinking on this topic, emphasizing the improbability of it:

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

On another page Cobb says this:

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

Obviously we have here a fairy tale, an "old wives' tale." Scientists have no credible tale to tell of how eukaryotic cells originated, just as they have no credible tale to tell of how prokaryotic cells originated. Whenever they refer to eukaryotic cells arising by fantastically improbable combination accidents, biologists are merely engaging in the most farfetched hand-waving. Because neither prokaryotic cells nor eukaryotic cells specify in their DNA how to make either a eukaryotic cell nor any of its organelle components, there is no conceivable lucky combination accident of prokaryotic cells that would result in eukaryotic cells with the ability to reproduce to make other eukaryotic cells. 

In light of all of these ocean-sized explanatory shortfalls, what are we to make of a recent statement at the beginning of an essay by neuroscientist Hannah Critchlow?  Simply that it is a gigantically unbelievable "old wives' tale," a tall tale that should not at all be classified as science.  Here is how Critchlow begins her essay (which you can read here):

"About 2 billion years ago, evolution performed an improbable experiment. A larger ancestral cell engulfed a smaller bacterium. It should have been a meal. Instead, it became a merger. The bacterium survived inside its host, and together they forged one of the most consequential partnerships in the history of life. The host offered shelter and access to oxygen. The bacterium supplied something revolutionary: a vastly more efficient way to generate energy.  From this intimate alliance emerged the eukaryotic cell – and with it, the possibility of complex life. Every plant, animal and thinking being traces its lineage back to that ancient symbiosis."

This is the preposterous tall tale called endosymbiosis or eukaryogenesis.  It's a ridiculous story along the lines of  "we got eukaryotic cells after a prokaryotic cell gulped its way to becoming 1000 times more complex."  No sensible theorist should ever tell this tale, which has zero credibility.  The tale is not an example of science with a capital "S," because no one has ever observed any such event occurring. Science with a capital "S" is facts established by observations, not math-oblivious wild tales describing events unlike any that have ever been observed. 

The truth is that scientists do not have any credible explanation for the origin of either of the two major classes of cells.  Scientists do  not have any credible explanation for the origin of prokaryotic cells, and scientists  do not have any credible explanation for the origin of vastly more complex eukaryotic cells.  Neither one of these origins has any Darwinian explanation.  You may start to realize how bogus are all "Darwin explained it all" claims when you realize that scientists these days are not providing a Darwinian explanation for either the origin of prokaryotic cells or the origin of eukaryotic cells. The "giant complexity leap by engulfing" tall tale Critchlow gives is not any type of Darwinian explanation, and is actually an explanation attempt hugely contradicting Darwin's favorite principle that "nature does not make leaps." 

Critchlow makes the untrue claim that an origin of eukaryotic cells created "the possibility of complex life,"  ignoring the fact that even the simplest type of cell (prokaryotic cells) is itself a very complex thing requiring half a million very well-arranged base pairs and hundreds of types of proteins, most being a separate type of complex invention requiring hundreds of well-arranged parts. Her little "gulping"  tale does not even try to explain more than one of the many differences between prokaryotic cells and eukaryotic cells. It's kind of like someone saying that a real working car arose from a palm-sized toy car, because the toy car got bigger. 

As many scientists have confessed, DNA and its genes contain no specifications for building the structure of bodies, and no specifications for building the structure of eukaryotic cells. So there is no conceivable event by which some combination accident or gulping accident involving prokaryotic cells could explain the origin of eukaryotic cells.  One prokaryotic cell might make itself more complex by gulping something, but that would not do anything to cause future cells to have the same increased complexity. 

After reading the neuroscientist Critchlow tell the enormously unbelievable fairy tale quoted above, you might start to get a suspicion along these lines: maybe neuroscientists may tend to tell tall tale yarns having no credibility, while reciting such groundless "just so" stories as if they were facts. And such a suspicion would actually be correct, because of  many other examples of absurd unwarranted narratives that neuroscientists like to tell. One of the most ridiculous is the claim that some mere strengthening of synapses can explain the wonder of human memory storage.  It is a tale as absurd as the "huge leap in organization by a gulping accident" tale Critchlow tells to try to explain the origin of eukaryotic cells.  Complex information never gets stored by some mere act of strengthening. Equally absurd is the tale that your ability to instantly recall complex relevant answers occurs from some process in neural tissue lacking any addresses, indexes or sorting, the type of things that make a fast retrieval of information possible in physical systems. 

What should neuroscientists be saying when they address the question of the origin of prokaryotic cells?  They should be saying something like, "I don't understand how the first prokaryotic cells arose." What should neuroscientists be saying when they address the question of the origin of vastly more complex eukaryotic cells?  They should be saying something like, "I don't understand how the first eukaryotic cells arose." What should neuroscientists be saying when they address the question of how human cells reproduce? They should be saying something like, "I don't understand how cells as complex as humans have are able to reproduce." What should neuroscientists be saying when they address the question of how humans learn things? They should be saying something like, "I don't understand how a human being can learn anything using a brain in which learned information has never been found by microscopic examination." What should neuroscientists be saying when they address the question of how humans recall things? They should be saying something like, "I don't understand how a human being can recall anything using a brain lacking any addresses, indexes and sorting, in which learned information has never been found by microscopic examination."

Yesterday I discovered a 2021 paper by two scientists who attempt to persuade us that some progress was made by neuroscientists in learning about a physical basis for memory. In the last few paragraphs, their pretensions fall apart, as the scientists make this confession, which makes it sound as if scientists have no real understanding of any physical basis for memory:

"Despite the tremendous efforts in the field to clarify the molecular  basis of memory processes, some very important questions remain unanswered... How does one singular memory get recalled when it is behaviorally relevant? How are the molecular mechanisms in memory systems not only flexible to allow immediate and quick learning but also persistent to store information during long-lasting periods?...Where is the information stored for long-term? Is there such thing as a memory code?...Despite half a century of research, we are still only scratching the surface of the molecular basis for memory function."

Schematic depiction of some types of experts

Mistakes in the Neuroscience Chapter of the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence

 At the link here, we have a link to something called the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, a document designed to guide judges in the United States who are evaluating claims of scientific evidence.  The page gives this description of that manual:

"A joint product of the Federal Judicial Center and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, Fourth Edition supports judges in managing cases involving complex scientific and technical evidence by describing the basic tenets of key scientific fields and by providing examples of cases in which that evidence has been used. It is intended to assist judges in identifying issues commonly in dispute and to help judges reach an informed and reasoned assessment of those issues based on expert evidence that is faithful to the law and within the boundaries of scientifically sound knowledge."

Alarm bells should go off when we read that phrase "the basic tenets of key scientific fields." Tenets refers to beliefs, not facts. The Merriam Webster dictionary defines a tenet as "a principle, belief, or doctrine generally held to be true especially : one held in common by members of an organization, movement, profession, etc."

In Volume II of the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, Fourth Edition (which you can read using the link here) we have on page 1185 a chapter on neuroscience, one entitled "Reference Guide on Neuroscience."  We get this description of the two authors: 

Henry T. Greely, J.D., is the Deane F. and Kate Edelman Johnson Professor of Law; Professor, by courtesy, of Genetics; and the Director of Center for Law and the Biosciences, at Stanford University. Nita A. Farahany, J.D., Ph.D., is the Robinson O. Everett Professor of Law and Philosophy and Founding Director for the Initiative for Science and Society at Duke University

We have a chapter that is being used to guide the decisions of United States judges when evaluating attempts to introduce neuroscience as evidence; but neither of the authors of the chapter is a neuroscientist (judging from the statements above and online statements of their educational backgrounds, and defining a neuroscientist as someone with a PhD or Master's Degree in neuroscience). The authors make some serious errors in their chapter, and I guess we should not be surprised given their lack of deep expertise in neuroscience. One of the authors (Henry T. Greely) is the author of a book with the very strange title "The End of Sex and the Future of Human Reproduction." 

Greely and Farahany start out with groundless bombast by claiming "science’s understanding of the human brain is increasing exponentially" and that "we know almost infinitely more than we did thirty years ago."  To the contrary, there has been little real important progress in neuroscience in the past 30 years. Thirty years ago we knew the basic facts about the brain that we now know. There has been no real progress in proving the main claims that neuroscientists like to make about brains, such as the claim that the brain is the source of the human mind and the storage place of memories.  Although there has been lots of use of fancy new technologies, this has not led to any great discovery during the past 30 years. Neuroscientists are still basically where they were 30 years ago, without any real understanding of how a brain could produce thought, self-hood, imagination, learning, recall or the lifelong preservation of memories. The microscopic examination of brain tissue has still failed to discover any trace in brain tissue of anything a human has learned. 

In the next paragraph Greely and Farahany say something that contradicts their previous boasts. They confess, "We still remain very far from a deep and broad understanding of how human brains work." But then they make this untrue statement: "If, as neuroscience indicates, our mental states correspond to, and result from, physical states of our brain, our increased ability to discern those physical states will have huge implications for the law." Neuroscience does not actually indicate that "our mental states correspond to, and result from, physical states of our brain," although such a belief is widely held in the belief community of neuroscientists. The facts of neuroscience, psychology and medical science again and again contradict the claim that "our mental states correspond to, and result from, physical states of our brain." Among those facts are the following:

• It is a fact that there are many dramatic cases in the medical literature of people who had more or less normal minds even though large fractions of their brain (or most of their brains) were destroyed due to injury or disease, including super-dramatic cases of people with good minds but less than 15 percent of their brains.
• Human brains (all very severely handicapped by a lack of any addresses and indexes, cumulative synaptic delays and unreliable synaptic transmission) are way too slow and way too noisy to explain the wonders of human best mental performances, which include endless wonders of blazing fast calculation, blazing fast precise recall, blazing fast memorization,  and the recitation with perfect accuracy of very long bodies of text consisting of hundreds of pages.
•  There is no understanding of how brains could achieve the instantaneous relevant recall of distant, obscure memories that humans routinely show, when someone is asked a trivia question,  given the lack of any coordinate system or addressing or indexing in a brain that might allow some exact position of a stored memory to be very quickly found.
• There is no understanding whatsoever of how concepts, visual information, long series of words, and episodic memories could ever be physically stored by a brain in any way that would translate all these diverse types of information into synapse states or neuron states. 
• It is a fact that old humans can reliably remember experiences they had more than 50 years ago, an ability that should be impossible given the very rapid molecular turnover and structural turnover in synapses (which neuroscientists typically claim to be the storage place of memory), and given that the proteins that make up such synapses have short average lifetimes of only a few weeks, 1000 times shorter than the length of time humans can remember things. The 2018 study here precisely measured the lifetimes of more than 3000 brain proteins from all over the brain, and found not a single one with a lifetime of more than 75 days (figure 2 shows the average protein lifetime was only 11 days).
• It is a fact that the microscopic examination of very many thousands of brains of recently deceased people (and the microscopic examination of endless samples of brain tissue extracted from living people) has never produced the slightest trace of learned information, something that would have been discovered in brains 50 years ago if brains stored memories and brains are the source of the human mind.
• Quite a few humans (such as HSAM subjects with normal brains who can remember every day of their adult lives, people who do very complex calculations "in their heads" with blazing speed, people who memorize very complex information with blazing speed, and people who memorize the entire text of long books) have demonstrated exceptional memory performance and exceptional cognitive performance that is impossible to explain under any theory of the brain (something having no component bearing any resemblance to a memory storage device). 
• It is a fact that for more than 50 years numerous people have reported vivid near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences occurring after their hearts stopped and their brains were inactive, during times when their brains had flatlined, and they should have had no consciousness at all (under "brains make minds" assumptions), with many of the observation details they reported seeing during such brain-inexplicable should-have-been-utterly-unconscious experiences being independently verified (as described here).

After some preliminary rhetoric, Greely and Farahany start getting into details. They give us a long discussion of the features and anatomy of the brain, one that is pretty factual and unobjectionable. But on page 1199 they start repeating "old wives' tales" of neuroscience literature. They state that the amygdala "modulates learning and memory." The claim is not well-established, and "modulates" is a rather vague word. More specifically, the authors dogmatically claim that "memories appear to be stored over much of the cortex." There is no scientific basis for this claim, and the use of the phrase "appear to be" indicates that the authors lack a firm scientific basis. Very much tissue from all parts of the brain has been microscopically examined, including tissue from recently deceased people, and tissue extracted from living people as part of surgical operations. Such microscopic examination has never revealed the slightest trace of anything a human has learned or experienced. 

A recent scientific paper basically confesses that scientists lack any understanding of how a brain could store memories. It states this (referring to vacuous hand-waving ideas that are untenable because of reasons such as the high structural instability of synapses and dendritic spines):

"Finally, one of the major unresolved questions in the study of brain learning is the nature of its underlying mechanism. Specifically, it is not yet known whether learning primarily results from modifications of synaptic weights[42], [43], [44] and dendritic learning[45], [46], [47], [48], [49], [50] or from changes in network topology."

See the section entitled "Human Memory (Often Claimed to be Stored in Synapses)" in my "Candid Confessions of the Scientists" post here for more than 40 statements by more than 100 scientists, all confessing that scientists do not have any good understanding of how a brain could store memories. Nothing in the brain bears any resemblance to a device or component for storing learned information. 

Some surgical operations serve as a test for the claim that memories are stored in the brain. For example, to treat very bad seizures, doctors sometimes remove half of the brain in a radical operation called a hemispherectomy operation.  We have quite a few cases of people who had such operations without reporting a loss of memories, and without seeming to suffer a loss of memories.  Such cases directly contradict Greely and Farahany's claim that "memories appear to be stored over much of the cortex," and also contradict all claims that memories are stored in the brain. You can read about such cases in my post "Preservation of Mind and Memories After Removal of Half a Brain" here. 

Below are some results reported in the American Journal of Psychology, Vol. 46, No. 3 (Jul., 1934), pages 500-503, regarding work of W. E. Dandy, in which he removed half of the brains of patients. You can read the results in the preview here (without doing any registration). We read the following (I have put a few of the sentences in boldface):

“Dandy has completely removed the right cerebral hemisphere from eight patients. He has performed total extirpations of one or more lobes much oftener... There are tabulated below certain generalizations on the effects of removing the right hemisphere.... The operation was the complete extirpation of the right frontal, temporal, parietal, and occipital lobes peripheral to the corpus striatum. The weight of the tissue removed varies, with the pathological conditions involved, from 250 to 584 grm [grams].Coherent conversation began within twenty-four hours after operation, and in one case on the afternoon of the same day. Later examinations showed no observable mental changes. The patients were perfectly oriented in respect of time, place, and person; their memory was unimpaired for immediate and remote events; conversation was always coherent; ability to read, write, compute, and learn new material was unaltered. Current events were followed with normal interest. There were no personality changes apparent; the patients were emotionally stable, without fears, delusions, hallucinations, expansive ideas or obsessions, and with a good sense of humor; they joked frequently. They showed a natural interest in their condition and future. They cooperated intelligently at all times throughout post-operative care and subsequent testing of function.”

It would be rather hard to imagine a more decisive refutation of the claim that the human brain is the source of the human mind, and the claim that the human brain is the storage place of human memories. 

In the scientific paper here, we have on page 248 and page 250 before and after test scores for various subjects who had of their brains removed in hemispherectomy operations.  The IQ score differences are slight. IQ tests don't involve learned information, but almost any IQ test would be largely a test of memory, as it would be a largely a test of ability to read test questions.  On the same pages we have before and after test scores for Peabody Picture Vocabulary Tests given to various subjects who had  half of their brains removed in hemispherectomy operations.   In these tests, someone is shown picture cards like the one below, and asked to name the words represented by the pictures.  These tests are tests of memory retention after removal of half of the brain.  On these memory tests there was no decline in the score of 21 subjects mentioned on page 248, and no decline in 7 subjects mentioned on page 250. 

An article in the LA Times tells us about memory preservation in a young girl who lost half her brain:

“How is it that 8-year-old Beth Usher of Storrs, Conn., can lose her left hemisphere, yet retain her large repertoire of knock-knock jokes? Beth’s memories survived not just the loss of brain tissue, but also the 32 days that she spent in a coma, the result of some brain stem swelling that occurred in response to the trauma of surgery. Shortly after Beth regained consciousness, her father began quizzing her about people and places from her past. Brian Usher didn’t get very far. 'Dad,' Beth interrupted, with a trace of impatience. 'I remember everything.' ”

In a scientific paper ("Why Would You Remove Half a Brain? The Outcome of 58 Children After Hemispherectomy −−The Johns Hopkins Experience: 1968 to 1996") we read about how surgeons at Johns Hopkins Medical School performed fifty-eight hemispherectomy operations on children over a thirty-year period. Eleven of these children had the left hemisphere of their brains removed; most of the rest had the right hemisphere of their brains removed.  The paper states this:

"Despite removal of one hemisphere  [i.e. one half of the brain], the intellect of all but one of the children seems either unchanged or improved....Although there have been major concerns about loss of language after left hemispherectomy, all eleven of these children have regained virtually normal language....It is tempting to speculate, that the continuous electrical activity of these severely dysfunctional hemispheres interferes with the function of the other, more normal hemisphere. This might explain why motor function improves after hemispherectomy and why language recovers after removal of the dysfunctional left hemisphere, but does not seem to fully transfer before surgery. Perhaps it also partially explains intellectual improvement in these children after removal of half of the cortex. We are awed by the apparent retention of memory after removal of half of the brain, either half, and by the retention of the child’s personality and sense of humor."

The observational results quoted above collectively defy Greely and Farahany's claim that "memories appear to be stored over much of the cortex," and they also dramatically discredit Greely and Farahany's attempt to persuade us that  "our mental states correspond to, and result from, physical states of our brain."

On the same page 1199 Greely and Farahany incorrectly state that "the hippocampus is necessary for the creation of many kinds of memory." This claim is debunked in my widely read post "Studies Debunk Hippocampus Memory Myths," which you can read here. On page 1216 the authors try to back up that claim about the hippocampus, offering this widely repeated but untrue claim:

"Our understanding of the role of the hippocampus in creating memories, as one example, was greatly aided by study of a patient known as H.M. When he was twenty-seven years old, H.M. was treated for intractable epilepsy, undergoing an experimental procedure that surgically removed his left and right medial temporal

lobes, including most of his two hippocampi. The surgery was successful, but from that time until his death in 2008, H.M. could not form new long-term memories, either of events or of facts."

The claim is untrue, and at the beginning of my post "Studies Debunk Hippocampus Memory Myths," which you can read here, I cite quite a few examples of this person (H.M.) learning new things after his operation. For example, a  14-year follow-up study of patient H.M. (whose memory problems started in 1953) actually tells us that H.M. was able to form some new memories after his operation. The study says this on page 217:

"In February 1968, when shown the head on a Kennedy half-dollar, he said, correctly, that the person portrayed on the coin was President Kennedy. When asked him whether President Kennedy was dead or alive, and he answered, without hesitation, that Kennedy had been assassinated...In a similar way, he recalled various other public events, such as the death of Pope John (soon after the event), and recognized the name of one of the astronauts, but his performance in these respects was quite variable."

In the same post ("Studies Debunk Hippocampus Memory Myths," which you can read here) I cite a great deal of evidence refuting the claim of Greely and Farahany that " the hippocampus is necessary for the creation of many kinds of memory." For example, A 2020 paper is entitled "Preserved visual memory and relational cognition performance in monkeys with selective hippocampal lesions." The paper states this:

"We tested rhesus monkeys on a battery of cognitive tasks including transitive inference, temporal order memory, shape recall, source memory, and image recognition. Contrary to predictions, we observed no robust impairments in memory or relational cognition either within- or between-groups following hippocampal damage."

Citing a previous study, the paper notes that "formation of new memories in the object-in-scene task, one of the most accepted tests of episodic memory used with nonhuman primates, was found to be unaffected by lesions of the hippocampus itself."  It also notes that "There is a concerning lack of clear causal evidence for a critical role of the hippocampus in visual memory, episodic memory, recollection, or relational cognition in nonhuman primates."

After some pages discussing various neuroscience techniques and technologies, Greely and Farahany finally make a claim of relevance to neuroscience and the law. They state on page 1221, "More than fifteen dif­ferent laboratories have collectively published twenty to thirty peer-reviewed articles finding some statistically significant relationship between fMRI-measured brain activity and deception." This means very little, because the use of way-too-small study group sizes is an epidemic in today's neuroscience. 

On page 1231 the authors confess this:

"There are now about twenty to thirty peer reviewed publications that, using fMRI, find statistically significant differences in patterns of brain activation depending on whether the participants were telling the truth or (typically) telling a lie when instructed to do so. Many of those publications find patterns that are dif­ferent from, and often inconsistent with, the patterns described in the other publications. Multiple inconsistent publications do not add weight to a scientific method or theory; indeed, they may subtract from it."

The authors make a good point on page 1233 (regarding introducing neuroscience evidence into a court case):

"The time necessary to introduce such evidence, and to educate the jury (and judge) about it, will usually be extensive. The possibilities for confusion are likely to be great. And there is at least some evidence that jurors (or, to be precise, 'mock jurors') are particularly likely to overestimate the power of neuroscience evidence.37 A high-tech 'picture' of a living brain, complete with brain regions shown in bright orange and deep purple (colors not seen in an actual brain), may have an unjustified appeal to a jury. In each case, judges will need to weigh possibilities of confusion or prejudice, along with the near certainty of lengthy testimony, against the claimed probative value of the evidence."

On page 1246 Greely and Farahany talk about "retail" use of neuroscience in court cases, and make a bullet list of what they call "the most plausible categories for such retail uses." They include on their bullet list these items:

• "predicting future behavior for sentencing"
• "credibility or deception in current statements"
• "the existence or nonexistence of a memory of some event and, possibly, some information about the status of that memory (true, false; new, old, etc.)"
• "the presence of bias against a party"

The authors mislead us by claiming that such things are "plausible categories" for the use of neuroscience in court cases. Neuroscience can do nothing to predict future crimes; neuroscience can do nothing to tell us about credibility of deception in current statements; neuroscience can do nothing to determine "the existence or nonexistence of a memory of some event"; and neuroscience can do nothing to detect "the presence of bias against a party." If any reliable scientific testimony were offered along such lines, it would fall under the category of psychology rather than neuroscience. 

Talking about efforts to use brain scans to detect lies (an area that is a morass of junk science), the authors start out well, but then goof at the end, saying this:

"Currently, as far as we know, evidence from fMRI-based lie detection has not been admitted into evidence in any court, but it was offered—and rejected—in at least three cases, United States v. Semrau, 99 Wilson v. Corestaff Services L.P., 100 and a widely publicized murder trial, Maryland v. Smith, 101 in the early 2010s. Since then, efforts to introduce evidence from this technology have largely disappeared—we find no reported cases about such attempted uses since 2012— but the story of its rise and fall provides a good example of a path for new neuroscience evidence. And the underlying science still exists and could well end up in court again."

The underlying science still exists? No, it does not. Greely and Farahany actually make it rather clear in the following pages that there is no solid scientific basis for thinking that fMRI machines can detect lying. 

All in all, Greely and Farahany's chapter is not one I can condemn as something that should be trashed and completely replaced by the writing of some other writer or writers.  Their chapter is mostly fairly good work, and it deals fairly well with the limitations and weaknesses of today's neuroscience (although not discussing that half as well as it should do to properly advise judges dealing with attempts to introduce neuroscientist work as evidence).  But their chapter has some serious errors, and some utterly unnecessary affirmations of groundless neuroscientist dogmas. The chapter could be fixed with a few days' work. I would suggest taking out the false and dubious statements, and adding ten additional paragraphs warning judges of the low standards, bungling methods and very frequent errors in today's cognitive neuroscience, along with the frequent spreading in that field of groundless triumphal boasts. Then add ten other long paragraphs discussing all of the reasons for doubting the dogmas of today's neuroscientists, which are additional reasons why judges should be extremely careful about allowing the introduction of neuroscience  evidence in court cases. 

The job of properly advising people about the weighty question of whether the brain produces the mind and whether memories are stored in the brain is one requiring years of the deepest study of very many topics including neuroscience, psychology, parapsychology and relevant medical case histories and case histories of exceptional human mental performances. When people whose background is mainly in the law and legal matters offer their opinion on that question, we need not necessarily assume that they have adequately studied the relevant evidence, unless we have evidence of such scholarship.