The Vague Unfounded Boasts of Biology Sound Like the Vague Unfounded Boasts of Astrophysics

An article at the Big Think website has a title sounding like it might be an example of scientist humility. The title is "Why the origin of life and the Universe itself might be forever unknowable." But despite the humble-sounding title, the article has several examples of unfounded boasts of knowledge. The author is astrophysicist Adam Frank, and Frank is a little frank, but not nearly frank enough. 

The article starts out with the preposterous "we're almost done" insinuation that scientists have only two explanatory problems left: the problem of the origin of the universe and the origin of the life. We read this: 

"Humanity has two old, profound questions. The first is about the origin of the Universe; the second about the origin of life."

To the contrary, humanity has a host of unsolved explanatory problems, including the unsolved problem of the origin of mind, the unsolved problem of how memory and learning occur, the unsolved problem of origin of the human species, the unsolved problem of the origin of language, the unsolved problem of the composition of the universe, the unsolved problem of the origin of very complex and organized biological innovations, and the unsolved problem of the origin of the adult human body, involving an utterly mysterious progression from a speck-sized zygote to the vast organization of the human body, a structure not specified by DNA (contrary to many erroneous claims). Human knowledge about reality is merely fragmentary. 

Frank gives us the following lame attempt to explain how planet Earth got all its organisms:

"We know that evolution on Earth (and probably anywhere else in the Universe) works by a process called descent with modification. Organisms reproduce and pass their genes on to their children. Every now and then, random mutations occur. If they lead to better fitness within the environment, entirely new organisms may appear."

There are very many reasons why this is not a credible explanation of the origin of species such as mankind. The first is that organisms such as ourselves involve hierarchically structured and enormously organized complexity that cannot be credibly explained by appealing to random mutations. What we have in a human body is enormously organized and fine-tuned complexity so immense that it can be called an enormous engineering effect. In his interesting book Cosmological Koans, which has some nice flourishes of literary style, the physicist Anthony Aquirre tells us about just how complex biological life is. He states the following on page 338:

"On the physical level, biological creatures are so much more complex in a functional way than current artifacts of our technology that there's almost no comparison. The most elaborate and sophisticated human-designed machines, while quite impressive, are utter child's play compared with the workings of a cell: a cell contains on the order of 100 trillion atoms, and probably billions of quite complex molecules working with amazing precision. The most complex engineered machines -- modern jet aircraft, for example -- have several million parts. Thus, perhaps all the jetliners in the world (without people in them, of course) could compete in functional complexity with a lowly bacterium."

So if a lowly bacterium has a functional complexity comparable to a jetliner, what kind of functional complexity does a human body have? Functional complexity so great it can be called an enormously strong engineering effect. But chance is not an engineer; random mutations don't engineer things; and accidents don't produce engineering. So Frank's little explanation of how we got vastly organized organisms does not work. 

(Image credit: Yuan et al. 2010, Structure of an apoptosome-procaspase-9 CARD complex)

Shown above is the apoptosome protein complex involved in programmed cell death. Note the references in the chart to propellers, which remind of us how much the complex resembles a product of engineering. Humans have more than 20,000 types of protein molecules, and the average protein molecule is a very special arrangement of more than 400 different amino acid parts. The arrangement of amino acids in each protein is as hard-to-achieve by chance as 400 accidentally typed characters making a paragraph of grammatical and functional prose. Extremely complex engineering arises in the form of protein complexes, in which different proteins (often useless by themselves) work together as team members to achieve some dramatic functional result. We see that in the visual above, where multiple instances of several different types of protein molecules come together to form an extremely complex structure consisting of thousands of well-arranged amino acid parts, and consisting of a total of tens of thousands of well-arranged atoms. A page describes the action of these individually useless proteins coming together to form a functional protein complex:

"The process of programmed cell death, also known as apoptosis, is highly regulated, and the decision to die is made through the coordinated action of many molecules. The apoptosome plays the role of gatekeeper in one of the major processes, termed the intrinsic pathway. It lies between the molecules that sense a problem and the molecules that disassemble the cell once the choice is made. Normally, the many subunits of the apoptosome are separated and inactive, circulating harmlessly through the cell. When trouble occurs, they assemble into a star-shaped complex, which activates protein-cutting caspases that get apoptosis started."

Another site that includes a 3D rotating animation of the structure shown above says this:

"The apoptosome is revealed as a wheel-like complex with seven spokes. On top of the wheel is a spiral-shaped disk that allows for docking and subsequent activation of proteases, which then target cellular components. When active, the apoptosome is revealed to be a dynamic machine with three to five protease molecules tethered to the wheel at any given time."

Below from page 137 of a PhD thesis is a list of biological systems described as if they were very impressive machinery:

Subcellular assembly	Sample of ‘molecular machine’ language	Source reference
Ribosome	“probably the most sophisticated machine ever made”	Garrett (1999)
Proteasome	“a molecular machine designed for controlled proteolysis”	Voges et al. (1999)
Glideosome	“a molecular machine powering motility”	Keeley et al. (2003)
Spliceosome	“among the most complex macromolecular machines known”	Nilsen (2003)
Blood clotting system	“a typical example of a molecular machine”	Spronk et al. (2003)
Photosynthetic system	“the most elaborate nanoscale biological machine in nature”	Imahori (2004)
Bacterial flagellum	“an exquisitely engineered chemi-osmotic nanomachine”	Pallen et al. (2005)
Myosin filament	“a complicated machine of many moving parts”	Ohki et al. (2006
RNA degradasome	“a supramolecular machine dedicated to RNA processing”	Marcaida et al. (2006)
RNA Polymerase	“a multifunctional molecular machine”	Haag et al. (2007)

An article by scientists discusses molecular machines in the human body:

"A molecular machine (or ‘nanomachine’) is a mechanical device that is measured in nanometers (millionths of a millimeter, or units of 10^-9 meter; on the scale of a single molecule) and converts chemical, electrical or optical energy to controlled mechanical work [1,2]. The human body can be viewed as a complex ensemble of nanomachines [3,4]. These tiny machines are responsible for the directed transport of macromolecules, membranes or chromosomes within the cytoplasm. They play a critical role in virtually every biological process (e.g., muscle contraction, cell division, intracellular transport, ATP production and genomic transcription)...Myosin, kinesin and their relatives are linear motors that convert the energy of ATP hydrolysis into mechanical work."

Humans are not machines, largely because humans have minds and lives and understanding that no machine has. But within our bodies are many types of extremely complex functional systems that can reasonably be described as molecular machinery or engineering. Such things are not credibly explained as being produced by the "random mutations" evoked by Frank. As some Harvard scientists stated, "A wide variety of protein structures exist in nature, however the evolutionary origins of this panoply of proteins remain unknown."

Two extremely important things to recognize are below:

• The credibility of all claims of an accidental origin of biological organisms is inversely proportional to the degree of hierarchical organization and broken-by-small-changes functional complexity in such organisms (the more of the latter, the less credible the former).
• The discovered amount of hierarchical organization and broken-by-small-changes functional complexity in living organisms has grown exponentially in the past century. 

Reminding me of examples discussed in my post "When Scientists Claim to See Things They Never Saw," Frank claims scientists saw something they didn't actually see. He says this:

"Using a variety of methods, biologists have mapped out the tree of relationships between living things across Earth’s long inhabited history, which goes back more than three billion years. They have been able to see when the different lineages of life split off from each other. For example, humans, chimpanzees, and bonobos share a common ancestor who lived about six million years ago."

No such splitting of ancestral lineages has actually been observed by scientists, who lack any power to observe any such things claimed to have occurred over thousands of generations millions of years ago. We do not know that "humans, chimpanzees, and bonobos share a common ancestor who lived about six million years ago." That claim is merely a guess. 

In 2017 bbc.com had a long article entitled “We have still not found the missing link between us and apes.” The article discusses the history of postulating a common ancestor linking current ape-like animals and humans. What we get is a story of a great deal of disagreement and changes in the prevailing narrative. Referring to a "last common ancestor" or LCA, we are told, “Surprisingly, the last 15 years has actually seen popular opinion begin to swing away from the idea of a chimp-like LCA, and towards a model closer to that argued by people like Strauss in the 1940s.” Of one analysis, we are told, “One of the implications of their interpretations was that all sorts of anatomical features shared by gibbons, orangutans, chimps and gorillas must have evolved independently in each of these apes.” That claim should raise suspicions, as such coincidental independent evolution is highly improbable.

The article says the following about a Last Common Ancestor:

" 'There has been a community shift, where people have begun to question what was an emerging consensus for a chimp-like LCA,' says Young. But even that is not the end of the story. There are still 'chimp-like LCA' advocates out there, and they are fighting back...Of course, only if and when fossils of the LCA itself come to light will the debate finally draw to a close.….It is possible, they say, that the LCA might actually have lived 13 – not seven – million years ago....There are also a few researchers who take a completely different view. For instance, Schwartz is adamant that it is orangutans, not chimpanzees, that are our sister species."

A scientific article tells us, “Few fields of research are subject to so many competing hypotheses, as illustrated by the variable number of ancestral species assigned to the human lineage by different authors, ranging from four to a maximum of 25.” Such gaps and disagreements should not at all inspire our confidence that scientists have a firm gasp on this matter. The scientists are apparently fighting among themselves, disagreeing about the most basic things, and missing many of the fossils they need. 

All claims that humans naturally evolved from any kind of ape-like or chimp-like or orangutan-like ancestor are lacking in credibility. Since DNA does not specify the anatomy of an organism, there are no possible random mutations in DNA that can explain very complex changes in anatomy. Since brains do not credibly explain the human mind, for reasons discussed on the posts of this blog, the origin of the human mind is utterly beyond the power of evolutionary biologists to explain.  In his essay "The Limits of Natural Selection as Applied to Man," it was forcibly pointed out by the co-creator of the theory of natural selection (Alfred Russel Wallace) that natural selection cannot explain some of these higher capabilities of the human mind. In fact, in his his 1910 book The World of Life: a Manifestation of Creative Power, Directive Mind and Ultimate Purpose,  Wallace argued that natural selection and random variations were very far indeed from being sufficient to account for the wonders of biology.

Frank's vague reference to "a common ancestor" between chimps and humans (without mentioning a particular species) follows the convention of most evolutionary biologists. They speak vaguely of such a common ancestor, without mentioning some specific species identified in fossils. No such ancestor has been found in the fossil record. The vague claims here remind us of what scientists say in regard to dark matter and dark energy. Astrophysicists such as Frank are always boasting that they understand what makes up most of the universe, claiming that most of the universe consists of dark energy and dark matter. But what is this dark matter and dark energy? No specific dark energy particle has ever been found. No specific dark matter particle has ever been found. Dark matter and dark energy have never been directly observed. The missing chimp/human ancestor fossils are like the missing dark matter particles and the missing dark energy particles, which are like the missing memory traces never found in the human brain by microscopic study. 

Just as scientists have scanned the heavens with the most powerful telescopes without ever seeing dark energy or dark matter, scientists have scanned the human brain with the most powerful microscopes, without ever finding any human memory. It's not just that they failed to read any learned information from microscopically examining human brain tissue. It's something much worse: that they never found in neural tissue anything that looked anything like stored information learned in school. Stored information has a particular hallmark: the hallmark of token repetitions. There is no token repetition to be found anywhere in the brain, except for the nucleotide base pair tokens in DNA which merely stand for particular types of amino acids. 

So our neuroscientists vaguely claiming they know memories are stored in the brain (without providing any plausible specifics of how that could work) are like our astrophysicists vaguely claiming they know that most of the universe is dark matter and dark energy (without providing any specifics about observed dark matter particles and dark energy particles). In both cases, people who don't understand things are pretending they have knowledge that they don't have, and are confusing speculations with knowledge. 

Frank gives us another case of scientists pretending to know things they don't actually know when he gives us the rather laughable boasting statement below, boasting that scientists know something about a Last Universal Common Ancestor of life:

"We do not know much about this creature. We do not have direct fossils of its existence. But we can infer its existence from the tree of life. There must have been a last universal common ancestor that gave root to all life on Earth. The recognition of LUCA is a triumph of modern biological sciences."

Scientists have something to boast about when they actually observe things, rather than merely making inferences based on ever-changing speculations about ancestry trees of life, unsupported by a credible theory of how such trees could have arisen.  And there was no "recognition of LUCA," because you can't recognize something that you've never seen. And why is Frank saying that the origin of life may never be found? It's because all attempts to support the groundless notion of abiogenesis (a natural origin of life from non-life) have failed miserably. Such a failure (and a lack of any credible natural explanation for the enormously abundant engineering effects in organisms) means we can have no confidence in the common ancestry claims Frank has made.   

Frank tells us that we may never know what caused the Big Bang (the universe's origin), and in this regard he has a good excuse for such a failure. The excuse is that according to the Big Bang theory itself, the universe should have been so dense during its first 100,000 years that all observations of such a time should forever be physically impossible, regardless of how powerful future telescopes are. But in regard to memory, neuroscientists have no excuse for their failure to read memories from brain tissue despite their claims that memory is brain-based. Scientists were able to discover information in microscopic DNA way back around 1950. With their current microscopic  technology, scientists should be able to discover irrefutable proof of brain storage of memories, if it existed. Their failure to find any such thing is one of many strong reasons for rejecting their claims that memories are stored in brains. 

We read here that "Cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) single particle analysis (SPA) is a technique for reconstructing the three-dimensional structure of a biomacromolecule using projected images acquired with an electron microscope and was the subject of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2017." A 2020 article is entitled "Cryo–electron microscopy breaks the atomic resolution barrier at last." We read this:

" Now, for the first time, scientists have sharpened cryo-EM's resolution to the atomic level, allowing them to pinpoint the positions of individual atoms in a variety of proteins at a resolution that rivals x-ray crystallography's. 'This is just amazing,' says Melanie Ohi, a cryo-EM expert at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. 'To see this level of detail, it's just beautiful.' Because the heightened resolution reveals exactly how complex cellular machines carry out their jobs, improvements in cryo-EM should yield countless new insights into biology."

This greater microscopic resolution is giving us all the more dramatic evidence for accidentally unachievable molecular machinery in human bodies, while at the same making ever-more-clear the failure of neuroscientists to detect any such thing as learned conceptual information stored in brains, where no trace can be found of any facts learned in school, and no trace can be found of any words people memorized or any sights people ever saw. The article shows us a stunning visualization of an enormously organized apoferritin protein complex looking even more complex than the one in the visual above.