This Is What Built the Mighty Castle of Materialism

Materialism is the belief that everything that exists is just matter or energy. Materialism denies the existence of things such as souls, spirits or any deity. Claiming that all life arose through purposeless accidental means, materialism is associated with belief systems such as Darwinism (the idea that all life descended from a common ancestor, through unguided natural processes), and also the idea that the human mind is merely a product of the brain, or the same thing as the brain or brain processes. 

Having taken root in many universities and colleges, materialism is rather like a mighty castle. But what built so mighty a castle? What is it some series of great discoveries that established such an ideological edifice? There never was any such series of discoveries. Darwinists can point to no experiment or observation which ever proved the idea of macroevolution, the claim that one species evolved into some drastically different species. Darwinists can point to no fossil discovery that ever showed the truth of Darwinist claims. When they try to do such a thing, the results they offer are meager. For example, the famous set of bones called the Lucy skeleton was a set of bone fragments scattered over many square meters, which were arbitrarily arranged as if they were parts of a single skeleton, even though we do not know whether they ever came from a single organism. There was never any clear story told by such fragments. 

A very big discovery was the discovery that DNA contains information specifying which amino acids make up particular proteins in the human body, using a simple system of representation called the genetic code. This discovery occurred in about the middle of the twentieth century. Materialists tried their hardest to portray discoveries about DNA as discoveries supporting Darwinism. Their claims along these lines were all centered on the idea that DNA was a blueprint specifying how to make an organism.  Around 1950 materialists started to tell us that evolution occurred because random mutations made changes in a blueprint for making organisms stored in DNA.  This was the central idea of what was called Neo-Darwinism  or "the Modern Synthesis."  

But it was all a great big lie. DNA has no specification for making an organism, and no specification for anatomy. DNA does not even specify how to make any of the more than 200 types of cells in the human body. DNA does not even specify how to make any of the organelles that are the building blocks of cells.  DNA also does not specify how to make the protein complexes that are the building blocks of organelles.  DNA merely specifies very low-level information such as which amino acids make up a particular protein. The chart below tells us the truth about this matter:

Far from being discoveries that backed up the claims of materialism, the biological discoveries of the mid-20th century and early 21st-century were actually discoveries that enormously defied the claims of materialism. It was discovered that humans have more than 20,000 types of protein molecules, with most of these types being types of very complex inventions requiring a special arrangement of hundreds of amino acid parts. The average protein molecule has more than 400 well-arranged amino parts, and requires more than half of this special arrangement to exist in order for the protein molecule to be functional. Protein molecules are very sensitive to small changes. You can read five quotes by scientists discussing this fragility of protein molecules in the section "The Fragility of Fine-Tuned Protein Molecules" in my post here.  For example, on page 123 of his work "The triple helix : gene, organism, and environment," evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin confessed this: "It seems clear that even the smallest change in the sequence of amino acids of proteins usually has a deleterious effect on the physiology and metabolism of organisms."  The existence of so-many very-hard-to-achieve types of molecular inventions in every body cast the greatest doubt on all claims of unguided biological origins.  

Moreover, no anatomy specification was found anywhere in DNA, leaving the origination of every mammal body as a great mystery that materialism had no answer for. DNA does not even specify how to make any type of cell. So how does a speck-sized zygote progress to become the vast organization of a human body? Materialists had no credible tale to tell to explain such a miracle of organization, and resorted to a lie to cover the shortfall: the lie that DNA is a body blueprint. 

In the years between 1950 and 2023, neuroscientists around the world eagerly tried to back up their claims that the brain is the source of the mind and the storage place of memory. They found no robust evidence to back up such claims. Despite developing microscopes vastly more powerful than those used to discover the genetic code around 1950, scientists were unable to find in brains any memories  that could be read by microscopic examination. There were no successful attempts to discover a neural basis for thinking, imagination, self-hood, memory formation, 50-year memory preservation and instant memory recall.  While learning more about the brain, scientists discovered extremely important neural shortfalls that tend to rule out claims that the brain is the source of the human mind.  Such shortfalls included the short lifespans of the protein molecules that make up synapses and neurons (two weeks or less),  the unreliable transmission of signals across chemical synapses (with a transmission likelihood of only 50% or less), multiple types of severe signal noise in the brain, and the complete lack of any addressing system or indexing system in the brain that could help to explain the wonder of instant human recall.  You can read about 11 such neural shortfalls in my post here. 

So there were no great discoveries that built the mighty castle of materialism.  But there was something else that was the main factor behind the rise of modern materialism: various forms of misleading speech and deception. The mighty castle of materialism was built from lies and deceit, built upon a host of misrepresentations and misleading equivocations and deceptions and word tricks, large and small. 

Below is a list of some of these misrepresentations and deceptions and word tricks that helped build the great academia castle of materialism:

• More than 160 years of using the misleading phrase "natural selection," which does not actually refer to any selection (selection is a word meaning a choice by a conscious agent). Darwin himself in a letter to Charles Lyell dated June 6, 1860 said, "I suppose  'natural selection' was a bad term ; but to change it now, I think, would make confusion worse confounded." Darwin wrote in 1869,  "In the literal sense of the word, no doubt, natural selection is a false term."
• The use of doubly-deceptive phrases such as "selection pressure," a reputed effect that does not actually involve either selection or pressure. 
• The very massive current occurrence of misleading university press releases, very often announcing new research and making claims about such research not matching anything shown by the research (with the press release claims very often not matching anything even claimed in the corresponding scientific paper). 
• The extensive use of deceptive brain scan visuals, which "lie with colors" by using misleading coloring effects in which very tiny brain activity differences are depicted in bright colors, leading people to think that particular regions of the brain "light up" and are much more active during certain cognitive activities, when in reality the difference is only about 1 part in 200 (the type of difference we might expect from random fluctuations, even if brains do not produce minds and do not store memories). 
• Ever-occurring misrepresentations in which it is claimed that brain scans (done through fMRI machines) are measuring brain activity, a claim that is not correct because such scans  merely tells us about blood flow in the brain, and do not measure an intensity of the chemical or electrical signals that are at the core of brain activity. 
• The massive repetition of enormous deceits about DNA, genomes and genes, with endless repeats of the strategically motivated false claim that DNA, genomes or genes contain a blueprint, recipe, program or specification for making a human body,  an idea that is untrue because  DNA, genomes and genes merely specify low-level chemical information such as which amino acids make up proteins, and do not specify any anatomy structures or even how to build any type of organ or cell. 
• Extremely misleading experimental studies that try to fool people into thinking that you can tell what a person was thinking or hearing or seeing by scanning his brain. The type of "smoke and mirrors" trick that typically goes on is that the study involves both brain scanning and also the use of AI system or databases or data backdoors, and the prediction of what the person was thinking, hearing or seeing usually is powered mainly by such things that are not the brain scans.  
• The use of enormously deceptive claims that there is no fundamental difference between the minds of humans and animals, or only quantitative differences.
• Misrepresentations by editors in which they incorrectly describe both the scope and the findings of investigations they have run regarding paranormal phenomena. 
• The frequent use of misleading language trying to make animals sound like they have minds rather like humans, and trying to make humans sound like beings who have minds like animals. 
• Misleading equivocations involving the word "evolution" that shift between four different definitions of evolution, switching between defining evolution as (1) mere gene pool variation; (2) macroevolution (dramatic anatomical transformations such as dinosaurs turning into birds); (3) common descent (the idea that all organisms are descendants of the same ancestor), or (4) the claim that all earthly organisms have natural accidental origins  (the factuality of the first definition being used to "prove" the correctness of the three vastly more presumptuous definitions, none of which involve things proven or observed). 
• Misleading equivocations involving the words "variant" and "variations" that switch around between mere assertions of variations in the size, weight and health of some organism to assertions that nature produces "variants" that involve dramatic new features (something not well-observed in the study of any generation of organisms).
• The frequent use of misleading cell diagrams that depict cells as being thousands of times simpler than they are. A Nature article says that "textbook depictions of the cell’s innards have changed little since 1896," and quotes a scientist saying, "Nothing is drawn the way the cell actually looks."
• Frequent misleading uses of the term "building blocks of life," which include calling biologically irrelevant molecules not used by living things "building blocks of life" (as in this article), and also referring to amino acids as "building blocks of life" (a misleading term because building blocks do not have to be used in any particular sequence, but amino acids only make proteins when they are arranged in very special sequences as special as the letter sequences needed to make intelligible paragraphs), and also calling cells the "building blocks of life" (a very misleading claim because cells are enormously complex internally dynamic structures, unlike building blocks, which are static and very simple structures, simply rectangular prisms of clay). 
• Misleading claims that "trees of life" (speculative social constructs of analysts made after countless arbitrary analysis choices) are "yielded" or "produced" by genomes, things that do not naturally tell any story about a "tree of life."  
• Innumerable appeals to a "primordial soup" claimed to exist billions of years ago, one supposedly filled with the lowest building blocks of life, despite a lack of evidence that any such thing ever existed, and despite the failure to produce any such soup in any experiments realistically simulating the early Earth. 
• Frequent misleading uses of the phrase "body plan," in which a body plan is strangely defined as the mere rough shape of all organisms in the same phylum, despite the term suggesting something vastly different: a blueprint for how to build the whole structure of an organism. 
• The massive occurrence in scientific papers of inaccurate citations, claiming that some paper showed or supported some claim that it never showed or supported, typically made by scientists who never read the paper they are citing (a scientific paper estimated that only 20% of people citing a scientific paper actually read the paper they are citing). 
• Inaccurate descriptions of what was stated by people who were brain zapped to try to produce an out-of-body experience, in which the subjects hesitating and ambiguous responses (often in response to "leading" questions) are described as reports of an out-of-body experience, when such a report was not given by the subject. 
• The very frequent use of misleading analogies, such as comparing Darwinian evolution to a tinkerer (a tinkerer is a conscious agent willfully attempting to improve something by trial and error, and evolution is no such thing). 
• Misstatements about the complexity of protein molecules,  such as documented here and here and here,  such as when an author claims that a typical protein molecule involves only about 100 amino acids, when the median number of amino acids in a human protein molecule is about 431, exponentially harder to achieve than merely 100. 
• Deception by skeptics (documented on page 353 of the document here) in which experiments they do producing compelling evidence for ESP are misrepresented as failing results, by the use of misleading data exclusion tricks in which much of the relevant evidence is arbitrarily thrown away. 
• The frequent use of misleading language designed to "sweep under the rug" the vast levels of organization and purposeful molecular machinery in organisms, such as language describing humans as "bags of chemicals" or "star stuff." 
• Deceptive appeals to artificial selection (a purposeful guidance of breeding) to try to support claims about so-called "natural selection" (claimed to involve no purposeful agency).
• Frequent misleading uses of the term "early human" to describe long-extinct organisms without any evidence to show that such organisms had any of the defining characteristics of humans (such as language and the ability to use symbols). 
• Outright lies by scientists about what they saw when they witnessed the paranormal, such as the well-documented case of lying by the physicist Sir David Brewster (discussed here). 
• Frequent claims that certain parts of the human body are "vestigial structures" with no current use, despite evidence that such structures do actually have a function. 
• Frequent profoundly misleading claims or insinuations that the origination of life from non-life merely requires "the right ingredients," as if you could get life from non-life by just dumping in some ingredients like someone making a soup. 
• Equally misleading claims (ignoring the state of vast organization required for even the simplest living thing) that there could have been some lightning bolt "spark that started life on Earth." 
• Extremely misleading statements that Darwinian evolution is not random, evoking some special, uncommon definition of the word "random" different from the normal definition of that term: "happening, done, or chosen by chance rather than according to a plan."
• Extremely misleading language in which non-biological reactions in lifeless chemicals are referred to as "metabolism" (contrary to the definition of metabolism, which is chemical reactions required for the maintenance of living thing), used for the sake of deceptively blurring the difference between life and lifeless chemicals.
• Many decades of extremely misleading claims of universal acceptance or near-universal acceptance of Darwinist dogma or other materialist dogmas, claims not well-established by secret ballot opinion polls (the only reliable way to measure the opinion of scientists), and contrary to the published opinions of experts rejecting such dogmas. 
• Misrepresentations by skeptics and psychologists about how successful ESP and clairvoyance experiments were conducted, inaccurately describing how such research was conducted (a prominent example is documented in the paper here by a Yale psychologist). 
• Extremely misleading claims in which mere gene pool fluctuations are referred to as evolution. A biologist complains about such deceits on the page here, noting that it is often claimed that bacteria are "evolving very quickly," and saying emphatically that "this is not true" because "for millions, or even billions of years, bacteria have not transgressed the structural frame within which they have always fluctuated, and still do."
• Misleading claims that when scientists say something is a theory, it means it is well-established (a claim that can be refuted by many examples, such as the common example of the term "string theory" to describe a completely unsubstantiated type of physicist speculation).
• Very frequent misleading characterizations of Darwinism nonbelievers, often involving attempts to insinuate people making no reference to scriptures are fundamentalists.
• Deceptive papers in which purely software implementations are passed off as things that help to explain human memory, by means of outrageous language abuses in which sections or layers of software code are improperly given anatomical names corresponding to parts of the human brain, and in which tricky equivocation occurs involving mixing up the human definition of memory (involving mental experiences) and the computer definition of memory (not involving mental experiences). 
• Deceptive claims about chance protein evolution, such as the assertion by one authority that if you have "trillions" of random protein molecules you can get "any function you want" (because the average amino acid length of a human protein is more than 400 amino acids, and because there are 20 possible amino acids in each position of a protein, such a statement underestimated by about 10 to the 500th power the difficulty of getting by chance "any function you want"). 
• Misleading language about natural history, such as failing to describe enormous leaps of organization and complexity as very complex innovations, but merely describing them as "variants" or "diversification."
• Misleading language using the phrase "missing link," often referring to things that are not credible evolutionary missing links, such as claiming that a type of dinosaur is a missing link between dinosaurs and birds, because it has a triangular membrane on its front similar to a triangular membrane on the back of birds.
• Misleading claims that evolution might have occurred before life existed, claims evoking a special use of the word "evolution" very different from  normal definitions. 
• A very large number of misstatements and misrepresentations by psychiatrists, very carefully documented in Peter Gøtzsche’s "Critical Psychiatry Textbook" that can be read here, with the misstatements often occurring to try to bolster weakly supported or unfounded claims that various types of mental illness are caused by brain states rather than life histories or socioeconomic conditions or personal life conditions. 
• The massive current occurrence of both misleading titles in scientific papers and misleading claims in scientific paper abstracts, with paper titles very commonly making claims not matching anything established by the research in the main body of the paper, and abstracts also frequently claiming the research showed something it failed to show. 
• A massive repetition by Darwinists of a doubtful claim that human genomes and chimp genomes are 98% or 98.6% the same, ignoring a 2005 paper with the title "Eighty percent of proteins are different between humans and chimpanzees." A 2021 study found that "1.5% to 7% of the human genome is unique to Homo sapiens," suggesting the claim of 98% similarity was probably in error. A 2002 paper is entitled "Divergence between samples of chimpanzee and human DNA sequences is 5%, counting indels." 
• Seventy years of false claims about the Miller-Urey experiment, wrongly suggesting the experiment (using the wrong gases to simulate the Earth's early atmosphere and involving a very special glass apparatus unlike anything that would have been available billions of years ago) did something to show that amino acids would have been common billions of years ago. 
• Deceptive claims in which attempts to reproduce the Miller-Urey experiment using a more realistic blend of gases are claimed to have produced "building blocks of life," even though the attempts failed to produce any such thing, not even producing amino acids. 
• Innumerable misleading articles announcing an observation in space or a meteorite of some building block of a building block of a building block of one-celled life, and suggesting this supports ideas of abiogenesis (an unguided origin of life), while failing to tell us that the reported observation was some negligible amount such as a few parts in a billion.   
• Chicanery, shenanigans and misrepresentations involving fossils, often including gluing together (using a mixture such as superglue and baking soda) fossil fragments not known to be from one organism and claiming they are from a single organism, and often involving the display of entirely artificial "fossil exhibits" involving no real fossils, with such deceits massively displayed in natural history museums. 
• Visual misrepresentations of organisms, such as a visual attempting to persuade us that giraffes could have easily evolved from okapi, and depicting okapi as being half the height of giraffes (they are actually only about a third the height of giraffes). 
• Frequent appeals to an utterly erroneous principle that any fantastically improbable bonanza of luck can happen as long as there are millions of years of chance events. 
• Frequent appeals to a "many random trials equals some successes" principle that is not generally true (whenever the chance of something happening is sufficiently low, we should expect no successes, even if there are a near-infinite number of random trials). 
• Extremely misleading statements about the quality of evidence for spiritual and psychical phenomena that tend to contradict Darwinist explanations, typically made by people who have never seriously studied such evidence, often claiming very large bodies of solid evidence gathered over decades or centuries are "no evidence," combined with misleading stereotypical, mudslinging or gaslighting characterizations of the people who have reported such phenomena.
• Deceptive drawings of embryos such as used by Darwinist zealot Ernst Haeckel, to try to create some impression that a study of embryos supports Darwinist claims, and the use of such drawings in Darwinist literature to the present day, decades after they had been debunked.  
• The repetition for many decades of false claims by biologists that the developing human embryo passes through a fish-like stage, along with claims that this helps show that humans are descended from fish, the alleged resemblances being merely pareidolia "Jesus in my toast" types of claims.
• Many decades of erroneous claims about origin-of-life studies, which have not made any substantial progress in explaining an origin of life from non-life. 
• Doubly-misleading language in which experiments involving deliberate continuous artificial selection by humans and producing mere disorganized clumps of cells are referred to as examples of "multicellularity evolution," when they are neither multicellularity (examples of organisms with many cells) nor natural evolution.  
• Misleading language about the origin of life, such as referring to amino acids as "seeds of life," which is as misleading as saying bricks are the seeds of cathedrals. 
• Questionable research practices: a survey of evolutionary biologists and ecologists reported that "around 64% of surveyed researchers reported they had at least once failed to report results because they were not statistically significant (cherry picking); 42% had collected more data after inspecting whether results were statistically significant (a form of p hacking) and 51% had reported an unexpected finding as though it had been hypothesized from the start (HARKing)."
• The very frequent use by natural history museums of "fossil exhibits" that are entirely plastic, plaster or fiberglass, with countless visitors getting the idea that such things were real fossils (read here for details).
• The repetition by science writers (and sometimes by neuroscientists) of false claims that certain people who died silently had brain activity that can help explain near-death experiences, despite there being no evidence such persons were conscious, and despite evidence showing that the electrical activity in the brains of such persons disappeared at the same time their hearts stopped (contrary to such claims). 
• Periodically repeating articles trying to suggest that macroevolution (something we cannot observe in the current world) is still occurring, articles with titles such as "Why do animals keep evolving into crabs?" -- titles that are misleading because they refer to speculations about events claimed to have occurred many millions of years ago. 
• The evocation of enormously implausible tales such as the tale of monkeys rafting across the Atlantic oceans millions of years ago, with such wild tales described as facts. 
• Frequent evocation of an utterly fallacious principle which one Darwinist evoked by saying "let us suppose instead that each step made in the good direction provides a small advantage in terms of survival or fecundity to the being that makes it," a principle extremely erroneous because improvements in survival or fecundity (reproduction) almost always require many coordinated changes before any such advantage is achieved. 
• Very frequent misleading claims using the ambiguous and imprecise term "consensus," a term with multiple meanings (including unanimity of opinion or a mere majority opinion), with the claims misleadingly suggesting that scientists agree about matters such as whether Darwinism explains the complexity of the biosphere and matters such as a natural origins of humans and a brain cause of minds, even though there is no good evidence scientists agree about such matters, and some polls and some long "dissenter lists" suggesting they do not agree about such matters, along with very many candid confessions statements by scientists sounding like the statements someone would make if he had little or no confidence about such matters (see here for a very long set of such statements by scientists). 
• Decades of poor research practices in neuroscience, such as the use of way-too-small sample sizes of fewer than ten subjects, failure to follow blinding protocols, lack of pre-registration, and the use of an unreliable "see-whatever-you-want-to-see" method for trying to measure animal recollection ("freezing behavior" estimation) rather than the reliable measurement techniques discussed here.  
• Passing off deliberately faked fossils as important evidence of evolution (such as the fraudulent Piltdown Man fossil which for forty years was hailed as a fossil of key significance). 
• The use for many decades of the misleading term "organic molecules," using a terminology in which any and all molecules containing carbon are called "organic," even when the molecules are not used by any living things (a habit that has fueled innumerable misleading science stories in which people are led to believe that the discovery of biologically irrelevant molecules have some biological significance).  
• The repetition by neuroscientists of utterly absurd claims that it takes hours for a human to form a long-lasting memory, claims that are contrary to every person's experience, which is that permanent memories can form instantly, with the claims being made because the people making such claims want us to believe that memories are formed through synapse strengthening known to take at least hours.  
• The frequent appearance of highly speculative "tree of evolution" charts not labeled as speculative, and wrongly suggesting some consensus opinion exists about some detailed evolutionary ancestry scenario for humans, with the great variation in the details of such charts showing that no such consensus exists.
• The frequent appearance of highly speculative "brain functional map" charts suggesting some knowledge that particular parts of the brain produce cognitive functions, suggestions that are unwarranted (see here for evidence against one of the standard elements of such charts). 
• The use of deceptive definitions of "cognition" or "cognitive" while claiming that mere microscopic chemistry or one-celled life could have been cognitive, while trying to suggest such primitive beginnings could have been a "root of cognition" or "rudimentary cognition" -- definitions that define cognition as less than how dictionaries commonly define it: "the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses."
• The use of misleading opinion survey tactics to try to get people to believe that many more people believe in Darwinist ideas than the actual number of people who have such beliefs, tactics that include carefully worded poll questions asked about whether you believe that man has "evolved over time," with any yes answer being depicted as support for the Darwinist account of unguided human origins (even though you can believe humans have evolved without believing in such an account), and also misleading poll result summaries in which people merely saying that they somewhat agree with some Darwinist claim being described as people who agree with that claim (with no mention being made of the use of "somewhat" in their poll answer). 
• The repeated appearance on "science news" pages of a groundless "fake news" claim that a chimpanzee long ago gave birth to a baby that was half-human and half chimp, a claim based on the flimsiest evidence, some scientist claiming that he heard long ago from some other scientist that a rumor about this was true. 
• The use of deception and/or the withholding of key facts in discussing peppered moth evidence and finch beak evidence for Darwinian evolution, described in detail in the article here.  
• Grossly untrue claims about what is interstellar space, such as the glaring falsehood recently told by an astronomer saying that there "seems to be no limit" to the degree of chemical complexity that interstellar space can produce (the reality is that no one has ever found in interstellar space any molecule even a hundredth as complex as the more complex protein molecules in human bodies). 
• The extremely severe lie by materialists that a split-brain operation (severing the nerve fibers connecting the two hemispheres of the brain) results in two separate human minds, contrary to the facts that no such thing occurs, and that such an operation leaves people with a single self.   
• The telling of the utterly false claim that without the theory of evolution, there would be no modern medicine such as vaccines (evolutionary theory has actually played almost no role in the rise of modern medicine, and medicine would be just as advanced if no such theory had ever arisen). 
• The use in neuroscience experiments of tortuous extremely convoluted analysis pathways in which brain scan data or biological data is passed through a series of programming iterations, often involving poorly documented gobbledygook code that no one but the original programmer could have ever understood, with the effect of the rigmarole iterations being some "black box" manipulation that not even the original programmer can now understand, and the resulting mess (perhaps having some desired pattern) being passed off as some enhancement of the original data, even though there is every season to suspect the result is a corruption, distortion or contortion of the original data. 
• The telling of the huge lie that eukaryotic cells were "the first cells to get organized," a fiction contrary to the fact that even the simplest self-reproducing prokaryotic cell requires a very high state of organization requiring a very special arrangement of hundreds of types of proteins, each requiring an average of hundreds of very well-arranged amino acids.
• The telling of the huge deceit that "everything that exists, everything that will exist, everything that does not exist and will not exist — was decided" in the first three minutes of the universe (very far from predicting any such thing as the appearance of humans, the Big Bang theory does not even predict a universe like ours, as it predicts a universe with equal amounts of matter and antimatter). 

If you strip away all the digressions and distractions and deceptions and diversions and misdirection and paper-padding and "covering of tracks" through obfuscation and thick jargon, and if you look carefully at the core ideas behind today's materialism, you will find that these ideas are very slight ideas with the intellectual weight of fortune-cookie slogans, ideas such as "lucky changes can happen, and luck can accumulate." These core ideas of materialism are contradicted by various mountains of evidence, such as the evidence for extremely precise fine-tuning in the laws and fundamental constants of physics and very precise fine-tuning in the expansion rate of the early universe, the evidence for very precise fine-tuning in thousands of types of marvels-of-engineering molecular machines within the bodies of organisms, the evidence for undisputed commonplace mental phenomena that cannot be credibly explained by brain activity,  and the mountainous evidence for paranormal psychical phenomena gathered for nearly two hundred years, often by very distinguished and credible researchers. How was it that the core ideas of materialism (so very slight and so massively contradicted by so much evidence)  were ever able to rise to the top in academia? Long story short, it was because for many decades materialists lied like crazy all over the place and practiced dozens of types of deceits large and small.

Major Journal Suggests 3% of Biology Papers Look Like Paper Mill Junk

In three previous posts on this blog I discussed the issue of fraud in biology research. The posts were these:

• Study Suggests Massive Faking in Neuroscience Papers
• They're Calling It a Huge Memory Research Fraud, But Is It Only the Tip of the Iceberg?
• Fraud and Misconduct Are Not Very Rare in Biology

A recent article in the journal Nature asks "How big is science's fake-paper problem?"  We read this:

"An unpublished analysis shared with Nature suggests that over the past two decades, more than 400,000 research articles have been published that show strong textual similarities to known studies produced by paper mills. Around 70,000 of these were published last year alone (see ‘The paper-mill problem’). The analysis estimates that 1.5–2% of all scientific papers published in 2022 closely resemble paper-mill works. Among biology and medicine papers, the rate rises to 3%."

What's so bad if a scientific paper resembles the product of a paper mill? The article gives us a bit of a clue, without explaining it very well. It says, "Paper-mill studies are produced in large batches at speed, and they often follow specific templates, with the occasional word or image swapped." The average reader will have no idea of what this refers to, so let me explain. 

In computer programming a template is some body of text containing placeholders. The template can be used to make many different versions of a narrative, by simply replacing the placeholders with specific examples.  For example, the page here gives us a template for producing a press release announcing some scientific research. The template starts out like this:

"Scientists today announced that they are the first to successfully demonstrate SCIENTIFIC FINDING. This has long been one of the holy grails of SCIENTIFIC FIELD. 'This finding radically alters our understanding of the field, to say the least,' says FIRST AUTHOR, a SCIENTIFIC FIELDologist from INSTITUTION who led the research. 'We were stunned when we made the discovery. For a few minutes we just didn’t believe what we were seeing,'  says FIRST AUTHOR, then SECOND AUTHOR (a student of FIRST AUTHOR) yelled "We’ve done it!" and we started dancing around the LAB/OBSERVATORY/FIELD SITE. It was very exciting.”

If you are writing a scientific press release, you could manually replace the capitalized phrases to match some new research.  But templates such as these can also be inputs to computer programs. Computer programs can generate countless different versions of the narratives in a template, by doing search and replace of the capitalized words. 

So, for example, imagine you want 10,000 different versions of the story below:

"MALE HUMAN ONE had a good life, but he knew that something was missing. He tried using dating apps to meet Miss Right, but somehow it never worked out. But one day MALE HUMAN ONE had a stroke of luck.  He was at the BUSINESS PLACE ONE where he was a regular customer. He looked to his left, and was stunned by the beauty of a female he had never met before: FEMALE HUMAN ONE. MALE HUMAN ONE felt sure that he wanted to strike up a conversation with the beautiful stranger, but he couldn't think of what to say. He thought of saying TRITE OVERUSED PICKUP LINE, but thought that would never work.  Suddenly, he had a good idea. Walking up to the stranger he said, ORIGINAL WITTY ICE-BREAKING LINE." 

It would be very easy to write a computer program that generated 10,000 different versions of this story.  The computer program could just run in a loop, and thousands of times replace the phrases MALE HUMAN ONE, FEMALE HUMAN ONE and BUSINESS PLACE ONE with items randomly extracted from a list, or randomly generated. Similarly, the program could thousands of times replace TRITE OVERUSED PICKUP LINE with an item randomly chosen from a list of such lines, and replace ORIGINAL WITTY ICE-BREAKING LINE with  with an item randomly chosen from a list of such lines. 

It seems that paper mills are doing something similar, to generate phony scientific papers, which amount to phony narratives. We hear in the Nature article that some machine-learning software is being used to look for papers that are suspected products of paper mills. An estimate has been produced that 3% of the biology and medicine papers from recent years are fake papers produced by paper mills. This 3% figure is higher than for any of the other fields mentioned. We read this: "A June 2022 report by the Committee on Publication Ethics, based in Eastleigh, UK, said that for most journals, 2% of submitted papers are likely to have come from paper mills, and the figure could be higher than 40% for some."

Why would such wrongdoing occur? If you are a scientist living in a "publish or perish" culture, it may be expected that you will author a certain number of papers each year. There is an effect called publication bias, in which scientific journals prefer to publish papers reporting positive results. If you are a scientist doing experiments that have recently produced only null results, you may resort to paying some paper mill to get some result that will have a higher chance of getting published. The paper mill companies are typically in foreign countries, and have discreet names such as Suichow Editorial Services. 

A researcher named Bernhard A. Sabel has developed what he thinks is a pretty simple way to spot paper mill papers in biology and medicine: look for papers which have author email addresses that are private emails or hospital emails rather than college or university emails such as joesmith@harvard.com. The technique of Sabel is entirely different from the technique mentioned at the beginning of this post. 

The latest version of a paper by Sabel describes the paper mill industry:

"The major source of fake publications are 1,000+ 'academic support' agencies – so-called 'paper mills' – located mainly in China, India, Russia, UK, and USA (Abalkina, 2021; Else, 2021; Pérez-Neri et al., 2022). Paper mills advertise writing and editing services via the internet and charge hefty fees to produce and publish fake articles in journals listed in the Science Citation Index (SCI) (Christopher, 2021; Else, 2022). Their services include manuscript production based on fabricated data, figures, tables, and text semi-automatically generated using artificial intelligence (AI). Manuscripts are subsequently edited by an army of scientifically trained professionals and ghostwriters." 

Sabel mentions a case of a paper mill that emailed a scientific journal offering a sum of $1000 if the journal published one of the papers the paper mill (calling itself an editorial services firm) helped to produce. 

A paper by Sabel states this:

"More than 1,000 paper mills openly advertise their services on Baidu and Google to 'help prepare' academic term papers, dissertations, and articles intended for SCI publications. Most paper mills are located in China, India, UK, and USA, and some are multinational. They use sophisticated, state-of-the-art AI-supported text generation, data and statistical manipulation and fabrication technologies, image and text pirating, and gift or purchased authorships. Paper mills fully prepare – and some guarantee –publication in an SCI journal and charge hefty fees ($1,000-$25,000; in Russia: $5,000) (Chawla, 2022) depending on the specific services ordered (topic, impact factor of target journal, with/without faking data by fake 'experimentation')" 

Sabel estimates that paper mills are a major business, earning a revenue of about a billion dollars per year.  He estimates that close to 150,000 papers are questionable papers with red flags indicating possible paper mill authorship.  

It's so much easier when the "experiments" are all fake

I would imagine that experimental neuroscience papers are some of the easiest types of science papers for paper mills to fake. Many experimental neuroscience papers follow a very similar approach. It's as if very many experimental neuroscientists lack the imagination to think up new types of neuroscience experiment designs, and as if such neuroscientists are just borrowing the design structure from previous experiments (which often have very poor experimental designs).  With such repetition occurring massively, it is easier for paper mills to just detect some design pattern, and use it as a kind of cookie cutter, duplicating most of the text and giving it some novelty by using search-and-replace algorithms in which placeholder text is replaced with phrases chosen from a list.  

What is described above is an example of what can be called commodification corruption. Commodification is when something becomes a commodity to be bought, sold and exchanged in an economic system, and the term has a connotation of something that should not have become a mere commodity becoming a commodity. In the current "publish or perish" culture of academia, two of the biggest commodities may be paper counts (a number supposedly indicating how many papers a scientist has written) and citation counts (a number of times a scientist's papers have been cited).  These metrics are used to judge the performance of scientists. Lots of corruption is occurring in connection with such commodification. Such commodification corruption includes the following:

(1) A large fraction of neuroscientists are producing junk science papers guilty of Questionable Research Practices, with such "quick and dirty" studies occurring largely because an easiest path is being taken for a scientist to increase his "paper count" supposedly listing how many papers he has written. 

(2) Many scientists who did not materially participate in producing a scientific paper are being listed as co-authors (a practice sometimes called "guest authorship"), both to increase "paper counts" of scientists, and to increase the chance of a paper getting published. Such "guest authorship" gifts (given to professors in the same department as the real paper authors) are also given as a kind of bribe to increase the promotion prospects of those granting the gift. 

(3) Many scientists are engaging in appalling lying by claiming they authored some particular number of papers, when they were merely one of the listed authors of most of such papers. For example, if a scientist was the sole author of 10 papers, and was merely one of the authors of 50 other papers (50 papers having an average of 7 authors each), it is very misleading for such a scientist to describe himself as the author of 60 papers (his work being equivalent to being the sole author of merely about 17 papers). 

(4) Scientists are massively citing their own papers (a practice called self-citation), and are citing the papers of their friends or associates while expecting the favor to be returned, in an "old boy network" that can be described as "I'll rub your back if you rub mine." 

(5) Some scientists are paying paper mills (described above) to produce fake papers, for the sake of increasing their "paper count" supposedly listing how many papers they published. 

(6) Quite a few papers are being partially or mostly "ghost written" by employees of pharmaceutical companies or biotech companies, who are paid to produce results (accurate or not) that will tend to raise the stock price of such companies (such as claiming a success for one of the company's pills). Scientists listed as co-authors of such papers (who often did little or nothing to produce them) are often investors in such stocks, and stand to gain from both an increase in their "paper counts," and an increase in the value of their investments. 

Corruption almost inevitably follows commodification.  Something else that has been commodified in the world of science is the production of exaggerated or inaccurate science news stories that serve as clickbait that is highly profitable for parties such as web pages running ads on the web pages that you reach after clicking on some clickbait.  The corruption behind that is very large, and discussed here. We are now pretty much in a territory of "you can't trust the science news headlines," largely because of all the clickbait going on.  

Today on my I-Pad I am reading a story about a neuroscientist who supposedly received many millions in federal funding. The story suggests massive wrongdoing in his research, and suggests that scientists knew about this for years, but were reluctant to blow the whistle because they thought it might harm their careers. We can only imagine how much "turn a blind eye" stuff is going on to help enable some scientists to put fake paper-mill science articles on their resumes, and also poorly designed junk science articles or articles they were not involved in but were listed as co-authors. It sounds like what goes on in the movie industry, where people often turn a blind eye to "casting couch" abuses, not wanting to be called "trouble makers" after they blew a whistle by complaining to the press. 

They Stored and Studied Thousands of Brains, But Still Failed to Show Brains Store Memories

The failure of scientists to find any memories by the microscopic examination of brain tissue is one of the strongest reasons for rejecting claims that the human brain stores memories. There is encoded genetic information in the nucleus of most cells, information which is pretty much the same in every cell, and is not memory information. That information was discovered around 1953. Since 1953 our technology has grown enormously. But there is still not a single case of anyone ever reading a memory from any brain (human or animal) outside of his own body. Scientists have never been able to read a memory by scanning with a microscope a living person's brain, or scanning some brain tissue. Do not be fooled by press accounts that sometimes grossly exaggerate scientific experiments, and give us headlines such as “Scientists invent mind-reading device.” Such experiments (typically trying to read neural correlates of visual perception) do not actually involve thought reading, and do not at all involve a reading of stored information in the brain.

When reminded of the non-existence of claims to have read memory information from human tissue by microscopic methods, someone might respond like this: 

"Well, the problem is that scientists don't have time to study a brain after someone dies, because the body is buried or cremated. If scientists were able to spend lots of time studying the brains of people who had just died, they would probably be able to find memories in the brains of dead people."

But this claim is not correct. There actually exists an institute of scientists devoted to studying the brains of dead people. And they have had over 4000 brains to study, mostly cases of brains that were donated very soon after someone died, and quickly preserved. 

The institute is called the Lieber Institute, and its web site is here. The site says that the  Lieber Institute has 48,000 square feet of laboratory space at Johns Hopkins University.  The Lieber Institute claims to have a repository of about 4000 brains.  On another page of the institute, we are told, "Each brain is donated by a bereaved family just hours after the loss of their loved one." A Washington Post article  describes  a guy working for that institute who has the job of calling the families of people who just died (often from suicide), asking them for the brain of the dead person to be donated. We are told such requests must occur very quickly. The article says this guy "has a small window of time in which to get that consent — just one to three hours." The Post story says, "Researchers try to obtain brains within 24 to 36 hours." We are told the brains are "flash frozen."

So we have a modern institute with 4000 brains frozen within about a day after death.  The Lieber Institute has been studying such brains for about a decade, mainly for the purpose for trying to find links between brain states and mental illness. The work of the Lieber Institute has involved a huge amount of studying brains frozen in the state they were put in within a day after death. You would think that if human brains stored memories, that by now such an institute would have been able to find abundant evidence of stored memories in brain.  But no such evidence has been found. Nowhere in the 10-year progress report of the Lieber Institute is there any mention of finding any memories in the brains of dead people. 

Could it be that one of the 100 or so publications on the institute's Publications page is one mentioning the finding of a memory stored in the brain? It seems not. Below is a list of all the papers on that page that use the word "memory":

"THE DOPAMINE D5 RECEPTOR IS INVOLVED IN WORKING MEMORY." This is a poorly designed Questionable Research Practices study involving only mice, one using a way-too-small study group size of only eight mice. 

"BRAIN CATECHOL-O-METHYLTRANSFERASE (COMT) INHIBITION BY TOLCAPONE COUNTERACTS RECOGNITION MEMORY DEFICITS IN NORMAL AND CHRONIC PHENCYCLIDINE-TREATED RATS AND IN COMT-VAL TRANSGENIC MICE." This study is another poorly designed Questionable Research Practices study involving only rodents, one using a way-too-small study group size of only six rats. 

"NEUROPROTECTIVE EFFECTS OF DOCOSAHEXAENOIC ACID ON HIPPOCAMPAL CELL DEATH AND LEARNING AND MEMORY IMPAIRMENTS IN A VALPROIC ACID-INDUCED RAT AUTISM MODEL." The paper is behind a paywall, and the abstract does not give any specifics to back up the claim in the title.

"STRONG COMPONENTS OF EPIGENETIC MEMORY IN CULTURED HUMAN FIBROBLASTS RELATED TO SITE OF ORIGIN AND DONOR AGE." The epigenetic "memory" referred to is not actual memory in the sense of being to recall anything. 

"DOPAMINE TRANSPORTER 3′ UTR VNTR MODULATES STRIATAL FUNCTION DURING WORKING MEMORY UPDATING ACROSS THE ADULT AGE SPAN." The study merely did some experiment claiming to show that working memory performance decreases with age, something already known (20-year-olds for example are better at remembering 5 just-mentioned 4-digit numbers than 80-year-olds). 

So based on The Publications page of the site, we should conclude that the Lieber Institute has not been able to find any evidence (through microscopic examination of thousands of brains) that memories are stored in brains. Its scientists have not read one single memory through microscopic examination. The Publications page of the site has no studies using the word "engram," a word sometimes when scientists claim to observe something in a brain they think may be a storage place for memory.  

4000 human brains microscopically studied with state-of-the-art equipment, but no sign was found of any stored human memories. Not even a tiny fragment anywhere.  Not so much as a single bit of brain tissue storing a home address or a telephone number of the name of a historical figure. 

The rationalizations given to explain failures of this type are amusing. It is sometimes claimed that the brain must use some "secret code" to store information, one that humans have not been able to crack. For comparison, the Bletchley Park analysts in England were able in the 1940's to crack the Enigma code used by the Nazis to transmit secret information. That was a code specifically designed to be impossible to decipher by anyone who did not know the secret code. The Bletchley Park analysts were able to crack the Enigma code using only the most primitive predecessors of modern computers.  Can we really imagine that today's scientists would fail to unravel a code used by the brain to store memories,  even though they have microscopes vastly better than those that unraveled the Genetic Code discovered around 1953, and even though they have computers a million times better than the Bletchley Park analysts had? 

It is much more logical and credible to believe that no such memories have been found by examining brains microscopically simply because brains do not store human memories. Nature never told us that brains store memories. It was merely overconfident scientists who told us that, scientists who never had any justification for such a claim. 

It is also sometimes claimed that memories are stored electromagnetically in the brain, the way a computer stores its memories electromagnetically. Some people claim that you can't retrieve memories from dead brains because the memories are fragile electromagnetic things that are lost when you die, in something like the way you may lose something you were writing if someone suddenly turns off your computer. But if memories were stored in the brain electromagnetically, then why would neurologists often use electroshock therapy on people with depression, a "shock their brains with electricity" technique that would destroy all their memories if such memories were stored electromagnetically? And if memories were stored in the brain electromagnetically, would we not expect epileptic patients to lose all of their memories every time they had a major seizure, which is like an electrical storm in the brain? No such thing happens. Severe seizures often are not remembered by patients having them, but there is no effect of someone forgetting his school lessons because he had a major seizure. 

When there is a hard-to-crack code what typically happens is that someone finds undeniable evidence that the code exists and was used, before anyone is able to crack the code. For centuries Egyptologists were unable to crack the code used in hieroglyphics, but they knew during those centuries that the walls of ancient Egyptian sites were using a code that had not yet been deciphered.  Such Egyptologists could see the repetition of symbolic tokens, alerting them that a code was being used.  In the case of the brain, not only can we find through microscopic examination no memories that can be read, but also we can find no indications that any code is being used in the brain other than the genetic code used to store genetic information, not memories. This is a very strong indication that brains do not store memories. 

Elsewhere in the world is an even bigger collection of brains, one that also has failed to substantially support claims of a brain basis for memory storage. The Japan Times tells us this:

" Countless shelves line the walls of a basement at Denmark's University of Odense, holding what is thought to be the world's largest collection of brains. There are 9,479 of the organs, all removed from the corpses of mental health patients over the course of four decades until the 1980s. Preserved in formalin in large white buckets labeled with numbers, the collection was the life's work of prominent Danish psychiatrist Erik Stromgren...The brains were collected after autopsies had been conducted on the bodies of people committed to psychiatric institutes across Denmark. Neither the deceased nor their families were ever asked permission."

We hear not one word about any discovery that came from studying these brains. A web page of the University of Odense describes the collection of brains, but fails to mention any progress that has come from studying the brains.  There is no link to any papers that were produced using such brains. 

There is another brain collection called the Human Brain Collection Core (HBCC). The collection is described here. The collection seems to consist of about 1000 brains, 700 from people who were diagnosed with mental illness. 300 of the brains are from normal people. We seem to have the same kind of method as used by the Lieber Institute. The families of people who recently died are asked to donate the brain of a family members, with a time pressure element of "we must act fast." 

Related to this collection is a "Selected Publications" page, apparently listing the best results obtained from studying these brains. None of the 46 papers reports anything like a discovery of memories by analyzing brain tissue. None of the papers has a title referring to either memory or engrams. 

Despite microscopically studying more than 14,000 brains (a large fraction of which were cryogenically preserved within a day after death), scientists are unable to read any memory from any of these brains, and are also unable to find any evidence of some neural code that could be used to translate learned information into brain states. The brains are saying "storing memories is not something brains do," but our scientists refuse to listen to what the brains are telling them.  

Below is a diagram from the paper "Materials Advances Through Aberration-Corrected Electron Microscopy." We see that since the time the genetic code was discovered about 1953, microscopes have grown very many times more powerful. The A on the left stands for an angstrom, a tenth of a nanometer (that is, a ten-billionth of a meter). 

Currently the most powerful microscopes can see things about 1 angstrom in width, which is a tenth of a nanometer. How does this compare to the sizes of the smallest units in brains? Those sizes are below:

Width of a neuron body (soma): about 100 microns (micrometers), which is about 1,000,000 angstroms.

Width of a synapse: about 20-30 nanometers, about 200-300 angstroms.  

Width of a dendritic spine: about 50 to 200 nanometers, about 500 to 2000 angstroms.

Clearly the resolution of the most powerful microscopes is powerful enough to read memories stored in neurons or synapses, if such memories existed. And more than 10,000 brains have been microscopically studied in recent years. The failure to microscopically read any  memories from human brain tissue is a major reason for thinking that brains do not store human memories.  

Besides failing to find specific memories and items of learned knowledge by microscopically examining brains (such as the information that the New York Yankees belong to the American League of US baseball), scientists can find no evidence of a mechanism for storing learned information in brains.  If such a mechanism existed, its fingerprints would be all over the place. Since humans can learn and remember so many different types of things (sights, sounds, feelings, facts, beliefs, opinions, numbers, smells, tastes, physical pains, physical pleasures, music, quotations, and so forth), any brain mechanism for storing all of these things would have a massive footprint in the brain and in the genome. No sign of any such thing can be found. The workhorses that get things done in the body are proteins, and humans have more than 20,000 types of proteins. No one has ever identified a protein that helps to write a memory of experiences or numbers or words to the brain or neural tissue, in any kind of way that helps explain how memories or knowledge could be stored in brains.  Of course, you can find studies maybe showing that protein XYZ was used when someone learned something, but that does nothing to show a mechanism of memory storage.