Misleading Claims and a Revealing Omission in NatGeo's List of "Biggest Scientific Breakthroughs of the Past 25 Years"

 The National Geographic Society was founded in 1888, and since that year it has published a magazine. For very many years the Society was guilty of promoting racism. In 2018 the Society itself had an issue confessing how racist its past publications were. A 2018 NPR article stated this:

"Editor in Chief Susan Goldberg asked John Edwin Mason, a professor of African history and the history of photography at the University of Virginia, to dive into the magazine's nearly 130-year archive and report back. What Mason found was a long tradition of racism in the magazine's coverage: in its text, its choice of subjects, and in its famed photography.

'[U]ntil the 1970s National Geographic all but ignored people of color who lived in the United States, rarely acknowledging them beyond laborers or domestic workers,' writes Goldberg in the issue's editor letter, where she discusses Mason's findings. 'Meanwhile it pictured 'natives' elsewhere as exotics, famously and frequently unclothed, happy hunters, noble savages—every type of cliché.' "

An example of the racism that National Geographic Magazine promoted is mentioned here: a photo caption in which a particular type of dark-skinned person is described as being lowest in intelligence. For more than 70 years National Geographic Magazine helped encourage misguided ideas that dark-skinned people are inferior or savages. 

National Geographic may have reformed its racism by 2018. But at the magazine there is still another form of stupidity : the stupidity of blind materialism.  For endless decades National Geographic (in its website and magazine) has promoted false or dubious claims about human minds, human bodies, human experiences and human origins. 

For years, National Geographic magazine (and its web site and TV channel) have acted as an uncritical echo chamber for prevailing materialist dogma.  This post sites some inaccurate statements on a National Geographic show about the origin of life.  See this post for a look at a National Geographic show that gave an absurdly biased treatment of a type of paranormal experience.  The Cosmos TV series on the National Geographic channel was an often erring mouthpiece for misguided materialist ideas. The National Geographic show "Brain Games" constantly committed the enormous error of describing any mental human experience as something that is going on in the brain or produced by the brain.  We never hear on National Geographic about the many powerful reasons for doubting claims that human consciousness and thinking are produced by the brain, and for doubting that human memories are stored in the brain.   

A recent National Geographic article is entitled "The Biggest Scientific Breakthroughs of the Last 25 Years -- And a Few to Watch." There are some serious misstatements in the article, and some of the times it boasts about supposed accomplishments that were never actually accomplished. 

The article starts out with a whopper right in in the first listed "breakthrough." The article lists as it first listed breakthrough "The Completion of the Human Genome, and the Advent of Synthetic Life." No actual "synthetic life" has ever been created by scientists. As an example of "synthetic life," the article claims "scientists developed the first synthetic cell in 2010." But we have a link that merely refers us to a paper describing a study that did not actually create any life from scratch. The study merely involved removing genes from a living cell. That is not creating "synthetic life," but merely tinkering with a pre-existing living thing. The paper is entitled "Design and synthesis of a minimal bacterial genome," and can be read here. The paper was promoted with a misleadingly-titled press release entitled "First Minimal Synthetic Bacterial Cell," one prone to create the utterly false impression that a reproducing cell had been produced from scratch. 

What is particularly ironic here is that the false claim that "scientists  developed the first synthetic cell in 2010" tends to create the impression that cells are relatively easy to create from scratch. But the research being referred to told us the exact opposite. After making a long attempt to modify a cell so that it had the smallest possible number of genes and the smallest possible number of types of protein molecules, while still being capable of self-reproduction, the scientists, were still left with a microbe with 475 genes, corresponding to 475 types of proteins. The resulting stripped-down genome still consisted of 530,000 base pairs. The misleadingly-titled press release entitled "First Minimal Synthetic Bacterial Cell" failed to mention this crucial point from the paper. 

Another false claim in the National Geographic article was the claim that the AlphaFold software had solved the protein folding problem. The problem has not at all been solved, and is still one of the biggest unsolved problems in science. 

Protein molecules are three-dimensional structures built from many different amino acid components, usually hundreds or thousands. A fundamental question is: how do protein molecules get their three- dimensional shapes?  This problem is known as the protein folding problem. We might have an answer for this if it happened that each amino acid stored in it three numbers specifying the 3D position that it should go to. We can imagine a setup in which an amino acid would store three different numbers: one representing the X-axis coordinate that the amino acid should exist at, another representing the Y-axis coordinate the amino acid should go to, and a third representing the Z-axis coordinate the amino acid should go to. We can imagine some complicated molecular machinery that would read such numbers, and drag each amino acids to the appropriate X, Y and Z coordinates (a particular point in 3D space) that the amino acid should go to. Under such a system, a 3D protein molecule like the one below might be constructed from a one-dimensional string-like chain of amino acids. 

But that is not at all the way nature works. An amino acid does not store any numbers. An amino acid stores neither 3D coordinate numbers, nor any other type of number. So how do the more than 20,000 types of protein molecules in our bodies get their intricate 3D shapes? That problem is what is called the protein folding problem. 

The AlphaFold software is able to predict the shape of many proteins not by any thermodynamic calculation process  but instead by a frequentist "pattern matching" approach that relies on some vast database of known 3D protein shapes and their corresponding amino acid sequences. In discussions of the protein folding problem, it is very important to not mix up two very different problems:

(1) The protein folding problem, which is the problem of how it is that one-dimensional polypeptide sequences (chains of amino acids) very quickly within organisms fold into a three-dimensional shape needed for the function.

(2) The protein folding prediction problem, which is the problem of what computer techniques can be used to accurately predict the three-dimensional shape of a protein molecule, giving its one-dimensional polypeptide sequence. 

The AlphaFold software has made progress on the second of these problems, not the first.  News reports about the AlphaFold software will often inaccurately describe it as having made progress on the "protein folding problem" (the first of these problems). But such reports should be only reporting that progress has been made on the second of these problems (the protein folding prediction problem). 

Later in the National Geographic article we have the claim that "The Deep Ocean Reveals How Life Might Have Started." The paragraph that follows this claim does nothing to substantiate it, merely talking about other things. We hear nothing substantiating the idea that any breakthrough occurred here. 

The truth is that scientists have made no progress in understanding how life could have originated. No experiment realistically simulating the early Earth has ever produced life. No experiment realistically simulating the early Earth has ever produced any of the protein molecules that are the main building components of the simplest one-celled life. No  experiment realistically simulating the early Earth has ever even produced any of the amino acids that are the building components of the building components of life. 

Later in the National Geographic article we got the claim that there were "possible biosignatures discovered on Mars, Venus and exoplanets." This is listed as one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of the past 25 years. But there is no robust evidence behind any of the claims. The claim that a biosignature was discovered on Mars is debunked in my post here. The claim that a biosignature was discovered on Venus is debunked in my post here.  The claim that a biosignature was discovered on planet K2-I8 b is debunked in my post here. The article refers to "exoplanets" (planets in other solar systems), but only mentions only one exoplanet, referring to K2-18b. 

There is a revealing omission in the National Geographic article. None of the claimed breakthroughs did anything to substantiate claims that brains make minds or that brains store memories.   It seems that cognitive neuroscientists are getting nowhere in their attempts to prove that brains make minds and that brains store memories. What they are most noticeably producing are low-quality or not-important science studies that serve to increase their "published paper counts," but do nothing to clarify how a mind can arise.